Holmes snorted. “You’ve met my brother, haven’t you? No, we do this alone.”
“You could kidnap Nathaniel,” I said, only half-joking. “Hey, maybe August could do it.”
He started. “Better not,” he said.
Was that an admission of guilt? I was going to murder him.
“And what? Torture him back at home until he tells us that he thinks Leander’s dead?” She got to her feet. “Think, would you.”
The ceiling fan whirred. The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour. Holmes paced in front of the window, talking to herself.
For my part . . . well, I had no part. What could I possibly suggest? “What do we even want from Nathaniel?” I said aloud. “His ties to Hadrian Moriarty? We have August, there. He’s a better link than Nathaniel could ever be, if we need to flush Hadrian or Phillipa out. She’s already asked us for access to August. Look—do we want Leander back, or do we want to solve the crime he was investigating?”
Holmes and August looked at each other.
“What? Is that a stupid question?”
I thought about it while we suited up. It only took a few moments to put myself into my Simon guise—a hat, a vest, the steel-toed boots. I was playing him again in case Nathaniel managed to catch sight of me, since I didn’t look dissimilar enough from Simon to convincingly claim I was anyone else. But as I parted my hair in the mirror, I realized that it was weirdly comforting to be him again. Simon. I knew how he walked, talked. How he thought. What he’d say. I didn’t always know those things about myself.
To my surprise, Holmes didn’t have her wig cap on. She didn’t have on a costume, either. She’d changed into a new pair of black jeans, a black button-down shirt done up to the collar. With her usual intensity, she was rooting through a makeup case.
“How are you doing yourself up?” August asked her, adjusting his fake nose. “Tourist? Nanny? Sorority girl?”
“Myself,” she said, looking in her hand mirror, “in the other universe where I’m an art student desperate for lodgings.” With a small brush, she began doing her eyes up in silvers and blacks.
“Won’t that be a hazard?” August asked. “You could always go redhead—”
“If you want to help, you can fetch me a curling iron,” she told him. “And after that, you can decide how badly you want Hadrian to continue thinking you’re dead.”
“That sounded like a threat,” he said mildly.
She took the iron from him and plugged it into the wall. “Either you’re in or you’re out. For the record, I’m fine with you staying here. I’m sure Milo has some data entry you can do.”
He stared at her for a moment, his face drawn. “I’ll go,” he said, with a barely concealed edge. “I suppose I already have my nose on.”
EAST SIDE GALLERY WASN’T ONE. OR IT WAS, BUT ITS NAME made it sound like it was tucked away in some snooty building, where people drank champagne and bought paintings for millions. I don’t know why I’d expected that here, a city where art was everywhere, transforming everything, a public act of reclamation.
Because East Side Gallery was the Berlin Wall. The wall that had divided the east part of the city from the west, a result of World War II and later, the Cold War, a symbol of a divided, unequal Berlin. One run by outside forces, separated by a wall that was barbed and booby-trapped and separating the poor, Communist-controlled eastern side from the richer, capitalist west. After demolition finally began on the wall in 1990, artists began painting murals on a mile-long section. Long, uncanny, evocative murals, of men wandering against a dark screen like ghosts, of doves and prisons and melting figures in the desert.
We approached it on foot, and I lagged a few steps behind Holmes and August, reading a short history of it all on my phone. The last few weeks felt like a history lesson I’d only caught the tail of, one on Berlin but on London, too, on love and inheritance and responsibility. It was like I was trying to read the cheater notes on the last century right before a midterm.
All of this made me feel really young, something I wasn’t used to, not when I was next to Holmes. She operated with such absolute confidence, even when the playing field was thick with adults. But now, walking this strange, lovely city after dark, the hint of snow on the wind made me pull my jacket a little tighter around myself, wishing I was home with Shelby and my mother, watching TV under a blanket on the couch.
We weren’t the only ones out after dark. Tourists clustered in front of a mural made of handprints, fitting their own palms against the wall. A street artist was selling painted tiles on the corner, playing quiet Europop from a battery-operated stereo. A pair of girls took turns taking pictures in front of a mural that depicted long twirling locks of hair. The blond girl laughed, tipping her head forward so that her curls spilled over her face, and as the other girl snapped photos, she said, Yes, you are my queen. Holmes brushed past them, August at her heels, and the brunette girl said, Forget it, I want her hair, looking after the two of them with longing.
They made a striking pair, Charlotte Holmes and August Moriarty. He looked, as usual, effortlessly cool—this rankled, especially when I knew my own came with a good bit of trying. He’d dyed his fauxhawk a temporary dark brown, and his false nose turned up at the end, but he was wearing his typical ripped jeans and bomber jacket. And Holmes strode beside him, looking now like a weapon made real. Her eyes were rimmed in a thick black that made her irises seem translucent. Her hair was a tumble of slept-in curls. She had a dark portfolio bag under her arm, and she walked like she had somewhere to be.