The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (3 page)

“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.”

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 type 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.

How did I know the design on the back had that little miscue? Because I had put it there. The pot on the top shelf to the right of the fireplace was one of my copies.

Segundo Cantú had walked into my shop shortly after Christmas carrying a large cardboard box. The box didn’t sport wrapping paper or ribbon, and Cantú definitely didn’t look like Santa Claus.

“I hear you can make copies of pots.”

I took an immediate dislike to him, perhaps because he had dispensed with any greeting or perhaps because there was something in his tone that implied I was a Xerox machine that did pots.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Well,” he said impatiently, “can you?”

“I can when I want to.”

“Good,” he said, “I want an exact copy of this one.”

He evidently did not hear the “when I want to” part of my answer.

Cantú was tall and slant-shouldered with long arms. His hatchet face was dominated by a long thin nose, a high forehead, and eyes that constantly darted.

He opened the box and placed the pot on my counter.

It almost took my breath away. Because of the passage of ARPA, there are very few ancient pots being dug up these days, and even without legal restraints, there wouldn’t be many because the things are damned hard to find. I have a knack for knowing where to look honed by years of walking the desert and graduate work in archaeology, but I’m lucky if one in a hundred of my illegal digs turns up anything even close to the pot that Cantú had placed on my counter.

The pots that were dug up when it was legal to do so are all in museums, private collections, or the inventory of a few lucky merchants like myself. Of course, there’s no way to know when a pot was unearthed, so when I do get lucky, I put my find in one of my display cases with a discreet little tented card on which is written a small price. Small in font size, not small in the quantity of dollars.

If someone questions the provenance of the pot, I tell them I dug it up when it was legal to do so. I suppose some people would see that as lying. I see it as an elliptical way of saying that as far as I’m concerned, it still is and always will be legal to dig up old pots. It’s no different from digging for gold. Except gold is easier to find.

You can see ancient pots in museums or in my shop, but you certainly don’t expect a guy like Segundo Cantú to be carrying one around in a cardboard box.

It was an odd shape, about fifty percent wider than it was tall with a narrow opening. It had two fiddlehead designs one hundred and eighty degrees apart, one slightly irregular, but you already know about that.

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

“I want you to make a copy of it,” he said, his long arms flopping around nervously.

“You already told me what you want. Now I’m telling you what I want. I want to buy it.”

“It’s not for sale.”

Then why do you want to copy it, I thought to myself. Maybe he wanted to put the original in a vault to keep it safe and put the copy on display. I’ve heard of women with big diamonds who have zirconium copies made because they don’t want to risk wearing the ten carat original in public.

Or maybe he already had a buyer for the original and wanted a copy to remember it by. It didn’t really matter why he wanted a copy. If he wouldn’t sell it to me, I could either make a copy or not. But I hadn’t yet given up on buying it.

“I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars for it.”

He didn’t blink and he didn’t hesitate. “I told you it’s not for sale. You gonna copy it for me or what?”

I quoted him a price of five thousand dollars, a little on the high side because I didn’t like him, but not so high – I hoped – as to make him change his mind. I could use the money. He tried to bargain with me, but I told him the price was firm. He finally agreed. I gave him a receipt acknowledging that he’d left the pot with me and a date a couple of weeks ahead when he could return for the copy, and he walked out.

He returned in February with another pot in what appeared to be the same cardboard box. I copied it for him. Then he brought me a third one in early April. All three of those copies I made for Cantú turned out to be in the collection I appraised.

I remembered Cantú’s last visit was in April because I was working on my income tax return. I also remembered that he paid me five thousand in cash for each copy.

Even though it was cash, I reported the income on my tax return, maybe because I was abiding the law or maybe because I was afraid Cantú might deduct it as an expense on his tax return and some sharp-penciled IRS agent would see a payment to Hubert Schuze on Cantú’s return and then look up my return to see if there was a corresponding income entry. What a racket income tax is. Cantú gets a deduction. I get higher taxes.

Each time Cantú left a pot to be copied, I had the pleasure of admiring it, going over every inch of it as I created its twin. Seeing the flaw in the first one – the one with the fiddle head design – made me think about the woman who made it.

My business has a logo displayed in gold leaf on the windows. The logo – initially foisted off on me by Susannah and some art student friends of hers – turned out to be spectacular. Two stylized hands. One reaches up, the other down. Together they form the double-helix shape of a pot, the hand below the soil surrendering it to the hand above. But something more is passing between those hands. I named my shop Spirits in Clay.

I know it sounds new-age and corny, but I couldn’t think of anything better at the time. Looking at Cantú’s first pot made me feel better about the name. There is a spiritual connection between the ancient potter and the modern one who finds her work. Of course I didn’t find this one. It came into my shop in a cardboard box. I didn’t own it and probably never would, alas.

As I studied that pot, a thought popped into my mind. I could make two copies and keep one for myself! Or make three – one for Cantú, one to keep, and one to sell. Then I realized that I couldn’t do that with a clear conscience without getting Cantú’s permission, and I was certain he wouldn’t grant it.

My code of ethics again.

I reconciled myself to the fact I’d never own that piece by focusing on the bright side. I’d get to study it, handle it, and copy it. I might have lived my entire life without seeing it, but now it would be in my possession for fourteen days.

In that regard, it was similar to my love life. I’ve been fortunate to be involved with a few women whose allure was even greater than ancient pottery, and I never got to keep one of them either.

I wondered briefly if it was sexist to draw an analogy between a woman and an inanimate object. I decided it wasn’t because I didn’t mean it that way and went back to looking at the pot and thinking about its maker.

The connection between the ancient potter and the contemporary one has nothing to do with tribe or ethnicity. We are not our bones, our flesh color, or our eye shape. We are what we
do
. Culture is behavioral, not biological. One good example is the anthropologist who “goes native,” who gets so wrapped up in the culture he’s studying that he actually becomes part of it. Permanently. Marries into it, adopts its language, dress, and customs. Burns his trousers and takes to wearing turtle shells on his knees.

I have a list of beliefs I call Schuze’ Anthropological Premises, abbreviated SAP, which is what some of my cynical friends say you have to be to believe them. SAP number 1 is that any human being can practice any culture. If a Norwegian newborn were adopted by a couple in the Acoma Pueblo, that child would grow up to be exactly like all other Acoma children. He would look a bit out of place, but everything about him other than his blue eyes and fair skin would be pure Native American. He would not someday suddenly long for herring. He would not dream of being a ski jumper in the Olympics.

He might someday wonder why he looked different. If his adoptive parents told him about his origins, it is possible that curiosity might drive him to Norway to learn about his ‘roots’. He might even decide to become Norwegian, to give up the culture of his upbringing and learn the culture of his biological parents. He could do that. Remember that SAP 1 says any human being can practice any culture. But he would have to
learn
to be Norwegian. It wouldn’t just spring forth from his DNA. It would be as difficult for him to learn to speak Norwegian as it would be for you to learn to speak it.

Many people today don’t understand this. They adopt babies from China, bring them to the United States, put them in our public schools, and raise them like you would raise any other child in America. All well and good. Then they decide to give them Chinese lessons. Now learning another language is always a good thing. But why Chinese? Spanish would be more helpful here in America. Arabic is growing in importance. Italian is beautiful. Just because a child is of Chinese ethnicity does not mean she has to learn Chinese. Your culture and your language are determined by who raises you and where they do it, not by your genes.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that several years after I earned my business degree, I was kicked out of the anthropology graduate program at the University of New Mexico. You may want to take my opinions with several grains of salt. If you suffer from hypertension, I recommend a salt substitute.