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attention.
    The rest of Hill’s story almost wrote itself: He would claim to be a representative of the Getty Museum, negotiating sotto voce on behalf of his colleagues at Oslo’s National Gallery. The Getty would ransom The Scream and in return for their hush-hush rescue work, Norway would loan it the painting.
    Hill would play a big, fast-talking American, a wheeler-dealer accustomed to getting what he wanted and not too fussy about how he got it. For an undercover cop with a hammy streak, it was the role of a lifetime. “It’s perfect,” Hill thought. “I’ll be the Man from the Getty.”
    Hill phoned John Butler, his Art Squad colleague, and spelled out his plan.
    “Nice idea,” said Butler. “Let’s try it.”
    Butler phoned back a few minutes later. “I’ve spoken to the Norwegians. They like it. What do you picture as our next step?” “First,” said Hill, “I guess we’d better talk to the Getty.”
    This would take some delicacy, since it was a bit late to ask the Getty for permission to invoke its name. And though the Getty wasn’t actually putting any money at risk, it was unlikely to welcome even the suggestion that it was a kind of ATM to the art world. Hill insisted that there was no problem. Most people were glad to do Scotland Yard a favor, and everyone in the art world wanted to help the Norwegians out of a jam. The people at the Getty might huff and puff, but they’d get over it.
    By good fortune, the Art Squad’s Dick Ellis had worked on several cases with the Getty over the previous half-dozen years. By happenstance, too, Hill had visited the Getty on his honeymoon twenty years before. He didn’t know any more about the museum than any other tourist might, but he figured he had seen enough to avoid any egregious faux pas. That was astonishingly nervy, or foolish, and completely typical of Hill. Since his long-ago visit to California, the Getty had begun building a lavish new museum that was located a dozen miles from the one Hill had seen and bore no resemblance to it. Hill waved all that aside.
    Ellis had a good relationship with the Getty’s director and with its head of security. When the time came for the Art Squad to make its pitch, Ellis would be the man to fly to Los Angeles and make nice with the California museum.
    Ellis, Charley Hill, and the head of the Art Squad, John Butler, met to fine-tune their strategy. It was early evening; the three men were at Scotland Yard. Butler called Ellis into his office. He had just opened a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey, which happened to be Ellis’s favorite. Hill was already there. The three detectives sat down and went over the whole scenario.
    All three were large, forceful, outspoken men, with big egos and little inclination to defer to one another. They knew each other well, as friends, colleagues, and occasional rivals. When they told war stories about old cases, the talk tended to veer off-course into long disputes over who had originally thought of what, amid much eye-rolling and muttering and indignant cries of “Bollocks!”
    On this night, though, the three policemen were in high good humor, delighted with what they were about to put in motion. The Getty! Christ, why hadn’t anyone thought of it before? This was going to be good.
    Soon after, Ellis flew to California to make his pitch. He is an impressive figure, an inch or two under six feet but as solid and sturdy as a battering ram. Even his fingers are thick and strong; he pounds two-fingered on his laptop keyboard as if he were thrusting his fingers into the chest of an adversary in an angry argument.
    In contrast with Hill, who had been odd man out in every group he’d ever joined, Ellis was the very image of a cop. He had joined the police at age nineteen and never risen to great rank, despite considerable talent, in good measure because he preferred a life of action to one behind a desk. His fellow cops, who had the foot soldiers’ suspicion of their