The Rescue Artist (29 page)

34
The Thrill of the Hunt

I
n the years that followed, Hill made the shotgun story sound like a glorious prank. He and Walker teasing poor Caro might as well have been two boys on a playground chasing a pretty girl with a frog. But when it came to the safety of works of art, Hill could hardly have been more serious. “I’m no artist, and I’m not even Kenneth Clark or Robert Hughes or anyone like that,” he once remarked, in a rare philosophical mood, “but I do have a compulsion to recover these pictures, and I enjoy doing it.”

To create beauty was rare and lofty work, but to safeguard cultural treasures was no paltry thing. “You’re just trying to keep these things in the world,” Hill went on. “It’s simply a matter of keeping them safe and protected and in the right places, where people can enjoy them.”

Hill was always reluctant to talk about “art and truth and beauty and all the rest of it,” presumably for fear of sounding like one of the “hoity-toity art-world pompous assholes” he so disliked. But, grudgingly, he did admit to a sense of mission. “It’s the story of Noah and the rainbow and all that, but you’re a steward not just to the animals two by two but to
everything
worthwhile in life. I left seminary school after two years, and sometimes I still think of myself as a failed priest. I suppose that makes me a self-righteous son of a bitch”—having veered dangerously near introspection, Hill scurried back to safer ground—”but this is a way of fulfilling that vocation.”

If the would-be priest could not save souls for all eternity, at least he could do his best to save some of mankind’s greatest creations for the next few centuries.

As always, though, Hill’s motives were mixed. Some of his zeal for recovering stolen paintings spoke more to adrenaline hunger than to spirituality.

Art theft was a “kudos crime,” Hill liked to say, which was to say that thrills and glory beckoned thieves every bit as temptingly as did daydreams of riches. Hill was quick to concede that the flip side of a kudos crime was a kudos chase. If stealing was a thrill, so was hunting down the thieves. “It’s a big thing, recovering an important painting,” Hill said, after one of his early recoveries, “and obviously I get a buzz out of it.”

Some thieves talked openly, almost sensually, about the thrill of taking what belonged to others. Peter Scott was an English cat burglar, a tabloid favorite, and yet another of Hill’s adversaries. From Scott’s first crime to his last, the risk of getting caught had only made the game more alluring.

Scott did more than his share of mundane thieving, but his favorite cases involved glamorous victims. In a decades-long career in which he claimed to have stolen loot worth £30 million, Scott robbed Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Vivien Leigh, and countless others. Most notoriously, he made off with a diamond necklace that belonged to Sophia Loren, who had been in Britain filming
The Millionairess
. In Scott’s heyday, London newspapers trumpeted the exploits of “The Human Fly.” (And he still ended up broke.)

In 1998, Scott came out of retirement and tried to fence a £650,000 Picasso portrait called
Tête de Femme
, stolen at gunpoint by a bank robber who was disappointed that the media never seemed to deem his crimes newsworthy. This time they did. Scott, who had hoped that his part of the deal would earn him £75,000, ended up instead (at age 67) sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Scott had succumbed to the thrill, “more potent than any woman,” of trying to outwit the clumsy and rule-bound authorities. “As a husband I was a failure and as a lover indifferent,” he acknowledged in his autobiography, “because my real passion was to be out on the roof, or creeping through the country, or making a little tunnel through a wall. I’d found this private … world which yielded a sexual, antisocial excitement unobtainable by other means.”

Charley Hill thought Scott was a
poseur
and a blowhard, but he shared Scott’s disdain for authority and his taste for the grand gesture. For Hill, when it came to art, and to life in general, high stakes were the only ones worth playing for. In college, he had rowed crew but quit when it became plain that he would never be great. “Unless you can gear yourself up for the Olympics or a national championship,” he asked, as if the answer were self-evident, “what’s the point of being a rower?”

Art crime was the same. “When I’m talking to villains,” Hill said, “the bigger they are, the more interesting it becomes. And the paintings I want to get back are the masterpieces of the western European canon.”

The outsized ambition was characteristic. But so was a sense of mocking self-awareness. The cynical gaze that Hill directed at the rest of the world could turn inward as well. “I feel as if I’m some kind of St. George,” he admitted happily. “The thieves are the dragon, and these wonderful paintings are the damsel about to be eaten.

“It’s all bullshit, of course, but it’s necessary bullshit. You’ve got to have some sort of self-esteem in this life, and that’s mine.”

35
The Plan

MORNING, MAY 7, 1994

W
hile Ulving spent a terrifying night obeying the cryptic commands of the man with the cap, Hill snored contentedly behind the thick walls of his room at the Plaza. At six in the morning, his phone rang. “This is Johnsen. I’m in the lobby. It’s time.”

Hill phoned Walker, and the two cops met Johnsen downstairs. “Let’s go for a drive,” Johnsen said. The little party set out in Hill’s rented car. Walker took the wheel, with Hill at his side. Johnsen sat behind Hill, twisted halfway around so that he could look out the back window.

Johnsen gave directions, though he wouldn’t reveal their destination. A rendezvous somewhere, Hill and Walker figured, presumably with Ulving and the bug-eyed stranger.

“Just make sure we’re not followed,” Johnsen told Walker. He cast a nervous glance out the side window and then corkscrewed himself around again, to resume his vigil out the back.

Walker quickly convinced himself there was no one on his tail—for once, they’d shed the Norwegians—but he hammed things up for Johnsen’s benefit. He came to a traffic circle and made a point of going around an extra time; he pulled off the highway as if he had engine trouble and let traffic pass by; he whipped across the road in a tire-squealing U-turn and briefly headed back in the direction they had come. Hill enjoyed the show from his front-row seat.

About thirty-five miles south of Oslo, they reached the town of Drammen. Johnsen pointed to a restaurant alongside the highway. Walker pulled in.

“Park next to that Mercedes.”

Hill, Walker, and Johnsen walked into the small, tidy café. It was quiet and almost empty at this early hour on a frigid Saturday morning. A few patrons sipped their coffee and tried to shake off their sleepiness. Ulving sat waiting at a table with the stranger. He’d never given his name, and Hill thought of him as Psycho.

Ulving, cringing and bleary-eyed, looked like the bigger man’s captive. The three newcomers joined Ulving and Psycho. Ulving barely spoke. Psycho, on the other hand, started in on business at once. It was time to work out the exchange; he had a plan. Walker would bring the money to a particular address. If the money was all there and there was no funny business, Hill or Walker would get a phone call relaying the painting’s whereabouts.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Walker growled. Why would he hand over the money for nothing and then trust the crooks to keep their side of the bargain?

Psycho countered with another plan that was just as flawed.

“That’s bullshit! Forget it!” Walker snapped. Logistics were his domain.

The mood at the crowded table was sullen and tense. Neither side trusted the other; each needed what the other had. Ulving cowered, Psycho blustered, Walker snarled. Psycho repeated his first, no-hope plan.

“Screw that! Find another way.” This time it was Hill.

A tour bus pulled into the parking lot. Suddenly the café was jammed with new arrivals jostling one another as they looked for seats and menus and shuffled off to the bathrooms. Ulving took advantage of the commotion to jump to his feet. “This is all too much. I don’t know what I’m involved in here. I have to leave.”

Psycho grabbed Ulving by the arm. “Sit down!” he growled, and he shoved Ulving back into his seat.

Ulving fell silent. Psycho leaned across the table and glared at Walker and Hill. “If we don’t get this done, I’m going to eat the painting, shit it out, and send it to the minister of culture.”

Johnsen chimed in with a plan. Just as bad as the others. Finally, Walker cut through the impasse.

“Why don’t we do it this way?” he said. “I’ll drive back to the hotel with you two”—he gestured toward Johnsen and Psycho—”and Chris will go with
you”
—Walker glanced at Hill and then at Ulving—”and look at the picture. If everything’s okay, Chris will ring me, and I’ll give you the money. Then Chris can come back with the picture in a taxi.”

It was a simple plan but it offered something to everyone. Johnsen and Psycho jumped at it. They knew that Walker had charge of the money; where he went, they wanted to be. Poor Ulving liked the idea, too, since it set him free from Johnsen and the stranger. Hill welcomed any plan that would get him to
The Scream
.

Walker would be on his own with two large, dangerous men, but he’d be back in the vicinity of John Butler and his police command post. In addition, by heading off with Johnsen and Psycho, Walker had separated them from the painting. If Hill couldn’t find it, or decided he’d been shown a fake … well, the plan didn’t cover that.

Still, Hill liked it. For a start, the scheme got him out of the goddamned restaurant. And Sid was a big boy. He could take care of himself.

In agreement at last, all five men headed to the parking lot. Psycho strode ahead, several steps in front of the others, as if he were in charge. That was a showoff’s mistake, and Hill registered it at once. What an arrogant asshole. Hill and Walker took the chance to hang back and exchange a few clandestine words. Walker kept his voice low and relied on the rumble of traffic on the highway to muffle his words even further.

“Get hold of Butler straight away and tell him what’s happening,” he whispered.

“I’ll do it as soon as I can.”

At the cars, the men split into two groups. Walker, Johnsen, and Psycho piled into Hill’s rented car and headed north, back to Oslo. Hill and Ulving settled into Ulving’s Mercedes sports coupe—Ulving had left his station wagon at home—and started south. Precisely where Ulving was taking him, Hill didn’t know.

The trail ended, he presumed, wherever the thieves had hidden
The Scream
. But even that was a guess, or a hope. All that Hill knew for certain was that he was headed into the unknown, without backup, at risk once again that someone would jam a shotgun into his neck.

36
“Down Those Stairs”

MID DAY, MAY 7, 1994

U
lving set off, veering all over the road. His speed wasn’t a problem. Hill was a fast and aggressive driver himself. But even in ordinary circumstances he hated riding in a car that someone else was driving, and Ulving seemed manic, swerving back and forth and talking without letup. Hill began to fear that before he ever had a chance to set eyes on
The Scream
, Ulving would skid into a ditch or smash head-on into another car.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Hill barked.

Hill disliked Ulving and his tone held more than a hint of menace, but Ulving replied as if the question were genuinely a request for information. He was exhausted, he said. He’d been up all night with the man with the cap. He jabbered on about how scared he’d been, how threatening the stranger was, how frightened his wife had been to see a huge and silent intruder trailing her husband through their house.

Hill laughed. The poor son of a bitch. He took Ulving for a crook, like his companions, but what a sorry excuse for a villain.

“What’s your point?” Hill demanded.

Ulving tried to bring his story back to
The Scream
. The deserted road, the man who emerged from the shadows with the painting wrapped in a blanket, the decision to hide it in Ulving’s summerhouse.

Hill felt a jolt of adrenaline. He did his best to force himself to let Ulving tell his story in his own way, but the reference to still another person handling the painting grabbed his attention.

“How many other people did you see?”

“Just him. Just the one man.”

“Wherever we’re going,” Hill said, “what’s going to happen when we get there? Are a bunch of gorillas going to jump on top of me and hold me at gunpoint until the other guys get their money?”

“No, no, no. That won’t happen. Nothing like that. There’s no danger. Only two people in the world know where the painting is, me and the man with the cap.”

“Right. Sure.”

A moment’s silence. Ulving concentrated on his driving and Hill pondered end-game scenarios. It’d be a fine balls-up if the bodyguard was safe in Oslo and the art cop was a hostage in East Nowhere, Norway.

“I won’t believe you until I see for myself,” Hill said. “If you think you’re going to get the money by holding me for ransom, you’ve got the wrong idea.”

“No, no, I promise you,” Ulving said. “There won’t be anything like that. It’s just going to be you and me.”

Hill half-believed him. In any case, Ulving was such a twit that he’d be a liability to anyone he was in league with. If somebody leapt out at Hill, Ulving would panic before anything terrible happened.

But Hill kept fretting. “Stop the car,” he ordered. He scanned the road anxiously for a tail. After a few minutes, he gestured for Ulving to pull back onto the road.

“I’m not worried about
you
, “Hill told Ulving. “I’m worried about how many goons turn up when we get there.” But only a few miles later he again told Ulving to pull over. Again he surveyed the traffic.

They reached the town of Øsgårdstrand, where Ulving had his summer-house. Munch had lived and painted in a summerhouse in this tiny village on a fjord, and Hill took the opportunity to talk about art for a few minutes. Munch had done a series of paintings that showed three girls on a pier, he said. Didn’t those paintings depict Øsgårdstrand?

Ulving perked up. Yes, that was Øsgårdstrand. And the white building in the background of those paintings was the hotel in town. It was still there, and that very hotel was the one Ulving owned a part-interest in. Ulving’s summerhouse, the hotel, and Munch’s summerhouse were all within a few hundred yards of one another.

Ulving drove to a small house and parked in front of the garage. His cottage was attractive and well-sited, perched above a glittering fjord and nestled in a stand of birch trees. Hill looked around appreciatively. White flowers grew all around. They looked almost like snowdrops. “Are these some sort of Scandinavian edelweiss?” Hill asked.

It was early May. Spring comes late to Norway, and Ulving’s house was still shut up. “You’re sure it’s safe to go in?” Hill asked yet again.

“It’s definitely safe,” Ulving said, and he pushed the front door open.

The glint of glass struck both men before they had a chance to step inside.

“What’s that?” Hill asked.

A large mirror lay smashed on the floor of the entrance hall. Shards of broken glass poked out of the frame. Smaller pieces had been flung farther away when the mirror crashed to the ground.

Hill turned to Ulving. “Was that there when you were here last night?”

“No.”

“How’d it get there, then?”

“I don’t know. The house is closed until summer.”

Hill considered a moment, then stepped inside. The house was dark and cold, the furniture swaddled in bedsheets.

With Ulving trailing behind, Hill stepped silently to the nearest door and shoved it open. Nobody inside. Next room. That one was empty, too. In a few minutes, Hill had surveyed the small house.

“Where is it?” Hill asked. No chit-chat about flowers now.

“Through here.”

Ulving led the way back to the kitchen. The floor was wood, bare except for a small rug. Ulving flipped the rug aside and revealed a trapdoor. The art dealer took a step back out of Hill’s way.

“After you,” Ulving said.

Hill laughed. “I’m not going down there. What do you expect me to do, spend the next three months locked in your cellar?” “That’s fine. I’ll go myself.”

Ulving clambered down the steps into his basement, into the dark. A moment’s fumbling and he found the light switch. More commotion near the stairs, then darkness again as Ulving flipped the switch off. He came back up the stairs carrying a blue bedsheet wrapped around something square. Hill heard a clinking sound.

Ulving handed Hill the blue sheet and replaced the trapdoor. Hill looked down at his hands. About a yard apart. That made sense. He raised his hands an inch or two. Hardly any weight at all. Good.

The two men walked into the dining room. The table was draped in a white bedsheet. Hill set the blue package down in the center of the white table. Ulving reached into his pocket and handed over two small pieces of engraved brass. Hill read one:
Edvard Munch, 1893
and then the other:
Skrik
, Norwegian for “scream.” Taken from the frame, Hill figured.

Hill turned back toward the dining room table. Ulving stood at his shoulder. Hill held the blue-wrapped package with his left hand and began to lift the sheet away with his right. Eager as he was, he worked carefully and gently. Even so, it took only a few seconds.

Horror-struck, Hill gawked at the sheet of cardboard before him. The problem wasn’t the cardboard—Hill knew that Munch had painted his masterpiece on cardboard and not on canvas—but the image. Everyone knew
The Scream
.

This wasn’t it.

Crude as
The Scream
was, this was vastly cruder. Hill saw
The Scream’s
famous central figure outlined in charcoal, a hint of railing in the foreground, a smudge of sky along the top. “What is this goddamned drawing?” Hill muttered. He stared at the cardboard a moment. Then, holding it by the sides, he slowly flipped it over.

Aha!
The Scream
, in its full glory.

None of the reading Hill had done had said a word about a false start on the back of the cardboard. Munch had evidently started working, disliked what he had done, and started again on the other side. Compared with its world-famous sibling, the abandoned
Scream
is upside-down. Munch had no doubt rotated the cardboard in 1893 just as Hill did a century later.

Hill started to breathe again. Jesus! Why hadn’t anybody written about that? Hill held the painting up and scanned it, savoring the kind of opportunity that he knew only came along a few times in a lifetime. No frame, no glass, no hovering guards, no crowds, nothing between you and a few square feet of sublime achievement.

A year before, Hill had stood in an Antwerp parking lot, alongside a gangster, and briefly held Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter
in his hands. “Whenever you hold a genuine masterpiece,” Hill had said afterward, “you see immediately that it’s a stunning picture. It
tells
you it’s a stunning picture. The quality just jumps out at you.”

In ordinary circumstances, Hill would have guffawed at anyone who talked like that—he liked tales of frauds and forgeries and he cackled with malicious laughter when he told stories of “some pompous asshole whose prized possession turned out to be a ghastly fake churned out in a downmarket bedsit”—but face-to-face with a masterpiece, he was not cynical enough to deny the thrill he felt.

Hill knew immediately that the painting before him, in this closed-up cottage 70 miles south of Oslo, was the genuine article. Even so, he forced himself to scan it slowly. He paid particular attention to the bottom right side of the painting. At the end of one long night a century before, Munch had blown out a candle and splashed wax onto his painting.

The drips, white verging on blue-gray, were unmistakable. The most prominent one was toward the bottom right corner, close to the screamer’s left elbow. Another, slightly less conspicuous, was a little higher and a few inches further to the right, across the top of the railing. Hill checked and then checked again.