The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  “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

  Ulving 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.

  37

  The End of the Trail

  AFTERNOON, MAY 7, 1994

  For a moment, Hill indulged himself. Concentrating on The Scream, he let Ulving drift out of his thoughts. The blue chalk was brighter in real life than in any of the reproductions, and so delicate that a cough could blow away lines that Munch had laid down a hundred years before. Close up, the green arcs next to the screamer’s head held the eye as forcefully as the famous orange bands across the sky. Tiny patches of raw cardboard peeked through the face.

  Now Hill focused again. He turned to the art dealer, who had never been more than a few steps away, and addressed him with his customary brusqueness.

  “Right, great. So what are we going to do now?”

  “Well, there’s the hotel here in Øsgårdstrand,” Ulving said. “We could go there.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

  “I can’t drive you back to Oslo. I’m just not fit to do it.”

  “I don’t want you to. I’ve got the painting now. The last thing I need is for you to land us upside-down in a ditch.”

  Hill picked up The Scream and wrapped it back up in the blue sheet. He followed Ulving outside and leaned over the passenger seat of Ulving’s sporty Mercedes, trying to set the priceless painting in the back of the little two-seater. Wrestling the bulky square of cardboard over the front seat headrest, Hill heard a dismaying thump. “Shit! I’ve dented the fucker on the goddamned headrest.”

  He glared at Ulving. “Drive.”

  Ulving drove to the hotel, only a few minutes away. “We can get a day room.”

  “Fine. Do it.”

  Ulving and Hill walked into the hotel, leaving The Scream unattended in the car. Hill, who was breathtakingly careless whenever he was not overtly paranoid, hardly gave it a thought. Who steals cars in Norway?

  Hill had yet to phone Butler. He spotted a pay phone near the front desk. The Scream’s brass nameplates jingled in his pocket as he strode across the lobby.

  “I’m just going to phone Sid,” Hill told Ulving, although it was John Butler and not Sid Walker that he planned to call. Hill couldn’t have phoned Walker if he had wanted to, since he had neglected to write down his number.

  Ulving tagged along. That wouldn’t do. Hill turned to Ulving. Fuck off! That was English, not American. Hill changed idiom and spoke aloud. “I need to talk to Sid. Go screw yourself!”

  “Oh, excuse me,” Ulving said, retreating.

  “John, it’s Chris.”

  “Charley, where the hell are you?”

  Butler was a good man in a crisis, but his voice was a near-whisper that betrayed his tension.

  Hill whispered, too, to foil Ulving. “I’ve got the picture. We’re at the Øsgårdstrand Hotel. We just booked into room 525. I’ll be there. No one else, just me and the painting. Send the cavalry.

  “Now listen, “Hill went on. “The important thing is, Sid is back at the Grand, with the two villains, Johnsen and the other guy.”

  “Shit! Okay.”

  “I’ll ring you again as soon as I get to my room.” Hill walked back toward Ulving. “Okay,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Sid’ll give them the money.”

  “What should we do with the painting?” Ulving asked.

  “Let’s go look at the room.”

  The room was on the second floor. Hill asked Ulving if there was a set of stairs in back. Ulving showed him the fire escape. Hill wedged the door open with a fire extinguisher.

  “Get the car and pull it around,” Hill ordered. “I’ll wait for you here.” Even for Hill, this was a colossal—and pointless—risk. He didn’t see it that way. Utterly confident that he knew his man, Hill figured it
was impossible that Ulving would race off with his $70 million prize. The only danger Hill could see was that, in the course of driving from the front to the back of the small hotel, Ulving would find a way to crash his car.

  Ulving pulled into view. Hill, still mortified that he had thumped The Scream on the headrest, lifted the painting from the car in slow motion. Then he dismissed Ulving.

  “Okay, I’ll get a taxi back. Drive home safely.”

  Ulving, trembling with a night’s accumulated tension, sped away.

  Hill carried The Scream up the fire escape and into his room. He placed the painting, still wrapped in its blue sheet, on the bed. Then he locked the door, chained it, and shoved a chest of drawers in front of it. He scanned the small room. What else could he do to protect himself in case someone tried to snatch the painting? Hill looked out the window. Ten feet to the ground. If someone managed to get in, maybe Hill could grab the painting and make it out the window. Worth a try. He opened the window wide.

  Hill ran through the brief roster of people who knew where he was. Ulving. Would he send someone to do what he would never dare do himself? Probably not. The receptionist? She had seen Hill but not the painting. She shouldn’t be a problem. The mystery man who had handed the painting to Ulving?

  “Fuck it! No one’s going to take the painting,” Hill said aloud. He unwrapped The Scream and propped it up on the bed, against the pillow. To his relief, he saw that the smack on the headrest hadn’t made a dent. He stepped back for a better look, then sat in a chair and stretched contentedly. Sprawled at full length, Hill put his hands behind his head and contemplated the painting he had studied in so many books.

  Munch had hated the idea that one of his paintings could disappear “like a scrap of paper into some private home where only a handful of people will see it.” It was good to think that his greatest painting had been saved from a far darker fate.