Two guys walk into a cafe...

Funny things happen when you hang around in a cafe for long enough.  We get a lot of odd people passing through.  If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might recall Pander and Flander, the anarchists who stopped by during the Democratic National Convention a few years ago.  Then there are the quirky regulars, like the guy who adjusts the position of our dog water bowl outside our patio every day.  But last week we had the weirdest interaction ever.

Jill and I were in the kitchen when two men dressed in suits came into the cafe. We don't see suits very often around here, and these were not your regular off-the-rack suits, these were $10,000 tailored suits.  One guy even had the calf-length-overcoat thing going on.  They went up to the counter, and Jill and I could see through the window that one of the men was talking at length with the barista, which we take as a bad sign--usually it means there's going to be a high-maintenance customer situation.  The barista left the men and came into the kitchen, reinforcing our fears that they were insisting on talking to a manager. However, that wasn't the case this time.  Instead, the barista said that the men were looking for a deaf woman who was named "Edna or Adna or something like that".  They said they were trying to deliver Braille books and they needed to find this deaf woman.  We all agreed, that's the worst cover story we've ever heard.  There's no way these guys were working for some nonprofit outfit.  Nor were they working for one of our country's fine investigatory departments, unless government salaries have gone up a lot.  These guys were private.  Gentlemen, if you want to unobtrusively locate someone, you're going to need to come up with a better story, and lose the Armani suits.  We told the men that we didn't know anyone who fit that description, which is what we would have told them regardless of whether we did or not.  They left and stood on the corner outside the cafe, where they were joined by two other men, one of whom was an older Godfather type, and the other of whom was a scruffy guy with long hair and sunglasses, clearly the muscle.  They talked for a while and then got into a rental car with dark-tinted windows.  We were so busy spying on them that we didn't think to take pictures, so we're hoping they come back.  But Edna, if you're reading this, they're getting close.  Might be time to relocate.