Every cat knows that wanting to get even isn’t the same as being able to get even.  And even if you can get even, you still must find the best way to get even.  It’s hard. So far as I know, Emperor Xi and his advisors are still working on that puzzle.   

After all, the emperor didn’t want to push Putin so hard that a bomb like the Uyghurs went off in the Forbidden City.  If Emperor Xi knew anything, he knew Putin had plenty of crazy in him.  Putin was violent too.  In principle, Emperor Xi didn’t mind violence too much.  Only the most meticulous bean counters knew how many Chinese Mao killed or even how many comrades the People’s Army mowed down in Tiananmen Square.  Big numbers don’t matter.  As Comrade Stalin once noticed, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”  Who cares if the population of China is 1 billion or 1.3 billion?  Let the demographers worry about that.

But this is all reconstruction of Xi’s mind.  I’ve only met him a few times in reception lines when I accompany a foreign dignitary.  A haughty man, he never has me included in the state photographs.  Instead, I revenge myself on him by feeling up his handsome, starlet wife.  She’s not any harder to make hay with than Melania.  You just rely on time-honoured kitty techniques.  Making biscuits on a woman’s tummy is always a good start, once you’ve made the initial approach of hopping into her lap for weaving about her legs.

For the time being, neither Wolverine, Peregrine nor, so I gathered, Putin worried about the Chinese.  To be careful, Putin did feed Mr Clean his honey-trap agent in Beijing.  You can’t find a well=distributed ash that the rains have soaked into a Beijing garden. 

The agent was as astonished as Joe Pesci’s psychopathic character in the “Goodfellas” when he walked into a room assuming he was going to be made and got a bullet in the head.   Wolverine told me he heard she arrived at her last party with the idea that she was getting an Orden «Za zaslugi pered Otechestvom» or Order “For Merit of the Fatherland” at the level of “first-class.”  Instead, she got Mr Clean’s death laser.  Life has so many surprises. It’s shocking she didn’t suspect this was her destiny.

Watching Wolverine do a pantomime of her final moments on Zoom did make me laugh. Wolverine’s ability to go bug-eyed enhanced his death act. The kill team then went to work arranging the erasure of every sign of her existence on earth, but most especially in Russia.  After he finished his comic routine for me, he commented, “Putin knows Xi.  That clown would have tried to have all Russian women of honey-trap age in China interrogated.  Why take risks when you can vanish the problem?”

Lord Caligula celebrated the Chinese explosion at his Suffolk estate with Constance Lawless.  As they sipped champagne, Constance remarked, “Our boys turned out better than we had hoped.  With their Eton educations, you could not hope for the engineering excellence they have attained, let alone their adroit problem management.”  Lord Caligula concurred.  “You know, I feared Peregrine might go to Cambridge after Eton rather into the family business.  I dreaded it.  One reason I opted for an estate in Suffolk rather than Cambridgeshire or even Essex was an infestation of dons in those two counties.  I can’t kill them all. Besides, some dons are okay.  I’d even trust them to eat sirloin if the pansies they teach insist on vegan dinners, but most dons are prissy, meddling do-gooders.”

“Oh?” purred Constance giving his Lordship’s love machinery a gentle nip.  She was always happy when her Lordship had one of his private showings of privates.

Continued thoughts of Cambridge began to incense Lord Caligula. “Trinity has always been a nut clutch.  Wittgenstein!  The lefties got that mad Austrian a professorship where I hear the dirty bugger seduced his boy students into believing his rubbish. Not satisfied with that crime, he had to cheek to bugger them at every opportunity as well.  I dare say my own sexual peculiarities are children of a Cambridge education.  At least I attended Trinity, not King’s College.  King’s was always the seedbed of the most relentless inverts.  Lytton Strachey went there. His creepy bi brother translated the lunatic Freud’s works.  That should tell you all you need to know.”

“Now, now” murmured Constance.  It turned out fine.  You have had a son, a smart, handsome bastard in Peregrine Blond-Bomb, and plenty of other bastards as well.  And consider how all those attractive wives you wearied of died in mysterious circumstances before they collected a half-pence of alimony.  Many men aren’t so lucky.”

Listening to his life of good fortune aroused his Lordship, as Constance knew it would.  At his best, he is far superior to Irascible Lawless.   Irascible never agreed to go with her to London.  It got in the way of him torturing the animals he trapped.  All Constance had to do to please his Lordship was flatter him whilst feigning an initial show of subservience.  Once aroused, his Eton and Trinity education got the better of him. Then, she could let her domina out.  His Lordship made a good bottom once you got him going and reinstated prior training.  Alas, she could never interest the obligate heterosexual Irascible in any Suffolk games. She did enjoy picturing I L& C together.

Her talk with Lord Caligula confirmed she must talk to Wolverine.  The lad was pushing the limits of survivability hard, and she was not confident he was ready to match wits and resources with Putin and Xi even if Lord Caligula was.  His Lordship had the royal connexions for that game.

For the journalist me, Constance Lawless was a godsend.  In my presence, she became an open book.  All you need do was push her nympho button and she’d tell anything.  I learnt about his Suffolk episode by making biscuits on her fanny. There’s nothing so forthcoming as a grateful bavard.  Without knowing it, she tattled a truth unknown to me about her dominant self.  Constance loved to kiss and tell and . . . brag, in fact.