During Mika’s first appearance on Morning Joe after her evening with Lord Caligula, she pounced onto the set with a lioness’s confidence.  She announced she had “cornered” his Lordship in a restaurant.  Her relentless queries battered away the man’s defences until he confessed to earning his money from fear and vengeance.

Joe joined her assault.  You’d have thought Joe was shocked to discover anybody would try to monetize fear and vengeance as Joe was now doing.  He raved about the world’s war pigs like Munitions Galore that got fat lapping up the blood of innocent children and others blown to smithereens by his Lordship and his bastard son and henchman Peregrine Blond-Bomb.  

None of these objections struck me as good candidates for changing Lord Caligula’s mind.   

I couldn’t help wondering if his Lordship might think the adulterous Joe and Mika had a right to lecture his Lordship about good morals.  After all, the rumour mills had it that they had been having goes at one another since 2010 or so.  Attentive readers may recall that Mika didn’t get rid of her husband, albeit by lawful means, until 2016.  The twice-divorced Joe didn’t give wife number 2 the heave-ho until 2013.  About 3 years after he started sampling Mika’s wares.  Like here, he knew her value.

Like Voltaire, they had a relaxed view of the demands of sexual morality as applied to themselves.  They were strict on matters that didn’t tempt them like selling Arms for huge profits.  I had heard Lord Caligula mention to her over their dinner that if not for men like himself, her dad would have had very little to do.  She should show more gratitude.  To judge by the sounds I heard emanating that night from the back seat of the limousine, Mika is no ingrate.

From what Wolverine told me, criticism of Munitions Galore never hurt its bottom line.  If anything, the snivelling critics made more buyers aware of Munitions Galore’s numerous product lines, all of them profitable without even more business.  

During the talk with Wolverine, he sang my praises as he described how delighted “our friends in Moscow” were to read my stories in L’Afrique Aujourd’hui.  Bart and Fielding may accuse me of being an imbecile, but unmet friends in Moscow had a different opinion.  Despite Fielding and Bart’s bad rating of my intellect, they both granted I had become a much better provider. I pleased them mightily by hiding my new wealth from Roberta and mike.  Wolverine had proved useful as he had become of master of Swiss bank accounts, shell companies, and cleaning money in all forms.  

Quine and Chicago liked the idea of inheritable fortunes. Quine liked to squeal, “You mean I’m an heir?  What am I worth.”  If Roberta was in the room, Bart would smack him senseless, telling Roberta, “The boy was having a bad dream.”  Chicago liked to carry on about how once he was rich, he would have regular pedicures.   Bart’s fear was that if Roberta ever leant about my growing holdings, she’d squander it on donations to Catholic Charities or, just as creepy, social justice programmes whether catholic or something else.  It made Bart and Fielding sick at heart to think Roberta might give their money away to feed the hungry or some such nonsense.

Wolverine had no doubt that charity was a waste of money.  “What happens when you give to the poor?  Let me tell you.  You destroy the identity of the poor.  It’s identity murder, a subspecies of soul murder.   The poor don’t mind their lives if you keep them away from malcontents and liberal goody-goods.  The poor man has a special perspective.  He has unattainable, but delicious, fantasies about the rich.  Why spoil them?  Do you tell a teen boy dreaming of in-out with Penelope Cruz that it’s an impossible love?  Cruel mothers may do that, but any decent mother ought to find something else to do with her time than steal her son’s dreams.  As I see it, a mother, no matter the photographic or pornographic evidence must never tamper with her young wanker’s dreams.  Impossible dreams carry a boy through his grim lot in school.” 

The range of Wolverine’s philosophical and psychological thinking always amazed me.  Given his theories, no wonder members of White’s in London talked to him whenever they could.  Wolverine wrote several opinion pieces explaining why White’s must never allow women members or remove British wild game from its menu.  He worried that having women members would cause the nauseating spectacle of members leaving the club sober or feeling that laws against sodomy were going to be enforced in the club.  These opinion pieces received the acclaim of members but did less well with jealous women scheming to attain membership.  One constant fear at White’s was cross-dressing women sneaking into the club.  More than one member wept at the thought of that.

I did take Wolverine’s renewed interest in philosophical thinking as a sign.  He wasn’t spending so much time, I reckoned, having to ward off pest from the FBI worrying about a couple of missing G-men.