The Rescue Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

titled aristocrats who preside over centuries-old country houses end up in the hands of down-market drug dealers who hide them in plastic supermarket bags and cram them inside train station lockers.
    It was the job of the Art Squad to know that dubious traffic in all its twists and convolutions.
    The squad was tiny, and honored more in speeches than in practice. A small group within the much larger Serious and Organised Crime Unit, the Art Squad never numbered more than half a dozen, often fell as low as two or three, and occasionally was disbanded altogether. Within Scotland Yard, politics was a rough and complicated game. For a group whose toehold on power was as precarious as the Art Squad, the risk of being defined out of existence as part of an “internal reorganization” always loomed large.
    Part of the problem was simply that “art” had to do with “culture,” and in the macho world of policing, anything so effete was suspect. The art detectives themselves hurried to deny any hoity-toity ways. “People often say to me, ‘You must know so much about art,’ “says Dick Ellis, one of the top men at the Art Squad for ten years. “The truth is, I know bugger-all about art.”
    “The police won’t say so,” remarks Charley Hill, “but what they think is, ‘What’s so important about pictures, anyway?’ The attitude is, ‘You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.’
    “Which is a difficult argument to counter,” Hill continues, “when you’re dealing with complete ignoramuses. You can take the high road all you want, and all they’ll do is write you off as some sort of aesthete who thinks that pictures are what it’s all about.”
    Ordinarily, the police are quick to sympathize with crime victims. But a little old lady who has been knocked on the head is an entirely different creature from Lord Pifflepuffle, whose estate has a hundred rooms and whose grounds stretch a thousand acres, and who has lost a painting purchased by his great-grandfather a century ago. When the loss is a painting and there are dozens more still on the walls, the well of sympathy can run pretty dry.
    In so grand a setting, the police are often ill at ease and primed to take offense. Lord P.’s posh accent may be enough to trigger their resentment, or perhaps his aides will make the fatal mistake of treating the police like servants. It doesn’t take much.
    In rare circumstances—if the stolen painting was a national treasure, say, or if the thieves shot someone—the hunt for the missing artwork may become a priority. More likely, the police will reason (silently) that Lord P. was a toff who should be glad he got off so lightly. He was rich, the painting was probably insured, and, in any event, there are bigger fish to fry.
    On the question of insurance, the commonsense assumption of the police—and of the thieves, too—is quite likely wrong. Hard as it is to believe, a great many paintings worth millions of dollars are not insured. In Britain, for example, the works of art in the permanent collections of the great public museums, including, notably, the National Gallery and the Tate, are not insured against theft. The rationale is that “You do not spend Treasury money twice.” In other words, the public, having provided the funds for the purchase itself, should not be further burdened with buying insurance.
    When great paintings travel from one museum to another for an exhibit, they are insured, but the insurance is “nail to nail.” It applies only from the moment the works are taken off the wall of their home institution to the moment they are set back in place. At home the paintings are insured against damage but not theft. Fire, because it could destroy paintings wholesale, is the nightmare fear for museums. Theft, which rarely involves more than a painting or two at a time, is seen as a matter for guards and cameras rather than insurers. The Scream was not insured.
    American policy is different from European,