different. There, his mission accomplished, the dashing detective leapt high into the air and spun halfway around in a joyful arc.
Epilogue
In Norway, the National Gallery put together a triumphant press conference.
Back in England, the press celebrated. “Yard’s Artful Dodgers Find
Two years passed before the trial began. In the meantime, Johnsen did his best to insure that Ulving, at least, would not forget him. The ex-con turned up at Ulving’s hotel one day, drunk and angry, with a snarling pit bull on a thick leash. He demanded that the clerk tell Ulving that a friend of his had come to see him, and then he took a room, kicked a few holes in the wall, and collapsed in a stupor on the bed. Months later, he was back, this time at Ulving’s summer cottage. Ulving was outdoors, sunbathing. Johnsen suddenly materialized, from a neighbor’s yard. He had traded in the pit bull for a rottweiler. “What are you going to say in court?” he demanded.
By the time of the trial, the state had long since fit the pieces of the story together. The plot had been the brainstorm of Pal Enger, the soccer player turned crook, who had planned the theft in the confident hope that a buyer would turn up.
At the trial, Enger was charged with theft, and Grytdal and Johnsen with handling stolen property. A fourth man, William Aasheim, who had been only eighteen years old at the time of the break-in, was charged with theft, too. According to the prosecution, Aasheim and Enger were the two men with a ladder who had set the whole story in motion on a February morning in 1994. Enger and Grytdal, it emerged, were old colleagues. The two had done time in prison together for stealing Munch’s
Ulving, who had not been charged, saw to his relief that the prosecution case seemed strong even without him. For fear of retaliation, he did his best to keep his testimony vague and innocuous.
The trial began in Oslo, but Norwegian law forbade anonymous testimony. That seemed to rule out Hill and Walker. The two undercover detectives worked in a violent world; forcing them to reveal their true identities in open court would have left them (and their families) sitting ducks for any crook with a gun and a grievance. In a compromise, the Norwegian court agreed to move part of the trial to London. There Hill and Walker gave their testimony from behind a screen, as “Chris Roberts” and “Sid Walker.”
In January 1996, the judge read out his verdict. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Enger, the ringleader, was sentenced to six years, three months; Grytdal, to four years, nine months; Aasheim, to three years, nine months; and Johnsen, to two years, eight months.
The four began serving their time but appealed their convictions. Conclusive as the evidence had been, a Norwegian appeals court ruled in favor of three of the four convicted thieves. All but Enger were set free. The court reasoned that, because Hill and Walker had entered Norway using false identities, their testimony about what they had seen there was inadmissible.
Hill, never much impressed by the law’s majesty (and always more concerned with paintings than with crooks), shrugged it off. With his customary refusal to allow mere logic to hem him in, he squeezed two contradictory responses into a single sentence and then dismissed the whole subject from his mind. “My personal view is that it’s complete bullshit,” he said, “but it’s the Norwegian system and you’ve got to respect it.”
Enger is still in Norway, still proclaiming his innocence. (He managed to get his name in the papers not long ago, this time by buying, rather than stealing, a $3,000 Munch lithograph at an auction.) Grytdal is reportedly a pimp in Oslo, and Johnsen has died of a heroin overdose. In February 2004, Aasheim was murdered on the streets of Oslo.
Ulving, the art dealer, came out of the story triumphant and officially vindicated. Charley Hill, unswayed, consoles himself with the bittersweet knowledge that, once again, the system worked as poorly as he expected it would. Hill refuses to believe that Ulving was an innocent caught in a mess not of his making. Ulving, Hill speculates, “wanted to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.” He wanted, that is, to have it both ways. If the money from the artnapping had come through, he would have taken his share of the proceeds. If the crooks’ plan fell apart, he would present himself as a patriot who had strived mightily to help his country recover one of its treasures.
The Norwegian authorities don’t see it Hill’s way. “I don’t think Ulving was involved with the criminals,” says Leif Lier, the detective. “He was
Today, Charley Hill is working as zealously as ever to find stolen paintings. Still a detective, he is out of the undercover game. He is on his own now, a detective-for-hire free to operate without layers of bosses to second- guess him. Characteristically, Hill paints the catch-as-catch-can life of a freelancer in the brightest of colors. “I’m a hunter-gatherer now,” he exults, “and my family and I eat what I kill.”
Some days the eating is better than others. Though Hill is not the only detective working full-time on recovering stolen art, he may be the only one who focuses almost exclusively on
The ponytailed, bearded Lord Bath is an exotic creature who favors velvet jackets, dangling jewelry, and the company of striking women. He has had seventy-one “wifelets” to date, by his count, and keeps a portrait of each one on display in Longleat House. (Several of the flesh-and-blood women live in cottages dotted around the sprawling grounds.) “To some extent,” Lord Bath boasts, “I pioneered polygamy in this country.”
Lord Bath’s insurance company announced that it would pay a ?100,000 reward for the Titian’s return. Every swindler and nutcase in Britain phoned in tips. For seven lean years, Charley Hill chased leads. Eventually he pieced together a trail that led from one Irish Traveler clan to another and then to a dicey sports promoter whom someone in the second gang had had the bad judgment to shoot. Titian’s exquisite painting, which depicts Mary holding the infant Jesus while Joseph looks on approvingly, was apparently handed over in an attempt to smooth things over. (Hill likes to imagine the scene around the victim’s hospital bed: “Sorry about the bullet. How about a picture of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus for all you’ve been through?”) The promoter eventually decided he could do without this particular get-well card and shipped the Titian off to a gang somewhere south of London. In the summer of 2002, Hill met an informant who claimed he knew where it had washed up. The story seemed to check out, though the thieves themselves were long gone, and Hill and his contact worked out a tentative deal.
On a hot August afternoon, Hill and the informant set out together. “So off they went,” recalled Tim Moore, the manager of Longleat House, who had been working with Hill, “and I thought, ‘Unless poor old Charles Hill is going to end up with a knife in his back or in a sack in the Thames, maybe we’re on to something.’ “
Hill drove. The informant gave directions. Eventually they pulled up to a bus stop. “There it is,” said the informant. “The bag at the old man’s feet.”
Hill grabbed the bag, a shabby, blue-and-white plastic thing with a cardboard-wrapped package inside. He