The Rescue Artist

“So now I was on the horns of a dilemma.”

The thieves weren’t trying to peddle a fake; if Hill was right, they had stolen a fake that they (and the owner) had believed was genuine. Hill, who had yet to say anything about the painting, fortified himself with more cognac. The two thieves looked on, amused rather than alarmed, as Hill once again scanned the painting front and back.

“We’ve got a problem here,” Hill said. “This might not be by Parmigianino; it may just be in his style. Because if you look closely…” and then he launched into “a stream of bullshit” on wormholes in the wood and patterns in the cracking.

The thieves were indignant. Their painting was a fake?! But though they didn’t believe Hill, at least he had put an end to any suspicion that he was a cop. The aim of detective work is to bring down criminals. Any genuine undercover cop, the thieves assumed, would have glanced at the painting, cheered his good fortune, and slapped on the handcuffs.

By now it was four in the morning. Hill told the thieves he didn’t want their painting. They drove him back to meet Walker at the train station. Walker, who had spent a long, cold night waiting in a parking lot, noted without enthusiasm that Hill had booze on his breath. Part of the job, Hill explained, and besides, it was not beer but cognac and good cognac at that. Walker didn’t seem much mollified.

Hill had far more distressing news to impart. “I think the thing’s a fake,” he said.

“Shit! Are you serious?”

Walker and Hill sped back to headquarters and reported the night’s doings. Their superiors, convinced that the painting was real and that they were on the brink of catching two criminals they had long been pursuing, ordered a raid on the house Hill had visited.

The next day Walker collected Hill at Grosvenor House. The police had grabbed the Parmigianino and brought it to the auctioneers at Christie’s. The painting, the experts decreed, was a Victorian copy in the manner of Parmigianino. It was worth not ?3 million but, on a good day, ?3,000.

For an art historian or a restorer, recognizing the painting as a fake might have been a routine day’s work. But they would have had expertise on their side and all the time they wanted. Hill, armed only with nerve and a good eye, was an amateur who had to make a snap judgment while a pair of crooks glowered at him.

It came out eventually that the thieves had stolen the painting twenty-five years before and put it away. For a quarter of a century, they had looked on it as a retirement fund worth millions.

“Well, everyone was bitterly disappointed,” Hill recalled, “because they were so desperate to put these guys away for something big. But my reputation soared; it made me. From then on, I was the Yard’s art ‘expert.’ And Sid suddenly realized that I could do the job. He said, in that growl of his”—here Hill put on a tough guy accent—” ‘Chollie, the thing I like about choo is, you got charisma.’ “

Charisma wasn’t quite the right word—nerve or flair would have been closer. But the point was that Charley had won Sid’s endorsement. Years later, he still glowed at the memory. “I was flattered by that. No fucker had ever said anything like that to me before. Sid was a really hard-nosed cop, whom I’d heard a lot about but never met, the foremost of all police undercover officers. And from that moment, I became one of his proteges.”

26

The Trick of It

Hill, who had spent a lifetime in dissatisfied flight from career to career, found a home in undercover work. Art jobs in particular were a perfect match, one of the few vocations in the world that called for someone who would be equally glad to study the brushstrokes in a 300-year-old painting or to kick down a robber’s door.

For Hill, the pattern never varied. Talent and brains would lift him up, and restlessness and rebelliousness would send him tumbling back down. He had nearly managed to flunk out of college, despite his taste for books. In the army, he no sooner earned a promotion than he picked a fight with an officer who busted him back to private. At Scotland Yard, nearly every higher-up was a “complete dunce who talked through his ass.” On the ladder of career success, Hill broke every rung.

Hill saw the pattern himself, but he took it as proof of integrity rather than of self-destructiveness. “Pissing people off is what I’ve done best in life,” he has said more than once, and his tone when he says so is boastful rather than wistful. He is, after all, a lone wolf, not a creature made to work in harness. “I was a real ‘fuck the army’ kind of guy, but I enjoyed fighting, and the people I was with enjoyed having me with them,” Hill says defiantly. “I was a good fighter but not a good soldier, and later on I was a good thief-taker but not a good police officer.”

Undercover work, with its emphasis on making it up as you went along and on working in small teams rather than in large groups, set him free. Suddenly the very traits that had set Hill apart and made him an odd fit in the police—the chafing at authority, the posh accent, the tendency to drip polysyllables, the arcane interests, the “outsiderness” in general—all turned to his advantage. The starting point in undercover work was the ability to go unrecognized. Hill was the last person anyone would identify as a cop.

“English detectives all look alike,” says Mark Dalrymple, the insurance investigator. “They’re always in suits —always the same inexpensive suits. Very plain ties, with a neat knot. Short hair, neatly cut. Polished shoes.” Dalrymple puts down his wineglass and swings his eyes around the crowded pub where he is holding forth, in search of a live example. “The minute they come in the room, every villain in a place like this knows who they are. Nobody ever makes Charley Hill.”

It is not because he is a man of a thousand disguises. Hill’s range is narrow. One of his undercover colleagues once worked his way inside a neo-Nazi gang and thwarted its plan to firebomb a synagogue. Hill could no more pass for a skinhead than could John Cleese. (Hill is typecast partly because his acting skills go only so far. But vanity comes into play as well. Hill brushes aside certain roles as not for him. He is a leading man. If all that’s wanted is a brute, plenty of others can fill the bill.)

“Most police operations are for drugs or arms,” says Dick Ellis, the Art Squad detective who specialized in putting together undercover teams, “and those tend to work out quite nicely. Those deals are done on a villain-to- villain basis, and we have some very well-trained, very astute police officers we can insert into those scenarios. But they could never, ever pose as anything other than a villain.”

The man who brought down the neo-Nazi gang, for instance, was a highly regarded detective named Rocky, who looks like a bigger, tougher Charles Bronson. In police circles, he was renowned for such feats as throwing a desk at a sergeant (and, more surprisingly, getting away with it). Rocky’s partner was supposedly the only person who could handle him. Charley Hill, a friend of both men, referred to them as “the monster and his manager.”

“Have you met Rocky?” asks Dick Ellis. “You aren’t going to get Rocky posing as a representative of the Getty.” Ellis is so struck by the image that he wheezes with laughter, as if he has a slow leak.

“Rocky does not come across as a well-educated, aesthetic, well-to-do person,” he goes on. “Rocky is your rough-and-tumble black market dealer, and he’s very good at it. But when you come up against something unusual, you need someone else.”

You need, in fact, Charley Hill.

Nearly always, Hill plays a swaggering American or Canadian with a loud mouth and a thick wallet. His characters are invariably light on scruples and, when it seems the best way to tempt a crook into the open, sometimes low on brainpower as well.

Despite Hill’s years in the United States, posing as a North American is trickier than it sounds. Getting the accent right is the first requirement, and the easiest. Capturing the melody of American speech, as opposed to the sound of individual words, is slightly more of a challenge. The pitch of an American’s voice tends to fall at the end of sentences; an Englishman’s voice falls less steeply, or even rises, almost as if he were asking a question. Hill must remember, too, not to cap his sentences with the rote questions—”He’s not really up to the job, is he?”—that the English use to soften their judgments.

Speed bumps pop up everywhere. Hill needs to purge his speech of countless English words and idioms beyond the familiar “lift” for “elevator” and “underground” for “subway.” The hardest to remember are words where