Oblivious to Hill’s suffering, Ulving twittered on, chattering about his business and his views on art. Occasionally he interrupted himself to take a few bites of breakfast. More chat. Now Ulving began contemplating a second trip to the buffet.
Hill, a much larger man than Ulving and normally a big eater, muttered something about getting underway. Finally Ulving finished his meal. Fogelberg still wasn’t done. Hill kept his back to Fogelberg and escaped out the restaurant door.
Safely out of sight, Hill made an excuse to Ulving about needing something from his room, and raced away. Then he phoned John Butler, the head of the Art Squad, in his makeshift office in his hotel room.
Hill told Butler to get a message to Fogelberg. Butler phoned Stockholm police headquarters, who delivered the message that there was a major undercover operation going on. If Fogelberg recognized anyone, he was to do nothing about it. Hill, who had no idea how long it would take to get the message through, continued to skulk around the hotel.
Hill’s only “plan” in case Fogelberg had spotted him, he admitted to Butler, was to cross that bridge—to jump off it, really—when he came to it. “I would have come up with something. ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ I don’t know, I’d turn on my American accent, I’d think of something. The best plan was to hide, which is what I did.”
The escape left Hill almost giddy. He was at least as fond as the next person of telling stories that did him credit, but the stories he liked best were ones where there was nothing to do but duck your head and trust to fate. In Hill’s world, a plan that worked was satisfying, but a stroke of undeserved good fortune was thrilling. Hill would have happily taken as his motto Winston Churchill’s remark that nothing in life is as exhilarating as being shot at and missed.
Having alerted Butler, Hill hurried back downstairs and met Ulving in the coffee bar. By this time Johnsen had showed up. During the discussions the night before both sides had agreed on a price for The Scream’s return: £350,000, the equivalent of $530,000 or KR 3.5 million. (Why the price had fallen from the £500,000 Ulving had mentioned earlier, Hill never learned.)
Walker had already converted the money from British pounds into Norwegian kroner. The fortune in cash was in the hotel safe near the reception desk, still in Walker’s sports bag. Hill feared he might trip up during the money talk, blurting out something about “pounds” that would mark him as English, when, as Chris Roberts, he should have been thinking in dollars. To keep from screwing things up, he steered clear of “pounds” and “dollars” and stuck with “kroner.”
Even tiny decisions like that could be crucial. Over the years, Hill had wrestled with the questions that lying brought with it—how to justify it, and when to do it, and how best to get away with it. On his bookshelves at home he had made a place for such tomes as Sissela Bok’s Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, but his own approach leaned more toward the practical than the philosophical. “Remember,” he would say, in the earnest tone of a Boy Scout leader teaching his young charges about wilderness survival, “lies are valuable—you don’t want to go around squandering them. You want to concentrate them, and you have to be effective with them.”
Occasionally Hill would try to explain to non-police friends the gamesmanship at the heart of undercover work. One essential lesson: when you lie, lie big. “The whole thing is a lie,” Hill would explain. “You’re a cop on a cop’s salary and you’re posing as someone who travels first-class and has half a million pounds in his suitcase. That’s okay. What gets you in trouble is lying about the little things; that’s when things get hard to remember and when you trip yourself up.
“If you try to remember too much, then you won’t act naturally. You always want to tell the truth as much as you can possibly do. It’s easier, there’s no conscience involved, there’s no blushing—you’re just telling the truth, so there’s no problem. That’s part of it. The other part is that you need to convince the villains that you’re a real person with a real life, and that’s easier to do if you can talk more or less freely.”
So Hill said. His practice contradicted his theory. In real life, as with the Getty plan, Hill rarely went for simple efficiency if he could come up with something elaborate and dangerous instead. Near the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer devises a complicated scheme to rescue Jim, the slave who has run away with Huck Finn and been recaptured. Huck had proposed a straightforward solution. “Wouldn’t that plan work?” he asks.
“Work? Why, cert’nly it would work,…” Tom says. “But it’s too blame’ simple; there ain’t nothing to it. What’s the good of a plan that ain’t no more trouble than that?”
Then Tom unveiled his own plan. “I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style,” Huck says, “and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.”
Huck at once rejects his own plan in favor of Tom’s. Charley Hill would immediately and instinctively have cast the same vote.
It was midday on Friday, May 6, and the coffee bar in the Plaza was quiet. Hill’s bodyguard, Sid Walker, leaned back in his chair and glared at the world. Walker’s main assignment was to look menacing. He was up to the task. Hill’s role was to do the talking. They were performing for an audience of two, but they had to get it right. If all went well, the two performances would complement one another—Hill’s improvised blather about art and the Getty was a soothing melody line; Walker’s nearly silent menace served as an almost subliminal growl, a bass line that reinforced the notion that these were indeed men accustomed to making clandestine deals.
The time was right, Hill judged, to snare Johnsen once and for all. “Sid, you want to show him the money?” “Yeah, sure.”
The etiquette here was more delicate than an outsider might have guessed. “Please” would have been a faux pas. Chris Roberts would use the word “please” for waiters and the like, to show that he was a gentleman, but he had to make sure that no macho crook took him for a wimp. If thugs sensed weakness, they’d move in. Hill was unarmed, in enemy territory. This was no time to play the ingenue.
Walker, too, had to watch himself. His job was to look after Roberts and his money. But he was playing a crook, not a servant. Any kind of “yes, boss” byplay would have been out of place, a jarring intrusion of Jack Benny and Rochester into a world where they didn’t belong.
The tiny issue of saying “please” or skipping it hinted at a far larger issue. The challenge for Hill, in playing Chris Roberts, was that he had to send two messages at once, and they contradicted each other. He had to convince the crooks they were dealing with a genuine member of the art establishment and at the same time he had to come across as a man of the world who couldn’t be pushed around.
Walker and Johnsen headed off toward the reception desk to look at the money. The scene played out almost wordlessly, punctuated only by a series of barely audible sounds. Footsteps on the gleaming floor, as Walker and Johnsen crossed the lobby. The click of the door to the hotel safe. Johnsen craned his neck, trying to peek around Walker’s broad back.
Walker turned toward Johnsen and held out the bag. A quiet zzziiipp as he opened it. Johnsen gawked.
Three and a half million kroner.
“You want to count it?”
No, said Johnsen, he didn’t need to bother counting. The money rustled softly as Walker flicked at a stack of bills with a thick thumb. Walker locked the bag back in the safe.
Johnsen came back to the table unable to hide his excitement. Hill was jubilant. Johnsen had seen the money, and it had gone to his head. “Hooked him!” Hill thought.
Hill and Walker had known all along they had the right bait. The trick was to dangle it gently rather than to risk scaring the crooks away with too much splashing and drama. The image to convey was that this was just one more step in an ongoing business negotiation. No fanfare, no big talk, no urgency.
Hill had learned in earlier deals how fraught this moment was. You had to
keep the tone casual: “Do you want to have a look at the money?” But it’s not casual, it’s crucial, because now you’ve captured their imagination. Now they know that all they’ve got to do is deliver on their end of the bargain, and all that money will belong to them. Sometimes they count it, sometimes they don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is for them to know the money is there. Talking about it is one thing. Seeing it is something different.
Johnsen tried to play it cool but couldn’t quite carry it off. Ordinarily he left most of the talking to his art dealer pal, Ulving. Today, as always, Ulving was chattering away. But now, revved up by the sight of a bag bursting with cash that was this close to belonging to him, Johnsen joined in.
Then he stopped dead, interrupting himself in midsentence. Ulving, oblivious, kept whittering on. Johnsen stood up and walked over to a man sitting at the bar.
Johnsen stood behind the stranger for a moment and then rapped him hard on the back, as if he were knocking on a door. The hollow sounds echoed. “What are you doing with a bullet-proof vest?” Johnsen snarled.
The man shrank into his seat and stammered something incoherent. The vest was borrowed; someone had asked him to test it; he’d been thinking of buying one. Johnsen cut the floundering short. “You keep staring at us over that newspaper. And you ordered your drink half an hour ago, and your glass is still full.” He gestured at the man’s untouched beer. “What’s your game?” No reply.
Johnsen stomped back across the room and flung himself into a chair. “The guy’s a cop.”
“Shit! Now what?” Hill thought.
How to explain away a plainclothes cop doing his (clumsy) best to keep tabs on Johnsen and Ulving? And if the Norwegian police had decided that Scotland Yard needed their help with surveillance, why hadn’t they told Hill and Walker what they were up to?
Hill hadn’t planned for this, and he had nothing ready. Something popped into his head. “Well, shit,” he grumbled, “A few months back they signed the Arab-Israeli peace accords here. They must be worried about some kind of terrorist attack. I guess they’ve got these guys looking after all the goddamned cops and the other people here for this horseshit conference.”
Hill was referring to the Oslo accords, which had been brokered in large part by Norway and signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in the fall of 1993. Hill had followed the negotiations closely. Back in London, Hill sometimes sat at his desk with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, and his fellow cops liked to tease the Professor for reading the Times when he could have been checking out the topless girl of the day in the tabloids.
Hill’s tone, as he griped about the surveillance cops in the hotel, was nearly as important as the message. He had to sound impatient, irritated, bored with the great “discovery” that Johnsen was so excited about. Anything but flustered, even though Hill had grabbed at the business about terrorists the way someone headed over a waterfall would grab at a tree branch over the water.
Johnsen seemed convinced, or at least halfway convinced. Hill was relieved and pleased with himself. The test of an undercover man was his ability to improvise. Before he could savor his escape, Johnsen was fretting again.
“I’ve seen other plainclothes cops around, too.”
“Oh, Christ,” Hill thought. Still, if the Norwegians were so amateurish that nobody could miss them, maybe Hill could turn that to his advantage.
“Well, that’s all the proof you need,” Hill blustered. “They’re obviously keeping an eye on this bullshit convention.”
Hill suggested they move to another hotel and leave the cops behind. Maybe they could put the deal off a week or two. Hill was bluffing—for one thing, the head of the Art Squad had set up his command post in this hotel—but Johnsen didn’t call him on it.
“I’m leaving for a while,” Johnsen said.
Off he went.
17
Russborough House Redux
Where Johnsen had gone, Hill had no idea. Anything was possible. He might have gone off to sulk, or to fetch a rifle so he could take the money that had been waved under his nose. But whether Johnsen was out for vengeance or merely out for a drink, Charley Hill was enjoying himself.
Art crime, Hill likes to say, is “serious farce.” Both words are important to him. The art is irreplaceable, which accounts for the seriousness, but fencing with crooks is a game of sorts, too, which is where the farce comes in. But for Hill, “farce” conjures up more than Keystone Kops and crooks falling off ladders. It refers, as well, to a more cosmic contest—the endless, necessary, and futile war of the good guys against the bad.
Hill has fought in that war for years, and happily, but as “an avowed believer in original sin,” he takes for granted that the police will never go out of business for lack of work. Hill’s good cheer and deep pessimism coexist somehow, and in the cases he likes best, comedy and tragedy wrap around one another as tightly as they do in his own tangled heart.
The years Hill spent chasing muggers down alleyways had done little to engage him. The stakes were too low, the surprises too few, the crimes too simple. Hill didn’t fully sort out what was missing until his first world-class case, the hunt for Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter and the seventeen other paintings stolen from Russborough House by Martin Cahill in 1986.
That once-in-a-lifetime theft was in fact nothing of the sort. Thieves had hit Russborough House in 1974, before Cahill came along. They would return in 2001 and again in 2002, each time making off with masterpieces worth millions. Several paintings, including Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter, have been stolen more than once, and Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli: Dancer has been stolen three times so far.
Hill once asked an Irish gangster named Martin Foley what he had against Lady Beit, the elderly owner of Russborough House. “It’s fookin’ nothin’ to do with her,” came the reply. “It’s just fookin’ easy.” Russborough House is a great, rambling place, Hill notes, “with bars on the window and locks and video cameras and all that shit, but the thieves are in and out—they know what they’re going to take—and it’s so isolated the cops take fifteen minutes to get there.”
“They enjoy doing it,” Hill says. “They’re violent thieves, and if anyone gets in their way they’ll run ‘em down.” For the crooks, this is sport (though, as is the case with most sports in the modern world, the dream of riches is never far off). The media, too, treat each new attack on Russborough House as light entertainment, a perennial story not far different from Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, and his shadow.
If art crime in general is “serious farce,” the here-they-go-again thefts at Russborough House are perhaps the ultimate example. Consider the setting, first of all. Russborough House is by repute the grandest house in Ireland. No crime scene could have less in common with the mean streets of a commonplace robbery. Next, the crime itself. Who has Vermeers and Goyas hanging on their walls?
Finally, the victims, who are too remote to win much sympathy. The late Sir Alfred was a nearly silent figure notable mainly for what one obituary called his “Teutonic earnestness.” Journalists found Lady Beit equally hard to fathom. In their portrayals, she sounded like Margaret Dumont, the grande dame who played Groucho Marx’s foil. In the summer of 2002, Lady Beit took a journalist on a tour of Russborough House. She gestured toward Goya’s Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate (which Hill had recovered with Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter). “That painting means a great deal to me, for two reasons,” Lady Beit explained. “Alfred was standing beneath it when he proposed to me in the house, and then during the Dugdale raid we were tied up beneath it.”
The Dugdale raid, in 1974, was the first attack on Russborough House. The thieves in the various raids have been as over-the-top as the victims and Russborough House itself. Rose Dugdale, who organized that first attack, which was by far the most inept of the four robberies, was an English heiress whose trust fund paid her $200,000 a year. Raised on a 600-acre estate (her parents also owned homes in London and Scotland), Dug
dale went to school in Switzerland and then studied economics at Oxford. In her twenties she proclaimed herself a revolutionary, though it was the debutante’s life she had seen in her teens that had opened her eyes and turned her stomach. “My coming-out ball was one of those pornographic affairs,” she told reporters after her arrest, “which cost about what sixty old-age pensioners receive in six months.”
Dugdale’s first ventures into crime were marked by ambition and amateurism in roughly equal measures. In June 1973, when she was 32, Dugdale stole a miscellany of paintings, silver, and jewelry from her parents’ home and was caught almost at once. The profits, it emerged during the trial, were intended for the IRA. “I think the risk that you will ever again commit burglary or any dishonesty is extremely remote,” the judge declared, and then he set the defendant free.
Six months later, Dugdale proved the judge an optimist. In January 1974, while posing as a tourist vacationing in County Donegal in Ireland, Dugdale rented a helicopter for a bit of sight-seeing. She convinced the pilot to help her load an odd cargo, four milk churns. Once the helicopter was airborne, Dugdale hijacked it. The milk churns, she announced, were crammed with explosives. Dugdale’s plan was to bomb a nearby police station. As it turned out, almost everyone but the police was in grave danger. One milk churn almost blew up inside the helicopter and had to be shoved frantically out the door. It plummeted into a river. Two other churns missed their targets and fell harmlessly into the sea. The last landed in a housing project but failed to go off. Somehow Dugdale escaped arrest.
One month after the helicopter caper, on a February evening in 1974, a guard at Kenwood House, a small museum in north London, heard the crash of metal against metal and then the sound of breaking glass. He rushed in and found that someone had smashed through a barred window with a sledgehammer, grabbed Vermeer’s Guitar Player, and fled. The break-in, the police said, was “an act of primitive violence.”
The Rescue Artist Page 13