Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  Fred shook his head affably. “Me? I’m just a field geologist with a mineral hammer and a tiny little braincase.”

  Nigel said, “Don’t believe a word of it, Ms. Hansen. Our Dr. Petridge here is a veritable warehouse of information on things mineralogical. Of course, he comes with no backup file, but that is the inherent weakness of your basic hominid. But getting back to your mission, my dear lady, what is it we can do for you?”

  I said, “I’d like to know what artists’ pigments might have been mined in Pennsylvania in the 1800s.”

  Fred Petridge’s swivel chair squeaked as he leaned back to examine the ceiling, where he apparently kept his mental retrieval system. “In the 1800s there was plenty going on. Pigment mining was a fairly local affair, with small shops scattered around the commonwealth, mostly mining ocher and other earth colors. Of course, you had your chromite mining down by the Maryland line; that was very big from about the 1820s through the turn of the century.”

  “I know that the 1800s saw the development of chemically-derived pigments,” I said. “Was there much pigment manufacturing here, or was it more like with the ochers, used directly?”

  “Well, chromite was processed into lead chromate. That was done down near Baltimore and then richer reserves were found in Africa and the game folded and moved there. It’s always thus with mining and manufacturing.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Right now our nation is importing most of its mined resources, and that creates a trade deficit.”

  Nigel interjected, “Can’t have all that mess right here in our own backyards, old man.”

  Fred shook his head. “I say if we’re using the resources, then we ought to use our own, and avoid weakening our economy. But you’re asking about the 1800s. Even the ochers were washed and sorted, and we have umbers. Come with me,” he said, leading us back out into the network of halls. “We have a nice old text in our library that might interest you.”

  The library was a large room with low ceilings and tall bookcases crammed with texts and maps. Fred introduced me to the librarian, who hurried back into the stacks and found the text in question.

  It was a slim volume entitled, The Mineral Pigments of Pennsylvania, by Benjamin Miller, published in 1911. I licked my chops, metaphorically speaking, and reached out to take it from the librarian’s hands.

  Nigel grabbed before I reached it and flipped through it impatiently, his mustaches pulling up like a moth folding its wings. “Looks very interesting, I’m sure. But how do you intend to use some old stuffy tome like this to catch bad guys?”

  “I work intuitively,” I said, trying to make that sound as if it explained everything.

  “Ah,” said Nigel. “First you fight your way into the wet paper bag, and then you fight your way back out again.”

  Fred said, “Oh, don’t get going on her, Nigel, she doesn’t know yet what a cream puff you really are. Don’t take him seriously, Em. I’m sure you can’t talk about most aspects of the cases you’ve worked on. But, of course, we’d love hearing about anything you can talk about.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “In fact, yes, a lot of it is privileged information. I can tell you that I have a date at the FBI’s forensic labs tomorrow … .”

  Nigel’s mustaches took flight again, and I saw almost all of his teeth. “Oh goody! Might I come along?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. I’ve had to survive a security screening to get cleared for the visit, and it took a week. I’m sure they couldn’t do it on twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  “Drat. But you’ll give us a full report.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes. Because you’ll come back the day after next, to join us. Won’t she, Freddie?”

  I said, “Join you for what?”

  “For where,” said Nigel. “Fred here has pretensions of taking me in the field to show me what’s actually on the ground. Imagine. It would tuck in nicely with your work, I’d say.”

  Fred nodded appraisingly. “Sure. We could go see some of the old chromite district as a focal point to experiment with your system. Another colleague of mine will be along, too, but that’s okay, there are seats for four.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said. “Where else might we be going on our trip?” Fred said, “Oh, I was figuring to run over to Manheim Township and look at some limonite pseudomorphs. They’re iron oxide—right up your alley—though I don’t suppose these ones were used in paints.”

  “Pseudomorphs,” said Nigel, wrinkling up his nose in such a way that his mustaches looked like they were having sex. “What possible use are pseudomorphs to a man like me?”

  “They’re a mined material, first,” answered Petridge, “and they’re a clue to what lies beneath.” He turned to me. “Here in Pennsylvania, we have a rather heavy soil and vegetative cover. It makes it difficult to discern much about the structure of the rock formations beneath, but we have our ways of figuring things out.”

  Nigel sneered theatrically. “GIS, my good man. I keep telling you, my GIS will make it all clear to you. Some good color infrared aerial photography with the right crop in the fields, and you’re going to see all the structure you can tolerate.”

  Fred shook his head. “Nigel, it’s remarkable that I’ve convinced you to look at actual data. You’d so much prefer to invent reality.”

  “Bosh,” said Nigel. “On Wednesday I’ll show you correlations between the county soils map and your geology, cross-correlated to property values and usage. You’ll be on your ruddy little knees asking for more.”

  “Can you show how that correlates with the farms?” I inquired.

  “A flick of the wrist,” said Nigel.

  “Well, then, we’ll meet here at eight,” said Fred.

  “For what?” squealed Nigel. “To drive a stake through my heart? What an ungodly hour!”

  I said, “Actually, it would be great if we could start a little later. I might be driving back up from Washington,” I said.

  Fred shrugged his shoulders. “Call it nine then.”

  SOMETIMES THE ADVENTURE of making professional contacts is an exercise in uncertainty, or even time wasted. I came away from the Pennsylvania Geologic Survey feeling intellectually stimulated, but wondering if I had gotten anything that would be of any use in constructing a master’s thesis. As I drove south towards Washington, I felt only a brewing sense of anxiety. Fred and Nigel were very entertaining individuals and obviously knew a lot, but I did not even know what questions to ask them. I had met Tert’s mother and sister, but had learned only that they were, each in her own way, as emotionally off-kilter as he was, and that the supposed collection of Western masterworks was either a fiction or stored somewhere else.

  And yet Tert had wanted to keep me away from the house. Why? Was he afraid I’d tell Faye that the family fortune was on the skids? I wondered why I was making so much work for myself. Faye is probably sick of him by now. I could just analyze the pigments in the chips he gave me, write up a short summary—or perhaps he doesn’t even want anything in writing—hand over the data, and spend the money.

  But you can’t publish those results, I reminded myself. So you’re off to find a painting or paintings you can analyze in public. Maybe tomorrow morning’s meeting at the National Gallery of Art will pan out, or the afternoon’s meeting at the FBI.

  The road wound ahead of me, a long black ribbon dotted with cars. About halfway between Baltimore and Washington, traffic slowed to a molasseslike crawl, and it took two hours to travel the next forty miles. In that time, I struggled to tease the two problems—Tert and his paint chips and the question of a Master’s thesis—into two heaps, but they kept grabbing hold of each other again.

  So this is rush hour, I mused. No one was going anywhere in a hurry. I inched southward along Interstate 95 to Washington’s beltway, where I had to slow down even more. Illuminated signs advised traffic conditions for several exits on either side of the junction. Eventually I gained the turnoff onto New Hampshire Avenue, following the instructi
ons Faye’s great uncle had advised, and moved ponderously miles and miles down a city street through endless traffic lights. I missed several critical turns where the route took unexpected jogs, but eventually found my way to Dupont Circle, where I dodged kamikaze Volvo and Mercedes drivers who were clearly tired of living, and missed my turn onto Massachusetts Avenue. I went all the way around the circle as cars crossed wildly to inner and outer lanes, then finally made the correct right turn and promptly overran the building I was looking for.

  I had presumed that something named the Cosmos Club would be well marked, perhaps with a large marquee sign with twinkling lights or neon, but in this grove of ostentatious buildings, their signs were oddly reserved. It took me three passes involving as many twisty negotiations of a network of side streets to find the club—a three-story mansion in some sort of Baroque revival style, encrusted with pillars and pilasters and dripping with carved putti and gargoyles—and then it was only by dead reckoning.

  Parking briefly on the street, I walked past the wrought iron gates and clear up the curving driveway to the door before I could read the small brass plaque by the ornate door that demurely indicated that this building indeed housed the Cosmos Club.

  Next I had to figure out how to get in. It seemed that one had to ring a buzzer and be let in by a man in uniform. He showed me through the ornate lobby and into a room to the right, where a young woman from somewhere in the Middle East checked me in, took a print of my credit card, offered me an apple from the bowl on the counter, and said that Mr. Carter—Faye’s great uncle—would be meeting me for dinner at eight. That gave me less than an hour to figure out where to park the car (there was a gated lot for fifteen dollars a night, highly recommended, or a long walk to a side street so I wouldn’t get towed, not recommended as the car might be stolen or ransacked), take my luggage to my room (down a couple of hallways, into the world’s tiniest elevator, around and down more confusing junctions of corridors, and into a room not much bigger than my car), and dress for dinner (Faye had intervened in my packing ritual just enough to persuade me to pack what little I had in the way of travel clothes that looked like city attire, which amounted to one knit skirt, a turtleneck shirt with no holes in it, a boiled-wool jacket, and a pair of dress pumps).

  It was a nice room, very clean and very quiet. I ceremoniously set my duffel on the little folding table supplied for luggage, kicked off my shoes, and lay down on the bed. I closed my eyes for precisely two minutes and forced myself to take long, deep breaths. Once done with that attempt at relaxation, I toured the room. It featured a tidy set of furniture in American Colonial style, a phone, a closet, and a small private bath. Here I was in for a treat: The Cosmos Club might believe in understated signs at the entrance, but inside it regarded its name and crest so highly that it printed one or both on all consumables—on the soaps, on the cups, on the hand towels, and even on the emery boards that had been kindly supplied should I choose to smooth my fingernails. Back by the bed on the tiny writing desk, I found the Cosmos crest on the pens and the little pads of paper. I decided that Washington was not only the capital of our nation, but also of self-importance.

  At the appointed hour, I made my way back down to the lobby by a route which took me through halls encased in an overwhelming amount of dark, ornately carved paneling past billiard rooms, ballrooms with Baroque and Rococo ceilings, and down curving stairways. On two levels I found galleries of portraits of members past and present, including proud displays of Cosmos members who had won Pulitzers, Nobels, and other prizes, and a nice oil of a past president of the United States who was identified here only as “Herbert Hoover, Mining Engineer.” By the time I found my way back to the lobby, I was positively giddy. The man in uniform bid me good evening and gestured toward an elderly gentleman in a dark green suit and bow tie who was seated in an overstuffed chair near a row of French doors.

  Mr. Carter was tall, like his niece, and equally slender—in his case, almost to the point of boniness—and blessed with the same large, eloquent eyes, although his were surmounted by an untamed array of twisting eyebrows. His pale gray hair lay in thin wisps around his sagging face. When he saw me approach, he rose from his chair with the stiffness of age and took my hand in his long, dry fingers. “Miss Hansen, is it? Welcome to my club. I trust they’ve made you comfortable.”

  “Please call me Emily,” I said, slipping into prep-schoolitis. I was back in the East, inside the many-toothed jaws of my childhood, and I could not for the life of me behave as the independent woman I so fervently tried to be.

  Mr. Carter led me into the restaurant, which was quietly alive with waiters in tuxedos and ancient diners enjoying lavish meals at tables heavy with linen cloths and elaborate settings. We settled in and ordered, then he said how pleased he was that Faye had befriended a geologist, and that I was to feel quite welcome at the Cosmos, which had been founded by John Wesley Powell, a giant among students of the Earth. “This is after all a meeting place for scientists, and you young women are earning your place right along with the men these days,” he informed me.

  I could see why Faye had sent me to him. You’re a nice old dinosaur, I decided, especially considering that you’re paying for dinner. Or at least I hope you are.

  He asked, “So what brings you to Washington, my dear? Faye tells me you are a forensic scientist.” Here he shot out his head like a turtle coming out of its shell, lowered his bushy eyebrows, and said, “Are you on a case?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. He was a sweet old geezer, and, like his great-niece, a bit of a rogue. I realized that I was thinking warmly of Faye for the first time in quite a while. I was, in fact, enjoying myself immensely, and felt grateful to her that she had made it possible. “Well,” I said, leaning forward to meet my host with a suitably conspiratorial tone, “I can’t talk about it much, but it involves paint pigments.” I chose these last words carefully, indicating by my choice of terms that the paints in question were those used by artists. “Pigments are often mined materials,” I added, for spice. “I’ll be visiting some chromite mines on Wednesday.”

  His wild old eyebrows shot skyward. “Aha! Then you must meet Martin Hauser.” He leaned back and beckoned to another old gent who was dining alone at a nearby table. “Ho there, Mart! Come join us.” As the man arrived, Mr. Carter added, “Miss Hansen, meet Mr. Hauser, retired chemical engineer for Chromex Corporation in Baltimore. Miss Hansen is a geologist, and a dear friend to my great-niece.”

  Mr. Hauser fit his suit like a sausage in its casing. He bowed slightly as he shook my hand and then lowered himself into a chair, crimping his rotund body into a sitting position. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your acquaintance?”

  I felt like I had both of my granddads to myself on Christmas morning. “I’m trying to learn what I can about mineral pigments,” I said. “It sounds from the name as if Chromex Corporation might have interests in that area.”

  Mr. Hauser’s cheeks went Santa Claus–rosy as they bunched up into a smile. “Why, my dear, Chromex has entirely too much interest in mineral pigments. Our site in Baltimore was ground zero for a marvelous experiment done by the Environmental Protection Agency. You see, Baltimore was the center of chromite milling and chromate pigment manufacture during the nineteenth century.”

  Why Faye, you sly fox, I mused. You’ve used some of your pixie dust to connect me with people who can help me with my thesis. Aloud, I said, “Wait, I’m confused: Did you say chromate or chromite?”

  Mr. Hauser smiled indulgently and waggled a fat finger at me. “Heavens, my dear, a geologist should know these things! Chromate is the ion: , or one chromium atom to four oxygen. Chromite is the mineral, FeCr2O4, so you have one iron, two chromium, and four oxygen.”

  “And what interest did the EPA have in chromite?”

  “None whatsoever,” he replied cheerily. “But of course, chromate contains into hexavalent chromium, a terrible toxin when released into the wild—what the EPA calls ‘the environment.’ I
n the latter half of the twentieth century, when the EPA decided that there was too much hex chromium leaching into Chesapeake Bay—which I don’t dispute; heavens, it was ruining the oyster beds!—we were required to do a clean closure of the old processing plant. We moved hundreds of thousands of yards of material and essentially sealed it in an impermeable sarcophagus. Then we all sat back and waited for the EPA to notice that the hex levels were not dropping in the Chesapeake.”

  “And weren’t they? Why not?”

  Mr. Hauser’s grin broadened until his eyes were merry little dots. “Because that wasn’t the only place the stuff was coming from. You see, during the mid-1800s, when chromite mining was at its height, Baltimore was also growing at a terrific clip. They needed more solid ground for building. Baltimore sits at the boggy edge of the Chesapeake, so they had some baylands to fill. And what nice, solid fill material was handy? Why, the tailings from the chromite milling! Half of downtown Baltimore is built on chromite rubble, and there’s no way the EPA is going to get those towering buildings to lift up their skirts while we sweep away the floorboards they’re standing on. So as groundwater percolates through the ground Baltimore is built on, it acts like one, big, nasty tea-bag spewing that carcinogen right into the Bay.”

  “Martin,” said Mr. Carter, “Miss Hansen will think your amusement over the fouling of the Chesapeake rooted in psychopathic glee.”

  “No, sir,” he replied. “This is how perfectly healthy scientists speak when discussing the human comedy. Certain tensions inevitably erupt around our attempts to fix errors made in prior ignorance, and a delight in irony can dispel the irritation built up while dealing with the zeal of regulatory agents who too often take the attitude that retroactive righteousness is a proper cure for the environmental woes that betide us all. In the 1800s, humanity wanted chromate, and the demand created an economic basis for mining, refining, and manufacturing products from it. Unfortunately the technology used had an unintended side effect, namely the release of toxins that were not understood until people and oysters began to show illness many decades later. Sadly, the cost of cleanup probably dwarfed the profits made in the heyday of production.”