Gold joined a trio of sergeants who were studying a blanket of earrings, bracelets and hairpins. The crown of his fedora came to the shoulders of the soldiers. One sergeant admired a pin with a peacock tail of silver and black jet. Joe slipped between the cars parked diagonally along the curb of the portal. The adobe overhang was supported by massive posts of ponderosa pine worn smooth by generations of tourists, and he could look at an angle through the colonnade without being seen himself. He recognized some of the women selling pots. Almost in front of him was a sleek and chubby girl with black bangs, a teenage cousin of his called Polly, for Paulina. She’d put down a copy of Modern Screen to show one of Sophie Reyes’ smooth, obsidian-dark pots to a kneeling man in a Panama. Gold moved closer, his eyes jumping from blanket to blanket. He stopped to pick up and examine a silver cigar holder. He seemed to genuinely want it, and replaced it on the blanket with regret. Falling into the spirit of friendly reverence, he joined two nuns in the examination of silver crucifixes. Gold seemed to suffer from boosterism, as he enrolled enthusiastically in whatever mood he encountered. He good-naturedly let himself be talked into trying a clip on his tie. The clip looked like a silver bomber; his tie had hand-painted palm trees. He gave the clip back and bent over the next blanket, Polly’s.

“For fruit?” Gold lifted a bowl with a debossed serpent around the rim.

Polly shrugged, but the man in the Panama said, “Would you put fruit on a Rubens? That’s a bowl by Sophie Reyes.”

“She’s famous?” Gold was impressed.

“To collectors.”

“You collect these?” Gold turned the bowl around.

“I collect Dolores. She’s dead and her pieces are very hard to find.”

“Like art?”

“It is art.” The man in the Panama looked up as he took the bowl from Gold, and Joe saw that the collector was Captain Augustino in civvies. “These pots are an expression of the native concept of the earth, and man’s emergence from the earth, each pot both earth and womb. A beautiful, powerful concept.”

“The decoration—”

“There is no decoration,” Augustino cut Gold off. “There is representation. The snake is the never-ending cycle of the world. It’s a representation of lightning. Lightning brings rain. Rain brings corn. You see the contradictions of violence and fruitfulness married in this symbol. This bowl is a vision of primitive harmony—though not quite as fine as a Dolores.”

“That’s the one you collect?”

“I can show the collection to you, if you’d like.”

“Thanks, but I’m only in Santa Fe for a day.…”