For Mother Teresa, having an idea was a mixed blessing.

Sometimes they came thick and fast, and collided with tremendous bumping and scraping like a pile-up on the Interstate in the fog. Sorting out the collision could take as long as the wrecking crews take removing the disabled vehicles and debris from the highway. Mother Teresa herself would be immobilized. One of her sons or daughters would sit her down with a bottle of marsala and encourage her to ""have a drink"" until ""things got better"". When the bottle was drained Mother Teresa would return to the kitchen and make a huge pot of tomato sauce. Spaghetti would be the restaurant special for a week or more afterward, often to the point where the regulars would complain.

Sometimes the ideas came one-at-a-time, but repeated over and over like the dripping of a tap into a basin of water during the night. There was no way to shut it off. This drove Mother Teresa nuts, and usually resulted in violence. The violence usually resulted in extensive damage to the bar. She would always blame it on ""anonymous customers, but the insurance adjusters were becoming suspicious. One time the bar was closed for two whole days while all the glasses and stem-ware and the glass surface on the juke box were replaced. Another time the repair bill was staggering because her liquor supplier had to retrieve a number of brands at great cost from the black market to re-stock her inventory.

And sometimes the ideas came with the clear bright light of a winter sunrise, or the explosive delight of fireworks on the 4th of July. When that happened Mother Teresa knew she was onto something. She felt calm, cool, collected. Then she took direct and immediate action. That''s what happened when she bought the bar. And when she adopted Bill as her ""brother"" to grease the immigration process, Bill having some unexplained gaps in his CV from the war years in Eastern Europe.

And that''s what happened this time. But when she turned and expressed her new idea to Bill, what he heard shocked him to the soles of his snake-skin boots.