"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.

"It must have been another full hour before I ventured forth from my secluded vantage to inspect the scene. They had taken everything. I searched every corner of the simple structure in hopes of finding some lead to follow. Hours later, I found a manifest in handwritten German among the scattered papers littering the floor. It detailed everything that had been moved into the tower over the past 3 years, everything that I had seen being carted away in a mere hour. I wept as I read through the list. Evan, the contents of those crates made the collection in this room look like a show of freshman projects at a third rate art college. My portrait was on the list.

"It took me twenty years to find it within the Soviet Union. It was in storage in the Hermitage along with all the other items on the German manifest."

"Where is it now?" I asked.

"In 1985 it was given by General Secretary Gorbachev to the Government of Italy along with several other pieces as a political offering. The Italians keep them leased out to various galleries around the world, though the dolts have it listed as doubtfully attributed to Vermeer."

"Won't they sell it to you?"