The Thriller of the Pumpkin Stem

"Secret Agent Jones": A fragment from 2007. When I came across it yesterday, I thought it was so endearingly dumb that I might as well share it, in a slightly emended form.

Secret Agent Jones was the consummate man of mystery. He had a smiling round face, a cheery and open manner, and a small stature, but in his pockets was always the cold steel of a revolver, and he did not work in a store or in an office nor yet in any other conventional business but – in the British Secret Service.

He had been with the government agency for decades. Such had his service been, that his employers had granted him the prestigious License to Bill, which permits the bearer to charge MI6 for extravagant costs incurred during his work on behalf of the government – even hotel room service, up to the sum of 100 pounds.

Jones — after being kicked out of Britain's finest institutes of higher learning, one by one, (beginning with Eton) —, entered MI6 to help one of his friends. This friend, it turned out, was in the pay of the Russians. When one day Jones inadvertently shredded the wrong letter, and humbly took a document that left no doubt of his friend's iniquity to a vigilant superior, he became a hero and rapidly rose in the ranks. His friendliness and charm helped him along the way, as did his wise habit of saying as little as possible, which much magnified the appearance of his intellect. 

So, one day, he found himself on a yacht with other luminaries. His face was unusually red because his tie (MI6 issue) was much too tight for him, having been prepared in Bond Street according to the measures given in a dusty old folder from the eighties. But he was glossy and neat and dark as the feast required, and he had put on sunglasses to lend him a modern chic. He fit in perfectly to the glittering crowd.

On Hallowe'en, just a month before, a jovial office party had taken place at MI6 headquarters in the heart of London. In the darkness an enormous pumpkin had sidled up to Secret Agent Jones, who was dressed as a bat. The pumpkin pretended to trip on one of Jones's great dark brown wings (a refurbished curtain with black pipe cleaners stuck onto it). Jones courteously lifted the pumpkin back up by the stem. In the stem there was a piece of paper. Jones took it; then the pumpkin whispered into his ears (which were greatly enlarged and tipped with great tufts of black bat fur) to read the paper carefully, then to destroy it by popping it into one of the jack-o-lanterns.  The secret agent flapped into the bathroom and read the following: