The Road to Omaha: A Novel

“He’s the biggest asshole of them all. This is a good place; he won’t last a month.”

  “Tell us something we don’t know, Pedro!”

  “Perhaps,” said Aaron Pinkus, interrupting, “you’d like to look around this magnificent lobby. It’s really very unique.… Would you translate, please, Raul.”

  “With great pleasure, sir.”

  Harry Milligan approached the tank top-cum-tattoos and whispered into his ear, only vaguely aware that a number of people in the lobby stared at them. “The great general moves in wondrous and mysterious ways, lad. I explained our mission and he was kinda quietlike, but as the Lord is my witness, I could hear the wheels spinning in that fine brain of his.… Y’know, that grand man could be scalin’ down the outside walls at this minute. I’m told he taught all the Rangers every thin’ they ever learned!”

  Suddenly, the intrusion startling, the septuagenarian in the patch-laden field jacket, his bowed legs a set of churning parentheses, rushed up to Milligan and Tank Top. “I’ve got it, boyos! They’re terrorists!”

  “Who, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Them fancy dans in the fish ’n’ chips!”

  “What’re ya talkin’ about?”

  “Those two dark-skinned, black-haired creeps leavin’ the front desk! They’re supposed to be big shots, right?”

  “Well, I guess they are, boyo. Look at ’em.”

  “Since when do big shots in big-shot threads get out of a lousy, small three-year-old Buick instead of a big limousine-type automobile? I ask ya, Harry Milligan, does it make sense?”

  “No, it don’t, ’cause it ain’t natural, not with highfalutin duds like that in a place like this. A three-year-old Buick just ain’t fittin’ transportation, yer right about that.” Harry squinted at the splendidly dressed visitors who looked for all the world like preening peacocks, foreigners from some sun-drenched country in the Mediterranean by the dark complexion of their faces.… Arabs! Arab terrorists who surely were not comfortable in the clothes they wore or they wouldn’t be hitching up their shoulders and wiggling their asses in their tight-fitting trousers. No, sir, those boyos were used to desert robes like in the movies and long-curved knives under their belts, not fancy-dan sashes around their waists. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” whispered Gilligan to Tank Top. “This could be it, boyo! Get word to each of our lads—tell ’em to move in slowly, keepin’ their eyes on those two Sahara rats. If they get into an elevator, we get in, too!”

  “Harry, I didn’t go to confession this week—”

  “Oh, shut up, there are seven of us, for Christ’s sake!”

  “That’s more than three on one, ain’t it?”

  “Now you’re an accountant, lad? Hurry along now, and lastly, tell the boyos that if I give the lodge war cry, we rush ’em!”

  Like a gracefully choreographed pavane with somewhat less than graceful dancers, the Milligan-Gilligan brigade began threading through the well-dressed guests in the hotel lobby. Bare arms with tattoos and T-shirts from O’Boyle’s Meats mingled with tropical worsteds and Christian Dior prints, while a swinging combat helmet kept crashing into the stomachs of Brooks Brothers blazers and Adolfo cocktail dresses, all to the growing concern of the entire front desk and the appalled victims in the lobby being assaulted by the offending intruders in their very strange costumes.

  Suddenly, a heavyset man with fire in his eyes emerged from an elevator. He looked around and moved quickly to a vantage point near the front entrance where he could obviously survey the lobby. Unseen by him, a tall, gray-haired figure in a buckskin Indian jacket came out of the shadows and sidestepped his way to within several feet of the agitated man.

  “¡Caramba!”

  “¡Madre de Dios!”

  The screaming duet filled the lobby as the two men in cutaways roared at the top of their voices while pointing accusingly at the heavyset man near the entrance.

  “¡Homicidio!”

  “¡Asesino!”

  “¡Criminal!”

  “¡Demandaré el policía!”

  The stunned, unfriendly-looking gentleman who was the object of the cutaways’ shrieking accusations began to run but was instantly stopped by the tall man in the Indian costume, who hammerlocked the man’s neck and head while jamming his knee up into the base of the accused’s spine.

  “That’s him, boyos!” came another roar that echoed off the walls and over the pandemonium of the crowds in the lobby. “It’s the great man himself! Erin go bragh, boyos! Charge in the memory of Saint William Patrick O’Brien!”

  And, naturally, the Milligan-Gilligan brigade pummeled through hysterical bodies and fell upon the two Arab terrorists in cutaways.

  “Wa chu doing, ole man?” yelled Desi the First, fending off an assault by a fat stranger now wearing a combat helmet.

  “Hey, loco jerk!” cried Desi the Second, his foot sending an O’Boyle Meats advocate into a lovely Queen Anne chair that collapsed under his bulk; he gripped the bare arm of Tank Top. “Das a nice lookin’ snake, ole gringo, an’ I don’ wanna hurt it, but chu gotta leave me alone! I got no disputa wid chu!”

  “Sergeants!” roared the Hawk, crashing through the collapsing figures around his two extremely adept adjutants. “Commander Pinkus has ordered an evacuation!”

  “As quickly as possible,” added Aaron by the door. “The hotel security was filling out stolen property forms in the office, but they’re out of there now and the police have been summoned. Quickly!”

  “Wad about the vicioso, Heneral?”

  “When he wakes up he’ll have a bad back for a month or two. I wonder if the Mafia has Medicare.”

  “Will you three please hurry!”

  “H’okay, Comandante,” said Desi-One, looking around at the melee in the lobby. “Hey, Raul!”

  “¡Si, Señor Embajador? You freak!”

  “We’ll call you later, man! Maybe you wanna join the army wid us, no?”

  “Maybe, amigo. It could be safer than this place. ¡Adiós!”

  Aaron Pinkus’s Buick coupe raced down Boylston Street and turned around the first corner that would lead them to Arlington and eventually the Ritz-Carlton hotel. “I simply don’t understands” protested the attorney. “Who were they?”

  “They were lunatics—old lunatics, senile lunatics!” replied an angry MacKenzie Hawkins, glancing into the backseat. “Did you two suffer any wounds?” he asked.

  “You crazy, Heneral? Dose ole men couldn’t steal chickens.”

  “What’s that?” yelled the Hawk abruptly as he watched Desi the First place four wallets on the seat between himself and Desi-Two.

  “Wad’s wad?” asked D-One, innocently looking up at the general.

  “Those are billfolds—wallets—four of them!”

  “Ees a big crowd back there,” offered D-Two. “My fren’ don’ work so hard today ’cause he can do lots better.”

  “Good Lord,” said Pinkus behind the wheel, a sense of defeat again overwhelming him. “The hotel security … those stolen property reports.”

  “You can’t do that, Sergeant!”

  “I’m not so lousy, Heneral. Ees only a sideline, as you gringos say.”

  “Oh, dear Abraham,” pleaded Aaron softly. “I really must calm myself, my blood pressure is stratospheric.”

  “What’s the matter, Commander Pinkus?”

  “Let’s just say this hasn’t been a normal working day for me, General.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “Oh, no, thank you. Driving actually takes my mind off things.” Aaron reached over to the radio and turned it on.

  The strains of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D for flute filled the small car, causing Desis One and Two to look at each other in disapproval and Pinkus to breathe steadily, deeply, for a few moments of peace. However, it was only a few moments. Suddenly, the music stopped and the excited voice of an announcer replaced the soothing Vivaldi with a nerve-shattering news flash.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you an e
xclusive bulletin. The Four Seasons Hotel on Boylston Street was only minutes ago the scene of an extraordinary incident. The circumstances have not been clarified, but apparently there was a riot in the hotels lobby causing numerous guests to be jostled and thrown to the ground—fortunately with only minor injuries so far reported. We switch you now by telephone to our correspondent at the scene, Chris Nichols, who was having a late lunch at the hotel—” the announcer paused, involuntarily adding, “Lunch at the Four Seasons? On our salaries …?”

  “Not lunch, you idiot!” broke in a second voice, deep and resonant. “My wife thinks I’m in Marblehead—”

  “You re ON, Chris!”

  “Just kidding, folks … but there was no humor in what took place here barely five minutes ago. The police are trying to unravel the facts and it’s not an easy job. All we know at this moment is that the cast of characters might have come out of a Hitchcock film.… A famous Boston lawyer, two Spanish ambassadors, Arab terrorists, a large elderly American Indian with the strength of a buffalo, an odd assortment of World War Two veterans in strange attire and even stranger hallucinations, and finally, a reputed Mafia executioner. Only the first and the last have been identified. They are the renowned attorney Mr. Aaron Pinkus, and one Caesar Boccegallupo, allegedly a capo primitivo in the Borgia family of Brooklyn, New York. The first-named, Mr. Aaron Pinkus, presumably escaped with the two Spanish ambassadors or was taken hostage by the Arab terrorists, depending on whose version one cares to accept. Mr. Boccegallupo is in custody, and according to reports keeps shouting that he insists on speaking to his lawyer, who he claims is the President of the United States. Well, regardless of political parties, we all know the President is not an attorney.”

  “Thank you, Chris, thank you for this exclusive report, and good luck in Marblehead with that exciting yacht club regatta—”

  “It’s over, you stupid son of a—” The Vivaldi returned but did nothing to lower Aaron Pinkus’s blood pressure.

  “Abraham has truly deserted me,” whispered the foremost lawyer of Boston, Massachusetts.

  “I heard that, Commander!” shouted MacKenzie Hawkins. “He may have, but as sure as leopards have spots, I haven’t! We’ll face the fire together, turn it on ’em, and blow ’em away, old buddy!”

  “Is it possible,” asked Aaron Pinkus softly, glancing at the Hawk, “that I have been presented with the human form of my own personal dybbuk?”

  14

  Sunrise Jennifer Redwing quietly shut the bedroom door and walked to the writing desk in the sitting room of the Ritz-Carlton suite arranged by Aaron Pinkus. “Your mother’s asleep,” she said as she pulled the chair away and sat down facing Devereaux on the couch. “At last,” she added, firmly crossing her legs and glaring at Sam.

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you that my mother isn’t always tanked.”

  “If I were a mother, Samuel Devereaux, and I had learned about my son what she’s learned about you during the last several days, I wouldn’t draw a sober breath for the next five years!”

  “Isn’t that a little severe, Counselor?”

  “Only if you chose to immolate yourself on the stage of the San Francisco Cow Palace, all proceeds going for the benefit of mothers driven to cuckooville by their offspring.”

  “She told you quite a bit then,” said Sam, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the lovely lady’s positively unfriendly gaze.

  “Only bits and pieces at the house, but for the past half hour, I’ve listened to a compendium of horrors—that’s when you may have heard me locking the door as she instructed me to do.… Underworld killers on a golf course, English traitors, Nazis on chicken farms, Arabs roasting goats’ testicles in the desert—and my God, kidnapping the Pope! You made allusions to this mad general scouring intelligence files to raise forty million dollars—but nothing like this! Jesus Christ, the Pope! I can’t believe it … she must have got that wrong.”

  “They’re not actually one and the same, you know. Christ and the Pope, I mean. Remember, I’m Anglican, although I can’t specifically recall when I last went to church. Early teens, I think—”

  “I don’t give a damn whether you’re Anglican or a moon drop from a Tibetan zodiac, you are certifiable, Counselor! You have no right walking the streets, much less—much, much less—being an officer of the court!”

  “You’re hostile,” observed Devereaux.

  “I’ve gone completely out of my mind! You make my maximum-nut brother Charlie look like Oliver Wendell Holmes!”

  “I’ll bet we’d get along.”

  “Oh, sure, I can see it now. Redwing and Devereaux—”

  “Devereaux and Redwing,” interrupted Sam. “I’m older and more experienced.”

  “—the law firm that set all manner of jurisprudence back to the Stone Age!”

  “Probably a lot clearer then,” said Sam, nodding. “They couldn’t chip out all those codicillary phrases on the rocks.”

  “Be serious, you idiot!”

  “An idiot I’m not, Red. A playwright once said that there comes a time when there’s nothing left to do but scream. I’m simply substituting an ironic chuckle for a shriek.”

  “You’re referring to Anouilh, and he also said ‘bearer of life, give light,’ and I substitute ‘law’ for ‘life’—which for a few moments in your house I thought you believed, too. We must give light, Sam.”

  “You know about Anouilh? I thought I was the only person I knew who—”

  “He was never a practicing attorney in Paris,” interrupted Jennifer, “but he loved the law—especially the language of the law—and he turned a great deal of it into poetry.”

  “You scare me, Indian lady.”

  “I hope so. We’ve got a very scary problem on the docket, Counselor.”

  “I don’t mean Mac’s megamess, although you’re right, it’s scary as hell. But somehow—don’t ask me how—I think we’ll muddle through, at least with our lives if not our sanity intact.”

  “I’m glad you’re so confident,” observed Redwing. “I’m not, on either point.”

  “ ‘Confident’ is the wrong word, Red. Let’s say I’m fatalistic because the fates will probably be on our side if for no other reason than the combine of Aaron Pinkus and MacKenzie Hawkins, two of the most resourceful men I’ve ever known, are running interference for us. And if I’m called off the bench, I’m not exactly inadequate myself.”

  “Then you’ve lost me. What were you talking about?”

  “You, lady.… In the space of a few hours, from a crazy moment in an elevator to this hotel suite, we’ve gone through quite a bit.”

  “That may be the understatement of your professional career,” Redwing broke in quickly, quietly, her eyes still glaring.

  “I know, I know, but something happened—”

  “Has it really?”

  “To me,” completed Sam. “I’ve watched you in what the psychology boys would probably call moments of extreme stress, and I like what I saw, respect what I saw. You can learn an awful lot about a person under those kinds of circumstances.… You can discover wonderful things, beautiful things.”

  “This is getting a little saccharine, Mr. Devereaux,” said Jennifer, “and I’m very sure it’s not the time for it.”

  “But it is the time, don’t you see? If I don’t say it now when I feel it so strongly, I might not say it later. It may just slip away and I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Why? Because the memory of—what was it your mother said?—oh, yes, the ‘eternal love of his life,’ some benevolent nun who ran away with the Pope, has come back to you? That’s only another crooked house on a crooked mile in cuckooville!”

  “That’s part of what I’m saying,” insisted Sam. “Because that memory’s fading, I can feel it, sense it. Only last night I wanted to kill Mac for even mentioning her name, but now it doesn’t matter, at least I don’t think it does. I look at you and I can’t see her face any more, and that tells me something pr
etty goddamned important.”

  “Are you telling me there actually was such a person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Counselor, I’ve got to be in the middle of a horror movie that has exhausted my popcorn, half of it sticking to a gum-laden floor.”

  “Welcome to the world of MacKenzie Hawkins, Counselor. And don’t get up from your seat, because if the greasy popcorn doesn’t make you slip down on your ass, you’ll lose your shoes to the gum.… Why do you think your brother beat feet? Why do you think I did everything within the power of the very powerful Aaron Pinkus to avoid getting mixed up with the mad Hawk again?”

  “Because it is total madness,” answered the bronze-skinned Aphrodite, her eyes softening. “Yet your brilliant Mr. Pinkus—and I concede that brilliance, because I know something about him—has not cut off the mad general. He’s apparently in constant touch with him, working with him, when we both know he could sever the relationship with one call to Washington, exonerating himself from any association whatsoever by simply stating that he never sought it.… And you, I watched you on the phone in the car; you were beside yourself with anxiety, no matter your feeble disclaimers. Why, Counselor? What hold does this creature have on you, on both of you?”

  Sam lowered his head, his eyes roaming within an imaginary circle of his shoes. “The truth, I guess,” he said simply.

  “What truth? It’s chaos!”

  “Yeah, there’s that, too, but underneath there’s truth. Like with Pope Francesco. It started off as the biggest scam in the history of the world, as Aaron called it, but down below there was something else. That beautiful man was being hamstrung by self-righteous people around him, men more interested in power than in progress. Uncle Zio wanted to widen the doors opened by John the Twenty-third, and they wanted to shut them. That’s why Zio and the Hawk became such friends in the Alps. Why they did what they did.”

  “The Alps! What they did?”

  “Easy, Counselor. You asked and I’m answering with a limited response. The Alps aren’t important, it could have been an apartment in Jersey City. What is important is the truth, and that’s Mac’s insidious trap. Through whatever circuitous routes his mind travels, he arrives somehow at a fundamental truth, always, I grant you, with a terrific scam.… Your people were raped, lady, and he’s produced what appears to be irrefutable evidence of that assault. Sure, there’s millions to be made by bringing even that appearance to judicial light, and more millions spread around by those refuting the evidence, but there’s no way we can deny his basic premise if his sources are authentic.… I can’t, Aaron can’t, and finally, you can’t.”