The Rescue Artist (6 page)

Landon Hill’s story was markedly less cheery. He emerged from World War II physically unharmed but psychically scarred. He had been one of the first American soldiers at Dachau, for instance, and the scenes he witnessed there—Landon supervised the unloading of railroad cars crammed with dead bodies—haunted him for the rest of his life. “One of those really bright people who couldn’t cope with life,” in Charley’s view, the war hero became an alcoholic. On a December day in 1966, drunk, he stepped out of a taxicab in Washington’s Dupont Circle and slammed the door on his coat. The taxi sped off and dragged him to his death.

Half a year later, Charley Hill volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He likes to boast that he comes from a long line of soldiers, and it doesn’t take much coaxing to start him reciting the roll. The list begins with his father, and, if he includes ancestors on both sides of his family, stretches back through the War of 1812 and the French and Indian Wars. Earlier than that, the trail is murky, but the first of Hill’s soldier forebears fought in a border skirmish in Scotland around 1400 and even made a cameo in “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” Charley quotes the lines with glee: “and good Squire Widdrington, though in woeful dumps, for when his legs were smitten off, he fought upon his stumps.”

Hill is forever screeching his car to a halt to read aloud a plaque to fallen heroes or to enjoy a melancholy stroll through a military cemetery. He opposed the Vietnam War, but he craved the adventure and the danger. And since the fighting was going on in any case, it seemed unfair to leave it all to the poor and the poorly connected. In a burst of “sophomoric idealism,”

Hill dropped out of college and went off to war. “Anyway, I
was
a sophomore,” he notes happily.

Hill found himself the lone college boy in a platoon of poor blacks and rural whites. Twelve of the fifteen men in his squad were killed or wounded. Hill survived his tour in the jungle unhurt, and he learned what it was like to come under fire and hunt an enemy who melted away into the night.

He learned, as well, something about himself that he very much wanted to know. The journalist Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, once remarked that many men “go to great lengths in life to not find out the answer to the question, How brave am I? War presents you with specific opportunities to find out the answer to that question…. The question is asked for you and answered for you, in front of you and in front of other people. It’s interesting, because you see it in all the people around you and you see it in yourself. And that’s knowledge you have for the rest of your life.”

Kelly may have been right that most men do not want to know how brave they are, but Hill craved that knowledge. Curiously, though, he passed his self-imposed test but found he drew little comfort from that success. Physical bravery turned out to be just a fact, like being six feet tall or having brown hair. Moral courage—the strength to obey one’s conscience in the face of opposition—was rarer and more admirable. Kelly, it turned out, had asked the wrong question.

Vietnam abounded in moral choices. After one raid on an enemy camp, Hill and two fellow soldiers found the camp abandoned but for a wounded old man, a Montagnard who had presumably led North Vietnamese soldiers through the mountain passes. Hill’s two companions wanted to shoot the man, but Hill stepped in, sparing the prisoner’s life. Eventually a captain turned up and ordered the wounded man evacuated by helicopter. The next time there was a firefight, one of the thwarted soldiers warned Hill, he’d get even with him.

When his tour of duty ended, Hill left November Platoon and returned home to Washington, D.C. At loose ends, and sobered and dismayed by what he had seen, he was without a plan for what he would do next. It would not be too much to say that art saved him.

“They were showing that wonderful series put together by Kenneth Clark,
Civilization
, at the National Gallery on Sunday mornings,” Hill recalls. “I was working nights as a security guard, but I woke up early, stood in a goddamned line, watched on the big screen, and sat there mesmerized. I loved it. It just opened my eyes. I’d already seen a lot of things—my mother had dragged my sisters and me to Florence and the National Gallery in D.C. and the National Gallery in London, and I’d taken Art 101—but I’d never had a coherent idea about art.

“I’d just come from a year in the jungle and this was my reintroduction to civilized life.”

PART II
Vermeer and the Irish Gangster

7
Screenwriters

I
t would be years before Hill thought of somehow turning his love of art into a career. In the meantime, he tried on and quickly rejected an entire wardrobe of possible lives. After Vietnam, he moved on from his security guard job and studied history at George Washington University. Then he won a Fulbright scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin, taught high school in Belfast, studied theology in London, and eventually landed a job on the metropolitan police force in London. The police work led eventually to undercover work in general and to art cases in particular.

Hill made a most unconventional cop. The British bobby in the 1970s still looked like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan, in his tall helmet and with an inch-long brass whistle clipped to his chest. One grizzled old cop from Norfolk—in gruffness and taciturnity the rough equivalent of a Vermont farmer—never quite got over his first encounters with his new colleague. “Picture a portly fellow with big, tortoise-shell glasses and curly hair patrolling his beat”—here he squared his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and took a few swift strides—”and all the time talking in that American/Canadian/English accent about medieval history and wearing a coal scuttle on his head. That was Charley Hill.”

Hill’s friends—he has a large and loyal circle, on both sides of the Atlantic—saw the same quirks, but saw them in a far darker light. The question they debated endlessly with one another was whether Charley would ever find a way to turn his contradictions to his advantage, or if the strain would eventually tear him apart. “We never stopped worrying about if he could hold it together,” said a friend who had stayed close to Hill since they were both sixteen. “He wanted to be a priest, and at the same time he was prepared to beat people up and shoot them and kill them. That’s not about conflicting goals, that’s about the
Three Faces of Eve.”

Now it was Hill’s job to dream up a way to return
The Scream
to its rightful owners. But before any scheme could be put into play, the Art Squad detectives would have to convince their superiors at Scotland Yard that the case was worth the effort. For Hill that was self-evident, a challenge scarcely worth dignifying with a response. What mission could be cleaner than recovering the loftiest creations of mankind from ignorant, violent louts? The brass were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn’t the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top pissed away money like water.

That wasn’t a view that won Hill many friends in high places, which only served to strengthen his conviction that he was in the right. Hill took a willful, sometimes adolescent, pride in offending anyone in a position to derail his career.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a compulsion that moves us to act precisely against what we recognize to be our own self-interest. We roll our eyes when the boss presents his pet idea; we snicker when we should praise; we blurt out the truth when a white lie would be just as easy and infinitely preferable. “With certain minds, under certain conditions,” wrote Poe, “it becomes absolutely irresistible.” The imp of the perverse has a permanent perch atop Charley Hill’s shoulder.

Bureaucrats, above all others, moved him to indignation. “Whingeing, plodding, paint-by-numbers dullards,” their only pleasures were kissing ass and getting in the way.
Of course
they’d want to leave
The Scream
to someone else.

It fell to John Butler, head of the Art Squad, to sell the mission to his bosses. He could argue sincerely that art crime was international and therefore called for an international response, but this was a tricky assignment even so. The international argument would have been easier to sell if somewhere along the line one of the nations involved was Britain. “What Butler had to do,” says Art Squad detective Dick Ellis, “was convince the hierarchy at the Met [ropolitan Police] to pay for an undercover operation to recover
somebody else’s property”
—here Ellis’s voice rises in admiration and incredulity, as if he were a sports commentator describing a skater’s triple axel—”even though it hadn’t come from London, and wasn’t in London, and wasn’t likely to come to London.”

Over the years, the men (and, rarely, women) in charge of the Art Squad had learned not to burden their superiors with too much information. “We liked to give them something of a fait accompli,” says Ellis, who ran the squad for most of the decade between 1989 and 1999. “Usually we’d already decided to go ahead and we’d had the first couple of meetings before we told anyone what we were up to. That was by and large how we got things off the ground. Then, once you’re flying, their only choice is to force a crash.”

Ellis spelled out the sales pitch he favored. The first approach to the higher-ups was easy. “If this works—if we can get
The Scream
back—the Art Squad will look golden, and
you’ll
look golden.” Smiles all around. Then came the twist. “We’ve already committed to this. If we pull out now we’re going to look bloody ridiculous. Or not
we—you
, in management, are going to look bloody ridiculous.” Too late now.

And then, unexpectedly, an English criminal came along and made everyone’s life easier. His name was Billy Harwood, and he had served seven years in prison in Norway for trafficking in heroin. The Norwegians had sent Harwood back to England to serve the remaining five years of his prison term, and the English had released him on parole.

Now Harwood contacted the Norwegian embassy in London with an intriguing story. From contacts he’d made in prison in Norway, Harwood said, he knew who’d taken
The Scream
. He knew the thieves and they trusted him. These were hard and wary men. No outsider could lure them into the open; at the first hint that something was up, they would protect themselves by destroying the painting.

But the crooks
would
deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee
The Scream’s
return to the National Gallery. In return, he wanted £5 million.

The Norwegians quickly contacted Scotland Yard to tell them about Harwood’s proposal. The English police didn’t put any stock in Harwood’s story—they figured him (correctly, it turned out) for an opportunist looking to spin some fast talk and big promises into a bonanza—but this was good news nonetheless. With Harwood inadvertently serving as a bridge between the English police and the Norwegians, Scotland Yard finally had a legitimate entrée into the case.

For Hill and all the other Art Squad detectives, planning stings was one of the best parts of the job. Recovering stolen art was different in crucial ways from most other police work. Finding a painting and hanging it back on the wall where it belonged was the main goal; throwing a crook in jail was secondary. (By the time the police found the trail, in any case, the original thieves might well be long gone.) The hope was to find a way to tempt a criminal who had stashed a painting in an abandoned warehouse or a locker at a train station to bring it into the open, where the police could grab it. That required, first of all, cultivating informants to pick up news and rumors. Many times a direct approach was futile: Kicking down a door and shouting “Police!” was all very well, but where was the painting?

For the Art Squad, making up stories was as much a part of the job as making arrests. In the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, when mysterious Japanese buyers paid record-setting prices for brand-name artists—$54 million for van Gogh’s
Irises
, $78 million for Renoir’s
Ball at the Moulin de la Galette
, $82.5 million for van Gogh’s
Portrait of Dr. Gachet—
the Art Squad kicked around schemes for taking advantage of those headlines. Could they find a Japanese-speaking detective to play a gangster or a tycoon who wanted a masterpiece to hang above his fireplace?

“You’re a bit like a scriptwriter,” says Dick Ellis. “It’s a challenge to come up with something that has a genuine feel to it. You bounce it around and ask, ‘Is this actually going to stand up? Are people going to believe this? Is it too outlandish?’ “

A good plan for a sting needs to combine several elements that don’t fit together easily. The best cover stories are simple because they have to work first time out. There is no dress rehearsal—just opening night. Since things inevitably go wrong, the trick is to find undercover cops who can ad lib. (Compounding all the hazards that come with too little practice time is a difficulty that real scriptwriters never face: the detectives only write the dialogue for half the performers.)

At the same time, the plot line has to be complex enough to be plausible. Crooks are jumpy, always on the watch for set-ups and double-crosses. If a come-on is too blatant, they’ll walk away. Game over.

“First of all,” says Ellis, “you sit down and look at the theft, and you try to figure the type of criminals you’re dealing with. You need to put yourself in their shoes and come up with a scenario that they’ll feel comfortable with. That means they have to feel in control of the situation, when in fact what you’ve done is feed them into a scenario where they’ve actually
lost
control to the police who are running the operation.”

This makes for a high-stakes game of “he thinks that I think that he thinks….” Lose your bearings, and you lose everything.