The Rescue Artist

32

On the Road

EARLY MORNING, MAY 7, 1994

Hill and Walker left Butler and headed off to their own rooms. It was late—Hill hadn’t gone out to Ulving’s car until midnight—and they would be underway early the next morning. (Walker, who had to switch hotels, would be on the move even earlier than Hill.) But they had time to grab a few hours’ sleep. For Einar-Tore Ulving, on the other hand, the night of May 6, 1994, would prove the longest of his life.

The art dealer’s ordeal began at midnight, when the stranger slipped into his car. Even with Johnsen and Hill out of the car and in the hotel, the newcomer stayed in the back seat, his eyes fixed on Ulving at the wheel. In the dark, with his cap pulled low over his eyes and his scarf pulled high over his chin, he was a large and looming shape. Afraid to speak or to turn around, Ulving sat cowering and waiting for instructions. His unwelcome guest never gave his name. The art dealer thought of him simply as “the man with the cap.”

Finally the stranger broke the silence. “Drive,” he said, directing Ulving through the near-empty streets of a wintry Oslo night. “Right.” “Left.” “Through the tunnel.”

Ulving obeyed. The route led out of the city, but Ulving had no idea of their destination. Soon they were on a quiet road. The houses were dark, the street deserted. No streetlights, no traffic, no pedestrians. “Stop!”

Ulving pulled over. “Wait here.” The stranger walked to a pay phone. A minute or two later, he returned and gestured to Ulving to roll down his window. “Drive south on the E-18,” he said, “and someone will phone you.”

Then he vanished into the gloom.

Ulving found his way to the motorway. He knew the E-18. He drove along, expecting his cell phone to ring at any moment. It didn’t. For an hour and fifty minutes he sped along the motorway in silence. The E-18 south from Oslo, as it happened, led toward the town of TØnsberg, where Ulving lived. He decided to drive home.

By now it was well past two in the morning. Ulving entered his darkened house. At once the phone rang. Unnervingly, the call came not on Ulving’s cell phone, as he had been expecting, but on his home phone. How did they know where I was? The stranger again, with more instructions. “Get back on the E-18 and go to the By the Way.”

Ulving knew the name—the By the Way was a restaurant on the expressway only five or ten minutes from his house. He sped over. The restaurant was long since closed, and the parking lot was empty. Ulving pulled his car to the edge of the lot and parked by a low stone wall. Then he sat in the dark and waited.

Suddenly the stranger materialized in front of Ulving’s car. “Get out!”

Ulving stood in the deserted parking lot. The man in the cap stared at him, silently, for a minute or two. “Open the back!”

The stranger moved a short distance away. Another man took shape in the darkness, on the far side of the stone wall. He carried a neatly folded blanket with something wrapped inside. He handed the blanket to the stranger and disappeared again. The stranger placed the blanket and its contents in the back of Ulving’s station wagon.

“That’s the picture.”

Ulving gathered his nerve. “I don’t want it in my car.”

“Well, it’s in your car.”

“Where are we going to take it?”

“To your house.”

“We can’t. My kids and my wife are there. But I’ve got a summerhouse in Øsgårdstrand. It’s empty now. We can take it there.”

The man in the cap went along with the new plan. Øsgårdstrand was only a few miles away. He and Ulving drove off and hid their package in Ulving’s summer house.

Ulving, exhausted, pleaded with the stranger. Couldn’t he go home and take a shower and change his clothes?

Yes, he could. This was unexpected good news, the first conciliatory remark the stranger had made. Ulving drove home eagerly and entered his dark house. To his dismay, the man in the cap barged into the house behind him. Ulving walked into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. His “guest” shoved the bathroom door open, then stood a yard from the shower, watching.

It was nearly five in the morning. Ulving’s wife, Hanne, woken by the commotion, hurried to investigate. Her husband was in the shower, a hulking stranger nearly at his side, glowering.

“What’s going on?”

Where to start? “It’s okay. Everything’s all right,” Ulving said. “Go back to sleep.”