The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (20 page)
Read The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Online
Authors: J Michael Orenduff
I pondered it for a minute. “I think you mean a mole.”
“A mole iz a spy?”
“No, a mole is a harmless little fellow whose name has come to be used in that way because he lives underground.”
“Ah, then he woss a mole. Our little circle came to believe he woss in league with the Ukrainians.”
“Did he do anything that might have gotten him killed?”
“Youbird, we are a harmless group of dreamers, a few refugees from a country that never exist. We raise a few dollars for the victims of the 1998 floods. No one kills anybody over the Rusyn question.”
He shook his head.
I remained on the
banco
after Father Groaz left. I puzzled over whether the pot smashing was related to Gerstner in any way. By five o’clock I had reached the conclusion I expected; namely, that I had no clue and wouldn’t have known what to do with a clue if I did have one. So I turned to something I do know about –
Dos Hermanas
.
The Dom Perignon hadn’t completely worn off despite the afternoon nap, so I was sipping my margarita slowly.
“I can’t understand why the police think you murdered Gerstner,” she said, incredulous.
“Well, I have a motive, I was in the building, I left the party for no good reason, and the shot was heard while I was gone. You have to admit that would qualify almost anyone for the suspect list.”
“But you already explained how the murder had to be at a different time or place.”
“I explained it to you, Suze, and to Layton. I didn’t explain it to the police.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was just digging myself in to a hole, and I decided not to say anything else.”
“That’s like my father. He likes to say, ‘When you find you’re digging yourself in to a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging’.”
“Which is what I did. Let Layton worry about it.”
“So now what?”
“I guess I wait for a call from Layton telling me everything is O.K.”
She took a sip of her margarita and tilted her head back to catch the sun’s rays. The air was cold but the sun was warm and we were back on the west veranda.
“What about the pots?” she asked up towards the sky.
“Being arrested for murder doesn’t change the fact I still need money. I’ve still got mortgage payments and rental payments, I still have nothing to sell in one of the shops, Consuela may still need a kidney transplant, and now I’ve got a big legal fee to boot.”
“It can’t be that much, can it?”
“Oh, it can mount up pretty fast. Layton charges five hundred dollars an hour.”
“Geez, Hubie, that’s a million a year.”
“That’s a pretty fast calculation for someone who claims she’s not good in math. But he makes a lot more than that. You don’t think he bills only two thousand hours a year, do you?”
“Will he bill you for the time during lunch?”
“The meter’s always running, Suze.”
“That’s not fair, Hubie. Why should he get paid while he eats?”
“For the same reason I got charged with a murder I didn’t commit.”
“Life’s not fair?”
“That’s the reason.”
39
On Friday morning I went to see a hatter named Vlade Glastoc.
I didn’t know there were still hatters. I figured hats all came from factories these days, but we have a hatter in Albuquerque, and he has a shop on Silver a block west of the train station where he can make any sort of hat you want and it fits you perfectly because he measures your head and tailors it right to your measurements. Or, maybe that should be ‘hatters’ it right to your measurements. And it is measurements – plural. Turns out a proper hat size is more than just the circumference of your noggin.
“Your head is perfectly sized for your height,” he told me after he had measured mine around the normal way as well as from ear to ear over the top and from my eyebrows to the base of the back of my skull.
I didn’t take much pleasure in his observation about my head size. After all, there are only thirteen men’s hat sizes ranging from 6
5
/
8
to 8
1
/
2
. Since there are three billion men, the odds would be that, with the exception of a few pinheads and guys with hydrocephalus, most of us would have the right head size.
“No one knows how to size a hat these days,” Mr. Glastoc lamented. He centered a plaster of Paris head on the counter and lowered a metal loop onto its forehead. “You see how that rests perfectly on the head?”
“It certainly does,” I said admiringly.
“It does not,” he contradicted. “It
appears
to rest properly because it is at the wrong angle. Observe,” he said like a magician, and tilted the hoop. “Now you see it is too small.” Then he tilted the loop in the other direction. “Now behold – it is too large.”
“Amazing.”
He nodded appreciatively. He was a small man with small eyes. I don’t know if he had the right sized head; it seemed a smidgen small to my untrained eye. He made up for his head size with a lot of hair, jet black and combed straight back without a part. He spoke faintly accented English and his word order was unidiomatic in a few cases, so I guessed he was foreign born, and it turned out I was correct.
Of course my getting it right may have been aided by his given name being Vlade, not a common naming choice for American parents. And I was also aided by the fact that Father Groaz had told me Glastoc was Rusyn.
I hadn’t told Glastoc that. I wanted information from him, but I didn’t want him to know what I wanted. I didn’t know what side he was on. In fact, I didn’t even know what sides there were.
“That’s an attractive flag,” I said to him.
He glanced at the flag on the headband catch of a natty hat I would have described as Tyrolean. I expected him to say something like, “Yes, that is the Rusyn flag,” thus providing an entrée for a conversation on the topic. Instead, he grunted and asked me what style of hat I had in mind.
I told him the one with the interesting flag appealed to me.
“All wrong for you. A hat like that is worn by large men as a minor decoration. On you it would only make you look smaller.”
“Oh. Well, how about a larger hat with the same headband. I really like that flag. What country did you say its from?”
“I didn’t say. Here, try this one.” He handed me a Western straw hat without a band.
“I don’t think I like straw. And I definitely want a headband.”
“Try this,” he said, producing another one from under the counter. It was a sort of an updated version of the homburg, and I hated it before even trying it on.
We went around like this for a while, me bringing up the headband and the flag and him bringing up more hats. Finally, he produced a soft felt number with a brim wide enough to give protection from the sun and a crown low enough to avoid making it seem like I was trying to look taller. It had an attractive band made of dark green ribbon, and it felt good in my hand and even better on my head.
“I’ll take this one if you can put that headband on it,” I said, pointing again to the Tyrolean model.
“I can’t sell you this one. It doesn’t fit you properly.”
“But it feels perfect.”
“The one I make will feel even better. Besides, this is a model that has been too long in the shop. Believe me, you will like better the one I make just for you.”
“Hmm. O.K., but what about the headband?”
He shrugged. “If you like it, I can make one like it for this hat, but I don’t think it is appropriate.”
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t even recognize the flag. It could be some terrorist regime for all I know.”
Whereupon his small eyes became even smaller, and he told me about the flag.
40
The hat was ready on Monday and I wore it to
Dos Hermanas
.
“Wow! First an ascot and now a fedora. You’re becoming sartorially splendid.”
“You think it looks good?”
“It looks great.”
I took it off and hung it on the back of an empty chair. “I feel sort of self-conscious wearing it. Men don’t wear hats anymore.”
“My father always wears a hat.”
“He wears cowboy hats. That’s not the same.”
“So you can be different. Where in the world did you find it?”
“I got it from Vlade Glastoc.”
“You went to Russia over the weekend?”
I gave her a blank look.
“Well? Isn’t Vladivostok in Russia?”
“Not Vladivostok, Suze. Vlade Glastoc. It’s a name.”
“Of someone who sells hats?”
“He makes them.”
“But he’s not in Russia?”
“No, he’s right here in Albuquerque.”
“I didn’t know we had a milliner in town.”
“Actually, I think he’s a hatter.”
“Why? Is he mad?”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far. A bit eccentric perhaps.”
“Well, what would you expect with a name like Glady Vlasnost? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s Vlade Glastoc. And it’s Rusyn.”
“So he
could
be from Vladivostok.”
“He isn’t Russian –
he’s Rusyn,” I said, stressing the long ‘u’ in Rusyn.
“Oh,
Rusyn
. Why didn’t you say so?”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Andy Warhol was Rusyn. His name was really Andrin Vargola, but he anglicized it to Andy Warhol. I read that his family came from Carpathia. Where is that, Hubie?”
“I’m not certain. Some of it’s in Ukraine.”
“You mean ‘The Ukraine’?”
“I think they dropped the ‘The’.”
She seemed genuinely disappointed about that, so I ask her why it mattered.
“Which sounds better,” she asked, “‘I went to Ukraine’ or ‘I went to The Ukraine’?”
“The latter, but that’s just because we’ve always heard it that way.”
“No, I think it’s because ‘Ukraine’ starts with a vowel. Other countries all start with consonants, so they don’t need a ‘The’.”
I puzzled over her bizarre theory for a few seconds then said, “Italy starts with a vowel, Argentina starts with a vowel, Uruguay—”
“Those don’t count. Romance languages have vowels everywhere. But countries where they don’t speak Spanish or Italian all start with consonants – Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan Canada, Sweden, Norway, China... You want me to keep going?”
“How about the United States?” I said smugly. “It not only starts with a vowel, but it’s the same one Ukraine starts with.”
“Right, and the name of the country is
The
United States of America. See, Hubie, you have to have a ‘The’ before a country that starts with a vowel.”
“Especially a ‘u’,” I said, relenting. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Because your hatter was from The Ukraine.”
So I told her what Groaz had told me about the Rusyns, aka the Rutherians, the Lemko, the Husal, and the Bojko, including the fact that Ognan Gerstner had joined their local group and been thought to be a mole.
“So you think that may have something to do with Gerstner’s death?”
“Father Groaz didn’t think so, but ethnic conflicts in that part of the world have generated violence for centuries, so I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“So you wanted to find out what this Vlade Glasnost knew about Gerstner.”
“Vlade Vlasnost… no, that’s not right either. Never mind – let’s just call him Vlad. And yes, I went to his shop to see what I could find out.”
“So the hat was just a front.”
“More of a top, actually. And I needed a hat anyway. Did you know skin cancer is a major problem for people who live here in Albuquerque?”
“Yeah, I knew that, Hubert. It kills way more people around here than drowning. Are you going to tell me what you found out or not?”
“I found out that the bottom of the Rusyn flag has five red mountain peaks, the top part is sky blue and in the middle is a yellow sun.”
‘That’s all you got out of him?”
I shrugged. “That and the hat.”
Susannah eventually had to leave for class, but I stayed to have another round. I tried to think about the Rusyns. Maybe there was a clue to Gerstner’s death there. The October air was crisp and dry, the sky dark blue above the Sandias and blood red over the mesa to the west. I decided to relax and forget about it.
41
Saturday broke clear and crisp, the kind of day that calls for a hardy breakfast.
Of course, my view is that every day calls for a hardy breakfast, and
huevos rancheros
is definitely hardy – two cumin-laced eggs over well on top of corn tortillas liberally doused with chile, cheese, and chopped cilantro. The only question is red or green. I chose green and added a side of sliced avocados, lightly salted and sprinkled with a squeeze of lemon to stop them from turning dark. I kept the plate in the oven until the last minute to make sure the breakfast stayed warm, and I kept the Gruet
Blanc de Noir
in the freezer until the last minute to make sure it stayed cold. Then I moved everything out to the patio and dined under the morning sun while listening to the susurrus of the dry autumn
chamisa
.