The Rescue Artist

a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box stuffed with cash, and a shotgun. No one ever mentioned the shotgun, which faced outward, but it did seem to cut down on haggling over the prices Duddin offered his clients for their wares.

He has lived all his life in Newcastle, in the north of England, and he speaks with the thick local accent. “I was blind out of me skull,” he says, fondly recalling one monumental bender, and, to American ears, the stretched- out vowels give his speech the wavery sound of a tape played on a malfunctioning machine: “I was blaind oot of me skool.”

Duddin’s wife, Mary, is always by his side. She is tiny, though she teeters on colossal high heels, and she has bright red hair and a tiny voice, too, pitched in a high squeak. Mary looks as if she has just wandered in from a rehearsal of Guys and Dolls, but she is shrewder than her husband, and far too shrewd to acknowledge that she knows it. As Duddin talks, Mary plays the role of the attorney who whispers a helpful word into her client’s ear while he covers the microphone and turns away from his senatorial prosecutors.

Mary’s family, too, is in the art line. In 1961, in one of the notorious art thefts in recent history, someone stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The theft generated enormous publicity because the museum had purchased the painting only weeks before, after a great kerfuffle. The painting had been in private hands and had sold at auction to an American oilman for ?140,000. Furious at the prospect of losing a famous painting of a national hero to a foreign buyer, Parliament and a private foundation came up with ?140,000 of their own. The American gave in, the painting stayed home, and the National Gallery put it on exhibit. Eighteen days later, it vanished.

In 1962, with the portrait still missing, the first James Bond movie opened. This was Dr. No, and the plot, such as it was, had to do with a villain who hatched evil schemes at a secret lair in the Caribbean. Dr. No took Bond on a house tour, which led past a portrait mounted on an easel. Lest anyone miss the joke, Bond did a double-take and the camera moved in for a close-up of the Duke of Wellington.

The real portrait finally turned up in 1965, unharmed but without its frame, lying amid a jumble of forgotten suitcases in the lost-luggage office of the train station in Birmingham. Six weeks later, the thief turned himself in, apparently convinced that the world would want to hear his story and that no one would punish a person for stealing something that was back where it belonged. The self-proclaimed thief was an unemployed taxi driver named Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle man who looked a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.

Bunton, a clumsy, eccentric man in his sixties, was Mary’s uncle. “Only an uncle by marriage,” she clarifies, “me auntie’s husband. Well, I don’t know how he got the painting home, but he put it in his cupboard in the bedroom. And Auntie made a joke the night he turned himself in. ‘I’ve been sleeping with the Duke of Wellington for four years,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never even known.’ “

At his trial, Bunton explained that he had stolen the painting as a political protest. He had no interest in commercial gain; his sole aim was to remedy a gross injustice. The government charged everyone who owned a television set a yearly fee, which went to support the BBC. Not even the elderly were exempt. Bunton was beside himself. What kind of government charged its citizens to watch television and then lavished ?140,000 on a bloody painting?

Both judge and jury seemed to find Bunton endearing, and they apparently had doubts about whether he really was agile enough to have taken the Goya from the museum by climbing out a window in a men’s bathroom, as he claimed. The jury performed a contortionist’s trick of its own. Bunton was not guilty of stealing the painting, they found, but he was guilty of stealing the frame. The judge imposed a sentence of three months.

Mary does not believe that her uncle stole the portrait. His two sons did, she says, and then he horned in on their glory. (The family, she says, was “all a bit nuts”—“a bit noots.”) It is a convincing if not ringing defense: her uncle was too fat to steal, not too honest.

Duddin’s world and the conventional one are not self-contained. They meet occasionally, as the lion’s world sometimes meets the antelope’s. But in ordinary times the two worlds are isolated from one another, and Duddin betrays surprise when it becomes clear that yet another commonplace feature of his life is strange to an outsider. Mundane questions—How big a bag does it take to hold ?20,000 in small bills? How long would it take to count?—throw him off-stride for a moment, as if an earnest visitor had asked him to explain how to make a sandwich or dial a phone.

A broader question that seems absolutely fundamental to a layman—Why steal a masterpiece?—leaves him frustrated and befuddled. Art is worth stealing because it’s valuable; what valuable means is “worth stealing.”

Speaking slowly and emphatically, Duddin strives to make matters clear. “If it’s very easy to take,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a buyer for it or not. If it’s difficult to take, you’re going to make sure there’s a market for it, because you’ve got to put extra work into it.”

But what do you do with it?

Driven to distraction, Duddin resorts almost to baby talk. He has been sipping his drink, but this calls for a pause and a deeper swallow. “Mr. Burglar, all right, goes and steals a painting that he’s got no market for. If he’s a professional burglar, then he deals with people regular. Someone who regularly steals antiques, we’ll say, will have an antique dealer that he deals with. So he goes to that antique dealer and says, ‘I know this isn’t your kind of meat, but I’ve got this’—Duddin lowers his voice to a stage whisper—‘and it’s worth a fortune. All I want is twenty grand on something that’s worth two million.’ “

Here Duddin interrupts himself to add an explanatory note. “All they want is enough money to live on for the next six months, what they call ‘working money.’ Enough money to go and look at other things and do something that’s easier sold.”

“I didn’t realize ‘til I went to prison,” Duddin says, with feigned coyness, “that people that burgle houses for a living consider they’ve got a purpose in life. They consider it their job. It’s a job of work, isn’t it? No different than a doctor going to hospital every day.”

It is not just work but hard work. “It costs money to burgle houses,” Duddin says wearily. “You’ve got to go and look around, you’ve got to set it all up, you’ve got to have transport. It’s like a building contractor, isn’t it?”

Duddin is as disdainful as Hill of the notion that reclusive tycoons commission thieves to steal for them. “Do you honestly think there are people who have millions of pounds, and art collections worth millions, who would risk going to prison for a painting?” he scoffs. “Are you addled? Would you, if you had that sort of money? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

“Freedom’s not worth much if you’ve got nothing,” he says. “If you’re sleeping rough under a tree and thinking somebody’s going to put you in a cell instead, well, that might even be an improvement. But when you’ve got a lot, your freedom’s worth a lot more, isn’t it? If you’re living in palatial surroundings and eating lobster and drinking champagne, you don’t want to go to prison, do you?”

Now Duddin turns his attention from the thief who steals a painting to the middleman he sells it to. “A dealer will lend Mr. Burglar ?20,000, ?50,000, whatever the figure might be, according to the article. It’s no different from a bank, is it, when you think of it? Even though he hasn’t got a use for it, he’s got security for his money, hasn’t he? He might have something worth several million”—Duddin’s voice rises in incredulity—”so it’s good security, isn’t it?”

Wearying of logistics, Duddin raises his sights and turns briefly to philosophy. “Let’s say you’ve got one prize possession, a painting. If someone stole that painting from you, you’ve lost the majority of your possessions. But if someone stole a Rembrandt from the Earl of Pembroke”—as someone did in fact steal the Rembrandt that Duddin tried to fence—”he’s probably got several hundred times that left. So why should it be so important? And that’s the ethics of it.”

Duddin shifts ponderously in his chair and leans back, pleased with the case he’s made. “You understand the difference? You haven’t stolen all of somebody’s wealth, even though you’ve stolen a great deal more wealth. You don’t break into an old lady’s house and take her pension book when that’s all she’s got.”

The theory of relativity, criminal version.