He continued. "So when you ask me if we are evil, I have no choice but to answer in the affirmative. I must answer so, for we are evil, even if we only have the capacity for it. The evil is latent within us. It lives and breathes in that twin fiend. Does that answer your question?"

I nodded. "I think so. There is something I'm curious about."

"What's that?"

"Why did you take the pieces off the dead bodies at Latsei?"

"Oh, dear Evan," he said with a sigh. "The answer is within your own question. They were dead, so what did it harm? Besides they had no idea of the jewelry’s value."

"That doesn't make it right."

He shook his head, disappointed. "Right or wrong is not the issue. I can live with it. That's my point." He finished the last of his wine in one long drink. "Let me ask you something. What would you do if a similar opportunity at fortune presented itself?"

He asked the question, knowing I couldn't answer. "I can't say. I'd have to be in the situation."

"That's right, and that's the decision I made when I was in that situation."

"Fair enough," I said, refilling both glasses.

"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?"