The Rescue Artist (10 page)

“Stop the car!” Hill barked, and then he hopped out of the Mercedes, halted traffic, retrieved the bell, and presented it to the woman on the bicycle.

“She gave me this wonderful smile of thanks,” Hill recalled long afterward, “and when I got back in the car, Antoine had this ‘what the fuck was
that?’
look on his face.”

For Hill, who is in many ways akin to the small boy who imagines himself the star of the big game (“bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, all eyes on Hill as he strides to the plate”), this tiny scene was a not-to-be-missed chance to play the hero. “It was a pure Walter Raleigh moment,” he recalled long afterward, basking in the memory. “That’s all it was. And poor Antoine sitting there thinking, ‘You ought to be concentrating on the job, not fooling about playing the gallant knight to some old biddy whose bicycle has gone bust.’ “

At the airport, Hill and Antoine parked the car and walked into the small restaurant. It was noon. Hill ordered a coffee and cognac. In waltzed a dozen flight attendants, and, just behind them, Mulvihill and a crony. “You got everything?” Mulvihill asked.

“Yup,” said Hill.

The trickiest, most dangerous part of any deal is the exchange itself, when money and goods finally change hands. Hill and Mulvihill had each brought an ally, for muscle and backup. While Hill sat in the restaurant with Mulvihill’s man, Mulvihill and Antoine walked outside toward Antoine’s car. Both men were car buffs, and the Mercedes served as an ice-breaker. Mulvihill studied the cashier’s checks and assured himself that they were the ones he had seen in the bank in Brussels.

Satisfied, Mulvihill returned to the restaurant. He turned to Hill.

“Want to see the pictures?”

Hill walked out to the parking lot with Mulvihill’s partner, to a rented Peugeot. The bodyguard opened the trunk. Hill saw a sports bag, about big enough to hold a tennis racquet and a pair of sneakers. Next to it sat a black plastic bag wrapped around something rectangular and several large objects hidden inside layers of wrapping paper. The plastic bag was the same size and shape as the one Hill had seen in Antwerp, when Mulvihill had shown him the Vermeer. Hill put it to one side for a moment. He unzipped the sports bag. Inside, he saw a rolled-up canvas that he recognized as Goya’s
Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate
. Glad as he was to see the painting—the thieves wouldn’t have brought it if they were running a scam—it was horrifying to see a two-hundred-year-old oil painting rolled up like a ten-dollar poster. Hill set the sports bag down gently. Turning to the bag that he hoped contained the Vermeer, he brushed a hand across his shirtfront, as if he were sweeping away a piece of lint.

Silently, two large BMWs alerted by Hill’s signal sped into place, one in front of the Peugeot, one behind. Each car was “four up,” with a driver and three men. This was the Belgian SWAT squad, big guys with Dirty Harry specials. They shouted commands in Flemish, presumably to drop everything and lie down. In case they had been misunderstood, the cops helped Hill and Mulvihill’s bodyguard to the ground.

Shoved facedown onto the asphalt, Hill and his companion were handcuffed and searched and then hustled into a car and whisked off to a local police station. Mulvihill was taken into custody, too, and so was Antoine. To Charley Hill’s great delight, the commotion had drawn the attention of everyone in the coffee shop, and the whole scene played out to a satisfying chorus of shrieks from the gawking flight attendants.

Once arrived at the police station, Hill and Antoine, the gendarme-cum-bodyguard, were freed from their handcuffs, congratulated, and left to celebrate. Mulvihill was charged with handling stolen goods, but, as the
Irish Examiner
later reported, “he miraculously managed to escape prosecution.”

The miracle was, in fact, mundane enough, though it did demonstrate that no one took art crime too seriously. A Belgian court dropped the charges against Mulvihill on the grounds that the robbery had taken place in Ireland, outside Belgian jurisdiction.

The trash bag did indeed contain the Vermeer. In all, the Belgian police recovered four of the Russborough House paintings (as well as three fake Picassos): the Vermeer, the Goya, an Antoine Vestier portrait, and Gabriel Metsu’s
Man Writing a Letter
. The Metsu was a companion piece to the same artist’s
Woman Reading a Letter
, the painting that police had found in Istanbul, where thieves were trying to barter it for heroin. The two works are considered Metsu’s masterpieces.

Today, all but two of the eighteen paintings stolen from Russborough House in 1986 have been recovered. The missing works are Venetian scenes painted by Francesco Guardi, which some rumors have placed in Florida.

Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
hangs safely in Dublin’s National Gallery, serene still, despite all she has seen.

Martin Cahill, the engineer of the Russborough House theft, was killed in August 1994, shot through the driver’s window of his car by a gunman dressed as a Dublin city worker. Cahill had slowed to a halt at a stop sign; a man with a clipboard approached the driver’s window to ask a few questions about traffic.

In January 2003 Niall Mulvihill was shot in a gangland attack in Dublin. Mulvihill took four bullets but managed to drive two miles toward the nearest hospital. He crashed just short of the hospital, causing a four-car pileup. No one was charged with his murder.

12
Munch

MARCH 1994

F
or five months after the Russborough House recovery, Christopher Charles Roberts did not exist. Then, with
The Scream
stolen, Roberts was back, reincarnated this time as the Man from the Getty.

Charley Hill’s first task in preparing for this new role was to learn about Edvard Munch. Studying up on artists was one of his favorite parts of the job. Hill’s love of art ran deep, though he was a buff rather than a scholar. In his spare time, in whatever city he found himself, he visited museums and looked in on old friends in the collection. In Prague, it was a Dürer self-portrait; at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Rembrandt’s
Sacrifice of Isaac
(“the angel arresting Abraham’s hand is extraordinary, even though it doesn’t quite work”); at the National Gallery in London a long list, perhaps headed by Leonardo’s
Madonna of the Rocks
.

In Washington, D.C., Hill always made time for a particular favorite, Gilbert Stuart’s
Skater (Portrait of William Grant)
. The striking work, an action painting in what was typically a stiff and earnest genre, thrust Stuart to fame. It depicts a tall figure in an elegant black coat and hat, carving a graceful turn on the ice on the Serpentine, in London’s Hyde Park. (The story has it that Grant told Stuart that “the day was better suited for skating than sitting for one’s portrait.”) For Hill, the skating Scot embodies an idealized self-image, “the way I would have liked to have seen myself in that time.”

For
The Scream
case in particular, where Hill’s role was not that of an art-loving (though crooked) amateur but of a bigwig at a world-class art museum, his research would have to be particularly thorough. There were no shortcuts. Learning about Munch was a matter of assembling a giant stack of art books and diving in. The only catch was money. Though he was preparing to play a free-spending honcho at a money-is-no-object institution—and though he supposedly intended to ransom a $72 million painting—Hill could not afford to buy the books he needed to study. Instead, he haunted the library and a bookstore near his home, where a patient manager made allowances for the tall man in the art section who read and read but never seemed to buy.

At the start, Hill knew no more about Munch than most people do. Temperamentally too conservative to care much for the modern world, he preferred paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though he made exceptions for a few works as close to the present day as the nineteenth century. The Goya portrait he had looked at in a car trunk, painted in 1805, reduced him to sputtering admiration. “Anyone with even half an eye or half a wit,” he says, “standing there, holding it, you can’t be anything but awestruck.”

He had never seen
The Scream
in the flesh, so to speak, and, if he failed to get it back, he might never have the chance.

Two men more different than Charley Hill and Edvard Munch would be difficult to find. Still, the gruff ex-paratrooper found himself sympathizing with the melancholy, high-strung artist. As haunted and unstable as his near-contemporary van Gogh, Edvard Munch had endured an upbringing that would have blighted the sunniest nature. When Munch was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, with her young son at her bedside. Nine years later, his older sister died of the same disease. His brother, too, fell ill with tuberculosis, but survived.

Insanity was another family curse. Munch’s sister Laura went mad and was eventually institutionalized. Munch’s grandfather had died, mad, in an asylum, and Munch himself suffered a devastating breakdown in 1908, at age 45, that left him hospitalized for eight months. His treatment included electroshock, but he emerged more or less recovered and returned to his work.

Even at his healthiest, Munch was far from robust. Sickly throughout his childhood, he had survived tuberculosis and suffered through long bouts of bronchitis. Throughout his life he suffered from panic attacks. At the time he was working on
The Scream
, it took all his nerve to force himself to cross a street or look down from even the slightest height. He lived in fear of inhaling dust or germs; he shrank from drafts; he was so afraid of open spaces that when he ventured outdoors he clung to the nearest wall.

“Disease, insanity and death were the angels which attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life,” Munch wrote in his journal. “I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the eternal punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.”

He learned many of those lessons from his father, a doctor who treated Oslo’s poorest residents for free but who adhered to fire-and-brimstone religious views. “When anxiety did not possess him, he would joke and play with us like a child,” Munch recalled. “When he punished us … he could be almost insane in his violence. In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.”

Munch grew to be a shy, lonely, hypersensitive young man, tall, thin, and good-looking (reputedly “the handsomest man in Norway”). In his twenties he fled puritanical Oslo for the guilty pleasures of Paris and the Black Piglet Café in Berlin. Here he drank too much, chased women and fled from them, and painted obsessively, late at night, in a shabby rented room cluttered with his own unfinished pictures.

The titles of some paintings from the 1890s, when Munch was in his early thirties and at his most productive, give some idea of his state of mind. He painted
Despair
and
By the Deathbed
in 1892,
The Scream
in 1893,
Anxiety
in 1894,
Death Struggle
in 1895.

The paintings are as bleak as the titles suggest. In comparison with Munch’s portraits of isolation and woe, Edward Hopper’s depictions of near-empty diners seem cheerful.
The Sick Child
, for example, shows Munch’s sister Sophie, in bed and dying, attended by her despairing mother. Sophie is wan and weak, but—and this is characteristic of Munch—the dying girl seems less anguished than the mother she will leave behind. The mother’s pain is more than she can bear; she holds her daughter’s hand, but she is past the point where she could offer any spoken consolation.

Even paintings with seemingly inviting subjects, like the 1892 street scene called
Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street
, are heavy-laden with grief. In Munch’s version of a spring evening, a stream of men in black top hats and women in dark dresses advance zombie-like toward the viewer, their eyes wide and staring and their heads barely more than skulls. A lone figure, depicting Munch himself, walks unnoticed in the opposite direction.

Munch’s aim in such paintings, he wrote, was to find a way to represent human “suffering and emotion, rather than to paint external nature.” The painter’s task was “to depict his deepest emotions, his soul, his sorrows and joys.” An artist was a psychologist with a paintbrush.

Freud and Munch were almost exact contemporaries. Though neither man ever mentioned the other in print, the two were engaged in the same quest. In the age of anxiety, if Freud was the great explorer, Munch was his mapmaker. Far more directly than most artists, Munch served up a kind of autobiography on canvas. His paintings put his private torments on public view.

His relations with women, for example, could scarcely have been more fraught. “His father had prayed late at night to save his son from the sinful attractions of women, flesh, and free love,” one art historian writes, “but the diabolic allures of alcohol and a bohemian life overpowered his prayers.” In 1889, when Munch was twenty-six, his father died. One of the father’s last acts was to mail his well-thumbed Bible to Munch, in Paris, in the hope that the directionless young man could yet be saved.

Women were temptresses intent on destroying men, and Munch had trouble resisting temptation. He fell in love for the first time at age twenty-two, with a married woman two years older than he was. “Was it because she took my first kiss that she took the sweetness of life from me?” he wrote later. “Was it because she lied, deceived, that one day she took the scales from my eyes so that I saw Medusa’s head, saw life as a great horror?”

Later relationships proved even more disastrous. For three years, the penniless artist carried on a tumultuous affair with a beautiful and vain woman named Tulla Larsen, a wealthy member of one of Copenhagen’s leading families. After their breakup, she lured Munch to her room by enlisting friends to tell him that she had fallen deathly ill and yearned for one final conversation. Munch arrived, and Tulla sat up in her deathbed flourishing a gun. She was not sick, she admitted, but she would kill herself if Munch refused to take her back. Munch reached for the gun, Tulla grabbed it back, and it fired. The bullet took off the top joint of the middle finger of Munch’s left hand. (Munch painted with his right hand.)

Munch later included Tulla Larsen in several works, notably in a portrait called
Hatred
and in another entitled
Still Life (The Murderess)
. “I have painted a still life as good as any Cézanne,” he wrote, describing the latter work, “except that in the background I have painted a murderess and her victim.”

In between stints with Munch, Hill pored over the Getty Museum catalogue. One of the prizes in the collection, he learned, is a strange work by James Ensor called
Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889
. The huge painting, about eight feet by fourteen feet, is an angry satire depicting the chaos that would greet Christ if he returned to the modern world. Jesus (who is depicted with Ensor’s features) is nearly swallowed up in a tumultuous crowd; political banners and advertising slogans (“Coleman’s mustard”) wave overhead; the mayor preens as if the parade were in
his
honor. Ensor’s masterpiece, Hill read, was one of the great forerunners of expressionism and a key step on the path that led Munch to
The Scream
.

Hill lit up. The Ensor painting, he figured, would be the key to his patter. The reason the Getty would pay the ransom, he’d say, is that the curators wanted to put
The Scream
on exhibition with Ensor’s painting. For Hill, seeing Ensor was the Aha! moment when his Getty story fell into place.

No one else would have thought so. Even without Ensor, the Getty scheme was far from simple. If Hill was prepared to play a rich American, why go to the trouble of involving a museum? Why not simply pose as a tycoon bent on assembling an art collection no one else could match? Hill contemptuously brushed aside any such objections as exactly the kind of “conventional and narrow-minded” thinking he despised.

“My art,” Munch wrote, “is rooted in a single reflection: Why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle?” Painting was not merely a career, or even a calling, but a cry from the abyss. “There should be no more paintings of interiors and people reading and women knitting,” Munch declared. “There should be images of living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love—I shall paint a number of such pictures—people will understand the holiness of it, and they will take off their hats as if they were in a church.”

Instead, they took out rotten fruit and hurled it as if they were in a burlesque hall. It was Munch’s raw, unfinished technique, not his subject matter, that inspired such scorn. The contempt directed at Munch echoed the critics’ mockery when, two decades before, the impressionists had mounted their first shows.

“There is not even any proper underpainting in the picture,” one Norwegian critic scolded, when he saw Munch’s
Portrait of the Painter Jensen-Hjell
. “The colors have been crudely daubed on the canvas; indeed it looks as if it has been painted with the blotches of paint left over on the palette after another picture.” One newspaper reported that visitors emerged from a Munch exhibition asking whether he held the paintbrush with his hands or his feet.