Once I grasped that the Russians had swiped a stealth bomb from terrorists in Goma, and killed them to boot, I wondered how that bomb would discover itself to the world. With Putin, you always had to doubt any benign goals. At the same time, I knew from Melania that Putin loved and was loved by Donald. Melania once exclaimed while scratching my tummy “If only I was loved so much!”
As soon as I heard that and noticed the Medea look in her eyes, I did what I could to soothe her. She adored it when I made biscuits on her torso. After ten or so exhausting minutes of massaging her, she regained her sanity. When you see a woman with a Medea gaze, you should wet yourself before leaving her to her own devices.
I never thought she would kill Barron, but Ivanka and Don junior killings seemed fair game. For a few minutes, I thought of touting a Mr Clean bot. Let Mr Clean make clean kills. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. Telling her about what a Mr Clean could do would, as the Great Nixon once said, “be wrong.”
Perhaps I was too cautious. Melania has never to date killed any of Donald’s dubious children. Of course, with Trumps, you never know how many bastards they have sired. Who knows if Melania has rid us of any of them?
If I had to guess, Uncle Cornpone would have had better luck tracing Melania’s possible murders than trying to pin anything on Mr Wolverine Lawless. Cornpone was spending far too much time at the Huddle House for his health. He’d go early for orders of chicken-fried steak with eggs sunny-side up and hash browns. As often as not, he’d order fried pickles to go. Unlike svelte, aristocratic Wolverine, Cornpone started putting pounds on pounds. A spare tire blew up around his middle that spilled over his ever-tighter waistband. His face got redder too. You couldn’t, to be fair, blame the red, bloated, mottled face on the Huddle House. Cornpone liked sitting in his Lazy Boy recliner with a jug of Early Times. To put all his physical deterioration on the Huddle House ignores other causes.
Cornpone would sit in his recliner, simmering in Early Times, and ponder how to link guilty Wolverine to the death of the two G-men. Sometimes, when very drunk, Cornpone would practice conjuring a tale that put Wolverine in the Huddle House when the skeezer OD’d on the toilet. When sobriety arrived with the dawn, that idea died with the dawn.
Cornpone did begin to think that the drop in Pulaski County’s population of bums and tramps had something to do with Wolverine. Where were these malodorous losers disappearing to? It was as if, like the G-men, like mike’s published papers, the G-men vanished into the universe without a trace. So, the Lost Hobo, reasons Cornpone, must be my beacon.
While Cornpone had such thoughts, he had no idea Wolverine Lawless was not even in Pulaski County. Laden with intelligence for Fort Leonard Wood and NGA, Wolverine lounged in a suite at Claridge’s, chatted with various CEOs, diplomats, intelligence operatives, munitions engineers, cyberneticists, and Oxonian classicists at Claridge’s teas.
I would never have learned about Cornpone’s thoughts if he was not a compulsive diarist and a compulsive bullshitter. All you had to do as a journalist if you wished to know Cornpone’s thinking, all I had to do, was to get to know the waitresses at the Hub Lounge or Bulgogi House in Saint Robert. Beware, though. You can get fatter than an Army wife if you take to eating Hunter Schnitzel at the Hub or Beef Bulgogi with Yaki Mandu as an opener. You could learn even more about Cornpone if you headed into downtown Waynesville to Hoppers Pub. You again risk your boyish figure if you order the Rings and Things or, for humans with a sweet tooth, fried cheesecake.
None of this resembles what Wolverine was eating. He might sit in the Fumoir at Claridge’s having a Grosvenor (Christian Douan, Macino Rosso, Raspberry eau de vie, with an absinthe finish). He liked to have Dorset crab and radish to open. He enjoyed a beef tartar with red chicory, sunflower seeds, and shallot crumble. For his main course, he liked the roasted Cauliflower with parsley tahini and pistachio. The peas with mint worked well as a side and the dark chocolate fondant with coffee ice cream was irresistible as a pudding.
Wolverine and Cornpone, you see, lived in different culinary worlds. In truth, Wolverine pitied the lower classes and blamed their parents for begetting children that grow up to be Cornpones. Wolverine did understand, being smart, the necessity of having poor people about to serve him. It was the contumely of a middling man like Cornpone that offended Wolverine.
Whenever Wolverine called, he bragged about how our work for Putin in African had exceeded even great expectations. He did say he had to hit some European cities before he headed back to “grunt” work in Missouri. He told me he had already made a reservation at the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski. He had meetings with the mighty to make big decisions. One thing I was sure of, at the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, “there ain’t no angels livin’ there.”
Despite my forever-fear of Chaucey’s retribution, as I write today, other news has overwhelmed me. This past Friday, I watched the erstwhile cheerleader Liz Cheney making a case against Trump and his only-see-him-wearing-kneepads coterie. And do, if you can, picture Liz with her delectable teen legs. Yum!
You know the kneepad boys. Tubby Bannon and Fibber Meadows are charter members, though Kenny ‘the bottom” McCarthy deserves an honorable mention. Liz could outride, outwrestle, outshoot any of them. As a tough guy, unlike DT’s gang, Liz is the real deal.
Still, I wondered about Liz lecturing on the 1/6 Insurrection. Does she believe that anybody in his secret heart doubts that DT and his boy-I’d-look-great-in-an-SS uniform did everything Liz the Fierce says they did? There are a lot of people willing to say they don’t believe it, but how many are so dumb that they believe it? I say, “Few, pitifully few.”
When I arrived for one of pet sessions with Melania, I once asked her about 1/6. Did she believe Don was guilty? She chuckled, “If you can count on anything with Donld, it’s that he’s always guilty, though you may have to indict a few bagmen before you reach him. Donald loves, as any woman knows, rubber gloves.” Also, on her view, Don is a bit like a 4-year-old. He has no real grasp of what is true and what is false. Donald’s mouth expresses his wishes rather than facts.
Still, I felt bad about Liz spending so much of her life making a case against a known rascal and his rascally pals. For one thing, her dad’s heart is so small, you must wonder how much time he has left. Liz even made me repent for having taken one of the few bribes I accepted as a journalist.
Perhaps, gentle reader, you remember the time. During Liz’s gay-bashing days, she was very hard on her Lesbo sister. Even then, that kind of out loud thinking could pull forth retaliation as a harvest. A Sapphic crusader, I can’t remember if it was Camille Paglia or one of her twins, promised me $100 to plant a story insinuating Liz was a faux heterosexual. For the $100, I agreed to do the story. I also included a link to a probably photoshopped episode of Liz lesbianing it up with a rather loud naked, hairy woman.
Believe it or not, this scoundrel never paid me the $100. She swindled me. It taught me an indispensable lesson as a journalist. When you agree to a bribe, get your money upfront. I did use a pen name for the story so Liz the Fierce never found me out. Be careful, though. A lot of politicos have mean teams of vicious, expert hunters.
Now listening to Liz recount the plots of Insurrectionists—Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Trump, congressional loons, crazy lawyers, a mad General, and assorted members of the Clueless—whilst watching footage of these clowns lacked the impact of the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde. When I see children or innocent shoppers being cut down with an AR, I start to think maybe I should stop sneaking out of the house.
Perhaps I should even try to talk mike into moving to Inverness in Scotland or Kyoto where nobody seems interested in hunting children or people they don’t know. I even start to feel I’m going to weep if I head earnest pols talking up solutions like outlawing ARs or Kalashnikovs. It’s all insane. The same types howl the gun-control “solution” every time somebody slaughters a fresh herd of innocents. Mike always taught me that if you keep doing the same thing over and over without result, your insane. You need to try something else. Even Roberta thinks you shouldn’t keep doing what doesn’t work.
When I a tête-à-tête with Peregrine, he vowed that staffing the schools with Munitions Galore killer bots, which looked indistinguishable to my eye from the Mr Clean model, would guarantee security. Peregrine also estimated he and his Munitions Galore could do it even cheaper if school authorities let him place bombs with his invisibility sheath on bombs in school hallways. Munitions Galore computers had already predicted with absolute accuracy where mass shooters would go in any modeled school before they reached the kids. All that then needed doing was for the bomb to detonate. “Turn the killer,” as Peregrine put it, “into body parts. Don’t waste scarce resources on apprehending and trying evil ghouls bent on evil. Be done with them.”
Bart had her own view. “Train feral cats to patrol the schools. Arm them well. I’d also recommend walkways hanging from hallway ceilings. Teams of well-trained, well-armed cats could either drop from the walkway and eat the murderous Bozo’s carotid and vertebral arteries. Alternatively, they could just shoot him down where he stood. Human coppers are too lenient. They’re always refusing the kill suspects. It’s why we have so much crime. You don’t see this in Saudi Arabia, where His Royal Highness even know how to handle sassy journalists.”
I’ll admit it. I don’t know that any of these well-intended measures will work any better than the endless string of defunct and resurrected re-resurrected gun-control measures. I suspect it’s easier to just move, but mike says he’s too old to traipse around the world in search of a safer country. The man’s lazy.
I feared the consequences of lying to Chaucer’s ghost, but I am a congenital optimist. What if the world unfolds in a way that conceals my lies? Undiscovered lies are close enough cousins to the truth to pass muster with me.
Uncle Cornpone’s industry might do the job for me. If he lacked a first-rate mind, he still had first-rate industry. This Gumshoe, if I judge Wolverine’s complaints about Cornpone, that Gumshoe was getting to Wolverine. If Wolverine’s bots had not killed the 2 G-men, no moral scruple would have interfered with Wolverine having him canceled. And Wolverine is not a fan of what we now called canceling. For Wolverine, “cancelled” meant dead.
The problem with another Wolverinean cancellation is that he had two recent cancels on his books. Yet another dead copper dead less than 1/2 year after the 2 coppers had disappeared started to look like an organized effort. Neither Lord Caligula nor Peregrine would approve of that. They rejoiced in subtle solutions. So did Einstein. As he put it, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”
Wolverine had to use all his self-mastery when Uncle Cornpone had the chutzpah to show up at his estate and, in the presence of several bot servants, accuse Wolverine of having his bots murder the 2 G-man. Imagine the sheer will that Wolverine used to not do what he wanted to do.
Uncle Cornpone had no proof, but Wolverine still yearned to kill him for his idiotic impertinence. Cornpone may have had the right answer about what happened to the G-men. So what? Cornpone no more deserved credit for his right answer than a 5th grader deserves for saying 16/64 = 1/4 because the 6s cancel. The gods have arranged heaven and earth so that fools are not always wrong. Sometimes they get something right through dumb luck.
One thing Chaucer told me scared me more than anything. What if heaven brims with boors? What would it be like to spend an eternity surrounded by ghosts whose sole hobby is talking about themselves? Could you imagine having to listen to Donald Trump talk forever? What might happen if your patch of heaven was shared with Amber Heard or, even worse, the wife basher, dope fiend Johnny Depp. And would god have the wisdom to keep Depp sober or to keep histrionic Heard’s fingers away from keyboards? I have doubts, horrible, horrible doubts.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping that the cat-god makes the world unfold in ways that hide my lies. Chaucer holds a grudge if you cross him.
After Lord Caligula’s evening with Mika and its aftermath, Wolverine told me his life settled down. A local police detective in Pulaski County whom Wolverine called, “Uncle Cornpone” or, depending on Wolverine’s mood, “Old Gumshoe,” continued to nose around Pulaski and adjacent counties in search of the missing G-men. The FBI would from time to time agree to offer Uncle Cornpone minor assistance. They might run a background check, but none of it was going anywhere.
With Munitions Galore’s business growing and my stories for Africans on Putin gaining celebrity, Wolverine was in a good mood. One evening he telephoned to me from Claridge’s London. He had just returned to his suite after what he described as a splendid tea with a friend of Vladimir. If I recall, Wolverine called him “Labrov,” which gave me horrifying mental images of soggy Labrador Retrievers. When I told myself Wolverine must have meant Lavrov, I began to get mental images of filthy, shit-stained lavatories. To help myself, I scurried off to demand Roberta change my litter.
Wolverine also told me that Peregrine with Lavrov or Lavrov or whatever his name was. They discussed an attempted use of one of Peregrine’s stealth bombs in Goma. A gang of fiends had tried to blow up a bomb in the East Congo. As nasty a place as Goma seemed to be, the gang convinced itself that it was doing the world a public service. In fact, or so they alleged, gangsters in Rwanda had paid them well to do this.
Before the bomb went off, it occurred to Peregrine that the Russians, in return for a fee, might wish to know about the scheme in Goma.
Putin, a great fan of peace, opposed blowing up a bomb that would create a zone of nuclear waste in the Congo’s east. For obscure reasons, Putin felt devastation at that level in the Congo was contrary to his interests. And so, he sent a team of Russian commandos to kill the troublemakers and seize their bomb.
Attentive readers may wonder how Putin’s commandos could know where a Munitions Galore stealth bomb was. Let me say that the idea of invisibility is a flexible one. Just because a Peregrine-designed Bomb is invisible to everybody else does not mean it is invisible to him. A man should know where his own children are.
After the Russians got the bomb, Wolverine had me write stories on the dark web claiming that a stealth bomb had been seized by unknown forces after blabbermouth bombers in their gang gave away its location. Kapow! In no time, governments on our planet were falling over themselves, excepting the scandal-hungry regime of Great Leader Kim, to deny they had any role in the scheme. A spokesman of Christians in Action in Langley, when queried about the story, could “neither confirm nor deny” any knowledge of what happened. Off the record, she doubted any bomb existed in the Congo. At the Kremlin, a spokesman denounced the west for its “profiteering” on death and hoped that this particular story was pure fiction. The Congo’s Prime Minister Kabila’s professions of ignorance about what may or may not have happened in Goma were for once credible. The complete lack of evidence that he had any increase in his wealth was always credible regarding his ignorance of big cases unless one could show he had had a recent influx of wealth. One of the beauties of postcolonialism is that it praised, rather than required as the colonialists did, a leader’s declining to steal.
As I got ready for bed that evening, I had another visit from Chaucer’s ghost. Boy was he pissed. The two dead G-men had started residing in his realm. “How dare your pal Wolverine visit these two boors on me. All they want to talk about is “killer bots” this and “killer bots” that. They need to get a death.”
I asked what I could do about it. To my surprise, Chaucey told me, “Why don’t you try throwing that new Gumshoe a bone about Wolverine’s bots?” Even though I thought that was an insane idea for me, I kept my mouth shut. Growing angrier and angrier, Chaucey screamed, “I’d do it myself, but why shouldn’t you have to do something. Wolverine’s your friend now. You have the dirt on him. So, let you be his Brutus. And the G-men ghosts are ghastly. The redhead may have been a looker once, but now she looks all ashen. Worse, every hair, and I do mean every, is burnt off her body. It’s as bad as after Daenerys had her first encounter with her dragons’ fire that left her a totally hairless nudie, not my style, thank you. But in that case, the hair grew back.”
When Chaucer was this way, there was no reasoning with him. I just wanted this kitty revenant out of my room, and a lying promise was sure to work as well as a real spell. So, I uttered, “I’m on it.” Chaucer disappeared. I remembered after this lie, Jack Handy’s wise observation: Broken promises don’t upset me. I just think, why did they believe me.”
By evening, Tucker Snarlson had put his sights on the lioness Mika and her lackey Joe. Snarlson began in calm measured tones about second amendment freedoms. He spent time thanking God that men like Lord Caligula had spent their life making second amendment freedoms real. Still more, men like his Lordship, thanks to the wisdom of our founding fathers, could earn a living helping threatened citizens defend themselves through the purchase of apt Arms, yet another Triumph of Capitalism.
Across the room, I heard Bart and Fielding howling their agreement. When Chicago made a face that implied contempt for Snarlson’s message, Fielding jumped on his sissy rump and gave him a lesson on how Mollys schooled wimp Toms. Chicago squeaked his apologies to her. “Every cat has a right to a vast arsenal of Arms to protect his holdings,” screeched Fielding. Fielding warned Chicago, “Don’t count on mike’s protection. Neither Bart nor I can so much as talk him into shooting the neighbour’s dogs. And never forget the day an insolent coyote scampered along the top of our backyard’s fence. Instead of killing him, mike, like the worthless sheriff in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, let him escape. After that dereliction of duty,” Fielding confessed, “I hid under the sofa in disgusted shame.”
As Snarlson moved to speaking about the role of Arms in the preservation of a society that is a paradise for white men, he explained why an abundance of guns and bombs were needed at the border.
“Even now,” he snarled, “invaders from south of the border sneak into our country without consequence to take our jobs, our women, and, yes, our beloved country from us.”
Snarlson then began to laud Prez candidate Trump for his proposal to build a beautiful wall. While picturing a wall, Bart and Fielding began to purr. Then Quine asked, “What wall?” From chats with Bart, I knew she pictured a slab of stainless steel with a top edge sharper than a straight razor. In her mind’s eye, the wall’s foundation jutted a good 50 feet into the ground. Her wall dwarfed China’s Great Wall.
On our country’s side of the wall, Bart pictured mines and pill boxes with .50 Cals that would sweep killing of anybody stupid enough to attempt a crossing. She liked the idea of having moats with piranha and ravening African crocodiles of immense length as a further deterrent.
When mike had the chutzpah to challenge the feasibility and sanity of the border wall, Bart stalked hissing out of the room. Mr Trump had promised the wall was a doable project that would be big and beautiful and paid for by the Mexicans.
At that idea, mike suggested Trump could propose Wall Bonds. DT’s fans could prefinance the wall and include a big interest rate on Wall Bonds. The Mexican would pay it all off once Trump was in office and threatening with nuclear weapons.
But to return to Mika v. Snarlson, their brouhaha amused Lord Caligula. At his command, one of his army of solicitors drafted a letter within a day of their spat describing his Lordship’s “sadness” that Mika has chosen to construe anything he uttered as a sign of heartlessness. Nobody loved peace more than his Lordship; however, the solicitor finished up with an ancient trope, writing, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” (For readers whose education was totally neglected, the Latin means, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”)
At the letter’s end, Lord Caligula scribbled a PS in his own hand. It read: “It is unbecoming for an older delectable woman to spoil her face with anger.” Nor did he stop there. “Do know that even in anger, your body is just scrumptious.” One should offer older women encouragement to groom well. His Lordship then superadded a series of “hugs and kisses” marks. I heard that Snarlson also got a solicitor’s note telling him that Lord Caligula had no need of underlings to defend him.
During Mika’s first appearance on Morning Joe after her evening with Lord Caligula, she pounced onto the set with a lioness’s confidence. She announced she had “cornered” his Lordship in a restaurant. Her relentless queries battered away the man’s defences until he confessed to earning his money from fear and vengeance.
Joe joined her assault. You’d have thought Joe was shocked to discover anybody would try to monetize fear and vengeance as Joe was now doing. He raved about the world’s war pigs like Munitions Galore that got fat lapping up the blood of innocent children and others blown to smithereens by his Lordship and his bastard son and henchman Peregrine Blond-Bomb.
None of these objections struck me as good candidates for changing Lord Caligula’s mind.
I couldn’t help wondering if his Lordship might think the adulterous Joe and Mika had a right to lecture his Lordship about good morals. After all, the rumour mills had it that they had been having goes at one another since 2010 or so. Attentive readers may recall that Mika didn’t get rid of her husband, albeit by lawful means, until 2016. The twice-divorced Joe didn’t give wife number 2 the heave-ho until 2013. About 3 years after he started sampling Mika’s wares. Like here, he knew her value.
Like Voltaire, they had a relaxed view of the demands of sexual morality as applied to themselves. They were strict on matters that didn’t tempt them like selling Arms for huge profits. I had heard Lord Caligula mention to her over their dinner that if not for men like himself, her dad would have had very little to do. She should show more gratitude. To judge by the sounds I heard emanating that night from the back seat of the limousine, Mika is no ingrate.
From what Wolverine told me, criticism of Munitions Galore never hurt its bottom line. If anything, the snivelling critics made more buyers aware of Munitions Galore’s numerous product lines, all of them profitable without even more business.
During the talk with Wolverine, he sang my praises as he described how delighted “our friends in Moscow” were to read my stories in L’Afrique Aujourd’hui. Bart and Fielding may accuse me of being an imbecile, but unmet friends in Moscow had a different opinion. Despite Fielding and Bart’s bad rating of my intellect, they both granted I had become a much better provider. I pleased them mightily by hiding my new wealth from Roberta and mike. Wolverine had proved useful as he had become of master of Swiss bank accounts, shell companies, and cleaning money in all forms.
Quine and Chicago liked the idea of inheritable fortunes. Quine liked to squeal, “You mean I’m an heir? What am I worth.” If Roberta was in the room, Bart would smack him senseless, telling Roberta, “The boy was having a bad dream.” Chicago liked to carry on about how once he was rich, he would have regular pedicures. Bart’s fear was that if Roberta ever leant about my growing holdings, she’d squander it on donations to Catholic Charities or, just as creepy, social justice programmes whether catholic or something else. It made Bart and Fielding sick at heart to think Roberta might give their money away to feed the hungry or some such nonsense.
Wolverine had no doubt that charity was a waste of money. “What happens when you give to the poor? Let me tell you. You destroy the identity of the poor. It’s identity murder, a subspecies of soul murder. The poor don’t mind their lives if you keep them away from malcontents and liberal goody-goods. The poor man has a special perspective. He has unattainable, but delicious, fantasies about the rich. Why spoil them? Do you tell a teen boy dreaming of in-out with Penelope Cruz that it’s an impossible love? Cruel mothers may do that, but any decent mother ought to find something else to do with her time than steal her son’s dreams. As I see it, a mother, no matter the photographic or pornographic evidence must never tamper with her young wanker’s dreams. Impossible dreams carry a boy through his grim lot in school.”
The range of Wolverine’s philosophical and psychological thinking always amazed me. Given his theories, no wonder members of White’s in London talked to him whenever they could. Wolverine wrote several opinion pieces explaining why White’s must never allow women members or remove British wild game from its menu. He worried that having women members would cause the nauseating spectacle of members leaving the club sober or feeling that laws against sodomy were going to be enforced in the club. These opinion pieces received the acclaim of members but did less well with jealous women scheming to attain membership. One constant fear at White’s was cross-dressing women sneaking into the club. More than one member wept at the thought of that.
I did take Wolverine’s renewed interest in philosophical thinking as a sign. He wasn’t spending so much time, I reckoned, having to ward off pest from the FBI worrying about a couple of missing G-men.
Gentle readers, you may recall that Lord Caligula invited a coy Mika to dine with him during an appearance on Morning Joe. Despite her pretense of reluctance, his Lordship never doubted she would arrive. Her gluttony for scoops had few equals. And the promise of learning how Munitions Galore’s new line of bombs deterred was irresistible.
At about 20.20, the evening of their conference, Mika arrived. She was 20 minutes late. Lord Caligula sat at a table. He was drinking a “51st Street Manhattan,” a mix of rye, dry vermouth, Amaro Lucano, Benedictine, and bitters. When Mika made it to his table, he pecked her left and right cheek, then asked what she would have. She ordered an ice-cold triple of Belvedere Vodka and an ounce of Royal Osetra Caviar to go with it. After praising her taste, he complimented her on her shaved legs. “Too many older women get neglectful of their legs. It’s unappealing to see a woman with legs reminiscent of a teen boy, if they even look that good.” Mika glared, then smiled.
His Lordship ordered sea trout and Spanish Mackerel as openers. He thought a moment, frowned, then added a Shellfish Medley to the hors d’oeuvres. For the main course, Lord Caligula ordered Dover Sole on a “potato cloud.” Mika settled for poached skate that came with sweet peppers, fried capers, dill basmati rice and brown butter sauce. Once he had main course ordered, he conferred with the sommelier, telling him to match the order with good wines. Before the Sommelier went away, he told him to also tell the waiter he wished to have an order of white asparagus and the house vegetable panche.
Looking at Mika, his Lordship asked her if she might save room for dessert. “The vanilla crème anglaise with genoise sponge cake is divine here. You’d not want to be blown up before you had some,” he chuckled. He let his lefthand run over her left knee. By then, she had enough the Belvedere and caviar in her to ignore the salacious intent.
The two of them made their way through the hors d’oeuvres. Mika peppered Lord Caligula with questions about his businesses, especially Munitions Galore. She focused on bombs. His Lordship made a habit of shaking his head whilst he exclaimed as he stared at her cleavage, as if it were on the menu, “If only I had thought to invite Peregrine. He is au courant about bombs.” Sometimes he would pretend to slobber out the words, then stare as his transparent spittle droplets shined on Mika’s well-seasoned cleavage.
When his Lordship was tucking his Dover Sole, Mika reminded him that he had promised to discuss what his bombs deterred. “Are you joking?” he asked. “I had imagined a woman of your lineage, the daughter of a celebrated diplomat, would know.”
She stared at him blankly.
There is nothing like an “expectancy pause” to milk information from an interviewee. Lord Caligula bit. “Why fear, my dear. It deters fear or gives the illusion of doing so, which is just as good. And when somebody put fear in them, they want vengeance. If not for fear and vengeance, I’d be broke. Nobody buys bombs to deal with a toddler. The Arms business is about fear and vengeance. It’s that simple. Peregrine’s gift, his genius as it were, is his ability to tap into the unconscious of his customers. He knows how they want to get even, how they wish to intimidate. You wonder to yourself, what has intimidation got to do with fear and vengeance? Well, sweetie, everything. If you have no fear of your opponent, you just take what you want. But now think about it. Once you put it to another human being, you have an enemy. That’s scary, even if you are too dumb to admit it. It makes you, from my perspective, a better customer.” He finished up with a brief riff on how what the Buddhist call, the Three Poisons—Delusion, Anger, and Greed are elements of the human psychology that power the Arms biz. Mika was sozzled enough to feast on this crap, true enough though it was.
I was watching and listening to it all from a dark corner. His Lordship wanted me on call as a soother just in case Mika started acting up. I was in New York anyway to see Melania. He also promised to signal when he wanted me to call our limousine. In return, I was getting tuna, halibut, red snapper, and octopus, to die for. Besides, the reporter in me wanted to spy on him and Mika.
When Lord Caligula motioned for his limousine, I fetched it to the front door of Le Bernardin. The driver was an exquisite coed from Columbia taking a graduate degree in Art History. Her specialty was western erotic art. A good thing too given how she earned money. The rear sister in the limo was a fornicator’s room on wheels.
As the night wore down, I noticed the more Mika drank, the more his Lordship took liberties with his hands. Mika would protest while giggling. It didn’t seem to be an effective strategy against his Lordship’s advances. He pressed for friendship with benefits. As Mika slid into the backseat, she complained he was worse than the boys at Williams College, a claim I assigned a very low probability. I stay low in the front seat and used my time to make biscuits on the driver’s exquisite, firm tummy. The noises in the backseat alarmed me. I had no idea Mika was such a loud, inarticulate bossy woman. My driver kept using the rearview mirror to observe the doings in the backseat. It made her smirk again and again. She was ignoring me. She was, it was clear, a voyeur with contempt for sexual actors. Like most art histories, she liked to look. I didn’t. And I’ve got bad vision anyway.
Once Mika was back home, I got a ride back to Trump Tower. As I scampered out of the car, Lord Caligula’s gloating, flushed face amused me. I also suspected he had designs on my driver, but I’ll never know. I hurried back to spend time with Melania.
The traceless vanishing of two G-men in rural Missouri did what anybody smart would expect. A plague of G-men arrived in Pulaski, Crawford, Texas Counties to investigate.
Investigators piled threats on threats on the 16-year-old squeezer that swiped the missing G-men’s car from the Walmart in St Robert. If you thought about this girl, you may have suspected she was, a flaming borderline. She was a girl never more than a half-jump from a looney bin. But she bypassed the looney bin. She dropped into her grave early.
An attendant at the Huddle House catty-corner from the Phillip 66 Truck Stop off I-44 in Cuba found her. She sat in the Huddle’s Lady Room. She had died of an overdose taking her last dump. Hers was no dapper cadaver. There she was enthroned in all her deceased magnificence. Behold: her cyanotic body propped up against the toilet stall’s left wall. Her last offering to our world rested half-submerged in the toilet water beneath her dead end. Imagine how her open, pale, snake eyes stared back at the attendant who found her. The attendant choked out an “Oh shit.” Then she screamed.
Lickety-split coppers from all about made it to the Huddle House. Some were happy to have orders of Fried Pickles, others ordered waffles. Sergeants and above ordered eggs and chicken-fried steak. They all waited, bored but eating, for permission to leave.
After a long wait, the FBI arrived. Angry G-men began to lay blame for the girl’s death on the dead girl. If only she had not fallen into the only life she had ever known, this would never have happened. That was the gist of their postmortem. A few G-men blamed co-workers for failing to offer the girl a better deal. The smart ones connected to the truth: She didn’t know squat.
Throughout the hunt for the gone G-men, Wolverine held a stream of parties attended by the rich and powerful. It was as if Wolverine made it a point to never let an investigator find him at home without a General, a gazillionaire, or a famed politician in his company.
Wolverine de-emphasised the presence of his numerous Bot security details. Instead, he decorated his property with Xe security for high-net-worth individuals.”
After investigators had made numerous visits, Wolverine’s suave presentation won them over. He always described the “bots” as experimental toys. He insisted he relied on his Xe team for protection, not novelties like a Bot. From what I gather, the G-men gobbled up this bullshit whole.
During this time of investigation, I wrote the Putin-loving stories for L’Afrique Aujourdh’hui. Subsequently, Wolverine and I turned the miscellaneous articles into a best-selling book in Francophone Africa. Wolverine also arranged for English and Portuguese translations. If any readers have seen the French and English translations, they’ll recall a placid Putin standing with an enormous wood cross behind him. All about him stand moonshine-swilling Americans in camo and their simian Ukrainian henchmen with hammer and nails. They’re ready to crucify loving Putin. The book’s title stretched above the cover picture. The title was magnificent in its ridiculousness: Will They Nail Our Saviour to the Cross?
By relying on materials Wolverine had sent me, I built a narrative aiming to prove that not only was Putin the reincarnation of Jesus but the reincarnation of Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X as well. My job required some fancy metaphysics. Both Lumumba and Malcolm X died at the hands of assassins after the birth of Putin. I worked out a multiple soul hypothesis. Exquisitely large, immaculate “soul receptacles,” that is, a body can hold several souls that can arrive at any time.
And so, Putin’s virtue allowed him to take in the souls not only of Jesus but of Lumumba and Malcolm X. It was as if Putin was not just a Trinitarian being, but a quadripartite being.
The writing was easy enough. As for having enough virulent passages about Americans and Ukrainians, I grabbed any extant antisemitic passages about Jews and Jesus I could find. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a treasure house for me. Mein Kampf and the writings of Goebbels were also superb. Once I substituted Americans or Ukrainians for Jews and Putin for Jesus, I had an embarrassment of riches when it came to hateful tropes to write into passages when I needed them.
Sometimes Wolverine worried that in some countries Lumumba was either not popular or was disliked. We found an easy solution. For the book’s editions in those countries, we just substituted the name of a beloved local martyr for Lumumba or, if need be, Malcolm, or even substituted Mohammed or Castro for Jesus.
At first, Bart disapproved of these articles and books. She claimed I was a horrible example to Chicago and Quine. She complained it was dishonest. Then she learnt the size of my advance and royalties. So she reversed herself. She also took back mean comments about me being a lying imbecile. Instead, she put it to me like this. “You’re not really lying. You’re being paid.” I resisted asking her whether she extended this defence to shyster personal injury lawyers that had accused her over the years of torts. I was being paid and she was not going to analyse away a benefit.
Before Wolverine left my house the day of drop by, he showed another side of himself. In the future, shaking his hatted head, he advised me to stay in my own lane. “A smart Tom,” he sighed, “keeps his nose out of other people’s business.” Besides, the two G-men were no friends of mine and Wolverine didn’t number them among his friends either. If they had disappeared, maybe they needed a lesson in minding their own damn business. Perhaps, too, they chose to disappear. More greedy FBI guys defect to Putin’s Russia than you might think.
When I told Wolverine, that any defections above zero would be more than I’d think, he grinned. He also began to pound the thick end of his walking stick into his left paw. “Nothing good comes to a Mr Nosey,” he muttered.
All at once, Bart was in the room between us. She was hissing spit on Wolverine’s bespoke suit as she made to him what she called “promises, not threats.” The gist of her promise was that if Wolverine didn’t learn to keep his club’s tip on the floor, any Molly might feel justified in abbreviating his lying life.
At first, Wolverine looked relaxed as he sized Bart up. Then I heard his suit jacket tearing. Right behind him, Tank had slashed his back. You could hear Fielding’s growling battle voice. “Mr Lawless, have we had a proper introduction? As a rule, critters like you slither or scurry into my house pay a death tax for their visit. Critters your size are short enough to wind up with their throats cut. Can you imagine that? Bart and I have a rule. Listen up. You must learn it. We handle Crockey’s discipline. He is ours to beat and abuse, nobody else’s. Anybody who forgets that may learn a hard, final lesson about life.” Bart listened. Her glinting eyes smiled at Wolverine.
After estimating the odds, Wolverine knew his answer. “Quite so.” Replied a grinning Wolverine. He left humming, an old, old Turtle’s tune, “So Happy Together.” He then added, “My Day Will Come” once he was on the pavement.
A week later I got a pushy message from Wolverine encouraging me to stick to writing light features or stories from materials he sent me. For example, he sent me a handsome advance for a story that would appear in L’Afrique Aujourd’hui on what Putin had been doing to “de-nazify” the Crimea for Africans. I was to explain that the Ukraine was a nest of antisemites, racists, Nazis, and Russian loathing thugs. If my French was not up to the task, Wolverine told me to write it in English or in High Cat. He promised to see to a translation. I’d have refused if that handsome advance hadn’t been a stack of Krugerrands wrapped in Franklins. Wolverine and Peregrine understand my weakness for 24-carat gold. He said it was a 10% advance for what he envisioned as a 5-piece story that would convert to a book on the heroic work Putin was doing to gift a restored Russia to the world.
About two months after the G-men visited, I ran across a story of their disappearance in an Ozark newspaper. I’m unsure what newpaper. Perhaps the story ran in the Pulaski County News.
As an aside, Pulaski, a Pole, came to America to make trouble after serving in campaigns to win freedom for Poles. He got himself hit by grapeshot rallying terrified French troops he tried to lead in an engagement to take Savannah during its siege in October 1779. Corpsmen apparently took his stupefied body onto the Wasp, a privateer ship. A couple of days later he died at sea. As if anybody then cared. Despite this poor end of Casimir Pulaski, propagandists kept his name glorious. If you look, you can find there are plenty of Pulaski counties, including in Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Virginia, and Georgia. You’ll notice he’s well regarded in mostly slaver states.
The striking thing about the disappearance of the G-men was that it was complete of the scrumptious redhead and her brawny partner. Their car had been found on a trailhead in the Mark Twain National Forest in an area not too far from Cabool. The coppers arrested a teen girl. She had left an unfinished homework assignment on the passenger side sideboard. From police reports I tracked down, she had “borrowed” the car after she noticed it parked and gathering dust in the same spot in the Walmart lot in St Robert, Missouri. Checked under the driver’s side floor mat and found a key. God had plainly wanted to gift this car to her.
She drove around and went out to the trailhead in the Mark Twain Forest. By then, enough of the crack she was using had worn off. She realized she was driving on fumes. Scared of being stuck in the forest, she took advantage of a local redneck when he pulled into the trailhead. In return for a blowjob, he gave her a ride home. Because he was a generous guy, he shared his crack pipe with her.
There was a photograph of her. She was a scrawny, unwashed girl, with dishwater blonde hair, and a chest that appeared about what one might expect on a 10-year-boy. Her upper incisors were missing, but she gave the police camera a big smile anyway. Her record included a few arrests at the Phillips 66 Truckstop in Cuba, Missouri. The girl liked to roam.
Police interrogation of her yielded no info about the G-men’s whereabouts. I grew suspicious. Nobody was sure why they had gone to Ozarks. If you don’t know the area, it’s a dissected plateau just like the Texas Hill Country. There are no real mountains there, just faux mountains. I also was sure that the land didn’t have the bodies of the two G-men in it.
I sent an e-mail to Wolverine to ask for a powwow.
When Wolverine arrived, he was wearing his Cocke Hat, bespoke suit, and held his walking cane. I blurted out once he got into my space, “What happened to them?” Wolverine looked at me with sad eyes, then shrugged his shoulders whilst wondering out loud what “them” I had in mind. “Cut the crap,” a cried, “you know what ‘them’! It’s the kind of them that carries Glock 19s, is paid on a GS PayScale, and if one of the disappeared agents perhaps had redheaded woman and a brawny guy on the team.”
Wolverine smiled. “What long ears you have Crockey. Are in love? I have heard that some intruders in Pulaski County and its surroundings can encounter misfortune if they wander on private property. I dare say that the Munitions Galore Household Cleaner units have done well there.? Wolverine told me his own mother, Constance, had bought herself one to help keep drug-addicts off the Michigan property that she and my papa own.
Frustrated, I asked, “How many do you own, Wolverine?”
He shook his head. “I don’t own any. Of course, my dear friend Peregrine put a few on my estate, perhaps a half=dozen, as test models. You know how his love for me makes him something of a fanatic when it comes to my safety.”
“And how many are still on your estate?” I asked.
“Oh, Peregrine took them away, but he did leave a new generation, a smaller more efficient model in its place. We like to call it Mr Clean after that bald queer that once made Housewives hearts go thump-thump. Now there’s a feature story I’m offering you gratis. Why not forget the disappeared G-men. Write about something people care about. Write about the vanishing of the Fag hag as a type. Now there’s a story.”