Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  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.

  “You can leave us if you want,” Wardlaw told Noreen. “Our guest and I need to have a little discussion, and then I’ll bring her up to your laboratory. I’ll be staying with her the rest of the time she’s in this building anyway. You got work to do, don’t you?”

  “I’ll stay,” she said stiffly. I had to hand it to Noreen: She had not left my side since fetching me from the lobby. She was obviously annoyed that Agent Wardlaw had insisted on observing me for so long before letting me into the building.

  I wanted to join her in kicking his butt up between his ears. “Okay, ask me whatever it is you insist on knowing,” I said irritably. “I’m not even sure who we’re talking about here.”

  “William Krehbeil the Third,” said Agent Wardlaw.

  My head sank toward my coffee cup. So much for my nonexistent poker face. “Okay, he is my client. But I have very little to say. Really, he’s a far better poker player than I am. Cool as a cucumber. Showed me next to nothing.”

  “What did he show you?”

  “No!” I said hotly. “Listen, this is not a fishing expedition. I am here because two of your best agents—Tom Latimer and Jack Sampler—have found me completely trustworthy. They like my instincts, approve of my ethics. So no, I am not going to blurt out everything I know about Tert Krehbeil to you just because you’re flashing a badge at me.”

  “Tert?” said Agent Wardlaw. “Is that some sort of a nickname?”

  I jumped to my feet. “I do not like your attitude, Mr. Wardlaw. I was looking for work when I found this job, and I can go right back to that status in a heartbeat with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I don’t need Tert Krehbeil and I don’t need to answer to you. You want to serve me a subpoena? I’ll get myself a lawyer. I may be flat broke and naïve as shit, but I don’t go around letting people like you intimidate me, do you hear me?”

  Wardlaw was grinning, his fingers interlaced on top of his necktie. “Jack said you were a spitfire. I like that in a—”

  “Go to hell!” I roared. I was still shaking, but it was a different kind of adrenaline rush now. I was ready to move. “Noreen, maybe you’d better escort me back outside.”

  Noreen stood up, and smiled for the first time.

  Wardlaw leaned back in his chair and raised a hand to calm me. “Okay, fun’s over, I can see that. Jack never was no idiot, and I can see he’s picked hisself a smart girlfriend. Sorry. Sit down. Please.” He patted the air with his paw.

  I stayed standing, but relaxed slightly. Noreen folded her arms across her chest again and looked back and forth between us like she was watching a particularly good tennis match.

  Agent Wardlaw cleared his throat. “Okay, we’ll do this the other way. This Tert Krehbeil—I like that nickname, kinda cute, kinda like ‘Turd’ or something—has got his tit in the wringer with us Feds. He’s an art dealer, you know that?”

  I said nothing.

  Wardlaw shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, well, art dealers are handling all kinds of dough, y’know? And it can kinda go to their heads sometimes. They start out with a little favor to a client … say, delivering the goods to them on the sly in-state, but shipping an empty crate to their country home out-of-state. That way the client avoids paying sales tax. That can amount to thousands, or even tens of thousands, of bucks.”

  I sat down again and leaned my head onto my hands on the tabletop. I felt a ripping urge to start gabbling, to tell this moron that I had known all along that Tert was dishonest. I wanted to underscore once again that I was nobody’s idiot. What stopped me was that I wasn’t sure whom I would be trying to convince, him or me.

  Noreen said, “So he’s been doing what, smuggling artworks? Defrauding the IRS?”

  “Probably some of each,” said Wardlaw. “These guys are like cakes of soap in the bathtub. We catch one and another one dives in and starts to get slippery. Of course it doesn’t help that they’re dealing to high rollers who think it’s just a laugh and a half to flout their obligations to the government.” He examined his stubby fingers, and took a nibble of one cuticle.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Wardlaw yawned. “Oh, the clients are a bunch of rich guys. Multimillionaires. Billionaires, some of them. So they get a hard-on for ways to show off to each other. They get to needing some new hit, something no one else has. A thing of great beau-ty,” he sing-songed, lifting one pinkie like he was having tea with the Queen. “They’ll buy an artwork and hide it away in some inner room in their mansion somewhere, and even the cleaning lady isn’t allowed in. Only they get to look at it, see? It’s like an Arab sheik having a new virgin every couple months.”

  Tert’s missing painting began to flash like neon in my brain. “So, let me guess: A painting that hasn’t been seen by very many people is worth more than one that has.”

  “The fewer the better,” said Wardlaw. “If the image is made public, they call it ‘burned.’ It’s like somebody else deflowered it.”

  “They want the piece that went straight from the artist’s studio into a private collection a hundred years ago,” I said sourly. So that’s it: If Tert’s painting had been real, it would have commanded an especially high sum. Crying over his lost childhood picture, my eye!

  Wardlaw scratched an ear. “Or they go for the big time, and do art theft on request. They make the necessary connections, and their tricky-fingered friend goes into the museum with a mat knife and liberates a Renoir from its frame. Either way, they get their rocks off.”

  My stomach was lurching at the terms he was using, but I could not deny that they fit perfectly with everything that had felt strange about Tert Krehbeil. He was my age or better, and had never married, presumably preoccupied with other obsessions. He had tossed out a check for three thousand dollars as if it were pocket change. He was aristocratic and dripping in a sense of entitlement, above the law. He was … what had his brother and sister called him? Precious. I asked, “Do you have anything solid on him, or does he just keep bad company?”

  Agent Wardlaw did not reply. Having made his accusation, he had folded his arms across his chest, waiting to see what I would do. For all the affect he showed, he might have been a B-movie version of the Sphinx.

  I sat and pulled my lip, thinking. What was I going to do?

  It was tempting to tell Wardlaw that apparently this time someone had put one over on Tert, and that he had gotten stuck with forged goods. But Tert had told me that the painting in question was a family heirloom. Was it, or was that another one of his deceits? He had moaned so persuasively about his grandmother and her beloved painting. Had that story been imaginary? Or had that once-proud family long since sold its treasures? Had he hired me to document a fake so they could collect insurance on a painting he’d already sold to some high-roller?

  And there was the little matter of Faye’s involvement with this deceitful little upper-crust so-and-so. She was staying with someone who was being watched by the FBI, and that was not good. Now I was completely certain that I should get Faye and Sloane Renee out of there.


  “Your friend Faye Carter is staying with him,” Wardlaw said, as if reading my mind.

  Another wave of adrenaline shot over me. I had let myself believe that Wardlaw was not the crispest card in the deck. “Faye Carter is the widow of Tom Latimer,” I said. “She has known Tert’s brother Hector since college, that much I’ll give you for free. She only met Tert a few weeks ago. I’m sure the whole thing amounts to nothing more than friend-of-the-family status, or I would have known about it. I am her closest confidante,” I said, appalled at the fiction I was weaving, “and she said nothing about him until a few weeks ago, when he phoned out of nowhere and asked her to transport some artwork for him.”

  Wardlaw pursed his chubby lips. “Did she do it?” He actually managed to look concerned.

  Heat swept up over my face as I realized that I was once again giving things away. Explaining now that the services she had intended to provide would support a show in a very highly regarded museum would sound like I was treading water, so I said, “If you’ve been following this guy closely enough to know I’m working for him, then surely you know the answer to that one!”

  He pawed the air again. “Okay, okay, calm down. I just wanted to make sure we didn’t miss something.”

  Through gritted teeth, I said, “Faye came east with me to take a break. It’s been a long, tough adjustment for her since Tom was killed. She thought she’d visit a few friends. Look, she has the baby with her. She’d never knowingly put that kid at risk, do you hear me?”