The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein Read online

  “Probably.”

  “Got anything to eat?”

  I made a big platter of nachos. Mine are nothing like the ones you get in fast food restaurants or even most Mexican restaurants. First, I use black beans instead of pintos. Second, I use cotilla cheese instead of cheddar. Third, I cover the beans and cheese with caramelized jalapeños instead of the vinegary pickled ones that come in jars. I omitted the jalapeños from most of the nachos so Tristan could eat them. He went through a twelve by fifteen broiling pan of nachos in just under four minutes.

  When he finally looked up from his plate, he said, “You wearing a shoulder holster, Uncle Hubert?”

  I followed his gaze to my jacket and saw the bulge. “No, that’s just a book I’m reading about the uncertainty principle. You know anything about that?”

  “Herr Gott würfelt nicht,” he replied.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a quote from Einstein. He never accepted the uncertainty principle. He believed the universe had to be predictable, so in response to the uncertainty hypothesis, he said ‘God doesn’t throw dice’.”

  “What do you think?”

  He turned up his palms and smiled. “I’m uncertain.”

  I called Dolly as soon as Tristan left, and I could tell from her voice she was happy I called. I wondered if she could tell from mine that I was nervous.

  I know it’s ridiculous, but I felt like I was sixteen again, calling Nancy Simons to ask her for a date. I’d just gotten my drivers license, and my father agreed to let me use the car so long as I was back by ten.

  I asked Dolly about her dad, and we chatted about this and that for a while. When I finally worked my way around to the purpose of my call, I told her that since she had invited me for dinner, I wanted to return the favor and wondered if she might be free the next evening.

  I guess my wording was a subconscious attempt not to sound like I was asking her on a date because I didn’t want to feel like a high school kid. We were two mature people who had gone to the same high school. Her father had been my history teacher. She had cooked dinner for me. Now I was cooking dinner for her.

  Right.

  When she asked if she could bring flan, I told her I was already planning a special dessert.

  “Can I bring wine?” she asked.

  I must have hesitated, because she said, “You don’t drink, do you? I noticed you had only coffee on Sunday.”

  “I’m just not fond of wine.”

  “Well,” she joked, “If you’re angling for a book, forget about it. Dad loved the one you brought, but I wouldn’t have any idea what kind of book to buy for you.”

  “Really,” I said, “you don’t need to bring anything.”

  I spent most of the next day cleaning the house. I washed everything in the house that was made of fabric, waxed everything that was made of wood, and dusted everything else.

  When all that was done, I made the special dessert, a pastel de tres leches. I’m not a cake kind of guy, but I love pastel de tres leches for tres reasons. First, one of the three milks is heavy cream. Second, the heavy cream is mixed with rum. Third, the cake is excellent with champagne.

  After the cake was done, I left the oven on and baked my famous chicken mole casserole. I admit the concept was inspired by Miss Gladys, but there are no ready-made foods in my dish, the ingredients being chicken, home-made mole, poblano peppers, and heavy cream. The home-made mole involves roasting a variety of seeds, nuts, peppers, and spices, and then blending them in with Mexican chocolate. I seldom make it because it’s so labor intensive, but it’s also a lot better than the prepared versions available in jars.

  Mole is actually a healthy dish, but the casserole contains heavy cream. Between it and the pastel, I used an entire quart of heavy cream. I just hoped Dolly wasn’t on a low cholesterol diet.

  After I rested from making the mole, I had just enough time to shower, shave, and dress. I turned the lights down, lit the candles, and tuned my satellite radio to a station that plays a lot of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. If I was planning to disguise the fact that the dinner was a date, I was failing miserably.

  Dolly showed up fashionably late, about a quarter after seven, in a white summery-looking and loose-fitting cotton dress with flowers embroidered around the boat neck and the cuffs of the long sleeves. She smelled and looked fresh-scrubbed and had no makeup that I could discern other than faint eye-shadow and lip gloss.

  She was pleasantly surprised to discover that I do drink, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she had never heard of Gruet. Introducing her to it was fun, and she became an instant convert. She suggested we sip it in the patio.

  I thought that was a good idea until I opened the door and Geronimo leapt up at Dolly, causing her to spill her champagne.

  She put the now-empty flute down and started rubbing the dog behind his ears.

  “I can’t believe you still haven’t found his owner,” she said.

  Oops.

  “Well,” I said slowly, hoping that something would come to me so that I could finish the sentence.

  “It’s O.K. I think I know what you’re trying to tell me. You’ve become attached to him and don’t want to give him up.”

  “I tried to do the right thing. I even placed an ad in the paper for a whole week.”

  “And you covered my neighborhood looking for his owner,” she reminded me. Except I didn’t, did I? I covered her neighborhood looking for the pots. The dog was just a cover story. I felt like a dog.

  “I feel guilty,” I admitted.

  “It’s O.K. Even though I wanted to adopt him, he was with you first, and you made a real effort to find his owner, so it’s only fair that you should be first in line to adopt him.”

  She was taking it very well, and I was feeling even worse.

  She suggested we have dinner in the patio, so I dragged the table outside. The candles made the patio look like an exotic resort. The chamisa that grows along the wall was fully bushed out with small yellow flowers. A light breeze pushed it against the rough adobe plaster creating a soft rhythmic brushing sound. Moonlight and candlelight played across the table, and Ella crooned from inside the house. It was about as perfect as it gets. Even Geronimo was surprisingly well-behaved, almost as if he understood that I was entertaining a lady friend.

  When we finally finished the meal, the dessert, and two bottles of Gruet, she told me she had to get back because of her father. I put on my jacket and walked her to her car where we did what was called at Albuquerque High School in the eighties ‘making out’. She was a lot more enthusiastic about it that Nancy Simons had been, and better at it, too.

  Instead of going straight back home, I detoured to the plaza, sat down on one of the benches, and stared up at the sky. It was a week or two past the summer solstice, so the sun had started north again and the nights would be getting a little shorter each day until December. But this night was spectacular with all five naked-eye planets visible, four of them low in the west and the big guy, Jupiter, visible to the east.

  I love the night sky in New Mexico. I watched until I got a crick in my neck, then I walked home.

  39

  I was in a great mood as I left the plaza, strode up to my door, and started to insert the key in the lock.

  I heard a vehicle approach from the east. Then I saw its reflection in the window to my left. It was a white van with black lettering on the side. It slowed. I turned. An arm extended from the window. A flare of red flame exploded from the end of the arm.

  I fell to the ground unconscious.

  When I came to, I was disoriented. Odd, I thought to myself, the stars are in front of me instead of above me. Someone is hovering in the sky and speaking to me. I can see her lips moving, but I can’t hear anything except the ringing in my ears.

  I tried to walk, but nothing happened. I tried to move my arms with the same result. I couldn’t move, couldn’t feel anything. I’m paralyzed, I thought to myself. I wanted to tell
the person hovering over me I was paralyzed, but I couldn’t speak. I wondered if I could move my eyebrows up in a succession of long and short movements and communicate with her by Morse code.

  I couldn’t move, but I could see. I knew I must be alive. I could smell, too. It was an odor like burning flowers.

  Then I was moving, headed up toward the night sky. Maybe I was dying, floating away. I was turning and bouncing slightly. The sky disappeared and was replaced by a metal ceiling. Another person was looking at me and she was also trying to speak to me, but I couldn’t hear her either.

  Then I passed out again.

  “You passed out twice?” asked Susannah. It was the next morning and she was standing next to my hospital bed frowning and picking at the breakfast they brought me before she came.

  “I was shot! I’m lucky I only passed out instead of dying.”

  “You were not shot. You were shot at.”

  “I was not shot at. I was hit in the chest.”

  “No, you were hit in the book. It’s a good thing the uncertainty principle is so complicated. If you’d been reading a Harlequin Romance, you’d be dead.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Harlequin Romance,” I quipped.

  Evidently she missed the humor. “What is this?” she asked, holding part of my breakfast aloft.

  “Breakfast meat,” I answered curtly. I thought she was taking my near assassination entirely too lightly.

  “From what animal?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She sniffed at the patty. “You were wise not to eat this. It could be dangerous.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s dangerous – being shot in the chest at close range.”

  “You weren’t shot in the chest, Hubie.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, pulling up my hospital gown, “Take a look at this.”

  “You’ve got a bruise.”

  “A big bruise. The police told me this morning the slug they took from The Book was a .38 caliber.”

  “What does the book look like now?”

  I started to complain that she was showing more solicitude for an inanimate book than she was for me, but I didn’t want to be a whiner, so I took the thing out of the nightstand drawer.

  “Whit Fletcher brought this by this morning. He thought I might want it as a souvenir.”

  “Isn’t this evidence?” she said as she stuck her finger into the hole that started at the cover and stopped just at the start of chapter 37.

  “I guess the bullet is the evidence. They took that out already.”

  “It must have been one of those demonstrators who shot at you.”

  “But the shot came from the United Plumbing van.”

  “That’s exactly my point. That was the van watching you during your lame ‘stake-out’ at Cantú’s house, so it all ties together.”

  “What ties together?”

  “Cantú was an immigrant, and the demonstrators were demonstrating against you getting off scot free after killing an immigrant.”

  “I didn’t kill an immigrant.”

  She poked at the plate. “Is this round yellow thing supposed to be an egg?”

  40

  I was anxious to erase the event from my life, so after Susannah drove me home from the hospital, I took a long shower then ate an even longer breakfast.

  I gathered all the papers from the hospital on my kitchen table and added them up, certain that the accounting department had made an error. They had not. The ambulance service, emergency room examination, one night in a regular room for “observation,” lab fees, doctors charges, and a number of petty miscellaneous charge such as a box of tissues came to just under five thousand dollars.

  I wondered again about the uncertainty principle. I knew I was never going to understand it. The bullet that was headed for my heart had followed a path that was determined precisely by the angle of the gun. Fortunately, it stayed on that path and ended up in The Book. In chapter 37 to be exact, which was thirty-six chapters farther than I had gotten.

  According to the uncertainty principle, if that bullet had been an electron, it might have swerved unpredictably, missed The Book and hit me directly. Of course a single electron wouldn’t have left a big bruise on my chest.

  It didn’t make sense. The bullet, after all, is just a collection of millions of electrons and other subatomic particles. If they are all moving around at random, how come the bullet doesn’t do the same?

  I decided I had wasted enough time on the uncertainty principle, and I turned my thoughts to two much more practical problems – who shot me and would they try it again? I thought about my futile search for clues in Cantú’s Cadillac convertible. I remembered thinking that the difficulty was that anything could be a clue, so how would you know one if you saw one? With that in mind, I found a yellow pencil and a yellow notepad and listed everything I could think of that might be connected to my involvement with Cantú’s collection and/or with my being shot. The list ran three pages. I read over it several times. The list got shorter each time because I marked out some items that appeared on review to be irrelevant. But the list didn’t just lose length. It gained coherence. I began to see how some of the things might fit together. I was developing a theory.

  I heard someone knocking at the front door. When I peered through the peephole, I saw Izuanita at the door of the shop.

  Maybe it was Susannah describing her as “deformed” or Chris’ description of her as a “Modigliani woman,” but whatever it was, she looked a little different. She still looked long and lean, and she still made me feel libidinous, but her face seemed further off kilter than I remembered and her prominent bone structure more conspicuous and slightly less charming than I recalled. Or maybe it was just the negativity of having spent the night in the hospital.

  I did not open the door. For one thing, I had enjoyed my time with Dolly. For another, I didn’t want Izuanita just dropping by at her convenience. I wanted her to call me. She could do that. I’m in the book. But was she? I had no idea, but I decided to find out. If I didn’t answer the door and she wanted to see me, she’d have to call.

  Then what? At least I’d have her number. Or at least I would if I had one of those phones that displays the numbers of your callers and keeps a record of them. I called Tristan, and he came over with a phone that had a little screen on it.

  “But if she looks me up in the book,” I said, “she’ll call the old phone.”

  He shook his head. “Your number doesn’t change when you replace your land line.”

  “I know that. This is not the first phone I’ve ever had. But I thought this fancy one with the screen was like your cell phone.”

  “It has some of those functions, but you can ignore them. Just use it like your regular phone.”

  He pulled his berry phone out of a little holster on his belt and dialed. My new phone rang. His number showed up on the screen. Black magic.

  That evening, someone knocked on my door. I looked through the peephole to see Izuanita staring through the glass with her hands together over her eyes like a visor to block out the reflection. Instead of going to the door, I willed her to call me.

  41

  On Sunday morning I had my normal weekend breakfast, an event that took so long to cook and so long to consume that it was noon by the time I finished.

  Of course the fact that I slept until ten was a contributing factor.

  After I washed the dishes, I walked to the Special Collections Branch of the Albuquerque Public Library on the corner of Central and Edith. I needed to walk off the chorizo, and I enjoy seeing the building, a beautiful old adobe with the traditional New Mexico palette of sand-colored stucco and turquoise-painted doors and window trim where I spent a good deal of my youth exploring the world of information. I would hoist a heavy volume of one of the reference works onto one of the massive oak tables and thumb through until something caught my fancy. It was long before I learned the origin of ‘fancy free’, but that’s what I w
as back then. I particularly loved reading about faraway places and the customs of different peoples. I should have guessed I’d end up an anthropologist. I think one reason travel doesn’t interest me is that real travel can never measure up to the trips I took in my imagination to those faraway places.

  That and the fact that I’m afraid to fly and don’t like crowds.

  I read a book about Einstein. Not about science, about the man. In addition to being the smartest person who ever lived (that’s what the book claimed), he also had a great sense of humor. Two sayings attributed to him stuck in my mind because they seemed relevant to the theory I was developing about Cantú’s pots and my being shot.

  The first was, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I had pared down my list of clues. What I needed to do now was put them in the simplest arrangement possible that made sense.

  The second saying was, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Einstein’s words described my situation almost perfectly. The only minor emendation I would make would be, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and male stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

  When I got home, two numbers were showing on the screen. I called Tristan and he looked them up in his reverse directory. As the name implies, a reverse directory allows you to look up a number and find the person’s name rather than the other way around. If you’re thinking that would be a handy thing to have, be advised that they are illegal unless you are the FBI or the CIA.

  Or Tristan. Actually, his is also illegal, but evidently there is no risk in his having it because it’s in something called an encrypted file in his computer. And it’s only for New Mexico exchanges, not an area high on the list for FBI or CIA surveillance.

  One of the numbers on my new phone was from out of state, so Tristan couldn’t look it up, but he guessed it was from a telemarketer.

  The other number was a 505 area code, so he could look that one up. It was a number from Santa Fe rather than Albuquerque, and it was assigned to Oscar and Izuanita Perez.