Excerpt of The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick
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Prologue
June 2004
The mismatched pictures stare down from the wall of the tiny
office:
Vermeer, Goya, Titian, Munch, Rembrandt. Ordinary reproductions
worth only a few dollars, they are unframed and of different sizes.
Several dangle slightly askew from tacks jammed in the wall. The
originals hung in gilt frames in the grandest museums in the world, and tourists
made pilgrimages to see them. Each was worth millions, or tens of millions.
And, at some point in the last several years, each was stolen.
Some were recovered—the tall man who arranged this small display is the one who
found them—and some are still missing. The "curator" of this odd collection
dislikes anything that smacks of statistics, but he is haunted by a melancholy
fact: nine out of ten stolen paintings disappear forever.
In the world of art crime, one detective has an unmatched
résumé. His name is Charley Hill. The aim of this book is to explore the art
underworld; Hill will serve as our guide. It is odd and unfamiliar territory,
dangerous one moment, ludicrous the next, and sometimes both at once.
We will look at many tales of stolen paintings along the way in
order to learn something of the territory in general, but the story of one
world famous work—The Scream, by Edvard Munch—will serve as the thread we
follow through the labyrinth. A decade ago, Hill had no more connection with
that painting than did any of the millions who recognized it instantly from
reproductions and cartoons.
On the morning of February 14, 1994, a phone call changed all
that.
Part One
Break-in
Oslo, Norway
February 12, 1994
6.29 a.m.
In the predawn gloom of a Norwegian winter morning, two men in a
stolen car pulled to a halt in front of the National Gallery, Norway's
preeminent art museum. They left the engine running and raced across the snow.
Behind the bushes along the museum's front wall they found the ladder they had
stashed away earlier that night. Silently, they leaned the ladder against the
wall.
A guard inside the museum, his rounds finished, basked in the
warmth of the basement security room. He had paperwork to take care of, which
was a bore, but at least he was done patrolling the museum, inside and out, on a
night when the temperature had fallen to fifteen degrees. He had taken the job
only seven weeks before.
The guard took up his stack of memos grudgingly, like a student
turning to his homework. In front of his desk stood a bank of eighteen
closed circuit television monitors. One screen suddenly flickered with life. The
black-and-white picture was shadowy—the sun would not rise for another ninety
minutes—but the essentials were clear enough. A man bundled in a parka stood at
the foot of a ladder, holding it steady in his gloved hands.
His companion had already begun to climb. The guard struggled
through his paperwork, oblivious to the television monitors. The top of the
ladder rested on a sill just beneath a tall window on the second floor of the
museum. Behind that window was an exhibit celebrating the work of Norway's
greatest artist, st, Edvard Munch. Fifty-six of Munch's paintings lined the walls.
Fifty-five of them would be unfamiliar to anyone but an art student. One was
known around the world, an icon as instantly recognizable as the Mona Lisa
or van Gogh's Starry Night. In poster form, it hung in countless dorm
rooms and office cubicles; it featured endlessly in cartoons and on T-shirts and
greeting cards. This was The Scream.
The man on the ladder made it to within a rung or two of the
top, lost his balance, and crashed to the ground. He staggered to his feet and
stumbled back toward the ladder. The guard sat in his basement bunker unaware of
the commotion outside. This time the intruder made it up the ladder. He smashed
the window with a hammer, knocked a few stubborn shards of glass out of the way,
and climbed into the museum. An alarm sounded. In his bunker, the guard cursed
the false alarm. He walked past the array of television screens without noticing
the lone monitor that showed the thieves, stepped over to the control panel, and
set the alarm back to zero.
From The Rescue Artist. Copyright © 2005 by Edward Dolnick. All
rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd
Street, New York, NY 10022.
