The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick

you.”
    The bank manager did his unctuous best, and Hill acted as if the fawning was merely his due. When the glad-handing had gone on long enough, it was time to brandish the checks. The bank manager produced them with a flourish, like a headwaiter presenting a rack of lamb on a silver tray. Mulvihill took the two checks in his hands, examined them closely and lovingly (“one million dollars and no cents”), and reluctantly turned them back to the bank manager.
    With the preliminaries completed, Hill and Mulvihill both figured that the next meeting would be for real. Next time, Mulvihill would drive away with his money, and Hill would fly off with his paintings.
    Hill and Mulvihill happily drove back to Antwerp. On the way, Hill, not paying attention, nearly missed the Antwerp exit. At the last instant, he swerved across the highway and careened across the merge lane, cutting off an eighteen-wheeler hauling a load of tomatoes. With the trucker’s air horn still blaring, Mulvihill looked approvingly at Hill.
    “Good work,” he said. “There’ll be no one following us now.”
    The two men, now fast friends, made final arrangements for the swap. The deal would go down at the Antwerp airport on September 1.

    On the appointed day, Hill drove to the rendezvous. A Belgian undercover cop called Antoine played the role of his bodyguard. Hill knew Antoine and liked him. More important, he looked like a bodyguard. Antoine was “a hairy-arsed, super-fit gendarme,” Hill would say later. “Doesn’t drink, lives on orange juice and yogurt”—Hill’s tone made plain that
he
would as soon live on goat urine and locusts—”and he was tooled up, not ostentatiously but obviously, so you’d be sure to know he was armed. He had real presence; he looked the part of a serious minder. And he had a briefcase with the cashier’s checks in it.”
    Antoine, a classic-car buff, drove a vintage, lovingly maintained Mercedes. As he and Hill made their way through Antwerp and out to the airport, an elderly woman on a bicycle rattled her way across a set of tram tracks. The bell fell off her handlebars and onto the street. It was mid-morning, and traffic was heavy.
    “Stop the car!” Hill barked, and then he hopped out of the Mercedes, halted traffic, retrieved the bell, and presented it to the woman on the bicycle.
    “She gave me this wonderful smile of thanks,” Hill recalled long afterward, “and when I got back in the car, Antoine had this ‘what the fuck was
that?’
look on his face.”
    For Hill, who is in many ways akin to the small boy who imagines himself the star of the big game (“bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, all eyes on Hill as he strides to the plate”), this tiny scene was a not-to-be-missed chance to play the hero. “It was a pure Walter Raleigh moment,” he recalled long afterward, basking in the memory. “That’s all it was. And poor Antoine sitting there thinking, ‘You ought to be concentrating on the job, not fooling about playing the gallant knight to some old biddy whose bicycle has gone bust.’ “
    At the airport, Hill and Antoine parked the car and walked into the small restaurant. It was noon. Hill ordered a coffee and cognac. In waltzed a dozen flight attendants, and, just behind them, Mulvihill and a crony. “You got everything?” Mulvihill asked.
    “Yup,” said Hill.
    The trickiest, most dangerous part of any deal is the exchange itself, when money and goods finally change hands. Hill and Mulvihill had each brought an ally, for muscle and backup. While Hill sat in the restaurant with Mulvihill’s man, Mulvihill and Antoine walked outside toward Antoine’s car. Both men were car buffs, and the Mercedes served as an ice-breaker. Mulvihill studied the cashier’s checks and assured himself that they were the ones he had seen in the bank in Brussels.
    Satisfied, Mulvihill returned to the restaurant. He turned to Hill.
    “Want to see the pictures?”
    Hill walked out to the parking lot