The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe (21 page)

57

Y
ou may recall my concern that the guys in the black helicopter might think my claim to be digging up pots was just a cover for espionage, since it was the third time I'd gained unauthorized entry.

If you've been counting, you know what happened next.

I had descended from the cliff and slipped between two large boulders. On the other side of those stones was the east slope of the Oscura Mountains, my route back to the ladder and the Bronco. All I had to do was keep walking.

Then I heard the roar and saw the rotating blades.

My rapid retreat back through the boulders was obscured by the sand kicked up by the copter's landing. I was back in the cliff dwelling when they started searching for me, protected only by the cleverly hidden path built by the Tompiro, some tall grama grass and a little carved mole.

The two soldiers in camo gear split up after they cleared the passage between the boulders. I relaxed a bit when the one who came my way sprinted past my perch. But he had returned and was scanning the terrain with his binoculars.

I turned on my fancy binoculars and aimed them at him. In the movies, this makes people blind. Tristan had told me that can't happen. What he had not told me was why. The answer is that the damn things shut down automatically if they get too much light.

Now you understand why I don't rely on technology. From the automated camera on the shop entrance to the night-vision binoculars, they always fail you when you need them the most.

So I just stared at him with my twenty/twenties. I need glasses only for small print. Good thing the camo guy wasn't a book.

Then he did something remarkable. He put down his binoculars. He took off his helmet. He tilted his head back. He was a hundred feet below me but clearly visible.

Pfc. Harland Wills.

I scrambled down.

His pack was off when I reached him.

“You find what you were looking for?”

“Yes.”

He held the pack open. “Quick, stuff it in here.”

I stuffed my bedroll into his pack.

He handcuffed me.

Just to make sure all the bases had been touched, I repeated the details of the cover story I'd given Major Owens.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Wills said as we passed through the boulders. “Trust me.”

I had asked him to trust me. He had. So I decided I would trust him.

It helped that I had no other option.

58

T
he “Tompiro caper,” as Susannah called it, had been one long string of unpredictable and inexplicable events.

It started well enough. Unearthing the pot during the Trinity Site Open House went just as we planned.

Then things began to spiral out of control. I had to bury the pot because Wills was with Susannah. It had been unearthed when I went back to get it. Carl Wilkes was murdered. My fake showed up in Faye Po's niche. Then in the Edwardses' house. Except it was the second fake. Or maybe it was the first one. If you're clear on this, I congratulate you. I can't keep it straight, and I'm the one it happened to.

Then the pot I sold to Faye Po ended up in Mariella Kent's collection. And the pot I buried at White Sands ended up with Faye Po. And my new friend Gladwyn Farthing turned out to be a thief and maybe a murderer.

So with all of that as background, I shouldn't have been surprised when they took me into an interrogation room at MP headquarters, and Glad was standing there next to Maj. Marvin Owens.

But I was surprised. Wills tightened his hand on my elbow as a reminder to stay silent. I glared at Gladwyn. He smiled at me.

“Good to see you, Hubie. You had us all worried, disappearing like that.”

Wills pushed me down into a chair. The major and Gladwyn sat down opposite me. Wills remained standing behind me with his hand above my elbow, as if he would grab me if I tried to bolt. The other MP also remained standing.

I found an oddly shaped coffee stain on the table and studied it.

The major explained that I was in serious trouble.

As if I didn't know that? But given the bizarre course of the Tompiro caper, I wouldn't have blamed him for thinking that even the most obvious of facts needed explaining to me.

“Mr. Farthing showed up this morning to tell us you had come down this way to hunt for artifacts. He said you told him the site was on the edge of the missile range. But when he looked at the map after you left, he realized it was
in
the range. When you didn't return last night as expected, he became alarmed that you might have wandered onto the range. He asked us to search for you.”

He paused. I continued to examine the stain. With a bit of imagination you could see it as a mole. I kept trusting Wills and remained silent.

“How did you get into the range?”

Maybe not a mole. Maybe a gopher. The body was thinner.

“Well?” prompted the major.

Wills touched my arm gently with one finger. I read this as a different instruction and answered the question.

“I didn't know I had entered. I guess I just walked in.”

“How did you avoid detection?”

“You're in a better position to answer that than I am. I don't know how you detect things.”

He didn't follow up on that. Instead he stated that there are
ENTRY PROHIBITED
signs every fifty feet around the entire perimeter of the range—more than twenty thousand of them.

“How did you manage not to see them?”

“It was dark.”

The major looked at Wills. “Do you remember him?”

“No, sir. But he must have been at the Trinity Site this year. I found a watch and finally tracked him down as the owner. I took the watch to his store and left it with a clerk. I never saw Mr. Schuze, but the clerk told me his name. So when you came to the barracks and informed us of the situation, I naturally volunteered to join in the search.”

“And you found him. Good work, Wills.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Did you search him?”

“Thoroughly, sir.”

“And?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Binoculars, canteen, compass, wallet, car keys.”

“No artifacts?”

“No, sir.”

The major pointed a finger at me.

“You sure you came into the range by accident?”

I lied and said I had no idea I'd wandered onto the range.

“You show up on this base again, and I'll make sure you stay on it a lot longer than you bargained for. You clear on that, mister?”

He sounded like Jack Nicholson in
A Few Good Men
. I was surprised he didn't yell, “You can't handle the truth!”

I wasn't worried about handling it. I would have settled for just knowing it.

He kept staring at me even after I had answered. I looked down.

Gopher wasn't right either. The tail was all wrong. Then it came to me—a platypus. And I wondered what the devil a platypus was doing in New Mexico.

The major spoke to Wills. “Get him out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wills put Gladwyn in the backseat of a jeep. He put me in the front passenger seat. We drove in silence to the main gate. My Bronco was parked just outside of it. I stared at it.

At this point, I was desensitized to surprise. If the five Avenger torpedo bombers from Flight 19, which disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, had been parked next to the Bronco, the most I could have mustered was a yawn.

Wills opened our doors. He handed me my sleeping bag. Glad gave me my car key and took the passenger seat in the Bronco. (Compared to the enigma of Glad being on the missile range seated at the right hand of the major, the fact that there was no sign of how he got there seemed a trifling puzzle.) I walked around to the other side and got behind the wheel.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The Black Cat.”

I drove from the gate to the intersection with Highway 70 and turned to the southwest toward Las Cruces.

Funny how time stretches out when you're driving along in silence with a murderous thief.

The planes from Flight 19 were not parked in front of Black Cat.

But Susannah's Crown Victoria was. Its oxidized purplish paint and rusted roof where the vinyl peeled off are hard to miss.

59

S
omeone want to explain this to me?”

We were seated on a bench in the median mini park with coffees from Black Cat. We had moved outside for privacy.

“You obviously didn't get my note,” Gladwyn said.

“What note?”

“The one I slipped under your door telling you to look in the hoarding.”

“That was a note? And what the devil is a hoarding?”

“The shadowbox-like thing on your shop. The place where you put the sale advert.”

“Why did you put a note there?”

“The door locked behind me when I left at five. The authorities came for me shortly afterwards. I wanted you to know I wouldn't be available the next day for minding the shop.”

“Why didn't you just slip the note under the door instead of slipping a note directing me to a second note using a term I never heard?”

“The note was multiple pages and had documents attached. It wouldn't fit under the door. Sorry about
hoarding
. What do you call an advert box of that sort?”

“If there's an American word for it, I don't know it. So the authorities arrested you and you left me a note before going to jail.”

He shook his head.

Susannah said, “Let him tell the story.”

“I was not arrested. It's a long story and, I regret to say, a painful one for me.”

He sipped some coffee, then took a deep breath. “I came to this country on a tourist visa. But my real goal was to live and work here. Green cards take a long time and I possess no special work skills that would speed up the process. So I decided to aim for an E-2 Treaty Investor Visa. It's for individuals who want to start an enterprise as opposed to working for an American employer. I suppose the idea is if you start a business, you aren't taking a job from a Yank and may even end up creating some jobs. The problem is that you need to demonstrate that you are making a substantial investment in the enterprise. The Department of State recently decided that fifty thousand is enough for a small business. There are some other requirements, such as being from one of the E-2 treaty countries, showing that the investment is totally at-risk, that the investment funds did not come from criminal activity and so forth. I met all the requirements except for the fifty thousand. My plan was to start the business on the sly. I have a modest income from my superannuation scheme, enough to live on, put a bit into the business each month and eventually have enough in the bank to get the visa.”

We call it a pension plan. The Brits call it a superannuation scheme, as if accumulating a lot of years is super and also a bit shady. In England, s
cheme
is evidently a synonym for
plan
and lacks the negative connotation it has here.

“The day after your first visit to the missile range, Private Wills came to the shop while you were out running errands. He placed a pot on the counter and told me you had
left it
at the missile range. I realized immediately that it must be the one you had told me about, and that you hadn't merely left it, you had buried it. But I didn't say anything to Wills. Instead I offered to buy it. I knew how much you wanted that pot, so I offered him a thousand dollars for it. He took it. I used part of my savings to buy that pot. I planned to tell you about it when you returned and have you pay me back. But then Carl Wilkes came in an hour or so later. He was excited when I showed him the pot. He said he would return the next day with the cash. So I changed my mind about telling you. I wanted to wait until Carl brought the cash. It would be a great surprise for you, since you didn't even know Wills had brought your pot. I kept the pot at my place that night but brought it in the next to have it ready for Carl. It was the most unfortunate decision of my life. Carl did not return the next day. Another man did. He said he had come to pick up the pot, and Carl would be along shortly with the money. Naturally, I told him I couldn't release the pot before having the money in hand. Whereupon he pulled a gun from his jacket.”

Now I realized why Glad had said “Again!” when I told him my alternative plan to his markdown sale had fallen through “at gunpoint.” He wasn't referring to a gun being pulled on
me
again. He was referring to a gun being pulled first on
him
, then again on me. But he had managed to cover his slip.

Up until this point, I had assumed his narrative was just a lame story he was weaving to explain away his misdeeds. But if he had in fact been robbed by Haggard, I might have to reconsider.

“I cost you thirty thousand dollars,” he said. “I should have told you about the pot the day Wills brought it.”

“What difference would it have made?”

“You might have called Wilkes and sold it to him that evening. You might have hidden it. Any course of action would have been better than mine. And it gets worse. I found a pot in your dustbin. I didn't know why you tossed it away. It looked better than some of the old cracked ones you have. So I decided to see if I could sell it and recoup a bit of the money I'd lost for you. I thought the Edwardses might be interested, so I took it to them. I was gobsmacked when they offered me thirty thousand. It was so providential. I could replace the exact amount I had lost for you on the real one. But when I tried to cash the check, they had stopped payment on it. I am truly sorry, Hubie. I apologise.”

You can hear the difference between the American
z
and the British
s
if you listen closely.

“Those are not the only two pots you were involved with. What about the Anasazi you sold for a third of its price?”

“I thought you were pleased about that.”

“I was. Until I figured out that you actually sold it for more than that and skimmed some off the top.”

His eyes widened. “I did not do that.”

“I called the buyer twice and in both cases he refused to talk to me.”

“It must be for some other reason. He paid me ten thousand and I gave you the check.”

“No cash on the side?”

“Absolutely not.”

“What about the ‘authorities' you referred to who didn't arrest you?”

“They were from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. They claimed I was running a business whilst on a tourist visa. They were right, of course, but I denied it. They did not arrest me. They asked me to go with them for questioning. So I left you a note explaining everything and even attached documents regarding the E-2 visa and information about whom to contact both at the British embassy and back home should I be ultimately detained. They questioned me vigorously even though I showed them before we departed that there is no merchandise, no sign, no cash box, nil. I told them I was living there, which is true, and they released me.”

“The reason there was no merchandise, sign or cash box,” I said, “was because the shop story was a ruse. You didn't rent the space to open a store. You rented it to swindle me while minding
my
store.”

“No, you've got it all wrong. I haven't started the shop because the money I intended to pay Martin to fabricate display cases went to Private Wills.”

I thought about it for a minute. “It appears we are stalemated. I can't prove any of what you said is false. And you can't prove any of it is true.”

“Yes he can,” said Susannah.

We both looked at her and said in unison, “How?”

She pulled a manila folder from her bag and five photos from the folder. They weren't technically photos because they were on copy paper from a printer. She lined them up on the sidewalk in front of the bench. I recognized all five of the men. Four of them were customers from several months ago.

She turned to Glad. “Show me which of these pulled a gun on you.”

He immediately picked up one of the papers. It was not one of my four customers.

It was the snapshot of Jack Haggard entering Spirits in Clay. Not when he entered wearing the hat, obviously. It was his entrance the day he robbed Glad.