If the seat back hadn’t been made of such soft, supple leather, Gus would have slammed his head against it. “They’re not going to take my word for our identities.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Shawn said through a mouthful of sandwich as he returned to his seat. “You can be very convincing.”
“There are laws and procedures,” Gus said. “Trying to enter the country without a passport is some kind of felony. They’ll throw us into a cell. And if we’re lucky enough to be able to get through to the American consulate, he’ll probably e-mail our pictures back to the Santa Barbara police for confirmation-and then we’ll be arrested and sent back there.”
“Then you really should try one of these chicken sandwiches,” Shawn said, holding out his plate with the untouched half on it. “Because it would be the highlight of a much better trip than the one you’re describing.”
If Gus had thought to pack his shoes with explosives, he would have definitely set them off at this point in the conversation. “How can you be so calm about this?”
Shawn took back the half sandwich and crammed it into his mouth, then returned to the refrigerator for another one. By the time he got back to his seat, he had swallowed just enough of the chicken salad to be able to talk through the rest of it.
“Because we’re not going through immigration,” Shawn said. “We’re not going to be locked in a tiny cell for not showing our passports because no one is going to ask us for our passports.”
“You have to believe me on this, Shawn,” Gus said, wishing there was some way he could get through his friend’s astonishingly strong denial mechanism. “Maybe there was a time a few years ago when that was possible, but after 9/11 there isn’t a country in the world where you can land at an airport and just waltz into town without proving you’re not some wanted terrorist.”
“I’m sure you’re right about that,” Shawn said. “But we’re not landing at an airport.”
Gus stared at him. “If you think we’re jumping out of this plane with parachutes, you’re insane.”
“Really?” Shawn said. “You want to jump out without a parachute?”
Gus resisted the temptation to shove Shawn’s second sandwich down his throat and watch him choke on chicken salad. “We can’t do any kind of jump out of a jet,” Gus said. “We’d die. Even if we had any idea what we were doing, we’d still die.”
“True,” Shawn said. “Which is why it’s a good thing we don’t have to jump out of the jet. We’re going to land.”
“But you just said-”
“What did I just say?” Shawn said. “I can’t remember that far back. We’d better rewind the tape.” He made a series of noises that Gus assumed were meant to approximate the sound of an audiotape rewinding. “No, really, Gus isn’t a complete dweeb. He just comes across that way. You should go out with him.” Shawn stopped. “Sorry. Ran that tape back too far. That was when I was talking to that blond sales rep at your company Christmas party.”
“I didn’t invite you to that party,” Gus said, the humiliation over the recent past momentarily eclipsing his fear of the near future.
“Don’t I know it,” Shawn said. “And let me tell you, that was one tough ticket. I think I had to walk almost all the way up to the door before they let me in.”
“In fact,” Gus said, as the memories came rushing back, “I didn’t even go myself. We were supposed to be on a stakeout that night. Instead, I was alone, because you said you were watching the rear entrance while I was covering the front.”
“I stake much better on a full stomach,” Shawn said. “Besides, that was the wrong part of the tape. Here.” Shawn made a slightly different set of noises to indicate that the tape was now fast-forwarding. “Here it is: ‘We’re not landing at an airport.’ Although I can see how you got confused. Most of the time it’s not worth listening to the second half of a sentence, anyway.”
Gus thought through his options and decided which of these subjects he wanted to talk about the least. Eliminating both the Christmas party and Shawn’s victory in the rhetorical battle, that left only asking exactly what he had meant. “So where are we going to land?” Gus said. “A petting zoo?”
“Probably something like that,” Shawn said. “I’d guess it would be a farm out in the countryside that just happens to have a long paved road right through the middle leading directly to a barn with suspiciously wide doors.”
“And you know this because you had a chance to study the flight plan, I suppose,” Gus said.
“I know it because it’s the only way a smuggler like Flaxman Low is going to be able to get his loot in and out of the country,” Shawn said. “He’s probably got some people on his payroll at air traffic control, too.”
“You keep saying he’s a smuggler and a forger,” Gus said. “But I didn’t see any evidence of that.”
“Sure you did,” Shawn said. “You saw everything I did. You just didn’t happen to notice any of it.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what I missed,” Gus said.
“Really?” Shawn said. “You don’t want to take a few guesses? Because we’ve got hours of flying time left, and since you won’t let me sleep, you might as well entertain me.”
Gus glared at him. “Forger and smuggler.”
“Fine,” Shawn said. “Start with forger. Perhaps you noticed a diploma on the wall of that room we were in.”
“From Harvard,” Gus said. “What about it?”
“Do you remember what it said?”
“It said he graduated from Harvard,” Gus said. “Isn’t that what Harvard diplomas generally say?”
“Yes, but this one said it in Latin,” Shawn said. “And while my knowledge of that language is pretty shaky, I did recognize the numbers 1963, which told me what year he was supposed to have graduated in.”
“If you’re going to tell me Harvard hadn’t been founded in 1963, I’m going to have to argue with you,” Gus said.
“Harvard stopped using Latin on their diplomas in 1961,” Shawn said. “Even though the students rioted over the change, they’ve been in English ever since.”
“There is simply no way you could know that,” Gus said.
“Unless I had undertaken an in-depth study of the history of higher education in this country,” Shawn said. “Or it was a clue on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? ”
“Okay, fine,” Gus said. “But they made that change almost fifty years ago. You’d think he would have noticed by now.”
“I’m sure he did, and he’s got himself a Harvard diploma done right hanging in some prominent place,” Shawn said. “The fact that this was on the wall in a guest bedroom suggests he’s only held on to it for sentimental reasons, like it was one of his first forgeries.”
Gus looked for holes in Shawn’s reasoning but couldn’t find anyway. “And smuggler?”
“Remember the razor, bowl, and shaving brush in that room?” Shawn said. “They were made out of ivory. And judging by the style, they were made in the past ten years.”
Shawn didn’t bother to explain further, but Gus didn’t need him to. “It’s been illegal to import elephant ivory since before 1990,” Gus said. “But this could have been a gift. Or a souvenir. Bringing a trinket back in your luggage doesn’t make you a smuggler.”
“Except by definition,” Shawn said. “But that’s not the kind of smuggler I’m talking about. Again, this is in the guest bedroom, as if it was nothing special. I suspect it was part of a large shipment and he decided to keep a sample back for himself.”
Gus worked through the logic and again could find nothing definitive to suggest it was wrong. He glanced over at Kitteredge to make sure he was still asleep. A quiet snore assured him he was. “If this was so obvious to you, how come Professor Kitteredge hasn’t been able to see it in all these years?”
“The same as with the conspiracy thing,” Shawn said. “Call it the Bernie Madoff effect. It’s because he’s smart. He’s certainly too intelligent to be taken in by an obvious crook. So he never bothers to question his assumptions about his old friend-because any assumption made by such a smart person must be right.”