The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  “Now, that’s an example of a man who’s a killer and a horrible scumbag in anybody’s book,” Hill said once, naming a gangster, “and yet he and I can talk as easily as you please.” Not long ago the two men met for a drink, in a bleak pub long after midnight. The bartender recognized Hill’s companion as soon as he walked in. His hands trembled as he served their drinks.

  “That son of a bitch is a fucking Khyber Pass bandit, British-version,” Hill said later. “But when he meets someone who isn’t frightened of him, and it’s someone who’s not out to do him harm, he likes talking to him. That’s the way these guys operate. It’s like Kipling’s poem: ‘There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, /When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.’ “

  At the other end of the social spectrum, Hill noted proudly, he and the Duke of Beaufort can happily pass an afternoon talking about art and armagnac. And though Hill would gladly visit with either the gangster or the duke, the two men on their own could not possibly find even an inch of common ground. “Never,” said Hill. “It couldn’t happen. Not unless [the gangster] sneaked into Badminton, held a gun to the duke’s head, and locked him up in a cupboard in the bedroom with the duchess while he ransacked the place. That’s the only rapport they would ever have.”

  But nobles and thieves are easy for Hill. It’s those in between he finds hard. His problem is not with shopkeepers and salesmen in stores and conductors on trains; he likes turning rote exchanges into small conversations. Things go astray when Hill decides that the person across from him has his nose glued to a rule book. “If I were dealing with a bureaucrat,” Hill conceded in an interview in 2003, “the chances are it would go horribly wrong. As often it has. They write me off as a snake-oil salesman, the sort of person they hate to have any dealings with, because they want to deal with bureaucratic procedures and buzz words and jargon from management-speak.”

  Hill paints his failure as proof of his virtue—better to be one of Kipling’s strong men than a member of the herd of “little bureaucrats feeding the meter”—and perhaps he could win over his enemies if he would make an effort. But he seldom does. Instead, in his encounters with those drab creatures who occupy neither the lowest nor the loftiest margins of society, Hill indulges himself in private jokes and obscure allusions.

  Occasionally Hill finds himself called on to talk to a group of museum officials or insurance agents. He tends to leave them bewildered. His stories begin in the middle and end without warning. He scatters endless names without explanation. Even comments that he intends as transparent leave many in his audience feeling they have wandered into the wrong lecture hall. At one talk, for instance, Hill wanted to make the point that collectors worried about art thieves must take steps to protect themselves, rather than rely entirely on the police. “In the early fifth century,” Hill remarked, “the Roman emperor wrote to a group of complaining Roman Britons that they should look after themselves. In the same year, Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, so the emperor obviously had a point about what he could do for this part of his empire.”

  With crooks, in contrast, Hill labors diligently to establish a bond. Honor among thieves is a fiction, but Hill has found that criminals do have a code of self-respect and self-esteem, and he has learned to turn that code to his advantage.

  His role-playing takes him far from his true character. In his personal life, Hill’s moral code is strict. He makes fun of his own uprightness (“I’m a Yankee Puritan of the worst kind, a Brit one”), but he adamantly adheres to such old-fashioned beliefs as the sanctity of promises and the obligations of friendship. His penchant for truth-telling is so extreme—perhaps this is part of its attraction—that often it verges on rudeness. At work, on the other hand, lying is a job skill as fundamental as driving. Chatting up criminals and spinning stories to thieves is all in a day’s work. For crooks, too, lying is second nature. One of his favorite sources, Hill says fondly, has “a capacity to lie that makes your eyes water.”

  Whether he is working undercover or as himself, Hill relies less on tricks than on the standard repertoire of anyone bent on seduction. He is outgoing but low-key, far too reserved and English to go in for backslapping or joke-telling. But he is friendly and solicitous, good with names, attentive to even the longest and most rambling stories. Some of this is simply good manners, but it goes deeper than that. “Even a villain has some humanity,” Hill remarks, “and the trick is finding a way to connect with it.”

  Well before the Munch theft, Hill had begun cultivating a network of criminals and near criminals with good sources in the art underworld. The meetings are clandestine, but Hill is not undercover. Watch him at work as recently as 2002, at dinner with an informant he has known for years. Tom Russell* is a fit, sixty-ish man who looks like Anthony Hopkins, or as Hopkins might if he had gone in for gold jewelry and shirts that revealed great tufts of chest hair. Despite the flash, Russell occupies a lowly, vulnerable spot in a dangerous business. In the ecosystem of the London underworld, he is a small, scurrying animal trying to live by his wits among a host of bigger creatures with short tempers and sharp teeth.

  Hill and Russell make a curious pair. The two men look and sound nothing alike. Hill, resplendent in his blazer, looks like a weekend sailor who has popped into his club for a few drinks. Russell looks as if he has been up all night in Atlantic City, and losing. Hill sounds posh; Russell speaks in the London equivalent of a dese-and-dose accent, in short bursts that overflow with slang and underworld shorthand. “A million quid” becomes “a million squid.” “Nothing” is “nuffink.” A job that was supposed to be easy “were going to be a piece o’ piss.”

  And yet the two seem like old friends. Rivers of drink lubricate the conversation. Hill is a self-described heavy drinker, and Russell is not far behind. Tonight Hill is drinking gin-and-tonics—he’s on his third before the appetizers are cleared—and Russell is having scotch. Hill, as host, makes sure that his guest is not left even momentarily holding an empty glass. (For either man to say “enough” or just to skip a round would be as unexpected as asking the bartender to brew a pot of chamomile tea.)

  Russell has a lot to say, but his voice is low and his manner furtive. His eyes flicker around the room as he talks. When a waiter approaches or a patron wanders by on his way to the bar, Russell goes silent and drags on his cigarette until the intruder departs.

  The recurring theme in all Russell’s stories is that, despite the risks he takes on their behalf, the police constantly double-cross him. He passes on information and, instead of paying him the reward money they have promised, the police shortchange him or stiff him outright. If he complains, they threaten to hand him over to his enemies. Sometimes the betrayal is so skilled that it is almost artful. “I’ve been shagged so beautiful I never even felt it,” Russell laments.

  To hear him tell it, Russell lives in an Alice in Wonderland world where those charged with upholding the law spend their days subverting it, and what little honor there is, is among thieves. “The decline in standards in this country is a disgrace,” he moans. “The things that go on—it makes me ashamed. Except for three men I could name—you know who they are, Charley—I wouldn’t trust the police to say an honest word.”

  Hill listens to all this with what seems like utter empathy. Often, as the two men talk, the tone veers from casual and light to dark and angry and back again. Russell takes the lead, and Hill adapts at once to every shift. When Russell mentions the name of one crooked cop, Hill’s eyes narrow in disdain. “I really do hate that bastard,” Hill snarls, and it is hard to detect the well-spoken art lover beneath the venomous mask.

  “Well, then, you’ve got plenty of company,” Russell says, “because I fucking hate him, too.”

  Both men turn to their drinks for a moment.

  Russell does most of the talking, and when he pauses between tales of how he has been done wrong, Hill catches up on domestic news. He asks after Russell’s wife
and gets updates on his kids. The surgery went well? Is his son’s football team off to a good start? Hill is impressed that Tom looks so fit. Is he working out? And where did he get that tan? Has he been on holiday?

  This is standard banter, but Hill appears to hang on every answer. The two compare notes on old acquaintances and run through a roster of cops and robbers they have known. The rhythm of the conversation evokes sports fans at a bar, recalling the old days. “He were a right villain, weren’t he?” Russell asks cheerily, when Hill throws out yet another name.

  The reminiscences turn from past triumphs and follies generally to art cases in particular. Russell asks Hill if he recalls the affair of the two ‘eads. Years before, a pair of thieves had set out to steal a monumental Henry Moore bronze from a garden. The statue, called King and Queen, proved too massive to move, so the thieves took a chainsaw to the figures and cut off their heads, figuring they could at least sell those.

  Russell’s usefulness to Hill is that, one way or another, he hears lots of gossip and rumors about stolen art. “I’d have no compunction about turning him in if he was doing the crimes himself,” Hill says later, “but he’s not. He just lives in that world, and he knows what’s going on.”

  Hill does not try to connect with Russell by minimizing his own knowledge of art, or his enthusiasm for it. When Russell struggles to come up with the name of a stolen painting that had once floated through London’s seamier backwaters, Charley reminds him that the missing work was Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. Russell’s interest in sixteenth-century religious art would have to multiply many times before it could qualify as negligible, but Hill rattles on happily about Bruegel for a few minutes. Hill, at least, is rapt. Pieter Bruegel, he notes, was known as Bruegel the Elder because his son, also an artist and also called Pieter, was Brueghel the Younger, but the son spelled his name with an “h,” whereas …

  The fancy talk, which seems like pointless showing off, is actually showing off with a point very much in mind. Two points, in fact. One is flattery: treating Russell with respect rather than condescension costs nothing and might earn some goodwill. More important, the highfalutin talk cements the notion that, however peculiar such devotion might be, Hill really does care deeply about art. The aim is to insure that when a stolen painting makes the rounds, Russell will make sure that Charley Hill hears about it.

  How much of his camaraderie with Russell and his ilk is sincere and how much put-on, Hill himself seems not to know. Certainly his disdain for dishonest cops is unfeigned, as is his belief that they are legion. “Wthout exception,” Hill says, “in every single job I’ve been involved in, there’s been a corrupt cop somewhere.” But Hill’s distrust of the good guys does not spill over into fondness for the bad guys. He is far too cynical to believe that thieves are unfortunate souls who might have been redeemed by a kind word and a helping hand at the right time. Hill is fond of invoking the great names of English history and legend, but the tales he likes best are of knights errant battling black-hearted villains. There are no Robin Hoods in Charley Hill’s Britain.

  Hill’s wife is a smart, insightful woman (and, by profession, a psychologist) who has often rebuked him for taking too rosy a view of his “horrible” acquaintances. Charley, she says, makes the mistake of thinking that because his informants are trying to do something good—help him find stolen paintings—they are good. The notion makes her indignant. “These are not good people,” she insists, as she has a hundred times before. “These are bad people, and the only reason they’d help to get a painting back is so they can tell somebody—a parole officer or a judge or someone—that ‘I helped Charley Hill.’ They’re manipulative, they’ve screwed a lot of people in the past, and now they’re simply trying a new maneuver, entirely for their own benefit.”

  Hill mounts a halfhearted defense, to little avail. (His acknowledgment that many of the characters he mingles with are “pretty appalling human beings” is perhaps a shade too cheerful.) The problem, his wife goes on, is that Charley decides to think the best of his dubious acquaintances ahead of time, because otherwise he could never behave in the friendly way he must if he is to forge alliances, and then he performs so convincingly that he takes himself in with his own act.

  It might seem a tough position for a professional cynic, to hear himself accused by the person who knows him best of holding a naively sunny view of human nature. Hill doesn’t seem much fazed, in part because the charge of naiveté doesn’t quite hit home. His tolerance has a different source. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” First-rate or not, many of us display such abilities every day. We scan a story on page one about astronomy and the cosmos, and then we turn to the back pages and read our horoscope to see what the day has in store for us.

  When it comes to judging friends and lovers, though, people tend not to be so tolerant of contradiction. A lover who betrays us reveals his entire character in a new and damning light. “I thought I knew you!” we cry, in a howl of anger and bewilderment. Hill has a rare talent for viewing character in a double light. He can look at one of his criminal cronies and say, “This is someone whose company I enjoy” and say, “This is a dangerous person who would sell me out without a second thought.”

  Hill is not merely tolerant of violent and dishonest men, though, but drawn to them. The fascination is not so much with the men themselves—often they are merely schoolyard bullies grown up—as with the opportunity they offer. Crooks mean action.

  Hill’s character is a mix of contrary pieces, and “restlessness” is one of the most important. In his case, restlessness is a near neighbor of recklessness. It takes a jolt of adrenaline to give life its savor. Years ago a friend dubbed him “Mr. Risk.”

  Hill is a man willing to put up with a great deal for a chance to experience something new: he insists that his motive for volunteering to jump from airplanes and to fight in Vietnam was “intellectual curiosity.” Crooks and con men, whatever else they may be, are not boring. For a man as temperamentally allergic to blandness and routine as Hill, that is a virtue almost beyond price.

  “I like dealing with these people and trying to work out how they think and what they’re about,” he once said, in a moment of uncharacteristic defensiveness. “I find it a hell of a lot more interesting”—his tone had darkened and his customary belligerence had returned—”than sitting in some office pondering mankind in the abstract, or counting beans about how the rate of one kind of crime compares with the rate of some other kind.”

  “The awful truth,” Hill went on, “is that I tend to like everyone and dislike everyone, including myself. I prefer the company of robust people. I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I prefer to drink a gutsy rioja to some godawful chardonnay.”

  “Robust” was coy. Hill’s real preference is for people and situations that offer the enticing possibility that at any moment things could go disastrously, irretrievably wrong.

  15

  First Encounter

  MAY 5, 1994

  With the discovery of The Scream’s frame, the police finally had the break they needed. The Norwegian police and Thune, the National Gallery’s chairman of the board, contacted Charley Hill and caught him up on the players: Johnsen, an ex-con; Ulving, an art dealer playing the role of middle man.

  Hill phoned Ulving at once. “This is Chris Roberts. I’m a representative of the Getty in Europe, and I hope we can meet.” Hill gave a phone number in Belgium.

  The Belgian number was a tiny ploy. To hide any connection with Scotland Yard, Hill told Ulving he was based in Brussels. The Belgian police had taken care of the phone setup as part of a thank-you for Scotland Yard’s help in recovering the Russborough House Vermeer in Antwerp a few months before.

  Hill suggested to Ulving that he fly to Oslo so they could meet and negotiate the painting’s return. A good idea
, Ulving said, and he suggested that Hill not come empty-handed. Half a million pounds sounded right. In cash.

  The money came from Scotland Yard, which kept a cash account for undercover operations. It fell to Dick Ellis, an Art Squad detective, to sign for the money, £500,000 in used notes. Taking responsibility for so much money, even briefly, was not an assignment anyone would seek. It carried all the potential for calamity of, say, being drafted to baby-sit a prince of the realm. In a long career, Ellis had never been involved in a deal with so much cash. He stuffed the bills, bundled in slabs, into a sports bag, nearly filling it. The plan was to fly the money to Oslo first thing the next morning. It would be too early in the day to sign the money out then, so Ellis planned to leave it overnight in a Scotland Yard safe.

  The bag proved too big for the safe. Ellis decided to lock it in his office. “The Yard’s a pretty secure building,” he says, “but I can tell you that was a long night.” The next morning, Ellis says dryly, “I was there on time.”

  On the morning of May 5, Ellis handed the cash to a thick, burly detective, an armored car in human form, called Sid Walker.* Six feet tall and 230 pounds, with a deep voice and a gruff manner, Walker looked like someone best left alone. In a long undercover career, he had convinced countless criminals that he was one of them. When he was young—he was about fifteen years older than Hill or Ellis—he had gone in for wrestling and rugby, and he still came across as formidable. Sometimes too much so. “He’s been hired for more contract killings than some contract killers,” Ellis says admiringly.

  Walker’s fellow cops, who gave one another a hard time almost as a matter of reflex, spoke of his coups with something approaching awe. But a few roles—shady art connoisseur, for one—lay beyond his reach. “Drugs, guns, contract killings, anything like that, and Sid was perfect,” Charley Hill remarked. “Because he looks like a gorilla, and he sounds like one.”