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wheeler-dealer who traveled in expensive but flashy circles, an outgoing man who liked to talk and drink late into the night and who might reveal, as the hours slipped by, that he could snarl as well as smile.
    The tone of these intimate performances—and the audience—varied from job to job. One week, Hill might find himself playing a swindler looking to buy counterfeit bills, and the next, he might be passing himself off as a crooked collector in the market for a stolen painting. As a swindler, Hill would likely curse and carry on. Playing a connoisseur, he would turn down the bluster and threats and instead conjure up a bit of what he calls “art chat.” A soliloquy on Turner’s use of light and shade might do nicely.
    Perhaps Hill’s allotted quarter-hour had gone by, but not by much. He smiled to himself and picked up the phone to tell Butler his plan.

6
The Rescue Artist
    C harley Hill is a tall, round-faced man with curly brown hair and thick glasses. He is half-English and half-American, and his biography sounds as if a careless clerk had stapled together pages from several different résumés. Born in England but raised mostly in the United States (with a couple of stints in Germany thrown in), Hill is an ex-soldier and ex-Fulbright scholar who flirted with academia, and then the church, and eventually landed a job as a cop walking a beat in some of London’s diciest neighborhoods.
    A stranger seeing Hill on the street might take him for an academic (though one less rumpled than most) or a businessman whose daydreams turned on balance sheets and bottom lines. A closer look would spur second thoughts. Hill swaggers when he walks, as if the sidewalk were his private property. He can be charming and engaging—especially if the conversation has turned to one of his pet topics, like naval history—but he is restless and impatient, with a bad temper that flashes unpredictably. A sudden glare or a slammed telephone serve as hints that perhaps this would not be a good man to cross.
    His speech tends toward the formal, but the scholar and the cop often collide head-on in his conversation. A sentence that begins with Charley quoting Edmund Burke on liberty may well end up with a reference to some “lying sack of shit.”
    Hill’s accent, too, is an odd mix. To Americans, he sounds almost, but not quite, familiar—Canadian, perhaps, or Australian? The English find him similarly hard to place. Is he English? Perhaps there’s a bit of Ireland in his speech?
    In time, Hill came to specialize in undercover work. At home in all the worlds he had passed through in his zigzag life—or in none of them—he found he could effortlessly win the confidence of a gang of thugs drinking in a dive or a party of art lovers strolling through a gallery. Unlike a character actor, who fits in so well with his surroundings that he can scarcely be recalled later, Hill does not disappear into his roles. He prefers, instead, to pose as an exotic stranger, an outsider but one worth doing business with.
    In the small world of art crooks and art cops, Hill stands nearly alone. On both sides of the law, the prudent strategy is to focus on art below the highest rank. From a thief’s point of view, the best paintings to steal are ones good enough to command high prices but not so stellar that they shout trouble; from an investigator’s vantage point, where the focus is on closing cases, stolen paintings are worth chasing only if the odds of success are high. A long shot, even if it might yield the painting of a lifetime, is too risky. Quantity trumps quality. “We fish with nets,” explains the head of a private firm in the art recovery business. “For us, it’s an industrial process. Charley Hill is like a man fishing with a rod. He’s looking for the biggest fish.”
    More often than anyone else, he’s landed them. Vermeer, Goya, and Titian are among the prizes. In twenty years Hill has recovered masterpieces worth well over $100