“Put in the opera, turn it up to full volume.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy sounded crestfallen. Which one would the kid have preferred? Destiny’s Child, no doubt.

“Full volume! I want my ears to bleed! You got any cigars?” Paul was a creature of appetites. Fine wines, lots of them. The best vodka in the world, lots of it. The strongest opium, the most exotic, the sweetest, the most delicious of whatever the world had to offer. One of his great regrets was the failure of either the Company to assassinate Castro or, better, of the U.S. to just come to terms with him. The loss of the Cuban cigar had been a blow.

Well, good god damn, that was Callas!

“Louder!”

“It’s as loud as it gets!”

He reached forward, turned the knob all the way up.

Oh, God, Lakmé. Oh, God, the “Bell Song.” That she had lived, this goddess Maria Callas, was proof that human beings were of interest to the good Lord. Nothing so fabulous could have come about by accident. “Hey, kid!”

No answer.

“KID!”

“Yessir!”

“That goddess is called Maria Callas. You ever worshipped a woman?”

“Sir?”

“It is a very special pleasure, I assure you. To worship something so gentle, so soft, so willing as a good woman.”

“Okay.”

He’d worshipped at the altar of the female all of his life. Three marriages, six mistresses, and whores enough to populate a small army were testament to that fact. Jesus, but she could sing. “Death, be not proud!”

“Yessir!”

“Do you fear death?”

“Yessir!”

“The goddamn Pathet Lao stuck an electric cattle prod up my ass and left it on so long steam came outa my nose. You know what I told them?”

“Name, rank, and serial number?”

“I told them, if they filled out the forms, they could get Visa cards from the Thai Farmer’s Bank. The deal was, let me go and I would help them fill out those forms. When they got their credit cards, that was the end of that Pathet Lao cell. Who wants to run around in the jungle covered with leeches when you could be sipping a Singapore Sling at the Poontang Hilton, am I right?” “I guess so, sir.”

He could see the kid’s eyes rolling in the rearview mirror. Well, let ’em roll.

Let the DCIA and the president whine about whether or not the damn vampires had human rights or whatever. Paul decided that he’d like to taste vampire. Probably like—not chicken, no, they’d taste like something else. Snake maybe, except he’d eaten snake in Cambo, and it did taste like chicken. They made dynamite snake curry in Kuala backstreets. Little pieces of sour asp meat marinated with asafetida and fried in ghee. Oh, that is good.