My sources tell me Lord Caligula had finished Zoom-sex session with Constance.  He was lounging on his chaise lounge in a silk smoking jacket and cap, having a Campari with soda and smoking an old Cuban Davidoff when he saw breaking news from Vladivostok.  Peregrine was in an adjacent room having a cup of chocolate when he heard his lordship bellow.   He had heard a different kind of bellow about a quarter of an hour early as his Lordship reached a climax with the video assistance of Constance.

He rushed into the room at this second bellow.  His father’s room was a mess with a miscellany of sex toys strewn on the desk about a computer.  His lordship had yet to put on breeches.  When Peregrine handed his Lordship a pair, saying, “Here father,” Lord Caligula exploded, ‘You’re one of my bastards.  Do not dare to have the impertinence to call me your father.  You have a shopkeeper’s obsession with modesty.  You’d think you’d have seen enough episodes of Rome to know that modesty for the Aristocracy is a needless affectation.  And father?  Keep in mind that I am at best your MGSD (Most Generous Sperm Donor.”

 None of this speech was unfamiliar to Peregrine.  He had heard it all before, though he was glad his Lordship had donned his silk breeches, as he had no desire to look any longer than he already had at his Lordship’s detumescent member. 

Before Peregrine could construct a witty reply, Lord Caligula ordered him to look at the telly.  The BBC World News was reporting a story from Vladivostok.  A bus of Chinese tourists from Suifenhe had made the mistake of arriving in Vladivostok on a Saturday afternoon. If the city had a sober Russian in it, the Chinese meet them.  As the Chinese began to debus, an inebriated teen boy in torn Levi’s, a shaved head, oxblood-coloured Dr Marten’s, an AC/DC t-shirt, and a Members-Only jacket screamed, “Chinamen!”  At once drunken hordes of Russians, guys and gals, set on them. 

News rushes of the incident revealed what the BBC reporters described as “tourists” being whipped with bicycle chains, hit with rods, stoned, beaten insensate with fists, kicked in the head, torso, or groin, eye-gouged by drunken howling Russian harpies, and otherwise abused.  More news footage showed battered Chinese lying naked or in shredded clothing on the filthy street.  Luckier Chinese were on their knees begging for mercy.  Reporters tried to speak to members of gangs of drunken Russian sailors insisting on their right to “defend the motherland.”

News Footage showed some sailors turned to the task of stripping the Chinese of whatever belongings they still had on. Once stripped the sailors then tossed them, denuded of their possessions and dignity, back into the bus or through its windows. Luckily for the Chinese, not a single Russian at the scene, including the cops, was sober enough to think of searching the bus.  To chants of “Beat the Chinamen, the bus rolled away.” 

Drunken cops then explained what a menace the Chinese were to the tranquility and public order of Vladivostok. They praised the self-help justice meted out by the crowd to Chinese troublemakers.

As Peregrine watched the coverage, he muttered, “What the fuh. . .”  but couldn’t get a “k” out.”  As Lord Caligula watched, he said “Indeed.”  After a pregnant pause, he added, “Emperor Xi will not be well pleased.”

Both his Lordship and Peregrine agreed that what they saw was “a bit much.” 

Unlike Peregrine, Lord Caligula’s political seasoning and knowledge of foreign affairs convinced him he had seen the unintentional thwarting of a Chinese special operation.  If anybody paid attention to the “tourists,” they seemed too fit to be plausible tourists, even if they were no match for maddened Russians.  Emperor Xi was going to be angrier than he already was before he set his team loose on the Russians. 

Lord Caligula had also had the benefit of a tip from me.  My contacts at the NGA, CIA, and NSA had told me they had reason to believe the Chinese had an operation planned in Vladivostok.  Unlike his Lordship, the intelligence agencies were less clear about the reason for the operation.  Instead, they had heard a group called the Kasparovs were ready to hatch their plot. With a master statesman’s skill, Lord Caligula assembled the pieces into a coherent story. 

Meanwhile, the news on BBC continued. A correspondent had retrieved a drunk pregnant teen from the crowd. Her purple hair gleamed in the sun. Her bloodied, eyeball-encrusted fingernails glowed on the telly, along with rather bad skin and yellow teeth.  Under questioning, she claimed with serene indifference to photographic evidence that the Chinamen had attacked her.  If you took her at her word, only the ferocity of her Russian rescuers rallying to defend her honor had saved her from the indecent advances of the so-called Chinese tourists.  ”Thank god, my guy got the boot and his blade in on the most forward of them sneaky ‘preverts.’  I might have been right ruined.”  Even I guffawed.  What an innocent waif she was.

At that point, Lord Caligula reached his limit. Campari and soda burst from his mouth and nose.  His Davidoff sailed across the room, coming to rest atop a very large obscene toy whose fluid-soaked surface extinguished it with a hiss.  Even Peregrine began to laugh. “No. We’d not want her ‘ruined.’”

In Beijing, Emperor Xi was looking cross as he stared at his television set.  A big shot in Chinese special ops sat looking panicked at Xi’s side.

Of course, I don’t know what Emperor Xi saw or had to say to his special ops experts after the Debacle in Vladivostok.  I must make it up.   Lord Caligula’s farcical rendition of it gave me hiccoughs I laughed so hard, but I doubt he killed the Emperor in his office.  The custom is to wait.

You don’t have to be a genius to get the gist of the Chinese plan.  The operatives took a bus to Vladivostok.  They debus, rendezvous at a place to prepare, do what they had to do to the Borei, return to the bus, and, at last, return to Suifenhe or even Harbin.  Nobody among the GKs had a soul so Russian that he anticipated the universal drunkenness on a Saturday afternoon, let alone the ferocious hooliganism that went with it.  The Russian made Manchester United fans look like rambunctious Sunday schoolers.  

Victory, as the saying goes, has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.  If you, gentle readers, could only see his Lordship mimicking a minister’s conjecture that a discrete visit to the wounded operatives could boost morale.  “Visit them?  I should grind them into sausages for my Chows!”  In his Lordship’s version, the Emperor then strangles the dim minister.  According to his Lordship, the Emperor asked why he could not have an office like the Head of Spectre has for times like this one.  If only failures could be sent skidding screaming down a chute to a tank of frenzied sharks. 

After his comedy routine, Lord Caligula did assure me that the Emperor will not let this disgrace pass without reply.

I recall the day after the incident seeing the Chinese Ambassador going to the Kremlin to protest the abuse of Chinese tourists in Vladivostok.  

Putin was Putin.  He deplored the violence but wondered what the “Chinamen” had done to provoke it.  And who were these “Chinamen?”  Putin invited the press to consider whether normal human beings go to Vladivostok as tourists.  These suspected tourists were plainly an ensemble of madmen.  Small wonder Russian patriots, who perhaps had a drink more than was wise, defended a young woman who cried for help when a so-called tourist and his lascivious accomplices tried to violate her.  Putin called for an investigation by authorities to identify what measures might be taken to keep vulnerable weak-minded foreigners from being stripped of their reason by the beauty of Russian women.  

For my part, I think Putin’s message was marred by an obese, untidy babushka scrubbing a floor not that far behind him.   Even I could keep my reason intact about her.  Call me sexist.  I like pretty. Check out my beauties Bart or Fielding.  I’m fussy.

Anyway, Putin’s answer did not mollify the angrier-than-a-wet-hen ambassador.  Instead, he told a BBC correspondent that he had come in search of redress for injuries to innocent Chinese tourists. Instead, he got a basket full of blame for his effort.  He added that he feared for the safety of Russians in China if this was their government’s response to just one consequence of Russia’s universal alcoholism and lawlessness.

The ambassador then scanned the Kremlin. Slowly, he turned his face back to the BBC correspondent.  He smiled at her. Then, gesturing at the Kremlin while also managing to point a finger at President Putin, in a full voice he told her his message.  She and the world heard his message loud and clear, ‘There ain’t no angels around here.”  He then said it again, or so I am told, in perfect Muscovite Russian.

By eventide that day, the BBC went to the Chinese Embassy to request comment on Patriarch Kirill’s denunciation of the Chinese ambassador’s “intemperate, unloving” comments that afternoon.  After the ambassador listened to the correspondent read from the text of the Moscow Patriarch’s denunciation, he stood with a blank face in a handsome blue suit. He commented as he shrugged his shoulders, “Yet another not-an-angel chattering in Moscow.”

Alas, the reporter-me knew there was more to come.