The Magi Caper
“Gretch, what do you think could have become of the gold?”
She didn’t answer.
“Gretchen is my girlfriend. Gretch is a Goth, and I’m a geek, or so she claims. I work in tech, but that’s as geeky as it gets. Most of the time I wear a blazer and bow tie. Except for the fact that she has black hair not fair, a Celtic chain and butterfly tattoos, and enough studs and rivets to build a small aircraft, she’s a dead ringer for Botticelli’s Venus and, oh, one other difference. Instead of a fig leaf, Gretch uses a fridge magnet.
“What gold?” She finally deigned to respond.
“The Wise Men’s gold.” I pointed to the cover of a Christmas card I’d just opened. The Wise Men were offering their gifts one of which was an open box with rays of gold radiating outward.
“It’s most definitely gone by now, so don’t agonize.” She was sitting on a high bar stool applying black paint to her toenails.
“Gone where?” was the obvious follow-up.
“Look Gretch, these kings or wise men supposedly brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. I think frankincense is like incense so, presumably, that might have been used by now. Burned, smoked, I don’t know. Myrrh. I’m not sure what that is.”
“I think it’s something to anoint your loins.” was Gretchen’s guess. Made me wish I had some myrrh to anoint Gretchen’s loins but, well, maybe later.
“Regardless, gold doesn’t get used up. Think of it. Do you see gold lying around on the street? It’s desirable, it’s valuable, and it’s indestructible. People take care of it. O.K., so some gets buried by pirates or sunk to the bottom of the sea, but the rest I would say is 100% safely in someone’s possession. And don’t forget Fort Knox.”
“Are you insinuating that the Wise Men’s gold ended up in Fort Knox?”
“Doubtful, but it’s got to be somewhere, don’t you think.”
“I suppose, maybe.” She slid down off the stool. “That reminds me have you seen my henna stencils.”
“Look in the refrigerator.” I suggested, and off she went to the kitchen.
The riddle of the lost gold had taken hold. First question, what form was it? The box with the gold rays on the Christmas card didn’t give even a hint. Ingots, I doubt it. Certainly not a poke of gold dust. Maybe in Sacramento or the Yukon, but definitely not Bethlehem. Coins with Caesar’s mug stamped on them? Seems inappropriate. Jewelry for a baby? I don’t know. Maybe a crown, but wouldn’t we have heard of such a thing?
Gretchen was back.
“Gretch, what would you give a baby that might be made of gold or silver?” She pondered but really didn’t have to exert herself. She’s a Mensa block warden.
“Probably a cup or spoon. Yeah, a baby cup or a baby spoon.”
“Eureka!” That’s my tatted genius.
Of course it would have been a spoon. A cup is from another story, but a spoon, perfect. Practical, not showy, not ostentatious, and pure. Oh yes. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this? A spoon. So what happened to the spoon then? Lost, buried, stolen? More questions.
“Gretch, hypothetical. One of the three wise men brings a golden spoon as a new baby gift. Assuming it wasn’t lost or stolen what would have happened to it?”
I thought I’d let that 170 IQ answer the easy questions.
“O.K. maestro. Once the child was taking solids the mom would use it to feed the baby. Doubt it would be put on display, which would make it vulnerable to kleptomania or even petty larceny. After it was no longer especially useful the Mom would put it away with baby mementos in safekeeping for her daughter-in-law or grandchildren.”
“Hmm,” I muttered to myself. History has taught us there was no daughter-in-law and no grandchildren.
“Listen Babe, one more question.”
“OK, just one more. We’ve got to be on our way, or the Sushi Barn is liable to run out of fugu.”
“If the Wise Man or Magus, whatever, from the Christmas story, brought a gold spoon, and that spoon was around today, do you think it might have some special properties like the Holy Grail?”
“Well, assuming all the ridiculously improbable elements of your hypo, then most definitely. Now let’s get going. I need raw fish and sodium.”
Now wining and dining the demanding Ms G’, though a pleasure to comply, is by far the toughest part of my day. I have the dream job of all dream jobs and dinner just marks the end of playtime. Yeah, playtime.
I work for Pepin International where I’m Director of PANTS.
Now before you start imagining anything kinky, that’s an acronym for Potential Applications for New Tech Systems. It’s a toy factory, high tech, and I’m captain of the test pilots. When the brainiacs over at R and D come up with a new invention they give it to me and my crew to see if we can find a use for it. Demographics decides if there are enough potential customers, then it’s on to legal, then production and pricing. Nobody hassles us, and our budget is infinite, although we never spend for much more than sugared donuts and ultra-caffeinated cola. Two days ago one of the real geeks brought over an aerosol spray that when applied to any picture makes it 3-D. Before that we were playing with an echo amplifier which finds the echoes of conversations of hours previous, amps them and plays back just what was said in the room before you arrived. Cool, but is there a market? I’ll decide in a week or two.
In PANTS we’ve got tomorrow’s computers today, and, of course, I’ve got my own private genius at home for dealing with human factors.
Now that I was on my gold prospecting mission, I put the team munchkins on the echo project and started searching the web for a very special piece of golden flatware.
Typing in the obvious words brought up too many results to evaluate, mostly catalog entries and after a couple of hours I had spots in front of my eyes and they weren’t Dalmatians. At one point I got the idea to add the word royal to the words golden and spoon. The gold was a gift from one of three kings. Now I wasn’t sure if the three kings were the same as the three wise men. No matter-I got a sweet hit-a short blurb that seemed right on the money. It was a blurb from a larger extract of a 1913 book on art history by one Sir Clovis Sangrail OBE and Fellow of the Royal Society. This apparently was Sir Clovis’ only appearance anywhere on the web as nothing further turned up no matter how I tweaked it. My tantalizing combination of words was about halfway into the three-page extract:
Little is known of the life and history of Da Vinci’s mother, Catarina. During the baby’s infancy, Da Vinci’s father, Ser Piero, a well to do Notary of Vinci, spent considerable time in the company of mistress and baby at their home in Anchiano and showered them both with gifts including fine wines and oils, rich raiment, books, and other presents. Of particular delight to Catarina was a miniature baby’s spoon crafted from brilliant gold and engraved with mysterious symbols of the East. She took much delight in feeding her infant and herself chips of ice flavored with honey and lemon. The artist gave this souvenir particular reverence, and later wore the golden spoon on a gold neck chain. He was said to have made a gift of the spoon to his patron, Francis 1.
So, the great Leonardo had been fed with a golden spoon of Eastern origin-very interesting. If Sir Clovis were to be believed, the spoon then passed to the King of France.
An afternoon of surfing the web for involvement of French or other royalty with gold spoons went nowhere, and by the end of the day, I think was actually seeing Dalmatians and hearing them bark as well.
Gretchen, of course, knew about the gold rush. I had talked about nothing else as she wolfed down eighty bucks worth of fish and seaweed at the Sushi Barn. She generally humored me, but this time when I showed her the Da Vinci selection she was downright enthusiastic.
“So where do I go next, Gretch?”
“I’ll think about it on our way to Mr. Thai’s Noodle Ranch. I’m starved.”
Between chomps of Pad Thai, Gretchen roughed out my to-do list.
“Look, as I see it you have a connection between a potentially sacred or holy relic and one of history’s geniuses right. So the question is what is the nature of the connection, if any. Inspiration? Maybe. But there are other possibilities.”
She paused for a gulp of orange pop.
“You asked if such an item existed would it, could it, have special properties, and I agreed. Well consider the hypothesis that DaVinci may have experienced those properties. Was he a genius because his mother was an obscure farmer’s daughter and his father a petty civil servant? Or maybe, just maybe, did the spoon have an effect on the little baby?” She grinned and signaled to the server for more noodles.
“So where does this take us my pretty?”
“It’s obvious. You’ve got to invert your search. You’ve been looking for the spoon itself. Why not look for geniuses of the level of DaVinci. Scratch that. There are none, except possibly myself. But look for high geniuses, and see if you can track the spoon that way. Stick to western Europeans and Americans at first. You’re not looking for chop sticks after all.” She smiled a Mona Lisa smile as she reached across the table to grab my orange drink to wash down her food.
What a woman. Beauty, brains, and a racecar metabolism. If I could find a girlfriend like Gretchen I could certainly find a little old spoon, which seemed to be of no interest to anyone but my girl and an art historian with a goofy moniker. The next morning bright and early at 10:00 a.m. the inverted search was commenced.
I made three lists. The first had the usual suspects Newton, Einstein, Darwin, et al. List two contained artsy-fartsy types like Rembrandt, Mozart, and Van Gogh. You know the drill. The last squad was the rags to riches-poverty to influence crowd. Here I had people like Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie, the first Astor, the First Rockefeller and so on.
I scored hits in every category almost at once.
Newton had the spoon. He was wearing it in a very blurry ink plate done of him by, guess who, our old acquaintance Sir Clovis or, more likely, unless he was immortal, an ancestor. Things were getting curiouser and curiouser.
Yet there was more. Much more. A photo of Einstein showed him pointing to a chalkboard with the same shaped spoon as drawn with Newton. I found a letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo lamenting that he had to pawn his beloved golden keepsake spoon to help a lady friend in need. There was a recently unearthed composition attributed to Mozart entitled in old German, “Der Goldener Shpoon.”
All day it was like this with mentions of the relic attaching to more than half the names on my lists and almost every name on list two.
Now I seemed to have a boatload of confirmation for my basic theory but now how to find the spoon now. After all, we know that people take good care of gold.
I longed for a clear view or description of the symbols on the spoon but that eluded me.
Trying the online marketplaces it was three strikes in a row, three outs in a row, and nine quick scoreless innings.
I tried to contact Gretchen by telepathy, and, whether it worked or not, the solution came into my mind and traveled at the speed of thought down my nerves to my typing fingers. The conspiracy boards-of course.
Typing in the basic words I had been hammering for the past several days and adding the word “conspiracy”, I was directed to several interesting sites. Lots of Holy Grail and Lost Ark stuff. There was plenty on JFK, the crystal skulls, and the Loch Ness Monster, but I found only one essay about my spoon. Yes I was beginning to consider the spoon as my own.
The essay was short, but it was enough.
A variant of the Holy Grail legend has it that, rather than
a cup or bowl, the holy relic was actually a spoon made of gold and originally of Persian design and crafting. The spoon was held
to be the artifact of gold presented by the three wise men.
Having been used by the Holy Infant it took on special powers
in addition to those endowed by its’ original goldsmith.
According to legend the spoon has remarkable properties
to heal the sick and elevate the healthy. It is thought
to be passed ceremonially from one generation to the next
for safekeeping for the Second Coming.
Now I had an idea how to find it. Make a fourth list of present day Newtons, Van Goghs etc. and then follow it to the source.
Brilliant. Maybe I am really a geek.
Gretchen’s jaw hit the floor when I told her I thought I had found my man and most likely the gold. Obviously, I wouldn’t expect him to turn it over, but once I had confirmed all the facts, then wow, what a splash.
I showed her the picture. “Here’s my genius G, and where be he, there be my gold.”
“Are you insane?”
I flipped her my ticket to Indianapolis.
“Would an insane man buy a first class ticket to Indiana?”
“What makes you think it’s him?”
“Look it all fits Babe. The reverse search. He’s my man. Look at that picture. Except for the space between the teeth and that it’s a male, it’s like a photograph taken by DaVinci. It all fits. The lists, the O’Reilly interview, the Top Ten lists, the total mastery of the late night variety format, the subtle use of double breasted blazers. Gretch, this man is our genius. Leonardo walks among us, and here he is.”
“Then why go to Indiana? Why not go to New York or Connecticut ?”
“Yes, that would be logical, but remember you told me to invert the search. I’m going back to the source, where he started out, like Da Vinci’s farm village, Muncie and Ball State. And check this. I showed her the amplifying echo retriever. This has a dial that goes back as far as seventy years. Think of what I might hear. Once I confirm everything, getting a look at the spoon will follow.”
Gretchen grimaced.
“I need you to take me to the airport tomorrow, Gretch.”
She shook her head in frustration.
“Take another look at the picture. You are looking at a man standing in one direct line from Bethlehem to Leonardo to Newton and the rest to the here and now.”
“I know when you wake up tomorrow you’ll have come to your senses.”
“Gretch, don’t let me down. If I miss that flight tomorrow night I’m busted. That ticket is non refundable.”
She muttered a grudging “O.K.” then “Mongolian Barbecue alright with you?”
When I got back the next night Gretchen wasn’t there and it got me nervous. Traffic to the airport was always unpredictable. To kill time I took out the echo amp to fool around a little. Since the gold fever had struck I had got in the unusual position of falling behind on my projects. I turned the dial on the echo amp for an hour earlier and was shocked to hear voices, I mean a single voice, Gretchen. I turned up the volume.
She had been speaking on the phone an hour earlier when she should have been at work. So I listened.
“I’m worried. This started as a game, and now he’s getting close.” A pause, then,
“Yeah, he knows it’s you or he thinks he does. He’s going back to Indiana to nose around.”
“Of course it was a great idea to hide it in plain sight. After that woman kept creepy-crawling your house, and after she caught on when we gave it to the astronaut, we had to think of someplace no one would ever look. Yeah, right out in the open. But that’s no good anymore. He’s sensitized. Every detail is a clue. I’ve hid it somewhere else for the time being but it’s a band-aid solution.”
There came another long pause then she spoke sharply and louder. “Don’t worry. He’ll miss his flight tonight.”
She seemed almost done. “I know. I know. I should never have suggested the reverse search. Who would have imagined he would think of you. I thought he’d be bird-dogging that English physicist. It was those top ten lists of yours. Just a tad too intelligent. O.K., I’ll keep you posted. Goodbye.”
I turned down the amp. This invention definitely had commercial possibilities.
But I was baffled. Gretchen being in league with the subject was crazy, but then I took out my lists, and when I looked at them I shocked myself. At the top of list number one “World’s All-time Greatest Geniuses” I had written “Gretchen” with two hearts on each side. I am too good sometimes by half.
What a trip! The spoon was here, and Gretchen had hidden it in plain sight. That should have made it easy to find. I looked around the apartment. Nothing. I ransacked the place nothing.
I was admiring a pair of G’s stone washed hip huggers when an idea hit. There was an 8x10 of Gretch on the kitchen counter. I slid it out from behind the glass frame and studied it. A smudge above Gretch’s navel in the picture looked suspicious. I sprayed the glossy with the 3-D in a can. The smudge popped off the page. Not exactly gold in color but with a small spoon-like bowl at one side and the familiar handle from the Newton picture on the other there was no doubt. Gretch had pierced her navel with the Da Vinci spoon. Was that girl smart or what?
So where would she hide it temporarily where no one would think to look? Why in plain sight of course. I smiled to myself and favorably compared my own intelligence to her’s as I opened the knife, fork and spoon drawer.
It was exquisite. Lighter than a feather and after rubbing away the black paint, brilliant gold. I tried taking a digital picture but the result was just pure light, an overexposure. I tried scanning it but with the same result. One test left. Let’s see how fruit cocktail tastes from a spoon thousands of years old.
I scooped a morsel of peach into my mouth, and before I swallowed musical notes went dancing before my eyes and in a matter of seconds I heard melodies, rhythms, harmonies, bird songs, arias and every beautiful sound that had ever been heard or would ever be heard. With a scoop of pear came the same experience but visual, every color shape, motion, and design blowing through my mind at light speed and leaving me dizzy but euphoric. Then, at last, I scooped a maraschino cherry, and when I put the spoon in my mouth there came a deafening roar as all the words ever spoken or written or dreamed filled my mind like an avalanche.
Gretchen arrived too late to have gotten me to the airport for the Indianapolis flight. Naughty little minx.
“What are you doing? What’s that music?”
I put a guitar I had been playing beside me on the floor.
“Oh just a duet for flamenco guitar I was composing, nothing much.”
“You can’t play guitar.”
“I’m thinking of taking it up.”
“You ready to make your flight?” Clever. She knew it was too late.
“Change of plans Babe. I’m not going to Indiana. Going to Florida instead.”
“Florida. What for?”
“I’m speaking to a hematology convention. I’ve thought of a certain molecule that when synthesized might block replication of certain lentiviruses that… oh why bore you? I haven’t even finished my calculations. I’ll do that on the plane.”
“The look on her face told me she knew I had gotten into the silverware, or should I say goldware.”
“Anyway Gretch, I’ve got four hours to kill before the Miami flight. Can I interest you in some sushi?”
“She melted into a smile, all her body piercings twinkling in the light of
the dozen candles I had taken the liberty of lighting. The smile reminded me of a famous painting, and it wasn’t Botticelli.
“Sure darlin’. But would you mind terribly if I brought someone along. I forgot to tell you, my Uncle Clovis is in town.”
The End
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