The Rescue Artist

36

“Down Those Stairs”

MID DAY, MAY 7, 1994

Ulving set off, veering all over the road. His speed wasn’t a problem. Hill was a fast and aggressive driver himself. But even in ordinary circumstances he hated riding in a car that someone else was driving, and Ulving seemed manic, swerving back and forth and talking without letup. Hill began to fear that before he ever had a chance to set eyes on The Scream, Ulving would skid into a ditch or smash head-on into another car.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Hill barked.

Hill disliked Ulving and his tone held more than a hint of menace, but Ulving replied as if the question were genuinely a request for information. He was exhausted, he said. He’d been up all night with the man with the cap. He jabbered on about how scared he’d been, how threatening the stranger was, how frightened his wife had been to see a huge and silent intruder trailing her husband through their house.

Hill laughed. The poor son of a bitch. He took Ulving for a crook, like his companions, but what a sorry excuse for a villain.

“What’s your point?” Hill demanded.

Ulving tried to bring his story back to The Scream. The deserted road, the man who emerged from the shadows with the painting wrapped in a blanket, the decision to hide it in Ulving’s summerhouse.

Hill felt a jolt of adrenaline. He did his best to force himself to let Ulving tell his story in his own way, but the reference to still another person handling the painting grabbed his attention.

“How many other people did you see?”

“Just him. Just the one man.”

“Wherever we’re going,” Hill said, “what’s going to happen when we get there? Are a bunch of gorillas going to jump on top of me and hold me at gunpoint until the other guys get their money?”

“No, no, no. That won’t happen. Nothing like that. There’s no danger. Only two people in the world know where the painting is, me and the man with the cap.”

“Right. Sure.”

A moment’s silence. Ulving concentrated on his driving and Hill pondered end-game scenarios. It’d be a fine balls-up if the bodyguard was safe in Oslo and the art cop was a hostage in East Nowhere, Norway.

“I won’t believe you until I see for myself,” Hill said. “If you think you’re going to get the money by holding me for ransom, you’ve got the wrong idea.”

“No, no, I promise you,” Ulving said. “There won’t be anything like that. It’s just going to be you and me.”

Hill half-believed him. In any case, Ulving was such a twit that he’d be a liability to anyone he was in league with. If somebody leapt out at Hill, Ulving would panic before anything terrible happened.

But Hill kept fretting. “Stop the car,” he ordered. He scanned the road anxiously for a tail. After a few minutes, he gestured for Ulving to pull back onto the road.

“I’m not worried about you, “Hill told Ulving. “I’m worried about how many goons turn up when we get there.” But only a few miles later he again told Ulving to pull over. Again he surveyed the traffic.

They reached the town of Øsgårdstrand, where Ulving had his summer-house. Munch had lived and painted in a summerhouse in this tiny village on a fjord, and Hill took the opportunity to talk about art for a few minutes. Munch had done a series of paintings that showed three girls on a pier, he said. Didn’t those paintings depict Øsgårdstrand?

Ulving perked up. Yes, that was Øsgårdstrand. And the white building in the background of those paintings was the hotel in town. It was still there, and that very hotel was the one Ulving owned a part-interest in. Ulving’s summerhouse, the hotel, and Munch’s summerhouse were all within a few hundred yards of one another.

Ulving drove to a small house and parked in front of the garage. His cottage was attractive and well-sited, perched above a glittering fjord and nestled in a stand of birch trees. Hill looked around appreciatively. White flowers grew all around. They looked almost like snowdrops. “Are these some sort of Scandinavian edelweiss?” Hill asked.

It was early May. Spring comes late to Norway, and Ulving’s house was still shut up. “You’re sure it’s safe to go in?” Hill asked yet again.

“It’s definitely safe,” Ulving said, and he pushed the front door open.

The glint of glass struck both men before they had a chance to step inside.

“What’s that?” Hill asked.

A large mirror lay smashed on the floor of the entrance hall. Shards of broken glass poked out of the frame. Smaller pieces had been flung farther away when the mirror crashed to the ground.

Hill turned to Ulving. “Was that there when you were here last night?”

“No.”

“How’d it get there, then?”

“I don’t know. The house is closed until summer.”

Hill considered a moment, then stepped inside. The house was dark and cold, the furniture swaddled in bedsheets.

With Ulving trailing behind, Hill stepped silently to the nearest door and shoved it open. Nobody inside. Next room. That one was empty, too. In a few minutes, Hill had surveyed the small house.

“Where is it?” Hill asked. No chit-chat about flowers now.

“Through here.”

Ulving led the way back to the kitchen. The floor was wood, bare except for a small rug. Ulving flipped the rug aside and revealed a trapdoor. The art dealer took a step back out of Hill’s way.

“After you,” Ulving said.

Hill laughed. “I’m not going down there. What do you expect me to do, spend the next three months locked in your cellar?” “That’s fine. I’ll go myself.”

Ulving clambered down the steps into his basement, into the dark. A moment’s fumbling and he found the light switch. More commotion near the stairs, then darkness again as Ulving flipped the switch off. He came back up the stairs carrying a blue bedsheet wrapped around something square. Hill heard a clinking sound.

Ulving handed Hill the blue sheet and replaced the trapdoor. Hill looked down at his hands. About a yard apart. That made sense. He raised his hands an inch or two. Hardly any weight at all. Good.

The two men walked into the dining room. The table was draped in a white bedsheet. Hill set the blue package down in the center of the white table. Ulving reached into his pocket and handed over two small pieces of engraved brass. Hill read one: Edvard Munch, 1893 and then the other: Skrik, Norwegian for “scream.” Taken from the frame, Hill figured.

Hill turned back toward the dining room table. Ulving stood at his shoulder. Hill held the blue-wrapped package with his left hand and began to lift the sheet away with his right. Eager as he was, he worked carefully and gently. Even so, it took only a few seconds.

Horror-struck, Hill gawked at the sheet of cardboard before him. The problem wasn’t the cardboard—Hill knew that Munch had painted his masterpiece on cardboard and not on canvas—but the image. Everyone knew The Scream.

This wasn’t it.

Crude as The Scream was, this was vastly cruder. Hill saw The Scream’s famous central figure outlined in charcoal, a hint of railing in the foreground, a smudge of sky along the top. “What is this goddamned drawing?” Hill muttered. He stared at the cardboard a moment. Then, holding it by the sides, he slowly flipped it over.

Aha! The Scream, in its full glory.

None of the reading Hill had done had said a word about a false start on the back of the cardboard. Munch had evidently started working, disliked what he had done, and started again on the other side. Compared with its world-famous sibling, the abandoned Scream is upside-down. Munch had no doubt rotated the cardboard in 1893 just as Hill did a century later.

Hill started to breathe again. Jesus! Why hadn’t anybody written about that? Hill held the painting up and scanned it, savoring the kind of opportunity that he knew only came along a few times in a lifetime. No frame, no glass, no hovering guards, no crowds, nothing between you and a few square feet of sublime achievement.

A year before, Hill had stood in an Antwerp parking lot, alongside a gangster, and briefly held Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter in his hands. “Whenever you hold a genuine masterpiece,” Hill had said afterward, “you see immediately that it’s a stunning picture. It tells you it’s a stunning picture. The quality just jumps out at you.”

In ordinary circumstances, Hill would have guffawed at anyone who talked like that—he liked tales of frauds and forgeries and he cackled with malicious laughter when he told stories of “some pompous asshole whose prized possession turned out to be a ghastly fake churned out in a downmarket bedsit”—but face-to-face with a masterpiece, he was not cynical enough to deny the thrill he felt.

Hill knew immediately that the painting before him, in this closed-up cottage 70 miles south of Oslo, was the genuine article. Even so, he forced himself to scan it slowly. He paid particular attention to the bottom right side of the painting. At the end of one long night a century before, Munch had blown out a candle and splashed wax onto his painting.

The drips, white verging on blue-gray, were unmistakable. The most prominent one was toward the bottom right corner, close to the screamer’s left elbow. Another, slightly less conspicuous, was a little higher and a few inches further to the right, across the top of the railing. Hill checked and then checked again.