"It was the money from those artifacts that started all this," he said, looking around at the faces and landscapes on the walls. "It started me you might say. It allowed me to become what I am now. There's something else you will come to know in time, and it goes back to what I said earlier. Life is not worth living unless you enjoy it, and unfortunately for most neophytes like yourself, amassed wealth is part of that. I don't have to tell you the difference money can make in your life, the way it sweetens it, the way it brings certain refinements into focus."

"This certainly is refined," I said, looking around at the walls.

"I told you this collection is my passion, what I didn't tell you was why."

"Go ahead," I said.

"All the pieces in this room have one thing in common, me. I commissioned all these works and modeled in several of them. I've had at least one portrait done in each of my last six trips. That's the kind of refinement I could not live without," he said with the resolve of a confirmed addict.

"What was there?" I asked, pointing to the blank rectangle on the wall behind me.

"A portrait of me. Done by Jan Vermeer in 1670."

"What happened to it?"

"It was taken from me, stolen from my home in Amsterdam by the Nazis in 1940. These two pieces were in the house as well," he said, pointing them out on the wall, "but the SS Captain in charge took only the Vermeer. I searched for that one piece for five years, until the end of the war. Ramsay helped me and set an appointment with a Luftwaffe Colonel in Berlin to pick it up in the closing days of the fighting. The Nazis, as it turned out, hid a large portion of their plundered art in the tall anti-aircraft towers around Berlin.

"The deal was ten thousand British pounds, Reich Marks were, of course, worthless by then, and a boat ride from Rostock to neutral Sweden for the Colonel in exchange for the Vermeer. I readied two hundred thousand pounds in hopes the Colonel was sitting on more stolen works. I even had a truck at the ready to cart off the cache I expected to find, but the Red Army beat me to him. I arrived in time to see them loading an eastbound truck with narrow crates. I sat huddled in a dense thicket nearby and watched them work, hoping to catch a glimpse of my portrait. Time after time the soldiers would reemerge from the open portal at the base of the ominous concrete tower carrying yet another narrow crate with a black eagle stenciled on the side. The Colonel's body lay at the base of the vacant spire, his powder blue airman's uniform darkened with blood. After an hour’s labor, they removed the last crate, closed the truck and retreated to the east.