In one corner, uncomfortably close to the chemistry set, someone had brought in a twin bed. It was clearly a new addition, much nicer than the shabby furniture surrounding it. It was clearly meant for me.
I decided to camp out on Holmes’s bed instead.
Milo (or his men) had built a loft for her, a bed bolted high up into the wall, as small and remote as the crow’s nest of a ship. From up there, she could survey her tiny fiefdom. I wondered how old Holmes was when Milo gave her this room. Eleven? Twelve? He was six years older; he’d have been eighteen, at the beginning of building his empire, from the timeline Holmes had given me. And he’d given her a space of her own in that new life. As I climbed up the loft’s ladder, I tried to imagine a miniature Holmes doing the same, a flashlight clenched in her teeth.
She must have felt like Milo’s first mate, surrounded by his loyal men, in a ship’s cabin of her own. Untouchable. Away from the world.
I knew what I was doing. By taking over her perch, I was gunning for a confrontation. Some sign that she still knew I existed. Watson, she’d say, lighting a cigarette. Don’t be a child. Get down here, I have a plan.
August Moriarty wasn’t a child. He was a man. That had been my first impression, and the one that ultimately mattered. I couldn’t help seeing him as a standard by which I’d already failed. If he was the finished sketch, I was the unfinished space around it. Let me put it this way: I was five foot ten on a good day. I had on faded jeans and my father’s jacket. I had twelve dollars in my bank account, and still, somehow, I was along for the ride, and the ride was in Europe, where my best friend paid for everything and spoke German to the driver and I tried not to feel like the cargo she’d strapped to the top of the car.
Time passed. Thirty minutes. An hour. I hated this line of thinking, but it was what I’d been left with.
To torture myself, I wondered what Phillipa Moriarty could possibly want with Holmes. Why she would agree to a lunch. I mean, I wasn’t stupid. I had a few solid ideas—death, dismemberment—but going through Milo’s mercenary company made me think she wasn’t up to serving violence. A détente, maybe? Maybe she knew where Leander was being kept. Maybe she was going to tell us that she wasn’t siding with Lucien in this ridiculous war.
Maybe she’d found out that her little brother August was alive.
As an act of desperation, I took out my phone to text my father. What do you know about Phillipa Moriarty?
The response was prompt. Only what’s been in the papers, and you’ve seen that, too. Why?
What about a bar called the Old Metropolitan?
Leander went there on Saturdays to meet with a professor from the Kunstschule Sieben. One of the local art schools. A Nathaniel. Gretchen was another name that came up quite often.
The forgers Holmes had mentioned. Any other places I should know about?
I’ll email you a list. I’m happy to hear that Milo’s taking this so seriously.
I was pretty sure that Milo wasn’t, and that he’d shoved us off on August because of it. I put my phone away.
After a minute, I pulled it back out.
When you were working with Leander, did you ever feel like you were his baggage? Like he’d insist on taking you along on a case, and then he’d run off and solve it without you?
Of course. But there’s a way to stop feeling like that, you know.
How? I asked.
I don’t know when my father became someone I trusted to go to for advice. It was an uncomfortable feeling.
My phone pinged. I’ve put a hundred dollars in your bank account. Now run off and solve it without her.
THE OLD METROPOLITAN WAS BUSIER THAN ANY BAR I’D been to in Britain. Not that I’d been to too many bars—but I’d seen enough. In Britain, you could have a beer with your dinner at sixteen if your parent bought it for you; at eighteen, you could order whatever you wanted for yourself. Germany’s laws weren’t all that different. One of the great ironies of my life is that I got shipped off to America for high school, a country that didn’t let people drink until they’d nearly graduated college.
The Old Metropolitan was full of students. It was only a few streets away from the Kunstschule Sieben’s campus, something I learned while wandering the neighborhood. When I’d left Greystone HQ, it was still late afternoon, so I decided to spend the time before nightfall cultivating a disguise. I’d watched Holmes remake herself in front of me, how putting a slight spin on her usual presentation turned her into an entirely different person. I’d asked her, once, what she thought of me going undercover. She’d laughed in my face.
Not this time. I bought a hat and a pair of shit-kickers at a thrift store. Then I found a barbershop and asked them for a haircut I kept seeing on the street, shaved on the sides and long on top. My hair was wavy, but whatever he styled it with made it lay slick and straight. When he finished, I put on my glasses and looked in the mirror.
I’d always had something that made grandmothers want to talk to me in waiting rooms. I looked friendly, I guess. I’d never been able to see it myself, but I saw its absence now. Grinning, I stuck the fedora on the back of my head, tipped the barber, and went out to find some dinner.
Simon, I thought. I’m going to call myself Simon.
I walked to Old Metropolitan with a gyro that I’d gotten from a sketchy-looking food truck up the street. Whenever I was in a new place by myself, I was always aware of how I was walking, what I was looking at, worried that I’d seem like a tourist and be slighted somehow for it. Tonight, I was wandering along like a local, licking the tzatziki sauce off my fingers, looking at the street art with disinterested eyes. Simon didn’t care about the giant neon dragon painted over the Old Metropolitan’s doorway, teeth bared like a warning. Simon had seen it a million times before. His uncle lived just down the block.