The Road to Omaha: A Novel

  “How the hell do I know, Petey?” replied the CO of the Milligan-Gilligan brigade. “My guess is that they’ll be runnin’ like a Donegal wind out of there once we find ’em.”

  “How will we do that, Harry boy?” asked Bobby Duffy, his words interspersed with one hiccup and two belches.

  “Come to think of it, I’m not sure.” Milligan squinted, the leathered lines in his face like crevices on a rhino skin. “Gilligan never actually told me.”

  “You got it wrong, Harry,” protested the erratically unstable Peter Duffy. “You yourself are Gilligan.”

  “I’m not himself at all, you slotted asshole! I’m Milligan!”

  “Very nice to make your acquaintance,” said Bobby Duffy, sinking down to the curb like an overripe, overdone baked potato punctured by a fork.

  “M’ brother has been afflicted by the evil anti-Christ demons!” cried Peter, falling down against the car door, his leg over his brother’s face. “It’s the curse of the witch-sisters!”

  “Good lad,” agreed Harry Milligan, kneeling and patting Petey’s head. “You stay here and ward off those terrible demons.” Harry rose to his feet and addressed the seven remaining troops of the Milligan-Gilligan brigade. “Come on now, boyos, we know what we have to do!”

  “What exactly is that, lad?” asked a gaunt septuagenarian, wearing an ill-fitting World War II field jacket replete with a dozen patches representing duty in the European theater of operations.

  “Billy Gilligan gave me the two names—the first, of course, the great General Hawkins and, the second, his employer, a gentleman of the law of which we’ve all heard of not unkindly. The Jewish fella who’s a big shillelagh in Boston and who has a number of fine Catholic lawyers in his firm.”

  “Smart, they’re always so smart,” intoned an elderly unidentified voice in the magnificent seven. “They hire Micks, but how many of us hire the skullcaps? Smart.”

  “So this is what we do, boyos. I myself will go to the front desk and make the inquiry. I’ll be tellin ’em I have to reach either the great general or his friend, the grand lawyer named Pinkus, because I got an urgent confidential message that concerns both of ’em, and the dear Lord knows I’m not lyin’ about that! Now, with such highfalutin fellas, they got no choice but to put me in touch with one or the other, right?”

  A chorus of affirmatives followed, marred by the dissenting voice of the oldest combatant in the field jacket. “I dunno, Gilligan—”

  “I’m Milligan!”

  “Wish you were Gilligan, he was on the force, y’know.”

  “I’m not … so what don’t you know, ya old fart?”

  “Suppose you get a secretary on the telephone, what are you goin’ to say?… ‘My apologies, lass, but somebody or other is about to blow away the great general and his friend, the Jewish shillelagh.’ … Somehow, lad, I think they’d call for the boys who drive those little white trucks with thick rubber walls and bars in the windows.”

  “I don’t hafta talk to nobody, you walkin’ object of a wake! Paddy Lafferty has told us all about the grand suit his employer keeps at the Four Asses, only we don’t know where it is. Now the clerks got to tell me on account of the urgent confidential message I’m carryin’, right?”

  There was a chorus of affirmatives, again marred by the septuagenarian legionnaire. “Suppose they don’t believe you? I wouldn’t. You got shifty eyes, when a person can see ’em.”

  There was now a brace of nodding heads as the combatants studied the flesh-encased eyes of Harry Milligan. “Oh, shut up!” cried Harry, shocking his troops back to the issue at hand. “They can believe me or not believe me, it don’t make no difference. They still got to give me a room number to call—then we’ll know where it is!”

  “Then what?” asked the cautious disbeliever.

  “Then we split up, and you, ya shriveled-up cadaver, you stay by the front entrance and if we flush the bastards out and they run into getaway automobiles, you damn well get the license plate numbers.… Thank Christ you weren’t in my outfit, you’d be arguing with Ike himself!” Milligan pointed to three of the remaining unassigned six legionnaires. “You lads cover whatever other exits there are to the street—Lafferty was clear about that—”

  “Where are they, Harry?” said a short, middle-aged man in a leather air corps jacket. “I was a tail gunner, so I’m not too familiar with ground tactics.”

  “You gotta find ’em, boyo! Paddy said to pipe ’em up.”

  “What does that mean, Harry?”

  “Well … well, Paddy wasn’t too clear about that, but I figure he meant not to let anybody out who shouldn’t.”

  “Like who?” asked a tall, slender man in his late sixties, his dress code in conflict with the mission, as he wore a loud Hawaiian shirt profuse with orange passion flowers, but nevertheless topped by a blue legionnaire’s cap.

  “Harry awready told us!” cried an overweight member of medium height, a metal combat helmet framing his bubbled-out face. “Any bastards who are runnin’ outside to getaway cars.”

  “Then we shoot ’em!” confirmed the slender gentleman in the Hawaiian shirt.

  “In the legs, boyo!” clarified Harry Milligan. “Like we used to do with the Kraut scouts. We gotta save ’em for interrogation!”

  “Right on, Harry,” the helmeted infantryman agreed. “Boy, do I remember! We’d capture ’em and all they did was cover their balls! ’Course I never had to shoot, but they got the message.”

  “Lads, I suggest you take off your headgear. Kinda obvious, you know what I mean?” Harry then addressed the last three combatants from Post O’Brien. “You boys, you stay with me, properly behind and mixin’ with the people in the lobby, but keep your eyes on me. When I move, you move with me, got it, boyos?”

  Once more, and now louder with determination, the chorus of consenting adults was heard. “We’ll go in first,” said the beefy ground soldier, clipping his helmet on to his combat belt beneath his bowling shirt, which proclaimed the virtues of O’Boyle’s meats. “Give us two minutes and we’ll find the exits and get stationed.”

  “Good thought, boyo. Off with you now—there’s no time to waste!” Milligan checked his watch as the three-man advance unit dodged the Boylston traffic and ran as fast as their elderly legs could manage into the hotel. The sight of them did not exactly overwhelm the uniformed doorman with inspirational thoughts. Harry turned to the remaining three and issued his orders. “When we get inside I’ll go to the front desk, very casually, mind you, like I walk through the lobby every day of me life, and sort of lean over the counter like a very important man, maybe winkin’ a couple of times to convey the fact that I got a confidential message for other important persons. Then I’ll hit ’em with the one-two punch, namely the two illustrious names of Hawkins and Pinkass.”

  “I think that’s Pinkoos, Harry,” offered a florid-faced, balding man in his late sixties, who was obviously a bowling colleague of the infantryman; unfortunately, the O’Boyle’s Meat Market T-shirt was inside out.

  “He’s right, Milligan,” confirmed a short man sporting a large, bushy mustache usually associated with English sergeant-majors at the turn of the century. Contrarily, his present uniform consisted of soiled Levi’s held up by red suspenders over a yellow and black plaid shirt. “I heard Paddy say Pinkoos lotsa times.”

  “Pinkuss is closer,” corrected the third member of Harry’s unit, an inordinately tall reed of a man wearing a dark green tank top that afforded a generous view of the tattoos on both his arms, especially an elongated hissing blue snake with the legend below it reading Don’t Thread on Me.

  “I’ll just say ‘Pinkiss’ real quicklike, that’ll cover it.… All right, boyos of Post O’Brien, we charge and win this one for the general!”

  Inside Aaron Pinkus’s Buick coupe, the sartorially stunning Desis One and Two, the former’s mouth somewhat enlarged by a plastic front denture, sat in the cramped backseat, each admiring himself and both constantly running their
hands over the smooth dark fabric of their cutaways, especially the satin lapels.

  “Remember now, Sergeants, pretend you don’t understand a word of English,” said Aaron behind the wheel as they turned into Boylston Street. “You’re ambassadors to the United Nations from Spain and very important men.”

  “Dad’sss nice,” interrupted Desi-One, lisping heavily due to the intrusion behind his lips, “but we still don’t know how we get the vicioso to be so mad at us.”

  “You mistake him for someone else, Sergeant, we’ve gone over that. When you see him in the lobby, you rush over and point at him, yelling that he’s a hunted criminal from Madrid.”

  “Yeah, we gone over dat,” said Desi-Two. “An’ we don’ like dat. The vicioso, like all viciosos, gotta gun, man, an’ he gonna let us know dat!”

  “He won’t have a chance to do you any harm at all,” replied Aaron to the implied protest. “The general will be right behind him and will immediately interfere—‘immobilize,’ I believe was the word he used. You trust the general, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah, we like him,” answered Desi-One. “We really like that crazy hombre. He gonna get us into da army!”

  “He also beat d’shit out of us at d’airport, amigo. Dad’s why I trust him.” Desi-Two kept nodding his head as he fingered the crease on his cutaway trousers. “Dad ole man got big testículos.”

  “So what den, Comandante?” asked a bewildered Desi the First.

  “The general, in his uniquely peculiar way, is quite astute,” replied Pinkus, hugging the curb behind several taxis to the Four Seasons’ entrance. “No government dares offend an allied government over lapsed security, especially countries that are strategically important. They might shut down their embassies and sever relations!”

  “Dad’ses wad we don’ like,” broke in Desi-One. “We don’ want no embassy español shut down, even tho’ we never been to España, especially if we gotta get shot. Our relations won’ like dat.”

  “The general has given you his word.”

  “Ees better be fooking good!… But den what?”

  “Well, the best way to explain it to you is that whoever sent this terrible person to Boston after the general will be forced to reconsider his methods.”

  “Don’ understand.”

  “He’ll be frightened to the point of calling off such assaults, warning everyone in Washington who had anything to do with sending such a vicious criminal after the general to cease and desist or disappear. Hawkins is geopolitically accurate. Our bases in Spain—mainly those with planes—must be sustained.”

  “¡Olé, Comandante!”

  MacKenzie Hawkins gave his command. “Blowtorch the door open now! I want it down in five minutes, got that, Captain?”

  “You got it, General,” replied the voice of the hotel’s engineer over the telephone. “But you promised, sir. I get a picture of you and me together, right?”

  “My pleasure, son, and I’ll put my arm around your shoulders like we crossed the Rhine by ourselves.”

  “Holy Christ, I’m in heaven before I lay down to die!”

  “Now, Captain. It’s imperative to the assault.”

  “Four minutes and eight seconds, General!”

  Hawkins punched the bar of the telephone and dialed the number of the cellular phone in Aaron Pinkus’s Buick. “Commander?”

  “Yes, General?”

  “I’ll be down in five minutes. Where are you positioned?”

  “Three cars from the entrance.”

  “Good. Establish yourselves at the front desk and synchronize your watch. Zero option is between thirteen and seventeen minutes. Read me?”

  “You’re not entirely illegible, General. I understand.”

  The Post O’Brien brigade was in place—tank top, tattoos, flight jacket, a bulging combat helmet, red suspenders, Hawaiian shirt, soiled Levi’s, and a squinty-eyed, winking leader at the front desk.

  “Yes, sir?” said the clerk, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket as if the sight of the man might produce an accompanying odor.

  “I’ll tell ya what I got, boyo, and you better move quick. Does the names Pinkiss and Hawkins strike a bell, lad?”

  “Mr. Pinkus maintains a suite here, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m not referrin’ to his inner private life, boyo, and I don’t give a damn how many sweeties he’s got. I gotta get a message to him and the general. It’s urgent and confidential. Now, how do you propose I do that, eh?”

  “I suggest you telephone Mr. Pinkus’s … rooms. Extension five thousand five.”

  “Five-zero-zero-five, right, lad?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That’s his room number?”

  “We do not have fifty floors, sir. No hotel in Boston has fifty floors. That is the telephone extension number.”

  “It don’t make no sense. In any decent hotel the room number is the phone number!”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why not? How can a person know where it is?”

  “Good point,” agreed the clerk. “You yourself might illustrate it.”

  “Illustrate what, boyo?”

  “The point, sir.… The house phones are over on that ledge.”

  Bewildered, Harry Milligan turned and hurried toward the bank of telephones on a marble counter attached to the wall. He picked one up and dialed rapidly. The line was busy.

  “This is your Washington surveillance,” said MacKenzie Hawkins into the phone, lowering his voice and speaking softly, urgently.

  “My what?” asked the man in a hotel room two stories below, his voice equally low but hardly soft.

  “Just listen to me. The target’s checking out—my informant tells me he called the bell captain to have his luggage taken downstairs.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Your liaison to D.C., and you should thank me, not curse me. Hurry up. Follow him.”

  “I’m locked in!” shouted the would-be assassin furiously. “The fuckin’ door jammed; they’re working on it now!”

  “Out. We can’t be involved any longer.”

  “Holy shit!… Wait a minute, the door’s being pulled out!”

  “Hurry.” The Hawk hung up the phone and looked down at Little Joey the Shroud sitting on the edge of the bed. “Are you going to tell me you didn’t know that man was in the hotel?”

  “What man?” protested Joey. “You are the fazool of fazools, Mickey Ha Ha. You need help, big fella, like maybe a nice place with green grass lawns and iron gates and lots of doctors.”

  “You know, Little Joseph, I believe you,” said the general. “It wouldn’t be the first time command has kept certain aspects of an operation from the scouts.” With these words the Hawk walked rapidly to the door and let himself out; he could be heard accelerating his pace down the corridor.… And the telephone rang. Joey reached over and picked it up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is this the grand and great general himself, sir?”

  “So?” replied a squinting, curious Little Joey.

  “ ’Tis the privilege of me life, General! ’Tis Private First Class Harry Milligan and I’m here to tell ya that we got the place not only surrounded but infilterated, sir! No harm’ll come to ya, sir, on the word of the patriotic boyos of the Pat O’Brien Commemorative Legion Post!”

  Quietly, slowly, Joey replaced the telephone and leaned back on the pillow. Fazools, he mused. The whole world was peopled with flakereenos, especially in Boston, Massachusetts, where the friggin’ pilgrims were probably inbred to begin with. After all, what did they have to do but have a little fun on the long journey in that boat, the Maypot?… Well, thought Joey, he was going to order a nice, early room-service dinner and then call code Ragu in Washington. Vinnie the Bam-Bam was going to hear a long, very screwed-up story whether he liked it or not. Fazools!

  Aaron Pinkus escorted his two diplomats in their cutaways to the front desk and proudly announced that his guests, the amb
assadors from Spain, would be occupying his suite and whatever courtesies were extended would be greatly appreciated, not only by their host, but by the government of the United States of America.

  The entire front desk converged to pay homage to the distinguished visitors, and when it was learned that neither spoke English, a Puerto Rican bellboy was summoned to act as interpreter. The bellboy, whose name was Raul, was overjoyed as his first communication with Desi the First consisted of the following—freely translated.

  “Hey, man, where’d you get that fancy uniform with the shiny buttons? You in the army?”

  “No, man, I carry suitcases. I’m assigned to you so I can make the gringos understand what you say.”

  “Hey, that’s cool! Where are you from?”

  “P.R.”

  “So are we!”

  “No, you’re not, you’re big-shot diplomats from Madrid! That’s what the cat said.”

  “That’s for the gringos, man! Hey, maybe later we have a nice party, what do you say?”

  “Hey, man, where you’re staying, they got everything!”

  “They got maybe girls? Nice girls, of course, because my associate is very religious.”

  “I’ll get him what he wants, and I’ll get us what we want. Leave it to me, man.”

  “What did they say, Pedro?” asked the head clerk.

  “Raul, sir.”

  “Terribly sorry. What did they say?”

  “They are very appreciative of the fine manners and exemplary kindness displayed by all of you. They are especially gratified by the fact that you have assigned this modest Raul to be with them throughout their stay.”

  “My word!” said an assistant manager. “You speak extremely well for a Sp … for a newly arrived person to our shores.”

  “Night school, sir. Boston University Extension Course for Immigrants.”

  “Keep your eyes on this young man, gentlemen. He’s different!”