Page 67 of The Gods of Chaos and Chance

Squeezy didn’t apologise when Aleksey sat down. Aleksey hadn’t expected him to. When he thought about this, it annoyed him, so he leaned right over the table, grabbedthe cretinin a headlock and mock-punched the side of his head. Possibly a bit harder than anything mock ought to be. It was powerful enough to rouse the dogs, who’d been sleeping peacefully at their feet.

Squeezy only laughed at this treatment, then pretended to be outraged, shocked and then mournfully hurt that his boyfriend hadn’t come to his defence. Or apparently seemed to care at all.

Aleksey posed the question again: what to do. ‘It is not so much that he did not die in Berlin that is important. It is who helped him that should perhaps be brought to light. Those so-called fakes you referred to professor were many times dismissed as just that by the highest people in the American administration.’

Ben interjected swiftly, ‘No, you can’t be serious? You’re not going to imply that the Americans had anything to do with smuggling him out and keeping him safe?’

‘I’m not implying anything; I am merely stating facts and drawing entirely reasonable conclusions.Nine thousandNazi war criminals escaped justice, Ben, and thousands of them were openly employed by the US government.’

Squeezy nodded glumly. ‘Operation Paperclip.’

Ben seemed out of his depth and glanced helplessly between them. ‘I don’t believe you. Why would anyone put up with it? Shit, come on, these days a politician can go down for eating a piece of fucking cake!’

‘But, in a way, the war hadn’t ended, Ben. They just turned the Nazi industrial war machine totheirbenefit to fight Stalin in the new war: the Cold War. There are no ethics when nations turn to violence.’ Fortunately for him, he reflected happily, or his grandfather’s fortune wouldn’t currently be paying for his seventh whisky. He wouldn’t claim that the entire sixty billion dollars that had been sent to Ukraine so far was currently in his bank account. Obviously not—it was spread out in many other bank accounts, too. But a fair proportion of it was. It swilled around nicely with the roubles he also got for supplying arms to the other side.

Ben blew out his cheeks and leaned back, clearly exasperated. ‘So, what, you think it would be good thing to stir this all up now, like Tim says: have people…held to account?’

Aleksey sat back, too, sighing. ‘I honestly don’t know, Ben. I think now perhaps you are right. Maybe the cretin is also right—for once. No one ever gets held to account.’

‘What cretin’s this then when he’s at home? Did Daddybark contribute to this little chat other than by those farts he thought we weren’t smellin’?’

Aleksey flicked his finger in the direction of the bag of hot chilli crisps Squeezy was currently feeding the old dog and raised an eyebrow.

Ben rose and began to clip on leads. ‘Let’s meet for breakfast. Think about it over night, and we’ll decide then? Fair?’

Squeezy took the looped handles from him, wiping his hands on his jeans and murmured with a despairing shake of his head, ‘Yeah, we’ll all think about Hitler while we’re shagging. That’ll be a nice aphrodisiac then, Diesel. Thanks for that.’

* * *

Chapter Forty-One

‘Why don’t I know anything?’

Aleksey suspectedyou know where my cock iswasn’t the answer Ben wanted, so only ran his fingers through the dark hair beneath him as reply. Then he sighed and pulled Ben up from the activity they’d both been enjoying.

They were lying atop the large bed in the hotel suite, the room pleasantly swaying around him, ears slightly buzzing, and Ben sucking him, licking him,wantinghim. He encouraged Ben to lie alongside and turned onto his side, facing him on the pillow. ‘You know a great deal of things most people can only dream of—practical things that have saved our lives over and over again. I had a unique childhood, Ben. You must remember that when Sergei and his friends gathered at the weekend retreats, they would talk endlessly about these things. They had lived in these times, foughtthiswar. I was included in these talks, as I was in all the other things they did—hunting, riding; I did not mean theother. And they would model the battles for me, forks as lines of panzers, salt spilled and shaped into terrain. Then I again studied such things in school and in the military academy. You mock my education, but it was different to yours, I think?’

Ben pursed his lips. ‘I didn’t go much—to school. But I remember something in history about someone called EmmyLou Pantshurt. Every time I was dragged back they were still talking about her. I never did get who she was. I think we did mention the war once or twice, because I recognised Churchill in that picture, but all we ever talked about was evacuees. We had to dress as one once and when I told my dad, needing some sort of costume, he reckoned I looked like a bloody evacuee already, so I just went as I was.’

It was worse than Aleksey had anticipated.

He rolled onto his back and lit a cigarette.

Ben returned to his fun activity below.

Aleksey hauled him up again. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ He took a drag and blew a smoke ring. ‘I want to know what you want me to do before we meet the others. I will do whatever you want. In fact, I actually want you to decide this. I trust your instincts, Ben. You think like you move: instinctively right.’

He almost thought he wasn’t going to get an answer because this response apparently required Ben to show him just how well he actually could move. Ben rose over him, grinning, choosing places to kiss, then changing his mind, swooping and attacking, making Aleksey laugh. Eventually Ben broke off from kissing and said definitively, ‘I think we should put them back where we found them and forget about them.’

‘Not destroy them entirely?’

Ben considered this, relaxing into the warmth alongside Aleksey once more. ‘I wonder why what’s her name who shot them didn’t do that. Why keep them? And did she hide them or someone else?’

They had no answers. Finally, Aleksey roused himself, stubbed out his cigarette and rose over Ben and bit lightly into his neck. ‘Compare educations with me for a while, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen… I’ll show you some things I know…’

Ben rolled them. ‘I think I just told you that I didn’t want…schooling…’ Ben was heavier and stronger than him, and they both knew it.

‘Ow, that…I’m sorry, Ben, my leg…’

---