The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  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.”

  Itching to share his triumph, Hill phoned his contact at the Getty to give him the good news and thank him for his help. What time was it in California? Midnight? Anyway, nobody home. Hill left a cheery message. It was only eleven in the morning in Norway, but it was time to celebrate. On a small table in the room, the hotel had provided a bottle of wine. Hill poured himself a drink. Vile! He found a small bottle of Scotch in the mini-bar. Much better. Drink in hand, he spent another minute with The Scream.

  Back to the world. When the good guys came to fetch him, Hill didn’t want them accidentally hurting the painting. He wrapped it up again, laid it flat on the bed, and set the brass nameplates next to it.

  Then he phoned Butler. When they had spoken just minutes before, Butler had whispered. Now he shouted down the line.

  “Where’s Sid? Charley, I can’t find Sid.”

  Hill was as alarmed as Butler. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Something’s happened. They’ve had an accident, something gone’s wrong.”

  It didn’t make sense. When Sid and Charley had driven away from the restaurant earlier in the morning, in separate cars, Sid had the shorter drive. He should have made it back to his room at the Grand Hotel long ago. Worse than that, Sid had headed straight back to Oslo. Hill and Ulving had made a longer drive and after that they had chased around forever to get the goddamned picture.

  Where was Sid?

  The answer emerged soon enough. Unbeknown to Butler and Charley, Sid was back at the Grand, in his room with Johnsen and Psycho. The Norwegian police team watching the hotel, whose job was to keep a sharp eye out for Walker and to contact Butler the instant they saw him, had managed to miss him.

  Which meant that Walker was alone in a hotel room with two high-strung, violent criminals, and no one had the slightest idea where he was.

  The three men did their best to pass the time. Psycho, whose real name was Grytdal, seemed to have taken a liking to Walker. He tried to strike up a conversation. The next day was his twenty-seventh birthday. Maybe someday he would travel to England and he and Walker could meet up. Maybe they could go fishing?

  Walker played along, but everyone was preoccupied and the conversation kept sputtering out. Time dragged on, and the crooks grew jumpier. Walker rummaged in the minibar for something they could drink. Any minute now, the Norwegians knew, Hill should call Walker to say that he had The Scream and it was time to hand over the money. When was that goddamned phone going to ring?

  Instead of a ring, they heard a knock on the door. Sid went to see who it could be. Two men in street clothes, chatting nonchalantly. One carried a bulging sports bag that Walker recognized at once—his bag, with the money! In his other hand, the man held a steaming cup of takeout coffee with a roll balanced precariously on top. His companion stood clutching a hamburger and a Coke.

  The Norwegian cops, one more time. Somehow signals had gotten crossed yet again. The Norwegians had expected to find Walker alone in his room. Their plan—which had never been communicated to Walker—was that eventually the crooks would show up, Walker would produce the money, and a team of cops from the next room would swarm in and arrest the bad guys.

  The two cops walked into the room. Johnsen jumped to his feet to see what the commotion was about. Grytdal lay sprawled across the bed. The cops looked at Grytdal and at Johnsen—they knew Walker, but not these two—and saw at once what they had walked into. “Police!” one of them shouted.

  Grytdal leaped up from the bed and tackled the cop nearer to him. The bag with the money fell to the ground. Coffee splashed across the carpet. The second cop jumped in, fists flailing. Grytdal struggled to his feet and threw a bearhug around the cop he had tackled. The other, larger cop pounded Grytdal from behind. Grytdal, in a fury, seemed not to notice the blows falling on his back and head. Grytdal and the cop fell to the ground again and rolled across the carpet, neither man willing to let go. The bigger cop stuck close to the tumbling bodies. He looked like a referee in a wrestling match, but he was hoping for a chance to deliver a good, hard kick to Grytdal’s head or ribs. The bag with the money lay unattended on the floor.

  Walker and Johnsen had yet to join in. Dodging bodies, Walker grabbed Johnsen’s leather jacket and flung it to him. “Let’s run!”

  The two men dashed out the door and down the hotel corridor. Johnsen spotted the emergency exit door that led to the stairs. Down he raced. Walker lumbered after him. Younger and faster than Walker, Johnsen soon left the detective alone in the hotel stairwell.

  That wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Walker hadn’t had time to devise a polished plan—only a minute or so had elapsed between the Norwegians’ knock on the door and the moment when the room became a cyclone of punching, kicking bodies—but fleeing the room wasn’t a bad idea. Walker hadn’t expected the Norwegians to drop by for a visit, but he did know that the cops had the hotel surrounded. If Johnsen did run, the cops ringed around the hotel should catch him.

  The alternative—staying in the room and joining the free-for-all—didn’t have much appeal. True, the cops would outnumber the bad guys three to two, but Grytdal’s mania seemed to even the score. Walker was a rough customer himself, but he knew that Johnsen was younger and, more important, a kick-boxing champion. Better to run Johnsen out the door and into a trap than to barge into the melee.

  Except that the police watching the hotel missed Johnsen as he ran out. With Johnsen gone, Walker raced back to his room. By the time he arrived the Norwegians had managed to handcuff Grytdal and radio for backup. Cops flooded into the hotel. They arrested Grytdal and dragged him off to police headquarters and took custody of the bag with the cash.

  Johnsen, on the loose, took a moment to think things through. The police, he knew, were after him already. His fellow thieves would be after him, too. In many a police sting, one thief is allowed to slip away. For the police, the rationale is cold-hearted but straightforward. The thief’s cronies would likely pin the blame for the arrests and the failed operation on the lone escapee, figuring that he had sold out his mates. Better to have the bad guys think they knew why things had gone wrong than to have them nosing around for an explanation. It wasn’t quite fair, the cops might concede, but, then, life isn’t fair.

  Less than an hour after he fled the Grand, Johnsen picked up a phone and called Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective. The two were old acquaintances, and Lier had a reputation for fairness.

  I need to come in, Johnsen said. Lier thought that seemed like a good idea. Johnsen summoned a taxi and rolled up to police headquarters in style. He had warned Lier that he didn’t have money to pay the fare, but Lier had told him not to worry. This one would be on him.

  At the Øsgårdstrand hotel, someone rapped loudly on the door to Charley Hill’s room.

  “Yeah?” Hill called.

  Back came a shouted name and a word that sounded to Hill like “Politi!” Presumably the Norwegian for “police.”

  “Okay.” Hill shoved the chest of drawers away from the door and opened it a few inches, though he left the chain on. He saw two men in street clothes, one of them tall and somber-looking, the other smaller, with curly hair. They held ID cards out toward Hill.

  Cops, or a pretty good imitation. Hill opened the door. “Hi, I’m Chris Roberts.”

  One of the newcomers looked at the square parcel in the blue sheet lying on top of the bedspread. “Is that it?” “Yeah.”

  Hill unwrapped The Scream
one more time. The cops stared. Then Hill rewrapped the painting and handed it to one of the cops. He handed the brass plates to the other. The three men headed downstairs.

  Hill told the Norwegian cops to give him a minute. The hotel was perched on a fjord, and a pier stood nearby. Hill remembered Munch’s painting of three girls on a pier, and he strolled out to the pier’s end as a small sign of respect for the artist whose work had led him to this out-of-the-way town.

  One of the cops kept a discreet watch. What was this crazy Brit up to now? Hill didn’t notice. He looked out across the water for a minute and punched a fist into the air in triumph. Then he broke into a celebratory jig. The Norwegian cop looked on—alone, at the end of the pier, a 200-pound bear of a man shuffled his way through a tentative and earthbound dance.

  That was mundane reality. On the movie screen that plays so often in Charley Hill’s mind, the picture was 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. The Scream was the star, and photographers pressed close for pictures. A hugely relieved Knut Berg, the museum’s director, posed for photo after photo with his recovered masterpiece. Leif Plahter, the art restorer, beamed happily at the painting he knew so well. The Norwegian detective Leif Lier hailed his British colleagues. “We would never have got the picture back,” he said, “if it had not been for Scotland Yard.” John Butler made a few gracious remarks about the benefits of international police cooperation. Only Charley Hill and Sid Walker, phantoms whose visit to Norway was a state secret, missed the party.

  Back in England, the press celebrated. “Yard’s Artful Dodgers Find The Scream,” the Daily Mail crowed, and in their own, more sedate way, the “quality” papers cheered, too. Scotland Yard stood on the sidelines and pouted. Butler’s television appearance in Norway had been replayed in Britain, and the police brass gave Butler a drubbing for his troubles. What was he doing flouncing around on television? What did that bloody painting have to do with police work? What did Norway have to do with London?

  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 Pål 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 Vampire.

  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 used by the criminals.” The police had arrested Ulving on the day they recovered The Scream, but they released him later the same day. For that arrest, Ulving won a judgment of about $5,000 against the state.

  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 great art. Given Hill’s nature, the decision not to hedge his bets was inevitable. The coups, when Hill can pull them off, are colossal. In the summer of 2002, for example, he recovered Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which had been missing for seven years. The painting, worth something in the neighborhood of $10 million, had been stolen from the Marquess of Bath, a seventy-one-year-old ex-hippie and flower child, the author of a six-volume (so far) autobiography titled Strictly Private, and the owner of a 100-room estate that has been in his family for four centuries and sits amid grounds that cover 9,000 acres.

  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.”

&
nbsp; 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 climbed back in his car, made a U-turn, and double-parked. He tore off a piece of the cardboard. Joseph’s head, Titian’s brushwork. Bingo!

  For his efforts, Hill earned £50,000, half the reward money. The other half went to the informant. And how did Lord Bath feel about the recovery? “I felt several million pounds richer.”