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With his long hair and intense stare, he paused between spoonfuls of mushroom, bacon and rice. He had already undergone a difficult surgery and blood transfusion. Some people called him Mr. Wastewater Treatment. A pair of dentures, loosened from his gums, protruded from his jaw. He was soft-spoken, religious, and bookish, brazen and shameless, so very left-handed. After a courtroom brawl with a client, the colonel knelt over a dust-caked body bag. He never backed down from a fight, which served him well. He soon gained a reputation as an adorably fearsome dictator and prodigious scotch drinker. For forty-five years, he operated a hastily built steamboat, his route stretching from some tropical southern island into the desert oases of the ancient Silk Road. He would host parties for the families of boys who have just undergone the religious ritual of circumcision, offering an ice cream dessert consisting of lemon sherbet and vodka, sometimes briefly pausing to wonder the distinction between killing and murder.

Bursting into an impish smile, descending on ropes from helicopters, his language was notoriously salty, getting weirder and weirder; the benign-looking figure beaming down used pressure cookers to perfect his congee, a rice porridge that can feature pork, pickles, mushrooms and preserved egg. The colonel, whose shin had been pulverized, had also been shot in the chest, unleashing scallop croquettes with crushed seaweed. He returned fire and wounded the muddy river bottom, revealing a strange corpse. He saw that it was that of an old man – unshaved but not bearded, formerly a man of daunting physical stature and reputation, with an angular face and cropped graying hair. The colonel was not prepared emotionally for the impact of seeing dead bodies. He tried to look the part by growing facial hair and donning a black frock coat and string tie. To help other men overcome the stress of killing, he arrived with a clear sense of purpose: to subdue violence with violence, using a pocketknife, exchanging his gun for a paintbrush, offering the warmest embrace imaginable. There was a ritual significance, over the last several centuries, to rural dialects in the west; a street war raged between local competitors, aggravated but also capable of fresh-cut fries.
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