The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (24 page)

She took the letter I handed her and examined it. “It’s a letter to Gerstner from a former student wanting a recommendation. Is this supposed to be a clue, Hubert?”

“Sure, but the address is Anthropology Hall, Room 204. Mail from people who didn’t know he was retired would be addressed to the chairman’s office on the first floor. I think they gave him an office to use after he retired. They do that sometimes if the retiree is still active in research.”

“He paints big abstracts using house paint. My studio friends don’t think much of his work, but they say he was good at teaching oil techniques.”

“Somewhere in Eastern Europe. I remember it was a standing joke in the department that the only representational painting he ever did was of a flag after the fall of the Iron Curtain.”

“Why was it a joke?”

“Because the painting is in the departmental gallery, so we had all seen it. It’s called
Red, Blue, and Yellow
, and it looks nothing like a flag. I guess he’d been doing abstracts too long to make anything look like something.”

Susannah took a sip of her margarita and smiled at me. “You’re going to burglarize the University again, Hubert? You must still be trying to get even with them for kicking you out.”

I smiled back at her. “I’m just trying to recover stolen property.”

“When the police take back stolen property, Hubie, that’s called recovering it. When
you
take it back, that’s called stealing it again.”

He was standing by Angie, his chin up, his mane brushed casually back, a big smile showing perfect teeth. He wore pleated grey herringbone slacks and a dark blue cashmere sweater. And – can you believe it? – blue suede shoes to match the sweater. I would have looked and felt like a buffoon in that outfit, but on Freddie it actually looked quite natural. He strode over like a male model, gave me a manly handshake, and locked his arm around Susannah.

We chatted for a few minutes – he told me he wanted to see my work, maybe show some of it in his loft – and then they left. I sat back down and ran through my plan and some more salsa and chips.

47

The next morning around eleven, I drove up to the keypad at Rio Grande Lofts.

Except it wasn’t there. The keypad, I mean. Rio Grande Lofts was right where it’s always been. But where the keypad had been there was a slot for inserting a card. I sat there staring at it until a horn sounded behind me. Unfortunately, it was not friendly Wes, the retired cattle buyer. It was a no-nonsense guy in a Lexus who was unsympathetic when I told him I’d lost my card. He did allow me to back out. I drove in to a parking space down the street and sat there thinking.

Then I drove to Duran Central Pharmacy and bought a hamburger with green chile. Yes, you can buy hamburgers with green chile in a pharmacy. Hey, it’s Albuquerque.

I took the hamburger to Tristan’s apartment. There was no yellow Post-It note on the door, so I let myself in and started making coffee and transferring the burger from the Styrofoam to a real plate.

I don’t know whether the brewing coffee or the clinking dishes woke him. He stumbled in to the kitchen and I stuck a hot mug of coffee in his hand. He took a couple of sips then stepped over and lowered the blinds.

He gave me a strange look. “Well, I’m not an expert, but I can give you a summary. First, there are different systems. You have a particular garage in mind?”

“Exactly, although I suppose you could trigger it if you had enough metal on you. Or in you. Can you imagine it, Uncle Hubert, having a metal hip or something and walking up to the gate and it swings open.” He laughed at the prospect.

“Could a metal hip actually open it?”

“No, because they’re made from titanium and it’s non-ferrous. And even if the hip was made of iron, it’s probably not big enough.”

“Without getting too technical, a high field detector works on the Hall effect, and it takes a pretty good chunk of metal to activate it. A normal car would activate it, no problem. But a bicycle wouldn’t, and with all the molded plastic body parts in cars these days, some compacts might not trigger it. That’s why a low field system is better. It works by sensing a disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field. See, the earth’s magnetic field is pretty weak, about half a gauss, so even a fairly small magnetic field like a bicycle can be detected.”

Before I left, I asked him how he was doing and he said O.K., so I gave him fifty dollars. I was impressed that he was washing the dishes when I left.

48

Susannah frequently has her book bag with her at
Dos Hermanas
because she leaves from there and goes directly to class. How she can learn art history after a few margaritas is an academic mystery.

That night she was putting the final touches on a paper. The image of the painting she had written about looked like an ancient icon you might find in an orthodox monastery adorned with an onion dome.

She cocked her head to one side. “I hadn’t thought of that. I guess ‘symbolist’ wasn’t a good word choice, but I can see how they chose it. They were artists who didn’t like the realism of the 19
^th
Century and how it elevated the mundane and even the gritty. They thought painting should reflect only noble themes – spiritualism, principles, ideals, things like that.”

Since I was planning larceny for the next morning, I felt unworthy to comment on principles and ideals. I just looked at the image of the painting on her cover page. It looked to me like a typical old Russian painting of a saint, a girl or maybe a young boy with his head at an odd angle and surrounded by a gold halo, something that should probably be preserved for historical reasons but you wouldn’t want hanging on your bedroom wall.

He was a handsome young man, slightly effeminate with dark hair and long lashes. His right hand curled out from under a long white robe and gently touched his heart.

“He doesn’t look like someone whose father’s last name would be The Terrible.”

She laughed again. “Don’t you know the story, Hubie? He was supposed to have been killed by Boris Godunov. Tchaikovsky wrote an opera about it.”

“You know I don’t like opera music.” I looked at the typing under the painting. It read: Царевич Дмитрий, 1899. The script looked old-fashioned. “Was Uapebny whatever the name of the painter?”

“No, silly, that’s the name of the painting –
Tzarevich Dmitry
. I typed 
it in the Russian alphabet because Casgrail is such a stickler. We have to 
put every title in its original language and God help you if you leave out 
the year.”

“So I guess the artist’s name is not pronounced Hectepob,” I ventured. It was on the title page as Нестеровв.

“It’s Nesterov. You don’t know Cyrillic, do you?”

“The only thing I know about the Russian alphabet is the ‘P’ makes an ‘R’ sound. And since Царевич is ‘tsarevich’, I assume the ‘U’ makes the ‘Ts’ sound in ‘Tsar’.”

“Or the ‘Cz’ sound in ‘Czar’,” she added.

Which gave me the opening to say, “Did you know the real cause of the Communist revolution was the peasants found out the Tsar and the Czar were the same person, and they thought no one should be allowed to hold that much power?”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

I glanced back down at the word Царевич and at the name of the painter – Nesterov in our alphabet, Нестеров in theirs.

49

I drove to the campus at ten o’clock on a Wednesday with classes in full swing. Students hustled between classes and of course no parking space was open. I pulled in to a loading zone in front of Anthropology Hall.

I visit the campus several times a month to use the library or attend lectures or recitals. I’ve even visited a few of my favorite professors in the business college. But as you might suspect, I hadn’t been in Anthropology Hall since the day I was booted.

I remembered Susannah chastising me for walking to Rio Grande Lofts the first time I got in and asking me what I was planning to do with the pots if I’d found them. I was taking no chances this time. If any pots were in 204, I was going to haul them away.

I was wearing a pair of torn and stained Levis I use in my workshop and a tan shirt I’d purchased for fifty cents at Goodwill especially for the occasion. It had a patch over the left pocket that said ‘Pete’.

It felt a little odd walking in, but I didn’t dwell on it and the feeling passed. I nodded at a student sitting at the reception desk. He returned my nod half-heartedly and returned to the book he was reading. I walked up the stairs, found 204, and loided the lock.

It was a typical faculty office, ten by twelve with a desk, desk chair, visitor chair, bookcases, and file cabinet. I went through the desk and took a few papers that looked like they might be significant.

The bookshelves contained mostly outdated textbooks and back copies of journals. There were some reference works and a few trade books. I suppose a map to the hiding place of the pots might have been tucked between the pages of one of the books, but the odds were slim enough that I didn’t bother looking.

The filing cabinet had the typical lock you see on filing cabinets, a keyhole in one of those oval steel buttons that locks all the drawers when pushed in, which it had been. I had no way of opening it given that my only lock trick is loiding, but I had prepared for this possibility.

I returned to the Bronco and got a hand truck. I drug it up the stairs in to Gerstner’s office where I strapped his file cabinet to it. Then I eased it very carefully down the stairs. The kid at the desk looked up and then went back to reading. I loaded the file cabinet in the back of the Bronco, thinking as I did that it was lucky Gerstner didn’t have a big heavy safe. Then I drove home.