The Rescue Artist

13

“Watch the Papers!”

APRIL 1994

Charley Hill was now steeped in the details of Edvard Munch’s life. With the Getty’s cooperation lined up, Hill was eager to bring Chris Roberts on stage. The problem was that no one had heard from the thieves.

It was mid-April, and The Scream had been gone two months. It was time, Scotland Yard decided, to coax the crooks out from hiding. Dick Ellis knew a dubious art dealer in Paris and prevailed on him to spread the word that the Getty was eager to work a deal for The Scream. There was nothing special about Paris in this case, except that it wasn’t London, so there would be no reason to suspect that Scotland Yard was involved.

In order to clear the way for the real thieves, Hill had to get rid of the pretenders. The first order of business was to dismiss Billy Harwood, the English criminal who had served time in a Norwegian prison and claimed to know the thieves who had The Scream. Harwood, the British cops had decided, was a scam artist.

Hill phoned Harwood. He was Chris Roberts, he said, the man from the Getty, working with Norway’s National Gallery to recover The Scream. For this conversation, all Hill’s newly acquired opinions on such matters as Munch’s use of bold colors to convey emotional turmoil were beside the point. Hayward was a waste of time, and Hill was a man in a hurry.

One appealing aspect of undercover work, Hill liked to say, was that it gave him a chance “to call on certain of my less attractive character traits—arrogance, bullying, self-importance—it’s a long list, but you get the idea.” He spoke lightly, as if he were joking, but, fittingly for an undercover man, Hill liked to hide in plain sight. Many of his jokes were simply unpalatable truths.

For undercover cops, who operate more or less on their own, bullying and self-importance are perennial temptations. Grandiosity is an occupational hazard. “The undercover stuff can get to you,” Hill once remarked. “You start believing your own bullshit, thinking you’re completely immune to having to address anything that smacks of the difference between right and wrong.”

Despite his scholarly tastes, Hill had a menacing, domineering way about him, and he used it to his advantage. Skinny when he was young, he had grown into a burly man. In a good mood, Hill had a teddy bear look, but the softness was deceptive. Like anyone with a bad temper, he felt a certain pleasure in giving way to his anger. During his days as a beat cop, Hill had pounded more than one mugger to the ground, and the memory of blows delivered (and caught) still pleased him years later. There was a code involved, and Hill would never pick on a little guy. But he believed in frontier justice, and he liked to quote a passage from Elmer Gantry. “He was,” Sinclair Lewis wrote of his title character, who had started a brawl, “in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain—unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.”

Hill was that rare creature, a bully with a taste for literature, and it was typical of him not only to see bliss in a beating but also to quote an author in support of his view. Now, as Chris Roberts, he shoved Billy Harwood out of his way.

The message wasn’t subtle. In almost so many words, Hill told Harwood to go to hell. He was asking too much, he was an asshole, and nobody was going to have any dealings with him. Harwood stammered in dismay and repeated his eagerness to help the authorities. “Mr. Helpful Citizen,” Hill scoffed, once Harwood was out of the way. “And all he asked in exchange was £5 million.”

The National Gallery, following Scotland Yard’s instructions, made a great fuss of announcing that anyone who had any information about The Scream should contact Jens Kristian Thune, the museum’s chairman of the board. Thune was a prominent and prosperous lawyer, but he had been chosen as mission control for the recovery of The Scream essentially by default. More worldly than the rest of the crew at the National Gallery, the portly and red-faced lawyer seemed better suited than any of the other museum officials to serve as the intermediary between the National Gallery and the public.

But all this—the theft of a masterpiece, the clamor from the world’s press, the presence of Scotland Yard, the hatching of undercover schemes—was new and astonishing to Thune, who found himself living inside one of the thrillers he liked to read. When The Scream was stolen, he had been National Gallery chairman for less than a week. The position, as it had been explained to him, was largely honorary. He would be expected to attend a few board meetings a year and to help choose a new director when Knut Berg retired the following year. No heavy lifting, except for the occasional glass of wine at a fundraiser.

On Friday, February 10, the day before the theft, Berg had taken his new chairman on an attic-to-basement tour of the National Gallery. Thune met all the museum’s employees, visited the guard’s security station, and marveled at the Munch exhibit. The next morning, Saturday, he drove with his family to the main train station in Oslo, headed for Lillehammer and the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. At 6:25 in the morning, the taxi passed in front of the National Gallery. Thune chattered excitedly to his family about the museum and his new job and the tour he had taken the day before.

Had the taxi been four minutes later, he might have seen a ladder standing curiously out of place.

Thrilled that the job of art museum chairman had magically given him entrée to a world of hard-boiled detectives and shady informants, Thune performed his new duties zealously. He was especially pleased with the tape recorder that the police had rigged up in his office. Each time the phone rang, he eagerly pressed the “record” button.

The calls poured in, the tapes rolled, and the red herrings piled up. Many tips seemed so transparently dubious—”Buy me dinner and a drink and I’ll make it worth your while”—that the police could reject them at once. Some leads took time and trouble to investigate. In early April, a police source told Leif Lier, the detective in charge of the investigation, that Munch’s painting was in Stockholm in a locker at the train station. The Scream had been taken from its frame—Lier groaned—and stuffed inside a hockey bag. The Norwegians prevailed on their colleagues in Stockholm to check out each of the thousands of lockers in the train station. The search began on April 3, Easter Sunday, interrupting the Swedish cops’ holiday. It took three days. Nothing.

The breakthrough finally came on Sunday, April 24. Thune had a cousin by marriage named Einar-Tore Ulving, who happened to be an art dealer. Small and high-strung, with a large, bald head that made him look a bit like Elmer Fudd, Ulving didn’t cut much of a figure. He had a sharp eye for a deal, though, and his business had prospered. Ulving owned a summer house and a part-interest in a hotel (both properties only a short distance from Munch’s summer house, in the town of Øsgårdstrand), and he liked to swoop low over the Norwegian countryside in his helicopter.

One of Ulving’s clients stood out. His name was Tor Johnsen,^* and he and Ulving made a strange pair. Ulving was soft and nervous, with the scrubbed-pink look of a ten-year-old buffed and honed for a piano recital; Johnsen was big and disheveled and, if not quite handsome, at least somewhere in the vicinity. Above all, he was menacing. Johnsen was, in Norwegian parlance, a “torpedo”—an enforcer, or leg-breaker, whose job was to convince people who owed money to Johnsen’s employers that it would be prudent to pay up. He had spent a dozen years in prison for setting fire to a house and killing several people inside. Between stints in solitary—Johnsen repeatedly attacked the prison guards—he had taken up Thai kick-boxing. Strong, agile, and bad-tempered, he became a jailhouse star and later a Scandinavian champion.

In the early 1990s, Johnsen developed an unexpected interest. He began showing up at art galleries and auctions, both buying and selling paintings. Ulving had noticed the “well-dressed, good-looking” newcomer but had not caught on immediately to his true character, perhaps because at their first meeting Johnsen was accompanied by a well-known and wealthy shipowner (the two had met at the racetrack). Soon enough, Ulving learned enough to fill in a little of Johnsen’s biography. Still, he was an art dealer, not a social worker. Johnsen became a valued customer.

Toward the end of April 1994 Johnsen phoned Ulving. He knew some people, the ex-con said, who could arrange for The Scream to be returned to the National Gallery. He remembered, too, that Ulving and Thune were cousins of some sort. Maybe Ulving could give Thune a call.

On April 24, Ulving phoned Thune. Ordinarily, Ulving would have highlighted the good points of someone he was vouching for. Here, in an attempt to boost Johnsen’s credibility as a thief and a friend of thieves, he stood the usual formula on its head. “I told him that Mr. Johnsen’s reputation was not very good,” Ulving recalled years later. “I told him he was a violent man. I told him he had been sentenced to jail for twelve years. So Mr. Thune knew all about him. And he asked me, ‘Do you think this is substantial?’ And I said, ‘Based on what I know about Mr. Tor Johnsen, I think this is really substantial, and should be followed up.’ “

When Ulving reported back to Johnsen, he admitted that he didn’t know how seriously Thune had taken his message. For the next few days, Johnsen replied, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the newspaper.

The next day, April 25, the top crime reporter at Dagbladet picked up his phone and heard a familiar voice. The caller had passed along useful tips in the past, and now he claimed to have information about The Scream. He couldn’t say more than that on the phone.

The reporter, Gunnar Hultgreen, arranged to meet his informant face-to-face. Hultgreen rattled off questions, but the informant ducked them, on the grounds that he was only delivering a message. He mumbled something vague about “evidence” that would support his story, rattled off a few place names, and told Hultgreen to find a photographer. Hultgreen scribbled names and crude directions in his notebook—Nittedal, just east of Oslo; signs for Skedsmokorset; the village of Slattum; a right turn; a bus stop.

Hultgreen nabbed one of the newspaper’s photographers. Then he phoned Lief Plahter, the chief restorer at the National Gallery, and told him he would pick him up in a few minutes. Plahter had worked on The Scream and knew it well.

Nittedal was about a dozen miles east of town, but the informant’s directions were frustratingly sketchy. Eventually the reporter, the photographer, and the art restorer found a likely bus stop and inched along the road nearby, scanning the ground, though they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for. Finding nothing on their first sweep, they turned around and crept back toward the bus stop.

It was the photographer who shouted first. “Could that be it?”

He had spotted a piece of carved wood a few inches long in the grass by the side of the road. The three men scrambled out of the car, the white-haired art restorer trailing his younger colleagues.

“Oh, my God,” Plahter cried, as soon as he caught up with the others. “This is the frame.”

It was, more precisely, a short section of the frame, lying upside down. No one touched it, in case the thieves had left fingerprints, but Plahter bent down for a closer look. He had recognized the frame at once because of its color and design, and now he saw indisputable proof that this small piece of wood was what it purported to be. Plahter pointed at the neat lettering on the back of the frame and read off the National Gallery’s identification number.

The next day’s tabloid headline screamed out, WE FOUND THE FRAME.