The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (30 page)

“Good point,” she admitted. “But then there was that house in California.”

“O.K., I did commit one break in. But I didn’t steal anything. I’m not a burglar, Suze.”

“So you keep saying. But you steal old pots.”

“They don’t belong to anyone, Suze, so it’s not stealing.”

She gave me that smile again. “What is it? Finders, keepers?”

“Exactly.”

“No offense, Hubie, but if you broke into my grandmother’s grave to get her wedding ring, I think I’d consider that stealing.”

“So would I. But I don’t rob graves. And the stuff I dig up is a thousand years old. Surely there should be some statute of limitation.”

“But that stuff belonged to somebody’s ancestors,” she persisted.

“We don’t know that,” I replied. “For all we know, the ancient peoples of this area died out and the current tribes moved in from elsewhere.”

“You don’t know that.”

“True,” I said, warming to my subject, “but here’s what I do know. All of us – black, brown, red, yellow, and white – are descended from a woman named Lucy who lived in Africa a million years ago. So I have as much claim to the loot in the ground as anyone else.”

“So at the end of the day, Hubie, you and I are both African Americans?”

“All of us are.”

“I’ll drink to that,” she said.

Susannah had to leave for class. She’s in her late twenties and brings youthful enthusiasm to my occasional illegal caper. I’m on the wrong side of forty-five and should know better. When she’s not drinking margaritas or kicking in doors, she waits tables two blocks from my shop at La Placita during the lunch shift and attends classes three nights a week. She’s currently studying art history, but she changes majors the way most people change socks. She seems to be working her way through the catalog of the University of New Mexico.

I graduated from that institution with a business degree in the eighties and went back a couple of years later to study anthropology and archaeology. I unearthed some valuable pots during a summer dig. They weren’t from the official excavation site; I found a better place to dig and hit pay-dirt.

Literally. I sold the pots to a wealthy collector for more than I earned during the two years I worked before returning to school. I viewed the money as a reward for having a better sense of where to dig than the professors who were supervising the project. Even though digging up old pots wasn’t illegal back then, the university viewed it differently. They expelled me.

“Can I get you another one, Mr. Schuze?” I looked up at Angie’s dark eyes peering at me from under those long lashes. How could I say no?

I sipped my fresh margarita and considered the pros and cons of breaking into a building. I’ve been hooked on digging up old pots ever since that fateful summer find, and it’s not just the money. It’s also the lure of buried treasure, the thrill of the hunt, and the satisfaction of the find.

It’s hard to describe the pleasure I feel when I find a long-buried pot. I’m overwhelmed by the realization that I’m the first person to touch it in a thousand years. I feel a strong connection with the potter who made it; I suspect he (or more likely she) might be proud it lasted so long. I fancy she might even be happy I’ve found it.

My sense of connection is one potter to another; two fellow humans who walked the same earth and put our hands in the same clay.

Because of the reverence I feel for ancient potters, it pains me somewhat to sell their works, so I always make sure the buyer appreciates the piece. The best thing I can do for the ancient potter is find a good home for her work. Of course if a few thousand dollars find a good home in my pocket, then the pain of parting is sweet sorrow indeed.

Passage of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) a few years back made it illegal to dig up old pots, but doing so still carries little risk. After all, the places one digs for pots are, almost by definition, deserted. The same cannot be said of buildings, especially residential ones.

So I should have been worrying, but the margarita was cool and the sun was warm, and my worries evaporated in the dry desert air. And why not? Worrying is a waste of emotional energy. The things we worry about often never happen, and the things we should fret about we usually don’t see coming. So not worrying turned out to be a good thing because if I had let myself worry, it would have been about being arrested for breaking and entering, not for murder. Which was the thing that happened that I didn’t see coming

So I just sat there on the veranda wanting the sun to stay up so I would-n’t have to go home, but of course it didn’t and I did.

I had walked downtown that morning to examine Rio Grande Lofts. I remembered watching many years ago from the windows of my social studies class at Albuquerque High School as the steel framework went up.

Rio Grande Lofts – it wasn’t called that then – started life as an office building with retail space on the street level. It was about the third or fourth tall building in town. In my high school naïveté, I assumed we were headed towards having a skyline and that Albuquerque would soon look like Manhattan, which – like the Rock of Gibraltar – I have seen only in pictures.

The building opened during a recession and never achieved full occupancy. Downtown shopping was in the final stages of losing out to the malls. The property changed hands a number of times and hosted a variety of ventures whose only common denominator was failure. Eventually, the rent from the few occupants failed to cover expenses and the place was boarded up.

Albuquerque’s latest revitalization plan calls for encouraging people to live downtown, and – surprisingly - it seems to be working. Even my old high school has been converted into lofts. The boarded-up office building also got a facelift. The ground floor was converted into a lobby with an entrance vestibule, a mailbox area, a locker room for the doormen, and a storage area. Floors two through eleven were divided up into residences. I suppose calling them lofts was meant to conjure up images of exposed brick, high ceilings, and industrial elevators. I was interested to discover if they really had that look.

But you probably know that curiosity about architecture wasn’t the reason I wanted to break in.

Apartment – excuse me – Loft 1101 was occupied by Ognan Gerstner, the recently retired head of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of New Mexico. He was the person who officially expelled me from the University. I disliked Gerstner, but that was true before he expelled me. I hold no grudge about it. So revenge was not my motive for wanting into the building.

Gerstner is also the person who forced out Professor Walter Masoir shortly before I went back to school and ended up in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. Gerstner had convinced the department to divest itself of its collection of Native American artifacts. Masoir was the only holdout to this politically correct plan, arguing quite reasonably that it makes no more sense to operate a department of anthropology and archaeology without artifacts than it would to operate a department of chemistry without beakers or test tubes.

The artifacts were eventually returned to the tribes who presumably had some claim on them. At least most of them were. It was alleged that a collection of rare and beautiful pots never found its way back to the pueblo to which its designs indicated it belonged. The evidence for this was admittedly weak; namely, a statement by a now deceased resident of that pueblo claiming they never received the pots. And the probative value of that statement was devalued further by the fact that the person it was told to was Walter Masoir, hardly a disinterested party.

As I mentioned, Masoir was gone before I started my studies, but I read his work, talked to students who knew him, and always admired him. Proving that the plan he opposed was at least partially a failure would have

been satisfying. But you probably can guess that vindicating an admired professor was also not the reason I wanted to break in to Rio Grand Lofts. Neither curiosity, revenge, nor vindication incited my illicit intentions. I wanted in to steal some pots.

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Coming in Fall 2009 from Dark Oak Mysteries www.darkoakmysteries.com www.orenduff.org