It's difficult to predict what the long-term fallout will be to this week's revelation that, for the past seven years, Volkswagen has been installing software designed to fool emissions tests in their diesel vehicles.
The company has already earmarked $9.8-billion to cover the fallout. Its reputation is in tatters, chief executive officer Martin Winterkorn has resigned and the company's stock dropped more than 30 per cent in three days.
What has not been reported, however, is that news of VW's dealing has sent a number of notable James Bond villains into a deep depression, as I can attest – they are in my house.
"I thought I was sinister," Auric Goldfinger says to me, sprawled dramatically on my office couch – my reputation for having a sympathetic ear having apparently spread to the criminal-mastermind community. "I invested my life in evil doings, but next to Volkswagen, I look like Maria from The Sound of Music."
"If you're Maria, I'm Gretl," sighs Hugo Drax. "I'm fairly sure my plan to poison the atmosphere with deadly nerve gas in order to kill all humanity would have worked, had I not skimped on my space station's radar-jamming device in order to ensure my shuttle's engine met basic environmental standards – I'm not a monster.
"My deadly gas was harmless to plants and animals – 11 million non-compliant VW vehicles dumping 948,691 tonnes of nitrogen oxide a year into our atmosphere, less so," Drax adds, doing some calculations on the back of an envelope.
This brings yet more sobbing from Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who has been curled up next to me all week, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his laptop while eating chips. "I miss my cat!" he wails. "I am sure that treacherous feline has left me for Martin Winterkorn – I just wasn't diabolical enough," he adds, reflexively beginning to stroke my hair again, as he does.
"Look," I plead with them, gently removing Blofeld's hand from my head, "you guys really have to stop comparing yourselves to other arch villains. You're all fiendish in your own way. It's not like you didn't try to utilize new technologies – ostensibly designed to save humanity – to wreak havoc. Isn't that right, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon?" I say coaxingly, to the despondent North Korean.
"Who's the man who tried to repurpose a giant orbital mirror created to end world hunger by refocusing the sun's rays and extending growing seasons? Who's the man who turned it into a giant laser? Who was going to use this evil satellite to blast through the Demilitarized Zone and conquer South Korea? You are. Yes, you are!"
The colonel, who has started a poetry blog, shrugs and gives me the closest thing to a smile I've seen since he arrived on my doorstep this week, asking if he could just "come in for a little while."
"Helloooo! My lab was in Venice," Drax interrupts. "Do you have any idea what the rents are like in Venice? But it never occurred to me that my product qualified for $51-million in subsidies for being green the way Volkswagen's did in the U.S."
"Sure," I add, grasping at straws, "but, as evil delivery-system names go, 'Moonraker' blows 'Jetta' straight out the sinister-moniker water."
"Whatever," Drax replies. "My nerve gas was derived from a rare Amazonian orchid. That passes 'green' and goes straight to 'precious.' I call myself evil but it still never crossed my mind to exploit the environmental angle.
"I mean, sure, I aimed to wipe out humanity in one fell swoop, and I thought that was pretty villainous, but a study just published in Nature says that smog causes three million deaths a year. It's been demonstrated that emissions from diesel cars cause 5,800 premature deaths annually in Britain alone, and VW had well-meaning consumers tootling around spreading this poison themselves. No space station involved – let alone one populated with a hot master race ready to step in, like the one I had going."
Here, Drax gets up and begins turning all my books on my shelves spine inward.
"Good to see you making an effort," I tell him soothingly. "But what you're doing there is not evil. It's just annoying – it will take me 20 minutes to fix that."
"I thought I was soooo malevolent," he says, emptying my stapler and attempting to slip a Windows Vista CD into my computer, "but I look at Volkswagen and my once-dastardly efforts start to look like artisanal evil. Compared to Volkswagen, I, with my organic-orchid poison, was practically selling cold-pressed coffee in Brooklyn – in Mason jars.
"Yeah, and all this really puts my scheme to make cars out of gold in order to smuggle the gold across borders without paying taxes in perspective," says Goldfinger, painting my toenails gold.
"Again, also not evil," I say, "just kitschy," but Goldfinger just keeps pedicuring and talking.
"None of my cars was rigged with a device to detect and thwart emissions tests that are there to combat air pollution and global warming. I was so close. I was making cars. And yet my whole master plan, my endgame, was to contaminate the gold in Fort Knox with deadly radiation in order to manipulate the markets. I just never stopped to think that the real dirty money was in the legitimate automotive industry.
"I am nothing. I am nobody. I have no evil legacy, 'Here lies Auric Goldfinger; he fudged his taxes and cheated at golf.'" Gold-finger then disappears under a blanket.
"Tell me about it. I only built a giant space laser …, " says Blofeld – this gets everyone's attention, as one or another of my guests has been trying to do this all week – "... controlled from a secret base on an oil platform and designed to destroy the world's nuclear arsenal in hopes of increasing the value of my own weapons stash at evil auction." He starts to pat my hair again.
"I certainly didn't partner with a bunch of well-meaning hippies to achieve that end. Evil fail! I never put out an ad campaign trying to dispel the 'myths' that space lasers were bad for you and that nuclear weapons produce harmful emissions, like those Volkswagen guys did with diesel.
"But I do want it noted, I was thwarted by a combination of James Bond and a team of Japanese secret-service ninjas. Not by a few scientists from a small NGO driving a Passat – the anti-Aston Martin – around California with an emissions tester in the trunk, like the team that took down Volkswagen," he says, using a teacup as an ashtray.
"See, there's some positive evil thinking," I say, turning my head as Darth Vader peeps around the door. "Hi, guys," he says. "It was called the 'Death Star.' We unveiled it by blowing up a peace-loving planet, but we never rigged it to pass emissions tests with flying colours, then fly out the testing facility's door producing 35 times the pollution allowed under a Clean Air Act. I think I'm just going to do volunteer work from now on, maybe backpack through Kashyyyk, and try to find myself again."
"Look, Darth, it's a bit much around here right now and this isn't your genre, could you just e-mail me?" I tell him, then say: "Hey, guys, let's go watch a movie. You can talk really loudly all the way through it."
This is all on your head, Volkswagen.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article referred to VW emissions as nitrous oxide. This has been corrected.