Oh my brothers and sisters, you may have guessed how keen President Putin got to have more Ice-10 Bombs. The results in China exceeded his expectations.
Even though Putin wanted an exclusive on all Ice-10 bombs, more of the top executives at Munitions Galore voted for that. The bomb was scalable, meaning it could work both as a tactical and a strategic weapon. And there were richer players than Russia that would kiss, makeup, and pay now that Munitions Galore had proof the bomb worked. It could destroy as many people as an H-bomb but without all that expensive damage to a target of conquest’s infrastructure.
Lord Caligula discerned a 5-alarm fire in the global intelligence community. M6 had sent those docile saps to one of Constance’s lairs to interrogate her. All they succeeded in doing was stoking Constance’s mighty appetite for sadistic liaisons. When boys from M5 showed at Peregrine’s London flat for a chat with him, Peregrine acquitted himself well but, lacking Constance’s penetrating insight into the human psyche, not as well as Constance. What did help Peregrine was getting the M5 boys to chatter about old Latin and Greek lessons and the beatings that went with learning dead languages in England. Time sweetens all miserable experiences if there has been enough of it. I dare say that if you waited 20 years after Omaha Beach, you’d have found chaps laughing about all the death and mayhem, not to mention insane orders.
Munitions Galore practised advice a lawyer once gave mike. Despite all the bureaupathic claims that one must write stuff down, the lawyer was blunt with mike. “I rather defend no notes than bad notes.” Since mike has no common sense, he kept writing notes anyway. It’s the curse of hypergraphia as mike put it.
Peregrine went on about all the requirements related to doing Top Secret work and the related problem of stove piping within the organisation. It is no wonder that he, as he represented himself, often had no idea what people in different shops at Munitions Galore were up to.
To hammer his point home, Peregrine told the story of Bobbie Nosick. She is not a relative of Robert Nozick. Munitions Galore hired her as a scientist, though her training was in philosophy. She wrote numerous libertarian papers setting out new rights of man. Man had a right to own vast arsenals of weapons of every imaginable kind to protect his holdings. He had a right to sell himself into perpetual bondage. All taxes were theft unless voluntary. She had papers explaining why property rights were absolute. She had other articles explaining why charity was permissible but was a moral injury to the poor who might have learnt something if they were left to starve. During her lunch breaks, she cruised to the canteen where she exchanged exposing her breasts for view—touch was a premium service–to junior scientists in return for them buying her lunch. Touching the breasts required adding wine to her lunch
Lord Caligula adored this wonderful woman. Then one day somebody wandered by his office. The door was ajar, and a mild reek emanated from behind it. Curious, the wanderer pushed the door. At once, the wanderer’s eyes fell on Nosick dead at her desk. Her lefthand showed a burn between her index finger and middle finger where a Lucky Strike cigarette had burned itself out. The 1/4 full pack of Luckys rested adjacent Bobbie’s brimming ashtray. Peregrine sighed, “The woman was too cheap to buy a cigarette case, even though Munitions Galore paid her more than any philosopher is going to make from the Open University.”
The body posed a problem. Because of all the stove piping, every office claimed they had no role in the removal of bodies. Everybody at Munitions Galore insisted they specialised in body creation. Some departments insisted the Department of Cadavers should be called, but either Munitions Galore had no such department or it was unlisted.
The Jews on the staff whined about it taking too long to bury her, since as one of their co-religionists, even though Bobbie hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since her teens when passages in the Hebrew Bible hit her as being cavalier about property rights and also as having a collectivist tone. When she demanded an explanation from her Rabbi, his story was so repellant to her principles, was such a “simpering” defence of the looters, that she never let the soles of her shoes hit the synagogue’s carpeted floors again.
So, there in the office, decaying at its leisure sat Bobbie’s dilapidating cadaver. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, and months to, well, a year or so. Nobody had a solution. Why? “It is,” said Peregrine, as he adjusted his snug waistcoat, “one of the dilemmas of modernity. We have a security apparatus that necessitates, at least from time to time, playing fast with reality of death.”
The M5 boys asked what became of Bobbie’s body. Peregrine replied, “So far as I knew, her clothing outlived the flesh. In time, the stench went away, or so I am told.” Of course, I heard a rumour that an HR person with profound anosmnia finally took over the office. Perhaps she just moved the remains to a rubbish bin and hoped for the best.
When I heard this story, I was horrified. I knew Ms Nosick. I also didn’t like Peregrine’s way of telling it. For example, he admitted to me that he had solved the problem. In fact, part of the impetus for creating the Mr Clean bots was Bobbie’s stinking corpse. Peregrine and his engineers created Mr Clean to dispose of Bobbie and all evidence of her demise. To prevent expectations of productivity from her, Peregrine wrote a directory entry for her. It read, “Bobbie Nosick, TENURED senior scholar/scientist, on research leave.” If you asked Peregrine about the research, he described it as “very hush-hush, though I once heard it had something to do with the paranormal.”
His stories made the eyelids of the M5s heavy enough that they departed and never returned. Once again, they got no new news of the desired kind.
To honour the 4th, I’m interrupting my story to reflect on my native land. The cat does not always have an easy go of it in America. In general, most Americans accept us. I’m lucky about that.
We cats have relied on our charm, good looks, and agility to win countless Americans over. These good Americans show their love us by various signs. It is America that you will encounter Maine Coon Cats or American Short Hairs. The names bespeak our membership in the American community.
Often I am grateful that America is a creedal nation. Americans are not a Blut und Boden nation, even though in the white heat of our day’s politics, too many Americans forget that. I don’t even know if I was born in the states. I think so, but don’t know it. My best guess is that I was born in Texas. Of course, most of the folks in my Childhood neighbourhood near Martinez Creek in San Antonio chattered away in Spanish with ease. The priests spoke it too.
Much of the politics in this country confuses me. Take the crowds of people pressing to cross the Rio Grande or come into California from Baja or Arizona or New Mexico. They are not, as my lefty chums imply, undocumented citizens. They are people wishing to become residents and sometimes American citizens. If they get into the US, their children become creedal Americans. As often as not, the parents of these Americans do too.
If they all have desires, it is to build a life in America rather than in Meso-America, Mexico, or someplace else. If blood matters, many come to American by losing blood to arrive.
Should people who sneak into America be allowed to stay? Let’s face it, we’re past the days when Texas Rangers could throw their butts across the US-Mexico border into cacti. I don’t know if they “should” be here. What I do know is that, like me, they are here. And they’re not lining up to leave either. They’re also transforming into Americans by being in El Norte.
Right now, a lot of Americans are waging war on one another over the recent SCOTUS decision on abortions. I’ve not read Dobbs. Like most people, I’ve better stuff to do than read Alito. If I’m going to read something, I’d rather read from Elliott’s Book of Practical Cats.
But consider the facts. You can’t make Americans to do what they don’t want to do, no matter how mean get in trying to make them.
I used to live in Tennessee. Only the gods know how much Hill Billy Heroin folks in Hamblen, Cocke, Sevier, Knox, Hawkins, or other counties are east Tennessee are using. It’s a lot.
Take my word for it. It’s less legal than abortion and has been for a long time. From what mike tells me, its being unlawful doesn’t count much with that crowd. And there is precedent. They didn’t give a damn that making moonshine was unlawful either. Where there’s a way. Will having abortions be more of a nuisance? For the next few years, sure.
Anyway, what a person thinks about abortion isn’t what makes an American. Whatever the core creedal beliefs of Americans are, getting “right-think,” whatever that might be, on abortion isn’t in the core.
A lot of the probable core is silly. If you’re an American you know the words of the “American Anthem” as surely as a Frenchy knows the words of “The Marseillaise.” You may know that Nathan Hale regretted having only one life to give for his country, that Washington was the first President, or that American flags have one star for each state in the Union. You’ll know that baseball games have a 7th inning stretch, that in the south people think NASCAR is a sport and that nowadays not many blacks vote for Republicans and that not many guys fond of camo vote for Democrats. You’ll know too that the right-wing loons vote Republican and that lefty crazies vote Democrat.
The odds are you have little idea of the steps it takes to pass a federal law. If you call the war Americans waged on one another from 1861 to 1865 “The War between the States,” you’re a Republican and if you call it “The War to free the Slaves” you’re definitely a Democrat. If you can name all the cabinet members of the current administration, you’re either young and do your homework, overeducated, or Joe Biden.
I could go on about being an American, but I am pretty sure that the beliefs that make us Americans are more like those above than what people get asked on a citizenship test. Most Americans also hate adultery, but not so much that they plan to change their ways. In that way, they’re just like Toms, except we Toms don’t pretend to hate adultery. And even though I’m a good American, I don’t get my fur in a knot at the idea of teens rutting with one another. Teens do that. And it’s very wrong of them to mention it to their parents it’s a matter of respect.
And on the 4th, all we Americans make a show of our passion for fireworks, sunburn, BBQ, and beer. There’s other stuff we Americans like too, especially on the boozy holidays, which is why the population is just short of 330 million.
And there is so much American stuff. But I’m an American kitty. I love it all. And I don’t care how stupid I may think your politics or practices are, please know I love you. After all, I’m not known as “The Love Machine” for nothing. I love you. Now have some BBQ and beer, give you main squeeze a squeeze, eat BBQ, guzzle beer, and get sozzled enough to go do something extravagant for an American cat. As the great Dionne Warwick once sang, “What the world needs now/ is cats sweet cats/ it’s the only thing/ that there’s just too little of. “Believe it. Believe it!” Please forget my namesake never won a fight in San Antonio! Happy 4th! Love, Crockett (aka The Love Machine or Crocky)
Constance checked into the Ritz-Carlton. From there she took a cab to The Basilica of St Louis, King of France. She genuflected, sat down, and then slid to her left in a pew near the middle of the church. She was alone. In the solitude of the church, she could anticipate at leisure her planned evening of debaucheries.
As she sat, two men wearing bespoke suits entered from the left and right side of her pew. They sat down on each side of her. Constance felt a surge of annoyance. How dare they ruin her delicious fantasies. The interruption was softened by their being handsome. Constance appreciated handsome men.
Based on multiple sources, the two SIS boys asked to have a word with her about her recent visits to Lord Caligula, her son, and me. They also had questions about Peregrine’s doings at Munitions Galore.
The two men had public school accents and they were wearing Westminster School rep ties and the pink socks of that school. Constance adored the pink socks. In a jiffy, Constance began to flirt rather than answer their serious questions.
“What gentleman would speak to a lady about bombs or money? I’m an old-school woman with old-school tastes. Healthy women don’t worry about bombs and cash. I’m far more interested in carats.” She peeled off a lot of clothing whilst offering these observations.
The SIS chaps pressed on with questions about Munitions Galore. “You mean to tell us that nobody mentioned anything about doings in Reading, thefts, trips to African, extra cash, things going boom-boom in China? Are you so far out of the loop?”
In reply, she later told me she did her best to recreate the famed Sharon Stone leg-crossing scene from “Basic Instinct.” The gesture came easy as she viewed panties as a waste of money. If they were what she thought they were, she bet they would accept, “I’m not the kind of woman that worries about men stuff. As you can tell, I’m not our age’s Madame Mao.”
The M6 boys were Mr Pink and Mr Puce. Constance offered them drinks as she moved ever more in the direction of being deshabille. To her delight, the lads accepted her offer to mix them martinis. She was breaking their mindset.
One of them, Constance thought it was Mr Puce, proposed that she let them “spit-roast” her. Constance’s riposte was to remind them of their school-boy origins. “I can tell by your posh voices that you two buggers didn’t get such an idea at Winchester. Why not show me how you to play and like good Englishmen let me whip you to arousal. Relax. It’s not gay if a woman’s in the room you all.”
After that, Pink and Puce began to argue about roles. Constance quickly bored of their bickering and announced her verdict, as she slashed Pink with a whip she had pulled from under the mattress. “Pink, you’ve a slight build and hairless body, you can be the first queen. Then you can have at it when Puce plays has his queenly minutes. Now get at it like proper Englishmen. We can all see how excited you two are.”
At that, the two buggers got very busy. Their ardour increased as Constance slashed away, and her own enthusiasm increased as she listened to Pink’s moans and groans. What a cutie he was.
To make Puce a presentable queen, she had more work, but once she had done it, Puce was smashing rather than a smasher. His zeal resumed after she resumed whipping him and pink. There were magnificent. Constance liked how whipping study young men added tone to her arms, a gloss to her skin, and gave her countenance a wholesome look.
All good things come to an end. According to Constance, once she had depleted them of their lust, she had left them black and blue or, more accurately in pale Mr Pink’s case, red, white, and blue. The crisis of facing their questions stopped. She told them what good boys they were, told them she had other duties, and shooed then out of her suite.
With the gone, she rang the front desk. “Sir, I had guests that had an injury when here. The room is now untidy. I’m going to need another suite. This one’s now too unhygienic”
The clerk said he could arrange that. He gave her the room number. As she left her suite for the new suite, housekeeping arrived. The maid looked alarmed and muttered, “Who were her guests? Elton John, Boy George, and Lindsey Graham all in heat?” With a smile, Constance told me she snickered.
Being so kind, she assured the maid that boys will always be boys. The maid then apologized. “I’m so sorry ma’am. I hadn’t meant to say anything.” Showing white teeth beneath crimson lipstick, Constance replied, “You’re fine, girl. You’re rather funny. Tschuss.”
Constance told me about the dangerous liaison at the Ritz with delight. Wolverine had once again anticipated her arrival, sending a truck of her preferred foods and booze to chez mike and Roberta. By then she had contacted Messieurs to assure them nobody need ever learn of their doings at the rich provided M6 ceased to intrude on her time. She added that videotapes of the day were best kept private than, say, splattered about the Mirror and other tabloids.
Even though I asked, Constance never told me the men who followed Pink and Puce into her next suite. What she did tell me is that after she switched suites, she rang Lord Caligula to urge him to come right away to Saint Louis. Within fourteen hours Lord Caligula walked into the Ritz-Carlton and asked for Constance’s suite. The front desk clerk told him he was expected. Up His Lordship went.
He and Constance took pleasure in her account of Pink and Puce. “You’re lucky, Constance. Absent the Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, and the like, your tactics would have failed. Never try that with the crafty brutes President Putin would send your way.”
When Constance began to joke about the paederasts of the English public schools and Oxbridge, I mentioned mike’s observation that she did everything they did.
Constance would have none of that. “Once again, mike has led you astray with his liberal bosh. I do what I do because I like it. These paederast inverts are in the grip of their compulsion. What I do is free will at work. What they do is a depraved compulsion. It is the sexual equivalent in them of a cough.”
As Constance carried out, she set out her view that mike was a cheap sophist, whose education at Stanford and elsewhere was superintended by a collection of dipsomaniacs and perverts. She believed his training at Minnesota’s Program and Human Sexuality had spawned endless false views in him. For example, he had worked in a Trans clinic. If you listen to mike, you would soon succumb to the error of thinking they are women. Any real woman could look and see the difference.
One of mike’s egregious errors is that public school boys “experimented” with same-sex sex. It’s a ridiculous “psychologist’s error.” Constance raged, “Experiment? I have been present at their filthy orgies. There is nothing experimental about it. Everybody used to know that. Etonians and their Oxbridge ilk were in the order of things intended to become Anglican priests. Did there exist a straight man with that training? Straight as a boomerang! Their wives 1930 or so all knew it, too, until gullible, nonsense gobbling fools like mike got indoctrinated into this nonsense.”
When I told her mike disagreed, she ate a scoop of caviar on a large chunk of salmon. Then she pronounced that, like John Snow, “Mike knew nothing.”
Aside from the news of the M6 failure, Constance told me that Lord Caligula made a failed attempt to get her to hire on as the chief spokesman of Munitions Galore’s Reading operation. She declined, explaining, “I’m rich and don’t need the headache.”
It was good she soon left. When I went to the kitchen I overhead Bart and Fielding talking over the best way to poison her.
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?”
Perhaps the day after Constance lost her temper, Wolverine and I were playing chess on Zoom. I was playing the Colle System and losing. But let’s be honest. It has never mattered what openings or defences I played. I always lost.
As Wolverine marched towards his inevitable victory, I heard his den door open. His butler Mr Jade, ushered in none other than the fat man Uncle Cornpone. After his butler announced Cornpone, Wolverine swiveled in his chair to gaze at him. Wolverine made no show of politesse. Indeed, he blew a stream of Sherman cigarillo smoke at Wolverine, then asked, “What do you want?”
Wolverine launched into a story about hearing shots on the property. Wolverine’s glare intensified. ‘We live in rural Missouri, Cornpone. Perhaps you’ve noticed around here that people own and shoot guns.” On the Zoom screen, I saw that Wolverine’s pupils had contracted.
“I was thinking you might let me have a look around to make sure your property is okay,” replied Cornpone.
Wolverine took a bite of pain au chocolat he was having with his morning expresso. He spoke without concern that he was sending a stream of expresso-soaked croissant flakes at Cornpone. “I have competent security for my estate. I don’t need the likes of you waddling about my estate in search of fictitious trouble. You can be on my property when you have a warrant.”
Cornpone backpedaled. He had begun to fear that Wolverine would complain to his captain. “I’m just trying to do my job, Mr Lawless.”
Wolverine, grinning from ear to ear, and sending more smoke towards Cornpone let him know what he could do to be of use. “If you wish to serve the public, Cornpone, you’ll retire. Frankly, it’s not even 11 in the morning and you still reek of cheap whisky. Mr Jade, please show this visitor the way out.”
Wolverine swung back to the screen. He looked over the board. After a few minutes, he called out his move, adding that it was mate in four. I didn’t see it. Wolverine explained it to me. He was right.
We then began to chat when I heard a scratch at my front door. I grimaced. I hopped into the window cell. A stretch limo was in my driveway. Terrified, I hopped back to my computer.
Wolverine laughed. “From your look, I know that the care package of trout, salmon, game, cream, caviar, champagne, and Chateau Lafite hasn’t arrived yet, but my mum has.”
It was mate again. Having no butler, I went to the door and let Constance is. If you know her, she is radiant after a kill. Close friends know she likes to have the kill’s organ meat, but in world of coppers and busybodies, you sometimes must kill and run.
As Constance flopped onto a chair in the living room, she surveyed the room. “Good to see you, Crockett. I can see Wolverine is paying you peanuts. When I read the articles in “L’Afrique Aujourd’hui” on Putin and that ridiculous book you made from them, I expected you to have more money. Writers can’t expect big paydays, but shameless prostitutes of the rich and famous can.”
In my defence, I pointed out that I had to consider the comfort of my servants. Neither Roberta nor mike were used to wealth.”
Constance started shaking her head. “Mike, mike. . . Crocky, what were you thinking? The man’s from a family of Irish wastrels. And look at all the books in this house. They litter the house and look read, too. A lot of its fiction and philosophy. Reading’s a servant’s pastime. No wonder mike hardly earns a plumber’s wage. And Roberta is never going to earn real money working at a university. She doesn’t earn all that much more than if she had entered a convent.”
I had had enough. I offered her a saucer of milk.
Then the gods rescued me. A delivery truck from a fancy emporium arrived. It had the goodies Wolverine bought to enable me to appease his mum. In fact, Wolverine was thoughtful. He sent along two caterers to set and serve.
Constance sprang to her feet and took command. She directed them to prepare her some caviar, smoked sturgeon, and ice-cold vodka.
“No champagne,” I asked?
“I’d rather have the champagne in the evening. Quality vodka is magnificent with smoked fish or a man once you’ve had him. I like a morning buzz too.”
I promised Constance I would take her word on that. The sturgeon and caviar would more than do.
By now, Bart, Fielding, Chicago, and Fielding had all made their way in. Bart and Fielding frowned. “What a surprise,” they chimed. I picked up that neither of them mentioned it be a happy surprise.
Nobody’s reservations about Constance kept them from joining her very early tea. Constance drank alone but did not eat alone. Fielding ate like a dipsomaniac on bender drinks.
After eating and drinking her full, Constance spotted Wolverine on Zoom. He had never signed off. He just sat in front of the screen chain-smoking his Shermans and nursing a bottle of Evian.
Over the to the screen Constance went. “Mummy thanks you for the goodies, dearest. You’re sometimes a good boy. Now mummy is going to hang up and have a chat with Crocky.” Wolverine began to protest, but she had cut the connection and turned off the computer.”
“Now Crocky, let’s talk about some strange stories about a package that went to Lagos for big money, that got from Lagos to Goma and then on to Moscow. It had, I’ve heard, a loud arrival in China. You’re going to tell me a lot more about that because I believe you know. I also believe you know what I do to liars.” I noticed that Bart and Fielding had entered the room. They were exhibiting what I recognized as the body language of predatory violence.
After the fiasco of having to erase “Colonel Law,” Wolverine saw the error of his method. “Why? Why” he wailed “did I only create one identity? I should have made several at a go. Now I must go to the expensive bother of blackmailing a civil servant again to restock my collection of Top Secret identifies.”
When he spoke to me, he admitted his failure to create more identities had him worried Constance’s misgivings about his readiness for the big time might, just might, have a basis in fact. But Etonians, he assured me, are quick studies. “I didn’t climb to where I am now by missing the same questions twice.”
Wolverine told me another problem that Constance caused him. She disdained the use of bots to do her killing for her. And she wasn’t a woman to let her own child’s property become a reserve for riff-raff.
During a walk about the property, she encountered a filthy, malordorous tramp. When she ordered him to produce an adequate justification for his being on the property, the sassy tramp told her to screw herself. That was the last straw for Constance. Her temper still had an edge from having to confront Wolverine. So, she drew her ancient and cherished Colt Python from a holster in the small of her back and put a .357 in the tramp’s face and one center mass just to show her sincerity. Being too royal to dig a hole for the tramp herself, she summoned a Mr Clean. The bot arrived on the scene. It showed great design features. It fed the bum’s body into its incinerator chamber at good speed. Once the body was a heap of DNA-free ash, the bot surveyed the area for traces of the decedent’s DNA, torching any areas that showed any tramp remnants.
Even though Constance admired the efficiency of this Mr Clean, she admitted to herself that she missed the pleasure of just letting a body rot where she shot it. A putrifying body is the best “no trespassing” sign. Ever since seeing a movie on Jimmy Hoffa, Constance also had an adored the old method of hiding a body by making it a cornerstone in a skyscraper. The bots method seemed a wee impersonal.
Gentle readers, you can picture Wolverine’s displeasure. To my surprise, Peregrine Zoomed me with details of it. Peretrine viewed the incident as high comedy.
Wolverine had called Peregrine to complain about Constance. When he came in on Dead Tramp’s Day from a long day of scheming, he saw Constance sitting in one of his Wegner Oculus Chair in front of his Wegner coffee table cleaning her Python. An array of her preferred Hoppe’s supplies, a beloved bore snake and q-tips were scattered on his handsome Wegner table. She was doing a meticulous cleaning of the Python. Because Wolverine knew full well that Constance disliked dirtying her Pythons by “wasting” ammo on inanimate objects, he asked her, “Who or what is dead?”
“Who knew you were such a humanist,” giggled Constance. “I suppose nowadays you’ve taken to living on a higher moral plane, now that you’ve got no younger boys at Eton to bugger.”
Peregrine was laughing as he talked. “Poor Wolverine. You know how mums are. They know how to push a son’s buttons because they installed them. So, you know Wolverine demanded to know whom she had shot dead.”
I was invited to consider Constance’s smile as she said, “Nobody, just some bum.”
Her description reduced Wolverine to logic. “If it were a nobody, neither of us would have a mess to clean up.”
“Oh,” she retorted, “Fret not. Mr Clean took care of the mess. Now the body is indeed nobody,”
As Peregrine told me this, he did a pantomime of Constance reassembling her Python and spinning its cylinder. He then pantomimed Constance releasing the cylinder and reloading her Python.
Peregrine then demonstrated Wolverine’s indignation.
In his best Wolverine voice, Peregrine shouted, “I have major concerns and you muck up the works with your amateur kill of vagabond hillbillies? You know I control the population of local rabble with my bots. I wonder how many people heard the shot? You’ve never had any control of your greedy appetite. mummy. It’s gross.”
To show me Constance’s reply, Peregrine gazed at his nails, gave a toothy smile, then rolled his eyes.
Then Peregrine stopped being funny. He told he called to tell me that Wolverine told Constance she was obviously bored and would be happier visiting St Louis, a city with good restaurants and almost adequate shopping. He also me told how happy you would be, Crocky, to see her.
“Happy?” I thought, about as happy somebody is to get a visit from Vlad the Impaler or a nunnery to have a visit from the Marquis de Sade and his entourage.
But if Wolverine wondered how many people heard the shot, it turned out the answer was “only one.” Uncle Cornpone heard it.
When I thought about Chaucer’s last visitation, the more I grew afraid about having done nothing to cause Wolverine trouble. My fear of both of them transfixed me. Did I have an escape?
As I thought the problem through, I recalled Colonel Law, a Wolverine alias at Fort Leonard Wood doing work with sappers and CBRNE. The cover was that Colonel Law was TDY (temporary duty) at Fort Leonard Wood. Since Wolverine had blackmailed his way into a TS SCI clearance that was ticketed up the wazoo, he had access to countless lore about bombs, radiation, chemicals, biologics, radiation, nuclear, and explosives. Given his status and Uncle Cornpone’s lack of any obvious jurisdiction, I could insinuate Colonel Law’s possession of knowledge about Wolverine’s criminal doings. And it wasn’t a lie. What Law new, Wolverine knew too.
Tattling on Law may seem suicidal, especially if Cornpone met Colonel Law in uniform, but I foresaw the risks. After making an anonymous call to Cornpone, I rang Wolverine, warning him that an unknown source in Pulaski County had left a message that the gumshoe Cornpone had been making discrete inquiries about Colonel Law.
Once he had digested my news, Wolverine began to howl. Then he pressed for names of possible snitches. I protested that I had no idea. Perhaps a friend of a source, but it didn’t even sound like anybody I knew.
Wolverine had to move into high gear to clean up the mess. He began by creating the impression at NGA that somebody named Cornpone in Pulaski County was on the Chinese payroll. He recommended banning Cornpone from Fort Leonard Wood as a prophylaxis against him harassing and interfering with the work of Colonel Law. According to Wolverine, Colonel Law was no longer at Fort Leonard Wood. His command needed him for a dark op. The mere mention of Colonel Law’s name by the likes of Cornpone could imperil the good colonel.
When Cornpone tried to enter Fort Leonard Wood, he was pulled aside by the MPs, frisked, had his sidearm confiscated, and told he was persona non grata at Fort Leonard Wood. Baffled, Cornpone kept repeating, “I am a Pulaski County Sheriff doing my duty. I must see the base commander on a matter of urgency.” A master sergeant sent to the gate to resolve the situation rejected Cornpone’s appeals to see a General. Instead, he told Cornpone, “I don’t care who you say you are or what badge you hide behind. From what I hear, you’re a stinking chunk of crap. Be glad I’m not arresting you for assault. Now get the F out of here.”
Cornpone demanded the return of his sidearm. The Master Sergeant sneered, “Have your boss send down an honest deputy to get it.”
Cornpone wanted to cry. Instead, he drove home. He told his Captain that the Army had taken his Glock 19 and would only return it to a deputy. Efforts to reassure his Captain that he had done nothing wrong got him nowhere. In fact, the captain wondered why Cornpone was at Fort Leonard Wood anyway. “It’s not in our jurisdiction.”
Even worse, this humiliating tale made its way into the Pulaski newspaper. Based on the content of the story only Cornpone or the Captain could have been its source. When I read the story, I felt I could eliminate Cornpone as the source.
The captain I later learnt was a nice gay guy with a taste for thin, handsome coppers and detectives. Alas, Cornpone was not that. Once the story was out, it was easy to imagine Cornpone drinking glass after glass of Early Times to heat his mangled ego. If I had to guess, I’d bet that Cornpone cried in his whisky.
With all the work Cornpone was making for him, I don’t think he would have sympathy for humiliated coppers. When he came home from a hard day fixing things, Wolverine was aghast when he looked into his estate’s salon and saw his mum, Constance Lawless accepting a Beefeater martini with three large Spanish olives. He pecked her on the cheek and asked for a class of chilled Evian.
Booze had made Constance blunt. She commented, “When in London, Lord Caligula told me what a naughty boy you’ve been. Perhaps you’re playing outside your league snookums?” She went on to lecture him on the risks of big-boy games with the likes of Putin and Xi.
“It’s easier to imagine yourself to be their match than to be their match.” To control himself he lit a Sherman cigarillo. He felt pain when Constance swatted the Sherman out of his lips as he began to take his first draw.
“Don’t be impertinent. How dare you smoke in front of your own mother.”
As Wolverine gave me the history of Constance’s visit, he confessed he thought of mauling her when she slapped him but limited himself to naming men he knew smoked in front of her. Nonplussed, Constance replied, “They’re men, darling, they’re men.”
Within an hour, Wolverine was on Zoom raving to me. As I started at him on my monitor, Wolverine was pounding on his desk. “The cheek of her. This is how she addresses me? Before she started running her mouth, my butler mentioned that before that huge martini, she had drank vodka from the freezer whilst eating schmaltz herring. The cow made her whoring fanny at home she did, then spent an hour insulting me. The C word is too kind for the likes of her.”
I have to admit. There are mysteries beyond me. The trinity, the creation of the universe, and sons and their mothers.
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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.
No newspapers reported the explosion of a bomb in a remote corner of China. Not even the Chinese mentioned it. Wolverine bragged about it to me during an enjoyable walk in the Mark Twain National Forest. Wolverine loved scurrying about any forest. He was at his best then.
Because of his clearances, he had news of the explosion and its location from NGA. He also knew that the Army CBRNE and Sappers had a considerable interest in this bomb. If a sapper hates anything, it’s a bomb he has no idea of how to defuse.
Of course, NGA was concerned as was the Christians In Action (CIA) because nobody had any inkling of the bomb’s existence or location until it went off. The Russians knew about it but, unlike Wolverine, were not bragging. Wolverine told me that the result of the explosion astonished even the Russians.
The clueless Uighur who had put the bomb in the bus he was riding as a passenger to a remote area of Northwest China. He got the bus because a scintillating blond Russian seduced him at his hotel. She screwed him till he fainted, put a bomb in his baggage, and slathered messages of her love on him in the early morning. It was his last coitus before death.
Wolverine took a swim whilst I watched. I’m not much for bathing, though my hygiene is excellent. Once Wolverine emerged from a stream, he gloated about the impact of the bomb.
Peregrine had gathered a small group of engineers about him near Redding. Perhaps their morals weren’t much. They would have worked for Hitler or Pol Pot if the money was right. But this assemblage of talent was incomparable. Drawing on the work of the great chemists/physicists/engineers Kurt Vonnegut and his quirky assistant Kilgore Trout, Team Peregrine had worked out a novel lethal idea. They created Ice 10. Like Ice 9, ice 10 has a high melting point, 60 C or 140 F.
What Peregrine’s geniuses did was construct a bomb whose wave pattern created Ice 10 in bodies with temperatures between 36.5 and 37.5, the range for a healthy human body. At that temperature range, the water in a human body converts to Ice 10. It becomes, for all practical purposes, an ice. Voila, a healthy human is dead.
Unlike Ice 9, Ice 10 does not convert other water external to it to itself. If you drop regular water on it, it simply remains regular pooling on a sheet of Ice 10. Peregrine’s team had no desire to destroy their own water supply.
The scientists making Ice 10 were careful about the temperature necessary to create it. They all loved cats. Since healthy cats have a body temperature that ranges from 38.3 39.2 C, cats exposed to the bomb blast wave had nothing to worry about. Well, almost nothing, as the bomb could force them to seek new servants.
The Chinese had responded as Putin and Wolverine expected. First, they rounded up and shot anybody with the same last name as the Uyghur on the bus. The Chinese investigators made him when they found the tip of his finger. Before shooting the rounded-up Uyghurs, investigators interrogated them and, after and only after a fair trial, did firing squads shoot them. As expected, the Uyghurs were all found guilty. Getting them all shot dead took authorities almost a week. The Chinese like efficiency. As Fielding might say, justice delayed is justice denied.
Once Uyghurs with the same family name as the so-called bomber were in their graves, Emperor Xi decided how harsh a pogrom against the remaining Uyghurs was appropriate. He decided on a severe one. One must not be a paper tiger.
Of course, the Chinese are not so dim as to imagine that Uyghur scientists could make a bomb as extraordinary as the bomb that went off. They had noted a 5-mile radius of frozen bodies. Some people, all febrile, survived, as did, praise the gods, every cat. There were others to blame.
And if you can’t blame only the Uyghurs, who else can you blame? Wolverine had an answer. Laughing, he explained the Chinese, per NGA and CIA contacts, had come across the remains of the bomber’s penis. The poor guy didn’t get a shower before he got on that bus of doom. Chinese scientists determined that the penis had DNA of non-Uighur and non-Chinese origin on it. They had discovered the telltale DNA of a Russkaya. You don’t have to be an expert to assume that your best hypotheses, in this case, are that (a) Emperor Xi was pissed and (b) in his secret heart, he was blaming the Russians.
Gentle readers, hear my cri de coeur. Less than a day after publishing my last episode, I became a victim of vice shaming. A lady reader fastened on my linking the words “fat,” “army,” and “wife” together in a way that implied that many, perhaps too many, Army wives are fat.
Now I don’t know how to defend myself because relying on the truth is an unavailable defence. And I had perhaps shown my malice toward the hefty when I engaged in the backward thinking that implies people can get fat from drinking too much, overeating, and lack of exercise. If that isn’t a Medieval doctrine, what is?
So what is my excuse? I shall take the high road. If we start allowing vice shaming, where does it all end? Vice shaming is misanthropy. To vice shame is to refuse to take people as the grubby beasts they are rather than as the angels they ought to be. For example, on Christmas eve or Easter when we have the energy to attend a Mass, don’t we say things like “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa“? In fact, there is a whole sacrament of confession, called by modernists the Sacrament of Penance, that requires the sins of Christians to make any sense. Did not Christ die for our sins, rather than our excellences? To vice shame, I say, is to shame the human race. Vice shaming is malignant misanthropy costumed as virtue signalling.
Now I want all my readers to know I know what a few of my grievous faults are. The vice shamer should also know that when I get scared enough to disguise myself and sneak into confession–there is no need for the priest to know who you are–one of my favourite sins to confess is uncharitableness to others. Sometimes it occurs to me to review my lies or other assorted mortal sins for the priest. If I’m feeling like a pest, I sometimes pile up so many venial sins and imaginary indiscretions that Fr Jerome accuses me of scrupulosity. By that point, I know I’m getting to him.
Unlike the Saint that translated the Bible into Vulgate, this Fr Jerome is a nice guy. The genius Saint had little to recommend him as a human being. For one thing, he had a vicious temper. My beloved Fr Jerome came to my attention when I learnt the teen boys in his parish, as well as the notorious adulterers, referred to Fr Jerome as Fr Easy. He favours gentle penance. You need have no fear of having to say an infinite string of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to appease the angry God. With Fr Jerome, you are likely to hear, “Go and sin no more.” As a saved but irredeemable sinner, you have to love that. Alas, it never seems to take long before even a good Catholic’s bad intentions get the better of him.
And don’t imagine I omit to confess my sporadic attendance of Mass on days of Holy Obligation. I’m a busy cat. A journalist never knows when a scoop will call him. Because I work so hard, I sleep in and I often need naps during the hours of evening Masses. And I reject the abominable modern custom of Saturday Masses. Can it be that the almighty wishes honest Catholics to share the sabbath with Jews, 7th Day Adventists, and such? I think not.
Whilst I’m at it, the custom of saying the Mass in the vernacular is another abomination. The Mass should be in a language that nobody, or at least very few, understands. Nothing destroys the faith of the faithful more than if they understand what the Priest is saying or is asking them to say. Irish Catholics know what I’m talking about: all that humbug about forgiving trespasses, to take just one example. Probably “forgiveness” is a mistranslation of the Latin or perhaps is intended as divine irony.
All this vice shaming has kept me from telling you, gentle readers, about Wolverine’s wending through cities in Europe to a secret meeting with Putin in Moscow. Once Wolverine verified that Team Putin had the Congo bomb, he and Comrade P discussed where to blow it up and on whom to blame the explosion.
Putin’s Soviet background showed. He pitched blowing the bomb up in Monaco to rid the world of a nest of rich capitalists. Against him, Wolverine pitched practical concerns. Why, given the facts, should either of them be opposed to rich anything? Besides, an explosion in Monaco on a wrong night could kill half or more of the world’s Russian oligarchs. Worse still, if you start killing a lot of rich people, the coppers and foreign governments will actually try to catch you. Would Putin make himself friendless? Stick to killing the poor. People snivel, wail, virtue signal, and do nothing of substance when you stick to killing the poor. Also, you don’t want to kill people only to make it hard to buy and sell bombs.
Also, the rationale for killing the original bomb thieves was to prevent a high publicity explosion. Blowing up Goma would turn into a media circus. Then Wolverine made his modest proposal: China. Blow up a remote portion of China. Be careful to confine the casualties to Chinese nationals. Foreign crybabies must not emerge once they suspect their loved ones have disappeared. If any country is ready to hide ugly truths, the Chinese are. You kill a few Americans or Swedes and you’d swear the world is ending. And the Masters of China are masters of the Hide the Truth game.
“But,” chimed Putin, “the Chinese will be enraged. They’ll want to know who did it.” Now Wolverine had checkmate,”Let’s set up the Uighurs. They’re a race of troublemakers. The Chinese know Uighurs are ungrateful, say, for the money the Chinese spend on their policing and political education. Above all, the Chinese will be delighted to blame them.”
Putin fell into his own hands. He was laughing so hard that little tears leaked from the sides of his pale blue eyes. “Krasivaya, Wolverine, Krasivaya. Mne eta nravitsya.” I thought I had the gist of it. Wolverine confirmed it. “Beautiful, Wolverine, beautiful. I love it.”
When I had a chance, I also asked Wolverine why Putin just didn’t ask Lord Caligula to gift him a stealth bomb. According to Wolverine, Putin had put so much money into Munitions Galore that he felt as if the thieves had swiped what he owed. He wasn’t going to stand by whilst a thieving gang made foreign policy problems for him in Africa with loot they stole from Putin. Russia preferred to start trouble on its own.