Lost

It was only the latest in a series of art thefts that have run through Europe like a plague in the past several weeks. But in some ways it was the most painful for art lovers. Vermeer was among the greatest of all painters, but he painted few pictures, and fewer still survive--no more than 36. Three weeks ago, a thief cut one of those precious 36 out of its frame in Brussels' Palais des Beaux-Arts, where it was on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. The place was closed for the night, four guards were on duty, but the burglar managed to roll up the painting and scramble down over a balcony. Roll up a Vermeer? Those surfaces cracked? The very thought is agonizing.

But this was no ordinary thief. Eight days after the robbery, the phone rang in the office of Walter Schwilden. an editor at Brussels' Le Soir. The caller identified himself as Till Eulenspiegel, the legendary German counterpart of Robin Hood. Till declared that he wanted nothing for himself. He demanded a ransom of $4,000,000, paid to a relief organization for East Pakistan refugees.

Till arranged to meet Schwilden after midnight in front of a church in a remote village. At the rendezvous, Schwilden found a scared young man wearing a plastic mask who blindfolded him, then drove him for miles around the countryside. "I am not a thief," he insisted. "I am an idealist who stole to do something about the refugees and the hunger." Deep in a forest, he produced the picture, which he held up before the car's headlights while Schwilden photographed it.

Museum officials and the insurance company piously proclaimed that they could not be sure that the photographs were of the real Vermeer and that they needed more proof. The thief fell into the trap, telephoning now one newspaper, now another.

He always went to the same telephone booth in a gas station to make his calls. One day the owner's wife overheard him saying something about a painting. When he hung up, the owner tailed him on his motorcycle, while his wife called the police. The thief tried to cut across fields, but was finally caught cowering behind a heap of manure. The boy identified himself as Mario Roymans, 21. In his small apartment above a restaurant where he worked as a waiter, the lost Vermeer was found under his bed. Roymans' knife had sliced an inch or so of canvas around the edge of the painting, and areas of paint had flaked away. Rijksmuseum Director Arthur van Schendel reported sadly: "I think it can be restored, but it will never again be as it was before."

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