The Rescue Artist

37

The End of the Trail

AFTERNOON, MAY 7, 1994

For a moment, Hill indulged himself. Concentrating on The Scream, he let Ulving drift out of his thoughts. The blue chalk was brighter in real life than in any of the reproductions, and so delicate that a cough could blow away lines that Munch had laid down a hundred years before. Close up, the green arcs next to the screamer’s head held the eye as forcefully as the famous orange bands across the sky. Tiny patches of raw cardboard peeked through the face.

Now Hill focused again. He turned to the art dealer, who had never been more than a few steps away, and addressed him with his customary brusqueness.

“Right, great. So what are we going to do now?”

“Well, there’s the hotel here in Øsgårdstrand,” Ulving said. “We could go there.”

“Okay. Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

“I can’t drive you back to Oslo. I’m just not fit to do it.”

“I don’t want you to. I’ve got the painting now. The last thing I need is for you to land us upside-down in a ditch.”

Hill picked up The Scream and wrapped it back up in the blue sheet. He followed Ulving outside and leaned over the passenger seat of Ulving’s sporty Mercedes, trying to set the priceless painting in the back of the little two-seater. Wrestling the bulky square of cardboard over the front seat headrest, Hill heard a dismaying thump. “Shit! I’ve dented the fucker on the goddamned headrest.”

He glared at Ulving. “Drive.”

Ulving drove to the hotel, only a few minutes away. “We can get a day room.”

“Fine. Do it.”

Ulving and Hill walked into the hotel, leaving The Scream unattended in the car. Hill, who was breathtakingly careless whenever he was not overtly paranoid, hardly gave it a thought. Who steals cars in Norway?

Hill had yet to phone Butler. He spotted a pay phone near the front desk. The Scream’s brass nameplates jingled in his pocket as he strode across the lobby.

“I’m just going to phone Sid,” Hill told Ulving, although it was John Butler and not Sid Walker that he planned to call. Hill couldn’t have phoned Walker if he had wanted to, since he had neglected to write down his number.

Ulving tagged along. That wouldn’t do. Hill turned to Ulving. Fuck off! That was English, not American. Hill changed idiom and spoke aloud. “I need to talk to Sid. Go screw yourself!”

“Oh, excuse me,” Ulving said, retreating.

“John, it’s Chris.”

“Charley, where the hell are you?”

Butler was a good man in a crisis, but his voice was a near-whisper that betrayed his tension.

Hill whispered, too, to foil Ulving. “I’ve got the picture. We’re at the Øsgårdstrand Hotel. We just booked into room 525. I’ll be there. No one else, just me and the painting. Send the cavalry.

“Now listen, “Hill went on. “The important thing is, Sid is back at the Grand, with the two villains, Johnsen and the other guy.”

“Shit! Okay.”

“I’ll ring you again as soon as I get to my room.” Hill walked back toward Ulving. “Okay,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Sid’ll give them the money.”

“What should we do with the painting?” Ulving asked.

“Let’s go look at the room.”

The room was on the second floor. Hill asked Ulving if there was a set of stairs in back. Ulving showed him the fire escape. Hill wedged the door open with a fire extinguisher.

“Get the car and pull it around,” Hill ordered. “I’ll wait for you here.” Even for Hill, this was a colossal—and pointless—risk. He didn’t see it that way. Utterly confident that he knew his man, Hill figured it was impossible that Ulving would race off with his $70 million prize. The only danger Hill could see was that, in the course of driving from the front to the back of the small hotel, Ulving would find a way to crash his car.

Ulving pulled into view. Hill, still mortified that he had thumped The Scream on the headrest, lifted the painting from the car in slow motion. Then he dismissed Ulving.

“Okay, I’ll get a taxi back. Drive home safely.”

Ulving, trembling with a night’s accumulated tension, sped away.

Hill carried The Scream up the fire escape and into his room. He placed the painting, still wrapped in its blue sheet, on the bed. Then he locked the door, chained it, and shoved a chest of drawers in front of it. He scanned the small room. What else could he do to protect himself in case someone tried to snatch the painting? Hill looked out the window. Ten feet to the ground. If someone managed to get in, maybe Hill could grab the painting and make it out the window. Worth a try. He opened the window wide.

Hill ran through the brief roster of people who knew where he was. Ulving. Would he send someone to do what he would never dare do himself? Probably not. The receptionist? She had seen Hill but not the painting. She shouldn’t be a problem. The mystery man who had handed the painting to Ulving?

“Fuck it! No one’s going to take the painting,” Hill said aloud. He unwrapped The Scream and propped it up on the bed, against the pillow. To his relief, he saw that the smack on the headrest hadn’t made a dent. He stepped back for a better look, then sat in a chair and stretched contentedly. Sprawled at full length, Hill put his hands behind his head and contemplated the painting he had studied in so many books.

Munch had hated the idea that one of his paintings could disappear “like a scrap of paper into some private home where only a handful of people will see it.” It was good to think that his greatest painting had been saved from a far darker fate.

Hill wasn’t especially motivated by money. He couldn’t have stayed a cop for twenty years if he had been. But, still, $70 million! Even more disorienting was to think that the piece of decorated cardboard on his bed had been copied and photographed and parodied and admired thousands and thousands of times.

Hill despised talk of Dr. No and his secret lair, but for several minutes he basked in the luxury of this private viewing. Not many people had ever had a chance to see a masterpiece in a setting like this. “Jesus!” he thought. “We’ve done it.”

Itching to share his triumph, Hill phoned his contact at the Getty to give him the good news and thank him for his help. What time was it in California? Midnight? Anyway, nobody home. Hill left a cheery message. It was only eleven in the morning in Norway, but it was time to celebrate. On a small table in the room, the hotel had provided a bottle of wine. Hill poured himself a drink. Vile! He found a small bottle of Scotch in the mini-bar. Much better. Drink in hand, he spent another minute with The Scream.

Back to the world. When the good guys came to fetch him, Hill didn’t want them accidentally hurting the painting. He wrapped it up again, laid it flat on the bed, and set the brass nameplates next to it.

Then he phoned Butler. When they had spoken just minutes before, Butler had whispered. Now he shouted down the line.

“Where’s Sid? Charley, I can’t find Sid.”

Hill was as alarmed as Butler. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Something’s happened. They’ve had an accident, something gone’s wrong.”

It didn’t make sense. When Sid and Charley had driven away from the restaurant earlier in the morning, in separate cars, Sid had the shorter drive. He should have made it back to his room at the Grand Hotel long ago. Worse than that, Sid had headed straight back to Oslo. Hill and Ulving had made a longer drive and after that they had chased around forever to get the goddamned picture.

Where was Sid?

The answer emerged soon enough. Unbeknown to Butler and Charley, Sid was back at the Grand, in his room with Johnsen and Psycho. The Norwegian police team watching the hotel, whose job was to keep a sharp eye out for Walker and to contact Butler the instant they saw him, had managed to miss him.

Which meant that Walker was alone in a hotel room with two high-strung, violent criminals, and no one had the slightest idea where he was.

The three men did their best to pass the time. Psycho, whose real name was Grytdal, seemed to have taken a liking to Walker. He tried to strike up a conversation. The next day was his twenty-seventh birthday. Maybe someday he would travel to England and he and Walker could meet up. Maybe they could go fishing?

Walker played along, but everyone was preoccupied and the conversation kept sputtering out. Time dragged on, and the crooks grew jumpier. Walker rummaged in the minibar for something they could drink. Any minute now, the Norwegians knew, Hill should call Walker to say that he had The Scream and it was time to hand over the money. When was that goddamned phone going to ring?

Instead of a ring, they heard a knock on the door. Sid went to see who it could be. Two men in street clothes, chatting nonchalantly. One carried a bulging sports bag that Walker recognized at once—his bag, with the money! In his other hand, the man held a steaming cup of takeout coffee with a roll balanced precariously on top. His companion stood clutching a hamburger and a Coke.

The Norwegian cops, one more time. Somehow signals had gotten crossed yet again. The Norwegians had expected to find Walker alone in his room. Their plan—which had never been communicated to Walker—was that eventually the crooks would show up, Walker would produce the money, and a team of cops from the next room would swarm in and arrest the bad guys.

The two cops walked into the room. Johnsen jumped to his feet to see what the commotion was about. Grytdal lay sprawled across the bed. The cops looked at Grytdal and at Johnsen—they knew Walker, but not these two—and saw at once what they had walked into. “Police!” one of them shouted.

Grytdal leaped up from the bed and tackled the cop nearer to him. The bag with the money fell to the ground. Coffee splashed across the carpet. The second cop jumped in, fists flailing. Grytdal struggled to his feet and threw a bearhug around the cop he had tackled. The other, larger cop pounded Grytdal from behind. Grytdal, in a fury, seemed not to notice the blows falling on his back and head. Grytdal and the cop fell to the ground again and rolled across the carpet, neither man willing to let go. The bigger cop stuck close to the tumbling bodies. He looked like a referee in a wrestling match, but he was hoping for a chance to deliver a good, hard kick to Grytdal’s head or ribs. The bag with the money lay unattended on the floor.

Walker and Johnsen had yet to join in. Dodging bodies, Walker grabbed Johnsen’s leather jacket and flung it to him. “Let’s run!”

The two men dashed out the door and down the hotel corridor. Johnsen spotted the emergency exit door that led to the stairs. Down he raced. Walker lumbered after him. Younger and faster than Walker, Johnsen soon left the detective alone in the hotel stairwell.

That wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Walker hadn’t had time to devise a polished plan—only a minute or so had elapsed between the Norwegians’ knock on the door and the moment when the room became a cyclone of punching, kicking bodies—but fleeing the room wasn’t a bad idea. Walker hadn’t expected the Norwegians to drop by for a visit, but he did know that the cops had the hotel surrounded. If Johnsen did run, the cops ringed around the hotel should catch him.

The alternative—staying in the room and joining the free-for-all—didn’t have much appeal. True, the cops would outnumber the bad guys three to two, but Grytdal’s mania seemed to even the score. Walker was a rough customer himself, but he knew that Johnsen was younger and, more important, a kick-boxing champion. Better to run Johnsen out the door and into a trap than to barge into the melee.

Except that the police watching the hotel missed Johnsen as he ran out. With Johnsen gone, Walker raced back to his room. By the time he arrived the Norwegians had managed to handcuff Grytdal and radio for backup. Cops flooded into the hotel. They arrested Grytdal and dragged him off to police headquarters and took custody of the bag with the cash.

Johnsen, on the loose, took a moment to think things through. The police, he knew, were after him already. His fellow thieves would be after him, too. In many a police sting, one thief is allowed to slip away. For the police, the rationale is cold-hearted but straightforward. The thief’s cronies would likely pin the blame for the arrests and the failed operation on the lone escapee, figuring that he had sold out his mates. Better to have the bad guys think they knew why things had gone wrong than to have them nosing around for an explanation. It wasn’t quite fair, the cops might concede, but, then, life isn’t fair.

Less than an hour after he fled the Grand, Johnsen picked up a phone and called Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective. The two were old acquaintances, and Lier had a reputation for fairness.

I need to come in, Johnsen said. Lier thought that seemed like a good idea. Johnsen summoned a taxi and rolled up to police headquarters in style. He had warned Lier that he didn’t have money to pay the fare, but Lier had told him not to worry. This one would be on him.

At the Øsgårdstrand hotel, someone rapped loudly on the door to Charley Hill’s room.

“Yeah?” Hill called.

Back came a shouted name and a word that sounded to Hill like “Politi!” Presumably the Norwegian for “police.”

“Okay.” Hill shoved the chest of drawers away from the door and opened it a few inches, though he left the chain on. He saw two men in street clothes, one of them tall and somber-looking, the other smaller, with curly hair. They held ID cards out toward Hill.

Cops, or a pretty good imitation. Hill opened the door. “Hi, I’m Chris Roberts.”

One of the newcomers looked at the square parcel in the blue sheet lying on top of the bedspread. “Is that it?” “Yeah.”

Hill unwrapped The Scream one more time. The cops stared. Then Hill rewrapped the painting and handed it to one of the cops. He handed the brass plates to the other. The three men headed downstairs.

Hill told the Norwegian cops to give him a minute. The hotel was perched on a fjord, and a pier stood nearby. Hill remembered Munch’s painting of three girls on a pier, and he strolled out to the pier’s end as a small sign of respect for the artist whose work had led him to this out-of-the-way town.

One of the cops kept a discreet watch. What was this crazy Brit up to now? Hill didn’t notice. He looked out across the water for a minute and punched a fist into the air in triumph. Then he broke into a celebratory jig. The Norwegian cop looked on—alone, at the end of the pier, a 200-pound bear of a man shuffled his way through a tentative and earthbound dance.

That was mundane reality. On the movie screen that plays so often in Charley Hill’s mind, the picture was different. There, his mission accomplished, the dashing detective leapt high into the air and spun halfway around in a joyful arc.