The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02]

by J. Michael Orenduff

  Mariella’s old money gave Layton’s career a rocket boost when they married, but he has added to the pile considerably with his legal practice. He serves the legal needs of most wealthy Albuquerqueans, including many other prominent lawyers. This he is able to do because he belongs to no firm and thus is not seen as a competitor. He runs his practice with a bevy of paralegals and secretaries but no other attorneys. And he doesn’t practice corporate law and only rarely stoops to criminal law when a current client requires it.

  In light of all this, you might wonder why Layton Kent would have me as a client. The answer is that the charming Mariella is a collector of the rarest and most expensive Indian pottery, and I am her personal dealer. I don’t know if Layton knows the background of some of the beautiful works in his sprawling pueblo moderne, but if he does, he has no doubt arranged for both himself and his wife to have what lawyers call plausible deniability.

  Layton’s table overlooks the 18th green at his club. He wouldn’t know an eagle from a roadrunner, but he does know the players, and as they finish their rounds, they come by his table to pay obeisance. He pointed me to my chair and took his own. A covey of staff appeared, picking up glasses and putting others down, placing napkins across our laps, and uncorking Dom Perignon.

  The waiter stood like a sentinel while Layton sipped the famous bubbly and signaled it fit to drink with a nod of his head. My glass was filled, and I took a sip. Dom Perignon is marginally better than New Mexico’s own Gruet, but it costs ten times as much. Though I indulge my own pleasures to the extent my purse allows, I can’t justify the extra cost of the fabled champagne. On Layton’s nickel, however, I was more than happy to sniff the yeasty nose and taste the dry effervescence of the most famous of all bubblies.

  Layton was wearing a gray wool suit with an almost invisible nutmeg pinstripe. His shirt was zucchini green and he wore a knit tie the color of wet sand. There were stays in his collar and a diamond in his tie the size of a martini olive.

  “We’ll both have the truchas en terracotta,” he announced to the room at large. He took a small sip of champagne and leaned towards me.

  “Now tell me how you ended up in this enchilada.”

  I told him the whole story while he waved to golfers, diners, and staff and an assortment of people visited the table to squeeze his hand. No one kissed his ring.

  Our fish arrived, the clay was cracked and then peeled off tableside, and the succulent trout was de-boned and placed on our plates. One bite of the perfectly cooked fish with its piñon pesto stuffing and for a brief moment I forgot about my legal troubles.

  I feared Layton hadn’t heard a word of my story, but he surprised me when it was over by summarizing the entire thing and asking a few pertinent questions. Then he dismissed me.

  “Can someone give me a ride back to my place?”

  “Dear boy, I run a law practice, not a taxi service.”

  But when I walked outside, the Rolls was waiting.

  38

  I went straight to my hammock and fell asleep.

  When I awoke, it wasn’t yet five o’clock and I didn’t feel like opening the shop, so I walked over to the church and sat on the banco like a zombie until I heard footsteps approach from behind.

  “Wall, Youbird, you khave come for confession?”

  “Hello, Father. No, just to get some sun.”

  “Zo you did not kill Master Gerstner as it says on the radio?”

  I shuddered at the fact my arrest had been broadcast. “I did not, so I have nothing to confess.”

  “Bot you know whot they say about confession.”

  “It’s good for the soul?”

  “Yas, and even batter for the priest. Iz our reality television.”

  When he stopped laughing, I asked him if he had known Gerstner.

  The light went out of his eyes and he sat down next to me and crossed himself. “Yas, I knew him. I had bad thoughts about him. May Got bless his soul.”

  “How did you know him, Father? Are you Czech?”

  “No, Rusyn.”

  “I didn’t know you were Russian”

  “Not Russian, Youbird – Rusyn.”

  “Ah,” I said, deciding to drop it.

  But it was too late.

  “Mebbe you know us by a different name. We are also known as Rutherians.”

  “Rutherians,” I repeated. “No, I’ve never heard that word.”

  “How about Ruthene?”

  How about Rosicrucians I was tempted to say, but I said, “Sorry, no.”

  “Lemko?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Have you heard of the Lemko? We are also called that.”

  I said no in what I hoped was an apologetic tone.

  “Husal?”

  How many names did these people have?

  “Bojko?”

  “No, afraid I don’t know that one either.”

  “Wahl,” he said languidly, “it doss not matter. We are accustomed to this anonymity.”

  The good Father then launched into a dissertation on the sad history of a group of people who have many names and are unknown by all of them. During his recitative – Wagnerian in its length – I remained confident that if I continued to pay attention, the point of the narrative would eventually emerge.

  I was mistaken.

  The Rusyns consider themselves to be the indigenous inhabitants of Carpathia. Some of Carpathia is in Ukraine, which claims the Rusyns are Ukrainians and the Rusyn language is a backward dialect of Ukrainian. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was a movement among the Rusyns to have their own country but the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia somehow undermined that pipe dream. I didn’t see what that had to do with Ukraine, but at least the breakup of Czechoslovakia was something I had heard of, which is more than I can say for the rest of the story.

  Evidently, the majority of the Rusyns have now turned their attention to achieving recognition and some degree of autonomy within Ukraine. To undermine that effort, the Ukrainian government has begun a “Rusyns are Ukrainians” propaganda campaign. This plays in to the hands of a hard-line splinter group who insist on a Rusyn state and are alleged to be willing to achieve their goal by any means necessary.

  After he had told me all that (you should be grateful I condensed it), he said, “Zo, Youbird, to make a long story short—”

  “Too late for that,” I interjected.

  But he pressed forward. “There are Rusyn cabals around the world seeking to support minority rights for my people. There iz a cell even here, and Gerstner joined our little group of peaceful dreamers.”

  I was a little shaky on my geography. “Do the Carpathians extend in to Czechoslovakia?”

  “Thar iz no Czechoslovakia, Youbird.”

  “Oh, right. So Gerstner was an ally.”

  “So we thought. Bot actually he wass a gawfer.”

  A golfer? I tried to imagine Gerstner in knickers and a porkpie hat. “He played golf?”

  “Mebbe I do not say it right. ‘Gawfer’ – a small animal who digs the ground.”

  I pondered it for a minute. “I think you mean a mole.”

  “A mole iz a spy?”

  “No, a mole is a harmless little fellow whose name has come to be used in that way because he lives underground.”

  “Ah, then he woss a mole. Our little circle came to believe he woss in league with the Ukrainians.”

  “Did he do anything that might have gotten him killed?”

  “Youbird, we are a harmless group of dreamers, a few refugees from a country that never exist. We raise a few dollars for the victims of the 1998 floods. No one kills anybody over the Rusyn question.”

  He shook his head.

  I remained on the banco after Father Groaz left. I puzzled over whether the pot smashing was related to Gerstner in any way. By five o’clock I had reached the conclusion I expected; namely, that I had no clue and wouldn’t have known what to do with a clue if I did have one. So I turned to s
omething I do know about – Dos Hermanas.

  The Dom Perignon hadn’t completely worn off despite the afternoon nap, so I was sipping my margarita slowly.

  “I can’t understand why the police think you murdered Gerstner,” she said, incredulous.

  “Well, I have a motive, I was in the building, I left the party for no good reason, and the shot was heard while I was gone. You have to admit that would qualify almost anyone for the suspect list.”

  “But you already explained how the murder had to be at a different time or place.”

  “I explained it to you, Suze, and to Layton. I didn’t explain it to the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was just digging myself in to a hole, and I decided not to say anything else.”

  “That’s like my father. He likes to say, ‘When you find you’re digging yourself in to a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging’.”

  “Which is what I did. Let Layton worry about it.”

  “So now what?”

  “I guess I wait for a call from Layton telling me everything is O.K.”

  She took a sip of her margarita and tilted her head back to catch the sun’s rays. The air was cold but the sun was warm and we were back on the west veranda.

  “What about the pots?” she asked up towards the sky.

  “Being arrested for murder doesn’t change the fact I still need money. I’ve still got mortgage payments and rental payments, I still have nothing to sell in one of the shops, Consuela may still need a kidney transplant, and now I’ve got a big legal fee to boot.”

  “It can’t be that much, can it?”

  “Oh, it can mount up pretty fast. Layton charges five hundred dollars an hour.”

  “Geez, Hubie, that’s a million a year.”

  “That’s a pretty fast calculation for someone who claims she’s not good in math. But he makes a lot more than that. You don’t think he bills only two thousand hours a year, do you?”

  “Will he bill you for the time during lunch?”

  “The meter’s always running, Suze.”

  “That’s not fair, Hubie. Why should he get paid while he eats?”

  “For the same reason I got charged with a murder I didn’t commit.”

  “Life’s not fair?”

  “That’s the reason.”

  39

  On Friday morning I went to see a hatter named Vlade Glastoc.

  I didn’t know there were still hatters. I figured hats all came from factories these days, but we have a hatter in Albuquerque, and he has a shop on Silver a block west of the train station where he can make any sort of hat you want and it fits you perfectly because he measures your head and tailors it right to your measurements. Or, maybe that should be ‘hatters’ it right to your measurements. And it is measurements – plural. Turns out a proper hat size is more than just the circumference of your noggin.

  “Your head is perfectly sized for your height,” he told me after he had measured mine around the normal way as well as from ear to ear over the top and from my eyebrows to the base of the back of my skull.

  I didn’t take much pleasure in his observation about my head size. After all, there are only thirteen men’s hat sizes ranging from 6 5/8 to 8 1/2. Since there are three billion men, the odds would be that, with the exception of a few pinheads and guys with hydrocephalus, most of us would have the right head size.

  “No one knows how to size a hat these days,” Mr. Glastoc lamented. He centered a plaster of Paris head on the counter and lowered a metal loop onto its forehead. “You see how that rests perfectly on the head?”

  “It certainly does,” I said admiringly.

  “It does not,” he contradicted. “It appears to rest properly because it is at the wrong angle. Observe,” he said like a magician, and tilted the hoop. “Now you see it is too small.” Then he tilted the loop in the other direction. “Now behold – it is too large.”

  “Amazing.”

  He nodded appreciatively. He was a small man with small eyes. I don’t know if he had the right sized head; it seemed a smidgen small to my untrained eye. He made up for his head size with a lot of hair, jet black and combed straight back without a part. He spoke faintly accented English and his word order was unidiomatic in a few cases, so I guessed he was foreign born, and it turned out I was correct.

  Of course my getting it right may have been aided by his given name being Vlade, not a common naming choice for American parents. And I was also aided by the fact that Father Groaz had told me Glastoc was Rusyn.

  I hadn’t told Glastoc that. I wanted information from him, but I didn’t want him to know what I wanted. I didn’t know what side he was on. In fact, I didn’t even know what sides there were.

  “That’s an attractive flag,” I said to him.

  He glanced at the flag on the headband catch of a natty hat I would have described as Tyrolean. I expected him to say something like, “Yes, that is the Rusyn flag,” thus providing an entrée for a conversation on the topic. Instead, he grunted and asked me what style of hat I had in mind.

  I told him the one with the interesting flag appealed to me.

  “All wrong for you. A hat like that is worn by large men as a minor decoration. On you it would only make you look smaller.”

  “Oh. Well, how about a larger hat with the same headband. I really like that flag. What country did you say its from?”

  “I didn’t say. Here, try this one.” He handed me a Western straw hat without a band.

  “I don’t think I like straw. And I definitely want a headband.”

  “Try this,” he said, producing another one from under the counter. It was a sort of an updated version of the homburg, and I hated it before even trying it on.

  We went around like this for a while, me bringing up the headband and the flag and him bringing up more hats. Finally, he produced a soft felt number with a brim wide enough to give protection from the sun and a crown low enough to avoid making it seem like I was trying to look taller. It had an attractive band made of dark green ribbon, and it felt good in my hand and even better on my head.

  “I’ll take this one if you can put that headband on it,” I said, pointing again to the Tyrolean model.

  “I can’t sell you this one. It doesn’t fit you properly.”

  “But it feels perfect.”

  “The one I make will feel even better. Besides, this is a model that has been too long in the shop. Believe me, you will like better the one I make just for you.”

  “Hmm. O.K., but what about the headband?”

  He shrugged. “If you like it, I can make one like it for this hat, but I don’t think it is appropriate.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t even recognize the flag. It could be some terrorist regime for all I know.”

  Whereupon his small eyes became even smaller, and he told me about the flag.

  40

  The hat was ready on Monday and I wore it to Dos Hermanas.

  “Wow! First an ascot and now a fedora. You’re becoming sartorially splendid.”

  “You think it looks good?”

  “It looks great.”

  I took it off and hung it on the back of an empty chair. “I feel sort of self-conscious wearing it. Men don’t wear hats anymore.”

  “My father always wears a hat.”

  “He wears cowboy hats. That’s not the same.”

  “So you can be different. Where in the world did you find it?”

  “I got it from Vlade Glastoc.”

  “You went to Russia over the weekend?”

  I gave her a blank look.

  “Well? Isn’t Vladivostok in Russia?”

  “Not Vladivostok, Suze. Vlade Glastoc. It’s a name.”

  “Of someone who sells hats?”

  “He makes them.”

  “But he’s not in Russia?”

  “No, he’s right here in Albuquerque.”

  “I didn’t know we had a milliner in town.”

>   “Actually, I think he’s a hatter.”

  “Why? Is he mad?”

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far. A bit eccentric perhaps.”

  “Well, what would you expect with a name like Glady Vlasnost? What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s Vlade Glastoc. And it’s Rusyn.”

  “So he could be from Vladivostok.”

  “He isn’t Russian – he’s Rusyn,” I said, stressing the long ‘u’ in Rusyn.

  “Oh, Rusyn. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Andy Warhol was Rusyn. His name was really Andrin Vargola, but he anglicized it to Andy Warhol. I read that his family came from Carpathia. Where is that, Hubie?”

  “I’m not certain. Some of it’s in Ukraine.”

  “You mean ‘The Ukraine’?”