The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein Read Online Free PDF Page B

commented.
    “Yeah, but I can’t work at that pace for that long. Making copies is painstaking work. I would need breaks. I don’t think I could do it in less than two years.”
    “I guess it would be hard to ask a buyer to wait two years.”
    “My experience with collectors is they like owning things, not waiting for things.”
    “So I guess your copying income has dried up.”
    “It looks that way. And if I can’t get more money for copying Cantú’s pots, I at least want to get my twenty-five hundred for the appraisal.”
    “You still haven’t told me why Cantú would want copies of the pots he was selling.”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he needed money but hated the idea of losing his collection so he had copies made as a compromise.”
    I scooped some salsa onto a chip and ate it. What could be better than Dos Hermanas on a hot summer day, the cool breeze from the evaporative cooler, the soothing sounds of Spanish from the kitchen, the fresh salsa with its jalapeño snap, perfect margaritas, and the best friend a guy ever had sitting across the table.
    Frowning. “There’s another possibility,” she said, her big eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Maybe Cantú was selling the copies and keeping the originals.”
    “He couldn’t have sold the copies. They’re still in the collection.”
    “How do you know they’re the copies and not the originals?”
    “A fair question. No matter how carefully you copy, there are always little differences. Suppose the original had a black band around it and the band on the copy was slightly wider. Well, that wouldn’t mean anything to the casual observer because no two old pots are ever the same. The Anasazi weren’t working at Royal Doulton with production lines and quality control. Each pot was a fresh creation. They might use the same design, but they had no way of making two pots identical, so the black band could be wide on one pot and narrower on the next. But the person who makes a copy knows when he doesn’t get it quite right, and he knows how he erred. So if the copier made the band slightly wider and he’s looking at the copy and the original next to each other, he knows that the wide-banded one is his copy. But no one else could know that because the copier could have just as easily have made the band narrower.”
    “O.K., that makes sense, but how do you know the collection you appraised belongs to Cantú? Maybe Cantú was just an errand boy for the collector.”
    Her suggestion made sense, so I asked myself why I hadn’t thought of it. When I answered my own question, I explained it to her.
    “I guess it’s possible,” I admitted, “but it seems unlikely. Ancient pots are fragile. I can’t see a collector letting some errand boy walk around with one in a cardboard box.”
    “Then who was the guy there when you did the appraisal?”
    “Maybe he was a friend Cantú asked to stand in for him because he didn’t want to be there when I came for the appraisal.”
    “Why wouldn’t he want to be there?” she persisted.
    I shrugged. “He’s a weird guy. Maybe he didn’t want me asking why my copies were in the collection and the originals were gone. Maybe he thought I might get angry that he was planning to sell my copies as part of the collection. Maybe he had a doctor’s appointment.”
    “At five o’clock in the evening?” She got that excited look she gets when she tries to morph reality into a murder mystery. “Maybe it was Cantú in disguise!”
    I started laughing. I explained that the guy at the appraisal was older and shorter than Cantú.
    “But you said he was stooped over. It could have been Cantú just pretending to be a hunchback.”
    “What about the older part?”
    “Makeup.”
    “I don’t know, Suze. That sounds like a lot of work for nothing. Instead of disguising himself and walking around bent over, why not just get a friend to deal with me?” And then I joked, “If Cantú was going to put on theater makeup, why not