The Rescue Artist

101—but I’d never had a coherent idea about art.

“I’d just come from a year in the jungle and this was my reintroduction to civilized life.”

PART II

Vermeer and the Irish Gangster

7

Screenwriters

It would be years before Hill thought of somehow turning his love of art into a career. In the meantime, he tried on and quickly rejected an entire wardrobe of possible lives. After Vietnam, he moved on from his security guard job and studied history at George Washington University. Then he won a Fulbright scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin, taught high school in Belfast, studied theology in London, and eventually landed a job on the metropolitan police force in London. The police work led eventually to undercover work in general and to art cases in particular.

Hill made a most unconventional cop. The British bobby in the 1970s still looked like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan, in his tall helmet and with an inch-long brass whistle clipped to his chest. One grizzled old cop from Norfolk—in gruffness and taciturnity the rough equivalent of a Vermont farmer—never quite got over his first encounters with his new colleague. “Picture a portly fellow with big, tortoise-shell glasses and curly hair patrolling his beat”—here he squared his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and took a few swift strides—”and all the time talking in that American/Canadian/English accent about medieval history and wearing a coal scuttle on his head. That was Charley Hill.”

Hill’s friends—he has a large and loyal circle, on both sides of the Atlantic—saw the same quirks, but saw them in a far darker light. The question they debated endlessly with one another was whether Charley would ever find a way to turn his contradictions to his advantage, or if the strain would eventually tear him apart. “We never stopped worrying about if he could hold it together,” said a friend who had stayed close to Hill since they were both sixteen. “He wanted to be a priest, and at the same time he was prepared to beat people up and shoot them and kill them. That’s not about conflicting goals, that’s about the Three Faces of Eve.”

Now it was Hill’s job to dream up a way to return The Scream to its rightful owners. But before any scheme could be put into play, the Art Squad detectives would have to convince their superiors at Scotland Yard that the case was worth the effort. For Hill that was self-evident, a challenge scarcely worth dignifying with a response. What mission could be cleaner than recovering the loftiest creations of mankind from ignorant, violent louts? The brass were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn’t the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top pissed away money like water.

That wasn’t a view that won Hill many friends in high places, which only served to strengthen his conviction that he was in the right. Hill took a willful, sometimes adolescent, pride in offending anyone in a position to derail his career.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a compulsion that moves us to act precisely against what we recognize to be our own self-interest. We roll our eyes when the boss presents his pet idea; we snicker when we should praise; we blurt out the truth when a white lie would be just as easy and infinitely preferable. “With certain minds, under certain conditions,” wrote Poe, “it becomes absolutely irresistible.” The imp of the perverse has a permanent perch atop Charley Hill’s shoulder.

Bureaucrats, above all others, moved him to indignation. “Whingeing, plodding, paint-by-numbers dullards,” their only pleasures were kissing ass and getting in the way. Of course they’d want to leave The Scream to someone else.

It fell to John Butler, head of the Art Squad, to sell the mission to his bosses. He could argue sincerely that art crime was international and therefore called for an international response, but this was a tricky assignment even so. The international argument would have been easier to sell if somewhere along the line one of the nations involved was Britain. “What Butler had to do,” says Art Squad detective Dick Ellis, “was convince the hierarchy at the Met [ropolitan Police] to pay for an undercover operation to recover somebody else’s property”—here Ellis’s voice rises in admiration and incredulity, as if he were a sports commentator describing a skater’s triple axel—”even though it hadn’t come from London, and wasn’t in London, and wasn’t likely to come to London.”

Over the years, the men (and, rarely, women) in charge of the Art Squad had learned not to burden their superiors with too much information. “We liked to give them something of a fait accompli,” says Ellis, who ran the squad for most of the decade between 1989 and 1999. “Usually we’d already decided to go ahead and we’d had the first couple of meetings before we told anyone what we were up to. That was by and large how we got things off the ground. Then, once you’re flying, their only choice is to force a crash.”

Ellis spelled out the sales pitch he favored. The first approach to the higher-ups was easy. “If this works—if we can get The Scream back—the Art Squad will look golden, and you’ll look golden.” Smiles all around. Then came the twist. “We’ve already committed to this. If we pull out now we’re going to look bloody ridiculous. Or not we—you, in management, are going to look bloody ridiculous.” Too late now.

And then, unexpectedly, an English criminal came along and made everyone’s life easier. His name was Billy Harwood, and he had served seven years in prison in Norway for trafficking in heroin. The Norwegians had sent Harwood back to England to serve the remaining five years of his prison term, and the English had released him on parole.

Now Harwood contacted the Norwegian embassy in London with an intriguing story. From contacts he’d made in prison in Norway, Harwood said, he knew who’d taken The Scream. He knew the thieves and they trusted him. These were hard and wary men. No outsider could lure them into the open; at the first hint that something was up, they would protect themselves by destroying the painting.

But the crooks would deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee The Scream’s return to the National Gallery. In return, he wanted ?5 million.

The Norwegians quickly contacted Scotland Yard to tell them about Harwood’s proposal. The English police didn’t put any stock in Harwood’s story—they figured him (correctly, it turned out) for an opportunist looking to spin some fast talk and big promises into a bonanza—but this was good news nonetheless. With Harwood inadvertently serving as a bridge between the English police and the Norwegians, Scotland Yard finally had a legitimate entree into the case.

For Hill and all the other Art Squad detectives, planning stings was one of the best parts of the job. Recovering stolen art was different in crucial ways from most other police work. Finding a painting and hanging it back on the wall where it belonged was the main goal; throwing a crook in jail was secondary. (By the time the police found the trail, in any case, the original thieves might well be long gone.) The hope was to find a way to tempt a criminal who had stashed a painting in an abandoned warehouse or a locker at a train station to bring it into the open, where the police could grab it. That required, first of all, cultivating informants to pick up news and rumors. Many times a direct approach was futile: Kicking down a door and shouting “Police!” was all very well, but where was the painting?

For the Art Squad, making up stories was as much a part of the job as making arrests. In the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, when mysterious Japanese buyers paid record-setting prices for brand-name artists—$54 million for van Gogh’s Irises, $78 million for Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, $82.5 million for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet—the Art Squad kicked around schemes for taking advantage of those headlines. Could they find a Japanese-speaking detective to play a gangster or a tycoon who wanted a masterpiece to hang above his fireplace?

“You’re a bit like a scriptwriter,” says Dick Ellis. “It’s a challenge to come up with something that has a