The Rescue Artist

34

The Thrill of the Hunt

In the years that followed, Hill made the shotgun story sound like a glorious prank. He and Walker teasing poor Caro might as well have been two boys on a playground chasing a pretty girl with a frog. But when it came to the safety of works of art, Hill could hardly have been more serious. “I’m no artist, and I’m not even Kenneth Clark or Robert Hughes or anyone like that,” he once remarked, in a rare philosophical mood, “but I do have a compulsion to recover these pictures, and I enjoy doing it.”

To create beauty was rare and lofty work, but to safeguard cultural treasures was no paltry thing. “You’re just trying to keep these things in the world,” Hill went on. “It’s simply a matter of keeping them safe and protected and in the right places, where people can enjoy them.”

Hill was always reluctant to talk about “art and truth and beauty and all the rest of it,” presumably for fear of sounding like one of the “hoity-toity art-world pompous assholes” he so disliked. But, grudgingly, he did admit to a sense of mission. “It’s the story of Noah and the rainbow and all that, but you’re a steward not just to the animals two by two but to everything worthwhile in life. I left seminary school after two years, and sometimes I still think of myself as a failed priest. I suppose that makes me a self-righteous son of a bitch”—having veered dangerously near introspection, Hill scurried back to safer ground—”but this is a way of fulfilling that vocation.”

If the would-be priest could not save souls for all eternity, at least he could do his best to save some of mankind’s greatest creations for the next few centuries.

As always, though, Hill’s motives were mixed. Some of his zeal for recovering stolen paintings spoke more to adrenaline hunger than to spirituality.

Art theft was a “kudos crime,” Hill liked to say, which was to say that thrills and glory beckoned thieves every bit as temptingly as did daydreams of riches. Hill was quick to concede that the flip side of a kudos crime was a kudos chase. If stealing was a thrill, so was hunting down the thieves. “It’s a big thing, recovering an important painting,” Hill said, after one of his early recoveries, “and obviously I get a buzz out of it.”

Some thieves talked openly, almost sensually, about the thrill of taking what belonged to others. Peter Scott was an English cat burglar, a tabloid favorite, and yet another of Hill’s adversaries. From Scott’s first crime to his last, the risk of getting caught had only made the game more alluring.

Scott did more than his share of mundane thieving, but his favorite cases involved glamorous victims. In a decades-long career in which he claimed to have stolen loot worth £30 million, Scott robbed Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Vivien Leigh, and countless others. Most notoriously, he made off with a diamond necklace that belonged to Sophia Loren, who had been in Britain filming The Millionairess. In Scott’s heyday, London newspapers trumpeted the exploits of “The Human Fly.” (And he still ended up broke.)

In 1998, Scott came out of retirement and tried to fence a £650,000 Picasso portrait called Tête de Femme, stolen at gunpoint by a bank robber who was disappointed that the media never seemed to deem his crimes newsworthy. This time they did. Scott, who had hoped that his part of the deal would earn him £75,000, ended up instead (at age 67) sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Scott had succumbed to the thrill, “more potent than any woman,” of trying to outwit the clumsy and rule-bound authorities. “As a husband I was a failure and as a lover indifferent,” he acknowledged in his autobiography, “because my real passion was to be out on the roof, or creeping through the country, or making a little tunnel through a wall. I’d found this private … world which yielded a sexual, antisocial excitement unobtainable by other means.”

Charley Hill thought Scott was a poseur and a blowhard, but he shared Scott’s disdain for authority and his taste for the grand gesture. For Hill, when it came to art, and to life in general, high stakes were the only ones worth playing for. In college, he had rowed crew but quit when it became plain that he would never be great. “Unless you can gear yourself up for the Olympics or a national championship,” he asked, as if the answer were self-evident, “what’s the point of being a rower?”

Art crime was the same. “When I’m talking to villains,” Hill said, “the bigger they are, the more interesting it becomes. And the paintings I want to get back are the masterpieces of the western European canon.”

The outsized ambition was characteristic. But so was a sense of mocking self-awareness. The cynical gaze that Hill directed at the rest of the world could turn inward as well. “I feel as if I’m some kind of St. George,” he admitted happily. “The thieves are the dragon, and these wonderful paintings are the damsel about to be eaten.

“It’s all bullshit, of course, but it’s necessary bullshit. You’ve got to have some sort of self-esteem in this life, and that’s mine.”