She shrugged. “You’d be surprised what it’s like, getting topped really well. Your ego is, like, imploded. This whole club is about blowing the ego away. Every room does it, but differently.”

“The Japanese garden?”

“The right kind of high, and you’ll feel very close to heaven there.”

“High is high.”

“No way. Our dealer is an MD who not only deals, he designs. He’s given all our customers physicals, he knows exactly what makes them tick. He’s doing blood tests, prescribing, adjusting, all during the course of the evening. They are being taken so high they’re gonna forget even their damn names.”

“And then the music blows you wide open.”

“You can get very close to God in here, mister. This place is sacred.”

Hell called sacred—that was something he never thought he’d hear. “Can we go somewhere else?” This was not the part of the club for him. He wanted to do some pipe, or at least get another drink. There wasn’t much second-hand smoke down here, and he was crashing.

This time they went up in an elevator so small that they were touching. He sprang up instantly. When the doors opened, he stayed like that, because this was a ballroom full of beautiful beds, and there were people openly making love on them.

A pair of singers, a lovely, tall girl and a young man who was even taller, stood together singing in voices so filled with gentleness that they might have been saints. He recognized “All Through the Night.”

“O’er thy spirit gently stealing,
Visions of delight revealing,
Breathes a pure and holy feeling . . .”

There was a solemnity to this place that seemed at odds with what appeared to be an orgy in progress. Paul was a smart man, and he was well able to see the careful thought that had been put into all this. This room, for example, was about disconnecting sex from sin. No more need to hide.

Once in a while, he’d hit a house in Vientiane or Phnom Penh with a bunch of guys, and it would develop into pretty much of an orgy. It was fun but it was ugly, and you felt dirty afterward. In this room the lack of shame brought with it a sense of purity. Thirty or forty human beings were enjoying one another in all kinds of intimate ways, doing everything you could imagine with each other. Their faces glowed with lust, they sweated. But it was all so joyous.

Maybe Leo was right, maybe there was something kind of sacred here.

Seeing all these bodies entwined, he was starting to look at Leo real hard.