The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein

The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein

J. Michael Orenduff

Oak Tree Press                     Taylorville, IL

THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED EINSTEIN, Copyright 2011, by J. Michael Orenduff, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Oak Tree Press, 140 E. Palmer St., Taylorville, IL 62568.

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First Edition, November 2010

Cover by MickADesign.com

Interior Pages by: Linda W. Rigsbee

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-61009-001-8

LCCN 2010940128

This book is dedicated to my father, Jess J. Orenduff (1911-1971), 
who taught me that life is to be enjoyed. I wish I had been a better son. And to my son, Jay, the best son any man ever had. 

Of the many people who assisted me in the completion of this work, I wish especially to acknowledge my life-long gencon partner Lai and my daughter Claire without whom none of my work would ever be completed.  Also, my sister Patricia and Professor Ofelia Nikolova, two of the dedicated mystery fans who preview my books. Thanks to Carolyn and Andy Anderson of Questa, New Mexico for their editing assistance. I also want to thank my publisher, Billie Johnson, who is great to work with. Finally, I should thank the hundreds of readers who have taken the time at signings and by email and post to make suggestions, all of which are greatly appreciated, and many of which find their way into the books.

I was trying to remember if I’d ever been blindfolded before. I didn’t think I had been, but the cloth on my eyes felt vaguely familiar, almost nostalgic. I couldn’t imagine why; the only images I could connect with blindfolds were kidnappings.

What I
should
have been doing was estimating the distance traveled by the car and memorizing the turns it made. I’d seen that once in an old movie where the person being kidnapped was later able to lead the police to the bad guys’ hideout by sitting in the patrol car with his eyes closed, recalling the trip.

“Turn right,” he would tell them. Then he would fall silent and intent as if counting to himself. “Turn left,” he would direct after the appropriate length of time.

Or maybe not. Maybe that works only in movies. Even if you counted at a set cadence and could remember that it was a count of, say, eighty-six between the second and third turns, that wouldn’t tell you how far you had gone unless you knew how fast the car was traveling. But I never got a chance to try it because I started wondering whether I’d been blindfolded before.

You might think it was foolish of me to be so easily distracted while being kidnapped. Except I wasn’t being kidnapped. I had voluntarily agreed to be blindfolded for this ride. As things turned out, it would have saved me a lot of hassle if I
had
paid attention to where we were going. I almost certainly wouldn’t have been arrested for murder.

I’d been told we were going to the home of a reclusive collector of Anasazi pottery. I’m a dealer in ancient pots.

I’m also a pot thief, but I wasn’t planning to steal anything. I’d been engaged to give an estimate of the value of the collection, a pleasant evening’s work for which the collector had agreed to pay me twenty-five hundred dollars. I would have done it for free just to see the pots, but there was no reason to tell him that. Anyone with a collection of true Anasazi pots is sitting on a fortune. Not literally, of course; they are way too fragile to sit on. But if he sold the collection – which I had been told was why he wanted an appraisal – then the twenty-five hundred would be petty cash to him. But for me, it would pay the mortgage for a few months and keep me stocked in New Mexico’s finest champagne, Gruet Blanc de Noir.

It was the height of the tourist season in Albuquerque, but I’d sold only one pot from my shop in Old Town. The tourists were out in full force buying dyed corn necklaces, beaded moccasins, cactus candies, and rubber rattlesnakes. Merchandise in the ninety-nine cents to nine-ninety-nine range was flying off the shelves of other stores around the historic plaza, but no one seemed willing to part with the thousand dollars it would take to buy the least expensive item in my store, a small shallow dish from the Acoma Pueblo with their traditional geometric patterns of black lines on a white background. The dish was unglazed and therefore unsuitable for most practical applications, but it displayed the simplicity and grace typical of Acoma, and I was surprised no one had bought it.

The most expensive piece in my inventory at that time was a squat Anasazi jug with a variety of minor nicks and dings, not to mention a hand-sized hole in its bottom. For those who wanted that pot but couldn’t swing the fifty-thousand-dollar price, I had fashioned a copy identical in all respects to the original, and it was only a tenth of the asking price. In some ways, it was even better. It didn’t have a hole in it, and no politically correct nitwit was going to hassle you about returning it to its rightful owners.

Supply and demand was what they taught me in the University of New Mexico Business School. The supply of copies is high since I can make as many as I want, whereas the supply of originals is low became the Anasazi stopped making pots about a thousand years ago when they disappeared.

Except there are a few more “originals” out there than there should be because some of my copies have been sold as the genuine article. I know it sounds unethical and maybe it is. But look at it this way. I’m happier because I get a better price, and the buyer is happier because he has the pride of ownership of something he believes is ancient and rare. Two happy consenting adults.

In fact, I’ve never lied about one of my copies. I don’t label them as genuine, and if someone asks me if one of them is real, I tell the truth. But if someone buys one off the shelf no-questions-asked, I take the money and wrap up the pot.
Caveat emptor.

The next thing I knew, the car came to a stop and the engine went silent. The driver opened my door and led me by the arm up a walk and into a house. I did notice how far it was from the curb to the door, and that came in handy later. Sort of.

“Stand here,” he said, and I heard him back away and close the door.

A voice from the other side of the room said, “You can take off the blindfold now.”

Then I remembered –
piñatas
.

Of course I’d been blindfolded before. Every fifth day of May from as early as I could remember until I was maybe eleven or twelve years old, there would be a
piñata
at my birthday party. The memory was bittersweet– the people involved mostly gone, my parents both deceased, my childhood friends drifted away, and my old nanny suffering from kidney disease.

But my cheerful nature quickly reprised the memory. My parents had led long and happy lives. My childhood friends had gone on, no doubt, to the lives they wanted, and we had all made new friends. And maybe the doctors could successfully treat Consuela Sanchez’ condition or even do a transplant if it came to that, and she would live to see the grandchild she so desperately wanted.

I pulled myself out of my reverie and responded to the unseen voice by removing the blindfold.

A large misshapen hand held open a swinging door. Between the door and the wall stood the owner of the hand, a stooped fellow with a strong jaw and eyes hidden deep under bushy brows. Above the brows was a big boney forehead complete with an occipital ridge, the likes of which one rarely sees outside of an anthropology lab.

When I’d been told he was a reclusive collector of Anasazi pottery, I’d assumed it was his hobby that made him a recluse. There are people out there who believe no one should possess any ancient pottery, and they’re not above breaking into houses to achieve their goal. Most of them are just misguided do-gooders, but a few of them are seriously deranged and potentially dangerous.

But looking at this contemporary Quasimodo made me wonder if it wasn’t his appearance that made him agoraphobic.

“I heard you like margaritas,” he said, “so I put one there on the coffee table.”

I glanced down and saw the drink. I know this is unfair and probably indicates a character flaw on my part, but my first thought was what kind of poison might be in the drink.

A bottle of Corona sat next to the margarita, and next to that was an opener and a glass with a wedge of lime on its rim.

“If you prefer a beer, I put one of those out, too,” he added. He had an Hispanic accent. Nothing unusual about that in Albuquerque, but his was different. His wasn’t hard to understand – quite the contrary. He pronounced each word carefully as if it were an effort.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” I responded. “Maybe I’ll have something later, but I think I should keep a clear head while doing the appraisal.”

“O.K., but don’t leave without a drink. I don’t like things to be wasted.”

Then you shouldn’t have put them out in advance, I was tempted to say. What I said instead was, “Are there other pots elsewhere in the house?”

“No,” he replied and let the door swing shut.

I was standing on Saltillo tile in a small entry area raised several inches above a living room carpeted in beige. There was a door to the right – a coat closet I assumed – a wrought iron railing to the left, and a step down straight ahead. The left wall had a fireplace with a stucco mantel and deep floor-to-ceiling shelves on each side that displayed twenty-five pieces of ancient clayware, mostly Anasazi but with a few works of different origin. Most people wouldn’t know the difference. I did.

There was a window in the wall directly opposite the entrance. Its thick cream-colored shade was all the way down but couldn’t block the strong desert sun. Even though no lights were on, the room was a clean well-lighted place. The coffee table with the drinks on it was in the center of the room in front of the fireplace, and a Danish modern couch was against the right wall. There was no other furniture in the room. Maybe the collector spent all his money on pots.

At the far end of the room just past the shelves was the swinging door the man who greeted me had disappeared behind to do whatever he intended to do as I did my work. I half expected to see a portrait on the wall with real eyes peering out at me. I had also seen that a couple of times in old movies, but there was no artwork of any sort on the walls.

Still, you couldn’t say the room was austere. No matter how grandiose the décor might have been, the pottery would have rendered it superfluous.

Ancient Native American pottery is more beautiful than gold and more expensive per ounce. My love affair with it started when I unearthed three pots while on a dig as a graduate student back in the eighties. The money I got for those pots was enough for a down payment on my Old Town adobe which has my shop in the front and my residence in the back. I love living there, and I love the freedom of being my own boss, but what I love most is my merchandise.

The pottery of the Anasazi, the Hohokan, the Mogollon, and all the other pot-makers of the Southwest’s ancient cultures is a national treasure. Prospecting for those pots is challenging, finding one is exhilarating, and when we do so, we should be celebrated and rewarded.

It was once thus. Treasure hunters – as we were called back then – enjoyed a glamorous public image, the sort of personae popularized in the last few years by the Indiana Jones films.

Then someone came up with the ridiculous idea that these national treasures didn’t belong to all of us, that these pots belonged to the descendents of the people who made them, and that those of us who dug them up were dishonoring their makers and defiling sacred objects.

I understand some of the motivation for these ideas. Some treasure hunters behaved badly. Some even dug secretly on reservations. But most of us felt more reverence for the objects we found than did those who wanted to stop us. After all, it was our awe of the pots that led us to seek them out in the first place. We believe – at least I do – that they deserve to be seen and enjoyed, not left forever in the ground. I’m certain the women who made them would rather have their pottery on display in my shop than having them slowly dissolving back into the clay from whence they came.

But the worst part about this new attitude toward ancient pottery is that there is not a shred of scientific evidence to suggest that the ancient potters actually
have
descendents. Indeed, the best anthropological evidence suggests that, for example, the Mogollon who lived in the Gila Wilderness died out completely, and no modern day Indians are descended from them.

But Congress caved in to political pressure and passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) redefining treasure hunting as theft. And as I often quip, who knows more about thievery than Congress?

Despite Congress’ efforts, here I was standing in awe in front of one of the best collections of Anasazi pots I had ever seen. I thought, as I always do in the presence of these luminous treasures, about the people who made them, about how much I share with them. We are all potters, people working the clay beneath our feet into the implements of our hands, the tools of civilization – water jugs, storage vessels, plates, and bowls. When I picture those ancient potters, I can feel the wet clay smooth between their fingers. I can see the glow of the firing dance across their faces. I can sense their pulse quicken as they remove the pot after the fire is cold and see that it is good.

I hope they somehow know how much their work means to me. If they were to see me making pots today, they would understand every step of my process. A thousand years separate us and we speak different tongues, but we have this much in common – the clay, the process, the pride of artisanship.

I reveled in that feeling for several minutes. Then I took from my briefcase a seamstress’ tape, a small sketchbook, and a box of pastel pencils and set about earning my pay.