“Why won’t you just send them?”
“If Charlotte had written you every day for months, Jamie, can you honestly tell me you’d forward them all to your father without a second thought?”
“Of course I would.” Of course I wouldn’t. But there wasn’t time to argue; the airport was looming in the distance. “Look, I have to go.”
“You need to promise me that you won’t look for Leander yourself. He’s created a complicated scenario, and I don’t want you mucking it up. Promise me.”
Not, it isn’t safe. Not, I don’t want you in danger. He just didn’t want me blowing Leander’s cover. It was nice to know that, as usual, he had his priorities straight.
“I promise we won’t go chasing after him,” I said, not meaning a word. “How about that?”
“We’re at the airport, miss,” the driver called, and beside me, Holmes burst out into horrified laughter at her phone.
I found you a guide, the screen read. But I’m afraid neither of you will approve.
“No.” Because I was now remembering exactly who worked for Milo Holmes. “No. Absolutely not.” Then I spat out a few other things that I’d heard on a dark Brixton street from the mouth of a man being curb-stomped.
“Jamie?” my father asked. “What on earth is going on?”
I hung up. I couldn’t stop staring at Holmes’s goddamn screen, which now read: Tell Watson to watch his language, will you? He’s blistering my poor wiretapper’s ears.
DESPITE BEING SHUTTLED BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN ENGLAND and America for most of my remembered life—or maybe because of it—I’d never traveled all that much otherwise. Our family vacations had always been underwhelming. Growing up in Connecticut meant that I’d made the one mandatory trip down to New York City with my family, but in our case, we ate in chain restaurants and saw a Broadway show about rollerblading tigers. (For that, as for most things, I blame my father.) After I moved to London, I went on vacation exactly once: my mother rented a camper van and took me and my sister to Abbey Wood. It was in the south of the city, barely a mile from our house. It rained all four days we were there. My sister and I had to share a fold-out bed, and I woke up on that last morning with her elbow physically inside of my mouth.
It was, in short, nothing like going to Berlin with Charlotte Holmes.
Greystone was headquartered in Mitte, a neighborhood in the northeast of the city. Milo had begun it as a tech company specializing in surveillance; he expanded his operations when it became clear that there were certain things humans couldn’t do. All I knew was that his employees—his soldiers and spies—were the main independent force on the ground in Iraq, and that once, Milo had ordered his personal bodyguards to frisk everyone at Holmes’s eighth grade graduation.
Holmes ran me through this, and more, in the cab from the airport, though I knew the bulk of it already. I wasn’t sure if she’d assumed I had a bad memory or if she was chattering on because she was nervous. She had good reason to be. In the next ten minutes, we’d be face-to-face with someone whose brother spent this past fall exploring fun and creative ways to have us killed, someone who’d faked his own death to escape that family (and prison), someone Charlotte Holmes had loved so much, she’d tried to have imprisoned because he didn’t love her back. August Moriarty had a PhD in pure maths, a Prince Charming smile, and a brother named Hadrian who’d probably taught him everything he knew about wheeling and dealing stolen paintings. Who else would Milo possibly tap to guide us through the city?
I wanted my ax back. Or Milo’s head on a pike.
The city was bare of snow and warmer than London, and I realized I didn’t really know a lot about where we were. Anything I did know about Berlin was rooted in world history textbooks and movies about the Second World War. I knew about the Nazis, and I knew that Germany made the best cars, that their language had compound words for emotions I didn’t know had names. My mother liked to refer to schadenfreude, joy at the misery of others, whenever she laughed at the traffic report on the radio. Who would be silly enough to own a car in London, she’d say. We took the tube like proper Londoners, or like what she thought proper Londoners should be.
The Berlin I saw now reminded me a little of London, in that the buildings we saw all seemed to be on their second lives. A grocery store we passed had the façade of an old museum. A post office had been turned into a gallery, the old Deutsche Bundespost sign faded above a window that displayed sculptures of . . . ears. I spotted a painted lamppost looming on the brick wall behind a real one. Everywhere there was art, on the buildings, on the billboards, creeping down the brick walls onto the streets in murals that read KILL CAPITALISM and BELIEVE EVERYTHING and KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. The words were all in English—lingua franca, I guessed, though I remembered hearing that the city was full of émigré artists, drawn by the cheap rent and the community. What struck me the most was how none of the graffiti had been covered up. It was like the city was made of it, this twinned transformation and discontent, and the storefronts that stood new and clean began to look unfinished, somehow, at least to me.
Though it wasn’t all like that, especially as we approached Mitte. The car took us by park after park, postage-stamp-sized in the middle of neighborhoods, and as we approached Greystone, we passed grand old beautiful museums, giant turnabouts, walls that gardens hid behind.
I pulled out my notebook to write it all down. Beside me, Holmes was looking out the window, too, but I didn’t imagine she was taking any of it in. She’d been there before. And anyway, if I were her, I’d be deciding what I could possibly say to August Moriarty.