crooked collector in the market for a stolen painting. As a swindler, Hill would likely curse and carry on. Playing a connoisseur, he would turn down the bluster and threats and instead conjure up a bit of what he calls “art chat.” A soliloquy on Turner’s use of light and shade might do nicely.
Perhaps Hill’s allotted quarter-hour had gone by, but not by much. He smiled to himself and picked up the phone to tell Butler his plan.
6
The Rescue Artist
Charley Hill is a tall, round-faced man with curly brown hair and thick glasses. He is half-English and half- American, and his biography sounds as if a careless clerk had stapled together pages from several different resumes. Born in England but raised mostly in the United States (with a couple of stints in Germany thrown in), Hill is an ex-soldier and ex-Fulbright scholar who flirted with academia, and then the church, and eventually landed a job as a cop walking a beat in some of London’s diciest neighborhoods.
A stranger seeing Hill on the street might take him for an academic (though one less rumpled than most) or a businessman whose daydreams turned on balance sheets and bottom lines. A closer look would spur second thoughts. Hill swaggers when he walks, as if the sidewalk were his private property. He can be charming and engaging—especially if the conversation has turned to one of his pet topics, like naval history—but he is restless and impatient, with a bad temper that flashes unpredictably. A sudden glare or a slammed telephone serve as hints that perhaps this would not be a good man to cross.
His speech tends toward the formal, but the scholar and the cop often collide head-on in his conversation. A sentence that begins with Charley quoting Edmund Burke on liberty may well end up with a reference to some “lying sack of shit.”
Hill’s accent, too, is an odd mix. To Americans, he sounds almost, but not quite, familiar—Canadian, perhaps, or Australian? The English find him similarly hard to place.
In time, Hill came to specialize in undercover work. At home in all the worlds he had passed through in his zigzag life—or in none of them—he found he could effortlessly win the confidence of a gang of thugs drinking in a dive or a party of art lovers strolling through a gallery. Unlike a character actor, who fits in so well with his surroundings that he can scarcely be recalled later, Hill does not disappear into his roles. He prefers, instead, to pose as an exotic stranger, an outsider but one worth doing business with.
In the small world of art crooks and art cops, Hill stands nearly alone. On both sides of the law, the prudent strategy is to focus on art below the highest rank. From a thief’s point of view, the best paintings to steal are ones good enough to command high prices but not so stellar that they shout trouble; from an investigator’s vantage point, where the focus is on closing cases, stolen paintings are worth chasing only if the odds of success are high. A long shot, even if it might yield the painting of a lifetime, is too risky. Quantity trumps quality. “We fish with nets,” explains the head of a private firm in the art recovery business. “For us, it’s an industrial process. Charley Hill is like a man fishing with a rod. He’s looking for the biggest fish.”
More often than anyone else, he’s landed them. Vermeer, Goya, and Titian are among the prizes. In twenty years Hill has recovered masterpieces worth well over $100 million.
Families have their own cultures, just as countries do. In Charley Hill’s family—his father an American soldier, his mother an embodiment of glamour and English elegance—the favorite stories all sounded the same notes: war, heroes, romance, tragedy. Charley Hill drank deep from those heady waters. The catch is that he came to believe fervently in two utterly opposed ideas. On the one hand, Hill is a true-blue believer in heroes and villains and fighting for the good cause, no matter how hopeless the odds. He is, simultaneously, a deep-dyed cynic and skeptic who believes in his bones that the race is not to the swift but to the con man who paid off the official timer.
In many ways, Hill is the world’s oldest Boy Scout. He would be
It is perfectly possible, though, that come two o’clock the next morning, the same pampered friends will find themselves careening down the highway in Hill’s car at 100 miles an hour. Hill will be at the wheel, ignoring his friends’ pleas to slow down. If they grow truly frightened, so much the better.
Such abrupt shifts are all the more striking because no one places a higher value on friendship than Hill. Photos of old pals hold places of honor on his refrigerator at home; he phones and visits and frets about chums from as far back as grade school. On the not-so-rare occasions when a college-age child of American friends washes up forlorn and homesick in London, Hill drops everything to swoop to the rescue. He doesn’t go in for long, soulful conversations—it is impossible to picture the words “Tell me all about it” passing his lips—but he has a knack for cobbling together outings and adventures that vaporize gloom and melancholy by their sheer intensity.
A drawing that depicted Hill’s talents would reveal a strange and uneven landscape, with silvery skyscrapers next to vacant lots and abandoned warehouses. Though he is a gifted mimic, for example, he is hopeless at languages. His greatest asset is a daunting, and dauntingly haphazard, memory. Nearly anything can trigger a cascade of recollections, most likely with names and dates and a word-for-word quotation or two.
Hill does not drone on, like some cocktail party bore. On the contrary, the mark of his conversation is that he dips in and out as the mood strikes him. Few others see the connections he does. Someone’s remark about present-day politics might move Hill to comment on George Washington’s record in the French and Indian Wars. An allusion to the latest celebrity trial might spur a recitation of a bit of doggerel on Oscar Wilde’s arrest (“Mr. Woilde, we’ve come for tew take yew /Where felons and criminals dwell /We must ask yew tew leave with us quietly /For this is the Cadogan Hotel”).
Hill’s aversions are as fervent as his obsessions. Order and precision are off-putting, history and art and geography enticing. Logic is a strait-jacket, and numbers are the friends of his sworn enemies, the bureaucrats. Hill is as unlikely to use a word like “percentage” or “average” as a minister would be to curse at the dinner table.
Even the numbers that his fellow detectives use to gauge the scale of art crime rouse his wrath. “It’s all bullshit,” he complains. “People talk about these incredible figures, but all the figures you see are completely made up. Police statistics do not distinguish between something of artistic quality and a sodding ornament somebody won shooting in a fairground.”
Hill can shut down without warning. One moment he might be happily rattling on about his hero Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary who fought in Italy in the 1300s and managed to get his portrait painted (posthumously) by Uccello. Then, suddenly, he will switch off. If he is driving, he will interrupt himself in midstream, grab the wheel in a stranglehold, and carry on in a silence broken only by the whine of the engine and a few snarled remarks about the prats who are blocking his way. If he is with friends at dinner, he will withdraw from the conversation, yawn mightily—it might be only nine o’clock at night—announce that he is knackered, and head home to bed.
When he is in a good mood, Hill’s natural bent is exuberantly over the top. Not content with remarking that one of his acquaintances has more admirers than another, for example, he delights in fashioning an elaborate comparison: “When Frank dies he’ll have a burning longboat pushed out to sea with his body on it and salutes from the warriors standing along the headland, with weeping women and children alongside them. But poor George will be interred and his body will eventually yield one loud fart in his cold coffin that no one will hear.”
In less boisterous moods, he favors a kind of wry understatement. Many of his fellow soldiers, Hill recalls, had taken “a career opportunity offered by the judiciary,” by which he means that a judge had given them a choice of the army or prison.
His boyishness is unmistakable. Thunder is good, lightning is better, a jaunt to town is much improved if some reason can be found to run after a moving bus and jump aboard the platform. A dusting of an inch of snow is more than enough excuse to bundle up in coat and scarf and gloves and boots, as if for an assault on Antarctica,
