When I surveyed the room, I saw Fielding and Bart had put their hard eyes on.  A slaughterman would give a steer entering the slaughterhouse the same look.  It was unwise of Constance to have made any threats, however veiled, in Bart’s house.  Fielding would have killed Constance for the sake of general principles.  She detests rich bitches.  Bart and Fielding were two tough Mollys annealed in a San Antonio barrio.

Constance pretended oblivion to the whole scene.  Fearing the direction of the impending action, I waved Bart and Fielding down.  “Just look at how serious these two get when they think anybody would hurt me.  Of course, Constance and I are dear friends.”  Bart and Fielding rolled their eyes.  The two of them dropped their lethal stares but stayed vigilant.  

“How rude of me.  I may have looked too mean.  Fielding and I mistook her for one of her bastards.”  Constance glared at her and I noticed her left nostril flared, so I got her to toss back another vodka.

Once she and I got talking, she knew about bits of the doings in Goma that I had not.  Living in Saint Louis, I did have NGA contacts from whom I got good intelligence.  Peregrine, Wolverine, and even Caligula had also provided telling details.  

For example, from Wolverine, I learnt an avaricious Munitions Galore scientist in Reading had provided a shifty, money-toting Nigerian with a small stealth bomb.  The scientist had worked on the bomb’s stealth jacket without knowing of its full capabilities.  After Lord Caligula rewarded him for his good work with a trip to Portugal, the scientist disappeared in a diving accident off the Portuguese coast.  No body was recovered.  

The Nigerian, bomb in tow, had no difficulty getting a stealth bomb onto his flight. That’s the beauty of this bomb.  The crafty Nigerian went from Gatwick to Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed International Airport.  Instead of meeting a representative of a Russian oligarch in Lago, love of money got ahold of him.  So, he met with a gang of big-thinking terrorist thieves with abundant cash and connections in Goma.  

Word is that the Nigerian conniver disappeared in Lagos without a trace, as did the money.  The oligarch was furious but denied he had anything to do with the Nigerian’s disappearance.  The terrorists took a flight from Murtala to Accra in Ghana.  The gang then had to fly to Addis Ababa to catch a flight from there to Goma.  It was a nightmare of a trip.  It takes 22 hours to get from Accra to Goma provided all goes well.

A snitch in the gang tipped the Russian oligarch’s contacts.  A Russian operative put a tracer on the “bomb” as the clueless terrorists waited in the Addis Ababa airport.  As soon as the Russians knew the bomb was going to Goma, Putin got the facts from his oligarch friend.  Now in the know, Putin mobilsed CCO assets and they were in Goma by the time the terrorist thieves arrived.  

Putin was enraged that somebody had swiped one of his Munitions Galore bombs.  Peregrine got an earful from Putin about that.  The CCO had no trouble dealing with this gang of amateurs. The thieves had death & blackmail in mind, believing the stealth bomb had a small, tactical nuclear device under its jacket.  They should have been as stealthy as the swiped bomb.  Instead, the CCO left them dead to feed local animals, including two happy crocs, in a shack outside Goma.

With the bomb back and in Moscow, Putin was unsatisfied.  Who financed this plot?  CCO experts came up with a list of plausible rich culprits in Uganda and Rwanda.  It was convenient list.  The likely Ugandan masterminds were in Kampala and the Rwandans in Kigali. Not hard places to find whomever you’re looking for.   

Less than ten murders later, Putin was satisfied.

Shortly thereafter, Wolverine had made his way to Moscow.  He had a better understanding of the bomb’s powers than Putin.  After he gave Vlad an inkling, it was child’s play to convince him that only the Chinese were ruthless, devious, secretive, and powerful enough to cover up what the bomb did after the bomb’s first test. 

But both Wolverine and Putin needed a real-world test of the bomb’s effectiveness.  Neither of them puts a lot of stock in what lab results showed.  Those two wanted a body of evidence.  In fact, they wanted lots of bodies of evidence.

I now knew more facts than anybody had previously shared with me.  As Constance had more to drink, it became clear that (a) she did worry about Wolverine getting himself into a game where he was outclassed and outresourced and (b) she worried that she might have no way of her cut of probable big bucks out of it.  Being a little drunk, she began to sniffle, “It would break Irascible’s heart to discover his own son was scheming to cheat his parents out of a cut of this big score.  What kind of boy had they reared?  Loving families shared what they stole.”

I offended her when I asked if she and Irascible shared.  “How dare you.  Irascible and I are Wolverine’s mother and father.  He’ll get his when he inherits it, provided he doesn’t proe to be an ungrateful, chiselling son.”  

Fielding had had enough.  

She switched the telly on.  Lou Dobbs was touting candidate Trump’s wall.  Constance smiled.

“I just adore that man.  We do need a wall.  We need more guns too.”  Bart broke in, “And the wall shouldn’t be just down south.  We need one to keep the snowbacks out.  Canadians have been mooching off us since the Revolutionary War.  When our ancestors were fighting, theirs were kissing King George’s crazy ass.”   For once, Constance, Fielding, and Bart agreed about something.  Bart and Fielding recalled the Battle of Martinez Creek.  Whenever they did that, you could count the seconds before they’d begin raving about the menace the Northern Hordes posed to our country.  There were risks to an open northern border. Fielding worried lots of “sissy draft dodgers and their fairy, French friends.” would sneak back to our country.  Bart snarled out that she feared a resurgence of Leonard Cohen’s music or, worse still, Gordon Lightfoot’s.  And then who knows how many moose, wolves, polar bears, racoons, and other undesirables would come south?  

The three ladies–Constance Fielding, and Bart–began to scream, “Our trump is Trump! Our trump is Trump!”  Chicago, Quine, and I for various reasons didn’t believe them.  If Trump’s the trump let’s play some other game.  We did and do have the common sense to keep that opinion to ourselves.

All this excitement left Constance feeling amorous.  “Find out what delicious entertainers are in town.  I’d so like a taste of Clooney this evening, but I’m so hot to trot, I’d settle for Pavarotti.  What libido those Italians have!  If you know him, Pavarotti’s lucky he’s not in jail.”  But if there was one thing Constance could not abide, it was poor nobodies.  Her appetite was for men worthy of “The Lives of the Rich and Famous, ” unless they were Russian ballet dancer.  She had no patience with homosexualists like Nureyev.

“Call my limo back, Crockett.  And don’t expect me back this evening.  You’re a nice guy, but this neighbourhood is declassee.  For god’s sake, Roberta and mike have you living next to an interstate.  Were houses adjacent to massage parlours, strip bars, and tire stores all unavailable?”  

Bart and Fielding hissed.  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she told them, “I forgot that you two were doing the best you could when you picked your overeducated servants.”  Her chauffeur opened the front door and out she waltzed to her limo.  

Bart and Fielding stared at me, smacked my nose, and said in unison, “When are you going to embrace us killing her?”