Thursday, February 20, 2003

As I rushed through the streets of Geneva yesterday, admiring the utter cleanliness of Swiss streets and Swiss Misses, I spotted a man lying against an alley wall. With his arm twisted horribly behind his back and his black beret askew, he looked like the very picture of suffering.

He beckoned to me, requesting in a hushed voice for me to come closer, and I complied.

“Sacre bleu!” he began as all Frenchmen are wont to do, “I have been, how do you say, mortally wounded.” Thank goodness he spoke English.

“Oui,” I replied with my extensive command of French. I needed to conserve both my store of English and my precious time, so I glanced at my watch.

“Stop looking at your watch!” he passionately reprimanded, needlessly tapping into his last reserve of WILL TO LIVE. “I need to tell you something.”

“Oui?”

And so he recounted the unfortunate train of events leading up to his dismal condition. He told me about how la FB“I”—the French Bureau of “Ingenuity”—entrusted him with a mission to trail a cunning German woman. He handed me her dossier.

The woman, Fraulein A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder—are you still with me, gentle reader?), lost him in a revolving door. Monsieur Beret clearly lacked the proper training. With a few swift counter-clockwise and clockwise feints, the crafty Fraulein left the blubbering Frenchmen in the door of a hotel. After a few minutes of valiant struggling, during which he broke his arm and his legs, he surrendered. And all of gay Paris—excuse me; gay PAREEE—wept.

“You must carry out my mission,” he concluded before falling into unconsciousness, but not before telling me that Fraulein A.D.D. was bound for America.

Stay tuned for more high adventure and Germ-antics!