The Rescue Artist (3 page)

Why bother with banks?

3
Whodunit?

FEBRUARY 12, 1994

I
n Norway, it seemed as if every police officer in the nation was searching for the thieves who had taken
The Scream
. Exactly how the crooks planned to cash in on the masterpiece was unclear, but one of their motives was unmistakable: the theft was a jeering insult, a raised middle finger directed at Norway’s cultural and political elite. No mere economic crime, this was personal, a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it taunt from criminals flaunting their cleverness.

That was the point, police assumed, of timing the crime for the Olympics, when 2,000 reporters were jostling for a story. It explained the choice of
The Scream
, one of the modern world’s most recognizable images. It accounted for the mocking note and the ladder—a gleaming, twelve-foot-long calling card—left defiantly in place.

For the thieves this was multimillion-dollar fun. Just forty minutes after the break-in, the phone rang at
Dagbladet
, one of Norway’s major newspapers. It was 7:10
A.M
. The caller asked for the news desk. “You have to get to the National Gallery,” she said. “Something amazing has happened—somebody stole
The Scream
and they left a postcard that said ‘Thanks for the poor security’ “

“Who is this?”

No reply.

“Who’s calling?”

The tipster hung up.

At 7:30, the National Gallery’s security chief made a melancholy phone call to Knut Berg, the museum’s director. “There’s been a burglary. They took
The Scream.”
Neither man needed to spell out for the other just how bad the news was.

At the same moment, many of Norway’s highest government officials were together on a private bus headed to Lillehammer to participate in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The mood was cheery and, bearing in mind how early it was, almost festive. Then came the crackle of a news bulletin on the radio. When the bus pulled in to Lillehammer, it was besieged by reporters shouting questions about
The Scream
.

Answers were scarce. Back in Oslo, television reporters flocked to the National Gallery to film their stories. “All we know for certain,” a stunned Knut Berg admitted, “is that, to our sorrow, what could not happen has happened.”

It had happened before, although never to
The Scream
. In 1980, only a few years into Berg’s tenure, a drug addict had walked into Norway’s National Gallery in the middle of the day and walked out with a Rembrandt. He found a buyer for the drawing, a small study of a man’s head, and pocketed about $10,000, some five percent of the work’s true value. French police recovered the drawing in Paris six weeks later.

In 1982 thieves once again entered the National Gallery during the day. This time they hid in a storeroom and emerged in the middle of the night when the guards were in another part of the museum. They grabbed a Gauguin, a Rembrandt (not the one stolen in 1980), a Goya, and five other works, passed them out a window to colleagues, and escaped. The theft led National Gallery officials to install additional alarms and outside cameras and to build the basement alarm station where the guard would later sit, unmindful of the television monitors, as
The Scream
was passed out the window.

In 1988, thieves broke into the Munch Museum in Oslo, only a mile or two from the National Gallery. There they stole
The Vampire
, perhaps Munch’s second best-known painting. Women in Munch’s work are sometimes desirable, often dangerous, and usually both at once.
The Vampire
depicts a red-haired woman biting, or perhaps kissing, the neck of a dark-haired man sprawled face-down before her.

The thief had none of the artist’s subtlety. He simply broke a window, grabbed the painting, and ran. The alarm sounded, but by the time the guard had hurried from the far side of the building, he found only broken glass and a blank spot on the wall.

In 1993, the National Gallery was hit again. With the Olympics less than a year off and plans for the blockbuster exhibition already underway, this was a hard-to-miss warning. The thieves struck on August 23, in daylight. While one shift of guards replaced another, and while a television crew filmed in another room, someone walked off with Munch’s
Study for a Portrait
, which depicts a sad-eyed young woman looking abstractedly into the middle distance.

The work, valued at $300,000, was not protected by an alarm, nor was it in a room watched by security cameras. In response, the National Gallery beefed up its security yet again. This time the museum was safe, Knut Berg declared. During the day, the guards would spot any thief trying to make off with a painting, and at night the museum was as secure as a fortress.

With
The Scream
gone and the world watching, the Norwegian police faced enormous pressure. They searched for fingerprints but came up empty: the thieves had worn gloves. There were no footprints inside the museum and no identifiable prints or other marks near the ladder. For a brief moment, it seemed that a tiny, dark stain on a piece of broken glass might be blood. Nope.

Police technicians scanned the museum’s surveillance tapes over and over again, frame by frame. The quality was frustratingly poor. The thieves did not seem to be wearing masks, but even blown-up pictures of their faces were too fuzzy to be of any use. A security camera trained on the front of the museum had filmed the thieves’ car, but the vague shape could not even be identified as a particular make.

The police did crack the tiny mystery of where the ladder had come from, but no one at the building site had seen anything. The postcard was scarcely more help. The scribbled message on the back was in colloquial Norwegian, so the police guessed that the thieves were from Norway, but that was hardly conclusive. Maybe some overseas Mr. Big had planned the job and hired local talent for the actual break-in.

Police appeals for help did not yield a single eyewitness. No one had seen two men carrying a twelve-foot ladder down the street or driving a car with a ladder lashed to the roof. Hope surged momentarily when police found a taxi driver who had been parked near the museum while the thieves came and went, but he insisted that he had been busy counting his take for the night. If anyone had come running from the museum carrying a painting, he had missed it.

He
had
looked up long enough to notice and describe in considerable detail a fair-haired woman, about 25, who had been walking down the street in front of the museum. Was this the mystery woman who had phoned
Dagbladet?
The police issued an urgent plea for help. Would the young woman in the red coat and red slacks, with a long braid, please come forward?

Silence.

While the police raced in frantic circles and National Gallery officials wrung their hands, the Norwegian public looked on with glee. A nation that placed a higher value on dignity and propriety might have reacted with outrage, but Norwegians treated the episode as slapstick. Even the figure skating farce at the Olympics—this was the year of Tonya and Nancy and the Great Kneecapping—was less entertaining.

Video footage of the thieves and their pratfalls on the ladder played endlessly on the news, like a scene from a silent comedy. The film looked all the sillier because the security cameras somehow made moving figures look as if they were racing at double speed and in herky-jerky lurches.

In living rooms and pubs across the nation, Norwegians stared delightedly at the tiny, black-and-white figures propping their ladder up against the wall. They watched the blurry figures slip and slide with their newly acquired treasure, and they guffawed with delight.

Score Round One for the bad guys.

4
The Priests

FEBRUARY 1994

A
t police headquarters, at the National Gallery, at Oslo’s newspapers and television and radio stations, phones rang day and night. Someone waiting for a bus had seen a man carrying a large plastic bag with a heavy wooden frame peeking out of the top. A man in a bar had overheard a suspicious conversation between two men sitting nearby. An ex-con had crucial information that he would happily share with the police in return for a small consideration.

Norway’s tabloids bayed for blood. What had the National Gallery been thinking? What were the police doing? Who was to blame for this fiasco? Journalists from around the world posed similar questions in a dozen languages.

The minister of culture and the leaders of the National Gallery disappeared to plot strategy, only to reemerge desperate and forlorn. What were their options? The state could not pay to get the painting back, even if someone knew whom to deal with, because Parliament would never agree to pay millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to thieves. And if somehow such a deal
could
be justified politically, it would set a terrible precedent that would mean open season on every art treasure in a national collection.

With public money ruled off-limits, the chance of a big money reward seemed lost. Reasoning that even a small reward might be more enticing than none at all, the National Gallery decided to reach into its own threadbare pocket. For information leading to
The Scream’s
recovery, the museum announced, it would offer a reward of KR 200,000, about $25,000. The painting, the newspapers repeated incessantly, was valued at over $70 million. Nobody bit.

The Norwegian police, in the meantime, had tapped their network of informants but had come up with nothing but false leads. If someone in Oslo’s underworld had stashed
The Scream
away, no one seemed to know it. This was bad news, and even worse than it appeared at first. The police desperately wanted a breakthrough, to silence their critics and show up the smirking thieves. But it was not simply a matter of self-respect.
The Scream
was delicate—the blue of the water in the middle distance, for instance, is chalk that could vanish with the touch of a careless sleeve—and every day of exposure was a risk. Thieves who would happily slide a masterpiece down a ladder might well cut it from its frame, for easier transport, or hide it in a moldy basement or an attic with a leaky roof.

Then, after five days of rumor and confusion but nary a lead, came the first possibility of a break. Two of Norway’s most controversial figures, priests who had been booted out of the state church for organizing anti-abortion protests, thrust their way into the middle of
The Scream
free-for-all.

Before the Olympics began, Ludvig Nessa and BØrre Knudsen had promised to pull off a “spectacular” protest to publicize their cause. The police knew the ex-priests well, from run-ins over the course of a decade. Typically Nessa and Knudsen would show up at a hospital and demand that the doctors stop performing abortions. If all went well, the hospital would call the police, and the priests in their black robes and white-ruffed collars would have a chance to make their case in front of the television cameras.

Arrests were all to the good, and so was anything else that drew the public eye to Action New Life. Protests and demonstrations drew the most attention, but mass mailings were useful, too. Nessa and Knudsen favored one drawing in particular. A crude cartoon, it showed a woman’s hand crushing a tiny, helpless figure. Even a glance revealed that the central figure, howling in anguish, was lifted straight from
The Scream
.

Within a day or two of the theft, a journalist phoned Ludvig Nessa with a “crazy idea.” Were the two blurry figures on the National Gallery tape in fact Ludvig Nessa and BØrre Knudsen? Nessa gulped and stammered. The reporter explained his reasoning and asked his question again. “No comment,” said Nessa.

On the morning of February 17, fax machines in every international media outlet in Norway and at every radio and television station in Oslo began spitting out the priests’ drawing. This time it carried a new message, in large black letters. “Which is worth more,” the headline shouted, “a painting or a child?”

Thrilled that the stalled hunt was on again, the media descended on Nessa and Knudsen. CNN carried the story, and so did the BBC and the
New York Times
. Neither priest answered direct questions about the theft. “We cannot be too open about this,” Knudsen told reporters. “We have sent a signal, and we want this signal to be understood, but we have to be a bit cryptic.”

Knudsen hinted at a deal. If Norway’s national television station agreed to show an anti-abortion film called
The Silent Scream
, then perhaps the National Gallery might find itself back in possession of its missing masterpiece.

The reporters pleaded for solid information. Did Knudsen know the whereabouts of
The Scream?
“No comment.”

Would he have been willing to steal the painting to promote his views?

“Yes, absolutely.”

The media loved the story, but the police scoffed at it. The priests were publicity hounds, said Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective in charge of the investigation, but they weren’t thieves. “We knew them very well, from protests over the years. It was a good newspaper story, but it was no story for the police at all.”

Far from Norway, a small group of men followed the case intently. They were Scotland Yard detectives, members of an elite group called the Art and Antiques Unit, better known simply as the Art Squad. The story broke over the weekend. Monday morning, February 14, 1994, first thing, the head of the Art Squad phoned his best undercover man.

“Charley, did you hear about
The Scream?”

“I watched it on the news last night.”

“Do you think we can help?”

Officially, another country’s stolen painting had nothing to do with Scotland Yard. The hunt for
The Scream
was certain to be tricky and expensive and likely to be dangerous. “Tell me again,” the police higher-ups were sure to demand, “why is this
our
problem?”

It wasn’t a bad question. The honest answer, in Detective Charley Hill’s words, was that the case had “sweet fuck-all to do with policing London. But it’s too good to miss.”