The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (3 page)
Read The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Online
Authors: J Michael Orenduff
“But you said he stole ‘mo
nay
’—the way a Frenchman might pronounce ‘money’.”
“No, he didn’t steal money. He stole a
Monet
, a painting.”
“The water lily guy?”
“Right.”
“No wonder you liked it.”
“Yeah, and Pierce Brosnan is hot.”
“Anyway, Ptolemy’s circles—”
“This is really delicious salsa,” she interjected with a sly smile on her face.
I took the not-too-subtle hint and changed the subject. “You think we’re harming our health by eating salsa and chips almost every day?”
“It’s not like we’re eating
chicharrones
. In fact, the salsa is probably good for you since it has tomatoes and a green vegetable.”
“But aren’t you supposed to have more variety in your diet?”
“Actually, I think it’s better to eat the same thing every day. Your body gets used to it and makes the necessary adjustments to digest it and use it to make whatever nutrients you need.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Digestion is just chemistry, Hubert. Say your body needs a certain protein to make fingernails. That protein is in corn, so when you eat chips, the body shoots some chemicals into the stomach along with the chewed up corn and the needed protein is synthesized and put to use. Now that same protein may be in lots of foods. But if your body is getting it from corn chips and suddenly you start eating spinach instead, then even if the protein is in the spinach, you might not have the right chemicals to extract it because it’s different from the corn.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Did you ever major in biology?”
“No, but I was pre-vet at one time, and I actually passed organic chemistry.”
“Pre-vet must have lots of guys in it. Why didn’t you just stay in that major?”
“I didn’t like the idea of cutting up animals in labs.”
“But you were raised on a ranch.”
“Right, and I castrated calves and killed chickens, but that’s part of ranching. We didn’t kill cats and dogs so we could cut them up to study.”
“But didn’t you realize when you chose pre-vet that you’d be—”
“Are you going to give me a hard time about this, Hubert? Because I don’t need that. I need someone to send me flowers, not tell me I wasn’t thinking clearly when I chose pre-vet as a major.”
“Sorry, Suze.”
“Sometimes you get so wrapped up in logic you forget about feelings. You’re like Spock, you know that, Hubert?”
“You’re right. But at least I don’t have those weird ears.”
She laughed and took a big swallow of her drink. She orders her margaritas without salt. If she has any other faults, I’m unaware of them.
4
I’d met Professor Masoir’s wife last spring when she came to my shop looking for something her husband could buy for their anniversary. She was a charming lady and I enjoyed our brief chat.
I met the Professor himself for the first time when he came in a few days later. I didn’t chat with him as I had with his wife, but the few words he spoke were music to my merchant’s ears – he told me he wanted to purchase a twelve-thousand-dollar pot by the famed Maria of San Ildefonso.
His October return prompted my interest in Rio Grande Lofts. He’d walked in my shop on Friday and asked, “Would you mind closing your store while we talk?”
I sell maybe three pots in a good month, so closing up for an hour doesn’t threaten the bottom line. I locked the door and rotated the laminated plastic sign to ‘closed’.
I offered him a cup of my coffee, which he wisely declined. It was almost two o’clock, and the coffee had been steeping since breakfast.
“You know who I am?” he asked.
“Yes. You’re the gentleman who wrote me a twelve-thousand-dollar check last spring.”
He lifted his chin and gave out a hearty laugh. Masoir is probably in his eighties. He wears a trim mustache on a sunken face. He’s slightly stooped and his hands show evidence of a mild palsy. He doesn’t look like someone who laughs often, but it was obviously heartfelt and made me feel like laughing with him.
“A good merchant remembers his customers by the size of their purchases,” he said.
“The UNM Business School should be proud of me.”
He was momentarily confused. “I thought you majored in anthropology.”
“I did the second time, but my first time through I studied business.”
“What made you decide to go back?”
“I’m not certain. At the time, I thought it was because the work I was doing as an accountant was so boring. Then I got into pottery and thought it was because I needed to exercise my creative side. But now I think it was because my first time through didn’t expose me to ideas, at least to important ones.”
“And what important ideas did you find in anthropology?”
“Is this a quiz?”
He laughed again. “Old habits are hard to break. I hope you’ll forgive the impertinence of a broken-down old professor.”
“You are old, but you are definitely not broken down.”
He nodded. “My wife says you are a young man of good character.”
“I’m happy she thinks so, but she met me only once and then only for perhaps fifteen minutes.”
“She fancies herself an astute judge of character, says she has a sixth sense about people.”
“Perhaps she does.”
“I doubt it. But regardless of how she comes to her judgments about people, she is almost always on the mark.”
“So you depend on her for accurate character appraisals?”
“After sixty years of marriage, Mr. Schuze, I depend on her for everything.” He hesitated for a moment. “Do you have a place where we can sit down?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like a dolt for keeping a shaky eighty-year-old man on his feet.
I took him back to my living quarters and sat him in my reading chair. I turned a kitchen chair to face him and asked him if he wanted anything to drink.
“Is it five o’clock?” he asked with a wry smile on his face.
“No sir. It’s only a little after two.”
“Then water if you don’t mind.”
He took a sip and kept the glass in his hand. “I see we passed through your studio to get here. I gather you’ve addressed the creative side you spoke of.”
“I’m afraid you gather incorrectly. I call it my workshop, not my studio. I make replicas of pots. I don’t think of myself as an artist.”
“You’re too modest. Most people who think of themselves as artists these days are decidedly not. Someone dumps a crucifix in a jar of urine and calls it art. At least your copies display craftsmanship.”
“I agree they do. I’m not modest about that. Maybe it’s because I respect the originals I copy.”
He sipped his water and nodded his head as if he shared that respect with me. “You know how they ran me off?”
“The story circulating in the department was you opposed the department’s plan to divest itself of its Native American artifacts.”
“You state it very diplomatically, but I suspect that wasn’t how you heard it.”
“I think the official characterization was you ‘demonstrated insensitivity to the strong link in tribal culture between people and the products of their hands and the unique cosmology of such peoples that rejects the western linear concept of time and posits a timeless link with their ancestors’.”
“You remember that?”
“Not verbatim. But I think it’s close.”
“Probably. It sounds like the twaddle in use back then. If they had said I failed to appreciate that Indians like their pots better than we like ours, their position would have sounded not only false, but – worse from their perspective – trivial. Academics fear nothing more than being thought trivial.”
“Ironic,” I commented, “since triviality is the essence of academe.”
“No wonder they kicked you out!”
“So do you think Indians value their artifacts more than people of European descent?”
“The question has no answer. There are millions of Indians. Any statement about what they value is a mere generalization. Only individuals value things. They say Indians value their dignity. Who doesn’t? I understand their concern may be more acute because the fate they have suffered in the last five hundred years is demoralizing in the extreme. But I also value dignity, and when a university tribunal ordered me to attend sensitivity training offered by a charlatan Indian activist from Colorado, I resigned.”
His shoulders slumped down slightly. “It was not an act of great courage to do so. The fact was I no longer wanted to work among the new faculty schooled in the radical graduate programs of the sixties.” He took another sip of water. “Empathy is not my strong suit. I was taught that the best thing an anthropologist can do is study cultures and report on them as a scientist. The worst thing you can do is give them sympathy. They don’t want it, and it clouds your objectivity. The new faculty didn’t see Native American culture as something to be studied. They saw it as a cause. Maybe their view had some merit I failed to grasp…”
His voice trailed off and his head angled down. Then he looked up at me. “At any rate, I tried not to look back when I left. Then this summer a very old friend of mine from the San Roque Pueblo came to see me.”
“San Roque!”
“Yes. Many of the rumors about them are either false or exaggerated. I lived among them for a year during a sabbatical. At any rate, my friend, Otaku Ma’sin, was very old – older than me if you can believe that – and he wanted to unburden himself. He told me he had heard about the University returning artifacts to the Indians. He believed the University had a collection of very old Ma pots. They call themselves the Ma people. ‘San Roque’ is obviously the name the Spaniards gave them. The pots have never been returned.”
“Why did he think telling you would unburden him?”
“Because there was a tribal elder whose position would have made him the designated recipient on behalf of the Ma, and when the pots were never placed in their
kiva
where they belonged, Otaku at first believed the elder had kept them for himself.”
“And he changed his mind?”
“Yes. He and the elder were alone one evening in a field of corn, and Otaku saw a yellow glow around the elder. This is a sign of purity. So Otaku figured the pots never got to the Pueblo. He was hoping I might right the wrong. He was also hoping his delay in reporting the absence of the pots would not become what the Ma call a scar on his soul.”
“Did you ever see anyone glowing yellow during the year you lived there?”
“Of course not. But I don’t question Otaku’s judgment of the elder any more than I question my wife’s judgment of you. The fact that he saw purity in the elder I accept. If it manifested itself as a yellow glow, then put it down to cultural conditioning. Or the reflected rays of the setting sun off the corn. At any rate, I believe the pots never found their way to San Roque.”
“And I take it you have a theory about what happened to them.”
“I do. And you are correct to call it a theory. I would not like you to give it any more credence than the word implies. I believe Ognan Gerstner stole them.”
And that is why, three days later, I found myself downtown staring at Rio Grande Lofts.
5
What did I see? An eleven-story building with few means of ingress.
Since it was originally built for offices, it had no balconies you could climb. The front door on the east side of the building opened to a lobby attended twenty-four hours a day by doormen. Two security cameras were visible through the plate glass, one pointed at the front door and one at the two elevators.
A service entrance on the west side of the building was secured by a lock that could be opened only from inside. I determined that by walking up to the door and noticing there were no knobs or keyholes in it.
On the south side of the building, a ramp led down to a basement parking garage. The opening at the bottom of the ramp was somewhat larger than the average garage door, maybe ten feet wide and eight feet tall, and was protected by a gate that came within an inch or two of the concrete on the bottom, top, and two sides. A snake might slip between the gate and the surrounding concrete while the gate was closed, but a jackrabbit couldn’t.
The gate was constructed of vertical iron bars six inches apart. I determined that by walking up to the gate and measuring. A small jackrabbit might fit through. I could not see any security cameras. A metal column near the left wall held a keypad. Residents entered by punching in a code and waiting for the gate to slide open.
Twenty feet to the left of the garage entrance was a garage exit. It had the same sort of gate, except there was no keypad. The exit gate opened automatically when a car approached it from inside the garage.
I assumed there was a door on the roof, so I decided to start my analysis at the top of the building.
But first I walked down the street to a drugstore and purchased a magazine. I can’t remember the last time I bought a magazine, and I was surprised by how expensive they’ve become. It wasn’t that long ago when a national magazine like
Time
or
Life
was available for a dollar. Some of the ones on the rack were as high as eight-fifty! Since I had no plans to read the magazine, I selected the one with the lowest price. It was called
Chrome Hogs
and sold for $2.95.