The Rescue Artist Part 2

Hill does not drone on, like some c.o.c.ktail party bore. On the contrary, the mark of his conversation is that he dips in and out as the mood strikes him. Few others see the connections he does. Someone's remark about present-day politics might move Hill to comment on George Was.h.i.+ngton's record in the French and Indian Wars. An allusion to the latest celebrity trial might spur a recitation of a bit of doggerel on Oscar Wilde's arrest ("Mr. Woilde, we've come for tew take yew /Where felons and criminals dwell /We must ask yew tew leave with us quietly /For this is the Cadogan Hotel").

Hill's aversions are as fervent as his obsessions. Order and precision are off-putting, history and art and geography enticing. Logic is a strait-jacket, and numbers are the friends of his sworn enemies, the bureaucrats. Hill is as unlikely to use a word like "percentage" or "average" as a minister would be to curse at the dinner table.

Even the numbers that his fellow detectives use to gauge the scale of art crime rouse his wrath. "It's all bulls.h.i.+t," he complains. "People talk about these incredible figures, but all the figures you see are completely made up. Police statistics do not distinguish between something of artistic quality and a sodding ornament somebody won shooting in a fairground."

Hill can shut down without warning. One moment he might be happily rattling on about his hero Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary who fought in Italy in the 1300s and managed to get his portrait painted (posthumously) by Uccello. Then, suddenly, he will switch off. If he is driving, he will interrupt himself in midstream, grab the wheel in a stranglehold, and carry on in a silence broken only by the whine of the engine and a few snarled remarks about the prats who are blocking his way. If he is with friends at dinner, he will withdraw from the conversation, yawn mightily-it might be only nine o'clock at night-announce that he is knackered, and head home to bed.

When he is in a good mood, Hill's natural bent is exuberantly over the top. Not content with remarking that one of his acquaintances has more admirers than another, for example, he delights in fas.h.i.+oning an elaborate comparison: "When Frank dies he'll have a burning longboat pushed out to sea with his body on it and salutes from the warriors standing along the headland, with weeping women and children alongside them. But poor George will be interred and his body will eventually yield one loud fart in his cold coffin that no one will hear."

In less boisterous moods, he favors a kind of wry understatement. Many of his fellow soldiers, Hill recalls, had taken "a career opportunity offered by the judiciary," by which he means that a judge had given them a choice of the army or prison.

His boyishness is unmistakable. Thunder is good, lightning is better, a jaunt to town is much improved if some reason can be found to run after a moving bus and jump aboard the platform. A dusting of an inch of snow is more than enough excuse to bundle up in coat and scarf and gloves and boots, as if for an a.s.sault on Antarctica, and then to set out across the wilds of Kew Gardens.

Even a make-believe adventure like a dash into the snow is better than no adventure at all, but Hill is no Walter Mitty. His work routinely involves dealing with "vindictive, cunning, violent thieves," and the danger is not a cost but a bonus. "I think the real reason Charley volunteered for Vietnam," remarks one friend who has known him since they were both teenagers, "is that he finally figured out that n.o.body gets killed playing football."

If Prince Valiant and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe shared custody of a single body, the amalgam might resemble Charley Hill.

Hill's father was a farmboy from the American Southwest, his mother a high-spirited Englishwoman who trained as a ballerina but then joined Bluebell Kelly's troupe of high-kicking dancers. (In an old Gene Kelly movie called Les Girls Les Girls, the Kay Kendall character was based on Hill's mother.) Hill's parents met during World War II, and few couples could have had less in common. Landon Hill grew up in hardscrabble Oklahoma and made it out to the wider world by way of Oklahoma A&M and the military; Zita Widdrington, daughter of the Reverend Canon Percy Elborough Tinling Widdrington, was raised near Cambridge, in the kind of setting that Americans picture when they dream of England. This part of East Anglia is thatched roofs and timber-framed houses and cheery pubs and a medieval church with a spire that soars 180 feet into the sky. The village names are out of Harry Potter: Harry Potter: Little Dunmow, Great Dunmow, Thaxted, Tilty. Little Dunmow, Great Dunmow, Thaxted, Tilty.

Zita grew up in a great, sprawling house that overflowed with visitors. (Her husband-to-be was one of them, a young Army Air Force officer whom she first saw playing chess with her father.) P. E. T. Widdrington was a rector in the Church of England and a Fabian socialist, "a showman and a show-off," in his daughter's words. G. K. Chesterton was a frequent visitor, George Bernard Shaw an occasional houseguest and the cause of much giggling among the children because of his scraggly beard and his preference for sleeping on the floor rather than in a bed.

It was a charmed and glittery life. One day at H. G. Wells's house, when she was six, Zita was told to prepare for a special treat.

"Zita, I'd like you to meet Charlie Chaplin."

A small, nondescript man drew near. Zita burst into fits of weeping. "He's not not Charlie Chaplin." The stranger retreated. And then, a few minutes later, this time wearing a bowler hat and twirling a cane, around the corner came the great man himself. Charlie Chaplin." The stranger retreated. And then, a few minutes later, this time wearing a bowler hat and twirling a cane, around the corner came the great man himself.

Even today, at eighty-seven, Zita retains the manner of a precocious child blurting out naughty and "forbidden" remarks, secure in the knowledge that she is too adorable to be rebuked. She is a formidable storyteller who basks in the spotlight. She tells of swimming in the Mediterranean sixty years ago with Didi Dumas, a handsome young Frenchman who was testing an underwater breathing device that he was working on with another young man, named Cousteau. She tells war stories-about her arrest (on trumped-up charges) for running guns to Greece, the jail cell she was thrown in, her escape on foot across France. She tells of a beau's death in the war in a plane crash (this was before Charley's father), "the great tragedy of my life."

Charley Hill was raised on such gripping and harrowing tales, though his own childhood was more prosaic. His father, Landon Hill, was an Air Force officer who later switched over to the National Security Agency. Zita spent her married life dragging her family from one dreary a.s.signment to another. "Dayton, Ohio," she sighs theatrically. "Oh, it was absolutely dreadful."

Charley, perpetually the new kid in town, attended perhaps a dozen schools in all, in Texas and London and Colorado and Frankfurt, Germany, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. (Decades later, he still recalls the name of the bully who beat him up when he showed up in San Antonio, age seven, fresh from England, chirping away in a funny accent and decked out in wool hat, long socks, and short pants.) Growing up became one long exercise in sizing up new acquaintances and learning how to fit in with the locals.

Charley is proud of his mismatched ancestry, "log cabin on one side and knight of the realm on the other." He prizes a collection of ancient family photos that show his American forebears standing proudly in front of a rude cabin in Oklahoma's Indian Territory. Better yet, in Hill's eyes, a great-great-grandmother on his father's side was a full-blooded Cherokee, so he can claim both both cowboy and Indian ancestors. The connection always sets Hill to computing just what fraction Indian he is himself, but he is deeply non-numeric and the answer never comes out the same way twice in a row. cowboy and Indian ancestors. The connection always sets Hill to computing just what fraction Indian he is himself, but he is deeply non-numeric and the answer never comes out the same way twice in a row.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton'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 "soph.o.m.oric idealism,"

Hill dropped out of college and went off to war. "Anyway, I was was a soph.o.m.ore," he notes happily. a soph.o.m.ore," 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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.

It 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 Was.h.i.+ngton University. Then he won a Fulbright scholars.h.i.+p 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 bra.s.s 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-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses 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." Three Faces of Eve."

Now it was Hill's job to dream up a way to return The Scream 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 bra.s.s were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn't the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top p.i.s.sed away money like water. 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 bra.s.s were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn't the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top p.i.s.sed 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 a.s.s and getting in the way. Of course Of course they'd want to leave they'd want to leave The Scream The Scream to someone else. 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 a.s.signment 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 d.i.c.k Ellis, "was convince the hierarchy at the Met [ropolitan Police] to pay for an undercover operation to recover somebody else's property" 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 The Scream back-the Art Squad will look golden, and back-the Art Squad will look golden, and you'll 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 b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous. Or not 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 b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous. Or not we-you we-you, in management, are going to look b.l.o.o.d.y 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 emba.s.sy in London with an intriguing story. From contacts he'd made in prison in Norway, Harwood said, he knew who'd taken The Scream 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 would deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee The Scream's The Scream's return to the National Gallery. In return, he wanted 5 million. 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 entree 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 j.a.panese buyers paid record-setting prices for brand-name artists-$54 million for van Gogh's Irises Irises, $78 million for Renoir's Ball at the Moulin de la Galette Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, $82.5 million for van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet- Portrait of Dr. Gachet-the Art Squad kicked around schemes for taking advantage of those headlines. Could they find a j.a.panese-speaking detective to play a gangster or a tyc.o.o.n who wanted a masterpiece to hang above his fireplace?

"You're a bit like a scriptwriter," says d.i.c.k 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 lost control to the police who are running the operation." 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.

8.

The Man from the Getty FEBRUARY 14, 1994.

Charley Hill's first thought was that the thieves who had The Scream The Scream knew that it would be impossible to sell it openly. Unless they had stolen the picture in order to destroy it, they had some other purpose in mind. What purpose? Ransom, most likely. knew that it would be impossible to sell it openly. Unless they had stolen the picture in order to destroy it, they had some other purpose in mind. What purpose? Ransom, most likely.

Could the Norwegian government pay for the return of a national treasure? No, that would just encourage the sc.u.mbags. What was a variation on that theme? Somebody else could pay on the government's behalf. "Blatant casuistry, of course," Hill thought, "but there you are."

Now, who in the h.e.l.l would do that?

The way to lure the thieves into the open, Hill figured, was to dangle money. Who could come up with millions to retrieve someone else's painting? In the art world, one name in particular means money. Even crooks know the Getty Museum, the sprawling southern California museum named for its founder, J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire. Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, had endowed the richest museum in the world.

Getty himself had been a sour, pinched, bad-tempered cuss, a d.i.c.kensian villain who looked a bit like Homer Simpson's boss, Mr. Burns. He lived outside London on an estate that was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by twenty attack dogs. A pathological cheapskate despite his riches, Getty kept a pay phone in his mansion for his guests and squirreled away bits of old string to reuse later. In 1973, Getty made news across the world when he refused to pay ransom to an Italian gang that had kidnapped his grandson and demanded $17 million for his release. Only after the gang cut off the boy's right ear and mailed it to a newspaper in Rome did Getty relent a bit. He negotiated his grandson's release for $2.7 million, which was, he said, as much money as he could put his hands on.

The Getty Museum, in contrast, spent money like a lottery winner on a binge. U.S. tax laws require that foundations spend five percent of their endowment each year, and for the Getty that meant a mandatory $250 million a year. Older, poorer museums cringed with envy as they watched their nouveau riche rival gobble up treasure after treasure. Today the Getty's see-it-and-buy-it frenzy has eased-the museum opened a new, six-building, dollar-devouring "campus" in 1997-but after years of conspicuous consumption, mention of the Getty produces a response that is almost Pavlovian in everyone who hears it.

It was the one inst.i.tution a villain would know about, Hill figured. No other museum conjured up images of money spilling out of pockets. Beyond that, the Getty could do what it wanted without fretting about the rules and red tape that slowed down tax-supported dinosaurs. Above all else the name had cachet. You couldn't tell the crooks, "Uncle Fred's going to pay your ransom." It wouldn't carry any weight. But a mention of "the Getty" would catch their attention.

The rest of Hill's story almost wrote itself: He would claim to be a representative of the Getty Museum, negotiating sotto voce on behalf of his colleagues at Oslo's National Gallery. The Getty would ransom The Scream The Scream and in return for their hush-hush rescue work, Norway would loan it the painting. and in return for their hush-hush rescue work, Norway would loan it the painting.

Hill would play a big, fast-talking American, a wheeler-dealer accustomed to getting what he wanted and not too fussy about how he got it. For an undercover cop with a hammy streak, it was the role of a lifetime. "It's perfect," Hill thought. "I'll be the Man from the Getty."

Hill phoned John Butler, his Art Squad colleague, and spelled out his plan.

"Nice idea," said Butler. "Let's try it."

Butler phoned back a few minutes later. "I've spoken to the Norwegians. They like it. What do you picture as our next step?" "First," said Hill, "I guess we'd better talk to the Getty."

This would take some delicacy, since it was a bit late to ask the Getty for permission to invoke its name. And though the Getty wasn't actually putting any money at risk, it was unlikely to welcome even the suggestion that it was a kind of ATM to the art world. Hill insisted that there was no problem. Most people were glad to do Scotland Yard a favor, and everyone in the art world wanted to help the Norwegians out of a jam. The people at the Getty might huff and puff, but they'd get over it.

By good fortune, the Art Squad's d.i.c.k Ellis had worked on several cases with the Getty over the previous half-dozen years. By happenstance, too, Hill had visited the Getty on his honeymoon twenty years before. He didn't know any more about the museum than any other tourist might, but he figured he had seen enough to avoid any egregious faux pas. That was astonis.h.i.+ngly nervy, or foolish, and completely typical of Hill. Since his long-ago visit to California, the Getty had begun building a lavish new museum that was located a dozen miles from the one Hill had seen and bore no resemblance to it. Hill waved all that aside.

Ellis had a good relations.h.i.+p with the Getty's director and with its head of security. When the time came for the Art Squad to make its pitch, Ellis would be the man to fly to Los Angeles and make nice with the California museum.

Ellis, Charley Hill, and the head of the Art Squad, John Butler, met to fine-tune their strategy. It was early evening; the three men were at Scotland Yard. Butler called Ellis into his office. He had just opened a bottle of Bushmill's Irish whiskey, which happened to be Ellis's favorite. Hill was already there. The three detectives sat down and went over the whole scenario.

All three were large, forceful, outspoken men, with big egos and little inclination to defer to one another. They knew each other well, as friends, colleagues, and occasional rivals. When they told war stories about old cases, the talk tended to veer off-course into long disputes over who had originally thought of what, amid much eye-rolling and muttering and indignant cries of "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!"

On this night, though, the three policemen were in high good humor, delighted with what they were about to put in motion. The Getty! Christ, why hadn't anyone thought of it before? This was going to be good.

Soon after, Ellis flew to California to make his pitch. He is an impressive figure, an inch or two under six feet but as solid and st.u.r.dy as a battering ram. Even his fingers are thick and strong; he pounds two-fingered on his laptop keyboard as if he were thrusting his fingers into the chest of an adversary in an angry argument.

In contrast with Hill, who had been odd man out in every group he'd ever joined, Ellis was the very image of a cop. He had joined the police at age nineteen and never risen to great rank, despite considerable talent, in good measure because he preferred a life of action to one behind a desk. His fellow cops, who had the foot soldiers' suspicion of their commanding officers, trusted Ellis as one of their own.

A veteran of countless briefings, Ellis is clear and well-organized. He speaks in numbered points, as if reading from an outline, and he likes to sort out logistical tangles. Ellis explained The Scream The Scream plan. The Getty gulped hard but heard him out. plan. The Getty gulped hard but heard him out.

In Hill's view, it was all a fine joke. "They were a bit tight-a.r.s.ed at first," Ellis reported. "They made clear that they wouldn't do this for just anybody. They didn't want the Des Moines, Iowa, sheriff's department ringing them up to say, 'Can you give us a hand here?' But in the end they cooperated brilliantly."

Ellis had brought a photo of Charley Hill to California with him, along with Charley's birth date and other background information. If the Getty was going to lend its cover to this operation, Hill would need a new ident.i.ty.

In short order, Charley Hill had vanished, and one Christopher Charles Roberts had arisen to take his place.* Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts's name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flas.h.i.+ng at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty's internal records-notably the payroll files for the past several years-had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts's bona fides. Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts's name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flas.h.i.+ng at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty's internal records-notably the payroll files for the past several years-had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts's bona fides.

The risk wasn't so much that a suspicious crook might phone the Getty and learn anything useful. Even in ordinary circ.u.mstances, most inst.i.tutions clam up when strangers ask questions about their employees. "But criminals will always check out the people they're dealing with," says Ellis, "and you have to be prepared for them to pay somebody within the inst.i.tution to get them the information they want."

That possibility raised another danger. What if someone on the crooks' payroll began looking for Getty employees who knew Roberts? How to explain that no one did? To ward off such trouble down the road, the Getty concocted in-house records that listed Roberts as a roving scout permanently a.s.signed to Europe, and working directly (and exclusively) for the director.

Unless you were in the very top tier of management at the Getty, Hill saw delightedly, you couldn't counter the argument that he was anything other than a proper employee. It was that good. Hill gave his new credentials an enthusiastic thumbs-up. "Everything looks perfectly pukka ... kosher."

The translation of English slang into American was almost instantaneous, unusual only in that Hill spoke both idioms aloud. Usually Hill s.h.i.+fted on the fly, seamlessly denouncing some hapless twit as an "a.s.shole" or an "a.r.s.ehole" depending on whether his listeners were Americans or Brits. (Bilingual cursing was especially demanding, since so often it came in the heat of the moment. Hill's time in the Army, when he had worked on sounding "like a redneck from Fayetteville, North Carolina," had given him good practice.) Hill is bilingual only in American English and British English, but within those narrow confines he is masterful. (On rare occasions he will venture as far afield as Canada. For an undercover job in the Czech Republic, Hill spent hours practicing broad vowel sounds so that he would sound authentically Canadian. Almost certainly this detail would be lost on the mobsters he was dealing with, but it reflected craftsmans.h.i.+p and professional pride, akin to a carpenter's taking pains to align all the slots in his screwheads in parallel.) Hill chose the name "Christopher Charles Roberts" as a mnemonic-the r r sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r's whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune someone he knew happened to call out to him on the street. sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r's whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune someone he knew happened to call out to him on the street.

"Hi there," he'd say aloud to himself, like a singer practicing scales, "I'm Chris Roberts." There were key sounds and phrases and mannerisms that you had to get right. Do it wrong or overdo it, like d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e playing an Englishman, and you'd be caught the minute you opened your mouth.

The role of Chris Roberts, Getty sleazebag, would soon put Hill's skills to the test. The grading, it is worth bearing in mind, would be done by professional criminals.

9.

The General Hill was the natural choice to star in the Scream Scream story because he had just scored a giant triumph. In 1986, seven years before the theft of story because he had just scored a giant triumph. In 1986, seven years before the theft of The Scream The Scream, a brutal Irish gangster named Martin Cahill had pulled off what was then the biggest art theft in history. Among the eighteen world-cla.s.s paintings that Cahill grabbed from a mansion outside Dublin, Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid was the gem of gems. Its value on the open market can only be guessed at; $50 million would not be a surprise, and $100 million would not be out of the question. In 1993, Hill went undercover and brought it back, undamaged. The coup catapulted him to the top of his field and made him a star. was the gem of gems. Its value on the open market can only be guessed at; $50 million would not be a surprise, and $100 million would not be out of the question. In 1993, Hill went undercover and brought it back, undamaged. The coup catapulted him to the top of his field and made him a star.

Six months later, The Scream The Scream vanished. For the Art Squad, the timing was ideal. If it could rack up a second huge success in a case sure to be splashed across the world's front pages, the Art Squad would be safe (at least for a while) from the in-house attacks that always came its way. For Charley Hill, too, the timing was fortunate, and not only because he was at the top of his game. Hill had decided that his undercover work in the Cahill case could serve as a model he could apply to going after vanished. For the Art Squad, the timing was ideal. If it could rack up a second huge success in a case sure to be splashed across the world's front pages, the Art Squad would be safe (at least for a while) from the in-house attacks that always came its way. For Charley Hill, too, the timing was fortunate, and not only because he was at the top of his game. Hill had decided that his undercover work in the Cahill case could serve as a model he could apply to going after The Scream The Scream.

Short, bald, chubby, unkempt, Martin Cahill looked like a down-market bartender or the night clerk at a fleabag hotel. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was, in fact, the top man in Dublin's underworld.