The Rescue Artist

The two men, now fast friends, made final arrangements for the swap. The deal would go down at the Antwerp airport on September 1.

On the appointed day, Hill drove to the rendezvous. A Belgian undercover cop called Antoine played the role of his bodyguard. Hill knew Antoine and liked him. More important, he looked like a bodyguard. Antoine was “a hairy-arsed, super-fit gendarme,” Hill would say later. “Doesn’t drink, lives on orange juice and yogurt”—Hill’s tone made plain that he would as soon live on goat urine and locusts—”and he was tooled up, not ostentatiously but obviously, so you’d be sure to know he was armed. He had real presence; he looked the part of a serious minder. And he had a briefcase with the cashier’s checks in it.”

Antoine, a classic-car buff, drove a vintage, lovingly maintained Mercedes. As he and Hill made their way through Antwerp and out to the airport, an elderly woman on a bicycle rattled her way across a set of tram tracks. The bell fell off her handlebars and onto the street. It was mid-morning, and traffic was heavy.

“Stop the car!” Hill barked, and then he hopped out of the Mercedes, halted traffic, retrieved the bell, and presented it to the woman on the bicycle.

“She gave me this wonderful smile of thanks,” Hill recalled long afterward, “and when I got back in the car, Antoine had this ‘what the fuck was that?’ look on his face.”

For Hill, who is in many ways akin to the small boy who imagines himself the star of the big game (“bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, all eyes on Hill as he strides to the plate”), this tiny scene was a not-to-be-missed chance to play the hero. “It was a pure Walter Raleigh moment,” he recalled long afterward, basking in the memory. “That’s all it was. And poor Antoine sitting there thinking, ‘You ought to be concentrating on the job, not fooling about playing the gallant knight to some old biddy whose bicycle has gone bust.’ “

At the airport, Hill and Antoine parked the car and walked into the small restaurant. It was noon. Hill ordered a coffee and cognac. In waltzed a dozen flight attendants, and, just behind them, Mulvihill and a crony. “You got everything?” Mulvihill asked.

“Yup,” said Hill.

The trickiest, most dangerous part of any deal is the exchange itself, when money and goods finally change hands. Hill and Mulvihill had each brought an ally, for muscle and backup. While Hill sat in the restaurant with Mulvihill’s man, Mulvihill and Antoine walked outside toward Antoine’s car. Both men were car buffs, and the Mercedes served as an ice-breaker. Mulvihill studied the cashier’s checks and assured himself that they were the ones he had seen in the bank in Brussels.

Satisfied, Mulvihill returned to the restaurant. He turned to Hill.

“Want to see the pictures?”

Hill walked out to the parking lot with Mulvihill’s partner, to a rented Peugeot. The bodyguard opened the trunk. Hill saw a sports bag, about big enough to hold a tennis racquet and a pair of sneakers. Next to it sat a black plastic bag wrapped around something rectangular and several large objects hidden inside layers of wrapping paper. The plastic bag was the same size and shape as the one Hill had seen in Antwerp, when Mulvihill had shown him the Vermeer. Hill put it to one side for a moment. He unzipped the sports bag. Inside, he saw a rolled-up canvas that he recognized as Goya’s Portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate. Glad as he was to see the painting—the thieves wouldn’t have brought it if they were running a scam—it was horrifying to see a two- hundred-year-old oil painting rolled up like a ten-dollar poster. Hill set the sports bag down gently. Turning to the bag that he hoped contained the Vermeer, he brushed a hand across his shirtfront, as if he were sweeping away a piece of lint.

Silently, two large BMWs alerted by Hill’s signal sped into place, one in front of the Peugeot, one behind. Each car was “four up,” with a driver and three men. This was the Belgian SWAT squad, big guys with Dirty Harry specials. They shouted commands in Flemish, presumably to drop everything and lie down. In case they had been misunderstood, the cops helped Hill and Mulvihill’s bodyguard to the ground.

Shoved facedown onto the asphalt, Hill and his companion were handcuffed and searched and then hustled into a car and whisked off to a local police station. Mulvihill was taken into custody, too, and so was Antoine. To Charley Hill’s great delight, the commotion had drawn the attention of everyone in the coffee shop, and the whole scene played out to a satisfying chorus of shrieks from the gawking flight attendants.

Once arrived at the police station, Hill and Antoine, the gendarme-cum-bodyguard, were freed from their handcuffs, congratulated, and left to celebrate. Mulvihill was charged with handling stolen goods, but, as the Irish Examiner later reported, “he miraculously managed to escape prosecution.”

The miracle was, in fact, mundane enough, though it did demonstrate that no one took art crime too seriously. A Belgian court dropped the charges against Mulvihill on the grounds that the robbery had taken place in Ireland, outside Belgian jurisdiction.

The trash bag did indeed contain the Vermeer. In all, the Belgian police recovered four of the Russborough House paintings (as well as three fake Picassos): the Vermeer, the Goya, an Antoine Vestier portrait, and Gabriel Metsu’s Man Writing a Letter. The Metsu was a companion piece to the same artist’s Woman Reading a Letter, the painting that police had found in Istanbul, where thieves were trying to barter it for heroin. The two works are considered Metsu’s masterpieces.

Today, all but two of the eighteen paintings stolen from Russborough House in 1986 have been recovered. The missing works are Venetian scenes painted by Francesco Guardi, which some rumors have placed in Florida.

Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid hangs safely in Dublin’s National Gallery, serene still, despite all she has seen.

Martin Cahill, the engineer of the Russborough House theft, was killed in August 1994, shot through the driver’s window of his car by a gunman dressed as a Dublin city worker. Cahill had slowed to a halt at a stop sign; a man with a clipboard approached the driver’s window to ask a few questions about traffic.

In January 2003 Niall Mulvihill was shot in a gangland attack in Dublin. Mulvihill took four bullets but managed to drive two miles toward the nearest hospital. He crashed just short of the hospital, causing a four-car pileup. No one was charged with his murder.

12

Munch

MARCH 1994

For five months after the Russborough House recovery, Christopher Charles Roberts did not exist. Then, with The Scream stolen, Roberts was back, reincarnated this time as the Man from the Getty.

Charley Hill’s first task in preparing for this new role was to learn about Edvard Munch. Studying up on artists was one of his favorite parts of the job. Hill’s love of art ran deep, though he was a buff rather than a scholar. In his spare time, in whatever city he found himself, he visited museums and looked in on old friends in the collection. In Prague, it was a Durer self-portrait; at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac (“the angel arresting Abraham’s hand is extraordinary, even though it doesn’t quite work”); at the National Gallery in London a long list, perhaps headed by Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.

In Washington, D.C., Hill always made time for a particular favorite, Gilbert Stuart’s Skater (Portrait of William Grant). The striking work, an action painting in what was typically a stiff and earnest genre, thrust Stuart to fame. It depicts a tall figure in an elegant black coat and hat, carving a graceful turn on the ice on the Serpentine, in London’s Hyde Park. (The story has it that Grant told Stuart that “the day was better suited for skating than sitting for one’s portrait.”) For Hill, the skating Scot embodies an idealized self-image, “the way I would have liked to have seen myself in that time.”