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.
We were still ten minutes from eight o’clock, the earliest she thought he’d show. But the East Side Gallery was a mile long, and though Holmes was checking her phone to see if Milo’s grunts had caught sight of Nathaniel on their security feeds, we hadn’t spotted him yet. I was beginning to feel like we were too out in the open. There weren’t any cafés around for us to hole up in if we were spotted. The road beside us was busy and broad, and there was no cover for us to duck behind. So we kept walking.
Until, half a block ahead of us, I saw Nathaniel blowing on his hands on a street corner.
My phone buzzed. Holmes had noticed him at the same time I did. Approach him, her text read, and tell him your uncle’s sick.
This hadn’t been the plan. At all. Uh I barely escaped the last time, I typed back.
He’s early. He’s going to see us. Better we make it intentional—at least you’re here at the right time. See if he’ll take you back to his flat. We’ll follow.
And what would he do to me there? If he was working with Hadrian Moriarty, if, despite Milo’s intelligence, he knew that Leander was dead, the only thing he could be doing here tonight was baiting a trap he’d set for us. We’d hardly made it out of our lunch with Phillipa unscathed.
I had to ask myself again—what were we even doing here?
Ahead, August was saying something in Holmes’s ear. She shook her head violently, but he ignored her. Half-turned to me, and nodded.
Then he took off at a jog to meet Nathaniel Ziegler.
Holmes stopped short. I was still a few steps behind. And August had a hand on the art teacher’s back, steering him away from us, saying something to him I couldn’t quite hear.
“He’s asking Nathaniel to take him to Hadrian,” she said, turning to me. She looked ready to spit nails. “He’s buying us time.”
“For us to do what?”
“To go raid Nathaniel’s horrible house for evidence,” she said. “Come on.”
IT STARTED TO SNOW.
The trip across town took an agonizing twenty minutes in traffic. Holmes kept scrubbing fog from the window and glaring out into the road, like she could will the other cars to disappear. We didn’t know how much time we’d have. We didn’t even know if Nathaniel still lived there, in that house above the cavernous pool, the place he’d been arrested for possession.
“Did it say what kind of drugs he’d had on him?” I asked her, at length.
“Pot, I think. I don’t know how actively prosecuted it is. Someone might have had to rat him out to get the police’s attention. I’m sure his being a teacher didn’t help.” The car slowed to a halt. “Finally,” she said, and shoved a bill at the driver, pushing me out the door with her other hand.
I pulled on my gloves. The fa?ade of the house loomed above us, a warning. “Is there a reason we aren’t taking a Greystone car?”
“My brother’s men. My brother’s cars. My brother having bugged my left shoe this morning, and the right one yesterday. My brother who thinks that he and my father are infallible and that the rest of us are imbeciles.” She barked a laugh. Her breath came out in a cloud. “Do you know that, in the footage he has, ‘Leander’ has to look down to find the doorknob to our front door? The house he grew up in. He doesn’t reach for it automatically—he looks for it. It’s not him, Jamie. Who knows how he was really dragged out of there. They could have dressed someone up like him for the cameras. Milo says I’m imagining things. He thinks he can’t make mistakes. And I play into it. I haven’t done anything for myself since I’ve been here, I’ve just relied on him, and I—”
She pivoted on her foot and made for the front door, but I caught her elbow and steered her back.
“Take a breath. Don’t look at me like that—breathe. You can’t go in there like this. Breathe.”