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"This is the best plan you can come up with," Alfredo said flatly. He looked back and forth between them—Joan, who was busying herself with making tea, and Holmes, who had that twitchy sort of look he sometimes got when they were in the middle of a case, like he was so absorbed in thinking through clues that he couldn't fully remember how to control his limbs.
"Until such time as I unlock the mysteries of either instantaneous teleportation or astral projection," Holmes said, "and so can make myself be in two geographically distinct places at once, I see no other way around this conundrum. And you have generally proven yourself to be somewhat better than incompetent, hence my request."
Alfredo squinted at him. "There was a compliment in there somewhere, right?"
Holmes sighed and rolled his eyes heavenward, as if Alfredo were the one being difficult here. "Watson, tell him," he said, pointing at Alfredo with one finger while still looking steadily at the ceiling's plasterwork.
Alfredo's grandma had been a mistress of this one particular expression, one she brought out when Alfredo denied he'd been into her pantry even though he had a sticky ring of jam around his mouth, or that time Miguel had been playing around on the fire escape like she'd told him not to, had fallen and dislocated his shoulder. It was a look of long-suffering, one which conveyed that sure she was fond of you, somewhere deep down, but right now she'd just as gladly wring your neck if it wouldn't cause her more trouble. The expression on Joan Watson's face just then was close kin to that expression.
Joan sighed and set her cup of tea to one side. "What Sherlock is trying to say is that we've narrowed down the counterfeiting ring to operating out of one of two colleges. One is upstate, the other is in southern New Jersey. Our informant's told us that there's going to be a major transfer of items—some stolen, some faked—at an academic conference held at the counterfeiters' university this weekend. The only problem is that both colleges are hosting history conferences on Saturday, which doesn't narrow things down any. Our best bet is to have people at both conferences pretending to be the buyers. If we're going to be in New Jersey, we need someone else at the college in New York."
"Buyers, plural," Alfredo said flatly.
"We know that the counterfeiters are expecting a couple, a male and a female buyer, posing as academics," Holmes said. "It's our intention to perform an interception." He drew out each syllable of in-ter-cep-tion, consonants sharp-edged enough to cut and teeth bared.
"Yeah, see," Alfredo said, leaning back in his chair, "even if I thought I could pull off posing as some college professor, there's only one of me, Sherlock. This is not going to fly."
"Indeed it would not, if you were to go to the meet by yourself," Holmes said with every sign of great satisfaction. "Which is where Ms Hudson comes in."
**********
Alfredo tucked his hands into his armpits, stomping his feet against the sidewalk to get some circulation going. Spring had started to blunt the worst of winter's edges, but the early mornings still had a bite to them, and this was early morning—he wouldn't need gloves in a couple hours, but right now Alfredo's fingers were freezing. He had no idea why the hell he'd agreed to any of this instead of staying in his nice warm bed and spending the weekend getting a head start on the Ferguson contract. The street was quiet for now, streetlights still far stronger than the faint early morning glow, but that would change soon when people who worked early shifts started leaving their homes. Alfredo had some spectacularly nosy neighbours, and no way they'd be able to hold back their curiosity if they saw him standing on a street corner at this hour of the morning, wearing a three-piece suit and with an overnight bag in one hand.
Not that he could blame them—Alfredo had been more than a little curious himself as to how, within the space of a few hours, Holmes had been able to get his hands on two staid three-piece suits, plus everything from crisp white shirts to some obnoxiously bright bow ties, all of them tailored to fit Alfredo perfectly. A little bit curious, a little bit freaked out, to be honest, but when he'd looked at Joan she'd just huffed and shrugged so it couldn't have been anything too illegal.
Right when he was starting to give serious thought to saying the hell with all of it and heading back inside, he heard the low rumble of a well-tuned car engine coming up the block. Alfredo turned to see Ms Hudson pulling into a free spot just behind him in a cherry red car that looked totally out of place in this neighbourhood.
She climbed out and popped the trunk for him to put in his bag with a cheery, "Good morning, Alfredo!" In her silk blouse and tweed skirt, Ms Hudson didn't really look much different than she usually did, except for how her hair was pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her heels had been replaced by shoes which had more than a hint of the orthopaedic to them. Even if Alfredo hadn't known that she could rattle off whole passages of the Iliad in the original Greek, he wouldn't think that she'd have any problem with fitting in at some college for the weekend as a visiting professor.
This car, on the other hand…
"A Ferrari 250 GT Lusso?" Alfredo said under his breath to her as he squeezed his bag in next to hers in the tiny trunk and closed it again with an effort. "Thought we were supposed to be doing this on the down low."
"Oh, but we are!" Ms Hudson said with a laugh, patting him on the arm before turning to get back into the car.
"Yeah, I know some professors make bank," Alfredo said, folding his legs up to fit in the car's passenger seat. He couldn't resist reaching out and running a hand lovingly over the dash. Even he'd never been in one of these before, and at one point he'd made a career out of getting up close and personal with rare cars whose title deeds he didn't technically possess. This one was a beauty. "But very few of them can afford to drive around in a vintage car that costs half a million dollars."
"I know, dear," Ms Hudson said, putting the car into gear and pulling out onto the street with smooth ease. "But we're pretending to be con artists who are pretending to be scholars of the classics. One set of clues for the academics, one set of clues for the people we'll potentially be purchasing from."
That did make a kind of sense. "So we pull up in a classic car looking like we've got money to burn, reassure them that we really are buyers for this crime syndicate?"
"Exactly," Ms Hudson said. "Joan and Sherlock are taking a chauffeured car, but I thought you and I would prefer something with a little more oompfh. Besides, what's the point in having a membership in the Classic Car Club if you never have an excuse to use it?" Her smile was as serene as always, but there was a little curl of mischief in its corner that reminded Alfredo just why he liked her so much.
"Sounds like a plan to me," Alfredo said, settling back as much as he could against the fixed seat.
Ms Hudson gunned the engine.
**********
Ms Hudson travelled just like Alfredo's mother did—never knowingly unprepared for any eventuality. Despite the small size of the car's interior, she had managed to find room for a bag of snacks and a large thermos of coffee, enough to keep them going through the early morning chill, across bridges and through streets snarled with rush-hour traffic. The coffee was strong, and packed the kind of hit you should expect from the caffeine requirements of anyone who was an acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes. The car's suspension gave them a pretty smooth ride, but Alfredo still felt like he was vibrating a little anyway by the time they pulled in for a rest stop at a diner just past Scranton.
"I don't know about you," Ms Hudson said as she locked the car behind her and slung her purse over her shoulder, "but I could go for some eggs and hash browns right now."
Alfredo looked over at the diner which sat on the same lot as the gas station. He could smell the odour of cooking grease from where he stood; the building's white and blue paint was worn and flaking in spots. He looked back at Ms Hudson's silk blouse, the string of pearls around her neck; she was smoothing some imperceptible wrinkle out of her skirt. "This really your kind of place?"
"Honey, the town I grew up in, a place like this would have qualified as genuine cordon bleu cooking," she said, linking her arm with his and striding off across the forecourt. "And sometimes I get nostalgic for terrible scrambled eggs and burnt bacon."
That was probably the most Alfredo had ever heard Ms Hudson voluntarily offer about growing up in Nebraska; most of the time, she spoke like her life had started the day she'd stepped off a plane at JFK. "Is that how they got you, the promise of crappy road-trip diner food?"
"In the spirit of the weekend," Ms Hudson said in a stage whisper as she opened the diner door, "let's call it my Achilles heel."
Inside the place at least looked clean, though the vinyl of the banquette seating was cracking in places, and the Formica tabletop had been scrubbed so many times that the marbled pattern was wearing away in the middle. The waitress had circles under her eyes, like she'd already been on shift for hours when Alfredo had just been waking up back in the city, and the look that she gave the two of them along with the menus was cool and warily assessing. Still, she was polite and quick to top up their coffee. Alfredo supposed he couldn't ask for more at this hour on a weekend morning.
Alfredo ordered orange juice and toast—he'd never had much of an appetite in the mornings—but Ms Hudson ended up with a plate piled high enough to feed the two of them.
"I don't indulge often," she said, dipping a flaky biscuit into the pool of country gravy on her plate when Alfredo raised a sceptical eyebrow at her. "But when I do, I suppose it's the same to be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, as the saying goes."
"Hell of a sheep," Alfredo said, slathering his toast with grape jelly.
They were just finishing up their coffees when Ms Hudson's phone beeped. She swiped a fingertip across the screen and read the message before her eyebrows rose. "Oh dear."
"What did he do this time?" Alfredo said. He'd made it through a hell of a lot of life without turning into a cynic, and look at him now.
"They went through a drive-through at a Starbucks," Ms Hudson said, "and Sherlock climbed out of the car window and very loudly accused the barista of murder. I think it all went about as well as you'd expect after that."
"Huh," Alfredo said. Without consciously meaning to, he looked over his shoulder at their waitress. She was behind the counter now, polishing glasses and watching them with a steady and unblinking thousand-yard stare. The diner was much quieter now than it had been when they'd walked in, only one table still occupied, and maybe the way the waitress had been watching them was less down to exhaustion and more a sign of open hostility. The hackles rose on the back of Alfredo's neck. "You want to get back on the road now?" he said, digging a ten dollar bill out of his wallet.
"Yes," Ms Hudson said firmly, "let's."
**********
Ten miles later, they reached the back of a very large and very obstinate traffic jam. People ahead of them were laying on their horns or getting out of their cars, craning their necks to see what was going on. Alfredo pulled out his phone instead and checked Twitter.
"Pile-up with five cars and a truck carrying livestock," he read out, giving a low whistle. "Trucks overturned, chickens on the road."
Ms Hudson let out a sigh. "So we'll be here for a while, I suppose."
"Unless you want to get out there and start herding chickens," Alfredo said.
"There are many reasons why I left Nebraska," Ms Hudson said primly, "and never again having to look a chicken in the eye is one of them."
The arch tone of her voice startled a laugh out of him. The closest Alfredo had ever been to a chicken was when he was picking a frozen one out of the chill cabinet at the bodega around the corner from his place. That was more than close enough for him. "I feel like there's a story there, Ms Hudson, and it's a story I probably don't want to know."
"Plausible deniability," Ms Hudson said. She shot him a look out of the corner of her eye as the car rolled another inch or so forward. The sound of car horns had reached a crescendo, challenging a Midtown traffic jam in volume. "You can call me Caroline, you know, if you'd like."
"Caroline," Alfredo said. "I'd like that. Thank you."
**********
After another forty minutes of sitting there, Caroline said, "Though on second thoughts, those chickens are starting to seem more appealing. At least they stayed where they were supposed to."
**********
"For the rest of my life," Alfredo said when they finally got clear of the jam, "anyone mentions Pennsylvania to me and I'm going to think of feathers."
**********
"I texted Joan to tell her what happened," he told Caroline as they crossed over the border back into New York State.
"Oh?"
"She said to stop trying to one-up them on crazy road trip stories. Also that Holmes made bail just before the cops found a bunch of bodies in the basement of that barista's house."
"No!" Caroline breathed, eyes round with shock.
"Yeah, they were…" Alfredo paused as he scrolled down through the rest of the message. His eyebrows rose and he shook his head briefly to clear it. "Yeah, I'm not reading the rest of that out loud. You don't want that in your imagination."
"And Sherlock put all of that together because he ordered a latte from the guy?"
"Looks like it," Alfredo said.
Caroline wrinkled her nose. "Another reason to be glad that Joan's the one who makes tea in that house."
"Another?" Alfredo said, because his mother had always said that curiosity was one of his besetting sins.
"Sherlock does experiments in the kitchen," Caroline said firmly. "Ones with an organic basis, which I then have to clean up. Trust me that you don't want that in your imagination."
Alfredo believed her.
**********
The rest of the drive went smoothly, the two of them talking occasionally, or listening to the NPR station that crackled in and out on the radio: fighting here, Wall Street embezzling there, the pregnancy of a Hollywood starlet whom Alfredo had only vaguely heard of. Most of the time, Alfredo looked out of the window, eyeing the countryside with the amateur appreciation of someone who knew there must be names for all those different types of trees but had no intention of getting closer in order to find out. Alfredo was city born and city bred; all of his grandparents had been born and raised on farms, one set in Cuba and one set in Georgia, and from everything he'd heard from them, they'd all made really good choices when they'd gotten the hell out of Dodge. He had no intention of lingering longer in rural western New York State than was absolutely necessary. Even the squirrels here looked shifty.
Just as they started seeing signs for the college's exit, Alfredo got a text from Joan saying that she and Holmes had arrived at their conference.
"They still don't know if they got the right one," he told Caroline. "But they registered and got their name badges and such. Holmes put them down as a married couple. Sir John Wellesley-Marr and his wife, Porcia."
Caroline winced. "Something tells me Joan didn't take that well."
"Not so much," Alfredo said, opening up a browser window on his phone and sighing at how long it took the search page to load. The coverage out here was terrible. "Who knows what's worse, having to fake being married to Holmes or having a name like your parents really loved Italian sports cars."
"Well," Caroline said as she swung the car onto the off ramp, "if Sherlock's continuing on with his classical naming tradition, he likely chose the name in homage to the daughter of Cato."
"Oh?" Alfredo said as he tapped sir john wellesley-marr into Google, because sometimes Holmes took his cover stories to great lengths and Alfredo had started to develop a case of morbid curiosity.
"Porcia's second husband was Marcus Junius Brutus."
"Guy who stabbed Caesar?" The search page finally loaded and Alfredo scrolled down through a list of results all cobbled together to give the impression of a reputable if faded academic career in Britain, and a similar family background among the impoverished rural gentry. Just good enough to give him some cachet, not enough to raise any alarm bells. Then Alfredo tapped through to the image page and he felt his eyebrows rise. He was going to have to make some popcorn, because if Joan ever found out about this she was going to eviscerate Holmes and his copy of Photoshop.
"Yes," Caroline said, taking the next right and passing through wide-set pillars and onto the kind of campus that Alfredo had only ever seen in movies. "She was renowned for being an ideal Roman wife. I suppose Joan could take it as a compliment that Sherlock thinks she could embody those ideals."
Alfredo thought of the weeks that the brownstone had been inhabited by two irritable roosters who'd been named for the founders of Rome, and then of the fact that there was definitely some hedging going on judging by Caroline's tone. "Just why was Porcia supposed to be such a great wife?"
Caroline sighed. "Well, she tortured herself to prove that she wouldn't let slip any of the assassination plans in advance through her inherent feminine weakness, and then when Brutus was killed she's alleged to have committed suicide by swallowing hot coals."
There was silence in the car for a long moment.
"Joan is going to kill him," Alfredo said.
"More than likely," Caroline agreed.
**********
They followed signs that led them into the heart of the campus, past red-brick buildings and a small lake and clusters of polo-shirt-wearing white kids. Alfredo felt a little bit like he was on safari, and had to resist the urge to snap photos on his phone through the car window—that probably wouldn't make him look like someone who did this stuff for a living.
"Do you want to run through this one last time?" Caroline said as they circled the parking lot reserved for conference attendees, looking for a free space among all the sensible mid-sized sedans and budget rental cars. The Ferrari stuck out like the sorest of thumbs among them; Alfredo had seen them get several curious, and one or two assessing, looks already from people walking past.
"We're both professors from South Central Texas State College," Alfredo said. The school didn't exist, but the name was both plausible and vague enough that hopefully anyone who saw their name badges wouldn't figure that out right away, especially since this was a regional conference in the northeast. "You're Joan Morgan and you're basically the whole Classics department. I'm Geoffrey Washington and I'm their new hire in early colonial American history."
"And it's Geoffrey, never Geoff," Caroline said, pouncing on a space which had just come free. Her accent thickened slightly as she spoke, still mostly Midwestern but with a length to the vowels that you might plausibly get if you'd spent ten or fifteen years living in Texas. "We've both been in the city for research this past week and thought it might be nice to see the western part of the state, have a little road trip and get to know one another as colleagues."
"Works for me," Alfredo said. Just enough falsehood in what they said to make them difficult to track down afterwards, in case this all went to hell like he was half-expecting it would; just enough truth to it that it'd be easy for them to remember. It was almost like back in the old days, pretending at confidence and cover stories so he could get close enough to a car to boost it, and that sent an extra kick of adrenaline through his system. He could feel the shiver of it in his veins as he got out and tugged his jacket straight, fixed his tie.
"You ready?" he asked Caroline once the Ferrari was locked. From the corner of one eye he could see someone watching them from the doorway of the nearest lecture building, someone watching them for far longer than could be explained by idle curiosity.
"Aien Aristeuein," she said, coming over to take his arm. Off his blank look, she continued, "It's a Greek phrase, it shows up in the sixth book of the Iliad when Glaucus is speaking to Diomedes. It means 'ever to excel'—a lot of schools use it as a motto."
"Huh," Alfredo said as they started up the narrow pathway that led from the parking lot to the Gothic-looking pile where the conference was going to be held. "Optimistic."
Caroline's mouth quirked. "You have something better?"
"No way out but through," Alfredo said. "Worked for me so far."
She smiled, and he pushed the door open for them.
Inside, there were some really enthusiastic undergrads working the registration booth. Alfredo didn't think he'd ever met people before who were actually perky—he'd thought that retail assistants with a sales target to meet were perky, but they had nothing on the relentless sunniness of these kids. No one living within the five boroughs of New York City could possibly approach how chipper they were. It made Alfredo feel pretty alien and more than a little bit old and he tried to channel that into making him look dignified and serious, like Professor Geoffrey Washington who was an expert on the seventeenth century and knew how academic conferences worked.
"We really hope you enjoy your time here!" one of them said as she handed over their name badges and a printed schedule. Alfredo skimmed the first page of it: Marriage, Morality and the State in the Nineteenth-Century US; Urban Planning in Post-War Europe. Didn't look like being able to remember all of 'Paul Revere's Ride' from grade school was going to help him much here. "There's some coffee and snacks available up on the mezzanine level, feel free to help yourselves! Have a nice day!"
Alfredo felt obscurely pleased when Caroline leaned into him as she was putting on her name badge and said, "Oh my god, I feel so elderly."
"Caffeine?" Alfredo said, nodding in the direction of the coffee. Even with that adrenaline boost he'd had a little while ago, he was feeling the early start and the long drive, and the high-polished leather shoes Holmes had provided him were starting to pinch his toes. Maybe it wasn't the perky volunteers—maybe he was just getting old.
"Please," Caroline said, but before they reached the foot of the stairs they were intercepted by a smiling woman in a sheath dress and glossy bob.
"Professors Washington and Morgan?" the woman asked. She wasn't wearing a nametag, and like the car which was parked ostentatiously outside, she seemed glossier than everyone else here. Alfredo was pretty sure she was the ringleader, and he slipped one hand into his pants pocket and thumbed on the little recording device that Joan had set up for him. "I'm Jill. It's so nice to finally meet you in person. We've set up a meeting room for project participants just down here, if you'd like to come with me? It'll be more private."
"That would be wonderful," Caroline said, and Alfredo let her take the lead while they walked past little clusters of professors deep in conversation and along a hallway into a classroom. Jill seemed inclined to think that Caroline would be the one doing all the talking anyway. Inside the room, there was a chalkboard and chairs and a table with several large cardboard file boxes sitting on it. Jill walked over to them and lifted the lid from one, and Alfredo didn't know a whole hell of a lot about history, but he knew you probably didn't cart medieval papers around in a cardboard box like that if you were doing things above-board.
"This is the full shipment," Jill said, handing over a manila file folder. "And these are the certificates of provenance, all made up to look like these have come out of private estate sales in southern France and central Italy. If you can get buyers for all of these quickly and quietly, we can arrange to have another for you by early September."
Alfredo made a show of looking over the boxes like he had a goddamn clue what he should be looking for, and then nodded at Caroline. She smiled at Jill and said, "Everything seems in order. We'll be waiting until the end of the day to remove the merchandise, of course. Just so it's less conspicuous."
"Sure. I assumed you'd be having someone come to help you guys." Jill said, raising an eyebrow. "Difficult to fit all of this in that car of yours."
"Yeah," Alfredo said, "we'll be having some people coming by."
**********
Holmes and Joan's client had apparently requested that this all be kept as low-key as possible, but it turned out that stuff like this got the FBI's Art Crime Team involved, and it was pretty difficult to get the FBI onto a campus full of bright kids with smartphones without someone noticing. Alfredo got a pissy text from Holmes, chastising him for the fact that he'd had to find out that they'd solved the case from Twitter.
"Not really big on the thank yous, is he?" Alfredo said. He and Caroline were leaning against the Ferrari, watching agents go in and out of the building and retrieve box after heavy box while a crowd of curious students watched from the lawn outside. Looked like some local news crew had showed up as well. If the administration couldn't tamp this down soon, it'd probably be national news by tomorrow.
"He just texted me to say that he'd been sent a Snapchat of us," Caroline said, frowning down at her own phone. "I have no idea what a Snapchat is."
"I feel a whole hell of a lot older than I did this morning," Alfredo said. He didn't know what a Snapchat was either. He could call one of his nephews to ask them, but feeling older was one thing; he wasn't really up for feeling ancient just yet.
"He'll probably thank us later," Caroline said. "That's generally how he works. Or he'll never say anything but a couple of days' time, we'll open the door to find a present so over-the-top that it's borderline inappropriate."
Alfredo sighed. He didn't think his neighbours had forgiven him yet for the last thoughtful gift Holmes had sent his way. Well, at least it kept him on his toes. And made sure he had a working fire extinguisher around. "You want to stop off somewhere for food on the way back? I could eat." If the Feds didn't have too many questions for them, they could probably be back in Manhattan by midnight.
"Oh no," Caroline said. "Sherlock paid for us to stay in a decent hotel, so we're going to stay in a decent hotel."
Alfredo thought about it for a moment. "We can expense stuff on his credit card, right?"
"I," Caroline said, with every sign of great satisfaction, "am getting a spa treatment."
**********
Alfredo woke up late the next morning and went down to the hotel dining room to drink some pretty good coffee and cheerfully ignore the fourteen text messages Holmes had sent him overnight.
"Joan called me this morning," Caroline said when she slid into the seat opposite him. She'd ditched the old lady shoes and let her hair out of the tight bun. "To convey her thanks and say they won't be back in the city for a while."
"Another murder case?" Alfredo asked as he cut up his waffles.
"The same one," Caroline said placidly, pouring herself some coffee. "Sherlock had some sort of epiphany on the drive back and realized that the barista must have had an accomplice."
"At this rate, they might never leave New Jersey."
"Hopefully our trip back won't take that long."
Alfredo chewed a mouthful of waffle for a moment and then said, "But we don't have to be back in the city right away, right?"
Caroline looked at him.
"I just…" Alfredo ducked his head, feeling obscurely embarrassed. "What you said about our cover story, about being colleagues who take a trip to get to know one another better? Seems like if Holmes is going to be roping us into more of this stuff, well, it's not a bad idea, maybe."
There was silence for a moment, and then Caroline's foot nudged his under the table. "You know, we're not that far away from Niagara Falls, all things considered, and the rental is still good for another few days."
"I've never been to Niagara Falls," Alfredo said. "Road trip?"
Caroline's smile was bright.