The Rescue Artist

and to carry.)

About an hour later, a tourist noticed the empty frame and informed a guard. Security ordered all the doors of the sprawling museum shut. Springing that slow-motion trap took ten minutes. Then, with the thief long gone, museum guards searched each of the museum’s thousands of visitors. The thief has never been found.

The daylight theft of the $1.3 million painting spurred an official investigation and the firing of the Louvre’s chief of security. (Two years later, as the bureaucratic battle dragged on, he was still living rent-free in an apartment in the Louvre.)

The investigators’ findings would have made Pollyanna despair. The Louvre had only an approximate idea of how many artworks it owned and how many people it employed. Built 800 years ago as a palace and converted to a museum two centuries ago, the immense complex is an endless and hard-to-patrol maze. Closed-circuit cameras did not cover the entire museum (room 67 was not monitored), and the camera systems in different wings of the museum worked independently and could not be scanned from a central location. Security at the Louvre was so poor, the report noted, that “it would be easier for a thief to steal one of its 32,000 exhibits than it would be to take an item from a department store.”

Why bother with banks?

3

Whodunit?

FEBRUARY 12, 1994

In Norway, it seemed as if every police officer in the nation was searching for the thieves who had taken The Scream. Exactly how the crooks planned to cash in on the masterpiece was unclear, but one of their motives was unmistakable: the theft was a jeering insult, a raised middle finger directed at Norway’s cultural and political elite. No mere economic crime, this was personal, a what-are-you-going-to-do- about-it taunt from criminals flaunting their cleverness.

That was the point, police assumed, of timing the crime for the Olympics, when 2,000 reporters were jostling for a story. It explained the choice of The Scream, one of the modern world’s most recognizable images. It accounted for the mocking note and the ladder—a gleaming, twelve-foot-long calling card— left defiantly in place.

For the thieves this was multimillion-dollar fun. Just forty minutes after the break-in, the phone rang at Dagbladet, one of Norway’s major newspapers. It was 7:10 A.M. The caller asked for the news desk. “You have to get to the National Gallery,” she said. “Something amazing has happened—somebody stole The Scream and they left a postcard that said ‘Thanks for the poor security’ “

“Who is this?”

No reply.

“Who’s calling?”

The tipster hung up.

At 7:30, the National Gallery’s security chief made a melancholy phone call to Knut Berg, the museum’s director. “There’s been a burglary. They took The Scream.” Neither man needed to spell out for the other just how bad the news was.

At the same moment, many of Norway’s highest government officials were together on a private bus headed to Lillehammer to participate in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The mood was cheery and, bearing in mind how early it was, almost festive. Then came the crackle of a news bulletin on the radio. When the bus pulled in to Lillehammer, it was besieged by reporters shouting questions about The Scream.

Answers were scarce. Back in Oslo, television reporters flocked to the National Gallery to film their stories. “All we know for certain,” a stunned Knut Berg admitted, “is that, to our sorrow, what could not happen has happened.”

It had happened before, although never to The Scream. In 1980, only a few years into Berg’s tenure, a drug addict had walked into Norway’s National Gallery in the middle of the day and walked out with a Rembrandt. He found a buyer for the drawing, a small study of a man’s head, and pocketed about $10,000, some five percent of the work’s true value. French police recovered the drawing in Paris six weeks later.

In 1982 thieves once again entered the National Gallery during the day. This time they hid in a storeroom and emerged in the middle of the night when the guards were in another part of the museum. They grabbed a Gauguin, a Rembrandt (not the one stolen in 1980), a Goya, and five other works, passed them out a window to colleagues, and escaped. The theft led National Gallery officials to install additional alarms and outside cameras and to build the basement alarm station where the guard would later sit, unmindful of the television monitors, as The Scream was passed out the window.

In 1988, thieves broke into the Munch Museum in Oslo, only a mile or two from the National Gallery. There they stole The Vampire, perhaps Munch’s second best-known painting. Women in Munch’s work are sometimes desirable, often dangerous, and usually both at once. The Vampire depicts a red-haired woman biting, or perhaps kissing, the neck of a dark-haired man sprawled face-down before her.

The thief had none of the artist’s subtlety. He simply broke a window, grabbed the painting, and ran. The alarm sounded, but by the time the guard had hurried from the far side of the building, he found only broken glass and a blank spot on the wall.

In 1993, the National Gallery was hit again. With the Olympics less than a year off and plans for the blockbuster exhibition already underway, this was a hard-to-miss warning. The thieves struck on August 23, in daylight. While one shift of guards replaced another, and while a television crew filmed in another room, someone walked off with Munch’s Study for a Portrait, which depicts a sad-eyed young woman looking abstractedly into the middle distance.

The work, valued at $300,000, was not protected by an alarm, nor was it in a room watched by security cameras. In response, the National Gallery beefed up its security yet again. This time the museum was safe, Knut Berg declared. During the day, the guards would spot any thief trying to make off with a painting, and at night the museum was as secure as a fortress.

With The Scream gone and the world watching, the Norwegian police faced enormous pressure. They searched for fingerprints but came up empty: the thieves had worn gloves. There were no footprints inside the museum and no identifiable prints or other marks near the ladder. For a brief moment, it seemed that a tiny, dark stain on a piece of broken glass might be blood. Nope.

Police technicians scanned the museum’s surveillance tapes over and over again, frame by frame. The quality was frustratingly poor. The thieves did not seem to be wearing masks, but even blown-up pictures of their faces were too fuzzy to be of any use. A security camera trained on the front of the museum had filmed the thieves’ car, but the vague shape could not even be identified as a particular make.

The police did crack the tiny mystery of where the ladder had come from, but no one at the building site had seen anything. The postcard was scarcely more help. The scribbled message on the back was in colloquial Norwegian, so the police guessed that the thieves were from Norway, but that was hardly conclusive. Maybe some overseas Mr. Big had planned the job and hired local talent for the actual break-in.

Police appeals for help did not yield a single eyewitness. No one had seen two men carrying a twelve-foot ladder down the street or driving a car with a ladder lashed to the roof. Hope surged momentarily when police found a taxi driver who had been parked near the museum while the thieves came and went, but he insisted that he had been busy counting his take for the night. If anyone had come running from the museum carrying a painting, he had missed it.

He had looked up long enough to notice and describe in considerable detail a fair- haired woman, about 25, who had been walking down the street in front of the museum. Was this the mystery