The Rescue Artist (16 page)

Johnsen seemed convinced, or at least halfway convinced. Hill was relieved and pleased with himself. The test of an undercover man was his ability to improvise. Before he could savor his escape, Johnsen was fretting again.

“I’ve seen other plainclothes cops around, too.”

“Oh, Christ,” Hill thought. Still, if the Norwegians were so amateurish that nobody could miss them, maybe Hill could turn that to his advantage.

“Well, that’s all the proof you need,” Hill blustered. “They’re obviously keeping an eye on this bullshit convention.”

Hill suggested they move to another hotel and leave the cops behind. Maybe they could put the deal off a week or two. Hill was bluffing—for one thing, the head of the Art Squad had set up his command post in
this
hotel—but Johnsen didn’t call him on it.

“I’m leaving for a while,” Johnsen said.

Off he went.

17
Russborough House Redux

W
here Johnsen had gone, Hill had no idea. Anything was possible. He might have gone off to sulk, or to fetch a rifle so he could take the money that had been waved under his nose. But whether Johnsen was out for vengeance or merely out for a drink, Charley Hill was enjoying himself.

Art crime, Hill likes to say, is “serious farce.” Both words are important to him. The art is irreplaceable, which accounts for the seriousness, but fencing with crooks is a game of sorts, too, which is where the farce comes in. But for Hill, “farce” conjures up more than Keystone Kops and crooks falling off ladders. It refers, as well, to a more cosmic contest—the endless, necessary, and futile war of the good guys against the bad.

Hill has fought in that war for years, and happily, but as “an avowed believer in original sin,” he takes for granted that the police will never go out of business for lack of work. Hill’s good cheer and deep pessimism coexist somehow, and in the cases he likes best, comedy and tragedy wrap around one another as tightly as they do in his own tangled heart.

The years Hill spent chasing muggers down alleyways had done little to engage him. The stakes were too low, the surprises too few, the crimes too simple. Hill didn’t fully sort out what was missing until his first world-class case, the hunt for Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter
and the seventeen other paintings stolen from Russborough House by Martin Cahill in 1986.

That once-in-a-lifetime theft was in fact nothing of the sort. Thieves had hit Russborough House in 1974, before Cahill came along. They would return in 2001 and again in 2002, each time making off with masterpieces worth millions. Several paintings, including Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter
, have been stolen more than once, and Gainsborough’s
Madame Baccelli: Dancer
has been stolen three times so far.

Hill once asked an Irish gangster named Martin Foley what he had against Lady Beit, the elderly owner of Russborough House. “It’s fookin’ nothin’ to do with her,” came the reply. “It’s just fookin’ easy.” Russborough House is a great, rambling place, Hill notes, “with bars on the window and locks and video cameras and all that shit, but the thieves are in and out—they know what they’re going to take—and it’s so isolated the cops take fifteen minutes to get there.”

“They enjoy doing it,” Hill says. “They’re violent thieves, and if anyone gets in their way they’ll run ‘em down.” For the crooks, this is sport (though, as is the case with most sports in the modern world, the dream of riches is never far off). The media, too, treat each new attack on Russborough House as light entertainment, a perennial story not far different from Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, and his shadow.

If art crime in general is “serious farce,” the here-they-go-again thefts at Russborough House are perhaps the ultimate example. Consider the setting, first of all. Russborough House is by repute the grandest house in Ireland. No crime scene could have less in common with the mean streets of a commonplace robbery. Next, the crime itself. Who has Vermeers and Goyas hanging on their walls?

Finally, the victims, who are too remote to win much sympathy. The late Sir Alfred was a nearly silent figure notable mainly for what one obituary called his “Teutonic earnestness.” Journalists found Lady Beit equally hard to fathom. In their portrayals, she sounded like Margaret Dumont, the grande dame who played Groucho Marx’s foil. In the summer of 2002, Lady Beit took a journalist on a tour of Russborough House. She gestured toward Goya’s
Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate
(which Hill had recovered with Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter)
. “That painting means a great deal to me, for two reasons,” Lady Beit explained. “Alfred was standing beneath it when he proposed to me in the house, and then during the Dugdale raid we were tied up beneath it.”

The Dugdale raid, in 1974, was the first attack on Russborough House. The thieves in the various raids have been as over-the-top as the victims and Russborough House itself. Rose Dugdale, who organized that first attack, which was by far the most inept of the four robberies, was an English heiress whose trust fund paid her $200,000 a year. Raised on a 600-acre estate (her parents also owned homes in London and Scotland), Dugdale went to school in Switzerland and then studied economics at Oxford. In her twenties she proclaimed herself a revolutionary, though it was the debutante’s life she had seen in her teens that had opened her eyes and turned her stomach. “My coming-out ball was one of those pornographic affairs,” she told reporters after her arrest, “which cost about what sixty old-age pensioners receive in six months.”

Dugdale’s first ventures into crime were marked by ambition and amateurism in roughly equal measures. In June 1973, when she was 32, Dugdale stole a miscellany of paintings, silver, and jewelry from her parents’ home and was caught almost at once. The profits, it emerged during the trial, were intended for the IRA. “I think the risk that you will ever again commit burglary or any dishonesty is extremely remote,” the judge declared, and then he set the defendant free.

Six months later, Dugdale proved the judge an optimist. In January 1974, while posing as a tourist vacationing in County Donegal in Ireland, Dugdale rented a helicopter for a bit of sight-seeing. She convinced the pilot to help her load an odd cargo, four milk churns. Once the helicopter was airborne, Dugdale hijacked it. The milk churns, she announced, were crammed with explosives. Dugdale’s plan was to bomb a nearby police station. As it turned out, almost everyone
but
the police was in grave danger. One milk churn almost blew up inside the helicopter and had to be shoved frantically out the door. It plummeted into a river. Two other churns missed their targets and fell harmlessly into the sea. The last landed in a housing project but failed to go off. Somehow Dugdale escaped arrest.

One month after the helicopter caper, on a February evening in 1974, a guard at Kenwood House, a small museum in north London, heard the crash of metal against metal and then the sound of breaking glass. He rushed in and found that someone had smashed through a barred window with a sledgehammer, grabbed Vermeer’s
Guitar Player
, and fled. The break-in, the police said, was “an act of primitive violence.”

The painting, renowned for its loveliness, depicts a young woman absorbed in her music and caught in midsong; somehow Vermeer contrived to paint the strings of the guitar so that we can virtually see them vibrating. In a corner of the painted scene, deep in shadow, a few stacked-up books sit neglected. The musician and her guitar glow with a honey-colored light.

The frame turned up the day after the theft, damaged, in a bush in Hampstead Heath where the thieves had thrown it. The public and the media responded to the break-in with the usual paradoxical mix of outrage and nonchalance. On the one hand, the stolen work was a priceless masterpiece and recovering it was a national priority. On the other hand, it was only a painting. Television reporters announced the robbery in breathless tones. Tellingly, though, they had to describe the missing picture without showing pictures of it, because the company that held the rights to the color slide had demanded a £10 fee for its use. Both the BBC and ITV, the commercial television channel, decided to save their money.

At this point, the story took an unexpected twist. Newspapers and radio stations began receiving anonymous phone messages. The three-centuries-old painting had apparently been stolen to right a twentieth-century political grievance.
The Guitar Player
would be destroyed, the caller warned, unless the authorities transferred two IRA activists, sisters named Dolours and Marion Price, from a London prison to an Irish one. The Price sisters had been convicted the previous year of carrying out a string of car bombings in London. Two hundred and thirty people had been injured.

The sisters, who were themselves demanding to be transferred to Ireland and on hunger strike, had been sentenced to life in prison. But the thieves had apparently made their phone calls without informing the Price sisters of their plan. Two weeks after the theft, on March 6, 1974, an envelope arrived at the London
Times
. Inside was a tiny strip of painted canvas, about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, and an oddly phrased note, unpunctuated and all in lowercase, typed on a piece of thin blue paper. The strip of canvas had been cut from the back of
The Guitar Player
, the note said, and it went on, “… the price sisters have given no sign of gratitude all we have established is that a capitalist society values its treasures more than humanity therefore we will carry our lunacy to its utmost extent the painting will be burnt on st patricks night with much cavorting about in the true lunatic fashion.”

On St. Patrick’s Day, Albert Price, the father of the convicted bombers, issued a plea asking the thieves to return the painting. His daughters had studied art, Price said, and they didn’t want Vermeer’s painting destroyed. “Dolours has seen the painting,” her father said, “and she told me that there were few beautiful things left and it would be a sin to destroy it. They appreciate the effort that is being made on their behalf but do not want anything to happen to the painting.” St. Patrick’s Day passed uneventfully.

One month later, on the evening of April 26, 1974, with
The Guitar Player
still missing, Rose Dugdale approached Russborough House on foot. She rang the bell at the service entrance, and when a servant opened the door, she said that her car had broken down. While Dugdale described her predicament, three gun-wielding men suddenly appeared behind her and pushed their way inside the house. They ordered the servant to lead them to Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, who were sitting in the library listening to music. The gunmen forced the Beits to the floor and tied them up.

Now Dugdale reappeared, telling her three accomplices which paintings to snatch off the wall. She interrupted her orders now and then to shout “Capitalist pigs!” at the Beits. Ten minutes later, the thieves fled with nineteen paintings that represented the gems from one of the greatest private art collections in the world.

A week later, the director of Ireland’s National Gallery received an anonymous letter. Part of the message carried an impossible-to-miss echo of the St. Patrick’s Day ransom note from the Vermeer theft the month before. The Beit paintings would be destroyed, the letter warned, unless the English authorities transferred the Price sisters to Ireland, along with two fellow prisoners and a $1.2 million ransom. With the letter, the thieves included three pages torn from Sir Alfred’s diary, which had been stolen at the same time as the paintings.

The thieves’ plan made little sense—who would try to put pressure on politicians in London by stealing paintings in Dublin?—but, regardless, the Russborough House paintings were gone. The Irish police organized a nationwide search for the thieves. On the day after the ransom letter was delivered, a policeman checking hotels and rental properties for suspicious characters peeked through the window of a small, isolated cottage near the sea, in Glandore, 200 miles from Dublin. Three oil paintings caught his eye. (These turned out to be Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid
, Goya’s
Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate
, and Velasquez’s
Maid in Kitchen with Christ and Disciples Outside Window
—the best of the 19 stolen works.) Rose Dugdale had rented the cottage two days before the theft. The other paintings were still in the trunk of her car. All were unhurt.

Dugdale was arrested. Only a few days later, the police in London received an anonymous phone tip bringing welcome news. They raced to St. Bartholomew’s Church. In the graveyard, leaning against a headstone, inside an old newspaper tied up with a piece of string, they found Vermeer’s
Guitar Player
.

Dugdale was never charged with stealing
The Guitar Player
, though the police assume that she was responsible. In June 1974, a month after she was found with the Russborough House paintings, she was put on trial in Dublin. She pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

In 1986, Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House. In this second theft, in contrast with the Dugdale one, the Beits were away. Cahill’s gang made off with eighteen paintings. In June 2001, the thieves were back. This was the third robbery overall, and the first in daylight. In a stolen Mitsubishi jeep, three thieves roared up the steps to Russborough House, rammed the front doors, and raced inside. Three minutes later they raced out again with Bellotto’s
View of Florence
and (for the third time) Gainsborough’s
Madame Baccelli
. The thieves sped away in a second stolen car. The two paintings together were worth £2.3 million.

The theft was bold but hardly polished. The thieves poured a can of gasoline over the jeep and tried, unsuccessfully, to set it on fire, and the police found a pair of used gloves inside. During their getaway, the thieves tried to hijack a car at gunpoint (to throw off police pursuit), but the driver refused to hand over his keys.