The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(74)

“She is not.”

“I am not!”

“She is not family without family,” I intoned.

“Today I am here by chance. I heard about this auction and decided, yes, I will show you a piece to illustrate who I am. Who you are. Who we all are, underneath our wrappings. Kincaid beside me, he hides from the cameras! He hides his face from your faces! What is a face?”

She paused there, looking distantly over the audience’s heads. They stared up at her, enraptured, or pretending to be.

“Ah,” she said with the solemnity of a sage. “No one knows what a face is. I have my theories. A face produces voice. A voice carries sound. In that sound, we find ourselves prisoners. Now I show you a piece that says, faces. Family. Identity. Prisoners! All these things.”

I nodded. “This is a piece about all these things.”

The screen behind the easel went dark. Moments later, the whole echoing room followed. There was a shuffling. Some gasps. On the stage, a small scuffle, and the moments stretched into each other until the black-and-white video finally began to play.

It was surveillance footage. The outside of a warehouse, as seen from above. A giant man wiped off his hands on his pants. He straightened, stared into the distance. Then he bent and, with a visible heaved breath, hoisted the limp body lying at his feet up and over his shoulder.

It was my body, but the audience didn’t need to know that. My identity wasn’t important to this story.

Static crackled from invisible speakers, set somewhere behind the stage. From them, a girl’s voice threaded out, broken sounding, desperate. “What exactly do you hope to accomplish here?” she asked. “You can’t hope to hold us for more than a few hours.”

The man dipped his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Where should I put the boy?”

“Be careful with him,” the girl said, stepping into frame. I wondered what the audience made of her—she was slight, swaying in her boots, in her tiny dress. “Please. He’s my— Be careful.”

At that, the giant said something inaudible, and carried the body away.

It was just the girl in the frame now. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I suppose you’ll want our phones,” she said.

A pause, where a response should be. The girl was speaking to someone who wasn’t in the picture.

“I’m just trying to help you to be thorough,” she said, and pulled hers out of her bra, dangling it from her fingers. “Here, you can have it.”

(In the audience, a young man’s reedy voice: “Don’t you love the composition of this shot?” Holmes shifted her weight next to me.)

“No. I won’t bring it to you,” the girl said. “What makes you think I’ll be a party to my own destruction?”

“Past events have suggested it,” the voice responded, barely audible. A woman’s voice, but the speaker was still off-screen. “I’m happy to help you in any way I can. You’re welcome to try to run, if you want. See how far you can get. Go on, we can time you.”

“You must be waiting for more guards,” the girl said. “You have a pistol in your pocket, but you’re too chickenshit to try to threaten me with it, even though I’m unarmed.”

An incomprehensible reply.

The girl took a step forward, then another. “Why are you doing this?”

“Stop moving,” the voice said.

“No!” she cried. “Where are you taking him?”

“Are you blind? He’s in the warehouse. Where you’ll be. We have business to discuss—” You could see her now, the back of her black-and-white head, blond and curled.

“Is this worth it? You abduct my uncle, lock him away God knows where, all so that you can continue selling your forged paintings?” (A gasp from the audience, a series of coughs.) “How much are you making off of them? Is it enough blood money for you? Where is my uncle? He’ll blow this up! He’s a detective! We’ll take this to the media! I swear it!”

She gave her speech clearly. She enunciated her consonants. She stated facts that were pure exposition, and she said each word with a clarity of emotion that was meant for a Broadway production. I turned to her—the now her, the one beside me—and grinned, even though she couldn’t see it under my mask. Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a brilliant house on top.

It was her show, after all.

In the video, Phillipa took a staggering step forward, and when she turned her head, her face was clearly visible. “You should ask yourself where your uncle is,” she said, like some leering villain, and the audience began to stir. Someone stood and said, “Is this fake? Was this staged?” The rustle of chairs pushed back, paddles dropped to the floor.

The video kept rolling. “Do you think you’re such a genius?” Phillipa said. “What if I told you he was right under your nose the whole time?”

“Oh God,” past-Holmes said, with a gasp loud enough to be picked up by the bug in her coat. That was how she’d gotten the audio, she’d told me; the Moriartys had hacked into the bug in her shoe, the one that Milo had put there to track her movements. She’d had one of the Greystone techs break into the Moriarty servers to look for audio she could use for her “installation.” The security footage was their own, she’d said. We found it when we broke in to get the recording. They’ll kick themselves over that one. “How could you? How—”