“It’s both!” he said sourly and defiantly. “They’re very similar.” With conscious effort he regained his composure. “You don’t realize it because you acquired your wealth and your power simultaneously,” he said. “Immortality and a great casket full of gold and jewels. Wasn’t that the story? You walked out of Magnus’s tower an immortal with a king’s ransom. Or is the story a lie? You’re real enough, that’s plain. But I don’t know about all those things you wrote. But you ought to understand what I’m saying. You’re a thief yourself.”

I felt an immediate flush of anger. Suddenly he was more consummately distasteful than he’d been in that anxious jittering state when we first sat down.

“I’m not a thief,” I said quietly.

“Yes, you are,” he answered with amazing sympathy. “You always steal from your victims. You know you do.”

“No, I never do unless … I have to.”

“Have it your way. I think you’re a thief.” He leant forward, eyes glittering again, as the soothing measured words continued: “You steal the blood you drink, you can’t argue with that.”

“What actually happened with you and the Talamasca?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said. “The Talamasca threw me out. I was accused of using my gifts to gain information for personal use. I was accused of deception. And of stealing, of course. They were very foolish and shortsighted, your friends in the Talamasca. They underestimated me completely. They should have valued me. They should have studied me. They should have begged me to teach them the things I know.

“Instead they gave me the boot. Six months’ severance. A pittance. And they refused my last request … for first-class passage to America on the Queen Elizabeth 2. It would have been so simple for them to grant my wish. They owed me that much, after the things I’d revealed to them. They should have done it.” He sighed, and glanced at me, and then at his coffee. “Little things like that matter in this world. They matter very much.”

I didn’t reply. I looked down at the picture again, at the figure on the deck of the ship, but I’m not sure he took notice of it. He was staring off into the noisy glare of the café, eyes dancing over walls and ceiling and occasional tourists and taking note of none.

“I tried to bargain with them,” he said, voice soft and measured as before. “If they wanted a few items returned or a few questions answered—you know. But they wouldn’t hear of it, not them! And money means nothing to them, no more than it means to you. They were too mean-spirited to even consider it. They gave me a tourist-class plane ticket, and a check for six months’ pay. Six months’ pay! Oh, I am so very weary of all the little ups and downs!”

“What made you think you could outwit them?”

“I did outwit them,” he said, eyes flashing with a little smile. “They’re not very careful with their inventories. They have no idea really how many of their little treasures I managed to appropriate. They’ll never guess. Of course you were the real theft—the secret that you existed. Ah, discovering that little vault full of relics was such a stroke of good luck. Understand, I didn’t take anything of your old possessions—rotted frock coats from your very closets in New Orleans, parchments with your fancy signature, why, there was even a locket with a painted miniature of that accursed little child—”