God, I was going to throw up. I fumbled for the controls to try to crack the window and let in some air. The cabbie started ranting at me in German until August intervened, leaning between the seats to reason with him. Their voices grew louder and louder, and I thought I’d puke right there on the floor.
I focused my breathing, the way I did during rugby drills, until my stomach stopped roiling. “Distract me. Where exactly are we going? Who gave you this information?”
August settled into his seat, glaring at the back of the driver’s head. “It’s at an art squat. Used to be an old department store, and then it was a Nazi prison. Now it’s almost like a city unto itself. There’s a café, a cinema, ateliers—it’s a shared space, and sometimes they’ll do an open studio night. You walk through with a glass of wine, look at what the artists are working on. If you’re a dealer, it’s a good chance to see what’s out there, though it’s best if you keep those intentions to yourself. They don’t love businessmen.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
He smiled grimly. “Dead men hobbies. My name around here is Felix, by the way.”
“Felix? Really?”
“Shut up, Simon,” he said in such an uncanny impression of Holmes that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
August had the cabbie drop us half a block away, so we approached the building from the rear. It sat on a low, grassy hill, a huge Frankensteined building against the darkening sky. I could hear music playing as we approached, though I couldn’t pinpoint from where. The doors were a panicked red, covered in glitter and nails and little paintings of eyes. I hesitated, my hand on the knob.
“Wait—” With an expert hand, August pushed my hair back from my face. “Button your shirt up to the collar. Tuck it in. Cuff your pant legs. No, further. And ditch your socks, you wear your trainers without them. You don’t speak much, but not because you’re scared, all right? You’re bored. Get a drink in one hand and scroll on your phone with the other.”
“Did you learn this from Holmes, or the other way around?” I asked him as I looked for a place to stash my socks.
“We had remarkably similar childhoods,” August said, his eyes as hard and blank as stones. “Let’s go.”
The building was strangely lit, with staircases that crawled up along the walls. I didn’t have any trouble imagining it as an old-time department store—the walls had a tall, molded look to them, and the staircases were wide enough to hold a steady stream of shoppers. But the paint had all chipped away. Chunks of the walls were missing, like an angry hand had scooped them out. Now everything was painted electric blues and yellows, the walls and the windows and the stretching ceilings, and while most of the murals were abstractly beautiful, here and there I caught a glimpse of a drawn-on face hidden inside the paint, its eyes watching me.
“August.” The hair on my arms was standing up.
“I know,” he said, and held a hand up while he listened. “The music’s coming from up above—the third floor, maybe? We’ll try up there.”
We climbed the stairs slowly. August assured me the building was structurally sound, but there was something so precarious about a place that had been repurposed so many times, like its essence had been stripped bare in the process. On the second landing, we stepped to the side as a crowd of tattooed girls pushed past us, laughing. One of them shot the kind of smile at August that girls at Sherringford sometimes aimed at me.
False walls had been built throughout the third floor, breaking up the giant space into smaller rooms. Studios, I thought. August had called them ateliers. None of the walls reached the ceiling, so you could see the cluster of lights each artist had set up to illuminate their space. A table was set up near the stairs, and August filled two plastic cups with vodka and soda and handed one to me, his eyebrow lifted slightly. Don’t talk, the look said. And don’t drink this either.
He shambled along slowly, sticking his head into studios, greeting people in German. “Ja,” he’d say, yes, and jerk his head at me with an apologetic-sounding murmur. Then we’d stand for a minute while he chattered at some shaved-head boy about his giant metal sculpture of a pickle. I kept scrolling down my phone. I had a text from Lena: where are u guys what happened to London so bored. I ignored it, and instead, pulled up the collection of Leander’s emails, but I couldn’t pay any attention to those either.
I was listening for the edges of Holmes’s voice. I noticed that August always kept himself turned toward the atelier’s open door so he could see if she walked by. Slowly, we made our pilgrimage. A set of televisions, all playing black-and-white newsreels from the 1940s while disco music blared. A set of toes made from ceramic and gold, arranged on a pink platter to look like snack food. Tiny paintings of naked girls presented by a smug-faced man I wanted to punch in the throat. Instead, I scrolled through Leander’s emails, not really reading them. All this to get them, and now I was too sick to focus. Dear James, each one began, Dear James, Dear James.
Then I came across one that began Dear Jamie, dated early this December, and for a minute I let myself stop listening for Charlotte.
Dear Jamie, I don’t know why I had the urge to write to you by that name. No one’s called you that since I have! I’ve been spending all my time hanging around these art school teachers and their little student flocks. They all have so much overwhelming affection for each other, these students, like they’re all drowning and simultaneously holding each other’s lifelines. Honestly, I don’t see how they don’t all end up at the bottom of the lake that way, but here they are, welding and sculpting and drawing under their teacher’s benevolent eye. Nathaniel even goes to their parties. I think he fancies himself a little in love with me, which is good for my purposes, but of course, terrible for his. It’s always a bad idea to fall in love with your dealer. . . .