The Rescue Artist

mission control for the recovery of The Scream essentially by default. More worldly than the rest of the crew at the National Gallery, the portly and red-faced lawyer seemed better suited than any of the other museum officials to serve as the intermediary between the National Gallery and the public.

But all this—the theft of a masterpiece, the clamor from the world’s press, the presence of Scotland Yard, the hatching of undercover schemes—was new and astonishing to Thune, who found himself living inside one of the thrillers he liked to read. When The Scream was stolen, he had been National Gallery chairman for less than a week. The position, as it had been explained to him, was largely honorary. He would be expected to attend a few board meetings a year and to help choose a new director when Knut Berg retired the following year. No heavy lifting, except for the occasional glass of wine at a fundraiser.

On Friday, February 10, the day before the theft, Berg had taken his new chairman on an attic-to-basement tour of the National Gallery. Thune met all the museum’s employees, visited the guard’s security station, and marveled at the Munch exhibit. The next morning, Saturday, he drove with his family to the main train station in Oslo, headed for Lillehammer and the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. At 6:25 in the morning, the taxi passed in front of the National Gallery. Thune chattered excitedly to his family about the museum and his new job and the tour he had taken the day before.

Had the taxi been four minutes later, he might have seen a ladder standing curiously out of place.

Thrilled that the job of art museum chairman had magically given him entree to a world of hard-boiled detectives and shady informants, Thune performed his new duties zealously. He was especially pleased with the tape recorder that the police had rigged up in his office. Each time the phone rang, he eagerly pressed the “record” button.

The calls poured in, the tapes rolled, and the red herrings piled up. Many tips seemed so transparently dubious—”Buy me dinner and a drink and I’ll make it worth your while”—that the police could reject them at once. Some leads took time and trouble to investigate. In early April, a police source told Leif Lier, the detective in charge of the investigation, that Munch’s painting was in Stockholm in a locker at the train station. The Scream had been taken from its frame—Lier groaned—and stuffed inside a hockey bag. The Norwegians prevailed on their colleagues in Stockholm to check out each of the thousands of lockers in the train station. The search began on April 3, Easter Sunday, interrupting the Swedish cops’ holiday. It took three days. Nothing.

The breakthrough finally came on Sunday, April 24. Thune had a cousin by marriage named Einar-Tore Ulving, who happened to be an art dealer. Small and high-strung, with a large, bald head that made him look a bit like Elmer Fudd, Ulving didn’t cut much of a figure. He had a sharp eye for a deal, though, and his business had prospered. Ulving owned a summer house and a part-interest in a hotel (both properties only a short distance from Munch’s summer house, in the town of Osgardstrand), and he liked to swoop low over the Norwegian countryside in his helicopter.

One of Ulving’s clients stood out. His name was Tor Johnsen,^* and he and Ulving made a strange pair. Ulving was soft and nervous, with the scrubbed-pink look of a ten-year-old buffed and honed for a piano recital; Johnsen was big and disheveled and, if not quite handsome, at least somewhere in the vicinity. Above all, he was menacing. Johnsen was, in Norwegian parlance, a “torpedo”—an enforcer, or leg-breaker, whose job was to convince people who owed money to Johnsen’s employers that it would be prudent to pay up. He had spent a dozen years in prison for setting fire to a house and killing several people inside. Between stints in solitary— Johnsen repeatedly attacked the prison guards—he had taken up Thai kick-boxing. Strong, agile, and bad-tempered, he became a jailhouse star and later a Scandinavian champion.

In the early 1990s, Johnsen developed an unexpected interest. He began showing up at art galleries and auctions, both buying and selling paintings. Ulving had noticed the “well-dressed, good-looking” newcomer but had not caught on immediately to his true character, perhaps because at their first meeting Johnsen was accompanied by a well-known and wealthy shipowner (the two had met at the racetrack). Soon enough, Ulving learned enough to fill in a little of Johnsen’s biography. Still, he was an art dealer, not a social worker. Johnsen became a valued customer.

Toward the end of April 1994 Johnsen phoned Ulving. He knew some people, the ex-con said, who could arrange for The Scream to be returned to the National Gallery. He remembered, too, that Ulving and Thune were cousins of some sort. Maybe Ulving could give Thune a call.

On April 24, Ulving phoned Thune. Ordinarily, Ulving would have highlighted the good points of someone he was vouching for. Here, in an attempt to boost Johnsen’s credibility as a thief and a friend of thieves, he stood the usual formula on its head. “I told him that Mr. Johnsen’s reputation was not very good,” Ulving recalled years later. “I told him he was a violent man. I told him he had been sentenced to jail for twelve years. So Mr. Thune knew all about him. And he asked me, ‘Do you think this is substantial?’ And I said, ‘Based on what I know about Mr. Tor Johnsen, I think this is really substantial, and should be followed up.’ “

When Ulving reported back to Johnsen, he admitted that he didn’t know how seriously Thune had taken his message. For the next few days, Johnsen replied, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the newspaper.

The next day, April 25, the top crime reporter at Dagbladet picked up his phone and heard a familiar voice. The caller had passed along useful tips in the past, and now he claimed to have information about The Scream. He couldn’t say more than that on the phone.

The reporter, Gunnar Hultgreen, arranged to meet his informant face-to-face. Hultgreen rattled off questions, but the informant ducked them, on the grounds that he was only delivering a message. He mumbled something vague about “evidence” that would support his story, rattled off a few place names, and told Hultgreen to find a photographer. Hultgreen scribbled names and crude directions in his notebook—Nittedal, just east of Oslo; signs for Skedsmokorset; the village of Slattum; a right turn; a bus stop.

Hultgreen nabbed one of the newspaper’s photographers. Then he phoned Lief Plahter, the chief restorer at the National Gallery, and told him he would pick him up in a few minutes. Plahter had worked on The Scream and knew it well.

Nittedal was about a dozen miles east of town, but the informant’s directions were frustratingly sketchy. Eventually the reporter, the photographer, and the art restorer found a likely bus stop and inched along the road nearby, scanning the ground, though they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for. Finding nothing on their first sweep, they turned around and crept back toward the bus stop.

It was the photographer who shouted first. “Could that be it?”

He had spotted a piece of carved wood a few inches long in the grass by the side of the road. The three men scrambled out of the car, the white-haired art restorer trailing his younger colleagues.

“Oh, my God,” Plahter cried, as soon as he caught up with the others. “This is the frame.”

It was, more precisely, a short section of the frame, lying upside down. No one touched it, in case the thieves had left fingerprints, but Plahter bent down for a closer look. He had recognized the frame at once because of its color and design, and now he saw indisputable proof that this small piece of wood was what it purported to be. Plahter pointed at the neat lettering on the back of the frame and read off the National Gallery’s identification number.

The next day’s tabloid headline screamed out, WE FOUND THE FRAME.

14

The Art of Seduction

The discovery of the frame was a good news-bad news joke on a giant scale. On the plus side, the police were finally dealing with actual thieves rather than hoaxsters and con men. Almost as important, it seemed likely that The Scream had not been smuggled out of Norway to some more remote hideaway. But the minuses were plain, too. If Munch’s masterpiece had been removed from its frame, the painting was as vulnerable as a turtle taken from its shell. And the thieves were still at large.

Ulving, the art dealer, assured the Norwegian authorities that he was merely a good citizen caught up in a story that had nothing to do with him, and doing his best to cooperate with the authorities. This was not the first