I have struggled to write this past week. I did anyway. As my late friend Chuck Close used to say “Inspiration is for amateurs.” You have to trust the process. If you sit down to write, you often discover that writing occurs whether you want to or not. Creation is doing, not waiting.
Now let me be candid. I’ve had to force myself to the process. Bart, my dear friend and lover, has got cancer. Roberta and mike noticed it. Bart told me she was fine. When Roberta forced her into a kitty carrier for a trip to the vet, Bart was in shock. She had never felt better. Sure, she had a lump or two, but then some vet started examining her. Do these vets know anything other than gloomy hypotheses? Being nattering nabobs of negativism, as Bill Safire once wrote, is their speciality.
Without getting Bart’s informed consent, Roberta scheduled her with a vet surgeon.
The vet’s henchmen assaulted Bart, drugged her, and then the chief witch began carving on her. If human women mourn the loss of two nipples, imagine how a Molly with nine nipples feels. Bart awoke to discover the slicers had done a bilateral mastectomy. She lost all her nipples.
Poor Bart came home and it took her a full three weeks to be rid of an E collar and out of a onesie. She didn’t even have the strength to plot vengeance on vets and their ilk.
If it weren’t for my fear of injury, I might have done more to rescue her; however, don’t the wise say that discretion is the better part of valour? So, what good would it do Bart for me to be injured defending her? I did write a letter to KPS (kitty protective services). The loafing incompetents there have yet to get to me. And so I wrote few futile feature stories on the evils of veterinary medicine did no good either.
I did tell Bart that I would have done more if only I hadn’t been travelling. Being a natural fink, Fielding ratted and said I, whilst she was being cut, sat around stress eating. Satisfied to have ratted me out, Fielding delivered a few rabbit punches to my head. I’d have taught Fielding a good lesson after that if she weren’t meaner, tougher, and stronger than I am. If you’re a guy, what I put up with from Fielding is the price Toms pay in Kittyland for the smart choice of choosing tough, fearless wives as bodyguards. Sometimes they have mean mouths too. What Tom likes being called a worm?
The negativist vets estimates that Bart won’t last another year. I cry bull shit. If anybody thinks Steve Seagal is hard to kill, he hasn’t met Bart or Fielding. Bart will go down swinging. Don’t bet she’ll be gone in a year or less. She is 15 or so now. But I expect her to wage war on cancer. Even now, she has gained weight. She is back up to seven and a half pounds. She has no plans “to go gentle into that good night.” She is a warrior.
In the years since the Lithuania bombing, I never told her I had any role. Neither she nor Fielding recognised anybody else as having a right to put me in danger. And if Lucky had settled for hiring somebody to kill Wolverine, Bart and Fielding would have offered her a deep discount.
But I never have claimed to be a bravo chap. I adore luxury. I am, despite the people I know, a safety addict. What I have had over the years is an invincible faith in my ability to love my way out of any trouble, especially when I take the elementary precaution of doing what I can to minimise risk to me.
Hence my horror at what I began to suspect was Lucky’s plan to do something to one of Wolverine’s bots. My intuition was sound.
So, one day I arrived in Waynesville to see Lucky. She had parked a rental truck was in the driveway. In the back of the truck was a largish tub of an evil-looking concoction. It was a vile fluid if anything was. She had a jack in the truck, rope and what appeared to be some kind of pully system. Don’t hold me to that. I’m no physicist.
She didn’t take long to tell me about a plan she had to “inspect a bot.” According to Lucky, she wanted to make sure that Wolverine was not building a bot army for a heinous but unknown purpose. I doubted that. Given my journalism training, I assumed she wanted to get one to reverse engineer a specialty of the Chinese. Why make something when you can wait until somebody else does? Let the suckers pay. You spare yourself the costs of R&D.
Still, I don’t pretend to know all Lucky’s women. From what I witnessed, she enjoyed violence for its own sake. It was seasoning for her life.
If everything I described after the blast seemed chaotic that’s because it was. I still don’t know all the details. Matters go worse a week or two later.
First, several Russians in Vladivostok, including several sailors, were kidnapped. Emperor Xi went to the trouble of summoning the Russian ambassador. He told him and the press gathered for the occasion that he hoped the kidnapper was not a comrade driven insane by the recent treatment of Chinese tourists in Vladivostok. “Nobody wants these kidnapped Russians returned to their motherland more than I do,” bellowed Xi. And they were.
A box appeared when a large drone landed in Red Square. A ramp slung down from it and down that ramp, a large, red freight box slid onto the square’s pavement. On its lid was scrawled “For President Putin.” Inside this freight box were the frozen bodies of the kidnapped Russians. Attached to each frozen body was a saucy postcard of a photograph of erstwhile Chairman Mao with a mocking expression on his face. In beautiful calligraphy somebody had written, “From China with Love.”
Putin exploded once briefed. Reuters ran a story about him foaming at the mouth whilst he promised vengeance. The Kremlin denied that Reuter’s story.
Emperor Xi, smiling and waving at a crowd during a speech, promised he would be sure the kidnapper, if Chinese, got what he or they deserved. He then conjectured that perhaps the Russians pulled a phoney stunt in a lame effort to win international sympathy. “As far as I know ” exclaimed the Emperor, “Nothing is beyond the Russians.” Chinese papers ran stories on why it was so likely that Russia ran this crooked operation from start to finish. Nation of Connivers was a typical headline.
All the Chinese foreign offices noted their “sorrow” over the deaths of the kidnapped Russians. Low-level emissaries were sent to attend the mass funeral since all the higher-level statesmen and politicos were “busy.”
Munitions Galore continued to market its stealth bombs, as always with half-naked or naked (you can run racier ads in France than America) as marketing bait. When you read those adverts, you’d swear buying a bomb worked way, way better than taking 100 mg of Viagra. Spokemen at Munitions Galore denied any knowledge of Ice-10 so far as I know. I did hear that for folks in the states with TS SCI clearance and additional very, very special tickets, Ice-10 was on offer as an expensive supplement that was perhaps available for “reputable,” peace-loving clients. I think in English that means clients with more money than God.
In the midst of all this topsy-turvy, Lucky moved to a new higher gear. She persuaded Cornpone that they needed to undertake an operation at Wolverine’s estate. She promised him my assistance.
Her first step was to hire a bum to hop a fence on Wolverine’s estate and stand at a designated spot. He demanded $100, but Lucky told him $50 take it or leave it. He took it. Lucky later told me that you must never overpay a bum. “It undermines respect.”
With her new hire in hand, she took him to the area she wanted him to enter. As before, she asked me to climb the same sycamore. Once I had got up the tree, she sent the bum over and told him where to stand. She preached how essential it was that he stay silent and still unless she ordered him to move.
Everything Lucky asked for she got. She again armed herself and placed a camera that allowed her to be out of sight. We all waited, but not long.
Mr Clean arrived. The bum looked at him. All at once, Mr Clean’s robotic eyes rolled open and the death lasering began. The bum collapsed. Old Mr Clean moved to the bum. Whoosh. On came Clean’s incinerator. As the bum’s corpse began to feed into the incinerator, I could hear a saw making him into incinerator digestible bits. In a jiffy, the bum-be-gone program had done its work. Aside from a bit of scorch at the spot the bot occupied, the area from a forensic point of view was immaculate.
Lucky called me back. I went to her most rikki-tik. Perhaps I looked a wee shocked.
“What a sentimentalist, you are” scolded Lucky. “You can’t worry about a bum that got paid. Look at the bright side. This guy died doing the best-paid job he ever had. There’s a dignity in that.”
I must have looked doubtful. “Oh, don’t tell me, darling, that you wanted me to pay him $100? That’s extortionate. And it’s not as if he was a buddy of yours or mine. Don’t be so glum. Turn that frown right side up into a smile! That’s a good lover.” Most of this chattering was in Lucky’s patronising motherese. I was likely stressed as I crawled into her lap as she drove in order to make biscuits on her tummy. She chuckled and scratched my head. “So much better than Cornpone! You’re the best, darling, absolutely the best. Don’t trouble Cornpone with the bum story It puts him into his tedious cop persona. He still worries about 2 bot-devoured G-men. He’s not that quick.”
With a crisis in Lithuania looming, my anxiety grew. When my nerves felt unsheathed to every element, I sought refuge with Melania. She was my shelter from the storm.
I knew how to stowaway on an airline, get to NYC, and then sneak a ride to Trump Towers. Once there, Melania spoiled me.
With Donald all-in to be President, it became likelier and likelier that I would have Melania all to myself. She loved it when I would walk about her silk-swathed body with my claws all out. She would giggle and carry on about how divine I was. Much better, I’d say, than having Donald’s chubby paws running over your bod.
After having my way with her, she would order puree of tuna brought to the bed for me. She would coo what a handsome boy I was as I ate. She told me that nobody knew how to love her the way I loved her. By then, I knew she liked it a bit rough, and I thank God nobody had ever declawed me. If you’re the Love Machine, you must have all your tools.
Chaucer was the chief impediment to my staying away from Waynesville. He saw my assistance of Lucky as a must for the handling of Wolverine. Also, I knew he made no idle threats.
Wolverine was, of course, aware of Lucky’s casing of him and his holding. But Lucky never scared him, even though Constance sent a stream of warnings from around the world. Instead of worrying, Wolverine bragged that Lucky was no longer going after an easy mark.
One evening, he asked me where she slept. I told him that she seemed to sleep in a different room each night. She had a labyrinth of sleeping fortresses under her house. Wolverine thought that news a pity. “What a paranoid world we live in,” he griped.
I kept worrying, based on Peregrine and Wolverine’s brags, that an explosion in Lithuania was imminent. So, it bothered me that I had no contacts in Vilnius. Who does? One day I endured listening to Wolverine talk up the delights of bathing in the Baltic Sea at Girulia. Worse still,he bored me with chatter about a beach party the town had in late July.
I wondered who wishing to bathe chooses Girulia as their beach destination? The Lapps? To be fair, the water temps in summer are, if anything, slightly warmer than in Malibu. Count on it. I’m not tempted. Let the Love Machine stay on the sand with the babes. I’m no fool. I’m a kitty Jimmy Cricket.
One morning, I heard the front door ring. In strolled Wolverine dressed to the nines, and smiling like a boy back from an orgy. He had come to brag.
According to Wolverine, an explosion had occurred at the Klaipeda bus station. The bomb was small and less than a quarter of the station was destroyed; however, for about 1/2 km radius human beings had what some described as “frozen” blood.
Wolverine bragged about Peregrine’s gifts. He had used contacts to plant a story that a crazed Norwegian had the bomb go off on his way to a less than $40 per night Hostel where he felt he had been overcharged. The chap disliked paying a 1/2 buck for a towel and for there being no free coffee or tea. But that blast educated us.
Less than 30 minutes after the blast and reports of a “freeze,” Russian, Chinese, Americans, Brits, French, and Israelis were prompt in offering assistance. As Lord Caligula would say, “We know who’s got Ice-10 in their sights. We wanted a diversion. We have one.”
Lord Caligula also pointed out the obvious. Aside from the retarded, who would believe that a Norwegian cheapskate could afford an Ice-10 bomb. His Lordship chuckled and cackled, as he announced, “My, my. I dare say some agent must have sold him the bomb for next to nothing when this dodo began complaining about the price of bombs on the dark web.”
Munitions Galore had used other agents as bellows for the chap’s rage. They had, if you believe his Lordship, suggested he could never let people charge him 50 pence for a towel without taking murderous vengeance on them. Fair’s fair.
A day or so later I spotted a brief report of a mad bomber who blew himself up in a Lithuanian bus station. There were reports of damage and a possible biohasard. Authorities made the ordinary lying promise of authorities everywhere that “the situation is under control.”
Even Lord Caligula zoomed me regularly to gloat. He imagined Emperor Xi pissing himself with curiosity about this one. His Lordship laughed about calls he had got as titular head of Munitions Galore from Putin and Xi. His Lordship, being a cagey master of all that is vague, put them both off. He told Putin he must be the prime suspect at every intelligence agency outside Russia. After all, he gave speeches about the happiness that Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia would have once reunited with mother Russia
Peregrine called me the next day and was in bad humour. He had had a visit from MI-5. One of the agents asked if anybody at Munitions Galore with expertise in Ice-9. As a toss-off, the agent asked if he knew of anybody who knew if anybody ever developed an “Ice-10 or higher.”
Peregrine wanted to kill the fink agent right then and there but feared MI-5 might send somebody smarter than the dead agent. Hence he remained a live agent.
Being around somebody as ruthless as Lucky goosed my faith. Perhaps it was mike who first wondered aloud why I seemed to waste so much time praying. So far as I know, mike never hassled anybody about being a prayer addict, but he didn’t view it as praiseworthy. In all my life, I never saw him pray.
I tried to explain that I lived a risky life. “What? The Fielding and Bart are still beating you?” They did and do, but why mention it? It’s not as if bashing me is a habit either of them is willing to stop. I was their Cornpone, but they weren’t as earnest about teaching me manners as Lucky was. I too was lucky.
To be honest, mike probably moderated the Bart-Fielding beatings I got. He is Buddhist and dislikes violence, even if I cannot recall Gandhi laughing when he noticed somebody had taken a licking and, like a Timex watch, kept ticking.
Besides, mike mentioned that he drove on I-44 4 or more days per week. “I’d not bother God, if there were a god, about keeping me alive on that stretch of road. It doesn’t work that well. In California, there used to be a stretch on the Monterey Highway near San Jose called ‘Blood Alley.” I drove it many times. It was an undertaker’s paradise. California also had a stretch of highway going from LA county into Kern County in the central valley called the grapevine. They called that stretch the ‘Windowmaker.’ If God gave so much as a fart about drivers, those roads would never have been built. If God existed, I dare say we’d not have the carnage on US highways that we do. And we’re not even the best at killing other drivers. Asians don’t joke about “Driving while Asian” for nothing.”
I hated it when mike got in his logic-chopping mode. Why can’t a kitty pray in peace? I like to think of my prayer sessions as my experiments in Methodism.
To be fair, I kept mike and Roberta in the dark about my adventures with Lucky. Chaucer, on the other hand, could care less what I did to preserve myself provided I got him the results he coveted.
Still, mike liked telling me that “petitionary prayers” were beggars’ prayers. According to him, sophisticated Christians practised “contemplative prayer.” It’s a way to being with God, a way, as Jesuits say of coming to see God in all things or of learning how to make one’s life a prayer.
Let me call mike out on this rubbish. I don’t need “presence” I need safety. If God isn’t going to deliver the goods when I ask, what good is He? I want a lucrative salvation with safety guaranteed in the here and now. All this thinly veiled eroticised union with God ought to make so-called sophisticated folks like mike suspicious of their own fancy, pompous, smart-boy pretentions. And I’ve seen Roberta fiddling with her Rosary. What makes mike so sure she’s not dreaming of billions when she’s hard at doing the Rosary? Besides, “the Our Father” is petitionary prayer. Ditto, for Hail Marys. Mike should think about that. He’s had some rabid mystic bite in the past. And as Father Newman once said, “Mysticism begins with Mist and ends in schism.” So, I plan to keep asking loud and clear for God to hand over what I want.
The reason I was surviving Lucky was my prayers, so screw mike. Being wise, I rush to admit how needless it is to share my ever thought with mike. Let him feel rather than be right.
I prayed for protection. As you see, my prayers were answered. If they weren’t, you’d not be reading me now.
I went back and forth to Waynesville. Lucky had eased up on Cornpone. The fat man began to walk again. Maybe he got enough Early Times in him that he didn’t notice any pain.
He would take me to the Hub. Nothing put him in better spirits than the Hub’s Hunter Schnitzel, a breaded, fried pork tenderloin (Yum!) with portobellos and a side of Hunter Gravy (Jaeger Sosse). If we had money from Lucky, I could always him into buying me broiled salmon with drawn butter. The butter is to die for.
These feasts helped us get on better. When he wasn’t too drunk, he wasn’t a bad guy.
Lucky continued to prod him for details about all things Wolverine. One day she put of a spike of fear into me when she asked him what he knew about Ice-10. I wondered what she must know about Ice-10 to ask the question. How did she know? Obviously, she suspected Wolverine had a role.
Around that time, I heard Wolverine had met with Lord Caligula and Peregrine about another test of the stealth bomb. They needed something that would divert Emperor Xi from Munitions Galore and also confuse Putin
Peregrine said the next test should surprise the world. He suggested using it on the Lapps or if that was too small a target on the Lithuanians. Lord Caligula asked if the Lapps weren’t some tribes of primitives living somewhere in Borneo or Sumatra.
Geography was not a strongpoint in his Lordship education. If you want to learn something at Eton or Cambridge, you sometimes must stop beating up the other boys long enough to read a few pages. Admittedly, if you’re rich enough, that’s optional.
Peregrine troubled to explain the Lapps were a people living in Finland who depended on reindeer to survive. “Why freeze them?” asked his Lordship. “Aren’t’ the already frozen or damn near it?” He glared at both Peregrine and Wolverine. After a few moments, he asked, “And who are these, what did you call them, Lithzanias? Some sort of stone users, perhaps? A bunch of wogs if I recall.”
As Peregrine and Wolverine stared at each other in disbelief, Wolverine attacked his Lordship’s indomitable ignorance. “They’re a small country on the Baltic Sea. The Russians occupied it after the war. Lithuanians are very fair. Linguists like to study them because their language is in many ways the closest language now used to Indo-European.”
“Indo-European?” choked his Lordship, “They might as well chatter in Sanskrit. Why aren’t they already extinct? Why was a fair race too stupid to progress?” Staring at him, Wolverine said, “Especially since we have such an outstanding example of fair race accomplishment at the table.” Lord Caligula scrunched his face. He was puzzled.
Peregrine then pointed out that Lithuania is a convenient easy target that few, if any, outside it would care what happened in it.
When Peregrine gave me the lowdown on all this, I’ll admit I never figured out where Lithuania was until mike showed me on a globe. When I asked, he said he didn’t know if they liked cats. Perhaps like the silly Germans, they prefer dogs.
Lucky sped down some back Ozark back roads. I like the beauty of the Ozarks. Nothing was easy about riding with Lucky at the wheel. She’d fly like a Formula I driver around turns at the edge of deep ravines with icy streams. I hate that. Water is terrifying. Height-induced vertigo also sucks. Why not? In my kittyhood, Roberta has often tried to drown me and always protests she is just ‘cleaning’ me. Sure, and the guillotine was just “trimming” Marie Antoinette’s long hair. Indeed, her hair was shorter once her head dropped into a frothy basket of her own blood.
Before long, I realised Lucky had again begun to reconnoitre Wolverine’s estate. Once again, she took me to a secluded stretch of a stone fence. She stopped her S-class MB.
We got out of the car. As we did, I noticed she pulled a 1911 from the glovebox.
“Are we expecting company?” I asked. “Oh, this? It’s a precaution, dearest. Beaucoup mean varmints wander the Ozarks.” I also spotted a phosphorous grenade at her feet.
“Vagabond varmints that you need a phosphorous grenade to deal with?” I asked.
She purred, “You can’t be too careful, sweetie.”
She surveyed the place with care. She shoved her 1911 in the belt of her jumpsuit, got a small notebook from a zippered pocket. Then she sketched the area on several pages. Done drawing, she asked me to hop the fence.
My skin crawled and went gooseflesh. “Do you remember ordering me never to go over that fence unless you came with me?”
She shot back, “Don’t be such a pansy. I’m right here. Go up that sycamore over there once you’re in. I’ll cover you. You just stay up in its branches until I tell you to come back to me.”
In these frightening circumstances, “cover” was an alarming word.
If I didn’t have that picture in my mind’s eye of battered Cornpone to spur me, I’d have told her to shove it. Alas, knowing how she dealt with dissenters, I was up whatever she called that tree in no time.
Up in the tree, I could see over the fence. Lucky had returned to her car. From the car, she came back to the fence with a small grey camera. She placed it on the fence, and then she dropped beneath the fence’s top. She now had a photographic view of my side of the fence. And she, unlike me, watched from the safety of an invisible perch behind the stone fence.
In a bit, I heard what I knew from video experiences was a bot’s approach. Sure enough, one of Wolverine’s Mr Cleans had arrived.
Once Mr Clean arrived, Lucky began taking notes. All was silent, save the bot and nature as her compact camera sent her its feed.
The bot investigated the area for about 15-minutes. After finding nothing that needed killing, Mr Clean departed.
Lucky then called me back, She made a fuss of me. “What a good, brave boy you are.” She was a patronising bitch for a woman who had just used me as bait.
Once we had returned to her lavish digs, she went to her study. I followed her. I climbed up on her lap. As she began clattering away on her iMac, I memorised a complicated password. It turned out her iMac was overflowed with info on Cornpone, on Waynesville, and on and on it went. When it came to people, it was a Who’s Who of the rich, powerful, and famed in Missouri. I noticed bios on an impressive range of executives, politicos, military brass and intelligence officers. She had piled details on every detail. Her computer brimmed with police reports that came her way via Cornpone. Over and over, I also noticed her meticulous notes on a huge range of topics. Take restaurants. She had complete floorplans, menus, staff names, parking, exists, and names of anybody in her list of Persons of Interest (POIs). Lesser persons also flashed on her screen if they had dirt on any of her POIs. She had a massive file on Wolverine that told me things even I didn’t know about him. What a naughty boy he could be! And she had a collection of maps of all kinds and photos of Wolverine’s estate and house, not to mention his bots
Once I saw Lucky was so OCD in her approach, I was unsurprised that she was still alive. She knew her work.
As weeks passed, Lucky also adjusted to my pose of skittishness. I vanished regularly. In time, she stopped beating Cornpon when I disappeared. She kept believing a handsome house guest would have repelled me less. In truth, I preferred Cornpone to stay at Lucky’s. When he was at Lucky’s, I could go over and rummage through his records and diaries. It wasn’t long before, more often than not, I’d then head home to Webster Groves. When in Webster I liked going to Webster U to watch Polgar’s chess team play games. Susan Polgar, a mad Hungarian Grandmaster and erstwhile girlfriend of the late and loony Bobby Fisher, had recruited an astonishing number of Grandmasters and International Masters to come to Webster to play chess. I often wondered what these brains could have done if they had studied maths, engineering, physics and such. Instead, they spend their days calculating how to move their 16 pieces to victory over their opponent’s 16 pieces on a 64-square board. That’s chess. At least with baseball players, you knew when they were playing ball, they were doing the only thing they could do well. Nobody lost giants of science to baseball teams. However, Webster came in way ahead of wandering about Lucky’s place observing Cornpone smoke, drink and fart. I think he had a good heart, but what a wreck of a man.
Watching chess at Webster was a life lesson. To study chess as an amateur is to study the Mastery of Life. Watching those geniuses at Webster at the chessboard, I came to master tactics, strategy, and patience. Chess is one of the secrets of my longevity. Cats have 9 lives because we have tactics and strategy. And above all, the inattentive and impatient don’t last long.
Lucky knew how to make a good first impression. She ordered off the menu, commanding the water to bring an order of grilled-shredded chicken lightly salted. Given where we were, I was not expecting her to get me a salad Niçoise. So, the chickee din-din was a kind offer.
After I finished, she grabbed me, went to her car, and told me she was in the mood for a ride. She drove me about the area. To my surprise, she took me out near Wolverine’s estate. In an isolated area, she pulled over. She strolled over to the fence, turning she issues a warning. “Be careful around here, darling. A wicked, wicked Wolverine lives here. He is a scourge and commands a squad of killer bots that are quick to kill. Never go over that fence unless I’m with you.”
I thought this was a bit thick. Uncle Wolverine would never hurt me. Well, maybe if I crossed him. He has a temper. I must say that Wolverine’s pad made me resentful of what mike and Roberta were providing me. His estate was filled with marvels and luxury.
Despite how nice Wolverine’s estate looked, Lucky started to snarl about scheming, murderous capitalists destroying a peaceful world. She also began a rave on how avaricious folks like Wolverine were. It was a typical lefty riff. Wolverine bathes in Krugerrands. He steals the bread of the poor. He eats the poor. When he vacations, he spends gobs of money cavorting with whores and his decadent billionaire chums. If Wolverine weren’t such a boy lover, he’d be indistinguishable from the odious perve Epstein and his cunning, depraved procuress Ghislaine. You know, Lucky added, when I met Gee in Paris, I should have garrotted her then and there. Instead, I let my love of kindness, beauty, and my natural leniency get the better of me. Ghislaine lived. Also, she was serving plenty of fine wines and champagne. It’s hard to savour a kill when you’re loaded. So why kill drunk? Lucky’s speech was sprinkled with “darlings” and “sweeties.” I had her smitten by me, or so I hoped.
The problem with a woman like Lucky is that, once she has had enough of you, she’ll rake you from her plate as fast as the busboy in a 3-star Michelin would rake off the leftovers of their Chef’s best dishes into the garbage. Once I was talking to mike and he warned me about this type of person. According to mike, the world has real bastards in it. Mike told me a chap named Sartre knew the mark of a bastard. According to Sartre, bastards distinguish a person like me from a table because I have a higher coefficient of difficulty. As mike put it, tables don’t resist being pushed about, human beings (mike can be so narrow) resist. You’d think he’d know from Bart and Fielding, or even Chicago or Quine, that a pissed-off cat has a very high coefficient of difficulty. We’re easy when you’re spoiling us. I suppose we’re rather like mistresses that way.
Still, I did know that I had better be careful around Lucky.
When we got to Lucky’s luxurious, dare I say estate, we sashayed in to discover Cornpone sitting on the couch in his underwear and a Polish t-shirt. To my disgust, he looked not under-groomed but never groomed. You knew his brief was a haven for brown spots. I stayed away.
He lit an Antonio Y Cleopatra cigar, poured himself more Early Times, ate a few Tums, then asked Lucky, whilst looking at me, “What is that?”
If you ask me, this slob couldn’t be dead soon enough. Lucky took it in stride.
“He’s my new friend, dearie. I think he’ll stay awhile.” Cornpone stretched out a fat, hideously hairy leg. He was barefoot and had ugly toes. I’ve always been a foot man, but this guy was beyond the pale. He lifted his T-shirt. How could it be? His belly was worse than his leg and feet. His belly was bloated, about the size of an overinflated beach ball and had an angry bullet scar.
Once I worked up the nerve, I later asked Lucky how she hopped into bed with this monster. She smiled. “I turn out the lights, darling, I turn out the lights. Everything looks the same when it’s pitch black.” I also noticed that when she got into bed with him, she wore black night blinds. Like many psychopaths, she also could put up with just about anything if the incentive structure was right.
Anyway, Cornpone in all his creepiness came to grab me. I fled! Before even Lucky catch me, I was out a window and high tailing it for safety. Glancing over my shoulder, I could see the fury in her face as she turned back toward Cornpone.
Next week I sneaked another ride from mike. Back to Lucky’s estate I went.
I hopped through the window. Lucky was in a black jumpsuit sitting on a chaise lounge. When I looked at the couch, I saw Cornpone lying obtunded. His entire body was a mass of bruises and abrasions. His right armed was in a sling and his right hand showed several broken fingers. Even the bottoms of his feet had bruises. A splintering bamboo cane lay on a coffee table in front of the divan. In front of the cane was a half-empty 1.75-litre bottle of Early Times. To the bottle’s right was a near-empty bottle of Tums. Next to the Tums, I spotted alcohol wipes, some salt vinegar, and what appeared to be tiny tub of battery acid.
Cornpone gave me a sorrowful look. Being wise, I jumped into Lucky’s lap. She cooed and cooed. I got an earful of Motherese. Then I saw her looking with utter detachment at Cornpone. She then shifted her gaze back to me. “I’m so sorry, darling. He was beastly to you. I don’t put up with that kind of naughtiness. I beat and tortured him for you, sweetie. The fucker now knows his place with you.”
Turning back to Cornpone, she fixed her cobra eyes on him whilst asking, “You will keep your fucking hands off him, won’t you, worm?” Boy, was I glad I wasn’t Cornpone.
“Yes,” he moaned. Lucky got up from the chaise still holding me. She walked to the coffee table. Grinning, she picked up the bamboo cane and then slashed Cornpone’s left foot with it. She then put the cane on the table and walked back to the chaise. Cornpone stayed on the divan blubbering out apologies. She told him to shut up or she’d dress his wound with battery acid and chlorine wipes.
She carried me to the car. I glanced back at the house. “Oh,” she said, “relax. He’ll be just fine when he rests and learns respect for my friends. You’re a wonderful friend, darling. It’s so nice to have somebody who understands me.” I resisted the desire to say that I thought Cornpone understood her just now.
Gentle reader, know that Lucky had not made me feel safer. I also had an indirect warning she was not to be trifled with. And how!
Once I ditched mike, I made my way up the road, crossed the interstate, wended left up a road past a Cracker Barrel. Then passed a Ruby Tuesday to arrive at the Walmart Parking lot. It’s easy to sneak a ride from there to Waynesville. As I sat near the exit of the parking lot, I felt a chill up my spine.
From nowhere, Chaucer’s apparition took a seat next to me. “It’s about time you got off your kitty ass to work. We’re now lucky to have Lucky on the job, rather than the slob, glutton, and dipsomaniac Cornpone.”
I’ll admit it right off. I was not so sure that the murderous Ms Ming was a welcome addition to the mix we had brewing. For one thing, I get around anybody willing to kill anybody standing in her way. No sooner did I say that, then Chaucer answered, “That’s the best thing about her. She understands that you must bulldoze obstacles, not pronounce them insurmountable.” Over the years, Chaucer said he had seen Lucky garrot loafing guards, poison inconvenient journalists, shoot and knife other operatives, and rid the world of bothersome politicians. What I wonder is, why is Wolverine still alive?”
Once I got up the nerve, I asked Chaucer what he wanted. What he wanted was for me to go talk to Lucky. I was to use my boyish charm as the Love Machine to win her over. I would then use my power to extract information from her about her plans.
Doubts assailed me. My working hypothesis about Lucky was that her heart was smaller than a microchip. Nothing about her suggested a goody–good sentimentalism. If anything, her history screamed she was a domesticated psychopath. Intelligence services across the world adore such agents. If you train a psychopath, you must monitor him closely. You must have the right incentives. You must cater to their inevitable perversions and love of risk. You must anticipate the regular stream of lies. If you can do all that and more, hire psychopaths. A collector may need a Jack Bauer, but he needs a strong-willed, ruthless Chloe directing him. Your psychopathic agents need tight collars.
If Lucky is indeed a psychopath, I saw one Love Machine manoeuvre I could deploy. Feed her vanity. Every cat knows the technique. When you enter the target’s zone, you make your disdain for everybody else present plain. In an audience of any size, you know somebody will want to pet you. Treat him as he would treat a rat’s body in his bed. Once you have your contempt for all noticed, simply hop into your target’s lap. Win!
I confess that many cats like to do this to cat phobics and haters just to screw with them. I’m not one of them. Besides, most psychopaths fancy cats. A cat’s self-interested mentality is something every psychopath understands.
Psychopaths even understand cat aggression, especially kitty predatory aggression. Any cat will show reactive violence if you mess with him. If you want to understand predatory violence, watch a cat stalking prey. He is patient and quiet before he pounces and kills. Psychopaths appreciate that we cats also like to toy with our crippled victims. After our first strike, we like to play before making the kill.
With so much to ponder, I startled when I heard Chaucey hiss, “I want results! No excuses; results!” Then he vanished.
It didn’t take long to hop into a sucker’s F-150 for a quick ride to Waynesville. I got out near City Hall, then scooted across the street to Hoppers. Lucky sat at a table drinking a club soda with a lime twist.
You already know my love method. A worthless pub manager tried to evict me. I eluded him. Other customers cried out for my company. I ignored them. Then, in a flash, I was in her lap. I rubbed on her, and then, guessing what she’d like, I began making biscuits on her chest as I pushed my face towards hers. She adored it.
The pissy manager rushed over to evict me. She told him to leave her and her friend (me) alone. She smiled as she asked him if he felt it would be safe to take me from her. He walked away muttering “Fine, fine.”
Lucky drifted into Motherese to speak to me, annoying habit of women. Please stop. It drives healthy cat so yearn to commit mass murder.
Anyway, she told me I had a rugged, handsome look. She conjectured I was a Snake in the Chinese zodiac and mentioned that she was a Tiger. Motherese or no, we were bonding.
For at least a week journalists wrote stories about the escalating bad relations between China and Russia. I stilled my pen. When I gave the matter any thought, I imagined Emperor Xi watching Mike Meyer play Doctor Evil. If you think about it, Doctor Evil is a good tonic for dictators. Few of them have a sense of humour.
Consider Putin. I have it from reliable sources that Putin doesn’t know how to laugh. Just as some people or tone-deaf, Putin is joke deaf. His foreign policy expert Laughoff told him the Chinese ambassador was witty. Putin couldn’t see it. Laughoff had the wisdom to know better than to try to explain it. Instead, Laughoff pointed out that the ambassador always got the press laughing during his interviews. “The press? An Army of Morons,” muttered Putin.
The Chinese soon announced a series of expulsions of Russian from China. The Russians opted to make a minimalist expulsion in reply. Laughoff drew up a list of the 10 homeliest men and women at the Russian embassy to send back to China. As he told Putin, “it’s a smart move. These people could procreate in Russia. i assure you it would not be with our country’s best and brightest.”
Wolverine had managed to reinstate his access at Fort Leonard Wood with the creation of new identities. All were on TDY to the Fort. Among the fictive soldiers were SFC Verity, Colonel Doom, and Commander Slackard. Wolverine was unable to resist a pretext for wearing naval dress blues; hence CDR Slackard. For a similar reason, he had papers for a USMC LTC that he named Offal. He said the idea for the name came to him when reading Homer.
The engineers at Fort Leonard Wood had, per Wolverine, realised a dangerous, perhaps undetectable bomb was on the loose. Nobody was willing to admit or deny that they knew what the bomb did or how it was hid. Wolverine did attend a series of briefs by senior engineering intelligence people on possible ways to defeat a wave pattern that might have a role in the bomb’s lethality. Unlike everybody else, Wolverine knew what that lethality was. It was reassuring that the briefers had no idea how to defeat it, though they had lots of unworkable ideas.
M5 I heard was working hard to place spies on the Munitions Galore payroll. Peregrine spotted them with ease. They never had the know-how to tempt him into hiring them.
Peregrine feared the chief risk to his projects was M5 buying somebody. So far, he had no evidence of that.
In hindsight, Wolverine should have kept Uncle Cornpone in his line of sight. Out of the blue, a trim woman had arrived in Waynesville. She bought a comfortable house. She also began to frequent restaurants favoured by Cornpone. Despite her being a beauty, she flirted with the fat, sloppy Cornpone. It worked too. It always does with straight good ole boys.
When she did talk, she had a gift for getting him to open up about his cop work and his current cases. Once she got Cornpone on the subject of Wolverine, I gather she picked and picked.
Cornpone and Lucky Ming were a coincidence of opposites. Unlike some people, I believe opposites never coincide by accent. Only art brings them together. I suggested to Wolverine, who had mentioned Ming’s arrival in Waynesville to me that he use his intel community sources to learn more about Ms Ming.
Even Wolverine was surprised. According to his sources, Ms Ming was an alias for an accomplished field operative. Over her career as an op in Europe and Asia, she had run honeytraps, recruited dupes, obtained what was alleged to be impossible to obtain, and assassinated an indefinite number of people that Emperor Xi had decided the world could do without.
Wolverine treated her presence with nonchalance. When I mentioned her to Lord Caligula, he viewed her presence in Missouri as anything but benign. He sketched his view for me.
Why would the Chinese waste an operative of “Ming’s” stature in Waynesville? For anybody well informed and willing to think, Ming’s becoming Cornpone’s boyfriend signaled the Chinese were guessing Wolverine was not a well-connected executive living big but cheap in Missouri. Rather, Ming’s bosses suspected Wolverine had a role in their NW explosion. Their suspicions mightily enhanced, on his Lordship’s account, by Wolverine’s position as a Munitions Galore executive well connected to Peregrine and Lord Caligula. The Chinese planned, his Lordship reasoned, Wolverine’s doings as Ariadne’s Thread to the Ice-10 crowd. Cornpone was a useful idiot in her hunt.
Summing up, his Lordship remarked, “Now the time has come for Wolverine to be on his toes.”
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.
Bobbie Nosick had had her trip from the nursery to the crematorium. Nobody would have guessed that the trip would end when a prototype of Mr Clear incinerated her. If you knew Bobbie, she would have demanded a fee from Peregrine and his engineers to use their proto-bot to incinerate her. The idea of “free” anything always brought Nosick’s blood to a boil.
Peregrine understood. So, being a gentleman, he paid a fee for services to her estate without specifying the nature of the services. Bobbie had accumulated a lot of money over the years. Aside from the cost of her Lucky Strikes, smoking paraphernalia, and gin, she seldom spent money. Even for her smokes and gin, she was more than willing to swap a hand job for a pack of Luckys.
If you visited Bobbie, she would charge you for using her toilet. If you refused, she’d direct you to the garden. People she adored got their drink and food at cost. Peregrine told me that his visits to Bobbie amused him as her house looked like a shrine to Ayn Rand. Photographs and nude portraits of her were everywhere. You’d also see photos of Bobbie embracing Murray Rothbard or visiting Milton Friedman’s grave. Her house of course had a library crammed with the collected works of Hayek and von Mises. She sometimes played what she viewed as greatest hits. For example, she listened over and over to Goldwater’s speech proposing to get rid of social security.
If Peregrine had too much to drink, he would describe his fear that somebody might have murdered Bobbie without paying her for the pleasure. It hurt Peregrine deeply to imagine that. Bobbie would not more be killed without pay than consent to sex without a fee. When she was with Alan Greenspan she always insisted on payment in gold. What a woman. A real looked to after you got past the cigarette smoke.
Nobody will ever understand Bobbie’s seminal role in the perfection of Death-bots. One could say her bot cremation, albeit of a very dilapidated cadaver, was a proof of concept. Without her stinking corpse, the engineers might have used sick dogs or other mammals. Bobbie showed the project worked on a human scale, though engineers being engineers would have preferred the bot confronted a battling, scream, wily subject. As Wolverine’s Mr Cleans showed, they work fine on humans, even when the victim’s being difficult. The proof in Bobbie’s case study failed to sow the laser would kill anybody in the right way or that the machine could cope with the flow of blood when a body was being right-sized for cremation.
Bobbie’s inspiring writing was among the forces that encourage the sales divisions of Munitions Galore to a complete commodification of killing and death. Further, one got just what one paid for. Putin, for example, had no right to insist on special treatment just because he had supported Munitions Galore project in the past. If he wants a stealth bomb, let him pay the market rate. He should also pay for silence regarding his role in the Ice-10s development and testing. Peregrine and Wolverine liked the reference to testing. It gave no specifics, but they were sure Team Putin’s key members would know the full meaning of “testing.”
Emperor Xi knew nothing of Bobbie, of Peregrine’s schemes, or of Wolverine’s role. His ignorance made them all laugh. Instead, the Emperor knew the Russians had some role in the death of Chinese citizens I the country’s northwest. The Russian he believed had had a hand in the bomber’s work was nowhere to be found. Hence he assembled a team of experts in Suifenhe in the northeast of China. The city is less than 4 hour of drive time from Vladivostok, a juicy target. There is both a major highway and a rail line connecting Suifenhe and Vladivostok. Harbin and Vladivostok are also connected by rail.
From his intelligence services, Emperor Xi learnt of Russian efforts to build more Borei-A submarines to replace ageing Typhoon submarines. At Xi’s direction, the team in Suifenhe with support from Harbin planned to a Borei-A nearing completion. The team had the job of figuring out how to do the job without implicating China. Accordingly, a team, calling themselves the Kasparovs worked to make it look that renegade Russians had sabotaged a Borei. Despite this promising plan, Emperor Xi was sad that he had nothing as devastating as Ice-10 to try on the Russians. He also wanted to put Putin in the same epistemic position as himself regarding the role of the Chinese in the debacle that was going to occur to a hush-hush project in Vladivostok. Putin must in a sense know it without being able to show it.