Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras Page 14

  “It’s not a plug extender. Inside the box is a little radio receiver and a printed circuit. Right now the current from the wall plug is not flowing into the new receptacle. You could stick a paper clip in there and not shock yourself.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “When the receiver picks up a signal of the right frequency, it activates a resistor that opens a gate in the printed circuit and connects the new outlet to the old one.”

  “And the leg bone is connected to the thigh bone, but why are you telling me all this?”

  He handed me an even smaller box with a button. It looked like a doorbell that had been removed from its jamb. “When you push that button, it sends a radio signal and the new outlet is activated. The camera is plugged into it, so current goes to the camera and it takes a picture.”

  “So it’s a sort of remote control?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  He shrugged. “You asked what good plugging the new receptacle into the old one did, so I told you. Anyway, when you push the button again, it turns the outlet off.”

  I pushed the button and looked on the computer and, sure enough, there was a picture of my kitchen door. Then I pushed it again. There was no clicking sound, but Tristan assured me the circuit was now dead. I didn’t stick a paperclip in there to find out.

  Then he went over the operation of the bug detector and left, a richer man but not necessarily any wiser.

  I sat at my kitchen table with a beer in my hand. I was sipping slowly. I wanted to have all my wits about me when Doak showed up. He did so exactly at eight at the back alley entrance and let himself in as I had instructed.

  I pushed the button as he entered. I wanted his mug shot on my computer in case he later tried to deny he had made the exchange.

  The bug detector was in my pants pocket. I heard the click of the camera and then felt a buzzing against my leg and thought for a moment the camera remote was somehow electrocuting me. I twitched and tossed the thing aside, and Doak gave me a patronizing smile as if the sight of him had frightened me.

  But his expression changed when I held up a card on which I had printed, “You are wearing a recording device. Say nothing. Take the device off and place it on the table.”

  His lips parted and I placed a finger across mine. He remained silent. I picked up the pot and placed it on the kitchen table. The blood drained out of his face. He reached under his coat and brought out a small recorder and a mike that looked like a tie clasp. He sat it on the table. I dropped it in my glass of beer.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  I held up the bug detector Tristan had given me.

  “I told that idiot Sanchez this was a bad idea. Campus security fancy themselves the FBI.”

  “You tell anyone else?”

  “Of course not. If I told my dean or anyone else it would get out. I only told Sanchez because I hoped to protect myself in case this was some sort of trap.”

  “You need to be more trusting, Doak.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  He turned the pot around slowly and examined it in great detail. Then he reached inside the pot and brought out the inventory tag, a rectangular piece of metal with a number and Valle del Rio Museum inscribed on it.

  He sat down at the table and stared at the tag.

  “What’s that?” I asked innocently.

  “Our inventory tag.” He shook his head. “I went to the Museum after you called and looked at the pot that was there. Of course there was no inventory tag, but what really gave it away was the inside of the pot. Whoever made it tried to fake the right tone using something that looks like henna. I knew immediately it was a fake. But I kept hoping until I saw this. I can’t believe this is happening. This could ruin me.”

  “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 let us in. The lab is in the basement and has no windows. 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, he removed the vial, washed it out and returned it to its storage area. He turned off the lights. I followed him toward the stairs. On the left wall were shelves holding 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. 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 I had stolen.

  During the planning, I had seen this caper as a challenge. I told myself museums were the enemy of the people. I rationalized what I was doing. But now that I had the pot, the reality of how I got 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 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—to partners in crime.”

  We clinked our glasses in celebration.

  “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. 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.”

  “Okay, 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 and cameras.”

  “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 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.”

  “Especially when the guard caught you up there, right?”

  I nodded. “If he’d come in a minute sooner, I would have been up the arroyo without a shovel.”

  She groaned.

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

  “It’s in an old adobe house in Corrales with kiva fireplaces in every nook and cranny. When you walk in you smell the piñon and 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.”

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

  “You know what I mean. 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.”

  “I get the picture,” I said to head off any further details.

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

  “I can’t believe your plan worked so well.”

  “Neither can I. I almost didn’t go through with it. The part I worried about most was fooling Doak. The inventory tag and the successful dating test helped, but the key was his vanity. 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.”

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

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

  “Let’s not say you stole it. 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. Tons of artifacts have to be given away, reburied or even discarded because of lack of space and interest.”

  I think I stomped 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.”

  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, an elderly gentleman with a trim mustache on a sunken face. 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. I recognized him instantly even though he didn’t know me. 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 gestured toward.

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

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

  Since I knew who he was, I said I’d be happy to accept his check. I watched with mixed emotions 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, so I was making a good profit. But I hated to see it go. I enjoyed looking at it every day. At least it was going to a good home. Walter Masoir was buying it.

  It was a rare work, late enough to show Maria’s spectacular style, early enough to be squarely in the tradition of San Ildefonso. I put it in a box padded by tissue paper and felt a 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 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 persuade him to change his mind.”

  “Tempting. 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.”

  After Wilkes left, I endorsed Masoir’s check and walked to the bank to deposit it. It wouldn’t cover my tax bill, but it would whittle it down considerably.

  I eased behind the counter after returning from the bank. I looked down at the laptop and realized that neither Masoir nor Wilkes would be pictured on it because the camera was still in my kitchen. I checked, and the most recent picture was of Doak coming in. I’d gone out and in the kitchen door to do things like empty the trash. But I had removed the r
emote and plug thing to my bedroom, so those trips had not been captured for posterity.

  Before Doak’s visit, I’d had two customers that afternoon while the camera was still watching the front door. I decided to take a look at them. When you have as few as I do, you cherish each one.

  I double clicked the icons earlier than Doak 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 recognized 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 two that read 03:35 and 03.18. The list uses military time. It was the morning of the same day the two customers had come in.

  My late-night prowler had returned. Or, worse, there were two of them. At least this time I would have a picture of the skulker. I clicked on 03:35, and of course it was the person leaving. A quiver of fear tensed my neck muscles. The streetlight barely illuminated his back, but the shape was all I needed to see. I hit the next icon just to be sure. And looked at Agent Guvelly entering my shop at 3:18 in the morning.

  39

  It was just past two, but I locked up 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 insists on calling it. I walked west on Central and turned north on the Paseo del Bosque trail. There’s a sculpture of sandhill cranes there. I prefer the real ones easily spotted in the open fields along the trail.

  I don’t understand the fascination of batting a ball over a wall, putting it into a hole in the ground, tossing it through a net or kicking it between goal posts. I know sports are good exercise, but walking is just as healthy, and there are no referees and coaches telling you what to do. You’re also less likely to be injured and—my favorite part—it stimulates thought.