The Rescue Artist

23

Crook or Clown?

APRIL-MAY 1994

The Norwegian police didn’t know what kind of crooks they were up against. While Charley Hill negotiated with Ulving and Johnsen, the police continued to work their own leads, to little avail. Looked at from one angle, the thieves—whoever they were—seemed professional. They had vanished at once, which showed planning, and then had stayed out of sight, which showed discipline. The police had squeezed their informants hard and come up empty. No booze-fueled bragging, no rumored deals, nothing. Weeks had stretched into months, and still the only clues the police had turned up, most notably the piece of The Scream’s frame, had been handed to them.

But viewed from a different angle, the same facts made the thieves look amateurish. True, they had been quick, but they had made climbing a ladder seem a feat on a par with walking on stilts. They had indeed kept silent, but was that silence a ploy designed to increase the pressure on the police or just a sign of befuddlement? Perhaps the thieves, now that they were in possession of their trophy, were in the predicament of the dog in the cartoon who has, to his astonishment, actually caught the car he was chasing. Now what?

And what was the moral of the theft’s timing? Horning in on the publicity generated by the Olympics was a coup—and a thumb in the eye of the police—but did the thieves’ audacity show that they were pros who knew exactly what they were doing? That was the media’s theory, based on the idea that the thieves were showing off for their fellow crooks. But maybe the real audience was the great, sensation-loving public. In that case, the theft of The Scream was not a mark of professionalism but an amateur’s “Hey, look at me” bid for attention.

And uncertainty about the thieves was only the first link in a murky chain. If the thieves who stole The Scream in the first place had since bartered or sold it to someone else, then any theories about who had originally done what, and why, were all beside the point.

Once they had sorted through the false leads of the anti-abortion activists and a slew of time-consuming but fruitless tips, the Norwegian police focused on Oslo’s small criminal community. In comparison with London or New York, Oslo was cozy and safe—the city’s population hovered at around half a million—but serious crime, much of it heroin-related, had encroached even on Norway. At the center of the criminal scene in the 1990s was a group called the Tveita Gang, which was about 200 strong and closely linked with criminals outside Norway. At the center of the gang was a raffish young crook named Pål Enger.

Enger, who was twenty-six when The Scream was stolen, had been well-known in Norway since his late teens. He wasn’t handsome—he had a big, bent nose and his ears stuck out—but he had a disarming grin and a friendly manner. No one would cast Enger as a movie’s romantic lead, but he would do nicely as a charmingly ne’er-do-well best friend. Enger had been a professional soccer player for Valerenga, one of Norway’s top teams, and had gone on to become perhaps Norway’s best-known criminal. “I was not one of the best [at soccer],” he once told the BBC, “but I was one of the best in the criminal world, and I thought it would be more fun to play on the team where I was best.”

In February 1988 Enger and an accomplice stole a Munch painting, The Vampire, from the Munch Museum in Oslo. The police launched an all-out investigation. Within a few days they announced they were close to cracking the case. They weren’t.

The months dragged on. Growing desperate, the police at one point even sought help from a psychic. Finally, a break: two men on a train had been spotted carrying The Vampire. The police raided their apartment. They spotted the supposed masterpiece at once and groaned in dismay. The painting that an excited tipster had identified as the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most tormented artists was nothing of the sort. It was, the police soon learned, a spoof that someone had painted in a couple of hours as a prank, for a bachelor party.

Six months after the theft of The Vampire, the police arrested Enger and a second man. He had stolen the painting, Enger said, in the vague hope that “maybe some Arabs would be interested” and he could sell it for a fortune. Enger and his accomplice were convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

That failed theft hardly seemed the work of a master criminal, but Enger did have at least one genuine skill beyond soccer. He had a gift for publicity, a talent for engaging the police in what amounted to street theater, with the ex-athlete himself in the starring role.

In Enger’s glory days, he had featured regularly in newspapers and on television. Now, with his soccer career in the past, it took more ingenuity to gain notice. Enger had developed an array of tricks. One of his favorites was to phone the police anonymously and warn them that Enger was up to something shady: Pål Enger had been seen, Enger would whisper, with what looked to be stolen goods. If the police showed up, Enger would howl that he was being harassed. Then he would report the mistreatment to his lawyer, the lawyer would call in the media, and, if all went well, the ex-con would wake to find his name—and, better, his face—splashed across Norway’s newsstands and television screens.

With his conviction for stealing The Vampire, Enger was a natural suspect when The Scream vanished. He had an alibi for the time of the theft, though, and the police had no evidence against him. Enger thrived on the attention. At the National Gallery, he posed for photographers by the spot where The Scream had hung, next to the poster and the handwritten “Stolen” notice that had replaced it. “I didn’t steal The Scream,” he insisted. “I had nothing to do with the theft.”

But as the police scanned tapes from the National Gallery’s security

cameras, they noticed a familiar figure in the swirling crowd of visitors to the Munch exhibit. Five days before the theft, there was Enger.

Perfectly true, the thief happily agreed, when the police brought him in for questioning. Why shouldn’t he visit an exhibit that was the biggest thing to hit Oslo in years? He was, after all, on record as an admirer of Munch.

The cops sighed wearily. Sooner or later, they had learned, Enger was sure to do his best to thrust his way into any case that was likely to draw attention. Like the parents of an incorrigible toddler, the Norwegian police had grown to tolerate what they could not seem to prevent.

Over the years Leif Lier, the detective in charge of the Norwegian end of the Scream case, had come to know Enger well. A patient man whose forbearance would be remarkable even if he were not a cop, Lier shrugged off Enger’s antics. “Enger was a pain in the neck from time to time,” Lier acknowledged, “but he was funny, too.”

On April 12, two months after the theft of The Scream, Enger’s wife gave birth to a baby boy. The proud father placed a notice in Dagbladet. The baby had arrived, the birth announcement declared, “With a Scream!”