Sherds

Here's the "Murder wall" I worked up in Scapple.

This isn't the plot, per se. These are all the elements of a central problem I'm trying to solve. The names are shorthand if not stand-ins; Chandler, Scion, and Dumont are all Greeks (the latter handle because of a certain resemblance to the kind of Grand Dame so wonderfully portrayed by Margaret Dumont). Atlantis is an art gallery.

A lot of lines are missing because of lack of space, and there may be some missing characters. One thing I wish I could do is label the lines, because sometimes the connections are tenuous ones ("crashed a car in which the Carabinieri discovered a picture of..." for instance.) Making them different colors would only go so far.

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It's all about the orphan. This is something that was done for various reasons by real-world antiquities rings, particularly the one centered around a certain Medici. This was partly for triangulation; washing an antiquity through various methods including putting it up for auction with Sotheby's then buying it back themselves. And partly as a marketing scheme. However, only the Getty really got into buying their antiquities piece by piece (the heart of the marketing scheme was, "I can sell you the last puzzle piece if you'll also agree to get these plates.")

I am still on the fence if this was ever intended in this case. In some documented cases a pot was partially restored for photographing (the old school traffickers really loved Polaroids. I'm not sure that flies as well today...getting pretty hard to find those self-developing packs.) Then it would be separated again and it might be years before full restoration was accomplished. In other cases, an intact piece was broken up to make sale-able bits (sometimes because the original was too large to move).

The backstory I'm going with now is this is a Cycladic workshop either in competition with the keramikos or a sort of off-shore workshop for the burgeoning Attic industry, and most of what is found on site is kiln misfires and other rejects. Which means the Enceladus Calyx might have been never whole but fractured in the kiln. One thing I haven't decided is if it was looted whole, or if the orphan was found separately. 

(One flaw with the intentional creation of orphans is they will have visibly fresh edges. They also tend to be broken conveniently between figures or other high-detail areas; both are things the Carabinieri Art Squad have learned to detect.)

So that's the Janus problem I'm having. Parts of the plot work best if the calyx is whole. Other parts work best if it is in pieces. And a whole lot of the string-and-photos above is trying to figure out when those pieces get separated and how that changes the rest of the plot. Perhaps it is Schrödinger's Pot.

Other questions are more an either-or. I'm thinking the material coming out of the Cycladic site is useful to the Dorian Invasion delusions of Professor Sharp and he could have seen, documented, and collected some of same through social connections to the rich dilettante who owns the land. Thing is, if it works for one Dorian, it works for another, and Atlantis Gallery would love to sell the stuff along with their Crystal Skulls and Ica Stones, but making that connection would make it too obvious that the good stuff in the Professor's collection came to him much later than the UNESCO cut-off year of 1970.

There are multiple other places where I'm trying to stretch the diagram to ask is it one branch of the decision tree, or another. So...maybe a better tool would be a programmers flow chart?

(Four hours of work later). And I've got it. It ain't neat, but it will work. Sharp picked up the orphan when the Scion had started on a new boathouse. He gave it to his protege Xander, who at a low spot in career decided to "find" it on a dig in Germany, announcing it on social media. The Atlantis gallery, who had acquired Sharp's collection towards the end of his life, saw a business opportunity and threw a lot more publicity at Xander than he had been expecting. Perhaps now the organization could move some of the low-grade stuff that had come out of the ground around the boathouse. What they didn't expect was to find a work of art and even partial restoration attracted the attention of some serious buyers. Unfortunately the pot had this one missing piece...)