The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick

cop. The British bobby in the 1970s still looked like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan, in his tall helmet and with an inch-long brass whistle clipped to his chest. One grizzled old cop from Norfolk—in gruffness and taciturnity the rough equivalent of a Vermont farmer—never quite got over his first encounters with his new colleague. “Picture a portly fellow with big, tortoise-shell glasses and curly hair patrolling his beat”—here he squared his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and took a few swift strides—”and all the time talking in that American/Canadian/English accent about medieval history and wearing a coal scuttle on his head. That was Charley Hill.”
    Hill’s friends—he has a large and loyal circle, on both sides of the Atlantic—saw the same quirks, but saw them in a far darker light. The question they debated endlessly with one another was whether Charley would ever find a way to turn his contradictions to his advantage, or if the strain would eventually tear him apart. “We never stopped worrying about if he could hold it together,” said a friend who had stayed close to Hill since they were both sixteen. “He wanted to be a priest, and at the same time he was prepared to beat people up and shoot them and kill them. That’s not about conflicting goals, that’s about the Three Faces of Eve.”

    Now it was Hill’s job to dream up a way to return The Scream to its rightful owners. But before any scheme could be put into play, the Art Squad detectives would have to convince their superiors at Scotland Yard that the case was worth the effort. For Hill that was self-evident, a challenge scarcely worth dignifying with a response. What mission could be cleaner than recovering the loftiest creations of mankind from ignorant, violent louts? The brass were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn’t the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top pissed away money like water.
    That wasn’t a view that won Hill many friends in high places, which only served to strengthen his conviction that he was in the right. Hill took a willful, sometimes adolescent, pride in offending anyone in a position to derail his career.
    Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a compulsion that moves us to act precisely against what we recognize to be our own self-interest. We roll our eyes when the boss presents his pet idea; we snicker when we should praise; we blurt out the truth when a white lie would be just as easy and infinitely preferable. “With certain minds, under certain conditions,” wrote Poe, “it becomes absolutely irresistible.” The imp of the perverse has a permanent perch atop Charley Hill’s shoulder.
    Bureaucrats, above all others, moved him to indignation. “Whingeing, plodding, paint-by-numbers dullards,” their only pleasures were kissing ass and getting in the way. Of course they’d want to leave The Scream to someone else.
    It fell to John Butler, head of the Art Squad, to sell the mission to his bosses. He could argue sincerely that art crime was international and therefore called for an international response, but this was a tricky assignment even so. The international argument would have been easier to sell if somewhere along the line one of the nations involved was Britain. “What Butler had to do,” says Art Squad detective Dick Ellis, “was convince the hierarchy at the Met [ropolitan Police] to pay for an undercover operation to recover somebody else’s property” —here Ellis’s voice rises in admiration and incredulity, as if he were a sports commentator describing a skater’s triple axel—”even though it hadn’t come from London, and wasn’t in London, and wasn’t likely to come to London.”
    Over the years, the men (and, rarely, women) in charge of the Art Squad had learned not to burden their superiors with too much information. “We liked to give them something of a fait accompli,” says Ellis, who ran the