The Rescue Artist Part 3

Decades ago, many art thefts were stylish, the province of smooth-talking villains with dubious morals and elegant manners. In recent years, the advent of big money has transformed a gentleman's sport into a serious, and dangerous, business. Raffles, the "gentleman thief" of Victorian England, has been shoved aside by thugs and criminal gangs whose expertise is in drug peddling and money laundering. Cahill, an armed robber, a kidnapper, and a car bomber, was typical of the new breed. Thomas Crown would have run away screaming.

Before Cahill, crime in Dublin had been largely a helter-skelter affair. Martin Cahill, who had more organizational skills and fewer scruples than any of his predecessors, changed the rules. "The General," as he was known, inst.i.tuted weekly meetings to plan future robberies. He kept a sharp eye on the money that came in and how it was paid out. He took on giant jobs that had been deemed impossible; he headed, for instance, a 10-man team that pulled off what was then the biggest robbery in Irish history, a 2 million theft of gold and jewels from a closely guarded and fortress-like factory. In Dublin under Cahill, the term "organized crime" took on real meaning.

Just as important in consolidating his hold on power, Cahill took over terror tactics from the IRA and turned them on the police. This had nothing to do with politics-Cahill had no political views except that anyone in his way was a blood enemy-but it brought violence into territory that had always been off-limits. When prosecutors found evidence that placed Cahill at the scene of an armed robbery, for example, Cahill planted a homemade bomb under the car of James Donovan, the state's chief forensic expert, who was slated to testify in court. For weeks before the attack, Donovan had been under siege. His phone rang at all hours with criminals mouthing threats or simply waiting, silently, on the line. As Donovan drove home from his forensics lab one night, with a policeman sitting in the car next to him for protection, he saw he was being followed. Donovan considered driving to police headquarters but decided that, no matter where he went, Cahill's men would simply shoot him and flee to safety. "So I decided to drive home because I'd like to die at home, and it would be easier for my wife to have to identify the body in our own house."

Donovan pulled into his driveway. Cahill's man drove up behind him and waited. And eventually drove off. But three weeks later, at 8:30 on a January morning, Donovan pulled onto the highway on his way to work and the heat of his car's engine detonated a crude bomb. "I suddenly saw a mushroom cloud in front of my eyes, and at the center a great big tongue of flame," Donovan recalled. "I saw the smoke first, then the fire, and then I went blind. My eyes had been scored by the pieces of metal and then I heard a ma.s.sive explosion. I tried to move my right hand and I couldn't. It was paralyzed. I put my left hand down and just past my knee found bits of squelchy material-tissue."

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, Donovan lived. He returned to work after enduring a series of operations, maimed and partly blinded. Cahill was never charged in the attack.

Cahill had started out as just another thug. He had been convicted for the first time at age twelve, of larceny. A few years later, in the hope that it would straighten out his wayward boy, Cahill's father sent the young man to a Royal Navy recruiter. Cahill and the other applicants were asked to scan a brochure that listed various posts they might train for. Cahill's eyes lit on "bugler," an unfamiliar word. He hadn't known the Navy needed burglars, Cahill told his interviewer, but he had plenty of experience.

In years to come, the stories that swirled around Cahill's name would be decidedly darker. Cahill was hugely feared, a Dublin legend discussed mostly in nervous whispers. "People remember pain," he once said. "A bullet through the head is too easy. You think of the pain before you do wrong again."

Cahill delighted in handing out punishments that fed the rumors. He once crucified a member of his own gang he suspected of treachery: while henchmen held his victim down, Cahill nailed the man's hands to the floor. When he was not terrorizing friends and rivals, Cahill lived a life of twisted domesticity, in a happy menage a trois with his wife and her sister. The household spilled over with nine young children, all fathered by Cahill, five with his wife and four with his sister-in-law.

In Cahill's professional life, contempt for authority played as large a role as l.u.s.t for money. His aim was never merely to outdo his enemies but to humiliate them, to proclaim his "f.u.c.k you" disdain to the world. In 1987, for example, thieves broke into the public prosecutor's office in Dublin and stole hundreds of the state's files on pending criminal cases. No one doubted whose handiwork it was.

Cahill savored even the pettiest triumphs over the powers that be. Through his years atop the criminal underworld, he took time each week to queue up for his weekly unemployment check, so he could thumb his nose at the state that denounced him as a public enemy but had no choice but to keep him on its payroll. The 92 checks were beside the point-Cahill owned two homes, five cars, and six motorcycles-but he thrived on the game-playing.

All the gangster's pranks proclaimed the same message: "I'm smarter than you are, and you can't touch me." He formed a group called Concerned Criminals, which advocated the right to "earn a dishonest living." A favorite Cahill ploy, on nights when his gang was engaged in a theft or a kidnapping, was to barge into a busy police station and make a scene, so that the police themselves would become his alibi.

On one occasion, when tax authorities sent an inspector to go over Cahill's accounts, the gangster played the genial host. At one point he excused himself to make a phone call, then returned to his guest and made a few remarks about vandalism and other dispiriting aspects of the modern world. Cahill gestured out the window to the street. "Now, d'ya see what I mean, just look out that window and look what those b.l.o.o.d.y vandals have done now." The tax inspector's car was in flames, burning like a bonfire.

Cahill's a.s.sault on Russborough House, a palatial mansion outside Dublin that housed one of the world's greatest private art collections, was his first venture into art crime. The robbery was doubly tempting, for it allowed Cahill to indulge both his greed and his hatred of the upper crust. The house, with a facade stretching 700 feet, was, by some accounts, the handsomest in Ireland. Built in the eighteenth century for a prosperous Dublin brewer (later the first Earl of Milltown), Russborough House had since 1952 belonged to an English couple, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit.

Sir Alfred had inherited a fortune-and a dazzling art collection-from an uncle who was one of the founders of the De Beers diamond company in South Africa. Lady Beit-Clementine Freeman-Mitford-occupied a high rank in the English pecking order and was a first cousin of the Mitford sisters, glamorous, aristocratic siblings (six altogether) notorious for their personal and political misadventures. The Beits had lived in South Africa for several years but had decided, in the early 1950s, to return to Britain. While flipping through the pages of Country Life Country Life magazine, Sir Alfred saw a photograph of Russborough House. He purchased the 100-room house without ever having seen it in person. magazine, Sir Alfred saw a photograph of Russborough House. He purchased the 100-room house without ever having seen it in person.

In 1986 Sir Alfred announced a plan to donate 17 of the masterpieces of his collection to the National Gallery of Ireland. Cahill p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. The opportunity to make a fortune for himself and and to deprive the state of a gift it coveted set him to planning in earnest. Sir Alfred's gift included Vermeer's to deprive the state of a gift it coveted set him to planning in earnest. Sir Alfred's gift included Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, a stunning painting that was by far the best, and the best-known, in the Beit collection. "Everything of Vermeer is in the Beit Letter," Letter," one enraptured scholar had written. one enraptured scholar had written.

Lady Writing a Letter was one of only two Vermeers in private hands; the other belonged to Queen Elizabeth. The painting was valued at 20 million. (After Vermeer's death, his widow had given it and a second of her husband's works, was one of only two Vermeers in private hands; the other belonged to Queen Elizabeth. The painting was valued at 20 million. (After Vermeer's death, his widow had given it and a second of her husband's works, Lady Playing a Guitar Lady Playing a Guitar, to a baker in Delft to settle a debt. The Vermeers owed the baker 617 florins, just under $80 in today's currency.) Vermeer, like Shakespeare, is a genius whose biography is almost completely unknown to us. (Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring Girl with a Pearl Earring is a triumph of imagination that succeeds because of Chevalier's artistry in building up a plausible world from a handful of scattered facts.) The little information we do have only deepens the mystery. The artist who created paintings that embody quiet and calm lived and worked in a house with 11 children (four others died in infancy). The house belonged to his mother-in-law, who lived there, too, and at first had opposed her daughter's marriage. Amid the noise and bustle, Vermeer devised masterpieces that the historian E. H. Gombrich aptly described as "still lifes with human beings." is a triumph of imagination that succeeds because of Chevalier's artistry in building up a plausible world from a handful of scattered facts.) The little information we do have only deepens the mystery. The artist who created paintings that embody quiet and calm lived and worked in a house with 11 children (four others died in infancy). The house belonged to his mother-in-law, who lived there, too, and at first had opposed her daughter's marriage. Amid the noise and bustle, Vermeer devised masterpieces that the historian E. H. Gombrich aptly described as "still lifes with human beings."

Vermeer's professional life seemed no more likely than his domestic arrangements to promote serenity. At his peak Vermeer was one of Delft's more successful artists, but painting never provided nearly enough to live on. Though many of his peers painted perhaps fifty works in the course of a year, Vermeer turned out only two or three. His work brought in about 200 guilders a year, about as much as a sailor's pay. Throughout his life, he worked a second job, as an art dealer, and selling other people's work proved far more profitable than selling his own.

Late in life, Vermeer sank into debt. For the last three years of his life, he sold no paintings at all. He fell into "decay and decadence," his wife later recalled, in a statement that was a mandatory part of the process of declaring bankruptcy, and then "in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead." He was forty-three.

The rest of the story is sc.r.a.ps and gaps. Vermeer's grandfather, one scholar has learned, was a watchmaker who strayed into coin-forging. He managed to leave town a step ahead of the police, but two of his accomplices were convicted and beheaded. Of Vermeer's career, almost nothing is known beyond what the paintings themselves reveal. He seems to have painted mainly for individual patrons rather than for the market at large: a printer named Jacob Dissius owned nineteen Vermeers. (They were auctioned off, for an average price of about $500 in today's money, after the printer's death.) Vermeer left no diaries or letters. His personality, his motivation, his judgment of his own achievement-mysteries all. Perhaps we know what he looked like as a young man: some scholars believe that a figure in an early work called The Procuress The Procuress is a self-portrait. Vermeer served a six-year apprentices.h.i.+p to an older artist-this was a requirement for members.h.i.+p in Delft's art guild, which he joined in 1653, at age twenty-one-so we know that someone taught him. No one knows who. Vermeer himself took no pupils. No one knows who posed for him, though some historians speculate that his wife may have modeled for is a self-portrait. Vermeer served a six-year apprentices.h.i.+p to an older artist-this was a requirement for members.h.i.+p in Delft's art guild, which he joined in 1653, at age twenty-one-so we know that someone taught him. No one knows who. Vermeer himself took no pupils. No one knows who posed for him, though some historians speculate that his wife may have modeled for Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window or several other works, or that one or another of his grown daughters may have modeled for or several other works, or that one or another of his grown daughters may have modeled for Girl with a Pearl Earring Girl with a Pearl Earring or or Girl with a Red Hat Girl with a Red Hat, among others.

"The greatest mystery of all," in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, "is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter."

Vermeer's obscurity lasted from his death, in 1675, until 1866, when a French critic named Theophile Th.o.r.e wrote three articles hailing the work of the painter he dubbed "the Sphinx of Delft." (Th.o.r.e went on to purchase, for prices in the range of a few thousand dollars in today's terms, Woman with a Pearl Necklace Woman with a Pearl Necklace, now in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin; The Concert The Concert, stolen from the Gardner in 1990; and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal Young Woman Seated at a Virginal and and Young Woman Standing at a Virginal Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, today both at the National Gallery in London.) Fascinated by Vermeer's use of light, the impressionists took up the cause, celebrating Vermeer as an ally two centuries ahead of his time. But not even the most fervent of those early admirers could have imagined that Vermeer would someday draw crowds who would wait in line for hours to see blockbuster shows devoted to his work.

By 1813 Vermeer had fallen so far out of favor that the exquisite Lace-maker Lace-maker, now in the Louvre, sold for 7, roughly $400 in today's terms. In 1816 his Head of a Girl Head of a Girl, which depicts a different girl with a pearl earring, brought a mere three florins, about fifteen dollars in present-day terms. Today the painting hangs in the Met. A poster would cost more than the painting itself once fetched.

In the years of Vermeer's obscurity, no one quite knew which of several almost identically named Dutch painters was which. Was Johannes Vermeer, who painted women reading letters and suchlike, the same man as the portrait painter Johannes van der Meer? Which of the two Jan van der Meers was which, and was either of them Vermeer? Few knew and fewer cared.

That confusion both contributed to Vermeer's obscurity and reflected it. A bigger factor working against Vermeer was his tiny output. No one knows why Vermeer painted so little. The technical perfection of his canvases-his achievement in capturing the varied textures of cloth and bread and tile and skin, for instance-reduces even the coolest critics to invoking "miracles" and "mysteries" that lie beyond technique. In the face of such seemingly effortless mastery, it seems natural to a.s.sume that each canvas took countless hours. But scholars who have studied Vermeer's brushstrokes, sometimes with the aid of X rays, believe that he did not work especially slowly; he often applied fresh paint on top of paint that had not yet dried. The biographer Anthony Bailey suggests that for long periods Vermeer did not paint at all. (He notes, too, that Vermeer was a painter obsessed with the play of sunlight, and gray and rainy Holland may often have left him waiting in frustration.) In the days before museums and ma.s.s reproductions, a painter who produced only a handful of works, and therefore almost never turned up at auction or in any other public venue, might disappear from view. The only consolation was that, if fas.h.i.+on ever s.h.i.+fted, the rarity that had once undermined an artist would suddenly work in his favor. The fewer the paintings, the more valuable was each one.

So it has proved with Vermeer. Martin Cahill didn't know much about art. He knew that much.

Scouting Russborough House was no challenge, for the grand house had been open to the public since 1976. Nonetheless, Sir Alfred's astonis.h.i.+ng collection was grievously underinsured. The coverage totaled $2.4 million, less than a fraction of the worth of the Vermeer alone, to say nothing of the works by Goya, Rubens, Velazquez, Gainsborough, and Hals, among others. "They do not represent money to me," Sir Alfred explained, "and no amount of money could compensate me for the loss of such beautiful objects."

For 1, visitors could buy a ticket and examine Vermeer's Lady Lady and Goya's and Goya's Portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate Portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate and the collection's other prizes at their leisure. The ticket came with a brochure that served as a guide and instruction booklet for the curious visitor. For eight weeks in the spring of 1986, Martin Cahill spent his Sunday afternoons at Russborough House mingling with the tourists and studying the masterpieces. and the collection's other prizes at their leisure. The ticket came with a brochure that served as a guide and instruction booklet for the curious visitor. For eight weeks in the spring of 1986, Martin Cahill spent his Sunday afternoons at Russborough House mingling with the tourists and studying the masterpieces.

On the night of May 21, 1986, Cahill and a gang of a dozen accomplices pounced. Sir Alfred and Lady Beit were away in London. Cahill had devised an elegantly simple plan. Just after midnight, he and two accomplices would sneak across the enormous grounds and approach Russborough House from the back. They would jimmy a window. Cahill would deliberately step in front of a motion sensor, tripping an alarm connected to the police station in the nearest village. Once the alarm had summoned the police, one of the thieves would disable it so that it could not sound again. Then, before the police could arrive, the thieves would retreat, empty-handed, to a hiding spot nearby.

On the night of May 21, Cahill set the plan in motion. Moments after the break-in, Cahill and his companions left the house and hid. The police raced the nineteen miles to the isolated country house. Together, the police and Sir Alfred's overseer surveyed the premises. Cahill and his men looked on from the darkness. The paintings were all in place. The furniture was untouched, and so were the clocks and the vases and the silver. No sign of a break-in. Evidently the alarm had malfunctioned.

The police drove off. Cahill waited a bit, and at about two o'clock in the morning, he signaled the rest of his crew. Up they drove, across the fields, to the dark and unprotected house. With Cahill clutching his 1 brochure as a guide, the gang raced from room to room grabbing paintings off the walls. Six minutes later, they roared off.

Martin Cahill, a brute who had once nailed an underling's hands to the floor, now had possession of eighteen of the world's cultural treasures. The Vermeer was chief among them. Vermeer's letter-writing lady, bathed in sunlight and utterly absorbed in her note, and her dutiful, timid-seeming maid, were both, of course, mere dabs of paint on canvas. Even so, it was hard to think of them in a gangster's hands without flinching.

On the day after the break-in, a group of schoolboys went fis.h.i.+ng four miles from Russborough House. They saw something odd in a ditch, scrambled over for a close look, and found seven paintings flung in a heap. The seven, which included two Guardis, a van Ruysdael landscape, and a Joshua Reynolds portrait, were the least valuable of those Cahill had stolen. Tossed aside as too much trouble when the thieves changed cars, the paintings were nearly undamaged.

That left eleven paintings missing. According to rumor, they lay hidden in a plastic-lined pit a bit bigger than a grave somewhere in the mountains south of Dublin. This was lonely territory, remote from prying eyes, and an area Cahill had long favored for burying stolen property or shooting his enemies.

10.

Russborough House Charley Hill had been involved in the Russborough House theft not merely from the beginning but from before the beginning. In the fall of 1985, before the break-in, rumors had begun circulating in the London underworld that someone with a load of stolen industrial diamonds was looking for a buyer. An informant brought the story to Scotland Yard, and a detective contacted Charley Hill. "Would Hill be willing to play the role of a crooked American and see what he could find out?

Hill grabbed his chance and contacted the would-be seller at once. His name, he said, was Charley Berman ("a good American name," Hill figured, "and it has the r's"), and his work often brought him to London. Over the course of the next several months, the undercover cop and the diamond dealer sized each other up-Hill conveying his willingness to do business, the seller talking up his wares-and the two men struck up a friends.h.i.+p of sorts. More or less idly, in the course of one rambling conversation, Hill told his new acquaintance that his main business was dealing in art.

The man trying to peddle the diamonds was a crook named Tommy Coyle, based in Dublin. Over the course of the next several years he would go on to compile a record that would lead police to call him the biggest fence in Irish history. In 1990, he nearly scored a colossal coup. Shortly before, thieves had stolen 290 million pounds of treasury bonds from a courier in London. Coyle was arrested as he and two other men boarded a flight from Heathrow to Dublin. Police found 77 million of bonds in the men's luggage. Put on trial but acquitted, Coyle celebrated his triumph by buying a racehorse and naming it 77 Mill.

Now, with Hill, Coyle went out of his way to emphasize what a big player he was. He had access to a lot lot of diamonds. "We're talking about Aladdin's cave here," he boasted. of diamonds. "We're talking about Aladdin's cave here," he boasted.

And then, out of the blue, something new. "I've got a picture you might be interested in," Coyle said. Hill half-expected a p.o.r.nographic photo. He took a look. Pica.s.so, not p.o.r.no. Or perhaps, as Hill suspected, a fake in Pica.s.so's style, though it wasn't easy to tell from a color photo.

A bit of research confirmed his suspicions. At their next meeting, Hill delivered the news.

"Look, I'm not interested in that picture; I don't think it's real," he said. "There are a lot more Pica.s.sos than Pica.s.so ever painted."

Surprisingly, Hill's stock seemed to rise after his demurral. Soon after, in April of 1986, Coyle worked the conversation round to art once again.

"There's going to be a big art job," Coyle told Hill, in an urgent whisper. "Would you have any interest in looking at the pictures from it?"

"Yeah, of course I would. How How big?" big?"

"Really big. You'll read about it in the papers."

In Coyle's Irish accent, "papers" was partway to "pipers."

"It'll be the big one," Coyle said.

"Yeah, okay," said Hill.

Then, bang! Russborough House was. .h.i.t and off they went, the Vermeer, the Goya, the two Metsus, the Gainsborough, two Rubens, the works.

The next day Coyle phoned Hill.

"Gee," Hill said, "that was was a big one." a big one."

Hill and Coyle arranged to meet in London to discuss the Russborough House bounty. Coyle flew in from Dublin, Hill (supposedly) from the States, and they rendezvoused at the Post House Hotel, near Heathrow Airport.

Coyle came up to Hill's room. Hill had been told to offer drinks, and the two men filled their gla.s.ses and sat down to chat. "Yeah, I'd be interested in buying the paintings when the heat dies down," Hill said. "Some of them, not all of them."

They talked about the paintings and sipped their drinks. Coyle, pleased with his prospects, finished his drink and prepared to leave. Hill and Coyle shook hands. Someone knocked on the door. A waiter, with four gla.s.ses on a tray, room service stuff. "Afternoon, gentlemen. Everything all right?"

"Yeah, we're good."

The waiter took away the gla.s.ses Hill and Coyle had used and replaced them with clean ones.

The room service waiter was a cop, and he hurried the crook's gla.s.s to a fingerprint lab. Within a day Scotland Yard had a positive ID on the man trying to peddle the Beit paintings. From there, the trail led straight to Martin Cahill.

The industrial diamonds, it turned out, came from a General Electric plant outside Dublin. Martin Cahill and his gang had been stealing them and selling them in Antwerp, and now they were looking for new business opportunities. Stolen art was a venture into a new market.

Cahill's own taste in art ran to cheery scenes like the dime-store print in his living room of swans on a river, but he believed that Sir Alfred's stolen paintings would bring him a fortune. "He'd been reading how there were all these really eccentric art lovers around the world who were prepared to pay millions of pounds for art and stash them in their bas.e.m.e.nts," said Paul Williams, Cahill's biographer. "He reckoned he would get millions, countless millions, of pounds for them on the black market."

With his new money, Cahill intended to make a major move into the drug importing and distributing business in Britain. The elaborate scheme involved setting up a "bra.s.s plate" bank in Antigua, a bank in name only, to launder the drug money that would soon be pouring in.

For a year, all attempts to recover the stolen paintings fizzled. Then came a break, or so it seemed, though in the end it nearly proved fatal. It was February 1987. The Dublin detective in charge of the Russborough House case, Gerry McGarrick, had a contact in the FBI named Tom Bishop.* McGarrick was an old pro. Weathered, able, reserved, he reminded Charley Hill of John Wayne. Bishop was a much-admired undercover agent. He had scored his greatest coup in the Abscam sting in the late 1970s, playing an aide of a supposed Arab sheik and handing out bribes on the sheik's behalf. The sting netted four congressmen and a senator, most memorably Florida representative Richard Kelly, caught on film stuffing $25,000 into his pockets and then asking an FBI agent, "Does it show?" McGarrick was an old pro. Weathered, able, reserved, he reminded Charley Hill of John Wayne. Bishop was a much-admired undercover agent. He had scored his greatest coup in the Abscam sting in the late 1970s, playing an aide of a supposed Arab sheik and handing out bribes on the sheik's behalf. The sting netted four congressmen and a senator, most memorably Florida representative Richard Kelly, caught on film stuffing $25,000 into his pockets and then asking an FBI agent, "Does it show?"

McGarrick's plan was for Bishop to play a big-shot American gangster who wanted some trophy paintings to hang on his wall. Hill, in his role as Charley Berman, served as go-between and vouched for Bishop to Cahill's gang.

Bishop flew to Dublin to meet Cahill's men. He took with him a folder of photos showing him with Joe Bonanno and other Mafia big shots. The pictures had been snapped secretly by the FBI, but they looked like photos a crook might display on his desk.

Included in Bishop's show-and-tell pack were some pictures of stolen paintings he'd recovered, by Georgia O'Keefe and some others. Bishop planned to pa.s.s them off as things that belonged to him. Hill and Bishop went through the packet one last time. Impressive, they both agreed. Both men overlooked one crucial item.

Bishop met Cahill's crew. He handed over his photos. One of Cahill's men flipped through it. The others looked on. Suddenly the crook stopped his flipping, pulled out a piece of stationery from the stack, and waved it in the air. The top of the page bore the FBI logo. Underneath was a handwritten note: "Tom, don't forget these."

Cahill's men stood up and left the room. The gangsters walked out without pausing to shoot Bishop, which was some consolation. (If the meeting had been held in the gang's own territory rather than in Bishop's hotel room, the outcome might have been different.) "The Tom Bishop screwup put an end to Charley Berman," Hill recalled years later, "because if Tom Bishop is a Fed, then Charley Berman, who brought him in, is a no-good son of a b.i.t.c.h, no matter where they think he's from, okay? End of Charley Berman."

Three years went by. Then, in May 1990, Turkish police in Istanbul arrested a Scottish criminal from Dundee who was trying to buy a s.h.i.+pment of heroin to sell in Britain. His down payment for the attempted purchase: Metsu's Woman Reading a Letter Woman Reading a Letter, stolen from Russborough House. Over the next few years, more of the stolen paintings surfaced. In April 1992, detectives in London working on a drug case happened on Gainsborough's Madame Baccelli Madame Baccelli, in the back of a truck. In March 1993, police chasing drug leads found a painting by the Dutch artist Anthonie Palamedesz in a locker at London's Euston train station. In the same month, British police acting on a tip raided a nondescript house in Hertfords.h.i.+re and discovered, behind the sofa, Rubens's Portrait of a Monk Portrait of a Monk. (The story of the last recovery had a bizarre twist. Before it made its way to Hertfords.h.i.+re, the Rubens had been hidden in a house in London. By coincidence, a run-of-the-mill thief, not connected in any way with the thieves who had hit Russborough House, happened to break into that very house. Finding the Rubens but not knowing what it was except that it looked posh, he grabbed it and ran off.) The London recoveries left four paintings still missing, including the Goya and, most valuable of all, Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.

In the meantime, Charley Hill had kept in touch with Gerry McGarrick, the Dublin detective heading up the Russborough House case. At some point in the early 1990s, Hill was in Dublin, and the two detectives met over a drink. By now some of the Beit paintings, though not the best, had begun turning up in London. McGarrick told Hill that he'd heard from informants that all the paintings had left Ireland and that the ones that had already been recovered in London were the only ones still in Britain. He'd heard rumors that the rest were somewhere in Belgium.

"At the time he said it to me," Hill recalled in 2002, "it was as good as saying, 'Kiss 'em goodbye.' "

11.

Encounter in Antwerp As time pa.s.sed, other informants picked up rumors of a Belgian connection. The story emerged piecemeal but the pieces seemed to fit together: Cahill's gang, which had been selling stolen diamonds to a dealer in Antwerp for nearly a decade, had now handed that same dealer some of the missing paintings-no one was certain which ones. With the paintings as collateral, the dealer had loaned Cahill $1 million. Cahill planned to turn his newfound money into heroin and then back into more money.

A million dollars was nowhere near the paintings' true value, but, after all, the thieves hadn't paid a penny for them. Outsiders who ponder art thefts always get it wrong: they focus on the gulf between a number like Cahill's $1 million and the $20 million that a masterpiece might fetch on the open market, and conclude that the thieves have blundered. Thieves sneer at reasoning like that. The proper comparison, as they see it, is not between $1 million and $20 million but between $1 million and zero, which is what the paintings had cost them.

The diamond merchant had locked the paintings in a bank vault in Luxembourg, knowing they would keep their value. (Unlike stolen cars or computers, which lose value by the week, stolen paintings by top-flight artists can safely be laid down as investments, like fine wines.) Presumably he intended to sell them someday, or to barter them for drugs or arms or counterfeit bills or some other black market commodity.

The problem for the police was finding a way to get those paintings out of the vault. On a tip, Charley Hill made contact with "a real crook of a lawyer" in Norway. Once again, Hill played a variant of his favorite role. This time he was an American art dealer working on behalf of a Middle Eastern tyc.o.o.n bent on a.s.sembling, for his own delectation, a collection of world-cla.s.s masterpieces.

His name was Christopher Charles Roberts, the identical pseudonym he would use in The Scream The Scream case. In this aspect of his life, as in every other, Hill was maddeningly inconsistent. In working undercover, he veered between obsessive attention to detail and carefree, well-then-f.u.c.k-'em casualness. Rebecca West once described someone as "every other inch a gentleman," and Hill was every other inch a master of minutiae. On the one hand, he might lavish hours on creating false papers perfect in every detail. On the other, he was more than capable of launching into spur-of-the-moment descriptions of buildings and even cities he had never seen. case. In this aspect of his life, as in every other, Hill was maddeningly inconsistent. In working undercover, he veered between obsessive attention to detail and carefree, well-then-f.u.c.k-'em casualness. Rebecca West once described someone as "every other inch a gentleman," and Hill was every other inch a master of minutiae. On the one hand, he might lavish hours on creating false papers perfect in every detail. On the other, he was more than capable of launching into spur-of-the-moment descriptions of buildings and even cities he had never seen.

But if Hill's improvisations sometimes landed him in predicaments that the rawest rookie would have avoided, he was equally capable of improvising saves that no one else could have come up with. The question was always, Which will it be this time?

In private life, too, Hill careened from extreme to extreme. He was cautious enough to have removed the street number from his front door after a spate of phone calls threatening him and his family, for instance, but so heedless of danger that on hot days he left that same front door standing wide open to all comers.

Hill's story of a Middle Eastern mystery man was ludicrous on its face, but he had found that greed worked wonders in covering over the holes in a plot. His usual strategy was not to concoct elaborate tales but merely to drop a few broad hints. He figured that this latest gangster audience would do the bulk of the storytelling work themselves, in a dollar-fueled daze that combined ignorance of the art market, prejudice (visions of oil-rich sheiks), and Hollywood cliches (Mr. Big, in shadows, putting his feet up on the battles.h.i.+p-sized desk in his palatial office, lighting a cigar, and gazing fondly at the newest gilt-framed stolen treasure in his collection).

"You've got to find the weakness in their beliefs and then exploit it," Hill says, "and crooks keep looking for G.o.dd.a.m.ned Dr. No. That's their fantasy-somewhere out there is Mr. Big or Dr. No or Captain Nemo, in his hideaway with all his treasures. It's complete bulls.h.i.+t, of course, but criminals would much rather live in a fantasy world. They could easily learn how things really work, but they don't want to listen to anything other than the sound of their own voices."

The crooked lawyer told Chris Roberts, supposed Middle Eastern middleman, that he could help him buy the Russborough House paintings. Through the lawyer, Hill soon met a mysterious figure named Niall Mulvihill. The Antwerp diamond dealer and Mulvihill, it seemed, were partners of some sort.

Irish newspapers usually referred to Mulvihill as a "South Dublin businessman." The nature of that business was never spelled out, but Mulvihill had evidently done well for himself. He collected antique cars and lived in a big, rambling house near Dublin and owned another home in Marbella, on Spain's Costa del Sol. He was tall and flashy, resplendent in blazer, golf slacks, and ta.s.seled loafers.

Hill liked nothing better than to play the same type. "I matched him ta.s.sel for ta.s.sel," Hill crowed in an interview years later. "I turned on this bogus bonhomie bulls.h.i.+t, hail-fellow-well-met and all that." The two men hit it off.

Hill's first problem was to get the paintings out of Luxembourg, where undercover police operations were forbidden. The law wasn't directed at Scotland Yard-it was a legacy of World War II, intended to insure that no Gestapo-style secret police could ever arise-but it made life more difficult for the Art Squad.

Hill spun a story that he hoped would take care of the Luxembourg hurdle. The Antwerp airport, he told Mulvihill, would make a convenient but slightly-off-the-beaten-track meeting spot. He would pay Mulvihill for the pictures and then fly out in a small plane, through France, on to Italy, and then to Lebanon. Though he didn't say so outright, Hill hinted that that was where the people he was buying the pictures for lived, and that's where they'd want to lay them down.

Mulvihill, impatient to see some money, quickly agreed. Antwerp was fine. What about the money that Hill kept talking about?

Hill told Mulvihill not to worry. The money would be there. What about the paintings?

All illicit exchanges proceed warily because the two sides distrust one another and, at the same time, need one another. The question for both sides is, in effect, this: when a hand disappears inside a jacket, will it reemerge holding a check or a pistol?

On an August night in 1993, in Antwerp, over dinner at the DeKeyser Hotel, Mulvihill told Hill he had something to show him. Seven years had pa.s.sed since the break-in at Russborough House. The two men walked to a parking garage nearby and rode the elevator to the third floor. The garage was full, and Mulvihill and Hill took several minutes to walk up and down, making sure they were alone. No one was around.

Mulvihill led the way to a parked Mercedes sedan, gestured Hill close, and opened the trunk. Inside was a black plastic trashbag. Hill gingerly rolled back the top of the bag. There, unharmed, still on its stretcher rather than rolled up, was Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. Hill picked up the priceless painting.

"It's an astonis.h.i.+ng thing to hold in your hands," he recalled a decade later. "No question it was the Vermeer. An amazing thing about a painting like that is you don't have to think, 'Is this a masterpiece or isn't it?' It just leaps out at you, bang!"

Mulvihill was "very matter-of-fact. He could have been selling me a truckful of sheepskin coats. This was just a straight business thing for him."

Hill clucked and fussed over the Vermeer, as befit an art buyer face-to-face with a treasure. The main thing was to look as if he knew what he was doing and to make the right noises. Hill talked about the history of the painting and what good shape it was in, and he made a big point of holding it with handkerchiefs on either side, to protect it. When Mulvihill wasn't paying attention, Hill made sure to leave his fingerprints on the back.

That was a precaution. Hill's underworld acquaintances were happy to drink with him, but he knew perfectly well that if it suited them, they would shoot him just as happily. When Hill talked about "stolen masterpieces in barbarian hands," as he sometimes did, his listeners tended to a.s.sume he was talking about thieves who lacked any appreciation of what they had stolen. And so he was, but that was only part of his point. Gangsters like Cahill were not only as uncouth as barbarians, but also as violent. Now he pressed his fingers against the back of the painting. If Hill were to vanish but the police eventually recovered the Vermeer in any case, the fingerprints might at least provide a lead to his disappearance. Hill handed the painting back to Mulvihill.

A week later, it was Hill's turn to play show-and-tell. With the cooperation of CitiBank, Scotland Yard had arranged to have two cas.h.i.+er's checks prepared in Mulvihill's name. One check was for $1 million, the other for $250,000. Just how Mulvihill intended to spread that money around, or why he wanted two checks, no one asked.