time, he said, that he had helped the police recover stolen paintings.
In 1988, thieves had stolen a number of Munch paintings and lithographs from private homes around Oslo. Out of the blue, someone phoned Ulving, trying to sell him a Munch lithograph. Ulving knew by the work’s description that it had been stolen and called the police. They told Ulving to go ahead with the deal, but the thief caught sight of the police lurking near the designated rendezvous and fled.
Several days later Ulving’s contact phoned him again, offering more Munch works. Ulving told the police again. They proposed another trap. This time Ulving was to say he wanted to buy several of the prints and paintings, rather than just one, for a client in Germany. Since the art was stolen, Ulving would offer only KR 1 million, about $125,000.
The art dealer and the thief agreed on a deal. The police rented an apartment above the thief’s, so they could keep watch uninterrupted. On a Saturday morning shortly before the assigned meeting time, a detective phoned Ulving. The thief had left home, and they had a car tailing him and a plane overhead tracking him. He was headed
Two minutes later, Ulving heard a knock on the door.
The thief burst in. “Everything ready?”
The police, Ulving later learned, had followed the wrong car. The thief hadn’t been in Oslo for two days. While the surveillance cops monitored an empty apartment in Oslo, the thief had checked into a hotel in the countryside, in the tiny town of Osgardstrand. Ulving did a double-take.
Ulving stalled for time. It would take him a little while to get the money together, and they needed to set up a new rendezvous. Once he had pushed his guest out the door, Ulving phoned the police and launched into an astonishing tale.
The hotel the thief had chosen for himself, of all the hotels in Norway, happened to be the one that Ulving owned! The coincidence was, Ulving would agree in an interview years later,
One name fit. The manager hotfooted it to the room. There, in the closet, he found seven stolen Munch paintings and lithographs. The police, in the meantime, nabbed the thief at the rendezvous.
Despite the happy ending, Ulving said the experience had left him gun-shy. One brush with thieves was more than enough. Who knew what might happen if he got mixed up with cops and crooks again?
To Charley Hill’s suspicious mind, everything about Ulving rang false. What was this good Samaritan doing tangled up in another stolen art case? Ulving insisted that his relationship with Johnsen was aboveboard. He was an experienced and knowledgeable art dealer; Johnsen had only recently discovered art. What could be more natural than for an expert to help a novice develop his eye? Hill’s working theory was far simpler: Johnsen brought Ulving art that he had stolen (or that someone he knew had stolen), and Ulving sold it. Ulving was a “typical art dealer, a mendacious son of a bitch, just patently and obviously weasely.”
The dogmatic tone was characteristic. Hill knew and admired dozens of serious, thoughtful, dedicated art dealers, and yet, confronted with a single dealer he thought was shady, he could forget all that in an instant. “Art dealers are used car salesmen,” he complained, thinking of Ulving but generalizing wildly, “except they have all the upmarket social graces.”
In other aspects of his life, Hill was prone to spectacular pratfalls, but he took great pride in his ability to read people. He made judgments about people quickly and amended them slowly or not at all. Whether his instinctive dislike of Ulving reflected insight or only nasty-mindedness was hard to know. Cops spend their careers scanning the gutter, and it is not a vantage point that gives them a sunny view of human nature. On one idyllic spring day years before he had ever met Ulving, Hill happened to see a jogger pass by in Richmond Park, the biggest and greenest open space in London. “Probably a rapist,” Hill muttered, “looking for some mum who’s only thinking about her baby in his stroller.”
The novelist and ex-prosecutor Scott Turow could have been thinking of Hill when he called cops “our paid paranoids.” “A copper sees a conspiracy in a cloudy day,” Turow wrote. “He suspects treachery when you say good morning.”
Though Hill disliked and distrusted Ulving, he had no doubt that he could win him over. Over the years, he had learned how to befriend all sorts of crooks and liars. In his line of work it was an essential skill. “That’s been my great strength,” he once observed, “to be able to develop rapport with criminals who tell me things they wouldn’t tell anybody else.”
Oddly, Hill’s gift for forging alliances seems to work at both ends of the social scale but to fail in the middle. Killers will happily drink with Hill, and lords and ladies, too, but good, solid, salt-of-the-earth citizens purse their lips in distaste and back away.
“Now, that’s an example of a man who’s a killer and a horrible scumbag in anybody’s book,” Hill said once, naming a gangster, “and yet he and I can talk as easily as you please.” Not long ago the two men met for a drink, in a bleak pub long after midnight. The bartender recognized Hill’s companion as soon as he walked in. His hands trembled as he served their drinks.
“That son of a bitch is a fucking Khyber Pass bandit, British-version,” Hill said later. “But when he meets someone who isn’t frightened of him, and it’s someone who’s not out to do him harm, he likes talking to him. That’s the way these guys operate. It’s like Kipling’s poem: ‘There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, /When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.’ “
At the other end of the social spectrum, Hill noted proudly, he and the Duke of Beaufort can happily pass an afternoon talking about art and armagnac. And though Hill would gladly visit with either the gangster or the duke, the two men on their own could not possibly find even an inch of common ground. “Never,” said Hill. “It couldn’t happen. Not unless [the gangster] sneaked into Badminton, held a gun to the duke’s head, and locked him up in a cupboard in the bedroom with the duchess while he ransacked the place. That’s the only rapport they would ever have.”
But nobles and thieves are easy for Hill. It’s those in between he finds hard. His problem is not with shopkeepers and salesmen in stores and conductors on trains; he likes turning rote exchanges into small conversations. Things go astray when Hill decides that the person across from him has his nose glued to a rule book. “If I were dealing with a bureaucrat,” Hill conceded in an interview in 2003, “the chances are it would go horribly wrong. As often it has. They write me off as a snake-oil salesman, the sort of person they hate to have any dealings with, because they want to deal with bureaucratic procedures and buzz words and jargon from management-speak.”
Hill paints his failure as proof of his virtue—better to be one of Kipling’s strong men than a member of the herd of “little bureaucrats feeding the meter”—and perhaps he
Occasionally Hill finds himself called on to talk to a group of museum officials or insurance agents. He tends to leave them bewildered. His stories begin in the middle and end without warning. He scatters endless names without explanation. Even comments that he intends as transparent leave many in his audience feeling they have wandered into the wrong lecture hall. At one talk, for instance, Hill wanted to make the point that collectors worried about art thieves must take steps to protect themselves, rather than rely entirely on the police. “In the early fifth century,” Hill remarked, “the Roman emperor wrote to a group of complaining Roman Britons that they should look after themselves. In the same year, Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, so the emperor obviously had a point about what he could do for this part of his empire.”
With crooks, in contrast, Hill labors diligently to establish a bond. Honor among thieves is a fiction, but Hill has found that criminals do have a code of self-respect and self-esteem, and he has learned to turn that code to his advantage.
His role-playing takes him far from his true character. In his personal life, Hill’s moral code is strict. He makes fun of his own uprightness (“I’m a Yankee Puritan of the worst kind, a Brit one”), but he adamantly adheres to such
