Sentence The Fivehundredandfiftysixth

And that was the very moment when three significant things happened simultaneously: Firstly – Reichsmarschall Herman Goering pushed his way back into the Herren below the Kit Kat Klub in Berlin 1938, but unfortunately the door slammed behind him so hard that it seemed to have fused with the frame and, no matter how forcefully they pushed, and pulled, the two Gestapo officers who had been hot on his heels were unable to effect an entry, and by the time they summoned a joiner who could take the door off its hinges, they found that the doorway behind it had been bricked up and by the look of the wall that faced them, at least 50 years earlier; "if it's the Herren you want, gentleman," said the joiner, "it's over there beside the Frauen, see?" and they did see, just as clearly as they had seen Goering open this door and rush through what now was an impassable wall, so, giving the joiner ten extra Marks for his trouble, the two watched him climb the stairs and then, in a hurried conversation, agreed that they would erase all memory of what they had seen, write no report, return to the local office where Goering had found them, and say nothing more to anyone about the little mystery; and Goering? oh, he had passed through the lavatory and out the opposite door which led into a little corridor with doors on either side and another facing him, at the far end of the corridor,

and the door he had come through had slammed shut and, if he had been able to open it, or remove it from it's hinges, he would have found an airing-cupboard full of towels and bed linen and a wicker hamper containing the clothes which had been grown out of but which would be useful for others to grow into; it was very strange indeed! but perhaps even stranger was the group of people who emerged from the different rooms, because Secondly, Connor and Kathleen O'Hare and their eleven children quickly filled the hallway and began to berate the burglar – or "whatever the Hell you fuckin' are," - for invading their home and wanting to know who he was and how he had got in and that they didn't give a flying fuck who he was or how he'd got in, he'd just fucking well get out again and, without ceremony, Connor O'Hare – a Fenian from County Clare who now drove buses for Glasgow Corporation – grabbed the interloper by his collar and the seat of his pants and, for a man of slighter build than the obese stranger, demonstrated fiercer and more powerful strength and propelled him along the corridor, through the Front Door of the apartment, and frog-marched him down three flights of stairs at a run and out into the Gorbals night, hurling him onto the road, where a lorry just missed him by a bare three inches and telling him to "fuck off back to where you came from," and Thirdly, oh yes thirdly: was when Gertie Mountcastle opened the door of the suite in their hotel, which she and Pantagruel MacFarlane shared, and found Joseph Goebbels standing there in his best black dress SS raiment and shaking with fury that his party had lost their taxi-cab to "that ensorcell mountebank, 

Gunther Grebeling and the two Scottisch prostitutes," which aroused so much righteous indignation from Gertie, who categorically insisted that neither she nor her friend were prostitutes, nor had left their room all evening. and was so convincing that Goebbels, invited into the suite to avoid the embarrassment of other guests and hotel staff overhearing what was being said, became so smitten by the charms and wiles of Pal – whom he quickly perceived had aristocratic, perhaps even Royal, and most certainly Aryan, blood flowing in her veins – that he went down on one knee and offered her his most heartfelt apologies for associating her and her young friend with a man of Grebeling's lowly status and offering her whatever inducements he could to win over her undoubted charms to the aid of his Party in avoiding the conflict which he feared might come if other European nations did not show due respect to his Fuhrer over the issue of Lebensraum and Pal, to her credit, did not make reference to the poor man's disability but allowed him to believe that he had made quite a conquest and that she would definitely partner him on a visit to the Opera next evening and when he had left, rubbed her hands with glee and admitted to Gertie that everything was going swimmingly and her goal – the assassination of Adolf Hitler – was one step nearer it's satisfactory conclusion! and while Pal and Gertie were toasting each other's sterling performance, here, in Berlin, in the Summer of 1938, away across to the furthest western fringe of Europe, on a blustery cold morning, the dejected figure of Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering, his clothes soiled and filthy dirty from rolling through oily puddles, rainbow-variegated in the glow of sodium street-lights, staggered he knew not where, certainly this was a district of Berlin he did not recognise, until he stopped by a Newsagent's door, from which light spilled out and illuminated a poster which he tried to read, but the black-on-white print might have been greeking in some gobbledygook language for all the sense it made, none of it meant anything to him and, wondering if perhaps he had been concussed in his fall, he staggered past and round the corner, which was why he had not realised that the Glasgow Herald of Wednesday the 16th of October 1946 carried the shocking headline that 'Goering Commits Suicide in Nuremberg!'