“Our investigation. Hey, maybe I do. How come I ended up playing pool with your boyfriend while you threw yourself at some auctioneer?”
“Honestly, will you quit imagining that I’m some tarted-up Mata Hari? My espionage work is far more subtle than that.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then how did you approach him?”
“I appealed to his sympathies.”
“Holmes.”
She paused. “I might have threatened to kill his shih tzu—”
“No. Never mind. Stop.”
We looked at each other. After a second, she started to laugh. “Watson, do you even know exactly what Leander is doing here in Berlin?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not exactly.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “Shouldn’t we get back to Greystone, then, and find out?”
six
Have you found him yet?
My father’s text woke me at five the next morning. Call me when you wake up. I need to know, my screen read. I turned it around in an attempt to assuage my guilt.
We’d spent this past fall fending for ourselves because Holmes had been too proud to ask her family for help. No more, I told myself, and clambered down from her lofted bed. When we’d gotten in last night, she’d flopped facedown on the cot and gone instantly to sleep, as though her body recognized the rare opportunity to recharge.
I slept fitfully, and now that I was awake, I was anxious to get going. Ten more minutes, and I’d go wake up Milo. I’d get him to throw some real resources at the Leander situation. Surely, with his help, we’d find Holmes’s uncle within the day, and then we could get down to normal things. Museums. Curry shops. Christmas shopping, maybe, and for a moment, I wondered what I should get Holmes. Pipettes? A book on something bizarre, like anglerfish? August would get her something better than that. Something more inventive.
No, it was definitely better to focus on the task at hand.
Milo was waiting for me in the hall, as though he were a robot that had been left to recharge there all night. “Watson,” he said impatiently. “Come along. Breakfast is in my kitchen.”
As I trailed after him, I realized that his actual living quarters were on the other side of the floor. Holmes and I, it seemed, had been housed in the hallway just outside the rooms that held Milo’s personal security team. He never said it out loud, but I got the sense that his sister was housed outside his penthouse for her protection and not because he thought she’d muck up his nice vintage carpet.
She was the first person I saw when we entered his rooms. She was framed by the floor-to-ceiling window, playing a song on her violin. I stopped in the doorway to listen. The sound was spectral, almost galactic in its runs and rivulets—it had an aching descant. A song for worrying. Except for her, the rooms were quiet. Milo had bustled back to the kitchen, busying himself with a coffee grinder. This morning he probably razed a small city. Now he was readying a French press.
His place had a musty sort of lived-in feel, all midcentury like the lobby but shabbier. On the plaid sofa, August sat with a mug between his hands, listening to Holmes’s violin with closed eyes. I was surprised to see more feeling on his face now than I’d seen at all the night before.
“Jamie,” August said as I dropped down beside him. “You’ve met Peterson, right? He’s arranging a briefing for us on Leander. Holmes is waiting for coffee, but there’s tea.”
“Thanks.”
He settled back into the cushions. “I love this one.”
She’d changed styles. Now she was playing something straightforward and mathematical, which meant it was probably Bach. She was wearing a pair of my socks and her CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS shirt and she was playing her ex-tutor’s favorite song, and I wondered if this was as close as she came to feeling sentimental.
She paused, a note still fluttering in the air. “Peterson,” she said to the doorway, her voice still thick with sleep. “So good to see you.”
“Ma’am.” He was wheeling in a kind of AV cart, but this one had twelve screens branching out from some kind of glowing processor.
Milo came in with a tray. He poured out the coffee carefully, in a way that suggested long practice.
“I would’ve thought you’d have someone to do this for you,” I told him.
“I think you discount the importance of routine,” he said. “My father always spoke about the importance of doing things for oneself, the same way every day. Frees the mind to focus on more important pursuits.”
Jesus, I thought, imagining him going through this whole ceramic-tray coffee ceremony alone, on this couch, as Peterson prepared his morning briefing. I’d surrounded myself with geniuses—the most miserably lonely geniuses I could find.
“Jamie.” Peterson powered up the monitors. “Feeling better?”
“I am, thank you.”
“We’ll be speaking more generally than we normally do,” he said in his affable way. “Mr. Holmes has requested that I bring you up to speed on the basics of art theft and law enforcement.”
“Wouldn’t the most expedient solution be to call the German government and ask them to tell you what Leander was up to?” Holmes asked, flopping down on the carpet.
“Mr. Holmes has in fact gathered that intel,” Peterson said blandly. “But he believes you are all in need of an education on the subject.”