In the meantime, in a dank, cold cellar deep in the Congo, Shmuel and Chani were waking up.
The REAL Shmuel and Chani. They’d made sure of that.
Or rather, they HOPED they’d made sure of that… so hard to tell these days.
Shmuel and Chani were both yawning and stretching, looking around to figure where they were and what had happened to that nice man who had been offering them perfume samples as they walked through that parking lot, when Mohammed McDonald-McVeigh walked in.
“Ahhhh- Rabbi and Mrs Plonitzky. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Shmuel opened his eyes, took in the damp, dark, gloomy cave and the enormous, sinister-looking man with the enormous, sinister-looking scar, and the enormous, sinister-looking- wait, was that a streimel?- and, most of all, the enormous, sinister-looking machine gun and proceeded to quickly close his eyes again.
Must be just a bad dream….
Last time this had happened, he’d woken up again just as the rav was finishing his shiur.
But he felt something prodding him, and alert to the fact that it could easily be that machine gun, he opened his eyes again.
“Now, Rabbi Plonitzky, I’d like to facilitate an exchange of information. You have something I want, and I have something you want.”
Shmuel couldn’t understand- what was with this guy? Why was a man who looked like an amalgamation of the antagonist of every Jewish novel out there (not hard- they were all the same in the first place) except for the streimel standing in front of him waving a machine gun and a cell phone?
He listened, dazed, as MMM continued his harangue.
“Your daughter has been telling you that she works as a speech therapist in a special ed preschool, am I correct?”
Shmuel nodded mutely.
“Well, she was lying to you. She is currently working for the NSA in an underground laboratory and is busy making the prototype of the shidduch vaccine. But you need to stop her. The active ingredient in her shidduch vaccine will react badly with the active ingredient in the Shidduch Suppressor vaccine which we’ve hidden in the HPV vaccine for frum girls.
“Therefore, you are going to pick up this phone and tell Rivky to stop this, or her parents- her real parents, not the doubles or triples or quadruples- will be shot. But—“
There was just enough of a tantalizing note at the end of that “but” to keep Shmuel from screaming out “Shema Yisrael.” “But—“
“But, if you do what I say and she stops her plans, I can offer you–“
There was a definite breathlessness in Shmuel’s voice. “You can offer me—“
“—A shidduch for Rivky.”
And immediately a fight broke out, as Shmuel and Chani scrambled to see who would get hold of the phone first.