The Rescue Artist

A year before, Hill had stood in an Antwerp parking lot, alongside a gangster, and briefly held Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter in his hands. “Whenever you hold a genuine masterpiece,” Hill had said afterward, “you see immediately that it’s a stunning picture. It tells you it’s a stunning picture. The quality just jumps out at you.”

In ordinary circumstances, Hill would have guffawed at anyone who talked like that—he liked tales of frauds and forgeries and he cackled with malicious laughter when he told stories of “some pompous asshole whose prized possession turned out to be a ghastly fake churned out in a downmarket bedsit”—but face-to-face with a masterpiece, he was not cynical enough to deny the thrill he felt.

Hill knew immediately that the painting before him, in this closed-up cottage 70 miles south of Oslo, was the genuine article. Even so, he forced himself to scan it slowly. He paid particular attention to the bottom right side of the painting. At the end of one long night a century before, Munch had blown out a candle and splashed wax onto his painting.

The drips, white verging on blue-gray, were unmistakable. The most prominent one was toward the bottom right corner, close to the screamer’s left elbow. Another, slightly less conspicuous, was a little higher and a few inches further to the right, across the top of the railing. Hill checked and then checked again.

37

The End of the Trail

AFTERNOON, MAY 7, 1994

For a moment, Hill indulged himself. Concentrating on The Scream, he let Ulving drift out of his thoughts. The blue chalk was brighter in real life than in any of the reproductions, and so delicate that a cough could blow away lines that Munch had laid down a hundred years before. Close up, the green arcs next to the screamer’s head held the eye as forcefully as the famous orange bands across the sky. Tiny patches of raw cardboard peeked through the face.

Now Hill focused again. He turned to the art dealer, who had never been more than a few steps away, and addressed him with his customary brusqueness.

“Right, great. So what are we going to do now?”

“Well, there’s the hotel here in Osgardstrand,” Ulving said. “We could go there.”

“Okay. Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

“I can’t drive you back to Oslo. I’m just not fit to do it.”

“I don’t want you to. I’ve got the painting now. The last thing I need is for you to land us upside-down in a ditch.”

Hill picked up The Scream and wrapped it back up in the blue sheet. He followed Ulving outside and leaned over the passenger seat of Ulving’s sporty Mercedes, trying to set the priceless painting in the back of the little two-seater. Wrestling the bulky square of cardboard over the front seat headrest, Hill heard a dismaying thump. “Shit! I’ve dented the fucker on the goddamned headrest.”

He glared at Ulving. “Drive.”

Ulving drove to the hotel, only a few minutes away. “We can get a day room.”

“Fine. Do it.”

Ulving and Hill walked into the hotel, leaving The Scream unattended in the car. Hill, who was breathtakingly careless whenever he was not overtly paranoid, hardly gave it a thought. Who steals cars in Norway?

Hill had yet to phone Butler. He spotted a pay phone near the front desk. The Scream’s brass nameplates jingled in his pocket as he strode across the lobby.

“I’m just going to phone Sid,” Hill told Ulving, although it was John Butler and not Sid Walker that he planned to call. Hill couldn’t have phoned Walker if he had wanted to, since he had neglected to write down his number.

Ulving tagged along. That wouldn’t do. Hill turned to Ulving. Fuck off! That was English, not American. Hill changed idiom and spoke aloud. “I need to talk to Sid. Go screw yourself!”

“Oh, excuse me,” Ulving said, retreating.

“John, it’s Chris.”

“Charley, where the hell are you?”

Butler was a good man in a crisis, but his voice was a near-whisper that betrayed his tension.

Hill whispered, too, to foil Ulving. “I’ve got the picture. We’re at the Osgardstrand Hotel. We just booked into room 525. I’ll be there. No one else, just me and the painting. Send the cavalry.

“Now listen, “Hill went on. “The important thing is, Sid is back at the Grand, with the two villains, Johnsen and the other guy.”

“Shit! Okay.”

“I’ll ring you again as soon as I get to my room.” Hill walked back toward Ulving. “Okay,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Sid’ll give them the money.”

“What should we do with the painting?” Ulving asked.

“Let’s go look at the room.”

The room was on the second floor. Hill asked Ulving if there was a set of stairs in back. Ulving showed him the fire escape. Hill wedged the door open with a fire extinguisher.

“Get the car and pull it around,” Hill ordered. “I’ll wait for you here.” Even for Hill, this was a colossal—and pointless—risk. He didn’t see it that way. Utterly confident that he knew his man, Hill figured it was impossible that Ulving would race off with his $70 million prize. The only danger Hill could see was that, in the course of driving from the front to the back of the small hotel, Ulving would find a way to crash his car.

Ulving pulled into view. Hill, still mortified that he had thumped The Scream on the headrest, lifted the painting from the car in slow motion. Then he dismissed Ulving.

“Okay, I’ll get a taxi back. Drive home safely.”

Ulving, trembling with a night’s accumulated tension, sped away.

Hill carried The Scream up the fire escape and into his room. He placed the painting, still wrapped in its blue sheet, on the bed. Then he locked the door, chained it, and shoved a chest of drawers in front of it. He scanned the small room. What else could he do to protect himself in case someone tried to snatch the painting? Hill looked out the window. Ten feet to the ground. If someone managed to get in, maybe Hill could grab the painting and make it out the window. Worth a try. He opened the window wide.

Hill ran through the brief roster of people who knew where he was. Ulving. Would he send someone to do what he would never dare do himself? Probably not. The receptionist? She had seen Hill but not the painting. She shouldn’t be a problem. The mystery man who had handed the painting to Ulving?

“Fuck it! No one’s going to take the painting,” Hill said aloud. He unwrapped The Scream and propped it up on the bed, against the pillow. To his relief, he saw that the smack on the headrest hadn’t made a dent. He stepped back for a better look, then sat in a chair and stretched contentedly. Sprawled at full length, Hill put his hands behind his head and contemplated the painting he had studied in so many books.

Munch had hated the idea that one of his paintings could disappear “like a scrap of paper into some private home where only a handful of people will see it.” It was good to think that his greatest painting had been saved from a far darker fate.

Hill wasn’t especially motivated by money. He couldn’t have stayed a cop for twenty years if he had been. But, still, $70 million! Even more disorienting was to think that the piece of decorated cardboard on his bed had been copied and photographed and parodied and admired thousands and thousands of times.

Hill despised talk of Dr. No and his secret lair, but for several minutes he basked in the luxury of this private viewing. Not many people had ever had a chance to see a masterpiece in a setting like this. “Jesus!” he thought. “We’ve done it.”