William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

“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.”

This time Gus could poke a hole in the logic. “But we don’t know there isn’t a conspiracy, just like he says,” Gus said. “Somebody killed Clay Filkins, and somebody managed to steal that painting. If it wasn’t a mysterious cabal run by some shadowy characters, who was it?”

“That’s an excellent question,” Shawn said. “And I suggest we wake up your professor and figure it out.”

Waking Kitteredge turned out to be easier in the abstract than in the concrete. After several minutes of trying, Shawn was tempted to give up, assuming that the professor had drawn not only his appearance, but the ability to hibernate for months at a time, from his ursine ancestors.

But Gus remembered the way Kitteredge would walk around in the mornings with a coffee cup glued to his hands, and he had the notion of starting a pot brewing in the jet galley. Once the scent had permeated the cabin, Kitteredge stirred awake with the slightest prodding.

After Kitteredge had consumed several cups of coffee, he stood up and walked around the cabin and then returned to his seat, where Gus and Shawn were waiting for him.

“Gentlemen, we are off on a great adventure,” he said. “And I want to thank you for being a part of it.”

“It wasn’t really our idea,” Shawn said. “It kind of happened to us. Like becoming fugitives from justice. So we were thinking we could use answers to a couple of questions before we go any further.”

“That’s certainly nothing I can object to,” Kitteredge said.

“Maybe I should have mentioned that we need short answers to our questions,” Shawn said. “We’ve been in the air for hours, and I think we’ll be landing sometime soon.”

Kitteredge smiled indulgently. No doubt people had been saying this sort of thing to him for years, and he took it as a welcome joke. At least, that’s what Gus told himself. Still, he felt it would be prudent to jump in with a question of his own before Shawn offered one that ended any possibility of useful conversation for the duration of the flight.

“One thing’s been troubling me, Professor,” Gus started before Kitteredge cut him off.

“Langston,” he reminded Gus.

“Langston,” Gus said, again feeling that silent little surge of pride.

“Like that’s any better,” Shawn said. “It’s almost as bad as being named Flaxman.”

“Yes, there’s one thing I don’t understand, Langston,” Gus said quickly, before the professor had a chance to notice that Shawn was speaking, too. “We’re following clues you believe Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted into his picture that would lead to the location of the sword Excalibur.”

“That’s right,” Kitteredge said.

“But that only makes sense if he and Morris actually found the sword,” Gus continued, checking his logic as he went to make sure he was on track.

“Also correct,” Kitteredge said.

“So if they had Excalibur, why didn’t they do what they’d set out to do?” Gus said. “Why didn’t they use it to become kings of England, or if that didn’t work out for them, at least sell it for unbelievable amounts of money?”

Gus shot a glance at the seat next to him and saw Shawn was nodding his approval of the question. And from Kitteredge’s pleased expression, it looked like Gus had hit on something the professor was eager to explain.

“That is an excellent question,” Kitteredge said. “But in order to explain it fully, you need to have a basic understanding of the Victorian view of the Arthurian legends as exemplified by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Although to be entirely accurate, it must be said that this element was certainly present all the way back to Malory.”

It was possible that Shawn did not mean for his groan to be so loud it filled the entire cabin. Not probable, but there was a small chance. Either way, it served to break Kitteredge’s attention away from the lecture he was about to launch into.

“Don’t worry,” Kitteredge said. “I’m not going to drag you down into the weeds of Balin and Balan or Pelleas and Ettare. This is just a quick introduction. And you probably know a lot of it already.”

“I remember when Wart got turned into an owl,” Shawn said. “And then there was something about a sword, and then his mother was raped and killed, and he spent years pushing a big log around in a circle. Although that last part might have been from Conan the Barbarian.”

“We know the basics about King Arthur,” Gus said. “Camelot, Round Table, Merlin, jousting.”