Despite appearances, Walker was quick-thinking, as agile mentally as he was physically—so experienced that almost nothing took him by surprise. He was well-organized, too, and he had laid down the guidelines that governed all of Scotland Yard’s undercover operations. Walker had been Hill’s mentor when the younger man first ventured undercover, and he had come to the rescue more than once when Hill had managed to offend his superior officers and get himself banished to Siberia.
Hill revered him. “He was, quite simply, the finest undercover officer of his generation,” Hill has said on more than one occasion, “and he also happens to be a personal friend whom I trust implicitly.” When the Art Squad put together its plan for retrieving The Scream, Hill made only one demand: Sid Walker had to be part of the team.
With the cash ready and a plan in hand, the Scream team set off from Scotland Yard to Oslo. There were three players: Charley Hill, playing Chris Roberts; Sid Walker, whose job was to guard Hill and head off trouble; and John Butler, the head of the Art Squad, who would stay in the background but would run the operation.
Hill arranged to meet Ulving in the lobby of the Oslo Plaza, the swankiest hotel in town, a brand-new, gleaming high-rise. Hill, Walker, and Butler had rooms on different floors. Walker would arrive first, on his own. With the help of the Norwegian police, Butler would transform his room into a command bunker for the operation. Hill would show up last, late in the evening.
On the morning of May 5, Walker strolled through security at Heathrow Airport with the £500,000 in his carry-on bag. Baggage inspections were rare in those pre-9/11 days, but airport security hadn’t been let in on the story. If someone found Walker’s money and wanted to know what he was up to, Sid would have to dream up an explanation.
Hill flew into Oslo, rented the most expensive car at the airport, a top-of-the-line Mercedes, and sped into town. Always a bold figure, he dashed on stage at the Plaza with the bravura of a Broadway star emerging, already singing, from the wings. He wore a seersucker suit, a white shirt, and a blue bow tie with big green dots, and he piled out of his Mercedes, bills crumpled in his hand for tips, beckoning one bellman to see to the car and another to grab his bags. Then he strode through the lobby to the front desk.
“Hi there,” in a loud and unmistakably American voice. “I’m Chris Roberts.”
Ulving was waiting in the lobby with Johnsen. Ulving perked up when he heard Hill, and he and Johnsen came rushing over to introduce themselves.
Sid Walker was already in the lobby, keeping a surreptitious eye on things. Not surreptitious enough, it turned out. Johnsen, a savvy and professional criminal, spotted Walker—though, for the moment, he kept silent—and recognized at once that he didn’t belong. Why was a roughneck like that hanging around the hotel?
It was ten o’clock at night. Hill told Ulving and Johnsen that after he went to his room and changed, they could meet for a drink. Soon after, the three men settled in at the Sky Bar in the hotel’s rooftop lounge. Minutes later, Walker came into the bar. Johnsen turned accusingly to Hill.
“Is he with you?”
Hesitation could mean disaster.
“Of course he is,” Hill barked at once. “He’s the guy who’s going to look after me. I’m not going to come into this town with a lot of money just to have you take it off of me.” Johnsen seemed to buy it, so Hill beckoned to Walker to come over.
The danger was that Walker had no idea about the conversation he had missed. He could only guess what Hill had been saying, and if he guessed wrong they were both in serious trouble. With Johnsen already on edge, Hill knew that the least signal from him to Walker—a raised eyebrow, for instance, as if to say “Careful now!”—was impossible.
“I saw you downstairs,” Johnsen challenged Walker.
Walker was dismissive. “Yeah. You did. What do you want me to do, sit in my room all day?”
Hill launched into the cover story he and Walker had cooked up ahead of time. Walker was an English criminal who lived in Holland and occasionally did bodyguard work for Hill.
Hill had planned to introduce Walker sooner or later. Maybe they’d gambled when they shouldn’t have. The only reason to leave Walker roaming free was the vague hope that he might turn up something intriguing. Hill hadn’t figured on Johnsen spotting the competition so quickly. Could he turn that to his advantage? Johnsen would be pleased with himself; maybe his pride in his own shrewdness would lead him to lower his guard a bit.
Hill figured the cover story rang pretty true. Walker wasn’t the kind of guy you asked a lot of questions about, because one look at him seemed enough to resolve any mystery about the line of work he was in. And it made sense that the man from the Getty would have a bodyguard to watch out for him and maybe do a bit of driving, because this was a foreign country and Hill was talking about an awful lot of money. Or so a crook might reason. The Getty would never have approved the business about a bodyguard with a criminal record, Hill knew, so he hadn’t told them that part of the story.
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893
tempera and oil pastel on cardboard, 73.5 × 91 cm
PHOTO: J. Lathion; © National Gallery, Norway/ ARS
Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893. It is his rawest, most emotional work and was inspired by an actual stroll at sunset. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead-tired,” Munch recalled. “And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city…. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”
Edvard Munch, The Vampire, 1893–94
oil on canvas, 109 × 91 cm
Munch Museum, Oslo. © Munch Museum /
Munch-Ellingsen Group /ARS 2004
The Vampire, perhaps the second most famous of Munch’s paintings, was itself once stolen. Munch feared women and yearned for them; his painting, originally known as Love and Pain, was about the anguish that accompanies love, not about literal vampires.
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1885–86
oil on canvas, 120 × 118.5 cm
PHOTO: J. Lathion; © National Gallery, Norway /ARS
The Sick Child depicts the deathbed of Munch’s sister, Sophie. The girl’s mother looks on helplessly. At one of his first shows, Munch approached The Sick Child only to find a rowdy crowd gathered before it, “laughing and shouting” in mockery.
Francisco de Goya,
Dona Antonia Zarate, c. 1810
oil on canvas, 82 × 103.5 cm
© Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland
In an undercover sting that reached its climax at an airport in Belgium, Charley Hill recovered two immensely valuable paintings stolen from Russborough House in Dublin. Both paintings were stashed in the trunk of a car, Goya’s Dona Antonia Zarate rolled up like a cheap poster, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid concealed inside a plastic trash bag.
Jan Vermeer, Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, c. 1670
oil on canvas, 71.1 × 60.5 cm
© Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland
Only thirty-five Vermeers exist, and over the years three have been stolen. One, The Concert, has been missing since 1990.
In 1995, thieves stole Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, worth perhaps $10 million, from England’s Lord Bath. An ex-hippie, an artist himself, and a self-proclaimed womanizer (portraits of seventy-one of his “wifelets” adorn his home), Lord Bath had inherited the painting from an ancestor who purchased it in 1878. After a seven-year search, Charley Hill recovered the painting. Here Lord Bath returns his Titian to its rightful place in Longleat House.
Longleat House is huge and isolated, with 100 rooms and grounds that stretch across 9,000 acres. Like Britain’s other stately homes, it is a sitting duck for thieves. By the time police arrive, the crooks have long since fled.
Francisco de Goya, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812
oil on wood, 52.4 × 64.3 cm
© The National Gal
lery, London
In 1961 Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington disappeared from London’s National Gallery, which had purchased it only weeks before. The painting was recovered four years later, but it made a cameo appearance in 1962 in the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in the villain’s Caribbean hideaway.
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn,
Jacob III de Gheyn, 1632
oil on panel, 24.9 × 29.9 cm
© Dulwich Picture Gallery
The most stolen painting of all is Rembrandt’s Jacob III de Gheyn, which has been stolen (and recovered) four times so far. Like most stolen paintings, the portrait is by a brand-name artist and small, not quite eight inches by ten, easy to fit inside a jacket. London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery insists its security is now impeccable.
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633
oil on canvas, 127 × 160 cm
On March 17, 1990, two thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole $300 million worth of art. Mrs. Gardner’s will stipulated that her museum be kept just as she had arranged it. Below, a visitor looks at the frame that once held Rembrandt’s only seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The painting itself is shown left.
© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA /Bridgeman Art Library
Edouard Manet, Chez Tortoni, 1878-80
oil on canvas, 34 × 26 cm
© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA /Bridgeman Art Library
The Gardner theft was the biggest in the history of art. The greatest prizes included Manet’s Chez Tortoni and Vermeer’s Concert. The case remains unsolved, and all the paintings are still missing.
Jan Vermeer, The Concert. c. 1658-60
oil on canvas, 64.7 × 72.5 cm
© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA /Bridgeman Art Library
The highest price ever paid for a painting was $104.1 million for Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe, at a Sotheby’s auction in May 2004. Boy with a Pipe, not considered one of Picasso’s masterpieces, set a record that eclipsed the previous high, $82.5 million for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Prices like those make news. The news draws crowds, and not all those in the crowds are solid citizens.
Pablo Picasso, Boy with a Pipe, 1905 oil on canvas, 81.3 × 100 cm
© Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, New York /Bridgeman Art Library /ARS
Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890
oil on canvas, 56 × 67 cm
© Private Collection /Bridgeman Art Library /ARS
Sid was glaringly out of place in a five-star hotel. Hill admitted to himself that he and Walker should have been more careful. Walker obviously wasn’t a Norwegian, and, much more important, he looked more like an armed robber than an international businessman.
Still, the close call left Hill closer to exultant than chagrined. He lived for such tightrope-without-a-net moments. “You can’t waver,” he’d learned in previous undercover ventures. “If you take time to gulp, you’re screwed. You’ve got to be as calm and relaxed and nonchalant and in control as you can be. You don’t run through your options. I don’t, anyway. I just trust my instincts. I don’t have a rational mind, and it’s so much easier to trust your instincts than it is to do a calculation. Usually it works out. Sometimes you get it wrong.”
This time it worked. Over the course of a few drinks, Johnsen’s suspicion of Walker gave way to something almost like camaraderie. The Norwegian leg-breaker recognized in the bad-tempered English crook a brother in arms. They were both professionals; they could work together.
The rooftop bar was more a drinking spot for tourists than for locals, because the prices were as stunning as the view. For Hill, flaunting his credit cards from the Getty, money was no object. Ulving and Johnsen were suitably impressed.
Hill kept the drinks coming and the talk flowing. The conversation dipped and meandered; there was no real agenda except to convince Ulving and Johnsen that they were indeed dealing with the Getty’s man. Each of the Norwegians posed a different challenge. Hill figured he had Ulving’s measure. The art dealer was unsavory and full of shit, but his self-importance made him vulnerable. Hill would have to watch his step when he talked about art, but he had enormous faith in his “bullshit art-speak mode.” And Ulving liked to go on about his helicopter and his hotel and all the rest, but Roberts was the big-spending, free-wheeling Man from the Getty, so Hill figured he had that angle covered, too.
Johnsen posed a graver threat. He was a switched-on, alert crook, not much on charm but canny and cunning. The story about Johnsen buying and collecting art was crap, Hill felt certain. When Hill launched into art bullshit, Johnsen didn’t have a clue. But he was dangerous anyway. With assholes like him, it wasn’t a matter of what they knew. Instinct, not knowledge, was vital. Crooks like Johnsen operated on intuition and experience. Are you the real McCoy or not? Am I dealing with an easy mark?
The worst thing Hill could do was give Johnsen the impression he could take his money and keep the painting.
At the bar with Ulving, Johnsen, and Walker, Hill held forth on the strange life and career of James Ensor. He was a Belgian painter, a contemporary of Munch, an odd duck who went in for a kind of Dada-esque surrealism. The Getty owned Ensor’s masterpiece, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. That huge painting, painted five years earlier than The Scream, had thematic and psychological tie-ins with Munch’s most acclaimed painting, “and what we have in mind is to show the great icon of expressionism and angst in juxtaposition with the great work of expressionism that relates to it in the Getty’s collection.”
Hill finished up with a few impassioned words about how important and groundbreaking the proposed exhibition would be. Johnsen seemed to have bought Hill’s line, or perhaps he had simply sat through as much art chat as he could take.
“Can we do the deal tomorrow morning?” Johnsen asked.
“Yeah, fine,” Hill said. “We can do that.” He ignored Walker—Walker was a bodyguard, not a partner, and didn’t need to be consulted on arrangements—and directed his attention toward Johnsen and Ulving.
“We’ll meet in the hotel restaurant tomorrow, for breakfast,” Hill said.
Hill strolled to the elevator and pushed the button for 16. He whistled a few cheery bars of an unidentifiable tune—for good reason, he had never tried to impersonate a musician—and headed to his room to see what the minibar might have in store. The next day’s plan, he felt sure, would go off without a hitch. It didn’t.
16
Fiasco at the Plaza
MAY 6, 1994
On his way to the rooftop bar, Hill had noticed that the hotel lobby seemed crowded, but he hadn’t paid much attention. In the morning he learned his mistake.
While he and Walker had been drinking with Ulving and Johnsen, hundreds of new arrivals had checked in. They had not made it to the pricey top-floor bar, but when Hill walked into the hotel restaurant the next morning, he could barely squeeze through the crowd. Who were all these characters greeting one another like old pals?
Hill would have been less puzzled if he had noticed the small sign near the registration desk: “Welcome to the Scandinavian Narcotics Officers Annual Convention.”
The hotel and the restaurant were crawling with plainclothes cops wearing badges that announced their name and rank. There were police and customs officers from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, gathered in clusters around every corner and at every table. Every cop in Scandinavia, it looked like, and, along with them, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, the works. On top of that, the Norwegian police had apparently decided on their own that they needed to protect Hill and Walker, and the entire top-of-the-range surveillance team was there as well.
The timing was terrible. Hill needed Ulving and Johnsen relaxed and ready to deal. Would they overlook the presence of 200 cops who had popped up in the middle of the first negotiating sessions?
A worse danger still—bad enough that Hill wou
ld have to exert all his will to resist the temptation to scan the room for familiar faces—was that one of those cops might be an old friend. Over the years Hill had worked plenty of drug cases and sat through countless meetings with police and detectives from all over Europe. What if some delighted cop came running over to pound his buddy from Scotland Yard on the back?
For the time being, Hill had only Ulving to deal with. Johnsen had announced the night before that he would skip breakfast and join the others later. Hill and Ulving checked out the breakfast buffet. Cops everywhere! Ulving seemed not to mind. Could he really be the honest outsider he claimed to be?
To Hill’s dismay, he spotted a high-ranking Swedish police official, a good friend. His name was Christer Fogelberg, and his expertise was in money-laundering scams. Hill had worked similar cases. Fogelberg had even modeled his unit on the corresponding one at Scotland Yard. He would be thrilled to bump into his buddy.
“Shit!” Hill thought. “He’s brought the whole entourage.” Fogelberg was on the other side of the restaurant, with his wife and his flunkies. “Do you mind if I sit on that side of the table, if we swap round?” Hill asked Ulving. “The sun’s in my eyes and I can’t see you properly.”
Hill scuttled round the table and sat down with his back to Fogelberg. Now he needed to finish breakfast quickly, so that he could be gone before Fogelberg passed by his table.
The Rescue Artist Page 12