The Road to Omaha: A Novel

  “You ought to have your blood pressure checked, son.”

  “You ought to have your head checked into a taxidermy shop! Now what the hell have you done, and why me?”

  “Please,” Pinkus intruded once again, shrugging apologetically at the Hawk, his brows now arched. “Permit me to attempt an explanation, General. As one attorney might to another, is that acceptable?”

  “We of command know best how to handle our own personnel, sir,” replied MacKenzie. “Truthfully speaking, I cousined the hope that you might clear your flanks and march to my drummer in that direction. Frankly, it’s why I showed you the core of the operation—not the tactics or my rules of engagement, naturally, but the down-range objective, as it were. Such basic intelligence is rarely a secret between such men as ourselves.”

  “Excellent initial strategy, General. I commend you.”

  “Commend him?” shouted Devereaux. “What the hell is he doing, marching on Rome?”

  “We did that, Sam,” said the Hawk quietly. “Remember, son?”

  “That is one topic you will never refer to in my presence, General Hawkins,” insisted Aaron coldly.

  “I figured you knew—”

  “You think Samuel would tell me?”

  “Hell, no. You could order him to a kamikaze squadron and he’d short out the spark plugs. No stomach.”

  “Then how?”

  “The Irish gunny described your covert surgical strike into Sam’s quarters. Gunnies usually try to impress command with their contributions.”

  “So?”

  “Well, you mentioned that the sergeant had tied the boy up and that told me you had dismissed the gunny before talking to Sam, which you admitted.”

  “And?”

  “Why tie him up unless he was hysterical like he is now? And why would such a cool officer of the court—a side of Sam I haven’t seen a whole hell of a lot of—be hysterical unless this incursion of yours produced something about him that he never wanted anyone, especially you, to know about?”

  “Based on certain obvious premises, your deductive reasoning is acute.”

  “That and the fact that when Sam slammed the phone down on me, he missed. I heard another voice over the line—one that didn’t have much more control than Sambo’s—and when we met in the parking lot, I knew it was you, Commander Pinkus. You yelled a fair amount yourself that afternoon. Especially about a certain operation of ours that concerned the Vatican.”

  “So much for a priori deduction,” said Aaron, now shrugging in defeat.

  “So much for lizardshit!” roared Devereaux. “I’m here! I exist! If you prick me, do I not bleed—”

  “Hardly appropriate, Samuel.”

  “What’s inappropriate? I’m listening to a couple of refugees from a Prussian time warp! My future, my career, my life itself—all are about to shatter into a thousand pieces of broken mirrors—”

  “Very nice, son,” broke in the Hawk. “Like the imagery.”

  “He stole it from a French playwright named Anouilh,” added the venerated Boston lawyer. “Samuel’s full of surprises, General.”

  “Stop it!” screamed Devereaux. “I demand to be heard!”

  “Hell, boy, they can hear you down in Washington, right to the Army G-Two data banks, where they keep all those intelligence files.”

  “I have the right to remain silent,” mumbled Sam, barely audible and collapsing back into the chair, pouting.

  “Then perhaps I may be allowed to break the silence, since you’ve restricted it to yourself?” asked Pinkus.

  “Mmmfff,” came the tight-lipped reply.

  “Thank you.… The point of your question, Samuel, focused on the material provided me by General Hawkins. Granted, there hasn’t been time to read it thoroughly, but from what I can glean with a fairly practiced eye that’s been perusing such documents for nearly fifty years, it’s incredible. Rarely have I ever read a more convincing brief. The legal historian who compiled this had the patience and imagination to perceive suspended or broken lines of legislative debate knowing that somewhere there had to be buried additional records that formed contiguous data spelling out the missing pieces. If this all stands up, the conclusions would appear to be indisputable, supported by copies of the original, authentic papers! Where did your source ever find them, General?”

  “It’s only rumor, of course,” answered the Hawk, frowning quizzically, “but I’ve heard that they could only have been unearthed from the sealed historical archives at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

  “The sealed archives …?” Aaron Pinkus looked harshly at the general, then sat down quickly in the chair and picked up several pages, bringing each close to his eyes, studying them not for content but for something else. “Dear Abraham,” he whispered, “I know these watermarks … they were picked up by an extremely sensitive copier, a state-of-the-art machine.”

  “Only the best, Commander.” Hawkins abruptly stopped; it was instantly apparent that he regretted the statement. He glanced over at Sam, who was staring at him, then cleared his throat. “I guess those pointy-heads—those scholarly types—get the best equipment.”

  “Almost never,” uttered Devereaux in a low, accusing monotone.

  “Regardless, General,” Pinkus continued, “a number of these papers—I refer to the ones concerning the historical documents—are actually reproductions of the original photostats—photographs of photographs!”

  “I beg your pardon?” The Hawk began mutilating the cigar in his mouth.

  “In the days before copiers, when you couldn’t simply flatten out aged or rotted parchment, or piece fragments together, and run a beam of light over the whole for an accurate facsimile, photographs, then later photostats, were made to be entered into the archives replacing the disintegrating originals.”

  “Commander, I’m not really interested in that technical crap—”

  “You should be, General,” interrupted Aaron. “Your unnamed legal source may well have come upon a decades-old conspiracy, but his discovery may conceivably be based on stolen evidence long since consigned to the sealed vaults of the government’s archives for reasons of the gravest national concern.”

  “What?” mumbled Hawkins numbly, aware that Sam Devereaux was now glaring at him.

  “The watermarks on these archival photostats indicate a rare, steel filamentous paper designed to withstand the ravages of time and the environmental conditions of the vaults. Actually, I believe Thomas Edison invented it around the turn of the century, and it was ordered into limited archival use in 1910 or 1911.”

  “Limited use …?” asked Devereaux hesitantly, his teeth clenched as he continued to stare at the Hawk.

  “Everything’s relative, Samuel. In those days deficit spending, when it existed, was restricted to no more than several hundred thousand dollars, and even those figures could freeze the Potomac. The steel-threaded pages in these photographs were enormously expensive, and to convert thousands upon thousands of historical documents into them would have broken the treasury. Therefore, only a limited number were chosen.”

  “Limited to what, Aaron?”

  Pinkus turned to General MacKenzie Hawkins, his demeanor perilously close to that of a judge pronouncing sentence. “To those documents determined by the government to remain beyond scrutiny for a minimum of a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Well, goddamn!” The Hawk whistled softly, slapping his beaded buckskins. “Pay dirt!” he added, looking benevolently at Sam. “Aren’t you proud, son, to have been the ‘spiritual influence,’ as the fine commander here put it, behind this grand project?”

  “What fucking project?” choked Devereaux. “And what goddamned spiritual influence?”

  “Well, Sam, you know how you always used to talk about the downtrodden people on this earth and how so little was done to help them? Some might have called all that spewing and mewing horseshit left-wing garbage, but I never did. I mean, I really respected your point of view, son, I really did.” br />
  “You never respected anything or anybody that couldn’t blow you away into a grave!”

  “Now that’s not true, boy, and you know it,” MacKenzie admonished, shaking his index finger at Devereaux. “Remember all those discussions you had with the girls? Each one of those dear ladies would call me and express her genuine respect and affection for you and your philosophical expressions of compassion. Especially Annie, who—”

  “Don’t ever mention that name to me!” roared Sam, clapping his hands over his ears.

  “I don’t know why not, son. I talk with her frequently, especially when she gets herself in some of those hairy situations she’s prone to, and let me tell you, Sam, she really cares for you.”

  “How could she?” yelled Devereaux, trembling with rage. “She married Jesus, not me!”

  “Dear Abraham,” intoned Pinkus. “I’m not a party to this colloquy.”

  “That’s a different caliber of weapon, son, if you’ll forgive the comparison.… But hear me out, boy. I searched for the downtrodden, a people who got screwed by the system, and put all my efforts in setting things right. Somehow I thought you’d be proud of me—God knows, I tried.” The Hawk lowered his chin down into the open collar of his beaded Wopotami jacket, his gaze forlornly on the carpeted floor of the hotel suite.

  “Cut that crap out, Mac! I don’t know what the hell you did or tried to do, I only know I don’t want to know!”

  “Maybe you should, Sam.”

  “Just … one minute,” Pinkus interrupted, his eyes on the contrite Hawk. “I think it’s time I should reach into my exaggerated bag of legal expertise and pull out a specific, if rarely used, statute. The penalty for unauthorized invasion of sealed government archives carries a sentence of thirty years’ imprisonment.”

  “You don’t say?” said the general, his gaze roaming the carpet as if trying to find a pattern on the all-blue covering.

  “Yes, I do say, General. And since this information has no discernible effect on you, I must happily presume that your counsel had full authorization to study the documents referred to in this brief.”

  “Wrongo!” shouted Sam. “He stole them—it’s the G-Two mess all over again! This lousy excuse for a human being, this unmitigated military mistake, this legend of larceny did it again! I know it because I know him—I know that dirty little boy look, the rotten kid who wets his bed and tells you it was raining under the covers. He’s the one who did it!”

  “Judgments made in the white heat of emotional reactions are rarely sound, Samuel,” said Pinkus, shaking his head critically.

  “Judgments made in the cold light of objective observation over a long and agonizing period of time are generally irrefutable,” rejoined Devereaux. “If the cookies are made of molasses and the son of a bitch has his hand in the jar with his fingers stuck together, you can be goddamned sure you found the perpetrator! Recidivism is a term the criminal courts have lived with for years.”

  “Well, General,” continued Aaron, peering at the Hawk over the rim of his glasses. “The prosecution seems to have raised a valid point, since he relates the current circumstances to a previous act you yourself have confirmed regarding the stolen intelligence files. Behavioral patterns are limited but acceptable evidence.”

  “Now, Commander Pinkus,” began MacKenzie, squinting and pursing his lips in bewilderment, “all this legal verbiage has my head spinning. To tell you the truth, I can’t follow half of what you say.”

  “Liar!” cried Sam, suddenly breaking into a loud singsong chant, like a child taunting another. “It’s raining under the cov-verrs, it’s raining under the cov-verrs …!”

  “Samuel, be quiet,” admonished the elderly lawyer, his voice ringing with authority as he turned back to the Hawk. “I believe we can settle this expeditiously, General. Professional courtesy has restrained me from insisting on the name of your incredibly gifted counsel, but now I’m afraid that I must. As an officer of the court, he can refute my young associate’s allegation and clear up the matter.”

  “It’s hardly proper, sir,” said Hawkins, his expression stoic, “for one commanding officer to ask another to betray a confidence. That sort of thing is for the lower echelon, where honor’s not so prevalent and spines are less than steel.”

  “Now come, really, General, where is the harm? Surely this brief, as brilliantly persuasive as it appears to be from what I’ve read, still has not been tested. Heaven knows, without attorney attribution and in the absence of government challenge, it certainly hasn’t been submitted to any court.” Aaron paused, laughing softly. “If it had been, we’d all know about it, as our entire judicial system, as well as the Department of Defense, would come to a stop, all the participants screaming in frenzy. So you see, General Hawkins, there’s nothing to be lost or gained.…” Pinkus’s genial countenance suddenly froze on his face. Slowly, involuntarily, it faded as his eyes grew wide and his face ashen. “Dear Abraham, please don’t desert me,” he whispered, staring at MacKenzie Hawkins’s totally blank expression. “My God, it was submitted!”

  “In a manner of speaking, it found its way to the place where it was intended.”

  “It surely couldn’t have been a legitimate court of law.”

  “Again, Commander, you might find allies in that assessment.”

  “Was it?”

  “Some say it is.”

  “But there’s been nothing in the media, and, believe me, they’d all be colliding with one another to get such extraordinary news out. It’s catastrophic!”

  “There could be a reason for that.”

  “What reason?”

  “Hyman Goldfarb.”

  “Hyman who?”

  “Goldfarb.”

  “It strikes a bell, but I really haven’t the vaguest—”

  “He used to be a football player.”

  In the flash of several seconds, Aaron Pinkus’s face lost twenty years. “You mean Hymie the Hurricane? The Hebrew Hercules …? Do you really know him, Mac—I mean … General, of course?”

  “Know him? I recruited that yarmulke yo-yo.”

  “You did?… Not only was he the greatest linebacker in the NFL, but he broke the stereotype of—shall we say, the overly cautious Jewish male. He was a lion of Judea, the terror of the defense—on a par with Moshe Dayan on the American football field!”

  “He was also a crook—”

  “Spare me! He was my hero of the hour, a symbol for all of us—the highly intelligent muscular giant who made us proud.… What do you mean, he was a crook?”

  “Well, he’s never actually been indicted—close, but no arraignments—but then there are reasons for that, too.”

  “Indictments, reasons? What are you talking about?”

  “He does a lot of work—not exactly officially—for the government. For a fact, I kinda started him off in that department, for the army, actually.”

  “Will you please make sense, General?”

  “In a short-shell casing, we had some fat, loose lips regarding certain weapons specifications that we couldn’t uncover, even though we knew where the leaks were coming from. I ran across Goldfarb, who was setting up a consulting business on security measures—hell, a picture of him in an undershirt would scare the shit out of Godzilla—and told him to get to work on the problem. You might say that he and his troops go where the Inspector General’s office wouldn’t get near.”

  “General, what has Hyman Goldfarb got to do with the silence that has followed your incredible brief when there should be pandemonium?”

  “Well, as these things happen in Dizzy City, one thing led to another for the Hurricane. I mean, his reputation spread like a brushfire started with flamethrowers, and before you could sit shiva, everybody in town wanted his services—especially against one another. His list of government agency clients reads like the who’s who and what’s what around the Potomac. He’s got a lot of powerful friends who wouldn’t admit they ever heard of him if you plucked their short hairs with
a pair of pliers. Squashing indictments are his for raising an eyebrow.… You see, that’s when I really knew we might be close to pay dirt.”

  “Pay dirt…?” Aaron shook his head back and forth as though trying to stop the clanging cymbals inside his skull. “May I ask for clarification?” he pleaded.

  “His people came after me, Commander Pinkus. It was an ambush, the objective capture and silence—I read ’em like a book.”

  “Capture … silence, a book? They came after you …?”

  “After the Wopotami brief was filed—long after! Which has to mean the brief’s being taken seriously but the news is being kept under the ponchos because the beltway’s about to spiral up to the moon. So what do they do in the meantime? They hire Hymie the Hurricane to solve their problem. Search, capture, and destroy! Read ’em like a book.”

  “But, General, the lower judiciary, with its caseloads and backlogs and …” Once again, Aaron Pinkus’s expression froze as his words trailed off into audible vapor. “Oh, dear God, it wasn’t …? It wasn’t.”

  “You know the rules, Commander. A plaintiff suing the state has direct access, dependent only on the validity of argument.”

  “No … no, you couldn’t have!”

  “I’m afraid I did. A little outside persuasion on a couple of sensitive law clerks and we went right up to the big legal bathtub.”

  “What bathtub?” shouted a totally confounded Devereaux. “What kind of crap is this moral degenerate trying to sell?”

  “I fear he may have sold it to someone else,” said Aaron, his voice faint. “He’s taken this brilliantly evolved brief—based on materials stolen from the sealed archives—directly to the Supreme Court.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “For everyone’s sake, I wish I were.” Pinkus abruptly found his voice and his posture. “Now, however, we can plumb the depths of this insanity. Who’s the attorney-of-record for the plaintiffs, General? A simple phone call will reveal the name.”

  “I’m not sure it will, Commander.”