The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy (The Pot Thier)

by J. Michael Orenduff

  8

  I waddled over to Dos Hermanas a couple of hours later, and Susannah told me I looked a little green around the gills.

  “What does the word ‘Ro-tel’ mean to you?” I asked her.

  “It’s a brand of canned tomatoes with green chiles in it. There must be a case of those cans in my mother’s pantry. Why do you ask?”

  “I think the Ro-tel company invented a dish called King Ranch Chicken.”

  “Uh, oh. Miss Gladys?”

  I nodded.

  “I take it you’re skipping dinner tonight.”

  Another nod.

  “You want an Alka Seltzer to drop in your Margarita?”

  I pulled a face and took a sip. No matter how full you are, there’s always room for alcohol.

  “You know what you were doing on Monday at Rio Grande Lofts, Hubie? You were ‘casing the joint’,” she announced proudly.

  “I guess I was,” I admitted. “Why do you suppose it’s called ‘casing’?”

  “Because you’re looking just in case?”

  “Hmm.”

  “This is so exciting, Hubie, like that old movie on late night television with Humphrey Bogart and that other fat guy.”

  “Sydney Greenstreet. But Humphrey Bogart wasn’t fat.”

  “I didn’t say he was.”

  “You said, ‘Humphrey Bogart and that other fat guy’.”

  “I meant the guy you mentioned the other day, Warner Oberon.”

  “His name was Oland, not Oberon.”

  “I thought maybe he was related to Merle Oberon. I adore her.”

  “Would I have seen her in anything?”

  “Wuthering Heights?”

  “I hope the movie was less boring than the book. What else was she in?”

  “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” she said and got a puzzled look on her face. “What’s a pimpernel?”

  “I have no idea.” I pressed my upper lip against my teeth and said, “You wanted to say something about Bogart, sweetheart?”

  “That doesn’t sound like him at all, Hubie. And it’s the other guy I wanted to say something about – the fat character. See, he was the mysterious character in the movie, and he wanted the malted falcon.”

  “I think that’s ‘Maltese’ falcon.”

  “Hmm. I thought maybe it was like a giant malted milk ball in the shape of a bird. What does Maltese mean?”

  “It means it’s from Malta.”

  “The island in the Mediterranean?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why did they call it that? The whole film takes place in California. Aren’t there falcons in California?”

  She took a sip of her margarita and shook her head. “Forget the bird, Hubie. But you understand what I was saying, right?”

  Strangely enough, I did. “I think so. Kasper Gutman was a mysterious character trying to get the Maltese falcon, and I’m a mysterious character trying to get the pots.”

  “Who’s Kasper Gutman?”

  “He’s the character played by Sydney Greenstreet.”

  “That’s funny, Hube, a fat guy playing someone named Gutman. But you can’t play a fat guy – you’d have to play the thin man.”

  “That was William Powell.”

  “Who cares. It’s still exciting. What’s your next move?”

  I looked around Dos Hermanas and realized how much I enjoyed being there. And how much I would miss it if I were in jail. “Maybe I should forget the whole thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the building has professional security, and I’m an amateur burglar.”

  “Amateur? What about all those pots you’ve stolen over the years?”

  “They were in the ground, Susannah, not in a building. It’s a lot easier. And besides, I didn’t steal them.”

  She gave me her mischievous smile, a little wider than the enigmatic one and a couple of watts brighter. “What do you call it, then?”

  “I prefer to think of it as harvesting the riches of the earth. Sort of like prospecting, except for pots rather than gold. Anyone resourceful enough to dig up the pots should get to keep them.”

  “What about someone resourceful enough to steal them out of a high security building?”

  “I’m not sure that would be stealing either,” I ventured.

  “You’re not going to tell me the pots in Gerstner’s apartment are part of the riches of the earth are you?”

  Perhaps I colored slightly. “Well, they aren’t like other things in people’s houses.”

  “No?”

  “No. If I burgled a house and took someone’s silverware, that would be stealing. But Gerstner stole the pots. He doesn’t own them. I don’t think I’d feel guilty about taking them.”

  “Sort of like you felt last spring when you stole that pot from the museum.”

  “I didn’t steal it, Susannah. And anyway, you know how I feel about archaeology museums. They’re places where—”

  “I know,” she interrupted, “places where pots go to die.”

  “Well, it’s true. Archaeologists call people like me ‘pot thieves’. They want exclusive control of every artifact under the ground, and museums are their allies. But you told me yourself that only a small percentage of all the artifacts dug up by archaeologists are actually on display in museums. Most of the stuff is in boxes in the basement either because there’s no room to display it or because it’s waiting to be studied.”

  “Yeah. I learned that in our class on deaccessioning.”

  I winced at the word as much as at the idea. I have a decent vocabulary from all my reading, but I’m not particularly good at language. I never can remember the difference between a simile and a metaphor, and I forget which conjunctions coordinate and which subordinate and don’t care anyway. But I know a phony word when I hear one. They made it up because saying they ‘deaccessioned some artifacts’ sounds better than saying they ‘threw them away’.

  “They actually rebury most of it, but some of it’s tossed out,” she admitted.

  “And they don’t want treasure hunters to dig up what they reburied!”

  “That’s because you don’t do it scientifically. You know, measure how deep it was, what sort of seeds were in the petrified poop next to it, and all that stuff.”

  “That’s what they claim. But they’ll never be able to scientifically dig and study even a small fraction of what’s out there, so why hoard things they’ll never find? More sites are destroyed by construction in a day than treasure hunters can dig up in a decade. Archaeologists should thank us since we increase the number of artifacts that are saved.”

  “But you don’t put them in museums where they’ll be safe.”

  “Safe from what? Being enjoyed?”

  “O.K., suppose I grant your point about museums. What does that have to do with Gerstner’s apartment?”

  “Well, all we have to do is figure out whether the pots in Gerstner’s apartment – if he has them – are like someone’s silverware or more like pots in a museum.”

  “I don’t know, Hubie. Is this a trick question?”

  “Maybe so. Maybe I’m just rationalizing. Anyway, it’s probably moot anyway. Staring at Rio Grande Lofts from the bus bench didn’t fill me with confidence.”

  “That reminds me. You know the magazine you bought so you could sit on the bench and look at the women with big boobs?”

  “I didn’t buy it for that reason. I didn’t even know what was in it.”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, you know the one with spigot tattoos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it reminds me of an artwork we studied in class. It’s a large sculpture of a reclining woman. In fact, it’s so large, you can actually walk inside her body. You enter between the legs of course. And guess what’s inside?”

  “Digested corn chips?”

  “No, a milk bar. You can actually order milk at a bar inside the sculpture of a reclining woman. Isn’t that a great concept?”

  “You’re
making this up.”

  “I’m not. It’s actually a famous piece. It’s called Hon-en Katedral. I think it means ‘woman as cathedral’. The artist is Niki de Saint-Phalle.”

  “I’ve never heard of her.”

  “Well, she’s famous. There’s even a perfume named after her.”

  “That’s the mark of a great artist all right.”

  “Is that sarcasm, Hubert?”

  “It is. ‘Saint-Phalle’ sounds French. Is this cathedral woman in Paris?”

  “Nope – Stockholm.”

  “No doubt right next to Warner Oland’s childhood home,” I quipped.

  She ignored that.

  9

  I picked up Walter Masoir the next morning in my 1985 Bronco. I needed to talk to someone at San Roque to find out what I would be looking for if I ever got inside Rio Grande Lofts, and Masoir had agreed to get me in the Pueblo.

  “Thanks for driving,” he said.

  “It’s the least I could do, especially since I’m the one who wants to go.”

  His mustache crept up slightly. “But you want access only because I asked you to recover the pots.”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “All right, I didn’t ask you. Not in so many words. But it’s obvious I would not have shared my suspicions with you had I not expected you to act on them.”

  “I’d like to see San Roque even if I did nothing about the missing pots.”

  “What anthropologist wouldn’t? But I’m also sure you want to do something about the pots.”

  He was right, of course. I wanted those pots, partly because I didn’t want Gerstner to have them, partly because I wanted to see them, and partly because I thought there was a lot of money to be made. But I was still wavering about actually trying to break in to a building.

  Of course you already know what I finally decided. I wouldn’t have brought the whole thing up if I hadn’t ended up in the damn place.

  “It’s also good you drove. My only vehicle is a 1965 Chrysler Imperial with a ground clearance of four inches. It would never make it across the ford. This vehicle, on the other hand, seems ideally suited to the task.”

  “Is the road that bad?”

  “It isn’t a road. The Jemez flows mostly below ground during half of the year. The wet sand is impassable. But San Roque is situated by a stone outcropping that serves as a ford. The ground there is solid but very bumpy. A few years ago I would have walked, but now…” He stared out the window.

  “I’ll get us across, and you get us in.”

  He nodded.

  San Roque Pueblo is tucked against the mesa on the north side of the Jemez River. On a sunny day, the barren ground resembles a sand painting with its mineral-laden soil displaying hues from mustard yellow to deep magenta. That particular autumn day was cloudy and cold, and the land across the river had the shape and color of elephant skin.

  The ford challenged us as Masoir had promised. I nudged the Bronco across slowly and carefully, but still bottomed out several times to the accompaniment of loud clangs.

  We emerged onto a sandy bank surrounded by a dozen men who hadn’t been there when we started across. They stood with hands in their pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold. Some looked down, some off to the horizon. None of them looked at us.

  Masoir told me to stop the car, turn off the engine, and do nothing else.

  We sat in silence for perhaps three minutes before one of the men started walking to the Pueblo. The others continued to stand in silence. After twenty minutes or so, an old man who had not been in the group came down the path and up to the passenger side of the Bronco. Masoir rolled down his window, and the old Indian spoke to him in a language that sounded like one of the Tanoan group, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to tell which one it might be.

  Masoir answered. The old man stood there for a while. Finally, he spoke again. Masoir exited the truck and motioned me to follow. Once we had gone a few paces, all the men fell in silently behind us.

  As our entourage walked up the trail to the pueblo, I realized it had grown colder, and I wished I’d worn a heavier jacket. We passed corrals and outbuildings and entered an open area between two groups of low-lying adobe structures. Playing children scampered out of sight as we approached, a mongrel dog with a piece of bread in his mouth trotting behind them.

  We turned to the west and ducked through a door so low even I had to bend down to enter. We were in a vestibule, dark and devoid of furnishings, with three doors, one straight ahead and one to each side. The old man opened the door on the right and gestured for us to enter. He stayed outside and shut the door behind us.

  A piñon fire warmed, lit, and perfumed the room. Blankets covered the dirt floor around the logs, and a very old man sat near the fire in faded jeans, a chambray shirt, and a wool sweater a size or two too small.

  We sat down opposite him and waited. He looked at me for what seemed like several minutes but was probably only twenty seconds. I tried to return his gaze with as noncommittal a look as I could muster.

  He spoke to Masoir briefly.

  Masoir merely nodded.

  A young man entered from a door behind our host and brought us each a bowl of red stew. The old man took a bite, chewed, and then signaled for us to eat. The stew had chunks of beef, course ground cornmeal, onions, tomatoes, and enough dried and ground red chile to incinerate an acre of forest. I finished the bowl as decorum required. Between the log fire and the stew, I was no longer cold.

  We lowered our bowls and listened to the Indian speak for perhaps fifteen minutes. I recognized a word or two, not even enough to tell what the topic was, but mostly I liked hearing the sibilant consonants that sounded like dry leaves being chased by the wind across sandy ground.

  When he finished speaking, he and Masoir exchanged sentences for another ten minutes. Then the old man smiled and fell silent, and we left.

  10

  Masoir was quiet as we rocked and bumped across the river and then plowed through sand up onto the highway. I was concentrating on choosing a path and steering, but my frontal lobe was questioning one of Schuze’s Anthropological Premises, abbreviated SAP, which some of my friends say is what you have to be to believe them. The one I was reconsidering was Number 9: Paleolithic cultures will eventually disappear. It’s just a matter of time and technology until the aboriginal peoples of the Amazon, for example, will be overrun by so-called civilization. But the Ma had been overrun four hundred years ago and were gamely holding on.

  When we reached the false security of smooth pavement, Masoir began to tell me what he had learned. The man we ate with had been next to Otaku Ma’sin in the tribal hierarchy. The story of the pots was not one the Ma often shared with outsiders, but the old man – whose name was Sema Ma’tin – knew from Otaku that he could trust Masoir.

  Masoir turned to face me. “I may have misled you, Mr. Schuze, and if so I apologize. I didn’t realize how much of the Ma language I have lost over the last twenty years. I didn’t understand much of what Sema said, and the part I did understand may not be useful to you.”

  “Please call me Hubert. And I’ll be grateful for any information you gathered.”

  “Well, let me start with one thing I am sure about. There were two sets of pots.”

  I turned to him with a quizzical look.

  “Actually, there have been more than two sets in the past. Ma legend says their ancestors without names made the first set. They attribute great power to the pots.”

  “Who are the ancestors without names?”

  “The Ma divide history more or less as we do with ancient and modern. Their dividing line is based on names they remember. Ma children are taught to recite their ancestors’ names back for ten generations. Everyone before that is called an ancestor without a name.”

  “So the first pots might date back to as recently as ten generations ago, say two hundred years or so?”

  “Theoretically, yes, but they must be much older because they
have to predate the arrival of the Spanish.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they say the Spanish stole the first set from them. They crafted a replacement set. That set was stolen by a governor when this area was part of Mexico. They made another set after that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the Mexican-American War resulted in New Mexico becoming a U.S. territory. Fearing they were going to be robbed once again, they crafted a duplicate set – that’s why I said there were two sets – and they put both sets in the kiva, the new pots in plain sight and the old set hidden. In case the Americans came to steal pots, the Ma hoped they would take the new ones and not know the difference.”