The Rescue Artist

Life would be easy if you could recover the painting and arrest the thieves. But it didn’t usually work like that. Which do you want, Hill would shout, a hubcap thief thrown in prison for six months or a Bruegel back on the wall where the world can admire it?

Just how the art dealer and his arsonist companion had come to be involved with The Scream in the first place was something Hill could sort out another day. For now, Hill’s job was to get things back on track. His first meetings with Johnsen and Ulving had gone well enough, he figured, and Johnsen had certainly swallowed hard when Walker showed him the money. But what had the Norwegian duo made of the police convention at the hotel and the plainclothes cop in the bulletproof vest?

Johnsen had left the Plaza in a hurry, saying he would return in midafternoon, leaving Hill to twiddle his thumbs. Hill hoped the Norwegian crook was busy with his partners, whoever they were, sorting out the logistics of handing over The Scream. If the deal was still on, that is. The fiasco with the police convention had certainly spooked Johnsen, and it might have scared him away altogether.

Hill tried to look at things from Johnsen’s point of view. On the one hand, the money. On the other, a hotel crawling with cops and a deal put together by two strangers. Who were Roberts and Walker?

With time to kill before Johnsen reappeared, Ulving suggested that he show Hill around town. Before they set out, the art dealer gestured to Hill to join him at the back of his Mercedes station wagon. Ulving opened a big box full of prints, including some woodcuts of The Scream. Hill couldn’t tell if they were genuine, but they looked good. Then the two men headed off for a bit of gallery-hopping. Ulving, in his element, bounced along proudly. He was a “slimeball,” Hill thought, cocky as hell and oblivious to the sneers and scowls directed his way by his fellow dealers as he sauntered through Oslo’s galleries.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Ulving and Hill returned to the hotel to see if Johnsen had showed up. They met Walker and settled in at the coffee bar to wait. About 15 minutes later, Johnsen stormed in.

“There’s cops all around the building,” he snapped, “and police cars parked outside. Two of ‘em, at least.”

Johnsen was furious, spitting out his words. Hill hadn’t known about the Norwegians’ plan to keep an eye on things, but he was as soothing and unruffled as Johnsen was indignant. “Let’s go up to my room,” Hill said. “I’ve got a bottle of Canadian Club up there, and we can talk.”

Hill’s room was on the sixteenth floor with a knockout view of the harbor and, what was more interesting to Johnsen, a clear view of the hotel’s main entrance. Johnsen and Hill stood together at the window. They looked down, and there was no missing the cops. Hill groaned to himself. The fuckers were in unmarked cars, lounging around in the sun, bored out of their minds and impossible to take for anything but police surveillance officers.

Johnsen looked at the cops and then glared at Hill. “What’s that about?” he demanded.

Hill decided he’d stick with the same line he’d taken to explain away the cop in the bulletproof vest. If the Norwegian surveillance teams had been skilled—if they’d been well-concealed and Johnsen had managed to spot them anyway—then he would have had some explaining to do. But incompetence like this was a gift. These guys couldn’t be trying to hide.

“Look at those assholes down there,” Hill said. “They can’t be looking for us, because nobody could have missed us wandering all over the hotel. They’ve got to be here to protect the narcotics conference.”

Everyone sat down to a drink. Ulving begged off. Hill’s opinion of him sank even lower. Johnsen and Hill each took a serious drink, a large Canadian Club, and talked about the merits of rye whiskey compared to scotch or bourbon. Keep it relaxed, Hill told himself. Take it slow.

Hill stood up and walked into the bathroom. In the morning, he had arranged his papers and his traveling kit with all the care of a set dresser on a Broadway play. Setting out a “prop trap” was a kind of silent storytelling. Hill had stacked a few business cards near his bedside lamp: Christopher Charles Roberts, Getty Museum. He had set his plane tickets by the phone, peeking out from a torn envelope; his Getty ID lay nearby, with a photo. On the desk, a few pieces of Getty stationery. Under an ashtray, a couple of crumpled credit card receipts, signed by Christopher Roberts. On top of the receipts, half a dollar or so in change, in American coins.

Hill had taken similar care with his toiletries kit, in case Johnsen (or, much less likely, Ulving) went into the bathroom and looked through his things. Shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste, all good American brands.

The preparation paid off. As soon as Hill shut the bathroom door behind him, Walker told him later, “Johnsen had a good ferret “round.” Though the crook had waited for Hill to leave the room, he made no attempt to disguise his snooping. For his part, Hill made a point of dawdling in the bathroom, to give Johnsen every opportunity to check him out.

Hill finally reappeared. Johnsen didn’t make any reference to the little test he’d conducted, but he seemed more at ease and began to talk again about how to carry out the Scream deal. It had to be done that night, he said. Hill and Walker would have to bring the money to a rendezvous. He’d let them know where.

Hill balked. “Nope!” he said. “We’re not taking the money out of the hotel until I’m assured that the painting is the painting and that it’s fine. We’ll do the deal after that.”

They wrangled for a bit. Johnsen left to make a phone call—he didn’t want to use the phone in Hill’s room— and came back a few minutes later, worried but still hopeful. For Hill, this wary jostling was sport. You had to stay alert and watchful, but there was no way of knowing just what you were watching for. In the meantime, you talked, partly to establish a bond, partly to pass the time, but mainly to amuse yourself.

Every case reached a point where the next move was up to the thieves and there was nothing the cops could do to hurry things along. Hill tried to relax and take life as it came. It took work, for though Hill was a brave man, he wasn’t a calm one. Off-duty, the moment a conversation lost its hold on him—and that moment was rarely slow in coming—Hill would start jiggling his keys, or twirling his glasses, or scanning the room in search of a book to pick up or a television to turn on or a magazine to skim.

Undercover, Hill’s fidgeting vanished. If the bad guys asked a question, you went along, looking to see if you could come up with something new. A drink or two helped. The fog—not knowing the rules of the game, or if there were rules, or just who you were dealing with—was part of the undercover challenge. Spinning a story for high stakes was a chance to exercise one’s powers. When it worked, it was enjoyable in the same way that it was enjoyable for a sprinter to run or a skier to carve a line through a turn.

Ulving asked Hill about the Getty and about his responsibilities there. Hill made it up as he went along. He hadn’t seen any of the new construction at the museum—his only visit had been twenty years before—but when he learned that Ulving hadn’t either, he laid it on thick. “When you visit the States, you have to come see us. And make sure you give me a call. If I’m not there, tell them you’re a friend of mine, and they’ll look after you.”

That kind of “lightweight bullshit banter” was Hill’s favorite. It kept the tedium at bay and sometimes it even helped move things along.

For Hill, the enemy always lurking in the wings, more formidable than any thief, was boredom. The great virtue of undercover work was that, temporarily at least, it provided a means of vanquishing his old foe.

25

First Time Undercover

By the time The Scream was stolen, Charley Hill had been an undercover cop for a dozen years. His very first undercover case, like the great majority of those that followed, had involved a stolen painting. (In most of the nonart cases, including one where he was taken hostage, Hill played a crook who wanted to buy counterfeit money.) The decision to give Hill a chance in an art case was easy. He was well-spoken, he didn’t look like a cop, and he had been a soldier and therefore could presumably keep his head. Above all, he was game.

In 1982 Scotland Yard had infiltrated a gang of armed robbers in south London. Somehow the thieves had acquired a painting by the sixteenth-century Italian Parmigianino, worth a few million pounds. The crooks wanted to unload it, and the cops saw an opportunity. A pair of detectives in the armed robbery squad took a look at Charley Hill and sounded him out about a role he would later make his own. How would he feel about posing as an American art dealer willing to buy a hot painting?