The Rescue Artist

25

First Time Undercover

By the time The Scream was stolen, Charley Hill had been an undercover cop for a dozen years. His very first undercover case, like the great majority of those that followed, had involved a stolen painting. (In most of the nonart cases, including one where he was taken hostage, Hill played a crook who wanted to buy counterfeit money.) The decision to give Hill a chance in an art case was easy. He was well-spoken, he didn’t look like a cop, and he had been a soldier and therefore could presumably keep his head. Above all, he was game.

In 1982 Scotland Yard had infiltrated a gang of armed robbers in south London. Somehow the thieves had acquired a painting by the sixteenth-century Italian Parmigianino, worth a few million pounds. The crooks wanted to unload it, and the cops saw an opportunity. A pair of detectives in the armed robbery squad took a look at Charley Hill and sounded him out about a role he would later make his own. How would he feel about posing as an American art dealer willing to buy a hot painting?

How would he feel? Hill’s early days walking a beat hadn’t been bad, but that assignment had been followed by a frustrating stint sitting at a desk shuffling papers. Hill had been trapped, like a soldier detailed to filling out endless forms in triplicate. Now someone had set him free. “I felt the way I had when I’d been given a weekend pass from Fort Bragg,” Hill recalled. “I saw Bragg Boulevard and Fayetteville, North Carolina, as it was years ago. It all came back. It was like the relief of going home.”

First stop, clothes. Hill whirled around London, flitting from shop to shop. Subtlety, he had decided, would be a mistake. “I thought I should put myself in the place of the people meeting me and give them what they wanted.” That meant something “fancy and flashy, some kind of half-assed cross between a celebrity chef and a Virginia preppy, horsey type.” In ordinary life, these were people Hill happily mocked. Now, with an excuse to abandon his English decorum, he combed through suit after suit in search of just the right degree of raffishness. Tie or bowtie? What color socks best set off a pair of spanking new loafers?

When he wasn’t shopping, Hill was studying. Parmigianino was a mannerist, he learned, which meant he had better read up on mannerism. Why did Parmigianino distort his subjects’ proportions in such odd ways, stretching his madonna’s neck so that it could never support her head, depicting fingers longer and thinner than any seen in nature? Parmigianino appears in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Hill found, and he set out to learn the biographical basics as well. Soon he could hold forth on the golden youth, “more like an angel than a man,” who at 16 turned out paintings that reduced older artists to awe and envy.

Hill’s undercover career began at Heathrow Airport, where he had (supposedly) just landed after a Concorde flight from New York. This was theater on the cheap—Scotland Yard hadn’t sprung for a plane ticket, but British Air had churned out the proper paperwork and slapped the appropriate tags on Hill’s bags. He’d studied the Concorde menu, too, in case the conversation veered that way. Hill emerged from the arrival area looking dapper and rested, as befit someone whose flight had taken only a few hours.

Waiting to meet him were three people: one of the Parmigianino thieves, the thief’s girlfriend, and an East End gangster who knew the American art dealer and could vouch for him. The “gangster” was in fact Sid Walker, and the job marked the first time Hill and Walker had worked together. The meet-and-greet small talk went off well. To Hill’s delight, the meeting seemed to be playing out just like a scene from a Hollywood film, complete with a crook and his moll. Life behind a desk didn’t come close.

The little group sat down for a get-acquainted drink. Hill, flush with cash, made a point of flashing a wad of greenbacks as he fumbled through his pockets looking for pound notes. The thief seemed to take to Hill, but his girlfriend held back. Hill and Walker chatted away like old friends. The thief made a passing reference to someone who had lost his nerve. Hill jumped in. “You mean,” he said, “his arsehole went sixpence half a crown.”

The phrase was not an idiom but a kind of compressed joke. A sixpence is roughly the size of a dime and a half crown is close to a silver dollar. Hill had heard the expression a few days before, and it had stuck in his mind. “I just blurted it out,” he said later, “because this was my first undercover job and I was in tough-guy-talk mode. And as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized, My God, an American would never say anything like that. He wouldn’t say ‘arsehole,’ he wouldn’t talk about crowns and sixpence. Jesus!

“And so I immediately said, ‘That’s what you’d say over here, isn’t it?’ to cover my tracks, as if I’d been joking. And they all laughed. The one who laughed the most, of course, so everyone would join in, was Sid. But he hadn’t laughed when I came out with that.”

Walker already had a towering reputation in Scotland Yard. Hill’s narrow escape from self-inflicted disaster impressed him. Maybe the new kid had the makings of an undercover cop.

Hill ordered another round of drinks. Then the party swept off downtown, to Grosvenor House, the hotel on Park Lane, to drop Hill at his room. The room was real, unlike the plane flight, but this stop was entirely for show. Guests at Grosvenor House had money to spare. If Hill stayed here, he was a player.

After dark, Walker swung by the hotel in a long blue Mercedes. The two cops ate dinner and Walker took Hill through various scenarios he might encounter when he met with the thieves again. Then they set off to a midnight rendezvous with the thieves on the eastern outskirts of London. After an hour’s wait at Falconwood train station in Kent, the crook from the airport showed up.

He and Hill drove off. Walker stayed behind. After endless twists and detours intended to throw off any surveillance and disorient Hill, they reached a large pseudo-Tudor house. Inside they met a new man. A standard feature of life undercover was that characters came and went without explanation, and detectives had to depend on their intuition and experience to guess who was who. Hill put the new man’s age at about sixty. He looked like an extra from The Godfather, and he seemed to be in charge. Out came a bottle of Rémy Martin, and with it, a stream of questions directed at Hill. Who was he?

Hill made it up as he went along, though he told the truth when he could. No one mentioned art; this was about Hill, not the nature of Raphael’s influence on Parmigianino. Hill found that stories about Vietnam went over well. This was a double bonus because it was rich territory and also safely outside the experience of a pair of English crooks.

Hill told the story of the first time he had come under serious fire. He had been in Vietnam about two weeks, in remote country in the central highlands. Hill was in the lead platoon making its way up a steep hill. “And then all this shit came flying down at us from the North Vietnamese—intense fire from AK-47s. About half the men in my squad were hit straight away. I hit the ground because I’d never experienced that in my life before. Whatever training you’ve done, nothing actually prepares you for that moment. You think, ‘Shit, I’m going to die here!’

“Well, they stopped firing, and we started firing back. The worst thing was that our guys below us started firing up through us, and they were coming up short with their grenade launchers, dropping these things right on us. And then, at just that moment, I saw one of our machine gunners was firing, but neither his assistant gunner nor his ammo bearer was anywhere near him. Except that the sergeant was nearby and cowering behind a boulder. I thought, ‘Oh fuck, what the hell is he doing?’

“I crawled over and grabbed the ammo belt, which was flying around, and Sterger—he was the machine gunner—and I moved forward quite some distance, to cover the whole front of the line. So we were above the point where the guys in my squad were being shellacked by the guys down below. It was chaos. We had to stop at one point because my glasses fell off. I said, ‘Shit! Wait!,’ and I put them back on, the sweat pouring down my brow, and off we went again. I was just popping the bullets in, and we were really laying down a hell of a blaze of fire.

“The M-79 grenade launcher rounds were dropping on us, plus the bullets flying up from down below toward the Vietnamese, and there was an artillery battery that must have been five miles away, and their rounds were dropping short. It was an awful thing. And then, just to make the nightmare worse, in flew some old F-100s—I don’t know if they were U.S. Air Force or the Vietnamese Air Force—dropping napalm, and they took out the whole tree line in front of us. Kaboomph!

“The napalm was exploding, and everything was red with flame and black with smoke, and we were so close we could feel the air being sucked from our lungs. The Dust Offs [medevac helicopters] were just flying around up high, but the ordinary helicopters came down and picked up the wounded. Eventually our lieutenant colonel pitched up in his Huey with the battalion sergeant major. But they didn’t land; they hovered up there and kicked a few boxes of ammunition out the door and disappeared off.

“Sterger certainly should have got a medal, but he got no commendation whatsoever. And the lieutenant colonel, who never got his hands dirty, ended up getting a Silver Star.”

It was a story that touched on several of Hill’s favorite themes—the bravery of the troops (not least himself) in contrast with the incompetence of their leaders; the danger of being shot in the back by one’s own side; the eternal truth that, when honors are doled out, virtue is ignored and cowardice rewarded. The crooks liked it, too. Hill is no thief, far from it, but his antiauthority streak runs deep, and the thieves saw in him some kind of cracked-mirror version of themselves.

With everyone in a convivial mood, the older of the two crooks pulled out the stolen painting. It was about twenty-four inches by thirty inches. Hill took it in his hands. “It certainly looked like a Parmigianino,” he said later, “but when I turned it over, I realized that the stretcher”—the wooden frame on which the canvas is stretched—”didn’t look old enough. It obviously wasn’t medieval. And when I looked more closely at the canvas, I could see that the craquelure, the pattern of hairline cracks on the surface of the painting, wasn’t right, either.

“So now I was on the horns of a dilemma.”

The thieves weren’t trying to peddle a fake; if Hill was right, they had stolen a fake that they (and the owner) had believed was genuine. Hill, who had yet to say anything about the painting, fortified himself with more cognac. The two thieves looked on, amused rather than alarmed, as Hill once again scanned the painting front and back.

“We’ve got a problem here,” Hill said. “This might not be by Parmigianino; it may just be in his style. Because if you look closely…” and then he launched into “a stream of bullshit” on wormholes in the wood and patterns in the cracking.

The thieves were indignant. Their painting was a fake?! But though they didn’t believe Hill, at least he had put an end to any suspicion that he was a cop. The aim of detective work is to bring down criminals. Any genuine undercover cop, the thieves assumed, would have glanced at the painting, cheered his good fortune, and slapped on the handcuffs.

By now it was four in the morning. Hill told the thieves he didn’t want their painting. They drove him back to meet Walker at the train station. Walker, who had spent a long, cold night waiting in a parking lot, noted without enthusiasm that Hill had booze on his breath. Part of the job, Hill explained, and besides, it was not beer but cognac and good cognac at that. Walker didn’t seem much mollified.

Hill had far more distressing news to impart. “I think the thing’s a fake,” he said.

“Shit! Are you serious?”

Walker and Hill sped back to headquarters and reported the night’s doings. Their superiors, convinced that the painting was real and that they were on the brink of catching two criminals they had long been pursuing, ordered a raid on the house Hill had visited.

The next day Walker collected Hill at Grosvenor House. The police had grabbed the Parmigianino and brought it to the auctioneers at Christie’s. The painting, the experts decreed, was a Victorian copy in the manner of Parmigianino. It was worth not £3 million but, on a good day, £3,000.

For an art historian or a restorer, recognizing the painting as a fake might have been a routine day’s work. But they would have had expertise on their side and all the time they wanted. Hill, armed only with nerve and a good eye, was an amateur who had to make a snap judgment while a pair of crooks glowered at him.

It came out eventually that the thieves had stolen the painting twenty-five years before and put it away. For a quarter of a century, they had looked on it as a retirement fund worth millions.

“Well, everyone was bitterly disappointed,” Hill recalled, “because they were so desperate to put these guys away for something big. But my reputation soared; it made me. From then on, I was the Yard’s art ‘expert.’ And Sid suddenly realized that I could do the job. He said, in that growl of his”—here Hill put on a tough guy accent—” ‘Chollie, the thing I like about choo is, you got charisma.’ “

Charisma wasn’t quite the right word—nerve or flair would have been closer. But the point was that Charley had won Sid’s endorsement. Years later, he still glowed at the memory. “I was flattered by that. No fucker had ever said anything like that to me before. Sid was a really hard-nosed cop, whom I’d heard a lot about but never met, the foremost of all police undercover officers. And from that moment, I became one of his protégés.”