The Rescue Artist

recognized at once that he didn’t belong. Why was a roughneck like that hanging around the hotel?

It was ten o’clock at night. Hill told Ulving and Johnsen that after he went to his room and changed, they could meet for a drink. Soon after, the three men settled in at the Sky Bar in the hotel’s rooftop lounge. Minutes later, Walker came into the bar. Johnsen turned accusingly to Hill.

“Is he with you?”

Hesitation could mean disaster.

“Of course he is,” Hill barked at once. “He’s the guy who’s going to look after me. I’m not going to come into this town with a lot of money just to have you take it off of me.” Johnsen seemed to buy it, so Hill beckoned to Walker to come over.

The danger was that Walker had no idea about the conversation he had missed. He could only guess what Hill had been saying, and if he guessed wrong they were both in serious trouble. With Johnsen already on edge, Hill knew that the least signal from him to Walker—a raised eyebrow, for instance, as if to say “Careful now!”—was impossible.

“I saw you downstairs,” Johnsen challenged Walker.

Walker was dismissive. “Yeah. You did. What do you want me to do, sit in my room all day?”

Hill launched into the cover story he and Walker had cooked up ahead of time. Walker was an English criminal who lived in Holland and occasionally did bodyguard work for Hill.

Hill had planned to introduce Walker sooner or later. Maybe they’d gambled when they shouldn’t have. The only reason to leave Walker roaming free was the vague hope that he might turn up something intriguing. Hill hadn’t figured on Johnsen spotting the competition so quickly. Could he turn that to his advantage? Johnsen would be pleased with himself; maybe his pride in his own shrewdness would lead him to lower his guard a bit.

Hill figured the cover story rang pretty true. Walker wasn’t the kind of guy you asked a lot of questions about, because one look at him seemed enough to resolve any mystery about the line of work he was in. And it made sense that the man from the Getty would have a bodyguard to watch out for him and maybe do a bit of driving, because this was a foreign country and Hill was talking about an awful lot of money. Or so a crook might reason. The Getty would never have approved the business about a bodyguard with a criminal record, Hill knew, so he hadn’t told them that part of the story.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

tempera and oil pastel on cardboard, 73.5 ? 91 cm

PHOTO: J. Lathion; © National Gallery, Norway/ ARS

Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893. It is his rawest, most emotional work and was inspired by an actual stroll at sunset. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead-tired,” Munch recalled. “And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city…. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”

Edvard Munch, The Vampire, 1893–94

oil on canvas, 109 ? 91 cm

Munch Museum, Oslo. © Munch Museum /

Munch-Ellingsen Group /ARS 2004

The Vampire, perhaps the second most famous of Munch’s paintings, was itself once stolen. Munch feared women and yearned for them; his painting, originally known as Love and Pain, was about the anguish that accompanies love, not about literal vampires.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1885–86

oil on canvas, 120 ? 118.5 cm

PHOTO: J. Lathion; © National Gallery, Norway /ARS

The Sick Child depicts the deathbed of Munch’s sister, Sophie. The girl’s mother looks on helplessly. At one of his first shows, Munch approached The Sick Child only to find a rowdy crowd gathered before it, “laughing and shouting” in mockery.

Francisco de Goya,

Dona Antonia Zarate, c. 1810

oil on canvas, 82 ? 103.5 cm

© Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland

In an undercover sting that reached its climax at an airport in Belgium, Charley Hill recovered two immensely valuable paintings stolen from Russborough House in Dublin. Both paintings were stashed in the trunk of a car, Goya’s Dona Antonia Zarate rolled up like a cheap poster, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid concealed inside a plastic trash bag.

Jan Vermeer, Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, c. 1670

oil on canvas, 71.1 ? 60.5 cm

© Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland

Only thirty-five Vermeers exist, and over the years three have been stolen. One, The Concert, has been missing since 1990.

In 1995, thieves stole Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, worth perhaps $10 million, from England’s Lord Bath. An ex-hippie, an artist himself, and a self-proclaimed womanizer (portraits of seventy-one of his “wifelets” adorn his home), Lord Bath had inherited the painting from an ancestor who purchased it in 1878. After a seven-year search, Charley Hill recovered the painting. Here Lord Bath returns his Titian to its rightful place in Longleat House.

Longleat House is huge and isolated, with 100 rooms and grounds that stretch across 9,000 acres. Like Britain’s other stately homes, it is a sitting duck for thieves. By the time police arrive, the crooks have long since fled.

Francisco de Goya, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812

oil on wood, 52.4 ? 64.3 cm

© The National Gallery, London

In 1961 Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington disappeared from London’s National Gallery, which had purchased it only weeks before. The painting was recovered four years later, but it made a cameo appearance in 1962 in the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in the villain’s Caribbean hideaway.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn,