The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  By now it was well past two in the morning. Ulving entered his darkened house. At once the phone rang. Unnervingly, the call came not on Ulving’s cell phone, as he had been expecting, but on his home phone. How did they know where I was? The stranger again, with more instructions. “Get back on the E-18 and go to the By the Way.”

  Ulving knew the name—the By the Way was a restaurant on the expressway only five or ten minutes from his house. He sped over. The restaurant was long since closed, and the parking lot was empty. Ulving pulled his car to the edge of the lot and parked by a low stone wall. Then he sat in the dark and waited.

  Suddenly the stranger materialized in front of Ulving’s car. “Get out!”

  Ulving stood in the deserted parking lot. The man in the cap stared at him, silently, for a minute or two. “Open the back!”

  The stranger moved a short distance away. Another man took shape in the darkness, on the far side of the stone wall. He carried a neatly folded blanket with something wrapped inside. He handed the blanket to the stranger and disappeared again. The stranger placed the blanket and its contents in the back of Ulving’s station wagon.

  “That’s the picture.”

  Ulving gathered his nerve. “I don’t want it in my car.”

  “Well, it’s in your car.”

  “Where are we going to take it?”

  “To your house.”

  “We can’t. My kids and my wife are there. But I’ve got a summerhouse in Øsgårdstrand. It’s empty now. We can take it there.”

  The man in the cap went along with the new plan. Øsgårdstrand was only a few miles away. He and Ulving drove off and hid their package in Ulving’s summer house.

  Ulving, exhausted, pleaded with the stranger. Couldn’t he go home and take a shower and change his clothes?

  Yes, he could. This was unexpected good news, the first conciliatory remark the stranger had made. Ulving drove home eagerly and entered his dark house. To his dismay, the man in the cap barged into the house behind him. Ulving walked into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. His “guest” shoved the bathroom door open, then stood a yard from the shower, watching.

  It was nearly five in the morning. Ulving’s wife, Hanne, woken by the commotion, hurried to investigate. Her husband was in the shower, a hulking stranger nearly at his side, glowering.

  “What’s going on?”

  Where to start? “It’s okay. Everything’s all right,” Ulving said. “Go back to sleep.”

  33

  “Hands Up!”

  The Norwegian cops, in the meantime, had their own trouble sleeping. “The thing keeping me up at night,” said Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective, “was worrying that the undercover agents would be hurt or killed, because we didn’t know who the criminals were.”

  Charley Hill had more regard for Lier than he did for most cops, but he didn’t share Lier’s concern. Though Hill was the least laid-back of men, his own well-being was not a subject that engaged him. Let someone venture a foolish opinion on, say, the French Revolution, and Hill would scowl and leap to correct the record. If the conversation turned to his own safety, he would drift off.

  Before 1994, Hill’s closest call had come in a counterfeit money case. In autumn 1988, Hill was undercover as a crooked American businessman named Charles Gray. He had heard rumors about someone looking to sell serious quantities of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. Hill, as Gray, put out word that he might be interested. Soon a shady used-car dealer outside London made an approach. The dealer handed over a few of the counterfeit hundreds.

  Hill took them to a friend at the U.S. embassy, a Secret Service man with a plum posting in London. Hill’s friend oohed and ahhed. Franklin’s portrait, the shading—these bills were superb. The Secret Service had picked up whispers about a giant shipment of counterfeit money coming into Britain from Italy. These were thieves worth going after. Scotland Yard agreed. Anything to help their American colleagues. Charles Gray met with the car dealer contact to work out a deal. A bit of haggling and then a handshake—Gray would pay £60,000 for a cool $1 million in phony but virtually undetectable hundred-dollar bills.

  Hill booked a ground-floor room at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow Airport for the handover. Though he liked to freelance, this job was not to be an improvised solo act. The Counterfeit Currency Squad was in charge, and the Regional Crime Squad was on hand, too. Hill’s hotel room was bugged, to obtain evidence for an eventual trial, and a surveillance team was in place. The Counterfeit Squad gave Hill a briefcase with £60,000 in cash.

  Hill met the car dealer at the Holiday Inn. The counterfeit hundreds, the man said, were in a valise in his car, in the parking lot. Hill and the dealer walked to the car, and Hill picked up the case with the phony bills. Immediately, he knew there was trouble. A million bucks in hundreds should have weighed about twenty pounds. This case was far too light.

  Hill played along. Carrying the valise with the counterfeit bills, he walked back inside and turned down the hotel corridor to his room, where he had left his briefcase and its £60,000. The car dealer was by his side. Suddenly two men in stocking masks leapt out.

  One robber jammed a sawed-off shotgun into Hill’s back. The two masked men hustled Hill and the car dealer down the hall and into Hill’s room. Shoving Hill toward the middle of the room, one robber forced him face-down on the bed. He pressed the shotgun hard into the back of Hill’s neck, below his right ear, and yanked his arms behind his back. Zzzzpppff! Duct tape. For criminals, tape was more convenient than handcuffs or rope. First the hands, then the ankles. In moments Hill was trussed and helpless.

  With his face mashed into the bedspread, Hill found that his glasses reflected glimpses of the room behind him. He occupied himself by trying to memorize his captors’ clothing, in case he ever had a chance to testify in court.

  The robbers tied up the car dealer, too, but—though Hill had no way of knowing this—not as tightly. The robbers and the car dealer were in cahoots, it would turn out later, and they had cooked up a simple scheme: the robbers would flee with their £60,000 profit and with the counterfeit money, too, to use another day. The car dealer would eventually work himself free and would then free Gray. The duped buyer would slink away—he could hardly go to the police to tell them he’d been robbed—and the thieves would live happily ever after.

  The police plan had gone ludicrously wrong. When Hill had left the hotel to pick up the counterfeit money in the parking lot, a team of cops had tailed him. When Hill returned to the hotel, the backup team found that they had locked themselves out of the fire escape door.

  In the meantime, the surveillance cops holed up in the hotel room next to Hill’s were preparing their recording gear. They had no idea that Hill had been mugged in the hallway. When the scene finally shifted to Hill’s room, they found themselves eavesdropping on a robbery. Convinced that Hill was about to be killed, they called in the troops. In came the nearest armed police, with machine guns, from nearby Heathrow. In came a police helicopter, hovering low over the hotel, rotor blades whooping through the air, strobe lights flashing.

  The cops who were already on the scene, unarmed and reduced to play-acting, did their best. One cop standing in the parking lot outside Hill’s room smashed his hand through the window (slicing himself badly) and shouted “Armed police!” Other cops followed his lead, shoving their hands through the broken window and into the curtains, pretending to have guns. Down the hallway thundered two more cops shouting “Armed police!” though they were only pointing the antennas of their radios.

  The crooks might have shot Hill or fired at the cops. Instead, they fled. Out the door and down the hall they ran, cops in pursuit. Moments later, they were tackled and arrested.

  The crooked car dealer hadn’t managed to make a break. Too slow in freeing himself, he was still wrapped up in duct tape when the police crashed in. The police untied Hill and handcuffed the crook. Hill fixed himself a drink at the minibar. He raised his glass to his former partner
in crime. “You don’t mind if I don’t offer you one?”

  Hill relished such cinematic moments. What could be better than an adrenaline-pumping adventure that featured large helpings of danger, stupidity, and bravery and then wrapped itself up in a happy ending and a wisecrack from the hero? Somewhere in the back of Charley Hill’s attic of a mind, Casablanca is always on the bill and Hill himself is Bogey.

  Hill turned over the £60,000 pounds and the counterfeit money to the police and made his way out of the hotel. A crowd had gathered. Tourists gawked in the lobby, trying to sort out what had happened. The waiters and chefs from the restaurant craned their heads to look. Hill threaded his way through the crowd to the reception desk.

  “I’d like to book out. I didn’t like my room.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. What was the matter?”

  “It was too noisy.”

  By the time Hill had finished with a police debriefing and driven home, it was three in the morning. At five-thirty, the doorbell rang. It was Sid Walker. He and Hill had an informant to meet, in connection with the paintings stolen from Russborough House in Dublin.

  “They’re talking about the counterfeit deal on the radio,” Sid said. “Well done.” Walker had absorbed the details of the story from the radio announcers’ breathless reports, but his own style was as understated as theirs was shrill. By his standards, his few words were close to a hymn of praise.

  “Well, I’m a bit knackered now.”

  Hill’s wife, Caro, had been roused by the doorbell and the sound of her husband talking to someone. Hill hadn’t woken her when he’d come in the night before. She stumbled downstairs and greeted Walker, an old friend.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  Sid chimed in. “Oh, it went very well. It’s on the news.”

  Caro noticed the angry red scrape just above Charley’s collar. “What’s that on your neck?”

  Sid stepped closer to see for himself. “It looks like the mark of a double-barreled shotgun,” he said deadpan, as if he were doing his earnest best to be helpful.

  34

  The Thrill of the Hunt

  In 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

  While 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.