St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

minority.”
    “How about Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington?” Jill asked, walking toward two paintings.
    “They’re the men who led the charge of cowboys, Indians, and wilderness sojourners into the twentieth century.” Zach looked at the two paintings. “The Russell is a fine example of the genre. The Remington has a signature.”
    She bit her lip against laughter. “Not one of his better efforts?”
    “Even the best painters turn out ordinary canvases. Fact of life. But most people care more for the signatures than the art. The prestige factor disappears if no one knows the artist’s name.”
    “You have a jaundiced view of art collectors.”
    “I was in the business for a few years,” he said.
    “I thought you were in intelligence.”
    “I was.” Still am, sometimes. Just for a different employer. One who understands that bad intel leads to really bad strategy.
    “What about the artists who aren’t household names?” she asked, gesturing at the rest of the wall of art. “Some of these paintings are very skillful, both in technique and in evocation. And some of them are barely a step above old magazine illustrations.”
    “Some of these were magazine illustrations. Don’t hold it against them. Western art is meant to be accessible. No scholarly explanations are required in order to enjoy it.”
    “My professors would call a lot of these sentimental and intellectually naive.”
    “Politics, not art,” Zach said. “Used to be that the Church commissioned and explained art. Now it’s the turn of secular priests selling modernism of some stripe to commission and explain. Same claim to moral power, different collection plate.”
    Jill watched Zach from the corner of her eye. He didn’t notice. He was looking at each canvas with the eyes of a scholar and the body of a brawler.
    If he’d been a painting, she’d have wrapped him up and taken him home.
    But he wasn’t, so she concentrated on a large canvas filled with colorful Indian braves and stalwart cavalrymen in blue coats and hats that had been tattered by weather and war.
    “My professors would scream,” she said, “but this painting really speaks to me. Guess I’m a natural-born plebe.”
    Zach glanced at the painting, then found its page in the catalog. Along with a brief biography of the artist, there was a price range the canvas was expected to bring.
    “You’re a plebe with great taste,” he said. “That’s a Howard Ruckelshaus. It’s expected to bring between a million and a million-two. If there are some heavyweight Ruckelshaus collectors at the auction, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bidding blow right through a million and a half. That’s what auctions are all about—excitement and record prices.”
    Jill stared at Zach, saw that he wasn’t kidding, and went back to looking at the paintings. She spent a long time on a bigger-than-life portrait of a drenched, exhausted cowboy in a yellow slicker hauling a saddle in one hand and a bridle in the other. In the corral behind him, his weary horse had its head down, eating a freshly broken bale of hay.
    “I’ve been there,” Jill said. “So tired you see double. But the horse has to be fed, watered, and rubbed down before you crash.”
    “Code of the West?”
    “Code of the ranch. Animals first, humans second.”
    The next painting that stopped her was an epic canvas, fresh and vivid, like it had just come from the artist. The canvas showed the driving of the golden spike that symbolically joined the transcontinental railway across the United States. Well-fed Anglo men were congratulating each other on completing an important job.
    Yet the focus of the painting was not the successful men in business suits, but rather a large group of Chinese workmen who had been shunted off to one side. They were allowed to witness the event their sweat had made possible, but they weren’t included in the congratulations.
    Jill made a small sound and studied the workers. Their faces were individual, unique, subtly heroic, without the bland sameness of the businessmen. Like the cowboy’s horse, the Chinese were bone-tired; unlike the horse, no one was going to see to their needs.
    “Remarkable,” she said. “The technique and composition are classical European, yet the Chinese men remind me of nothing so much as the clay army of Xian. Individually human and universal man at the same time.”
    “The artist is a Chinese immigrant. Lives in Tucson.” Zach skimmed the