The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy (The Pot Thier) Read online

  Finally, I looked up at Martin. “This is the best work your uncle ever did. Don’t tell me he wants to sell it.”

  “He didn’t make it.”

  “Who did?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  I held it up to catch the sunlight from the window. The glaze was the key. “I was assuming it was your uncle’s because you brought it. But now I see it couldn’t be. It was made before he was born. It’s not the work of the ancient ones – it’s too precise – but it is very old.”

  “How old?”

  “My best guess would be a hundred years, but I could be way off.”

  “I doubt it. You know your pots pretty good for a yellow hair.”

  “My hair is brown.”

  “You all look the same to me.”

  “Then how come you always recognize me?”

  “You’re the short one.”

  “I could point out that you’re the same height as me.”

  “Yeah, but in my tribe, I’m tall.”

  “Where did you get the pot?”

  “The trading post west of Bernalillo.”

  “Did you ask where they got it?”

  He shrugged. “Same old story. Said they bought it off an Indian who needed money.”

  “Why would someone from another tribe have an ancient pot from your people?”

  Martin just shrugged.

  “Your uncle ever see anything like this before?”

  He shrugged again.

  I sat the pot down on the corner, suddenly nervous about holding it. “You know what this is worth?”

  “Me guess much wampum.”

  “You guess right, Tonto. At least fifty thousand, maybe twice that much. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Keep it safe for now. And maybe study it.”

  13

  Martin calls the pots in my new shop fakes because they are.

  I own the east third of a north-facing adobe a block off the square in Old Town. The proceeds from the sale of the pots that got me expelled provided the down payment, and the mortgage has only five years to run.

  The middle third of the building became vacant last spring when the former tenant was arrested for murder. If he ever gets out of prison, I’m a good candidate for his next victim. I’m the one who proved he did it.

  I was in one of those dry spells between customers when Reggie West was carted off to prison, so the owner of his part of the building agreed to let me rent the space with a five-year option to buy. Maybe I’ll accumulate a down payment during the next five years. If not, I can wait until my current mortgage is paid off and take a new one. Meanwhile, I have both a mortgage payment and a rental payment.

  My landlord now enjoys not only my rental payments but also depreciation he can take off his taxes. Which just shows you how ridiculous the tax laws are, because the building is definitely not depreciating. It is appreciating and has been doing so steadily for three hundred years. According to the original title, the house was built by Don Fernando Maria Arajuez Aragon when the Spaniards returned after being driven out by the pueblo revolt of 1680. He sold it three years later to Don Pablo Benedicion Verahuenza Orozco for 15 pesetas. I don’t know how much 15 pesetas were worth in the late 1600’s, but it took a lot of appreciation for the price to climb to the outrageous level I’ll have to pay if I decide to exercise my option to buy.

  My shop faces north and fronts the street. My living area faces south and fronts the alley. Or should that be ‘backs the alley’? My workshop is between the two. Since renting the new space, I had spent most of my time there making copies of the genuine pots in my inventory.

  I have a gift. I can reproduce any piece of Southwestern Native American pottery. I couldn’t duplicate Japanese Raku or the ring vases of ancient Scotland, but if any of my faux Anasazi pots are excavated a hundred years from now, I’m confident they will end up displayed in a museum as the genuine article. I’m not an artist, but I am a skilled craftsman. My feel for the local pottery results from growing up with it, studying it, digging it up, and making it.

  The genuine pots I dig up share shelf space with my clever copies. The ancients didn’t sign their pots so I follow their example. I never claim my copies are genuine. I remain silent. Caveat emptor.

  I once had a buyer who paid with a bad check. Then he had the pot appraised by an expert who told him it was a fake. The appraiser was guessing, but I couldn’t argue, could I? I had invested a good deal of time and effort in that pot, but I never got any money for it. Caveat venditor.

  Despite all my experience, it had never occurred to me until recently that I could sell fakes as fakes! It turns out there’s a market for things people know are not the real deal. The $50 Mexican Rolex probably outsells the Swiss model.

  So I started making copies of the real pots in my inventory. Some of the older genuine ones are worth anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000. A replica will fetch ten to twenty percent of the price of the original. So people who admire my genuine 1940 Santo Domingo pot but don’t want to shell out $25,000 for it, can buy a high quality replica for $3,000. The pot they get is just as beautiful as the original and indistinguishable even down to the brand new patina. You might think ‘new patina’ is an oxymoron, but if you saw one of my replicas, you would change your mind. I’m sorry I can’t tell you how I do it – it’s a trade secret.

  It’s important my replicas look old because, although I hate to think ill of my customers, I suspect some of them don’t tell their friends and neighbors their pots are fakes.

  Working all summer, I had built up the inventory in my new store. Being a tenant doesn’t entitle me to connect the two spaces by cutting through the wall, so I was only opening one at a time, usually the new one. Business is brisker for copies, and if someone wants one of the expensive originals, they know where to find me because I leave a sign to that effect on the door of the original store.

  I had around forty real pots (and a few of my anonymous copies) on offer in the store I own and maybe ten declared copies displayed in the store I rent. I would have had twice that many, but I sold ten copies during the summer for a total take of $24,250. That sounds like a good summer until you realize that the genuine pots I sold during that same summer (a total of two, alas) produced more revenue than the ten copies. Making and selling fake pots is fun and profitable, but I wasn’t planning to give up my day job.

  My original shop showed the wear and tear of every one of its three hundred years when I bought it. The back portion of the space had been the storeroom, and its walls looked like a sample board of materials – adobe, cement, gypsum board, plywood, fake tile laminates, and even cardboard here and there. The remodel removed everything down to the original adobe. I used my clay skills to cover every square inch of wall with adobe plaster. The interior now has the organic look of a swelling and ebbing sea. The only seams are two expansion joints. But they aren’t there for expansion purposes.

  I needed the expansion joints because when you turn and press the wall sconce to the left of them in a certain way, a plastered panel swings out on invisible hinges, and that is where I hide pots that for obvious reasons cannot be displayed in public.

  After Martin left, I deposited the pot he brought in my secret hiding place. Then I walked up to the St. Neri gift shop in the former convent next to the Church to see if they had a pamphlet about the saints. I wanted to know more about San Roque. They had the pamphlet and something even better, a colorful carving of San Rogue by the famous santera Marie Romero Cash. I knew I had to have it when I saw she depicted the Saint with sores on his knees and attended by a dog who was licking those lesions. I knew that scientists had recently discovered that dogs can smell cancer in their masters, and I conjectured that the same must be true for leprosy. Then I wondered if the santeros of New Mexico knew the power of dogs long before scientists “discovered” it.

  I put the carving on my kitchen table before returning to the new store. I entered from the alley and
was helping myself to a second cup of coffee when they came in. It was pretty clear they weren’t there to buy pots. They had baseball bats, but I didn’t think they were there to play ball either.

  As I stood there in shock and fear, two of them started smashing my pots with vicious swings. The third one started towards me.

  Though not a pacifist, I believe non-violence is usually the right path. I also believe there are times when you have to stand up for what is right. Times when you have to disregard your own personal safety and put yourself in harm’s way to stop wrongdoing. And, clearly, this was not one of those times.

  I ran out the back as fast as my little legs could carry me, dashed the twenty feet to my back door, slammed and locked it, and called 911. Then I sat down at my kitchen table and prayed to San Roque for protection.

  14

  The police knocked ten minutes later, but it felt like a full hour.

  “How do I know it’s the police?” I asked through the door.

  “Open the damn door, Hubert,” replied Whit Fletcher, Detective First Grade, Albuquerque Police Department. I did.

  Fletcher wore a shiny silver suit and a spread-collar green shirt with the top button undone. A large black string tie lurked under the collar like a shy snake. Fletcher is six feet tall with a slight paunch. His eyes slant downward giving him a hangdog look, and he has wrinkles on his cheeks and a dimple on his chin. He was clean-shaven that day but in need of a haircut. He ran his fingers through his hair to get it off his forehead and said, “You look a little pekid, Hubert.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “It’s nice you civilians appreciate us. We got here in record time. You was only cowering in here for ten minutes.”

  “It seemed longer. And I wasn’t cowering. I was hiding.”

  “From what?”

  “From three goons who were smashing up my store and threatening to do the same to me.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Are they still there?”

  “Yeah, Hubert, they was thoughtful enough to wait for us so we wouldn’t have to put out an APB.”

  Several caustic responses sprang to mind but went unspoken. I’ve known Whit for many years and had more dealings with him than I should have had. He’s basically a good cop. I think his gruffness is mostly an act. He’s been known to supplement his income when it doesn’t significantly divert the flow of justice, but he’s hard on the truly bad guys. He’s also hard on the English language.

  I suppose all ten of my replicas had been smashed, but I couldn’t be certain because the only things left on the shelves were some very small fragments and dust. If you break a properly fired clay pot, you get a few large shards. If you hit one of the shards, it breaks into smaller ones. A clay pot does not shatter into small pieces all at once.

  The small amount of debris left behind offered no clue as to whether they had broken all the pots or only some of them. And I didn’t know which way I wanted it. On the one hand, I wanted the pots to survive. I hadn’t put any blood or tears into them, but I had invested a good deal of sweat. On the other hand, I didn’t want those crazies to have any of my pots. I knew at least some of the pots had been smashed. But what I really couldn’t figure out is why they took the pieces with them?

  “Anything missing, Hubert?”

  “I would think a trained detective would notice the store is empty.”

  “No need to get huffy. I figured maybe you only sell stolen pots in this new store, so you keep ‘em out of sight.”

  “I don’t sell stolen pots.”

  “I don’t care if you do so long as they’re the ones you dig up. Just don’t steal ‘em out of people’s houses, cause then you’d be a burglar.”

  “There were ten replicas in here. Three men came in. They had baseball bats with them and—”

  “Save it for the statement. What’s a replica?”

  “It’s a copy.”

  “So you’ve branched out from selling stolen pots to selling fake ones?”

  “Selling fake pots is not illegal.”

  “Let’s let the DA decide that. You wouldn’t happen to have picture of these fakes, would you?”

  “No, but I have pictures of the pots they were copies of.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do.”

  “Believe me, Whit, no one can tell the difference.”

  15

  Susannah said, quite reasonably, “I can’t understand why they took the broken pots with them.”

  I answered, quite honestly, “Neither can I.”

  “Did they look like Indians?”

  “I think asking if someone looks like—”

  “Don’t tell me it’s politically incorrect to say someone looks like an Indian, Hubert. I already know that. But you know what I mean. Did they have blue eyes and blond hair like a Swede?”

  “Warner Oland was a Swede and he had brown hair and eyes.”

  “I don’t care what he looked like. As far as I’m concerned, he had black hair and slanty eyes.”

  “That was just the clever Hollywood makeup.”

  “Hubert, I’m trying to help you here and you keep dragging red herrings across my effort.”

  “Did you know herrings come from Sweden?”

  “Geez. Just forget I brought it up.”

  “I’m sorry, Suze. I haven’t been myself all day.”

  “Yeah. I noticed the improvement immediately.”

  “I don’t know what to do, maybe because there’s really nothing I can do. I started to call and tell you I wouldn’t come today, and then I thought what am I going to do, sit around and stew all evening? So here I am, and I really do feel better now that I have you to talk to, but I’m not even doing that right.”

  “It’s O.K., Hubie. You probably have post dramatic syndrome.”

  “I think that’s ‘post traumatic syndrome’.”

  “Well, guys smashing up your shop with baseball bats sounds pretty dramatic to me. Would you rather talk about something else?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’d feel better if we could figure out why those guys smashed your pots. And if we knew why they took the pieces, it might help us understand why they smashed the pots to begin with.”

  That sounded reasonable enough. “O.K., you wanted to know if the three guys looked like Indians.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, they had medium brown skin and black hair.”

  “So they could have been from the Pueblos.”

  “Yeah. But they could also have been from Chile for all I know.”

  “Let’s assume the pueblos, Hubert. I don’t think any Chileans would come all the way to Albuquerque to smash your pots.”

  I nodded in acknowledgement.

  “If they were Indians, maybe they thought you were belittling their culture by copying their pots.”

  “Why wouldn’t they come tell me that first and ask me to stop? Their culture puts a premium on talking things out and on conciliation. It’s not like them to show up and smash things.”

  “And most environmentalists don’t set fire to logging trucks, but any group can have a few crazies.”

  “O.K., let’s say you’re right. Why did they take the pieces?”

  “So you couldn’t put them back together again,” she stated confidently. She seemed quite pleased with that conjecture, and I’ll admit it makes sense to someone who isn’t a potter. Which is why I hadn’t even thought of it.

  “Hate to disappoint you, Suze, but I couldn’t have put those pieces back together even with the help of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.”

  “Well, maybe they wanted to bury the pieces back on Indian land, not let them stay with the white man.”

  “If they were insulted by the copies, why would they want to bury the pieces on their land?”

  “Oh, right. Well, maybe they didn’t know they were fakes.”

  It was like the light bulb going on,
but it didn’t burn for long. “Now you’re getting somewhere. Maybe they didn’t know I now have two stores. Maybe they thought they were smashing up the store I’ve had for many years.”

  Then I thought about it some more and said, “But that doesn’t work, does it? If they thought the pots were originals, they would want to repatriate them, not smash them.”

  “So they knew they were fake?”

  “I think they had to know.”

  “So we’re in a dilemma. If they thought the pots were real, they would have taken them without smashing them. And if they thought they were fakes, they would have smashed them without taking the pieces.”

  I nodded. She shook her head and waved at Angie, and we got a much-needed refill. Trying to make sense of the pot smashing incident was thirsty work.

  “So now what?”

  “Now I break in to Rio Grande Lofts.”

  “Great!” she almost shouted. Then she tried to restrain herself, which goes against her nature, and said, “I guess I shouldn’t say that, huh? I don’t want you to get in trouble.”