The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras

by J. Michael Orenduff

  “Well, I can’t believe I’m giving this back to you. And I can’t even take any credit for it, because we both want to make sure no one ever knows it was missing. You to protect the Museum and me to protect my ability to sell the fake.”

  “There’s one test I need to run to make absolutely sure this is genuine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a scientific dating test; I can have my staff…” He caught himself and looked up at me.

  “You’ll have to run it yourself. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes. The longer I have this thing in my possession the more risk for both of us. If you don’t know how to run the test, I can do it with you watching.”

  “I know how to run it.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  We drove to the Museum in separate cars, mine with a box holding the pot. He disabled the alarm and monitoring system with a key and then let us in. The lab is in the basement and has no windows, so once we were down there, he turned on the lights.

  “I’ll need a small scraping from the pot for this, and it must have some of the pigment; you can’t date pure clay.”

  “I know that. But at least take it from the part that’s already chipped so as not to further damage the pot.”

  “Your concern for the pot is touching,” he said sarcastically.

  More than you know, I thought to myself.

  He scraped some material into a vial. He put the vial in the machine, secured the hatch, and we stood listening to a low hum. In about forty-five seconds, a green light came on, and a small screen flashed the numbers, 900-1100.

  Without saying a word, Brandon removed the vial, washed it out, and returned it to its storage area. He turned off the lights and I followed him slowly towards the stairs. On the left wall were shelves holding quite a few pieces not currently on display. My night vision is excellent. I selected a small Remington bronze and lifted it silently as I walked by.

  We went upstairs to the dark main floor and back to the pedestal to make the exchange. I sat my box down near the wall, and while he was placing my fake pot carefully on the pedestal, I placed the real one in the box. Then I placed the Remington in the box with the pot. Doak came over to me as I was closing the box.

  “Do you have my thousand dollars?” I asked.

  “Get out,” he replied.

  I did, and felt guilty about carrying away a pot that I had stolen.

  During the planning, I had seen it as a challenge. I had told myself that museums were the enemy of the people. I had rationalized what I was doing. But now that I had the pot, the reality of how I had gotten it stared me in the conscience. I hadn’t ‘liberated’ it. I hadn’t righted some wrong the Museum had committed. I hadn’t honored the ancient potter. I hadn’t acquired the pot by ‘exchange.’ I’d stolen the damn thing.

  I didn’t feel guilty about the Remington. If it should turn out that I didn’t need it, I could always return it to Doak just to make him even more concerned about security.

  I felt a little better by the time I went to bed, partly because I had the real Mogollon pot secured away in my special hiding place and partly because I had washed down some piñon candy with several glasses of Gruet.

  And on top of that, I had mastered technology.

  Well, perhaps mastered is a bit strong. After I returned from the Museum, I put Doak’s bug and my bug detector in a grocery sack for Tristan. I didn’t think he had any use for either device, but I figured he could probably recycle all the little doodads inside the infernal things. While looking at the detector, I figured out all by myself that the reason it had seemed to shock me was because there was a switch that allowed the user to be alerted to the presence of a bug by either ringing or buzzing, and I had inadvertently set the switch to buzz.

  But that was just the beginning of my Feats of Technology.

  I checked my computer and there was a picture of Doak entering my kitchen door from the alley. Of course that had been set up by Tristan. The next part I did all by myself.

  I took the plug extender doohickey and plugged it into a wall receptacle in my bedroom. Then I plugged the satellite radio into it and pushed the button with the hieroglyphic symbol for ‘on’. I pushed the up button until I found a station that played big band jazz from the forties and fifties. I took the remote to bed with me and read for an hour or so with music in the background. When I was ready to go to sleep, I pushed the remote and the radio went out. A few minutes later, I did the same.

  37

  “We did it, Hubie!”

  “We did indeed.”

  “A toast,” she said, “to partners in crime.”

  We clinked our glasses together in celebration.

  Susannah said, “I have a couple of questions. First, how did you get the inventory tag off?”

  “Easily. They don’t want to damage the artwork, so the tags are put on with something like the glue used for Post-It notes. I knew the tag had to be inside because you can see all around the outside, and the first time I went to check it out, I picked it up and sat it back down, remember? I realized the pot sat smoothly on the pedestal, so the tag couldn’t be on the bottom.”

  “O.K., but why put the tag in the nasal spray bottle?”

  “The tag is metal; it might have set off the metal detector. So I placed it in a bottle they had already seen. I figured people hand things to them like that all the time when it’s something they don’t want to pass through the detector, things like computer disks, cameras, etc.”

  “But why would someone want to keep nose spray away from a metal detector?”

  “No reason I can think of. I just figured they would take it if I handed it to them. If they had asked, I would have told them something like my doctor told me the medicine was sensitive to electronic fields.”

  “I can’t believe it worked,” she said. “I can’t believe we actually did it. Or I should say you did it; I didn’t really do anything.”

  “On the contrary; your part was crucial. And I know how scared you must have been because I felt the same way when I was up there with my arm stuck down the maw of the pot.”

  “Geez, Hubie, you must have really been scared when the guard caught you up there.”

  “A minute sooner and I would have been up the arroyo without a shovel.”

  She groaned.

  “Tell me about Zia,” I said. “I’ve never eaten there.”

  “It was great, Hubie. It’s in an old adobe house in Corrales and there are kiva fireplaces in every nook and cranny, so when you walk in you smell the piñon and you see the orange glow of the flames. The floors are Saltillo tile with Navajo rugs scattered everywhere, and the tables have dried chamisa in Nambé vases. It’s about the most romantic place I’ve ever seen.”

  “And the food?”

  “I didn’t understand the food, Hubie.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to understand it; I think you’re supposed to eat it.”

  “You know what I mean, Hube; it’s one of those places where the food is supposed to reflect a philosophy.”

  “Which philosophy—Platonism? Do the waiters walk around with food cut-outs so the fire can cast their shapes on the walls?”

  “No, I think it was nihilism.”

  “Let me guess. Because the portions were so small.”

  “How did you know?”

  “One of their ads describes the food as ‘nouvelle New Mexican’. I think ‘nouvelle’ must be the French word for diet.”

  “More like the French word for starvation,” she said. “I was dying for a Blake’s Hamburger after we left. But I couldn’t very well ask Kauffmann to buy me a burger and fries after he’d just spent a hundred bucks on dinner,

  could I? And of course we were already headed back to his hotel…”

  “O.K., I get the picture.”

  Our drinks had evaporated in the dry desert air, so I signaled to Angie for another round.

  Susannah said, �
��I still can’t believe everything worked out so well.”

  “I have to tell you that I almost didn’t go through with it. Right before I called Doak, I started thinking the whole idea was too simple too work.”

  “On the contrary. It was ingenious precisely because of its simplicity. But still, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. The part I was most worried about was fooling Doak.”

  “That was easier than you think. He’s a museum director and art historian, but pots are not his specialty. But the best thing I had working for me was his vanity. He was so worried about looking bad that he would have done anything to cover up what looked like a theft.”

  “But the key was your beautiful reproduction.”

  “Which I couldn’t have done without your pictures and measurements.”

  “And of course the inventory tag and the successful dating test helped.”

  I nodded. “He was so anxious to remove the threat to his position that he probably wanted the date test to work so he could be done with the whole problem.”

  “Well, I wish he had suffered a little longer. Am I a bad person to wish that, Hubie?”

  “Am I a bad person to have stolen the pot?”

  “Let’s not say you stole it, Hubie. Let’s just say you deaccessioned it.”

  “Deaccessioned? Surely that’s not a word.”

  “It is, and an important one. The art history program even offers a seminar in deaccession policy. And you’ll like one thing they teach; namely, that tons of artifacts have to be given away, reburied, or even discarded because of lack of space and interest.”

  I think I stamped my feet under the table. “See why I find archaeologists and museums such phonies? They have more stuff than they can store or study, and they would still rather throw it away than see a treasure hunter get it.”

  “Feel better now?”

  “I do. Thanks. Do you feel better about what we did to Doak?”

  “I guess so. I do know he’s terrible to women and a pompous jackass to boot.”

  “So you aren’t likely to take a class from him.”

  “Are you kidding me? The first thing the other students told me when I became an art history major was stay away from Doak. And anyway, since becoming museum director he teaches only one course a year, a graduate

  seminars in his specialty.”

  “Which is?”

  She smiled at me and took a sip of her margarita.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Queer theory.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “His specialty is queer theory.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Because he gropes women? You don’t have to be gay to teach queer theory, Hubie.”

  “I meant you can’t be serious that they call it that.”

  “Geez, Hubie, you really are oblivious to a lot of the modern world.”

  “Deliberately and happily so,” I agreed.

  “But don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

  “I’m an anthropologist, Suze—sort of unofficial since I never got my degree—so of course I want to know what’s gone on in the grand sweep of human history. But I’m not much interested in fads.”

  “Today’s fads are tomorrow’s history, Hubie.”

  “Most are just passing.”

  “Well, you could still read the paper to know what’s going on,” she suggested.

  “Reading a daily paper to find out what’s going on is like watching the second hand of your watch to find out what time it is.”

  “Wow, that’s deep, Hubert. Did you make it up all by yourself?”

  I gave her my sly smile. “No, I think I read it in the paper.”

  38

  Thursday morning I made a good sale. Then I lost an important sale I was counting on. To top it all off, I saw a dead man walking. Sometimes the business world is tough.

  The bong announced a customer. I looked up to see an elderly gentleman with a trim mustache on a sunken face. I recognized him instantly even though he didn’t know me. He was slightly stooped, and his hands showed evidence of a mild palsy. He wore a white shirt with a spread collar and a string tie. He stood just inside the entrance and surveyed the merchandise. Then he came to the counter and pointed to a pot behind me.

  “I’ll take that Maria.”

  I looked around to verify which one he was gesturing towards.

  “It’s twelve-thousand dollars.” I said.

  To which he replied steadily, “Will you take a check?”

  I knew who he was, so I said I’d be happy to accept his check, and I watched in satisfaction as he wrote out in a shaky hand a figure with five digits to the left of the decimal.

  I bought that pot for two thousand shortly after buying the shop, and I’ve often thought it was an impulsive purchase. But it appreciated every year, and now Walter Masoir was buying it. Despite the enormous profit, I hated to see it go. But at least it was going to a good home.

  It was a rare work, late enough to show her spectacular style, early enough to be squarely in the tradition of San Ildefonso. If it had been larger, it would have commanded somewhere over fifty thousand, but it was very small, and the twelve thousand was the most I had ever gotten for a pot less than six inches across. I put it in a box padded by tissue paper and felt a small pang as it left the shop.

  Then Carl Wilkes walked in.

  “I don’t know any way to tell you this except straightforwardly. I can’t pay you for the pot.”

  I felt a bigger pang.

  Masoir’s check that had seemed so bountiful as he wrote it out was now less than half of what I just lost on the cancelled sale of the Mogollon pot. And I had risked prison getting it.

  “I’ll take an IOU,” I said.

  He gave me a forlorn smile. “It wouldn’t be much good without my client’s money.”

  “Maybe you could tell me who your client is, and I could arrange to have someone go persuade him to change his mind.”

  “Tempting,” he said, “but my business depends on protecting the anonymity of my clients.”

  “Even when they renege?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Maybe he’ll come around and do the right thing.”

  Wilkes and I chatted a while longer, and after he left, I endorsed the twelve-thousand dollar check to the IRS and mailed it to them. It didn’t cover my tax bill, but it whittled it down considerably. What really galled me, though, was having to put a stamp on it. I know it’s only forty-two cents, but aren’t the IRS and the Postal Service part of the same government? When you’re sending them twelve thousand dollars, the least they could do is pay the postage.

  After I got over my petty pique, I noticed the laptop under my counter. The camera was still in my kitchen, so the most recent picture on the computer was of Doak coming in. I had gone out and in the door the camera was watching to do things like empty the trash, but of course I had removed the remote and plug thing to my bedroom, so those trips had not been captured for posterity. But before Doak’s visit, I’d had two customers that afternoon while the camera was still watching the front door, and I decided to take a look at them. When you have as few as I do, you cherish each one.

  I powered up the computer. That’s what Tristan tells me we say these days instead of ‘turned it on’. I double clicked the door icon and got the list of times. I clicked on the most recent one and saw Doak again. Then I clicked back and saw the second customer leaving, the second customer entering, the first customer leaving, and the first customer coming in. I may have been distracted at the time, but I did recognize both their faces in their coming-in shots. If they came back, maybe I could sell them something.

  On the list of times, I noticed one that read 03:35. The list uses military time, so I knew it was three thirty five in the morning, and I also knew it was on the same day the two customers had come in and Doak had kept his late night rendezvous with me.

  I also knew it was the second ti
me in two weeks I’d had a late-night prowler. At least this time I would have a picture of the skulker. I clicked on that time and saw in my doorway none other than agent Guvelly.

  39

  It was just past two in the afternoon, but I locked up the shop anyway. There was a chill wind, so I put on a red sweatshirt with ‘Lobos’ in silver across the front. I’m not a fan of my alma mater’s sports teams, but I do like the look of red and silver. Or cherry and silver as the Lobos’ PR office likes to call it. I walked west to the Rio Grande. When I got to the river, I turned north and walked briskly along the levee.

  I have never understood the fascination most people have with batting a ball over a wall or putting it into a small hole in the ground, through a net, or between goal posts. I enjoy walking as a means of transportation and it’s also great exercise. When the mood and circumstances are right, you can also get some serious thinking done, and that’s what I needed.

  I needed Whit Fletcher’s help, but I couldn’t get it unless I helped him. The best help I could offer him was solving the murder in the Hyatt. I didn’t even know who the victim was, and, as far as I knew, I was still a suspect.

  The spring melt had started in the mountains to the north and the river had enough flow that I could actually hear the current. My thinking wasn’t getting anywhere, so I just let the sound of the river relax me as I walked along.

  Then it started snowing. It was early May, which tells you how late my payment to the IRS was and also how fickle springs are in Albuquerque. Soft flakes fluttered around me and disappeared as they hit the ground. I tried to catch a few on my hand, but the warmth of my palm melted them as they landed. The smell of the salt cedars along the river and the sight of the snow put me in mind of Christmas, but just as that pleasant thought was settling into my mind, the snow stopped and the sun came out. I don’t own an umbrella or a snow shovel and neither does anyone else in town. Of course it does rain and snow here. It just doesn’t do either long enough to justify buying the equipment.