The Rescue Artist

31

A Stranger

MIDNIGHT, MAY 6, 1994

Hill climbed in the back seat of Ulving’s Mercedes, but he made a point of leaving his door open. “I’m happy to listen to what you’ve got to say,” he announced, “but I’m not going anywhere with you.” Ulving was in the driver’s seat, with Johnsen next to him. Hill sat behind Johnsen, half in the car and half out, with his right foot on the ground. Johnsen was in a foul mood, cursing Ulving and the Norwegian cops and life in general. Evidently he had been going on for a while. Ulving slumped meekly in his seat.

Johnsen gestured toward a black van parked nearby, its windows dark and its roof festooned with antennas. “I checked it out,” he snarled. “It’s police surveillance.”

“Did you speak to ‘em?” asked Hill. The Norwegians again, trying to help.

“No, there’s nobody in it. I rocked it back and forth, just to be sure. But I know it’s a surveillance van.”

“Then where the hell are they?” Hill asked. “Where’re the goddamned

cops?”

Johnsen pointed to a club next to the hotel. Blaring music poured into the night. The police were making a night of it.

Hill tried to calm Johnsen down. Flattery was usually a good bet. “The cops must be watching you because they know you’re a jailbird.” At least for a moment, Johnsen quit his bitching. “Ah, vanity,” Hill told himself. In any case, better for Johnsen to think that the cops were keeping an eye on him than to think they were in league with Roberts and Walker.

Suddenly someone yanked open the back door across from Hill. The stranger slid into the car and directed an angry stare at Hill, who braced for trouble. Something about the newcomer’s eyes was wrong, almost crazy. He was a big, physically imposing man, dressed entirely in black, with a cap pulled low on his forehead and a scarf and gloves. For Hill’s benefit he spoke in English. Hill couldn’t place the accent. Where was this hopped-up fuckhead from? France?

Johnsen seemed to know the new man, but Ulving didn’t. “We’ve got to go meet a friend of mine,” the stranger said. He gestured toward Hill. “You’ll be able to see the painting.”

Then he gave Ulving, in the driver’s seat, a shove. “Now!”

“Horseshit!” Hill said. “It can wait ‘til morning. I’m not going anywhere now.”

The newcomer turned toward Hill. “Why is that door open? Close it.” “I’m not closing the door.” The stranger again. “Close it!”

“Listen, if one of you guys pulls out a .38 and points it at me, I want to cause you some problems. If you’re going to get me, you’re going to have to be quick.”

It was a standoff, but the crooks seemed to like the tough-guy talk. The stranger was a thug and Johnsen was a bully, and Hill had responded in a way they understood. Rash though he could be, Hill had been serious about not going anywhere. A drive in the dark to a destination he didn’t know, on his own, in a foreign country—he’d have to be nuts. Hill looked at the black-clad, bug-eyed crook trying to cajole him into this dubious excursion, and an image of the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood flashed into his mind. Who’s for a walk in the woods?

“I’m not going to sit here forever,” Hill said. “It’s cold, and I’ve got no socks on.” Johnsen and the stranger craned around for a look. This was Norway, in winter. The tension ratcheted down a notch.

“I’ll be happy to travel anywhere you want me to in the morning,” Hill said.

Ulving chimed in. “Let’s do it now.”

The others ignored him. Hill turned to Johnsen. “If you want to keep an eye on me, why don’t you stay in the hotel overnight? Let’s book you a room.”

Hill and Johnsen headed toward the hotel. Ulving stayed behind with the stranger with the manic eyes. Hill stepped up to the reception desk. “Do you have a room?” This could have been trouble. With hundreds of narcotics officers gathered for a convention, the hotel might be full. Hill hadn’t made a backup plan.

“Yes, Mr. Roberts, of course.”

Hill handed over his Getty credit card and signed for Johnsen’s room without asking the rate. Johnsen watched closely, noting the clerk’s obsequiousness and registering all the little flourishes that marked Hill as a man of the world. Hill was, Johnsen would say later, “a very elegant gentleman, a little too elegant, in my opinion, to be a police officer.”

With Johnsen safely assigned to a room well away from his own, Hill hurried off to Butler’s room, to brief him. Butler was irritated that Hill had gone out of the hotel, but Hill brushed the scolding aside. It was his ass on the line; he’d make his own calls.

But there was a problem with the next day’s plans. Ulving and Johnsen and the stranger had said something about driving out of the city.

“You say you’re going south with these guys?” Butler asked.

“Yeah.”

The Scotland Yard detectives had permission to wander around Oslo as they pleased, but for reasons Hill didn’t quite follow, they had been warned to steer clear of the area south of the city.

“John, for fuck’s sake, what are you talking about?” Hill shouted. “Are we going to get this painting back or not? What is this police bureaucracy territorial-imperative jurisdictional-hassle shit? I mean, stop it!”

“No. You can’t do it.”

“John, if we don’t do it this way, there’s no chance we can keep our credibility with these assholes.”

“Fuck it, you’re not going! There are procedural problems, and you can’t do it.”

For the first time, Sid Walker joined the argument. “Well, John,” he said quietly, “Charley’s got a point.”

Outvoted two to one, Butler gave in. The three men made a plan, or at least agreed to proceed without a real plan. They did take steps to safeguard the fortune in kroner that Walker had flashed under Johnsen’s nose. At dawn, Walker would take his bagful of cash out of the Plaza, book a room at the Grand Hotel, and lock the money in a safe there.

Beyond that, they would have to wing it. Come morning, Hill and Walker would go off with Johnsen to wherever it was the Norwegians had been so eager to get to the previous midnight.