The traceless vanishing of two G-men in rural Missouri did what anybody smart would expect.  A plague of G-men arrived in Pulaski, Crawford, Texas Counties to investigate.  

Investigators piled threats on threats on the 16-year-old squeezer that swiped the missing G-men’s car from the Walmart in St Robert.  If you thought about this girl, you may have suspected she was, a flaming borderline. She was a girl never more than a half-jump from a looney bin.  But she bypassed the looney bin.   She dropped into her grave early.

 An attendant at the Huddle House catty-corner from the Phillip 66 Truck Stop off I-44 in Cuba found her. She sat in the Huddle’s Lady Room.  She had died of an overdose taking her last dump.  Hers was no dapper cadaver.  There she was enthroned in all her deceased magnificence.  Behold: her cyanotic body propped up against the toilet stall’s left wall. Her last offering to our world rested half-submerged in the toilet water beneath her dead end. Imagine how her open, pale, snake eyes stared back at the attendant who found her.   The attendant choked out an “Oh shit.” Then she screamed. 

Lickety-split coppers from all about made it to the Huddle House.  Some were happy to have orders of Fried Pickles, others ordered waffles. Sergeants and above ordered eggs and chicken-fried steak. They all waited, bored but eating, for permission to leave. 

After a long wait, the FBI arrived.  Angry G-men began to lay blame for the girl’s death on the dead girl.  If only she had not fallen into the only life she had ever known, this would never have happened.  That was the gist of their postmortem.  A few G-men blamed co-workers for failing to offer the girl a better deal.  The smart ones connected to the truth: She didn’t know squat.

Throughout the hunt for the gone G-men, Wolverine held a stream of parties attended by the rich and powerful.  It was as if Wolverine made it a point to never let an investigator find him at home without a General, a gazillionaire, or a famed politician in his company.

Wolverine de-emphasised the presence of his numerous Bot security details.  Instead, he decorated his property with Xe security for high-net-worth individuals.”  

After investigators had made numerous visits, Wolverine’s suave presentation won them over.  He always described the “bots” as experimental toys.  He insisted he relied on his Xe team for protection, not novelties like a Bot.  From what I gather, the G-men gobbled up this bullshit whole.

During this time of investigation, I wrote the Putin-loving stories for L’Afrique Aujourdh’hui.   Subsequently, Wolverine and I turned the miscellaneous articles into a best-selling book in Francophone Africa. Wolverine also arranged for English and Portuguese translations.  If any readers have seen the French and English translations, they’ll recall a placid Putin standing with an enormous wood cross behind him.  All about him stand moonshine-swilling Americans in camo and their simian Ukrainian henchmen with hammer and nails.  They’re ready to crucify loving Putin.  The book’s title stretched above the cover picture.  The title was magnificent in its ridiculousness: Will They Nail Our Saviour to the Cross?  

By relying on materials Wolverine had sent me, I built a narrative aiming to prove that not only was Putin the reincarnation of Jesus but the reincarnation of Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X as well. My job required some fancy metaphysics.  Both Lumumba and Malcolm X died at the hands of assassins after the birth of Putin.  I worked out a multiple soul hypothesis. Exquisitely large, immaculate “soul receptacles,” that is, a body can hold several souls that can arrive at any time.  

And so, Putin’s virtue allowed him to take in the souls not only of Jesus but of Lumumba and Malcolm X.  It was as if Putin was not just a Trinitarian being, but a quadripartite being.

The writing was easy enough.  As for having enough virulent passages about Americans and Ukrainians, I grabbed any extant antisemitic passages about Jews and Jesus I could find.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a treasure house for me.  Mein Kampf and the writings of Goebbels were also superb.  Once I substituted Americans or Ukrainians for Jews and Putin for Jesus, I had an embarrassment of riches when it came to hateful tropes to write into passages when I needed them. 

Sometimes Wolverine worried that in some countries Lumumba was either not popular or was disliked.  We found an easy solution.  For the book’s editions in those countries, we just substituted the name of a beloved local martyr for Lumumba or, if need be, Malcolm, or even substituted Mohammed or Castro for Jesus.

At first, Bart disapproved of these articles and books.  She claimed I was a horrible example to Chicago and Quine.  She complained it was dishonest.  Then she learnt the size of my advance and royalties.  So she reversed herself.  She also took back mean comments about me being a lying imbecile.  Instead, she put it to me like this.  “You’re not really lying.  You’re being paid.”  I resisted asking her whether she extended this defence to shyster personal injury lawyers that had accused her over the years of torts.  I was being paid and she was not going to analyse away a benefit.