Pierre slipped on his muddy, torn sneakers.

He flexed his left wrist, making a fist and stretching his fingers back out again.

Jack Daniels is not the breakfast of champions for table tennis pros, it seems.

After ten Jack-n-Coke combos, Pierre had challenged his Russian friend Igor, both of them former champions, to a “friendly” game of what casual Americans called ping-pong.

Several seventy to ninety mile-per-hour serves later, the two, despite weaving on their feet, returned to top competitive form.

Igor slammed an aggressive shot over the net.

Pierre slung his right hand out, missed the ball, tripped over his feet and fell backward.

Quickly thinking, he tried to throw the paddle away, bracing his right hand to cushion the fall.

Instead, his full weight accelerated into the floor through his left wrist.

An athlete with a wrist brace was one thing but an underground member of the Resistance working as a double agent for Interpol and Sûreté Nationale…?

Igor promised to show up for a rematch after Pierre’s wrist healed.

Meanwhile, Pierre had a cover story of teaching dance lessons at the local nightclub to keep going.

“I weel joust sai I ran into an ould classmate from yoonuhversuhtay,” he told his lover and dancemate, Bai.

She nodded.

Bai had other concerns filling her thoughts, such as why Pierre had to return to Bagneux so soon, what kind of flat she would get for herself and who would be her dancemate when Pierre was gone for good.

She was in another timezone, a different but similar galaxy, when it came to phrases like ‘integration of stiff and differential-algebraic methods for collocation and general methods of linear differential equations.’

“Besides, I snore,” she thought, reminding herself why Pierre would go off in the wee hours of the morning to sleep with old girlfriends who just wanted him for his money, little interested in Pierre’s brilliant thoughts and his plans for world domination.

Bai was more interested in controlling the solar system.

With whom? Hmm…