Once solicitors got charges against Peregrine dropped, he left Holland.  Peregrine zoomed me, how he got my number at Claridge’s is anybody’s guess. He complained that Lord Caligula was sending him to Kiel to the Universitätsklinikum Schleswig-Holstein, the top hospital in Kiel.  Constance’s bill had already been settled by his Lordship.  Not wanting a lot of questions, his Lordship also made the hospital a large donation in Constance’s name.  Peregrine’s fear was the mood Constance would be in.

To confuse prying eyes, Peregrine told me he had to fly into Copenhagen.  A driver would fetch him from the aeroport and take him to Kiel.  A second driver would fetch them from the hospital in Kiel to drive him and Constance to Berlin.  He was to take them to the Hotel Adlon. Lord Caligula would meet them there.

  His Lordship had reserved the Berlin Suite for Constance.  Peregrine also learnt, he told me, that the Adlon’s Linden Suite was reserved for him and Wolverine.  When Peregrine mentioned the Linden Suite had only 1 King bed, Peregrine told me that his Lordship exploded, screaming, “You two fairies spent what 5 years buggering each other at Eton, and now you pretend to have wholesome preferences.  Pretend for the week you’re Etonians again.  I’ll have lube placed in the suite for you.”  When Peregrine explained that he and Wolverine were bisexual, his Lordship got further incensed. “Bisexual?  What rubbish. I know you boys for what you are.  A pair of Trisexuals is more like it.  You’ll try anything sexual, eh?  You two are as deviantly indiscriminate as anybody ever graduated from an English public school.  Do you want me to hire an Etonian beak for the week to flog your naked bottoms? Will that warm you up? Stop complaining.  You and Wolverine will share that suite.”

By now, Peregrine was in tears.  I suggested he just let another room in addition to the suite.  He went sour.  “Would you deprive me of my friend Wolverine’s companionship?  He is so fun and cuddly.” I knew it was time to give up.  The Zoom call ended.

I wondered whether to tell Lucky.  She had gone to Reading to take photos of the Munitions Galore’s charred buildings.  Lucky adored this genre of photograph.  The woman took pride in her work. 

During a break from watching cartoons, I switched the telly to BBC news.  

Eureka!  There was Lord Caligula being asked about the fire at Munitions Galore.  Without losing a beat, his Lordship said, “In the last days, God foretells that bad things happen.  This, though, isn’t much of a bad thing.  I am no fool. I carry insurance for calamities like this. Talk to my insurance brokers and Lloyds.  They’re crying in their goblets of gold.  I’m at last getting money from my policies.” 

It’s hard to fault his logic.  Let fools like mike say that the best liability policies are the ones you never need to use.  If I spend my money on insurance, I want something more than a promise to pay if this or that happens.  I want a cash return, a lovely Krugerrand or two.  

About the time, the clocks started chiming 6, Lucky swept back into our suite.  She was wearing, black capris with her feet stuffed into a pair of red hightop converse sneakers. she had on a pale green silk shirt, over it was was wearing a black jacket with a dragon in red, green and gold on each sleeve.  The jacket had a beautiful full-colour tiger on the back. 

I noticed on closer inspection that the jacket had an interior pocket with one of her Walters in it.  The jacket’s exterior pockets had her police Spyderco and a mace dispenser in them.  She had dropped a bag with an old, treasured Pentax camera and almost certainly another Walter in it.  Then she pulled me over to the couch.  She opened her laptop and before I knew it she had transferred photos of the the ruins in Redding to the laptop from her iPhone.  “Look, darling, isn’t it all glorious?”  She was so happy in vengeance that I didn’t have the heart to tell her Lord Caligula was well insured.  Instead, I mentioned I most enjoyed looking at photographs with good food.

In a jiffy, she had me one of those scrumptious haddock omelets with mornay sauce sent up. When I ripped the omelet open, the haddock was delightfully flaky.  I heard her murmur “Darling, you look so content when you eat well.  I could just eat you up.”  

Frankly, I’d rather she not go that far.   I already had to be careful that I didn’t get myself too sauced with mornay.  If I did, I was risked a bath.  

It must have been close to 9 PM when the phone rang.  Lucky seemed weary. She flipped the speakerphone on.  Bam.  I recognised the voice of Wiredu.  

I heard this words, “Miss Ming, I thought yo might like to know that  Constance Lawless, Lord Caligula, one of his bastards, a chap called Peregrine, and Constance’s boy Wolverine Lawless have checked into the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.  Don’t worry.  They no longer have pictures of Hitler in the lobby.  It’s safe for an asian girl to visit. I thought you’d like to know.”  I heard the click. 

Lucky looked at me.  “That was the creep Wiredu’s voice, wasn’t it, darling?” I nodded. She continued, “The chickenshit wants me to do his work for him.”

Now of course I wondered how much Lucky knew about Wiredu.  Lucky was even better connected than Fielding.  But the real question was why his Lordship’s gang was in Berlin. Linden avenue where the Aldon is was an area not took far from Friedrichstrasse, where Berlin’s Puppenjunge once loitered.  If you walk out of the Aldon to go east on Unter den Linden, you’ll run into Friedrichstrasse.  If you head north on Friedrichstrasse, you’d reach the Bahnhof.  Train stations are always havens for punk trade. 

Ad you ou can bet your life that there is not a Paedophile Polar Bear alive that hasn’t read Puppenjunge, a book translated by the paederast John Henry Mackay as The Hustler.

Of course, the hustling boys in Puppenjunge are too old for polar bear tastes, but they still can’t get enough of the book. I’ve never met a Paedophile Polar Bear who had not worn out several copies of The Hustler.  

Paedophile Polar Bears are also mad for the work of Christopher Isherwood, and I’ve yet to meet one who hasn’t see Cabaret a few hundred time, or extolled the genius of J M Barrie, the eccentric, asexual bore who wrote Peter Pan and, even worse, The Boy Castaways of  Black Lake Island.   But the bears are so keen Barry, but not as keen as they are Mackay or Isherwood.  

So, I began to suspect the bears had something to do with Lord Caligula’s visit to Berlin. Perhaps Lucky did too. She wasted no time booking us the Penthouse Suite at Das Stue.   Once she had the suite booked, she smiled, telling me, “You’ll love it, darling.  I’ll order their fresh eels for you. Don’t worry, I’ll slice them up small for you.  If you want, I’ll get you some sturgeon too.  This chic hotel will put us near the Zoo and away from the spies near the Brandenburg Gate.”  

There was no escaping.  I was on my way to Berlin, a city with a history of setting the standard not for low morals but for no morals.  It is a new Babylon.  And it was going Babylon even before Weimar decadence and all queer Nazis that smoothed Adolf’s climb to power.  I think the Brown Shirts were cut from the same cloth as the hairy Proud Boys. These are all the type of guys at home in leather bars.