The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein (4 page)

After I surprised Susannah by telling her I knew the address where I’d appraised the pots, she decided the explanation of that would probably take us through another round of drinks, so she had summoned Angie for refills.

After delivery, I took a sip to make sure they were as good as the last ones. They were.

“I discovered something surprising during my appraisal. Three of the pots in that collection are copies I made.”

“You sold the collector three copies? How come you didn’t recognize him?”

“I don’t think the guy I saw there was the collector.”

“Then who was he?”

“I have no idea, but I think the collection actually belongs to a guy named Segundo Cantú.”

“What kind of name is Segundo?”

“It’s the kind that comes after Primero and before Tercero.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. I’ll admit it’s not too common these days, but some Hispanic families used to name their male children after the order of their birth.”

“What, they couldn’t think of any names so they just went with numbers?”

“Ordinal numbers.”

“Huh?”

“When people say numbers, they normally mean cardinal numbers – one, two, three, like that. I was just pointing out that the names are ordinal numbers – first, second, third.”

She gave me that impatient look she always gives me when I say anything about math. “What difference does it make what sort of numbers they are? It’s still weird.”

“I don’t know. Look at all the kings and queens with numbers. Elizabeth the First, Henry the Eighth—”

“I rest my case. No one is weirder than the royals.”

“Good point,” I replied and hesitated. “I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.”

“Segundo Cantú.”

“Oh, right. Well, he brought me a pot last December and paid me five thousand dollars to make a copy of it.”

“Why would he want a copy of his own pot?”

“Let’s come back to that. He came back again in February with a second pot he wanted copied. Then he brought a third one in April.”

Susannah recited the order of months out loud while sticking up a finger for each one. “December, January, February, March, April.” She studied her fingers. “He was bringing you a pot every other month.” She paused briefly to think then said, “You should get the fourth one this month.”

“Somehow I don’t think I will. So let’s get back to your question of why he was having me copy his pots. Here’s my theory. He had decided to sell his collection. But before he sold a pot, he wanted a copy of it. So he sold the first pot in December, telling the buyer he could take delivery in a few weeks. Meanwhile, he has me copy it. After he gets the copy, he gives the original to the buyer and collects his money, let’s say fifty thousand.”

“So he pays five thousand for the copy and sells the original for fifty? He’s coming out way ahead.”

“Right. Then in two months, he sells another one, and we go through the same rigmarole. Same again two months after that. But then some buyer – maybe one of the first three, maybe someone new – offers to buy the whole collection. Cantú agrees, so I’m not going to get any more copying business from him”

“Why not? If he wanted copies when he was selling them one at a time, why wouldn’t he still want copies when he’s selling them all at once?”

“My guess is the buyer isn’t willing to wait that long. It takes me at least two weeks to make a good copy. Multiply that times the twenty-two remaining originals, and you get forty-four weeks.”

“That’s almost a year,” she commented.

“Yeah, but I can’t work at that pace for that long. Making copies is painstaking work. I would need breaks. I don’t think I could do it in less than two years.”

“I guess it would be hard to ask a buyer to wait two years.”

“My experience with collectors is they like owning things, not waiting for things.”

“So I guess your copying income has dried up.”

“It looks that way. And if I can’t get more money for copying Cantú’s pots, I at least want to get my twenty-five hundred for the appraisal.”

“You still haven’t told me why Cantú would want copies of the pots he was selling.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he needed money but hated the idea of losing his collection so he had copies made as a compromise.”

I scooped some salsa onto a chip and ate it. What could be better than
Dos Hermanas
on a hot summer day, the cool breeze from the evaporative cooler, the soothing sounds of Spanish from the kitchen, the fresh salsa with its jalapeño snap, perfect margaritas, and the best friend a guy ever had sitting across the table.

Frowning. “There’s another possibility,” she said, her big eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Maybe Cantú was selling the copies and keeping the originals.”

“He couldn’t have sold the copies. They’re still in the collection.”

“How do you know they’re the copies and not the originals?”

“A fair question. No matter how carefully you copy, there are always little differences. Suppose the original had a black band around it and the band on the copy was slightly wider. Well, that wouldn’t mean anything to the casual observer because no two old pots are ever the same. The Anasazi weren’t working at Royal Doulton with production lines and quality control. Each pot was a fresh creation. They might use the same design, but they had no way of making two pots identical, so the black band could be wide on one pot and narrower on the next. But the person who makes a copy knows when he doesn’t get it quite right, and he knows how he erred. So if the copier made the band slightly wider and he’s looking at the copy and the original next to each other,
he
knows that the wide-banded one is his copy. But no one else could know that because the copier could have just as easily have made the band narrower.”

“O.K., that makes sense, but how do you know the collection you appraised belongs to Cantú? Maybe Cantú was just an errand boy for the collector.”

Her suggestion made sense, so I asked myself why I hadn’t thought of it. When I answered my own question, I explained it to her.

“I guess it’s possible,” I admitted, “but it seems unlikely. Ancient pots are fragile. I can’t see a collector letting some errand boy walk around with one in a cardboard box.”

“Then who was the guy there when you did the appraisal?”

“Maybe he was a friend Cantú asked to stand in for him because he didn’t want to be there when I came for the appraisal.”

“Why wouldn’t he want to be there?” she persisted.

I shrugged. “He’s a weird guy. Maybe he didn’t want me asking why my copies were in the collection and the originals were gone. Maybe he thought I might get angry that he was planning to sell my copies as part of the collection. Maybe he had a doctor’s appointment.”

“At five o’clock in the evening?” She got that excited look she gets when she tries to morph reality into a murder mystery. “Maybe it was Cantú in disguise!”

I started laughing. I explained that the guy at the appraisal was older and shorter than Cantú.

“But you said he was stooped over. It could have been Cantú just pretending to be a hunchback.”

“What about the older part?”

“Makeup.”

“I don’t know, Suze. That sounds like a lot of work for nothing. Instead of disguising himself and walking around bent over, why not just get a friend to deal with me?” And then I joked, “If Cantú was going to put on theater makeup, why not take the opportunity to make himself better looking?”

“Good point. From your description, he sounds like the sort of guy I always get on blind dates.”

“You don’t go on blind dates.”

“Now you know why,” she quipped. Then she hesitated for a minute and said, “Although I did go on one last night. Well, it wasn’t really a blind date, more like an arranged meeting disguised to look like a chance encounter.”

“Huh?”

“Some of the students wanted to grab a bite after class, and they asked me to go. I said I was too tired, but they insisted. When we got to the café, there was a guy who seemed to be waiting for us, an international student. He was by himself and there were five of us, two couples and me. They all quickly grabbed seats in such a way that the only empty one was next to Chris. So I figure it was a set-up. But no one had said anything to me, and I get the impression they hadn’t said anything to him either, so neither one of us had that awful feeling of being on a blind date.”

“Chris is the name of a foreign student? Where’s he from, Canada?”

“Italy. His real name is Christoforo Churgelli, but everyone just calls him Chris. Seems like a nice guy, sort of odd, but in a nice way. How did we get on this topic?”

“I have no idea.”

She puzzled for a moment. “Oh, right, Cantú not making himself up to be better looking. I still don’t see how you can be certain it’s Cantú’s collection. Maybe he sold the whole thing to the guy you saw, copies and all.”

“Could be. That would really gall me because that would mean that weasel sold my copies as originals. He may have made ten times more on my copies than I got for making them.”

“And when you sell a pot that you got for free by digging it up, how much more do you make than the person who made the pot in the first place?”

“That’s different,” I said, perhaps defensively.

“How?”

“The potters who made the pots I sell are dead. I couldn’t give them a commission on the sale even if I wanted to.”

“Well, Hubie,” she said after draining the last of her margarita, “I know you think the collection belongs to Cantú, but there’s only one way you can be certain about that.”

Which is why I was riding blindfolded again the next afternoon, this time in the passenger seat of Susannah’s purple 1995 Ford Crown Victoria.

It didn’t start out purple. The factory color was blue, but too many years under the New Mexico sun oxidized the paint in some peculiar way that made it turn purple. The roof never was blue. It was white vinyl that dried up and flaked off over the course of several years during which the car looked as if it had a bad case of dandruff. But it’s all gone now, and the roof is just tinny-looking metal with streaks where the glue used to be that once held the vinyl in place.

The Crown Vic came with every electronic gadget available – air, cassette player, power windows, cruise control, power seats, even a power trunk release. None of those things still function. I doubt she misses the cruise control, nobody has any cassettes to play these days, and how difficult is it to open the trunk with a key? But not having air conditioning in Albuquerque is bad. Having inoperable windows is even worse. So when the little motors that operate the windows burned out, Susannah took the inside door panels off and manually lowered the windows. Of course there isn’t a crank, so there’s no way to raise them again.

No problem. It rarely rains here and no one is going to steal the car.

I’m still amazed that she knew how to take those panels off. There were no visible screws or latches or anything. She didn’t do quite so well getting them back on because they sort of flop around when you open the door, and if it’s a windy day – which it frequently is in Albuquerque – then you have to hold the panel when you open the door or it’ll fly away.

I like riding in Susannah’s car even though my feet don’t touch the floor if I sit all the way back in the seat. You could park a Corolla in there.

Segundo Cantú was listed at 183 Titanium Trail, a street in a subdivision of condos called
Casitas del Bosque
. The other street in the development was named Platinum Place. In the real Albuquerque – as opposed to its faux southwestern-style suburbs – there are original streets named Lead, Copper, and Silver. All those things are mined in New Mexico. So far as I know, there is no platinum ore in the State. I don’t even know if titanium comes from ore, but I don’t think we have any.

Susannah mapped out the route to 183 Titanium Trail and insisted I wear a blindfold while she drove there. I protested at first on the grounds that I could just close my eyes and imagine that I was recreating my first trip, but I eventually gave in to her argument that we needed to recreate the conditions of the first trip as faithfully as possible. I also gave in because she thought it would be “peachy” to have a blindfolded passenger.

She told me to take some time to put myself in the right frame of mind, to imagine that I was taking the same trip. When I said I had done that, she set off. We rode in silence as agreed, and I paid attention to how long we went straight, how often we turned and the direction. Since we had nothing else to go on, we decided she would drive at the speed limit. The ride seemed to match the way it had felt the first time except for the fact that the Crown Vic has loose steering and feels like a boat in high swells when you round a corner.

When she came to a stop and cut the engine, I took off the blindfold.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well, I have to admit you were right. Having the blindfold on helped me compare it to the original trip.”

“And did it seem the same?”

“I have no idea. The blindfold kept making me think of
piñatas
.”

She took a swipe at me, but the front seat is so big that I just leaned towards the window and she missed.

“It did seem like the same ride,” I said after I stopped laughing at her.

“Does the house look the same?”

I fell for it. I actually looked at the house as if I might recognize it. I gave her a look to acknowledge that she got me back for the
piñata
remark, then I looked at the place in earnest.

The “
casitas
” were in clusters of six, each one identical from the outside except for the wrought iron numbers on the plank doors. The clusters were low-slung with buttresses at both sides and differentiated by the color of the stucco – light brown, dusty rose, grey, dark brown, and an awful mustard. Unit 183 was in one of the light brown clusters. Despite the development’s name being
Casitas del Bosque
, there were very few trees around the
casitas
unless you count a few straggly junipers. There was an irrigation canal at the end of Titanium where it intersected with Platinum. I wondered what sort of alloy those two would create.

On the narrow strip of dirt between the curb and the canal grew a stand of cottonwoods, willows, and catalpas. Maybe they were the
bosque
.

“I need to see inside,” I observed rather redundantly.

“Go knock on the door and see if anyone’s home.”

“Are you crazy? What if Cantú answers the door?”

“Tell him you came to see his pot collection.”

“What if he doesn’t want me to see it?”

She sighed. “It doesn’t matter, Hubie. All you’re trying to do is get a peek inside. As soon as he opens the door, you’ll know if it’s where you did the appraisal.”

“I already know it’s where I did the appraisal.”

“Come on. You can’t be absolutely certain.”

She was right. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get my twenty-five hundred back, but it was pay for appraising the collection, and until I was positive who owned the collection, I didn’t know how to go about reclaiming it.

“Let’s drive around back,” she said and started the engine. We were headed due north. I’d like to claim I knew that because of my Y chromosome, but the truth is I knew we were headed north because the Sandia Mountains were on our right. At the end of Titanium Trail, we turned east toward the mountains onto a service drive. After about a hundred feet, the service drive made a second right angle turn to the right so that we were now headed south and were directly behind the units.

I remembered the window with the cream-colored shade and told Susannah about it as she swung into the service drive. There were one-car garage doors at the back of each unit, and next to each garage was a small patio. She drove slowly along as we looked at each window.

Spotting the cream-colored shade would have strengthened my conviction that this was where the pots were. We spotted it alright. There was one in every window.

“I can’t believe everyone in the neighborhood bought the same shades,” I said.

“They didn’t. Those are probably the ones that came with the places.”

“And no one decided they wanted a different color or maybe Venetian blinds?”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t look like the sort of neighborhood where people hire interior decorators.”

There was something forlorn about the place. No window boxes, no brightly painted doors, no landscaping. It looked like a place people lived while looking for something more permanent. I think they call them ‘starter homes’.

One of the garage doors opened a few units behind us and a car backed out and headed in our direction. Since the rear service drive was wide enough only for one car, Susannah drove around in front to let the car exit.

Then she said, “Let’s look in the garage.”

She paid no attention to my protest as she noted Cantú’s unit aloud. “Fifth one from the north end,” she said as she drove back around. She stopped directly behind number 183, got out of the car and peered through the small windows in the garage door as I scrunched down in the seat trying to make myself invisible.

“There’s a Cadillac convertible in there,” she said.

“That seems a bit fancy for this neighborhood.”

“The thing actually has fins.”

“Sounds like something Cantú would drive. He’s got this boney frame and—”

“Yeah, you told me that. So you think this is the house where you did the appraisal?”

“Of course. It’s Cantú’s address, it seems the right distance from Old Town, and the house is about the right size. It was roughly twenty-five feet from the entry where I took off the blindfold to the window with the shade pulled down, and these
casitas
are about that deep. On top of all that, I did notice how far my blindfolded walk was from the car to the front door, and this front sidewalk is the right distance. Everything fits.”

“So now what?”

“He’s probably here since there’s a car in the garage. Maybe I should keep checking back until I find the garage empty and then see if I can get in somehow.”

“Break in like you did at Berdal’s apartment?” she asked mischievously.

“I didn’t break in. You kicked in the door.”

“You were
trying
to break in, but you weren’t very good at it. Meanwhile, I was standing out there freezing my butt off, so I finally just kicked the door in because we’d still be standing there if I hadn’t.”

And the banter continued in this mode as we drove back to Old Town. At one point I put the blindfold back on surreptitiously, and when Susannah noticed she almost ran off the road laughing. It was almost five, and I was looking forward to discussing how to reclaim my missing appraisal fee with Susannah at
Dos Hermanas
. Then I remembered she’d told me she had a date that night with Chris the foreign student. Since it was Friday, that meant I wouldn’t see her again until Monday at five, at which time she would probably tell me her date had been a disaster. She’s unlucky in love, but it never gets her down. Still, I worry about her. I resisted the temptation to warn her about Italian men, partly because it was not my place to do so, but mainly because I don’t know anything about Italian men.

What I did know was that 183 Titanium Trail had to be the house I had done the appraisal in. The location seemed right. The size seemed right. The back window was in the right place. The door was the right distance from the curb. I was positive it was Cantú’s house. I was positive it was Cantú’s collection.

But I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that some small detail was wrong.