The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (2 page)

She knows me better than I know myself.

“Something like that,” I admitted. “I haven’t thought it completely through. I do know this, though; if another pot hunter had found it, I certainly wouldn’t entertain the idea of breaking into his house to steal it.”

“Honor among thieves?”

I scowled. I think of myself as a decent person. If I see money fall from someone’s pocket, I chase them down and return it. I’ve never seen a pot fall out of anyone’s pocket, but if one did and I found it, I would return it. Of course, it would probably be just a handful of shards after the fall, but I wouldn’t even steal another man’s shards. But when I dig up a thousand year old pot, its rightful owner is long gone, so I don’t feel guilty about making it my own.

“Seriously,” she continued, “I know you’re a man of principle, but is a museum different from someone’s house?”

“Maybe. It was the unholy trinity of professional archaeologists, museums, and political correctness activists that got pot digging outlawed in the first place. And I’ll tell you what I think of museums. They’re places where…”

“Pots go to die,” she said before I could.

“I guess I’ve told you that before?”

“Repeatedly.”

“Well, it’s true. What I object to is museums taking things out of circulation. Courtiers buried Pharaohs with riches while the peasants lived like slaves. Today we put our valuables into museums instead of graves, but that helps the common man about as much as the gold in Tut’s sarcophagus helped the Egyptian peasants. Buying and selling, goods changing hands, that’s what makes an economy work.”

“Spoken like a true shopkeeper.”

“And proud of it. If Congress had given tax breaks to treasure hunters instead of criminalizing them, they could have added a few more percentage points to the gross national product, not to mention increasing what we know about the peoples of the past.”

“That’s why we have archaeologists, Hubert.”

“Right, concentrating on one square meter on the edge of an artifact-rich site, their little brushes moving a teaspoon of sand a day while some graduate student writes every move down in a notebook.”

I fumbled around for an analogy. “It’s like the department of agriculture placing a fertile field off limits except to a handful of agronomists who are experimenting with micro lettuce while hungry people are barred from

planting food crops.”

“You’re not exactly starving, Hubie!”

I shrugged. I felt better getting it off my chest. She caught the attention of our server, the lithesome Angie, and ordered a third round.

“You sure you want another one?” I asked. “Don’t you have class tonight?” Susannah is a permanent, part-time student at the University of New Mexico, majoring in whatever course is offered during the evening of the current semester.

“It’s a guest lecture on Frederick Remington, Hube. You can’t face something like that on only two margaritas.”

I drained my glass and asked why a psychology major would attend a lecture on Remington.

“Honestly, Hubie, sometimes I think you don’t listen to me. I dropped psychology last semester. I’m majoring in art history now.”

“Sorry,” I said, “it slipped my mind, but now I remember.”

Angie refilled our glasses, and Susannah asked her to bring some more tortilla chips and salsa.

“The chips and salsa soak up the tequila; I’ll be fine by seven.”

“That’s an interesting theory. Why did you choose art history, Suze?”

“The same reason I chose psychology, Hubert – to meet guys. But all the guys you meet in psychology are psychotic. That’s why they study psychology in the first place, to find out what’s wrong with them. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I know that, Susie. In fact, I think I’m the one who told you that. Remember? When you told me you were going to switch to psychology? Before you switched. But you went ahead anyway, didn’t you?”

“Geez, Hubie, you sound like my mother.”

“Sorry, Suze. I don’t mean to be so critical.”

“Anyway, you’re an artist; you should appreciate my new major.”

“I’m not an artist, Susie; I’m a ceramicist. I make clay pots.”

“That’s art.”

“Quick,” I said, “name ten famous artists right off the top of your head.”

“Let’s see,” she said and ticked them off on her fingers, “there’s Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Andy Warhol.”

“See? Not a potter in the bunch.”

“Well, maybe you’ll be the first one to become famous.”

“Thanks, Suze, but I don’t think so. Even if pots were art, I just make copies.”

“But you do like art history.”

“I do,” I said, “and I admire you for exploring all your intellectual horizons.”

“I’m not exploring my intellectual horizons, Hubie; I’m trying to meet a good man. To which I should say good luck or fat chance or something.”

“Well, you won’t meet any in art history; almost all art historians are women, and the men in art history…”

“I know; they’re all gay.”

“Well, maybe not all,” I suggested helpfully.

“All the ones here are, and you’re right, almost all art history students are women.”

“If you knew that, why did you choose art history?”

“I know it now, Hubie; I didn’t know it then.”

I leaned back in my chair and gave her an appraising look. “You know what I think, Susannah? I think you did know it. I think you really are academically inclined, but you like to pretend you’re just in school to meet men.”

“Now you’re going back to psychology, Hube; let’s get another margarita.”

I looked down and discovered our glasses had emptied themselves while we were talking.

“If we have another one,” I asked, “how many will that be?”

“Four I think.”

“Isn’t that too many?”

“You know what you always say, Hubie; a bird can’t fly on one wing.”

“Neither can a bird fly on three wings,” I opined.

“Exactly,” she said. “A bird with three wings will be all lopsided and really unable to fly. At least four is an even number.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said—and I didn’t.

3

The next morning I walked over to the University to visit the Valle del Rio Museum. I walked because I enjoy walking and because parking spots at the University of New Mexico campus are about as common as Nobel Laureates. I didn’t know whether I would eventually try to get the pot, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look around. I was wrong.

It was a sunny spring day with a soaring New Mexico sky. Classes were in full swing and people were everywhere, so no one paid any attention to me as I milled around outside, sat on benches, leaned against trees, and thoroughly studied all the windows and doors of the Museum. Finally I went inside. I acted like a typical museum patron, staring at the works on display. Except that I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at walls, floors, ceilings, outlets, conduits, fixtures, and everything else except the display pieces.

The Mogollon pot was in a side room, still displayed as I remembered it, on top of a plinth, a word even Ogden Nash couldn’t rhyme. Velvet ropes stretched between four stanchions and kept viewers just out of arm’s length from the pot. There was no one else in the room. I gently lifted one of the stanchions and waited. Nothing happened. No alarms sounded, no sirens wailed, no automatic doors slammed shut, no guards rushed in.

I removed the end of one of the ropes from its stanchion and waited again. Same result. I placed the end of the rope quietly on the floor and walked up to the pot. Nothing happened. Evidently, there were no invisible laser beams to be interrupted. Nor were there any motion detectors. I listened for footsteps and heard none. The guards and the ticket takers were still in the front room. I pulled two paper napkins from my pocket and, draping them over my hands, I lifted the pot up about an inch and carefully sat it back in exactly the same spot. Then I put the napkins in my pocket, stepped back outside the forbidden square and replaced the rope on the stanchion.

I now knew that I could get the pot off its pedestal with no problem. But what good was that knowledge to me? The windows had steel bars embedded in the walls. The front door was metal-plated. The back door was also metal-plated and had a double cylinder deadbolt lock, meaning you have to use a key to open it from outside and inside. The basement had no entry from outside. It didn’t even have window wells. There were no skylights. And at least two people were always at the front door. Patrons were required to check all parcels, book bags, purses, and briefcases at the front desk before passing through a metal detector which was the only way in or out. Exiting with any sort of package would be impossible unless the entire staff were chloroformed. And even that wouldn’t work because the only security camera I could see was aimed at the front door. The pot was about eighteen inches tall and perhaps fourteen across, so I couldn’t smuggle it out in my pockets, unless of course I broke it into shards which would probably lower its value considerably below twenty-five thousand, not to mention make a lot of noise and attract the guards.

There was no way for me to get into the building when it was locked at night. There was no way to sneak anything out when it was open during the day. I was stumped. But when I was a math student, many of the theorems I was assigned to prove seemed unproveable at first sight. I discovered that you just have to keep thinking about it, looking at it from different angles, and asking questions that might lead to a new perspective. Quixotic questions like how could you show the theorem can’t be proved? or what would have to be the case if you were to prove it? or how would you change the theorem to make it easier to prove? These seemingly paradoxical questions—which in my mind always contained italicized words—often led me to see a path to the solution that I hadn’t seen by taking the normal and straightforward approach. So rather than conclude that getting the pot out of the Museum was impossible, I decide to seek an ingenious and creative solution.

It took me forty minutes to walk back to my shop, and I used the time to let my ingenious and creative juices flow. Evidently, the flow was more of a trickle, because when I got back to my shop, I still had no clue how to get the pot out of the Museum.

4

I once had a bell mounted on a little arm above the front door of my shop, and it would tinkle—rather merrily I thought—whenever a visitor crossed my threshold.

My nephew Tristan is determined to bring me into the electronic age, so he replaced my bell with a contraption that shines a laser beam across the door and bongs when it’s interrupted. The beam, not the door; the door is made of three-hundred-year-old piñon and couldn’t be interrupted by anything measuring less than 7.5 on the Richter scale.

Shortly after I arrived back at the shop and opened for business, the bong let me know the beam had been interrupted. This particular interruption wore a size fifty windowpane suit with panes that were too large and lapels that were too small. He had a pasty complexion and razor cut hair held in place by either the world’s strongest hair spray or shellac. The desert wind had started early that day and the morning’s clear sky was now fuscous with blowing sand. Despite the whipping wind, not a single strand of my visitor’s pale brown hair was out of place. He looked at me and then he looked around the store like he owned the place.

The suit, haircut, and demeanor said federal agent. Maybe Tristan was right to install the laser. A tinkling bell doesn’t put you on alert like a grating bong.

Razor cut reached the counter, produced a leather folder, flipped it open to reveal a badge, and then quickly flipped it shut. At least I assumed it was a badge. It could have been a turquoise and silver squash blossom for all the look I got at it.

“Agent Guvelly, Bureau of Land Management. You Hubert Schuze?”

“Happily so,” I replied.

“We’re investigating the disappearance of a Mogollon pot.”

I stood there stunned. I haven’t even stolen it yet, I thought. I haven’t even decided to steal it. I don’t know how to steal it. How could he be investigating a theft that I haven’t even attempted?

“We have reason to believe you may know something about it,” he said.

I just stared at him. This can’t be happening, I thought. Then it came to me. I had been spotted at the Museum, someone had stolen the pot after I left, and they thought I did it. But I still couldn’t think of anything to say, much less how someone could have done the impossible and gotten the pot out of the Museum.

“Well?” he asked. I noticed his lips didn’t move when he spoke.

“Well what?” I said stupidly.

“Do you know anything about it?”

“I know it was still there when I left,” I said uncertainly.

He gave me a quizzical look. At least I thought it was quizzical. With his broad face and frozen countenance, it was hard to judge what sort of look he had.

“When was that?” he asked.

“When was what?” I answered. Stupidity seemed to be working, so I decided to stick with it for now.

“When was it that you last saw it?”

“This morning.”

“So you admit it,” he said. “Where is it?”

Admit what? I thought. “It was in the Museum where it’s been ever since I can remember.”

“The Museum?”

“Yes, the Museum.”

“What Museum?” he asked.

I was tempted to ask ‘Who’s on first,’ but this didn’t seem the time for levity, so I said, “The Valle del Rio Museum at the University.”

“Don’t play games with me, Schuze.”

I tried to affect a smile both humorous and innocent, but probably got banal instead.

“I’m confused,” I said. “What exactly are you asking me about?”

He moved uncomfortably close to me. “I’m asking about a Mogollon water jug that was stolen from park headquarters in Bandelier.”

So that was it. He was talking about the other Mogollon water jug.

Guvelly continued, “Our files say you’ve been stealing pots from Federal land and selling them for many years.”

“Sometimes asserted; never proved,” I replied.

“All that means is you haven’t been caught yet.”