1 

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 familiar, vaguely nostalgic.  I couldn’t imagine why; the only images I could connect with blindfolds were kidnappings and executions.

            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 and 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 again 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 also have a reputation – undeserved in my opinion – as 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, yet 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 mysteriously 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 had come 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’ll be the first to admit that my mental processes more often shamble than sprint, but I managed not to get lost in 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.

            The ancient pottery of the American southwest 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 persona 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 it slowly dissolving back into the clay from whence it 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 Southwestern New Mexico until a thousand years ago 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 (APRA) 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 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 a seamstress’ tape, a small sketchbook, and a box of pastel pencils from my briefcase and set about earning my pay.

2 

Susannah’s big brown eyes stared over the rim of her margarita glass, incredulous.

            “You let him blindfold you?”

            “It was part of the deal,” I said.  “Carl said the guy is paranoid about his collection, so he never lets anyone see where he keeps it.”

            “But you said it was in plain view in the living room.”

            I shrugged and looked around for Angie.  “I guess he never has guests.”

            Business is slow in the high-end pot trade, and Susannah’s chores as a part-time server at La Placita don’t allow much time for socializing, so she and I meet most weekdays at five for margaritas at Dos Hermanas Tortillaria where we can get anything that’s on our minds off.  The topics run the gamut but frequently deal with her attempts to find Mr. Right and my brushes with the law.  She’s in her late twenties and full of enthusiasm and energy.  She’s often irreverent and sarcastic just for fun, but she’s always upbeat.  She’s honest and refreshingly naïve.  She’s a couple of inches taller than me, a couple of decades younger, and has thick brown hair the same shade as her eyes.  She’s outdoorsy and athletic looking, but still very feminine.

             It was a hot dry summer day in Albuquerque, and I needed another margarita.  Actually, I needed a glass of cold water to quench my thirst because I knew where quenching it with margaritas would get me – Jimmy Buffet’s favorite town.

            So when the willowy Angie made her way through the crowd and over to our usual table, I asked for a large glass of ice water.

            And another margarita.  The water was a complement, not a substitute.

            Susannah ordered more salsa and chips.  The salsa at Dos Hermanas Tortillaria is made by hand on site by one of the hermanas.  I don’t know which one because they’re usually in the kitchen in their white frocks with their hands covered in masa and their heads covered with old-fashioned hairnets.  The front of the house is run by Angie and the rest of the hired help, but the sisters don’t let anyone but family do the cooking.

            The salsa is simple - tomatoes, jalapeños, white onions, and cilantro, finely chopped and seasoned with just a touch of salt and their secret ingredient, lime zest.  I make the same recipe at home but it’s never as good, probably because the sisters have a source for real tomatoes whereas I have to use the hydroponic, picked-green and ripened-in-the-truck jobs they sell in grocery stores.

            Susannah has a theory that the chips soak up alcohol and keep her from getting drunk.  I think what does it is the great tomatoes.

            She grabbed the last chip from the bowl before Angie whisked it away and said, “You know what you should have done, Hubie?  You should have counted how long you went before each turn and which direction the turns were.  Then you could have followed that route and found out where he lives.”

            “You must have seen that in an old movie.”

            “You saw it, too?  Humphrey Bogart, right?”

            “I don’t remember who was in it.  Anyway, I was busy doing something else.”

            “What?”

            “I was trying to remember if I’d ever been blindfolded before,” I said sheepishly.

            “How long could that take?  We can rule out you going in front of a firing squad unless they had white-tipped canes to go along with their rifles, and I don’t remember you ever telling me about being kidnapped, so…Wait!  I’ll bet you played pin the tail on the donkey at birthday parties, and that’s when you were blindfolded.”

            “Close.  It was at birthday parties, but it wasn’t pin the tail on the donkey.  It was when I got to swing at the piñata.”

            “Bet you were never the one who busted it open.”

            “How did you know that?”

            “You probably couldn’t reach it,” she said mischievously.

            “I wasn’t that short then.”  I’m 5’ 6” now and used to the occasional short joke.

            “No one’s tall in the first grade, Hubie, but I’ll bet you were the shortest one.”

            “Was not,” I said in my little boy voice.  “Pudgy Perez was even shorter than me.  Wider too.”

            “I think I could have guessed that.  What happened to him?”

            “He never got much taller, but he got a lot wider.  He’s a mechanic.  I take my Bronco to him when it needs repairs.”

            “He must be a genius to keep that thing running.  But why did you never hit the piñata?”

            “My mother said it would be rude for the guest of honor to be the one who broke the piñata, so my father would pull the rope when I swung.  Then after everyone had a turn or two, he would let one of the other kids clobber the thing without making it look too obvious.  He was pretty deft with a piñata rope.”

            I guess my eyes may have clouded over a bit with nostalgia.  I stared off into the middle distance.

            After a few seconds, Susannah said, “Something bothering you, Hubie?”

            I shrugged.  “When I was older, maybe around fifteen or sixteen, Consuela told me that the tradition is to let the birthday person break the piñata.  I was kind of upset.”

            “You were angry with your parents for not letting you break the piñata?”

            “Of course not.  I was embarrassed that all my friends probably thought my family were dolts because we didn’t know the rules about piñatas on birthdays.”

            “That’s your worst childhood experience?”

            “Hey, it’s hard enough fitting in when you’re short and don’t play sports, but throw in feeling foolish, and —”

            “Get over it.”

            “Yeah, you’re right.  Anyway, I still had a lot of fun.  I remember once when I was about eleven, the piñata had mints in it, and when it broke open they showered down on the grass.  Lupita Fuentes and I jumped at the same mint, but she grabbed it first and popped it in her mouth.  Then she stuck her tongue out with the mint on it.”

            “Geez,” Susannah moaned, “I think I know where this is going.”

            “Yep.  ‘You want to taste it?’ she said.  That was my first kiss.”

            “Wow,” she said sarcastically, “Your first kiss and a French one at that!”

            “I wonder what ever happened to Lupita?” I mused.

            “Probably married Pudgy Perez.  Can we get back to your blindfolded ride?  I don’t see how thinking about blindfolds could prevent you from memorizing the route.”

            “I’m not very good at multitasking.  And anyway, I didn’t think there was any reason I’d need to go back, so why memorize the route?”

            She gave me that ironic smile, like the Mona Lisa but without all the crackly lines.  “You could have gone back to steal the pots.”

            I gave her one of my own smiles, the one that’s designed to make me look like the sage humoring an untutored waif, but which Susannah says only makes me look like Joseph Biden.

            “I’m not a thief, Susannah.”  The thief debate is a staple of our cocktail hour at Dos Hermanas, as is Susannah’s rocky love life, her studies at the University (currently in art history, but subject to change without notice), old movies, and anything else that one of us thinks worth remarking.

            “There was that pot you took from the University,” she reminded me.

            “Which was subsequently returned along with a sizeable scholarship fund for students.”

            “Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you took it.”

            “Maybe I had a hunch,” I said lamely.

            She laughed and took a chug of her margarita that was larger than Miss Manners recommends for young ladies.  Susannah takes hers without salt on the rim.  Other than that, she has no flaws.

            “Anyway,” I added, “you helped me take the thing.”

            “True,” she agreed, “but it’s not stealing when an art historian does it.”

            “I know,” I said, “you call it deaccessioning.”

            “And there was that pot you stole from Hugo Berdal’s truck.”

            “You may recall that Hugo was dead and therefore had no need for the pot, which, incidentally, he had stolen in the first place.”

            “Quibbling.”

            “There was something else we took from that truck,” I reminded her, “the inflatable woman.”

            “Yuk, don’t remind me.”

            I sipped my margarita after rotating the glass a few degrees in order to get just the right amount of salt from the rim.  It’s a subtle but important skill that I’ve honed over the years.  When the last hint of the blue agave had faded away, I took a long draw on my water.

            “As it turns out, I do want to go back,” I said.

            “Hubie!  You are going to steal his pots!”

            “Of course not.  But I would like to get my twenty-five hundred dollars back.”

            “I thought he paid you before you left.”

            “He did.  After I finished, I went over to the swinging door and knocked on it.  Without opening the door, he asked me if I was through.  I said I was.  He asked me if I’d had my margarita or my beer.  I told him I hadn’t, and he said, ‘At least take a drink of one of them while I get the money’.  I heard his footsteps recede, and to tell you the truth, I was beginning to think he wouldn’t pay me unless I drank something.”

            “Did you think he was trying to poison you?” she asked excitedly.

            “As a matter of fact, the thought did cross my mind.  But what reason would he have to kill me?”

            “To keep the location of his collection a secret,” she ventured.

            “If he was going to kill me, then why bother blindfolding me?”

            “So you wouldn’t get suspicious,” she said without hesitation.  “If he hadn’t blindfolded you, you would have wondered why he didn’t, and you might have jumped out of the car when it slowed down for one of those turns you didn’t count.”

            I couldn’t help but laugh.  “You read too many murder mysteries.  Anyway, he obviously didn’t poison me.”

            “Maybe it was a slow-acting poison.  Or maybe he put it in one of those time-release capsules.  I saw that once in a —”

            “He didn’t poison me.  The beer hadn’t been opened.  Even so, I smelled it when I opened it and it smelled right, and you know my sense of smell is infallible.”

            “That’s true,” she conceded, ‘but your eyes are failing.”

            “They’re not ‘failing’; I just have to use reading glasses sometimes.”

            “I wonder why our sense of smell doesn’t fade like our sight as we get old?”

            “I have no idea.  Anyway, the beer smelled fine.  It tasted right, too.  In fact, I wanted to sit there and finish the bottle.”

            “Even without chips and salsa?”

            “Well, there was that,” I conceded.  “I also wanted to get away from him.  So when he called me back to the swinging door, I walked over.  He cracked the door slightly, counted out twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills one at a time as he transferred them from his left hand to his right, and then he stuck them in my shirt pocket.  He told me to walk over to the door and then turn around with the blindfold in my right hand and face the window.  I did as he directed, and after I’d been standing there for a minute or two, I heard the front door open.  The driver came up behind me and transferred the blindfold from my hand to his hand and then to my head.  Then he led me out into the car and drove me home.”

            “So you never got a look at him?”

            “No.  My instructions were to be standing in front of my shop at exactly five o’clock facing the Plaza.  That’s why I missed our cocktail hour yesterday.  I was told not to look back, just to keep facing the Plaza.  I heard a car drive up, and someone got out but left the motor running.  He walked up behind me and said, ‘I’m going to blindfold you now’, and he did.  You know the rest.”

            “Maybe the driver was the guy at the house.”

            “Couldn’t be.  After the driver closed the door with me standing in the entryway, the guy at the house told me I could take the blindfold off, and he was standing across the room in the swinging door.  There wasn’t enough time for the driver to go out through the front door, run around and come back through the back door and be standing there by the swinging door.”

            “Maybe he closed the door without going through it and then tiptoed quickly over to the swinging door.”  Susannah has a vivid imagination.

            “I think I would have heard him.  And anyway, what would be the point?  Why would he not want me to know he was the driver.”

            “So you couldn’t identify him,” she said as if that were obvious.

            I stared at her. “But I can identify him; I saw him in the house.”

            “Yeah, but you can’t identify him as the driver.”

            I shook my head in confusion.  “What difference does that make?”

            “I don’t know.  We’ll have to find out what he was up to before we can know that.  Maybe being the wheelman makes the crime more serious.”

            “Wheelman?”

            “That’s what it’s called, Hubie.  If he just takes the money, then it’s theft.  But if he takes the money and also drives the getaway car, then maybe it’s something like aggravated theft.”

            “It wasn’t a getaway car, Suze; he was just taking me home.”

            She shrugged.  “So he takes you home, takes off the blindfold while you face Mecca or whatever, tells you not to turn around and drives away, leaving you standing there with twenty-five hundred dollars in your shirt pocket.  So why did you say you need to go back to get your money?”

            “Because when I reached in to my shirt pocket to move the bills from the pocket to my wallet, they were gone.”

            “So that’s it!  He didn’t want an appraisal at all; that was just a pretense so he could rob you.”

            “If so, he must be the stupidest robber in history.  The money he took from me was what he gave me to begin with.”

            “Oh, right.  Well, it may not be robbery, but he did gyp you.  You didn’t get paid for your work”

            “Maybe.  He might be so cheap that he couldn’t part with the twenty-five hundred even though his collection is worth somewhere around a million dollars.  But it’s also possible the driver just saw the opportunity to make a quick twenty-five hundred, and the collector guy doesn’t know the driver took my money.”

            “Unless they’re the same person.”

            “We already went through that; they were not the same person.”

            “If you’d done that counting the turns thing, you could go back and find out for sure.  But it’s too late now.”

            “Not really,” I said smugly.

            “Oh?”

            “Yeah.  I know the address.”

3 

A week before what turned out to be my ill-fated trip in a blindfold, a cadaverous man walked into my shop just before closing time.

            My first thought was less than charitable; I was afraid he was going to die or at least pass out and make me late for margaritas with Susannah.  Of course I would have helped him as much as possible, but it did seem a little unfair that I had sat around all day without making a single sale and then just before closing time, some moribund tourist picks my shop to collapse in.

            But he didn’t collapse.  Despite his ashen complexion and skeletal frame, he made his way towards the counter in a hesitant gait but with a glint in his eye.  When he reached it, he put his hand on it for support, and said, “Could you get me a chair, Hubert?”

            I dragged the one I was using around to the front of the counter and he lowered himself unsteadily into it.  I noticed that in addition to being completely bald, he had no eyebrows.

            Once he was seated, he looked up at me and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

            “No,” I admitted, “but give me a minute, and it’ll come to me.”

            He smiled again.  “Same old Hubert.  Like a peanut M & M - a hard center of confidence hidden by a thin shell of reticence.”

            “Now I know who you are.  You’re the poet laureate of New Mexico.”

            “Same sense of humor, too,” he replied.  Then he gave me that half-smile, and I knew who he was.

            “Mr. Wilkes, welcome back to my shop.”

            Carl Wilkes is a treasure hunter like me.  Well, perhaps not completely like me.  I think his list of what one is allowed to do in the pursuit of pots is more inclusive than mine.  He’s the person who convinced me to get the Mogollon water jug that was in the museum at the University, but that caper had a happy ending, so I never held it against him.  Even had it come to a bad end – which it very well could have – I had no one to blame but myself.  He didn’t twist my arm.  And now he seemed too weak to twist even his own.  He had a thick but close-cropped beard when first we met.  He was thin even then.  Now he was emaciated.  The beard had evidently gone the way of the hair and brows.

            I knew he wanted something, but I didn’t ask.  We chatted about our first caper until he finally came around to the purpose of his visit.

            “You know a man here in Albuquerque who owns a couple dozen Anasazi pots?” he asked.

            “No, but I wish I did.”  I had five at the time (not counting copies), and I thought I had the biggest collection in town.

            “You’re not likely to meet him,” he replied.  “He’s a recluse.  He’s considering selling the pots, and he wants them appraised.”

            I nodded slightly but said nothing.

            “Would you consider doing it?  He’ll pay you twenty-five hundred dollars, and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

            “Why ask me?  You can appraise them as well as I can.”

            Another reluctant smile.  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but you know more about ancient pots than anyone, and you’ve bought and sold enough of them to know the market.  But there’s another reason for me not to do it.  I’m hoping to serve as agent for the sale, and I’m sure the guy’s sharp enough to realize that having the agent appraise the merchandise is a conflict of interest.”

            “Because the agent might low-ball the estimate to make it easier to sell?”

            “Yeah, and then take a kick-back from the buyer who got the good deal.”

            It sounded like something Wilkes had heard about, maybe even done.  That started me thinking about the ethics of the situation.  I may be labeled a pot thief by Congress, but I have a code of ethics when it comes to my business which I prefer to think of as treasure hunting.  Wilkes had said he was ‘hoping’ to serve as the agent for the sale, which implied to me that he didn’t have a firm agreement to do so.  An Anasazi pot in decent condition can easily bring fifty thousand dollars, so a collection of two dozen could bring well over a million dollars.  If the agent got ten percent, that’s over a hundred thousand, a sum that made the twenty-five hundred appraisal fee look like chump change.

            I’m not an immodest fellow, but Wilkes was right about my knowledge of ancient pottery.  There aren’t too many people who deal in it, none on the scale I do, and if the collector asked around, he would no doubt hear about me and might decide to ask me to act as his agent.  But if Wilkes could convince me to do the appraisal, then that would rule me out as the agent.

            If the drift of my thinking makes you suspect I didn’t completely trust Carl Wilkes, then you followed that drift correctly.  The fact that he hadn’t mentioned the gentleman’s name wasn’t merely an oversight on his part.  Don’t get me wrong; I liked Carl.  But as we say in New Mexico, ‘You can like your neighbor, but you still brand your cattle’.

            I told him I’d think it over.

            As he left, he gave me another half-smile, reminding me of the first time we met.  He was at that point a Mysterious Stranger, someone who walked into my shop and offered to buy a pot I didn’t own, and everything about him from his clothes to his indirect wordings made me wary.  But those half-smiles revealed a warmer facet of his personality.

            You already know I decided to do the appraisal because you came in just as I was riding blindfolded to do it.  I had come to the conclusion that I couldn’t serve as the agent even if the collector asked me to do so.  I didn’t even know he existed before Carl Wilkes told me about him, and I couldn’t steal Carl’s potential client even if that client wanted me to.  And I stuck with that opinion even though I suspected Carl might steal a client from me if the situation were reversed.

            So that’s how I ended up taking out my seamstress tape, my sketch pad, and my colored pencils. 

            I’m an artisan, not an artist.  I wanted the sketch pad and pencils so I could draw each pot and its designs.  The seamstress tape is flexible, so I could wrap it around the base, widest spot, and rim of each pot to get the dimensions. Using color pencils would allow me to put in the right shades.  Size, shape, design, and color are four of the key elements used to classify pottery.  The other two are the type of clay and the glaze.  You can’t be absolutely certain about those last two without lab tests, but I’ve seen enough pots and thrown enough pots to make reliable guesses, so I wrote down next to each sketch the sort of clay used and the glaze.  Then with all that information at hand, I could check my records and the records of other sales and put an accurate price on each piece in the collection.  The agreement was that I would send the estimate, listed by piece, to a post office box.

            Carl had made a good estimate of the time involved, about two hours.  That’s just for the rough sketches, and they didn’t need to be any more than that.  I wasn’t going to frame them; I wasn’t even going to stick them on my refrigerator door with magnets.  They were just notes about what was in front of me.

            I finished all the pots to the left of the fireplace in about an hour.  Then I started on the first pot on the top shelf to the right of the fireplace.  It was a bit of a challenge because the shelf was sufficiently above my 5’ 6” that I couldn’t put the tape around the pot to measure it, so I had to estimate.  Also, I couldn’t get close enough to see the detail in the glaze although I could see the potter had used slip for the design, slip being a sort of pigmented clay slurry that stays put during firing and is better than just a thin glaze.

            The going seemed much easier than it had with the pots on the other top shelf, the shelf to the left that I’d already done.  In fact, my listing of the attributes of this particular pot came so easily and naturally that I found myself writing some of them down before I’d even seen them.

            Huh?

            I put the sketch pad and pencils down and stared at the pot.  I realized I knew what the other side of it looked like even though I couldn’t reach it to turn it around and look.  The front side had a sort of swirly fiddlehead design that may have been a symbol for a waterfall or a desert whirlwind.  Or maybe it was a symbol for a fiddle.  We anthropologists make a lot of assumptions about symbols used by extinct tribes based on very scanty evidence, and I suspect we are wrong more often than we are right, but that’s the nature of the science.

            The back side of the pot had the same design except the potter’s stick had slipped in her hand for some reason – maybe one of her kids had bumped into her – and even though you could see where she had tried to coax the slip back into the right curve, she hadn’t been able to do so completely and hadn’t taken the time to smooth the whole thing down and start over.  Which is what I would do today, but then I’m not working in a cliff dwelling with kids swarming around me and needing to replace a pot one of them carelessly knocked over.

            How did I know the design on the back had that little miscue?  Because I had put it there.  The pot on the top shelf to the right of the fireplace was one of my copies.