The Road to Omaha: A Novel

  “I was merely playing a roll, Mrs. Lafferty.”

  “Call it whatever you like, Mr. Sutton, but for me and all the girls in Old Southy, you were the only reason we watched that stupid show. We was all in love with you, boyo.”

  “I knew that son of a bitch never got me a decent contract!” spat out the actor under his breath.

  “What was that, sir?”

  “Nothing, dear lady, nothing. Cut away, cut away! You’re obviously a woman of great taste.”

  The kitchen door burst open, the hulk of Cyrus following, his dark face alive with anticipation. “We’re on, ‘General’!”

  “Fine, young man! Where’s my uniform? I was always a splendid figure in military plumage.”

  “No plumes, no uniform, that’s out of the question.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “To begin with, the general is no longer a general by request of the Pentagon and just about every other major influence in Washington, including the White House. Secondly, you’d call attention to us, which isn’t practical.”

  “It’s rather difficult to get into a role without proper accoutrements, which naturally presumes accurate clothing—as in a uniform.… Actually, as a general I outrank you, Colonel.”

  “If you’re going to play that game, Mr. Actor, you’re playing a general; you were field-commissioned a major and I was given the rank of colonel. You lose, Sir Henry.”

  “Damned impertinent civilians—”

  “Where the hell are you, still in World War Two?”

  “No, I’m an artist! The rest of you are civilians … and chemists.”

  “Man, you and Hawkins got more in common than El Alamein. Then, most of the generals I’ve known were actors, too.… Come on, let’s go. They expect us at twenty-two hundred.”

  “Twenty-two hundred what?”

  “Hours, Major, or General, if you prefer. It’s military for ten o’clock at night.”

  “Never could figure those damned numbers—”

  The “Nobel” committee’s three hotel suites were adjacent to one another, the middle rooms designated as the meeting ground for the august General MacKenzie Hawkins, Soldier of the Century, and the distinguished “visitors from Stockholm.” As negotiated by the general’s aide-de-camp, one Colonel Cyrus Marshall, U.S. Army, Retired, the conference was to be private, without press coverage or news releases. As the colonel explained, although the celebrated warrior was immensely honored by the award, he was currently in seclusion writing his memoirs, Peace Through Blood, and wished to know the extent of his travel and media commitments before rendering his decision to accept. The committee spokesman, Lars Olafer, reacted to the secret meeting with such enthusiasm that Colonel Cyrus added gas-spraying weapons to the already complete arsenal on his and Roman Z’s persons. A trap was to be reversed in the best tradition of subterranean rats and Cyrus knew exactly how to do it. Pull in the rodents, immobilize them, bring them to with bound hands and feet, then subject them to interrogation usually described as psychologically macabre but without physical harm. Like ice picks poised in front of their eyes.

  “I’d be far more impressive in a uniform!” said Sutton angrily, walking down the hotel corridor in a pinstriped suit recruited from his Boston apartment. “These damn clothes were appropriate for Shaw’s The Millionairess, but not for the mission at hand.”

  “Hey, you look terrific,” said Roman Z, pinching Sutton’s cheek to the astonishment of the actor. “You should only have perhaps a flower in your lapel, it would have a certain somzing.”

  “Cut it out, Roman,” said Cyrus quietly. “He looks fine.… Are you ready, General?”

  “You’re talking to a professional, dear boy. The adrenaline flows as we approach the moment. Now, the magic begins!… Knock on the door, precede me, as is proper, and I shall make my entrance.”

  “Remember, Pops,” admonished the mercenary in front of the door. “You’re one hell of an actor, I’ll give you that, but please don’t get carried away and scare the hell out of them. We want to learn everything we can before we make our move.”

  “Now you’re a director, Colonel?… May I explain for your untutored frame of reference that there are three descending ts in the theater: talent, taste, and tenacity, and within the second category is contained Hamlet’s entire advice to the players. I remember one time in Poughkeepsie—”

  “Tutor me some other time, Mr. Sutton. Right now, let’s just have the magic begin, okay?” Cyrus rapped on the door of the hotel suite, drawing himself up to his full military height and ramrod posture. The door was opened by a white-haired man with a salt and pepper chin beard, a pince-nez looped over his nose. “Colonel Marshall, sir,” continued Cyrus, introducing himself. “Chief aide-de-camp to General MacKenzie Hawkins.”

  “Välkommen, Colonel,” said the ersatz elderly delegate supposedly from Sweden; he spoke in an extremely thick Scandinavian accent that made the traveled Cyrus wince. “Vee are vid extreme pleasure to meet zee grand gheneral.” The delegate, bowing obsequiously, stepped backward so as to admit the celebrated Soldier of the Century, who strode through the door like an animated Colossus of Rhodes with an agitated Roman Z shuffling rapidly behind him.

  “I am deeply honored, gentlemen!” exclaimed the actor, his guttural bark extraordinarily close to that of MacKenzie Hawkins. “Not only honored but supremely humbled by your selection of this minor player in the major conflicts of our times. I have merely done my best, and as an old soldier tempered by battle, I can only say that we fill the wall up with our heroic dead, those brave souls surviving, pressing ahead to victory!”

  Suddenly, a rush of voices, the accents diverse and having nothing to do with Sweden, burst forth.

  “Christ, it’s him!”

  “You forget your grammar, but by God, it is!”

  “I don’t believe it! I thought he died years ago!”

  “Never on stage, he didn’t! He never died on stage—he was always magnificent!”

  “The finest character actor of our time! The Walter Abel of the seventies and eighties. Brilliance personified!”

  “What the hell is going on?” shouted Colonel Cyrus, his naturally endowed but untrained voice no match for Ethelred Brokemichael’s clandestine unit of actors. “Will somebody tell me?” he yelled, trying to be heard above the din as the men of Suicidal Six crowded around “General MacKenzie Hawkins,” shaking his hand, patting him on the shoulders, one overwrought man kissing his Players Club ring. “Goddamn it! Will someone explain what this is all about?”

  “Let me try!” said Dustin, breaking away from the others, his eyes dazzled. “You obviously were recruited late in this operation so you would have no way of knowing, but this isn’t that clown Hawkins, but one of the theater’s most outstanding artists! We all saw him when we were younger, studied his performances, followed him into Joe Allen’s—that’s an actors’ bar—and bombarded him with questions, trying to absorb whatever he could impart.”

  “Impart what? What are you talking about?”

  “This man is Henry Irving Sutton! The Sutton, Sir Henry—”

  “Yes, I know,” interrupted Cyrus softly, in his voice the essence of abject defeat. “After a long-gone English actor named Irving, who had nothing to do with the bank or a tailor on First Avenue.… Wait a minute!” yelled the mercenary suddenly. “Who the hell are you people?”

  “Each of us gives only his name, rank, and serial number,” replied Marlon, overhearing Cyrus’s question and reluctantly turning away from the adulated Sutton, who was accepting the accolades of his peers with brilliant humility. “I say this in sadness, Colonel, for I once had a small role in a Sidney Poitier film, and he, too, was and is a marvelous artist.”

  “Name, rank, and—what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said, Colonel. Name, rank, and serial number, according to the laws of the Geneva Convention. Nothing more.”

  “You’re soldiers?”

  “Very accompl
ished ones,” answered Dustin, glancing over at his hero, namely Henry Irving Sutton, who was now holding his worshipers spellbound recounting past triumphs. “We accept the risks of combat without uniforms, but to date it’s never been a factor.”

  “Combat?”

  “Select covert activities, gray to black operations—the reference to ‘black’ having nothing to do with race, of course.”

  “I know what ‘black’ operations are, I just don’t know what the hell you are!”

  “I just told you, we’re a military unit specializing in clandestine activities, missions involving maximum security.”

  “And this Nobel committee crap is one of those operations?”

  “Between the two of us,” said Dustin confidentially, leaning toward Cyrus, “you’re lucky we are who we are, or your pension might go down the tube. That man isn’t General Hawkins! You were taken in, Colonel, flimflammed, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was …?” said Cyrus, staring, as if in a catatonic state.

  “You certainly were, sir, as was obviously Mr. Sutton—Sir Henry. He’d never tarnish his magnificent reputation by being involved in a global conspiracy to cripple this country’s first line of defense. Never!”

  “First line of defense—a global conspiracy …?”

  “That’s as far as our briefing went, Colonel.”

  “This is too fucking much!” said Cyrus, as if coming out of a trance. “Just who are you and where do you come from?”

  “Fort Benning, under the command of Brigadier General Ethelred Brokemichael. Our specific names are neither relevant nor called for at this juncture, but suffice it to say we’re called the Suicidal Six.”

  “The Suicidal—! My God, the Delta Force to the max? The most effective antiterrorist unit ever put into the field!”

  “Yes, that’s what we’ve heard.”

  “But you’re … you’re—”

  “That’s right, we’re actors.”

  “Actors?” yelled Cyrus so fortissimo that Henry Irving Sutton and the adoring crowd around him fell silent, staring at the mercenary in astonishment. “You’re—you’re all actors?”

  “And as splendid a group of confreres as I’ve met in years, Colonel. They play their parts to perfection. Notice the care they’ve taken with their clothing, the proper European cuts, the subdued colors as befits distinguished academics. You might also drink in the consummate attention they’ve given their tonsorial effects—flicks of gray, not overdone, to add a few years to their ages. And their postures, Colonel, the ever so slightly stooped shoulders and the minor concavities of their chests, as we observed entering the room; and the pince-nez and the tortoiseshell glasses, all are marks of men in sedentary professions with strained eyes.… Yes, Colonel, these are, indeed, actors—fine actors.”

  “He notices everything!”

  “Such observation!”

  “Every minute detail—”

  “Details, gentlemen,” proclaimed Sutton, “are our secret weapons, never forget that.” A chorus of “Never!” “Certainly not!” and “How could we?” followed the proclamation until the elderly actor held up his hands. “But, of course, I don’t really have to tell you that. I understand you convincingly deceived several million people with your performance at the airport.… Well done, shepherds of Thespis! Now, I want to know each of you. Your names, please.”

  “Well,” began the spokesman, Lars Olafer, none too subtly, nodding at the mercenaries, “without certain people present we’d enthusiastically introduce ourselves by our real names, but our orders are to stay with our sobriquets, which is most embarrassing to me personally.”

  “Why is that?”

  “To be frank, an undeserved title, one you’ve earned but I haven’t.… I’m called ‘Sir Larry,’ for my first name is really Laurence.”

  “With a u?”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Then I say you have earned it. When Larry and Viv were together, we quaffed many an ale together, and in truth there’s a certain similarity in your appearance to that skinny but terribly likable fellow. I played the First Knight in his and Tony Quinn’s Becket, of course.”

  “I may die right here on the spot—”

  “You were great!”

  “Magnificent!”

  “Extraordinary!”

  “Passable, if I do say so.”

  “Can we cut the bullshit, if I say so!” shouted Cyrus, the veins in his thick neck pronounced.

  “I’m called The Duke.”

  “I’m Sylvester—”

  “Marlon’s the name.”

  “Dustin—y’know, y’know … am I, am I right, right, right?”

  “Telly’s the moniker, General, baby. Wanna lollipop?”

  “You’re all superb!”

  “And this is all preposterous!” screamed Cyrus, clutching the lapels of Dustin and Sylvester. “You bastards listen to me!”

  “Hey, my black good buddy,” said Roman Z, softly patting the broad back of his recent cell mate. “Don’t shoot up your blood pressure, man!”

  “Blood pressure, hell, I should shoot every one of these sons of bitches!”

  “Now, pilgrim, that’s downright primitive,” said The Duke. “Y’see, mister, we don’t believe in violence. It’s actually just a state of mind.”

  “State of what?” roared the dark-skinned mercenary.

  “Of the mind,” explained The Duke. “Freud called it the frenzied extension of the imagination—we use it a lot in acting classes, usually with improv, naturally.”

  “Naturally!” Cyrus released his helpless hostages. “I give up,” he mumbled, sitting down in the nearest chair as Roman Z massaged his shoulders. “I give up!” he repeated, shouting, his wide eyes appraising the crowd of lunatics in front of him—and below him. “You’re the Suicidal Six? The antiterrorist Delta Force unit songs have been written about? Nothing makes sense!”

  “In some ways, you’re right, Colonel,” said Sylvester in his normal Yale Drama School voice, “for we’ve never had to fire a gun or basically injure anyone beyond a sprained wrist or, at worst, a cracked rib.… We just don’t work that way. You see, it’s easier on everybody. We impersonate our way into and out of missions, frequently intimidating the targets, but every now and then making a friend or two.”

  “You’re breakouts from a funny farm,” said Cyrus, “or maybe you’re not really from this planet,” he added numbly.

  “You’re too hard on us, Colonel,” protested Telly in his normally cultured voice. “If all the armies of the world were made up of actors, wars could be mounted as civilized productions, not uncivilized slaughters. Merits would be given for individual and collective performances—the best orations, the most convincing snarls, the finest crowd reactions—”

  “Then, of course,” interrupted Marlon, “there’d be points for costuming and set decoration, for the most creative props, as in weapons and mise en scène locations—”

  “As well as plot and story development,” broke in The Duke. “I suppose you could term them military tactics.”

  “Let’s not forget direction, for God’s sake,” cried Sir Larry.

  “And choreography,” added Sylvester. “A choreographer would have to be an organic extension of any director, under the circumstances.”

  “Wonderful, simply wonderful!” exclaimed Henry Irving Sutton. “An international academy of the theatrical arts could be set up to judge the forces in the field, in the air, and on the water. Naturally, military consultants would be included for semblances to authenticity, but their consultancy would be secondary, the primary judgments made on the basis of creativity—of conviction, characterization, passion!… Art!”

  “Right on, pilgrim!”

  “Hey, Stella, he got it right!”

  “You … you … you are with … with … with it!”

  “Speak the speech, I pray you—”

  “Beautiful, sweetheart. Have a lollipop!”

  “Yeah, yeah, we don??
? need no howitzers t’ blow the gooks away!”

  “What?”

  “Well, he’s gotta be right, y’know what I mean? Nobody gets shot. Nobody gets his face in a bucket!”

  “Eeeowweeah!” bellowed Cyrus, his scream worthy of Anouilh’s dictum. “I’ve had it! I’ve really had it!… You, Sir Henry Horseshit! You were military—I heard that certifiable Hawkins say you were a goddamned hero in North Africa! What happened to that man?”

  “In a primitive sense, Colonel, all soldiers are actors. We’re terrified, but we try to pretend we’re not; we know that at any moment our precious lives may be taken from us, but we abandon that knowledge for the irrational reason that the immediate objective is paramount, although in the core of our minds, we understand that it’s merely a statistic on a map. The problem with soldiers in combat is that they must become actors without proper training, proper professional training.… If all the drenched, mud-sunk foot soldiers understood the rules, they’d do as Telly says, and snarl viciously while firing above the heads of other young men they don’t know but might have a drink with in some bar in another time and place.”

  “Bullshit! What about values and beliefs? I’ve fought on different sides, but never against what I believed in!”

  “Well, then, you’re a moral man, Colonel, and I commend you. However, you also fight for the most questionable motive of all. Money.”

  “What are these clowns fighting for?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea, but I doubt it’s financial remuneration. As I understand it, they’re fulfilling their lifelong theatrical ambitions—in a rather unorthodox way, but obviously with considerable success.”

  “I’ll sure as hell give them that,” said Cyrus, turning to Roman Z. “Have you got everything?” he asked.

  “Everyzing and everyone, my enduring friend.”

  “Good.” The huge chemist turned back to the actors, singled out Dustin, and spoke. “You, shorty, come over here.” The diminutive performer looked questioningly at his comrades. “For God’s sake, man, I just want to talk to you privately. Do you think my friend and I would take on the entire Suicidal Six?”