The Rescue Artist (23 page)

For half an hour, Hill studied and restudied the paintings, playing for time and rambling on about Lucas Cranach and Veronese and Reni as best he could, to an audience made up of cops gone bad, at least one of them a killer. When he could manage to do it inconspicuously, he tried again to send the help signal. Nothing. Finally the Germans acted on their own, bursting in brandishing Dirty Harry handguns and arresting everyone. Hill and the Czech gang leader ended up sprawled next to one another face-down on the concrete floor. A cop bent low to handcuff Hill’s arms behind his back and whispered into his ear, “Goot verk!”

Charley Hill, on the grounds of Blenheim Palace. The pose was a subtle homage to one of Hill’s favorite paintings, Gilbert Stuart’s
The Skater
. A man of action with a connoisseur’s eye, Hill liked to think of himself as spiritual kin to Stuart’s skating scholar.

Gilbert Stuart,
The Skater
. 1782 oil on canvas, 147.4 × 245.5 cm
© National Gallery of Art. Washington DC, USA /Bridgeman Art Library

Hill’s passport photo, taken in 1969 in Saigon.

A memorial service for the eleven men of Bravo Company’s Lima Platoon, killed in an ambush on Easter Monday, 1969.

Zita Hill, Charley’s mother. An elegant, high-spirited woman, Zita trained as a ballerina but joined Bluebell Kelly’s troupe of high-kicking dancers for a European tour just before the outbreak of World War II.

Landon Hill, Charley’s father, in Air Force uniform.

Hill is proud of his dual ancestry, “log cabin on one side and knight of the realm on the other.” His mother grew up in a glamorous English household where the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were frequent visitors. His father’s family hailed from the American west. Here several of Hill’s relatives (the boy who would become his grandfather is sixth from the left) pose in front of the family homestead in Oklahoma in the 1890s.

In Charley Hill’s first case as an undercover detective, two crooks tried to sell him a painting by the 16th-century Italian Parmigianino. The painter’s most famous work, often called the
Madonna of the Long Neck
because of its exaggerated proportions, is at left. Hill examined the crooks’ painting and told them he thought their prize was a fake.

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
was stolen from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery by a thief who tucked it under his arm and ran out the door. The painting, by Bruegel, was valued at £2 million. The painting eventually made its way to a gang of small-time thieves, who showed it to an expert to find out if it had any value. The expert took a look and fainted.

Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long
Neck, 1534-40
oil on panel, 135 × 219 cm
© Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Italy /Bridgeman Art Library

Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
, 1565 oil on panel, 34.4 × 24.1 cm
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust. Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London

Photograph of Edvard Munch c.1892
© Munch Museum, Oslo

Munch painted his self-portrait in 1895, two years after
The Scream
. A more tormented man would be hard to imagine. “Disease, insanity, and death were the angels which attended my cradle,” he once wrote, and they chased poor Munch throughout his long life.