hotel corridor to his room, where he had left his briefcase and its ?60,000. The car dealer was by his side. Suddenly two men in stocking masks leapt out.
One robber jammed a sawed-off shotgun into Hill’s back. The two masked men hustled Hill and the car dealer down the hall and into Hill’s room. Shoving Hill toward the middle of the room, one robber forced him face-down on the bed. He pressed the shotgun hard into the back of Hill’s neck, below his right ear, and yanked his arms behind his back.
With his face mashed into the bedspread, Hill found that his glasses reflected glimpses of the room behind him. He occupied himself by trying to memorize his captors’ clothing, in case he ever had a chance to testify in court.
The robbers tied up the car dealer, too, but—though Hill had no way of knowing this—not as tightly. The robbers and the car dealer were in cahoots, it would turn out later, and they had cooked up a simple scheme: the robbers would flee with their ?60,000 profit and with the counterfeit money, too, to use another day. The car dealer would eventually work himself free and would then free Gray. The duped buyer would slink away—he could hardly go to the police to tell them he’d been robbed—and the thieves would live happily ever after.
The police plan had gone ludicrously wrong. When Hill had left the hotel to pick up the counterfeit money in the parking lot, a team of cops had tailed him. When Hill returned to the hotel, the backup team found that they had locked themselves out of the fire escape door.
In the meantime, the surveillance cops holed up in the hotel room next to Hill’s were preparing their recording gear. They had no idea that Hill had been mugged in the hallway. When the scene finally shifted to Hill’s room, they found themselves eavesdropping on a robbery. Convinced that Hill was about to be killed, they called in the troops. In came the nearest armed police, with machine guns, from nearby Heathrow. In came a police helicopter, hovering low over the hotel, rotor blades whooping through the air, strobe lights flashing.
The cops who were already on the scene, unarmed and reduced to play-acting, did their best. One cop standing in the parking lot outside Hill’s room smashed his hand through the window (slicing himself badly) and shouted “Armed police!” Other cops followed his lead, shoving their hands through the broken window and into the curtains, pretending to have guns. Down the hallway thundered two more cops shouting “Armed police!” though they were only pointing the antennas of their radios.
The crooks might have shot Hill or fired at the cops. Instead, they fled. Out the door and down the hall they ran, cops in pursuit. Moments later, they were tackled and arrested.
The crooked car dealer hadn’t managed to make a break. Too slow in freeing himself, he was still wrapped up in duct tape when the police crashed in. The police untied Hill and handcuffed the crook. Hill fixed himself a drink at the minibar. He raised his glass to his former partner in crime. “You don’t mind if I don’t offer you one?”
Hill relished such cinematic moments. What could be better than an adrenaline-pumping adventure that featured large helpings of danger, stupidity, and bravery and then wrapped itself up in a happy ending and a wisecrack from the hero? Somewhere in the back of Charley Hill’s attic of a mind,
Hill turned over the ?60,000 pounds and the counterfeit money to the police and made his way out of the hotel. A crowd had gathered. Tourists gawked in the lobby, trying to sort out what had happened. The waiters and chefs from the restaurant craned their heads to look. Hill threaded his way through the crowd to the reception desk.
“I’d like to book out. I didn’t like my room.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. What was the matter?”
“It was too noisy.”
By the time Hill had finished with a police debriefing and driven home, it was three in the morning. At five- thirty, the doorbell rang. It was Sid Walker. He and Hill had an informant to meet, in connection with the paintings stolen from Russborough House in Dublin.
“They’re talking about the counterfeit deal on the radio,” Sid said. “Well done.” Walker had absorbed the details of the story from the radio announcers’ breathless reports, but his own style was as understated as theirs was shrill. By his standards, his few words were close to a hymn of praise.
“Well, I’m a bit knackered now.”
Hill’s wife, Caro, had been roused by the doorbell and the sound of her husband talking to someone. Hill hadn’t woken her when he’d come in the night before. She stumbled downstairs and greeted Walker, an old friend.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
Sid chimed in. “Oh, it went very well. It’s on the news.”
Caro noticed the angry red scrape just above Charley’s collar. “What’s that on your neck?”
Sid stepped closer to see for himself. “It looks like the mark of a double-barreled shotgun,” he said deadpan, as if he were doing his earnest best to be helpful.
34
The Thrill of the Hunt
In the years that followed, Hill made the shotgun story sound like a glorious prank. He and Walker teasing poor Caro might as well have been two boys on a playground chasing a pretty girl with a frog. But when it came to the safety of works of art, Hill could hardly have been more serious. “I’m no artist, and I’m not even Kenneth Clark or Robert Hughes or anyone like that,” he once remarked, in a rare philosophical mood, “but I do have a compulsion to recover these pictures, and I enjoy doing it.”
To create beauty was rare and lofty work, but to safeguard cultural treasures was no paltry thing. “You’re just trying to keep these things in the world,” Hill went on. “It’s simply a matter of keeping them safe and protected and in the right places, where people can enjoy them.”
Hill was always reluctant to talk about “art and truth and beauty and all the rest of it,” presumably for fear of sounding like one of the “hoity-toity art-world pompous assholes” he so disliked. But, grudgingly, he did admit to a sense of mission. “It’s the story of Noah and the rainbow and all that, but you’re a steward not just to the animals two by two but to
If the would-be priest could not save souls for all eternity, at least he could do his best to save some of mankind’s greatest creations for the next few centuries.
As always, though, Hill’s motives were mixed. Some of his zeal for recovering stolen paintings spoke more to adrenaline hunger than to spirituality.
Art theft was a “kudos crime,” Hill liked to say, which was to say that thrills and glory beckoned thieves every bit as temptingly as did daydreams of riches. Hill was quick to concede that the flip side of a kudos crime was a kudos chase. If stealing was a thrill, so was hunting down the thieves. “It’s a big thing, recovering an important painting,” Hill said, after one of his early recoveries, “and obviously I get a buzz out of it.”
Some thieves talked openly, almost sensually, about the thrill of taking what belonged to others. Peter Scott was an English cat burglar, a tabloid favorite, and yet another of Hill’s adversaries. From Scott’s first crime to his last, the risk of getting caught had only made the game more alluring.
Scott did more than his share of mundane thieving, but his favorite cases involved glamorous victims. In a decades-long career in which he claimed to have stolen loot worth ?30 million, Scott robbed Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Vivien Leigh, and countless others. Most notoriously, he made off with a diamond necklace that belonged to Sophia Loren, who had been in Britain filming
In 1998, Scott came out of retirement and tried to fence a ?650,000 Picasso portrait called
