Plunder of the Ancients by Lucinda Schroeder

Author:Lucinda Schroeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Being sequestered in a well-worn hotel room that grew smaller with every hour was driving me up a wall. I hated not being part of the action and having to sit on the sidelines like a kid sent to the corner for spitting. The torment reminded me of when I was stuck for two days in a six-by-eight-foot cabin in Alaska waiting for my informant Mark Hanson to come back to base camp after an illegal bear hunt. Dense fog had left Mark and his two guides sitting on the tundra until the weather improved so they could fly again. I had no idea what Mark would do or, worse, what he’d say. I worried that Mark would break under such intense pressure and tell the guides who we were. This had happened with informants before. In the end Mark maintained our cover, but he told me later he was so weary being under scrutiny that he almost folded. While the circumstances were different, the stress felt the same.

Sitting by the window of my hotel in Santa Fe, I envisioned my surrogate spies trudging up and down Canyon Road, the center for high-end galleries that carried exquisite sculptures, incredible original artwork, and the finest of Indian weavings. Peder and Wally would be drooling over superior examples of baskets, rugs, parfleches, beaded shirts, and doeskin dresses costing much more than their annual salaries.

They’d also see early fifteenth-century retablos, notebook-sized wooden boards used as canvases. Early Catholic friars painted images of various saints on them and gave them away as part of their Christian mission. Collectors craved them. Intermixed with the fine galleries were shops that filled in the gaps with lower-end Indian paraphernalia and modern Indian-made trinkets for the tourists to buy. For today, my agents were to stay away from the Spirit Bear Gallery and focus on the gallery scene in general. Spirit Bear would be on the radar tomorrow.

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