The Last of August

Milo pursed his lips. “You’re going too fast.”

“I’m not,” she said, and flipped both her hands upside down. The screens obediently stopped. “Those sensors are a ludicrous waste of resources, by the way. Whatever happened to a remote control?”

August coughed. “I designed the math for the sensors. It’s based on a differential of—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. With an imperceptible motion, she set the screens going again. “Look here. The night Leander disappeared. We have him and Jamie having what I’m sure was a very touching moment by the woodpile; here they go, one, two, back to the house. Through the window, we see the family assembled at dinner. Leander in his room.” A flick, and the screen changed. “We’re on a time lapse, inside. Milo only had still cameras within the guest rooms. They photograph every ten minutes.”

“An oversight,” he said, “that I’ve now rectified.”

“Obviously. Here: Leander on his phone. Pacing, or at the very least moving about. Now Leander packing his bags. And here, in the front hall. He heads quickly down the stairs, holding his suitcases, and”—she flipped to the camera of the outside of the house, where a man in a black cap took off down the drive—“there he goes. Off screen, to a waiting car.” She leveled a look at her brother. “Where did he go after that?”

With a sigh, Milo snapped his fingers. The screens went black. “We don’t know where he is now. But we know where he was and what he was doing before. According to my contacts, the German government has hired him to infiltrate a forgery ring and compile enough evidence to prove their work as fake. These forgers have been knocking off the work of an artist from the 1930s, Hans Langenberg. The sheer number of paintings that have been ‘recovered’ has raised some alarm bells, so they’re making this a special case.”

A painting appeared on the screen. I blinked. It had that atmospheric quality I loved, all cobalts and grays with flashes of eggshell white. In the painting, a girl sat reading in the corner, bored in a red cotton dress. The man next to her turned a letter opener in his hands. Another looked out a darkened window. They were all clustered together in the painting’s lone splash of light; the rest of the room was muted, unexplored.

“This is his most famous painting—The Last of August, it’s called. He was German, from Munich. Unmarried, no family. Intensely secretive, and thought to be very prolific, though he only ever gave his agent three of his paintings to sell. In the last year, an actual trove of ‘newly discovered work’ popped up on the auction circuit.” The screens were crowded, suddenly, with similar paintings, ones set in attic rooms and garrets, a back garden at night. Always a group of figures somewhere in the background, holding bright objects in their hands, both looking and not looking at each other. “They’ve stumped authenticators. It’s impossible to tell whether these were Langenberg’s work. And if this is revealed to the public, it could look like opportunistic forgers are benefitting off of genocide. Already there are murmurs that the money is lining neo-Nazi pockets. The German government wants this stopped as soon as possible.”

The paintings were all appealing, forged or not, and I was disappointed when the screens shut off again.

August must’ve seen my face. “They’re lovely,” he said in that voice I hated, the one where he was pretending to be himself.

“Yes,” Holmes said, to my surprise. “The Last of August. Funny, it’s beautiful. They all are. And Leander was attempting to track down the supposed forger, examine their studio, find evidence that Langenberg’s renaissance is a fake one?”

“That was his specific operation, yes.” Milo nodded to Peterson, who began packing up the cart. “For his safety, I wasn’t told more than that. But Lottie, this ring runs the length and breadth of Europe. Berlin is a fair place to start, of course, but I know for a fact that he was exploring connections in other cities. Budapest. Vienna. Prague. Krakow. This is a massive undertaking, and he could quite literally be anywhere. Yes, he stopped sending emails to Jamie’s father, but he could be in deep enough that he doesn’t want to risk exposure. Sending lengthy daily reports to your best friend, last name Watson, isn’t exactly the height of subtlety.”

“He called me Lottie,” she said to him, a plea in her voice. “In his message. He never calls me Lottie. He didn’t leave me a present when he left.”

“Darling, everyone calls you Lottie.” He stood. “Don’t be a child. Leander could very well be in over his head. He could, in fact, be in danger. But he has been before, and he will be again. It’s his job. I won’t make it my business. Especially not when I’m in such a precarious position with Hadrian already. Do you think it was easy explaining to him that Leander had just suddenly decided on a sojourn outside the country of his own volition, and not because he was two seconds from stumbling on information that would uncover Hadrian Moriarty’s dirty dealings? No. I have a line to walk here.”

“This isn’t that missing giraffe fiasco in Dallas, or that piracy case in Wales. This—it feels different. He disappeared from our house.”

“And Father says he’s fine,” Milo said, as though that was an irrefutable argument. “I know you’re concerned, but I need to focus my extraprofessional efforts in a single direction. Honestly, Lucien is much more of a concern right now. If there’s any chance he was involved in Mother’s poisoning . . . and who knows? That threat could involve Leander as well. You can’t argue that it would hurt for me to double down on Lucien Moriarty and on our family’s security. Our mother is in danger, and while I know that she isn’t Lottie’s favorite person”—Holmes flinched—“I also know she doesn’t want her dead. My men on the ground are examining the security breach. I’m getting weekly reports. I’m nearly done weeding through our staff. My concern is that Lucien is in Thailand, getting through to his men somehow, and I need to find out how.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">