Earth Colors (21 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Earth Colors
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“Look closely at the story told in each picture,” Emmett continued, now almost whispering. He pointed at one picture and then another, and settled on
Apache Scouts Listening
, another tour de force in Hooker’s green. “The scouts are hiding in a grove of trees, listening for the approach of an unseen enemy. The story goes that if they heard anything—a barking dog, a breaking twig—they have been discovered. But if all Remington wanted to do was tell that story, he would have shown us also the men and dogs that were tracking them. But no, he left them outside the frame. So where are they?”
“The threat is outside the frame, out here with us. That makes it so much more frightening!”
“He left the story open and unresolved,” Emmett said quietly. “Because
that
is what is true.”
AS I RODE THE METRO BACK TO DUPONT CIRCLE AND RETRIEVED my rental car for the drive out to Quantico and my meeting with the FBI, I felt a great weight rolling off my shoulders. I had found a missing part of myself in Remington’s paintings. I had experienced art, that force which lifts us above ourselves and out into the clear air of vision.
It had been months, a year or more, since I had felt such clarity. I could now name the fog that had clouded my sight for so many months: trauma. I had been with Tom when he died, a witness to war, and it had so terrified me that I had left part of myself behind, frozen in that time and place, and there was nothing that would ever erase the grim truth of what I had seen. But Remington had shown me the deeper purpose of art: it embraces the ambiguity and tension between light and darkness, wresting beauty from the deepest pain and anger, restoring harmony to that which has been divided.
The beauty of the love I felt for Tom and Jack and Faye and her baby were forever crosscut with a memory I did not like to revisit. I felt guilty that Tom had died, because I’d had a hand in putting him in that wrong place at that wrong time, but also because I had survived. I felt a longing for him and for our lives as they had been before, back when Faye was my friend and confidante, not just an intimate in need of my help.
Tom’s death was one small footnote in the war on terrorism. War in any form was hideous. It was a darkness that reached out to swallow the bright center of clarity. Everything in my being resisted that darkness, and yet Remington had embraced it, held it shimmering in tension against the light, showing me to my astonishment that the light was not complete without it. He had found power and strength in darkness which informed
the light, and brought its crushing weight to force the brilliance of truth to blaze more fiercely.
It was time for me to bring light into my darkness, to cast it into the shadows that had grown around me. To do that I must face what frightened me, and shatter the ice of my grief. I had to quit leaning on a love relationship that had fizzled almost as soon as it had started. I had to start living my life by a plan that built a future, rather than as a reaction to my past. I had to figure out what I wanted to have in that life, and make it happen, even if that meant embracing the biggest ambiguity on two legs: me.
This resolution to plan ahead made me look at the puzzle of Tert’s paint chips from a very different angle. The subject of toxicity in artists’ paints had come up several times in the past twenty-four hours, and pointed straight at Tert’s elderly mother. There were too many things about her condition that diverged from the usual decrepitude of age. Her skin was sallow and weirdly scarred around her cuticles. She was breathing badly and yet sat out on the porch, suggesting that this problem did not have its roots in infectious disease. She was having trouble seeing even with her glasses on, and oscillated in and out of being as batty as a church steeple. Did this mean she suffered from heavy-metal poisoning? And Deirdre had said that her symptoms always increased after Tert’s visits. Was he poisoning his own mother and sister? And how about Deirdre’s numb hands, and her incredible irritability? Could her neurological problems spring from the same source?
These thoughts made it difficult for me to concentrate on my driving, but somehow I got to Quantico, Virginia, and found my way to the new building that housed the FBI’s forensics laboratories.
The FBI lab building was post-industrial-modern and had gangs of vent stacks that rose high above its top floor, making it look like the
Queen Mary
at full steam. I parked the car and presented myself for the security screening. Noreen Babcock had explained to me that I would have to go through a rather rigorous shakedown, so I was prepared when I was asked to empty my pockets into a bucket for X-ray and walk through a metal detector, but it was the first time I had weathered a full-body frisk. After that, I identified myself through a microphone to a woman who lurked behind bulletproof glass. I explained who I was and whom I was there to see, and she told me to sign a roster, issued me an electronic badge, and pointed to a telephone that I should use to phone Noreen. I clipped the badge to my collar, then dialed and got a recording, so I left a message saying I was waiting in the lobby.
Minutes ground by. By the time twenty had passed, I began to wonder if Noreen had gone home sick or been called into some important meeting, or if, worse yet, I had the wrong day. And did I have the correct hour? And she was here, and not in downtown D.C., wasn’t she? Had the creature behind the glass given me the correct number?
I was just about to dial the phone a second time when a woman about my size, shape, and age popped into view right in front of me. “Em?” she said. “I’m Noreen.” She wasn’t smiling. Something was wrong.
I got up from the bench I had settled on. “I’m glad to meet you,” I said doubtfully. “I … I wasn’t early, was I?”
She blinked. “No. I’m sorry, there’s … something’s come up.”
“I could come back another day,” I said quickly.
“No. No, that’s not it. Actually, it’s about your security clearance.”
“What?”
“Come this way,” Noreen said, averting her eyes from the woman behind the bulletproof glass, who was now staring at us with frank interest.
Noreen turned to a guy with a beer gut and the remains of bad acne who was seated nearby. I had noticed him when I arrived. He had been waiting placidly, apparently in no hurry. I had examined him abstractly, short on anything else to do, and he had done the same with me. But now he stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, an action that thrust his gut even farther forward. “Emily Hansen,” he said with a slight drawl, “I am Agent Wardlaw.”
I stifled a nervous giggle at the idea of an FBI agent named Wardlaw, and stuck out my hand.
He did not shake it. Instead, he kept his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth a bit on his heels, working his lips as if he had a toothpick between his teeth. He wore a dark, conservative, ready-to-wear suit with a white, polyester broadcloth shirt and a dark tie that was a hair too narrow.
I felt an urge to give the man a pair of dark glasses and a bad hat and ask him to play the blues for me. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Agent Wardlaw spoke to Noreen. “I got her a visitor’s badge, but she has to stay with me,” he said.
I turned to Noreen. “Uh, does this guy know I’m a friend of Tom’s?”
Noreen nodded. “Yeah, elsewise you wouldn’t be getting in at all today. Look, Tom was legendary, and more than a few of us knew he was training you and trying to recruit you. Oh hell, we know all about you. You underwent a security screening a long time ago, you just didn’t know it.
And you passed with flying colors. The thing is, it seems that just recently, you’ve—”
Agent Wardlaw interrupted. “I’ll take over now, if you don’t mind. Ladies?” He made a gesture toward an inner door.
With misgivings, I followed him. Noreen fell into step beside me, saying, “I’m sorry about this, Em. We just had to set up a few things … .”
We marched in silence through a series of hallways past large displays of the results of other investigations. After several turns, we stepped into a small conference room. Agent Wardlaw indicated that I should sit in a chair that waited at a long table. There was a telephone on the table. A long cord led off toward a smaller table by the wall, suggesting that the telephone had been set there for this occasion.
I sat. I was not liking this. It was, in fact, beginning to scare me. I glanced up at Noreen for some sort of indication of what was going on, but she avoided eye contact.
Agent Wardlaw picked up the receiver, laid a small notebook open on the table, and began to dial a series of numbers that were written on the page. He seemed to be punching in an abnormally long sequence of digits. Finally he settled in and listened, unbuttoning his suit jacket and tugging his waistband up over his expansive gut. At length, the party answered. He gave some clearances. Then he handed the phone to me.
“Hello?” I said uncertainly.
A second passed, two, then a very familiar voice came on the line. It said, “Hey, babe.”
“Jack?”
There was that same funny delay, then: “It’s me all right.”
“What the—” I looked up at Agent Wardlaw, who was not smiling. In the split second after I recognized Jack’s voice, I had decided that this must be some elaborate joke the boys were playing on me, but this man still looked like he thought I was something the cat had dragged in.
“Honeybun,” Jack said, “listen up, and listen quick. You’re in Quantico, right?”
“Yeah … where are you?”
He did not answer my question directly. “I am on a satellite phone, so this is being expensive, and it’s gotta be short. And there are people listening, got me? Our people. This is a secure line in the respect that everybody listening is friendly, but they don’t know you like Tom and I
do. So, here’s the deal: You’ve gone and gotten yourself a client, eh?”
I said nothing. My heart beat out a tattoo. I glanced over at Noreen, who was standing half turned away, her arms folded across her chest to comfort herself. Her lips were tight with anger. After maybe five seconds, I said, “Jack, I have taken on a case, yes, but you understand that there is such a thing as discretion.”
The satellite delay made Jack’s sardonic laugh come a beat late. “Sure, darling, except your client is someone our guys have been keeping an eye on.”
The floor felt like it was dissolving below me. The room went slightly gray. “What the f—” I caught myself, remembering that judgmental strangers were listening.
“We will deny
all
of this if you spill a word of it to
anyone
,” Jack said. “And that includes Faye. You keep your lip buttoned. I am on the phone right now hoping you’ll do the smart thing and sever your contract.”
“Jack, I can’t—”
“Yes you can, and you will. Because I know you understand what’s at stake. We’re bending the rules just to warn you. And if you play this wrong, you … know how difficult it will be to get anyone on your side in the future.”
“Okay,” I said weakly.
“Good. I know and you know that you had no intention of doing anything illegal when you took this guy on.”
“I have not broken any laws!” I said hotly.
“Of course you haven’t. But your client probably has. That’s why he’s on our list. You got me?”
My skin began to feel clammy. “What’s he done?”
“Well, now, we lack a little evidence on that score as yet, but trust me, he’s been on the radar screen for quite a while now. It’s an old game called supply the guys with the strongest currency. When I first came on board, it was the Italians; then, when the mark got strong, it was the German industrialists. The mark fell and the yen came up, and it was the Japanese. Next it was the drug lords, and after them, the Arabs. They all want pretty things. We’ve been working with Interpol for years on these jobs.”
“You’re talking about stolen art?”
“Don’t ask questions. Now, Emmy, Agent Wardlaw was kind enough to give me a holler when he saw your name come across his bow. He knew
you’d probably take this better coming from me than from him. Am I right?”
I sat in stunned silence. “You think I wouldn’t listen to him?”
“Knowing you like I do, he’d have had quite a job getting you onboard all by himself. So here I am up in the middle of the night, and it’s what, two in the afternoon where you are. I got to get back to my sack, sweet thing. I wish you were … well, you know. It’s time for me to hand you back over to Pretty Boy there.”
“Do you know this man, Jack?” I blurted. “Do you vouch for him?” I was reading Noreen Babcock’s body language. She did not like this fellow.
“Yeah, yeah, Wardlaw and I go way back. You ask him about the job at that bar in Cleveland sometime. Or the time he got his butt in a crack in Kansas City. Look, keep your nose clean, darling. I miss you. Wish I could say more.”
“Jack—”
“I gotta go, hon.”
“Jack?” I was beginning to tremble with adrenaline, and only half of it had to do with the intimidation I was feeling from being goose-walked down the hallway by one of the Blues Brothers. The rest was the shock of hearing for the first time in over half a year the voice of a man whom, for better or worse, I loved.
“’Bye now,” he said. The line went empty.
I wanted to reach out across the miles and grab Jack and kiss him and, at the same time, throttle him. I held the phone to my ear a moment longer, hoping that I was dreaming this whole thing, and that in a moment, the conference-room door would open and he would walk in and throw me on my back on the table and give me some of what I had been missing for far too long.
Agent Wardlaw pulled a small object with a wire trailing out of it from his ear and put it in his pocket. Then he reached out and took the phone back from me and returned it to its cradle. Almost amiably, he said, “That bit about Kansas City is a lie.”
 
 
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Noreen, Agent Wardlaw, and I were settled in a small employees’ lounge with cups of coffee.

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