Sentence The Sixhundredandtwentyeighth

 

And as they ate their Big Macs and fries, Sadie Moskowitz asked: "do tell us, Hymie, you owe him nothing now, he's humiliated you so publicly, already, the guy's a nogoodnik," and Hyman Z Kaplan agreed with that; "aside from his Camorra, who're the Makers and Shakers, there's a posologist – well that's what I call him – he's a psychologist who aims to distribute the bile like snake venom, too much and you give the game away, too little and it's just an irritant, get the dosage right and you paralyse your target without leaving a mark, it's an Art, with that guy; and then there's a bunch of guys in the Writers Room churning out his Tweets, but when he's feeling really vindictive he likes to send them

himself, like the one about me, but here's something, do you know that he is a direct descendant of a Scotch nobleman, Sir Parlane MacFarlane?" and his two old friends exchanged glances: "is that the one who seems to have returned from the dead, from the Middle Ages?" asked Rose Mitnick, "indeed so," replied Hyman, "the Scottish cops are hot on his trail, he and his valet, a guy called Dominic Doubleday, who is the ancestor of a certain Duncan Doubleday, the Deputy Chief Constable, are both on the run and laying low, but I have an informant who tells me that MacFarlane has learned of Duck, worked out his genealogy and plans to come over here if he can, to meet his most illustrious descendant and with some hope of evading Scottish Justice," the ladies laughed at this preposterous tale; oh yes, they had heard about the strange happenings around the Scottish Borders town of Melrose and it's magical Eildon Hills: "didn't a great Scottish poet, Thomas the Rhymer also return?" asked Sadie; "yes," said Hymie, "together with a daughter of Sir Walter Scott," and "wow!" cried Mitnick, "this sounds like a Real Life Outlander! is it all true?" and Kaplan laughed: "well no-one

seems to have any idea how it all came about – there's talk about Wormholes in Space and Time, Parallel Universes and Quantum Shifts, but all Joe Public gets is that there's something strange about those Hills, Magical! or Spooky! people have disappeared, and prominent people at that: the Leader of the Unionist Party in the Scottish Parliament, also a direct descendant of MacFarlane, Sir Pantagruel MacFarlane, and various other less well-known folks, and the weirdest one of all was a noted historian, Professor Sir Clement Dane, disappeared and came back with a bunch of US Infantry who'd been lost, believed killed, out in Vietnam, but coming back before he disappeared and now him and his former self have taken a couple of rooms in the town's only pub (the others are hotels) The Ship Inn and they're doing interviews with media from all over the world; but it's MacFarlane the cops want to catch – he started a child-sex-abuse club, The Ring of Gold, way back in the 13th Century, and it's still on the go, so the police want to interview MacFarlane, his valet and a few other members who managed to get out of a house just minutes before the police arrived, and one of the gang is Ranulph Ochan'toshan OBE," at which Sadie squealed: "I interviewed him on TV about ten

years ago, he was a kind of British Pee-wee Herman and a buddy of Rolf Harris, yeah?" and Hyman nodded: "yeah, the whole thing is like one of those kids puzzles where you follow a piece of string with no idea what you're gonna find at the other end, but certainly one strand of DNA seems to lead here, to President Donald Duck," and the three took final bites of their Burgers and sat quietly for a moment, thinking, and after a short minute, Rose Mitnick's phone trilled, she read the message and said: "someone just told me that this MacFarlane guy and his chap, Doubleday, are on a plane due to land at Kennedy in a couple of hours," and Kaplan, incredulous that his story was being pulled out from under his feet, by Mitnick, no less: "who's your source Rose?" and she laughed back, "Carmen Caravello, her sister's husband's nephew Max is an accountant at the FBI in New Jersey and he just saw the name flashed up and thought I'd be interested in a scoop, I'm kinda seeing him, in a sort of a way, if you follow, he's Hispanic natch, but he's Kosher, and this is HOT!" at which all three grabbed their coats, hats, phones and bustled out to hail a cab, keen to be the vanguard on this story, with Kaplan asking, "what's the quickest way for us to get to Kennedy?" and Sadie shouted, "by plane, you schmuck!"