Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love.

Finally he lay on his deathbed. The Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. But the angels and saints cried to God to intervene.

“In all the world, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.”

And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage.

Well, he would bury the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man’s personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt’s true life, or what sort of person he was.

But the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, or set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artists. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time.

That is my theory of Rembrandt and those faces.

Now if I were mortal, I would write a novel about Rembrandt, on this theme. But I am not mortal. I cannot save my soul through art or Good Works. I am a creature like the Devil, with one difference. I love the paintings of Rembrandt!

Yet it breaks my heart to look at them. It broke my heart to see you there in the museum. And you are perfectly right that there are no vampires with faces like the saints of the Drapers’ Guild.

That’s why I left you so rudely in the museum. It was not the Devil’s Rage. It was merely sorrow.

Again, I promise you that next time we meet, I shall let you say all that you want to say.

I scribbled the number of my Paris agent on the bottom of this letter, along with the post address, as I had done in the past when writing to David though David had never replied.

Then I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, revisiting the paintings of Rembrandt in the great collections of the world. I saw nothing in my travels to sway me in my belief in Rembrandt’s goodness. The pilgrimage proved penitential, for I clung to my fiction about Rembrandt. But I resolved anew never to bother David again.

Then I had the dream. Tyger, tyger … David in danger. I woke with a start in my chair in Louis’s little shack—as if I’d been shaken by a warning hand.