The Rescue Artist

woman who had phoned Dagbladet? The police issued an urgent plea for help. Would the young woman in the red coat and red slacks, with a long braid, please come forward?

Silence.

While the police raced in frantic circles and National Gallery officials wrung their hands, the Norwegian public looked on with glee. A nation that placed a higher value on dignity and propriety might have reacted with outrage, but Norwegians treated the episode as slapstick. Even the figure skating farce at the Olympics—this was the year of Tonya and Nancy and the Great Kneecapping—was less entertaining.

Video footage of the thieves and their pratfalls on the ladder played endlessly on the news, like a scene from a silent comedy. The film looked all the sillier because the security cameras somehow made moving figures look as if they were racing at double speed and in herky-jerky lurches.

In living rooms and pubs across the nation, Norwegians stared delightedly at the tiny, black-and-white figures propping their ladder up against the wall. They watched the blurry figures slip and slide with their newly acquired treasure, and they guffawed with delight.

Score Round One for the bad guys.

4

The Priests

FEBRUARY 1994

At police headquarters, at the National Gallery, at Oslo’s newspapers and television and radio stations, phones rang day and night. Someone waiting for a bus had seen a man carrying a large plastic bag with a heavy wooden frame peeking out of the top. A man in a bar had overheard a suspicious conversation between two men sitting nearby. An ex-con had crucial information that he would happily share with the police in return for a small consideration.

Norway’s tabloids bayed for blood. What had the National Gallery been thinking? What were the police doing? Who was to blame for this fiasco? Journalists from around the world posed similar questions in a dozen languages.

The minister of culture and the leaders of the National Gallery disappeared to plot strategy, only to reemerge desperate and forlorn. What were their options? The state could not pay to get the painting back, even if someone knew whom to deal with, because Parliament would never agree to pay millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to thieves. And if somehow such a deal could be justified politically, it would set a terrible precedent that would mean open season on every art treasure in a national collection.

With public money ruled off-limits, the chance of a big money reward seemed lost. Reasoning that even a small reward might be more enticing than none at all, the National Gallery decided to reach into its own threadbare pocket. For information leading to The Scream’s recovery, the museum announced, it would offer a reward of KR 200,000, about $25,000. The painting, the newspapers repeated incessantly, was valued at over $70 million. Nobody bit.

The Norwegian police, in the meantime, had tapped their network of informants but had come up with nothing but false leads. If someone in Oslo’s underworld had stashed The Scream away, no one seemed to know it. This was bad news, and even worse than it appeared at first. The police desperately wanted a breakthrough, to silence their critics and show up the smirking thieves. But it was not simply a matter of self-respect. The Scream was delicate—the blue of the water in the middle distance, for instance, is chalk that could vanish with the touch of a careless sleeve—and every day of exposure was a risk. Thieves who would happily slide a masterpiece down a ladder might well cut it from its frame, for easier transport, or hide it in a moldy basement or an attic with a leaky roof.

Then, after five days of rumor and confusion but nary a lead, came the first possibility of a break. Two of Norway’s most controversial figures, priests who had been booted out of the state church for organizing anti- abortion protests, thrust their way into the middle of The Scream free-for-all.

Before the Olympics began, Ludvig Nessa and BOrre Knudsen had promised to pull off a “spectacular” protest to publicize their cause. The police knew the ex-priests well, from run-ins over the course of a decade. Typically Nessa and Knudsen would show up at a hospital and demand that the doctors stop performing abortions. If all went well, the hospital would call the police, and the priests in their black robes and white-ruffed collars would have a chance to make their case in front of the television cameras.

Arrests were all to the good, and so was anything else that drew the public eye to Action New Life. Protests and demonstrations drew the most attention, but mass mailings were useful, too. Nessa and Knudsen favored one drawing in particular. A crude cartoon, it showed a woman’s hand crushing a tiny, helpless figure. Even a glance revealed that the central figure, howling in anguish, was lifted straight from The Scream.

Within a day or two of the theft, a journalist phoned Ludvig Nessa with a “crazy idea.” Were the two blurry figures on the National Gallery tape in fact Ludvig Nessa and BOrre Knudsen? Nessa gulped and stammered. The reporter explained his reasoning and asked his question again. “No comment,” said Nessa.

On the morning of February 17, fax machines in every international media outlet in Norway and at every radio and television station in Oslo began spitting out the priests’ drawing. This time it carried a new message, in large black letters. “Which is worth more,” the headline shouted, “a painting or a child?”

Thrilled that the stalled hunt was on again, the media descended on Nessa and Knudsen. CNN carried the story, and so did the BBC and the New York Times. Neither priest answered direct questions about the theft. “We cannot be too open about this,” Knudsen told reporters. “We have sent a signal, and we want this signal to be understood, but we have to be a bit cryptic.”

Knudsen hinted at a deal. If Norway’s national television station agreed to show an anti-abortion film called The Silent Scream, then perhaps the National Gallery might find itself back in possession of its missing masterpiece.

The reporters pleaded for solid information. Did Knudsen know the whereabouts of The Scream? “No comment.”

Would he have been willing to steal the painting to promote his views?

“Yes, absolutely.”

The media loved the story, but the police scoffed at it. The priests were publicity hounds, said Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective in charge of the investigation, but they weren’t thieves. “We knew them very well, from protests over the years. It was a good newspaper story, but it was no story for the police at all.”

Far from Norway, a small group of men followed the case intently. They were Scotland Yard detectives, members of an elite group called the Art and Antiques Unit, better known simply as the Art Squad. The story broke over the weekend. Monday morning, February 14, 1994, first thing, the head of the Art Squad phoned his best undercover man.

“Charley, did you hear about The Scream?”

“I watched it on the news last night.”

“Do you think we can help?”

Officially, another country’s stolen painting had nothing to do with Scotland Yard. The hunt for The Scream was certain to be tricky and expensive and likely to be dangerous. “Tell me again,” the police higher-ups were sure to demand, “why is this our problem?”

It wasn’t a bad question. The honest answer, in Detective Charley Hill’s words, was that the case had “sweet fuck-all to do with policing London. But it’s too good to miss.”