The Rescue Artist (12 page)

14
The Art of Seduction

T
he discovery of the frame was a good news-bad news joke on a giant scale. On the plus side, the police were finally dealing with actual thieves rather than hoaxsters and con men. Almost as important, it seemed likely that
The Scream
had not been smuggled out of Norway to some more remote hideaway. But the minuses were plain, too. If Munch’s masterpiece had been removed from its frame, the painting was as vulnerable as a turtle taken from its shell. And the thieves were still at large.

Ulving, the art dealer, assured the Norwegian authorities that he was merely a good citizen caught up in a story that had nothing to do with him, and doing his best to cooperate with the authorities. This was not the first time, he said, that he had helped the police recover stolen paintings.

In 1988, thieves had stolen a number of Munch paintings and lithographs from private homes around Oslo. Out of the blue, someone phoned Ulving, trying to sell him a Munch lithograph. Ulving knew by the work’s description that it had been stolen and called the police. They told Ulving to go ahead with the deal, but the thief caught sight of the police lurking near the designated rendezvous and fled.

Several days later Ulving’s contact phoned him again, offering more Munch works. Ulving told the police again. They proposed another trap. This time Ulving was to say he wanted to buy several of the prints and paintings, rather than just one, for a client in Germany. Since the art was stolen, Ulving would offer only KR 1 million, about $125,000.

The art dealer and the thief agreed on a deal. The police rented an apartment above the thief’s, so they could keep watch uninterrupted. On a Saturday morning shortly before the assigned meeting time, a detective phoned Ulving. The thief had left home, and they had a car tailing him and a plane overhead tracking him. He was headed
away
from Ulving; if he arrived at all, it wouldn’t be for a long time.

Two minutes later, Ulving heard a knock on the door.

The thief burst in. “Everything ready?”

The police, Ulving later learned, had followed the wrong car. The thief hadn’t been in Oslo for two days. While the surveillance cops monitored an empty apartment in Oslo, the thief had checked into a hotel in the countryside, in the tiny town of Øsgårdstrand. Ulving did a double-take.
The hotel in Øsgårdstrand?

Ulving stalled for time. It would take him a little while to get the money together, and they needed to set up a new rendezvous. Once he had pushed his guest out the door, Ulving phoned the police and launched into an astonishing tale.

The hotel the thief had chosen for himself, of all the hotels in Norway, happened to be the one that Ulving owned! The coincidence was, Ulving would agree in an interview years later,
“so
strange, really unbelievable.” Ulving phoned his hotel manager and told him to check the register of the tiny establishment. Look for a room booked two nights before, by a male guest, traveling alone.

One name fit. The manager hotfooted it to the room. There, in the closet, he found seven stolen Munch paintings and lithographs. The police, in the meantime, nabbed the thief at the rendezvous.

Despite the happy ending, Ulving said the experience had left him gun-shy. One brush with thieves was more than enough. Who knew what might happen if he got mixed up with cops and crooks again?

To Charley Hill’s suspicious mind, everything about Ulving rang false. What was this good Samaritan doing tangled up in another stolen art case? Ulving insisted that his relationship with Johnsen was aboveboard. He was an experienced and knowledgeable art dealer; Johnsen had only recently discovered art. What could be more natural than for an expert to help a novice develop his eye? Hill’s working theory was far simpler: Johnsen brought Ulving art that he had stolen (or that someone he knew had stolen), and Ulving sold it. Ulving was a “typical art dealer, a mendacious son of a bitch, just patently and obviously weasely.”

The dogmatic tone was characteristic. Hill knew and admired dozens of serious, thoughtful, dedicated art dealers, and yet, confronted with a single dealer he thought was shady, he could forget all that in an instant. “Art dealers are used car salesmen,” he complained, thinking of Ulving but generalizing wildly, “except they have all the upmarket social graces.”

In other aspects of his life, Hill was prone to spectacular pratfalls, but he took great pride in his ability to read people. He made judgments about people quickly and amended them slowly or not at all. Whether his instinctive dislike of Ulving reflected insight or only nasty-mindedness was hard to know. Cops spend their careers scanning the gutter, and it is not a vantage point that gives them a sunny view of human nature. On one idyllic spring day years before he had ever met Ulving, Hill happened to see a jogger pass by in Richmond Park, the biggest and greenest open space in London. “Probably a rapist,” Hill muttered, “looking for some mum who’s only thinking about her baby in his stroller.”

The novelist and ex-prosecutor Scott Turow could have been thinking of Hill when he called cops “our paid paranoids.” “A copper sees a conspiracy in a cloudy day,” Turow wrote. “He suspects treachery when you say good morning.”

Though Hill disliked and distrusted Ulving, he had no doubt that he could win him over. Over the years, he had learned how to befriend all sorts of crooks and liars. In his line of work it was an essential skill. “That’s been my great strength,” he once observed, “to be able to develop rapport with criminals who tell me things they wouldn’t tell anybody else.”

Oddly, Hill’s gift for forging alliances seems to work at both ends of the social scale but to fail in the middle. Killers will happily drink with Hill, and lords and ladies, too, but good, solid, salt-of-the-earth citizens purse their lips in distaste and back away.

“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.”