The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein Read online

  “I wasn’t that short then.” I’m 5' 6" now and used to the occasional short joke.

  “No one’s tall in the first grade, Hubie, but I’ll bet you were the shortest one.”

  “Was not,” I said in my little boy voice. “Pudgy Perez was even shorter than me. Wider too.”

  “I think I could have guessed that. What happened to him?”

  “He never got much taller, but he got a lot wider. He’s a mechanic. I take my Bronco to him when it needs repairs.”

  “He must be a genius to keep that thing running. But why did you never hit the piñata?”

  “My mother said it would be rude for the guest of honor to be the one who broke the piñata, so my father would pull the rope when I swung. Then after everyone had a turn or two, he would let one of the other kids clobber the thing without making it look too obvious. He was pretty deft with a piñata rope.”

  I guess my eyes may have clouded over a bit with nostalgia. I stared off into the middle distance.

  After a few seconds, Susannah said, “Something bothering you, Hubie?”

  I shrugged. “When I was older, maybe fifteen, Consuela told me the tradition is to let the birthday person break the piñata. I was kind of upset.”

  “You were angry with your parents for not letting you break the piñata?”

  “Of course not. I was embarrassed that all my friends probably thought my family were dolts because we didn’t know the rules about piñatas on birthdays.”

  “That’s your worst childhood experience?”

  “Hey, it’s hard enough fitting in when you’re short and don’t play sports, but throw in feeling foolish, and—”

  “Get over it.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Anyway, I still had a lot of fun. I remember once when I was about eleven, the piñata had mints in it, and when it broke open they showered down on the grass. Lupita Fuentes and I jumped at the same mint, but she grabbed it first and popped it in her mouth. Then she stuck her tongue out with the mint on it.”

  “Geez,” Susannah moaned, “I think I know where this is going.”

  “Yep. ‘You want to taste it?’ she said. That was my first kiss.”

  “Wow,” she said sarcastically, “Your first kiss and a French one at that!”

  “I wonder what ever happened to Lupita?”

  “Probably married Pudgy Perez. Can we get back to your blindfolded ride? I don’t see how thinking about blindfolds could prevent you from memorizing the route.”

  “I’m not very good at multitasking. And anyway, I didn’t think there was any reason I’d need to go back, so why memorize the route?”

  She gave me that enigmatic smile, like the Mona Lisa but without all the crackly lines. “You could have gone back to steal the pots.”

  I gave her one of my own smiles, the one designed to make me look like the sage humoring an untutored waif, but which Susannah says only makes me look like Joseph Biden.

  “I’m not a thief, Susannah.” The thief debate is a staple of our cocktail hour at Dos Hermanas, as is Susannah’s rocky love life, her studies at the University (currently in art history, but subject to change without notice), old movies, and anything else one of us deems worthy.

  “There was that pot you took from the University,” she reminded me.

  “Which was subsequently returned along with a sizeable scholarship fund for students.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you took it.”

  “I had a hunch,” I said lamely.

  She laughed and took a chug of her margarita larger than Miss Manners recommends for young ladies. Susannah takes hers without salt on the rim. Other than that, she has no flaws.

  “Anyway,” I added, “you helped me take the thing.”

  “True,” she agreed, “but it’s not stealing when an art historian does it.”

  “I know. You call it ‘deaccessioning’.”

  “And there was that pot you stole from Hugo Berdal’s truck.”

  “You may recall that Hugo was dead and therefore had no need for the pot, which, incidentally, he had stolen in the first place.”

  “Quibbling.”

  “There was something else we took from that truck,” I reminded her, “the inflatable woman.”

  “Yuk, don’t remind me.”

  I sipped my margarita after rotating the glass a few degrees in order to get just the right amount of salt from the rim. It’s a subtle but important skill that I’ve honed over the years. When the last hint of the blue agave had faded away, I took a long draw on my water.

  “As it turns out, I do want to go back.”

  “Hubie! You are going to steal his pots!”

  “Of course not. But I would like to get my twenty-five hundred dollars back.”

  “I thought he paid you before you left.”

  “He did. After I finished, I went over to the swinging door and knocked on it. Without opening the door, he asked me if I was through. I said I was. He asked me if I’d had my margarita or my beer. I told him I hadn’t, and he said, ‘At least take a drink of one of them while I get the money’. I heard his footsteps recede, and to tell you the truth, I was beginning to think he wouldn’t pay me unless I drank something.”

  “Did you think he was trying to poison you?” she asked excitedly.

  “As a matter of fact, the thought did cross my mind. But what reason would he have to kill me?”

  “To keep the location of his collection a secret,” she ventured.

  “If he was going to kill me, then why bother blindfolding me?”

  “So you wouldn’t get suspicious,” she said without hesitation. “If he hadn’t blindfolded you, you would have wondered why he didn’t, and you might have jumped out of the car when it slowed down for one of those turns you didn’t count.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You read too many murder mysteries. Anyway, he obviously didn’t poison me.”

  “Maybe it was a slow-acting poison. Or maybe he put it in one of those time-release capsules. I saw that once in a—”

  “He didn’t poison me. The beer hadn’t been opened. Even so, I smelled it when I opened it and it smelled right, and you know my sense of smell is infallible.”

  “That’s true,” she conceded, “but your eyes are failing.”

  “They’re not failing. I just have to use reading glasses sometimes.”

  “I wonder why our sense of smell doesn’t fade like our sight as we get old?”

  “I have no idea. Anyway, the beer smelled fine. It tasted right, too. In fact, I wanted to sit there and finish the bottle.”

  “Even without chips and salsa?”

  “Well, there was that,” I conceded. “I also wanted to get away from him. So when he called me back to the swinging door, I walked over. He cracked the door slightly and counted out twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills one at a time as he transferred them from his left hand to his right. He stuck the money in my shirt pocket and told me to walk over to the door and face the window with the blindfold in my hand. After I’d been standing there for a minute or two, I heard the door open. The driver came up behind me and transferred the blindfold from my hand to his hand and then to my head. Then he led me out into the car and drove me home.”

  “So you never got a look at him?”

  “No. My instructions were to be standing in front of my shop at exactly five o’clock facing the Plaza. That’s why I missed our cocktail hour yesterday. I was told not to look back, just to keep facing the Plaza. I heard a car drive up. Someone got out but left the motor running. He walked up behind me and said, ‘I’m going to blindfold you now’. You know the rest.”

  “Maybe the driver was the guy at the house.”

  “Couldn’t be. After the driver closed the door with me standing in the entryway, the guy inside told me I could take the blindfold off, and he was standing across the room in the swinging door. There wasn’t enough time for the driver to go out through the front door, run around and come throu
gh a back door and be standing there by the swinging door.”

  “Maybe he closed the door without going through it and then tiptoed quickly over to the swinging door.” Susannah has a vivid imagination.

  “I think I would have heard him. And anyway, what would be the point? Why would he not want me to know he was the driver?”

  “So you couldn’t identify him,” she said as if that were obvious.

  I stared at her. “But I can identify him. I saw him in the house.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t identify him as the driver.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “What difference does that make?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to find out what he was up to before we can know that. Maybe being the wheelman makes the crime more serious.”

  “Wheelman?”

  “That’s what it’s called, Hubie. If he just takes the money, then it’s theft. But if he takes the money and also drives the getaway car, then maybe it’s something like aggravated theft.”

  “It wasn’t a getaway car, Suze. He was just taking me home.”

  She shrugged. “So he takes you home, takes off the blindfold while you face Mecca or whatever, tells you not to turn around and drives away, leaving you standing there with twenty-five hundred dollars in your shirt pocket. So why did you say you need to go back to get your money?”

  “Because when I reached in to my shirt pocket to move the bills from pocket to wallet, they were gone.”

  “So that’s it! He didn’t want an appraisal at all. That was just a pretense so he could rob you.”

  “If so, he must be the stupidest robber in history. The money he took from me was what he gave me to begin with.”

  “Oh, right. Well, it may not be robbery, but he did gyp you. You didn’t get paid for your work.”

  “Maybe. But it’s also possible the driver just saw the opportunity to make a quick twenty-five hundred, and the collector guy doesn’t know the driver took my money.”

  “Unless they’re the same person.”

  “We already went through that. They were not the same person.”

  “If you’d done that counting the turns thing, you could go back and find out for sure. But it’s too late now.”

  “Not really,” I said smugly.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I know the address.”

  3

  A week before what turned out to be my ill-fated trip in a blindfold, a cadaverous man walked into my shop just before closing time.

  My first thought was less than charitable. I was afraid he was going to die or at least pass out and make me late for margaritas with Susannah. Of course I would have helped him as much as possible, but it did seem a little unfair that I had sat around all day without making a single sale and then just before closing time, some moribund tourist picks my shop to collapse in.

  But he didn’t collapse. Despite his ashen complexion and skeletal frame, he made his way towards the counter in a hesitant gait but with a glint in his eye. When he reached it, he put his hand on it for support, and said, “Could you get me a chair, Hubert?”

  I dragged the one I was using around to the front of the counter and he lowered himself unsteadily into it. I noticed that in addition to being completely bald, he had no eyebrows.

  Once he was seated, he looked up at me and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but give me a minute, and it’ll come to me.”

  “Same old Hubert. Like a peanut M & M – a hard center of confidence hidden by a thin shell of reticence.”

  “Now I know who you are. You’re the poet laureate of New Mexico.”

  “Same sense of humor, too,” he replied. Then he gave me that half-smile, and I knew who he was.

  “Mr. Wilkes, welcome back to my shop.”

  Carl Wilkes is a treasure hunter like me. Well, perhaps not completely like me. I think his list of what one is allowed to do in the pursuit of pots is more inclusive than mine.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome after the trouble I caused you.”

  Wilkes was the guy who convinced me to get the Mogollon water jug that was in the museum at the University.

  “It all worked out in the end. And even if it hadn’t, you didn’t twist my arm.”

  Now he seemed too weak to twist even his own. He had a thick, close-cropped beard when first we met. He was thin even then. Now he was emaciated. The beard had evidently gone the way of the hair and brows. I knew he wanted something, but we chatted about the museum caper until he finally came around to the purpose of his visit.

  “You know a man here in Albuquerque who owns a couple dozen Anasazi pots?” he asked.

  “No, but I wish I did.” I had nine and thought I had the biggest collection in town.

  “You’re not likely to meet him,” he replied. “He’s a recluse. He’s considering selling the pots, and he wants them appraised.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  “Would you consider doing it? He’ll pay you twenty-five hundred dollars, and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

  “Why ask me? You can appraise them as well as I can.”

  Another smile. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but you know more about ancient pots than anyone. But there’s another reason for me not to do it. I’m hoping to serve as agent for the sale, and I’m sure the guy’s sharp enough to realize that having the agent appraise the merchandise is a conflict of interest.”

  “Because the agent might low-ball the estimate to make it easier to sell?”

  “Yeah, and then take a kick-back from the buyer who got the good deal.”

  It sounded like something Wilkes had heard about, maybe even done. That started me thinking about the ethics of the situation. I may be labeled a pot thief by Congress, but I have a code of ethics when it comes to my business which I prefer to think of as treasure hunting. Wilkes said he was ‘hoping’ to serve as the agent for the sale, which implied to me that he didn’t have a firm agreement to do so. Two dozen Anasazi pots would be worth at least a million dollars. The agent’s ten percent would be a hundred thousand, a sum that made the twenty-five hundred appraisal fee look like chump change.

  I’m not an immodest fellow, but Wilkes was right about my knowledge of ancient pottery. There aren’t too many people who deal in it, none on the scale I do. If the collector asked around, he would hear about me and might decide to ask me to act as his agent. But if Wilkes could convince me to do the appraisal, that would rule me out as the agent.

  If the drift of my thinking makes you suspect I didn’t completely trust Carl Wilkes, then you followed that drift correctly. The fact that he hadn’t mentioned the gentleman’s name wasn’t merely an oversight on his part. Don’t get me wrong – I liked Carl. But as we say in New Mexico, ‘You can like your neighbor, but you still brand your cattle’.

  I told him I’d think it over.

  You already know I decided to do the appraisal because you came in just as I was riding blindfolded to do it. I had come to the conclusion that I couldn’t serve as the agent even if the collector asked me to do so. I didn’t even know he existed before Carl Wilkes told me about him, and I couldn’t steal Carl’s potential client even if that client wanted me to. And I stuck with that opinion even though I suspected Carl might steal a client from me if the situation were reversed.

  So that’s how I ended up taking out my seamstress tape, my sketch pad, and my pastel pencils. Why pencils instead of a camera? Because the owner had specified no photographs. That and I probably couldn’t figure out how to work today’s digital cameras.

  I’m an artisan, not an artist. I wanted the sketch pad and pencils so I could draw each pot and its designs. The seamstress tape is flexible, so I could wrap it around the base, widest spot, and rim of each pot to get the dimensions. Using pastel pencils would allow me to put in the right shades. Size, shape, design, and color are four of the key elements used to classify pottery. The other two are the t
ype of clay and the glaze. You can’t be absolutely certain about those last two without lab tests, but I’ve seen enough pots and thrown enough pots to make reliable guesses, so I wrote down next to each sketch the sort of clay used and the glaze. Then with all that information at hand, I could check my records and the records of other sales and put an accurate price on each piece in the collection. The agreement was that I would send the estimate, listed by piece, to a post office box.

  Carl had made an accurate estimate of the time involved, about two hours. That’s just for the rough sketches. They didn’t need to be any more than that. I wasn’t going to frame them. I wasn’t even going to stick them on my refrigerator door with magnets. They were just notes about what was in front of me.

  I finished all the pots to the left of the fireplace in about an hour. The first pot on the top shelf to the right of the fireplace was sufficiently above my 5’ 6” that I couldn’t put the tape around the pot to measure it, so I had to estimate. Also, I couldn’t get close enough to see the detail in the glaze although I could see the potter had used slip, a pigmented clay slurry that stays put during firing and is better than just a thin glaze.

  Despite the pot being on the top shelf, the going seemed easier than it had with the previous ones. In fact, my listing of the attributes of this particular pot came so easily and naturally that I found myself writing some of them down before I’d even seen them.

  Huh?

  I put the sketch pad and pencils down and stared at the pot. I realized I knew what the other side of it looked like even though I couldn’t reach up to turn it around and look. The front side had a sort of swirly fiddlehead design that may have been a symbol for a waterfall or a desert whirlwind. Or maybe it was a symbol for a fiddle. We anthropologists make a lot of assumptions about symbols used by extinct tribes based on scanty evidence, and I suspect we are wrong more often than we are right, but that’s the nature of the science.

  The back side of the pot had the same design except the potter’s stick had slipped in her hand for some reason – maybe one of her kids had bumped into her – and even though you could see where she had tried to coax the slip back into the right curve, she hadn’t been able to do so completely and hadn’t taken the time to smooth the whole thing down and start over. Which is what I would do today, but then I’m not working in a cliff dwelling with kids swarming around me and needing to replace a pot one of them carelessly knocked over.