Earth Colors Read online

  “They’re wonderful,” I said. “I’ve never seen Remingtons glow like this.”

  “We struggled to get the lighting just right, and we replaced the frames. Black, very simple, that’s what Remington intended; the frames underscore the darkness. Collectors too often replaced them with fancy gilt because that’s what they were used to, but that puts light around the edges instead of darkness.”

  “It’s amazing how bright the darkness is in some of these,” I marveled. I pointed at Friends or Foes?, which played its visual tricks with a surprisingly pale shade of blue. A lone brave has halted, alert and uncertain astride his horse, staring across a snow-covered, starlit vastness. The horse’s breath forms ghosts in the frigid air. An unseen moon casts their shadows across the frozen ground. Horse and rider are lost in a world of coldness, a chilling blue, as the brave tries to ascertain what awaits him at a row of distant lights.

  My eye was drawn next to The Hungry Moon, a dark, moody painting of three Indian women dressing down a buffalo kill in the moonlight. “The subjects form a dark hole right in the center of the composition,” I observed.

  “Yes,” said Emmett. “You can sense their anxiety, their rush to complete the task. Why were they working in the night, and where were their men?”

  The Hungry Moon was composed primarily using dark greens and black shadows. Suddenly that peculiar green flashed a message to my brain, and I turned and stared at The Sentinel, the green painting I had seen only weeks before at the Whitney Gallery in Cody. “This shade of green,” I said. “It’s …” I turned slowly and examined adjoining walls.

  Emmett said, “Remington used the trick of juxtaposing that bluish green with a yellowish white many times; it’s as clear and masterful as a signature musical riff played in concert, tossed out in bravado flourishes. Look: Here it is again.” He pointed at Shotgun Hospitality, which used these colors to depict the nighttime visit of three Indians. They had caught one uncertain white man seated alone by his campfire. The Indians are standing swathed in blankets that make them even more massive, more imposing, and the one at the center of the scene has his back square to the viewer. Emmett said softly, “Again he’s filled the center of the composition with a darkness that consumes our attention.”

  This was romantic realism at its most grim.

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I glanced from painting to painting, taking in each one using that green as the mask of darkness. The value of the color varied from canvas to canvas, and the degree to which it had been grayed, but in each, it was the same unmistakable blue-green. “Hooker’s green,” I said aloud.

  Emmett turned from his own musings and looked at me. “Yes. An interesting choice, eh?”

  An interesting choice. Those had been the exact words Tert Krehbeil had used when discussing the pigment with his companion in Cody.

  And as I looked at this color repeated in so many of these paintings, I realized how he knew that the painting he had shown me was a forgery.

  The green in Tert’s painting was not correct. It was not Hooker’s green.

  I steadied my voice and asked questions as calmly as I could. “Hooker’s green was on your list of Remington’s pigments. I went to an art-supply shop before flying out here and looked all through the oil paints, but it wasn’t there.”

  “Of course not. It’s a watercolor pigment.”

  “Then how—”

  “It was occasionally made up as an oil paint back then. The problem is that the yellow—”

  “Gamboge.”

  “Yes, gamboge is water-soluble, and it’s not lightfast. It’s also extremely toxic.”

  “Really? Then why did he use it?”

  “Well, Remington wanted that precise effect, and it took those two pigments to get it. Prussian blue is a distinct dark blue, rather less purple than ultramarine, but not as warm as indigo. And gamboge is a mustard yellow. In Remington’s day, the only other pigment that even came close was Indian yellow, and it had already been outlawed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because even then, in an era when people were much more used to using and abusing animals, the manner in which it was created was considered cruel.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  “Cows were fed mango leaves and kept on short water rations. Indian yellow is an acid that collected in their urine. Nowadays we have a synthetic pigment that comes close, but it’s not the same.” He shook his head. “No, they’re never quite the same.”

  I took a breath. “So Emmett, speaking of inexact pigments, are you ever asked to examine forgeries?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Certainly. People donate paintings and want to write them off their taxes, so of course we have to look them over carefully, and occasionally we get one that’s been cooked.”

  “What do you look for? Modern pigments in a painting that’s supposed to be old?”

  “Yes, certainly, but that’s only good if the forger was a callow idiot. More often, he’s smart enough to use only colors that existed at the time the artist was working. Then we have to look a little deeper.”

  “Such as?”

  “The lead in the lead white. As a geologist, you probably already know this: With modern milling and cyanide processes, how pure is the lead produced at a silver mine?”

  I said, “The lead is removed from the silver, not the other way around … . No, wait! I get it! I’m used to thinking of the silver as the product and the lead as the by-product, but either way, you’re just trying to separate the two. Prior to the development of cyanide refinement systems a century ago, some of the silver would be left in the lead!”

  Emmett said, “You could check the date of that development with your mining specialists. And there are other clues. If it was a supposed Renaissance painting you were dealing with, I’d say to look at the ground. There are coccoliths in the earlier gessoes. By the nineteenth century, the precipitation techniques filtered them out. You can also look at the sulfur ratio in the ultramarine; that’s a way to tell the natural from the synthetic. I’m sure you can think up plenty of other little tricks, and if you do, will you please tell me?” He gave me a meaningful smile.

  I smiled with chagrin. I had nothing I could give him yet, but when I did, I vowed that he’d be one of the first to know. “Most certainly,” I said. “I probably won’t be able to tell you much about the specific job I’m working on, but any new tools of the trade will certainly come your way. Mind if I share your techniques with my colleague at the FBI?”

  “I’d be delighted. But do advise him that our shop isn’t set up to do analyses at the level of rigor they require for legal evidence.”

  “I’ll advise her. And what would that level of rigor require?”

  “I’m sure she could tell you better than I. But at minimum, the chain-of-custody documentation would be much more stringent.”

  Chain of custody … The words hit me like a brick as I realized another part of Tert’s deceit. He just cut out the chips and handed them to me … . Oh, no. … It took me a moment to pull myself together and act like I hadn’t just been caught being a total ignoramus regarding documentation of evidence. Of course a chain-of-custody would be required! Em Hansen, what were you thinking! I said, “What is your standard chain-of-custody system?”

  “Well, whenever a valuable painting is moved—say, from a collector’s home to the shop for repairs, or to the museum for display—documentation is required. And insurance. Typically, our team goes straight to the owner’s house and builds the shipping crate right there, and the owner witnesses the painting being packed safely in the crate. He—or she”—he gave me a wink—“signs the document, as do the handlers. They carry it into their truck. And yes, sometimes the owners require we use Brinks.” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Although I don’t know why they’d want to call attention to the move, and the insurance is in place regardless. Heavens, I’ve done the blanket-wrap method myself, and the insurance was every bit as valid, and ther
e was less banging around.”

  “Blanket wrap?”

  “Yes. One takes a special soft blanket and just wraps it around the painting, frame and all, and lays it flat in the trunk of a car. It’s perfectly adequate for a shorter jaunt, and as I say, sometimes there is less jostling that way.”

  “And do you sometimes take the painting off the stretchers?” I inquired. I wanted to know whether Tert’s methods had any legitimacy whatsoever.

  Emmett shrugged his shoulders. “It depends. For a larger work, as long as it’s not painted on a wooden panel and hasn’t been backed with something stiff along the way, then unmounting and rolling can be the answer. Oils are surprisingly elastic. You put cheesecloth against the paint film to prevent scraping.” He gestured at the paintings on the walls. “One of these would fit into a large mailing tube, as you wouldn’t want to roll it very tightly. But if it’s a Remington, that would be sinful, because you’d want to take every measure to prevent the slightest chip. Although one of these would take a crate too big to fit into a lot of common carriers. He had a standard size, twenty-seven by forty inches. With crate, that’s … let’s see … add eight or ten inches each to height and length, and say, twelve inches in thickness … . You get the idea. And a crate that size is heavy!”

  “You wouldn’t be able to fit one into the baggage bay of a private airplane,” I said, trying to keep a sardonic tone out of my voice. I tried to imagine Faye wrestling something that size or weight into her airplane. There was no way she could manage it. And if my survey of Tert’s mother’s house was correct, there were no other paintings. He had indeed been lying to Faye. He had never intended that she move a painting for him. Then why had he asked her to come to Cody? The whole reason for getting her to Cody must have been to engage her connections to people who could document that his painting was indeed a forgery, and do it with strict confidentiality. But why would he want to keep it a secret? And who copied the original, and where had the original gone?

  Emmett was saying, “Oh, no. No, you’d need a commercial airliner, and, well … It’s so much easier to send by surface.” He glanced at his watch, indicating it was nearing time that he must address other demands on his schedule.

  I slowly turned, taking in each painting one more time, letting them raise me above the concerns of Tert Krehbeil. These were real. They filled me with awe, and happiness, even as their subject matter and force of light and darkness and composition filled me with foreboding. These paintings were not jovial, nor composed for the pure premise of beauty; no, these pictures yanked the viewer in and shouted something deep and unnerving. “I’ve seen a great number of his paintings at the Whitney Gallery in Wyoming,” I said, “but these … there’s something about them … .”

  Emmett took a moment longer and stood like I did, taking in the view, his hands clasped behind his back. “You’re noticing what Remington knew about himself: In his earlier work, he was an illustrator, not a fine artist.”

  “What is the difference between the two, really?”

  Emmett sighed. “That’s always hard to say. There’s an intangible quality that separates the two, a line that dances and vanishes. But in his earlier work, Remington was accurately termed a ‘black-and-white man.’ He even painted in black and white sometimes, knowing that any colors would be lost in reproduction. Remember that he worked in the days before color printing, before television, radio, and high-speed, candid photography. We needed narrative scenes for black-and-white publication, so if you were an artist trying to make a living, that’s what you created: black-and-white illustrations. Look at The Luckless Hunter there: It was published in Scribner’s as a halftone. The subtleties of the color were lost, but not the strength of the composition or the narrative. Yet this was one of his last paintings, a masterpiece of color usage.”

  “And I can feel just how cold that Indian is, riding along in the dark, over the snow … .”

  “And Remington was at last acknowledged as an artist, not just an illustrator. Because as you can see here, he could illustrate any story and make it so gripping that you can, as you say, feel the cold, and yet he aspired to more. He wanted to be included among ‘the painters,’ as he called them, so he labored hard to work with color. He had early successes, but the Academy of Art was interested in harmony. They found Remington’s colors too harsh, too dissonant. What they didn’t know was that he was painting the impressions of a landscape that was just that—harsh, unforgiving, even brutal. It was not the soft, dripping stuff of the Eastern scenery and lighting.”

  “Amen to that,” I said, knowing all too well how quick Easterners could be to dismiss the West as quaint, or naïve. My West was a land of contrasts, all right, but also of clarity. “So what inspired him? What carried him over the threshold from … picaresque to profound?”

  “Nicely phrased,” Emmett said. “Well, what happened is that Remington went to war. His father was a hero of the Civil War, who died when Remington was still quite young. He must have idolized his father, and wished to measure up to his glory. So he went to Cuba. He became a war correspondent in the Spanish-American War, and it put an end to the romantic notions of his childhood. He came home in a state of shock, what we now call post-traumatic stress.” His hand fluttered up with the tension of his tale. “These paintings were his struggle to embrace that ambiguity. Here is beauty, seamlessly intermixed with threat and danger.”

  “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.”

  20

  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.