The Road to Omaha: A Novel

  “Got it and I’ll never forget it! Not only that, I’ll defend you in court with all the legal expertise Aaron Pinkus Associates has!”

  “That’s terribly considerate, sport … all right, Devvy, here we go!” With those words the powerful speedboat lurched forward with such force its bow sprang out of the water like an ascending egret. The roar of the engines muted all other sounds as the craft sped out of the briefly sheltered area back into the angry waves past marker seven. Then, true to his word, Frazier went into a wide, steep bank to the left, sending up a huge sheet of ocean spray to the starboard, a continuous wall of dense foam and sea that provided complete cover for any activity in front of or behind it—such as a prone figure rolling over the side into the water.

  Which was precisely what a determined if anxiety-prone Sam Devereaux did, hardly buoyed by his captain’s last words, shouted as he waved his hand. “Now, old chum, and I know you can do it. You were on the school’s swimming team!”

  “No, Frazie! It was tennis! I didn’t make the swimming team!”

  “Oh, sorry … over you go!”

  Buffeted by waves, Sam kept his head half-submerged as the Coast Guard patrol boat whipped to the left in pursuit of his former classmate, its loudspeaker blaring. “You can run but you can’t hide, you swizzling son of a bitch! We’ve got you this time—resisting arrest, drinking while piloting your craft, recklessly endangering the life of your passenger, who’s also under arrest! Oh boy, I’m gonna ream you!”

  Suddenly, further stunning a bobbing Devereaux, who gasped for air, came the sound of a much more powerful loudspeaker—from Frazie’s boat. The noise it emitted could best be described as that of a blaring seagoing whoopee cushion.

  “… who’s also under arrest … a man named Samuel Devereaux, and you are both under arrest.” Under arrest? He was under arrest? He had vaguely heard the words while clinging to the deck, but in his own personal hysteria they had not registered. Arrest! By name! Oh, my God, I’m a fugitive! They were searching for him; there was probably a dragnet! It had to mean that Aaron and Jenny and Cyrus and Roman and the two Desis had been taken—taken and broken, forced to confess everything! And Mac—he’d probably be executed!… And Jenny, the new love of his life—they would hurt her, maybe do terrible things to her. The desperate men in Washington would stop at nothing!

  Well, they hadn’t figured on Samuel Lansing Devereaux, attorney of consequence, avenger of the mistreated, and the scourge of corruptors everywhere! And he had learned from a master—a misguided, antediluvian master, to be sure—but nevertheless a master! Of lies and theft and trickery, all those fine attributes that made him the Soldier of the Century! Sam would use every devious device, every nefarious deception he had learned from the Hawk to spread the truth and free his comrades. Not only free his comrades but save his country from the grip of the insidious manipulators. Not only free his comrades and save his country, but bring the glorious Sunrise Jennifer Redwing permanently into his life! He’d do it all with a voice tape securely locked in a finger-sealed plastic bag he had found in the Birnbaum kitchen that was now in his deepest pocket. Coughing and swallowing seawater, Devereaux struggled with all his strength against the tide and the chopping waves toward the beach. He had to prime the inventive part of his brain and, as Mac had frequently made clear, be prepared to instantly create whatever fiction he could think of to support the false facts. Like: “Wow, am I glad to be on land! My boat capsized!”

  “Hey, there, mister!” cried the teenage girl who had run down from the house to greet him at the water’s edge. “I’ll bet you’re glad you got here, on land, I mean. Did your boat capsize in the squall?”

  “Yes … well, yes it did. Pretty rough out there.”

  “Not if you’ve got a decent keel. Or if you’re a pot, just get to marker seven.”

  “Young lady, I’m not in the habit of smoking such substances.”

  “What?”

  “Simply put, I don’t use pot, as you call it.”

  “Pot …? You mean ‘grass’? Nobody I go out with does, either! I meant ‘pot’ like in pot-sailor. You know, engines and oil leaks that mess up the water.”

  “Oh, of course! I’m just a little disoriented from the swim.” Sam rose unsteadily to his feet, his right hand checking his trouser pocket. The sealed tape was there. “As it happens, I’m in a great hurry—”

  “I’ll bet,” interrupted the girl. “You want to call your marina or the C.G. or probably your insurance company. You can use our phone.”

  “Aren’t you a bit too trusting?” asked Devereaux, the attorney in him demanding the question. “I’m a stranger washed up on your beach.”

  “And my older brother is the wrestling champ of New England. There he is!”

  “Oh?” Sam raised his eyes to the house. Walking down the beach steps was a handsome, crew-cut gorilla whose muscular arms were inordinately long, rather near or below his knees. “Fine-looking young man.”

  “Oh, sure, all the girls are crazy about him, but wait’ll they find out!”

  “Find out?” Devereaux had the sinking feeling that some terribly intimate family secret was about to be divulged. “Some people are merely different, my dear, but we’re all God’s children, as the prophets say. Be tolerant.”

  “Why? He wants to be a lawyer! I mean, is that nerdsville to the max, or what?”

  “To the max,” muttered Sam as the champion wrestler of New England approached. “Sorry to bother you,” said Devereaux. “My heel—keel—wasn’t decent enough and I capsized.”

  “Probably winded into a forced jibe,” said the young man pleasantly, “and it’s also probably your first boat.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Pretty obvious. Long pants, oxford shirt, black socks, and one brown leather loafer—how that stayed on, darned if I know.”

  Devereaux looked down at his feet. Indeed, the wrestler was right, he had only one shoe. “I guess it was foolish of me, I should have worn sneakers.”

  “Topsiders, mister,” corrected the girl.

  “Naturally, I forgot, and it was my first boat.”

  “Sail?” asked the young man.

  “Yes, sail—two sails, one big one and small one in front.”

  “Oh, wow,” said the teenage sister. “It sure was his first boat, Boomer!”

  “Be tolerant, kid. Everybody has a first boat. I had to swim out and get you in your first Comet at marker three, remember?”

  “You big sludge, you promised—”

  “Cool it.… Come on in, mister. You can dry off and use the phone.”

  “Actually, I’m in a terrible hurry.… Frankly, I have to reach the authorities on a very urgent matter, and the phone won’t help. I have to be there in person.”

  “Are you a narc?” asked the young man sharply. “You sure as hell aren’t a sailor.”

  “No, I’m not a narc. I’m simply a man with information that’s needed urgently.”

  “Do you have identification—”

  “Is that necessary? I’ll pay you for getting me where I have to go.”

  “Definitely identification. I’m pre-law at Tufts and it goes with Initial Procedures One. Who are you?”

  “All right, all right!” Sam reached into his drenched, buttoned rear left pocket and managed to extricate his wet, swollen wallet. It was not likely that the dragnet for him had gone public; the dirty bastards in Washington would be too cautious for that. “Here’s my driver’s license,” he added, suctioning out the plastic card from its slot and handing it to the wrestler.

  “Devereaux!” cried the young man. “You’re Samuel Devereaux!”

  “It’s been broadcast then?” said Sam, holding his breath, trying desperately to invent a fiction according to the Hawk. “Then I must explain to you the other side of the story and you must listen to me.”

  “I don’t know about any broadcasting, sir, but I’ll listen to anything you say! You’re the guy who got those rotten judges thrown o
ut. You’re a legend—kind of a new legend—for all of us going into law. I mean, you built the malfeasance charges against those judicial creeps like they were textbook cases! And every one held up to the last indictment!”

  “Well, I was kind of pissed off—”

  “Sis, hold the fort,” broke in the future attorney, grinning broadly. “When Mom and Dad get back, tell ’em I’m driving a man who’s going to be on the Supreme Court someday to wherever he wants to go.”

  “The FBI would probably be best,” suggested Sam quickly. “Do you know where the local office is?”

  “There’s one in Cape Ann. They’re in the papers a lot—you know, the narc boats.”

  “How long will it take to get there?”

  “No more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go into the house and get into some dry clothes? My father’s kind of skinny like you.”

  “There’s no time. The issues at stake are momentous, believe me!”

  “Oh, boy, let’s take off! The Jeep’s in front.”

  “Nerdsville,” said the teenage girl.

  “Ahchoo!”

  “Bless ya,” said Tadeusz Mikulski, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, his flat voice and dour expression conveying far less than a benediction. In truth, as he studied the strange figure seated in front of his desk, a man with one shoe who was obviously under severe stress and whose wet clothes were making puddles on his floor, Agent Mikulski reminded himself that his retirement was only eight months, four days, and six hours away, not that he was counting. “Okay, Mr. Deverooox,” he continued, looking down at the various soaked articles of identification extracted from the subject’s wallet. “Let’s start again.”

  “That’s Devereaux,” said Sam.

  “Look, Mr. Devereaux, I speak English, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Czech, and would you believe Finnish, due to the Estonian influence on the language, but French has always eluded me. Perhaps it’s a natural aversion; my wife and I spent a week in Paris, and she spent the better part of my annual salary while we were there.… Now, my error explained, may we start over again?”

  “You mean, you don’t know my name?”

  “I’m sure it’s my loss, but then I doubt you’ve heard of Casimir the Third, also known as Charles the Great, King of Poland in the fourteenth century.”

  “Are you crazy?” cried Sam. “He was one of the most brilliant diplomat-rulers of his time! His sister was on the throne of Hungary and he learned from her court the expertise he needed to unify Poland. His treaties with Silesia and Pomorze were models of legal temperance.”

  “All right, all right! Then maybe I’ve heard your name or read it in the papers, okay?”

  “That’s not what I’m asking, Agent Mikulski.” Devereaux leaned forward in the chair, a small bubble of water in his shirt unfortunately bursting through the buttons. “I’m talking about the dragnet,” he whispered.

  “The old television show?”

  “No, me!… I have to assume it’s been spread by those bastards in Washington, because my associates were obviously taken—probably tortured to find out about Frazie’s boat—but there are times when subordinates must learn the lesson of ‘I was only following orders!’ … You can’t take me in, Mikulski, you must hear what I have to tell you and listen to the tape recording that confirms everything I say!”

  “You haven’t told me anything. All you’ve done is wet my floor and ask me if my office is tapped.”

  “Because the arm of this conspiratorial government-within-the-government is evil incarnate! They—it—will stop at nothing! They stole half of Nebraska!”

  “Nebraska?”

  “Over a hundred years ago!”

  “A hundred … no fooling?”

  “Tragically, obscenely, Mikulski! We have the proof and they’ll do anything to stop us from being at the Supreme Court tomorrow to present ourselves personae delectae!”

  “Oh, yeah, that,” said the FBI agent, pressing a button on his telephone console. “Prepare psychiatric,” he said quietly into the intercom.

  “No!” screamed Sam, yanking the sealed plastic bag from his pocket. “Listen to this!” he demanded.

  Agent Mikulski took the plastic bag, which dripped, profusely soaking his clean blotter, removed the tape, and placed it into his desk recorder. He pressed the button; there was a sudden eruption of static followed by a spinning circle of water that splashed across the faces of both men as the thin black tape exploded from the machine, reeling across the room in splintered fragments. Whatever was on the tape had been obliterated.

  “I don’t believe it!” shouted Devereaux. “I matched the yellow and the blue lines to reach green on that pouch and sealed it! Those commercials are bullshit!”

  “Maybe your eyesight’s not so good,” said Mikulski, “although I’ve got to agree with you, I can’t freeze a kielbasy in one of these mothers.”

  “It was all there—everything! The general, the Secretary of State, the whole conspiracy!”

  “To steal Nebraska?”

  “No, that was a hundred and twelve years ago. Federal agents burned the bank where the Wopotami treaties were kept.”

  “Not me, pal. My grandparents were still slinging cowshit over in Poznań…. Woppa-who?”

  “Another general, my general, pieced it all together from the records in the archives—records and missing records he knew were missing!”

  “Archives …?”

  “The Bureau of Indian Affairs, naturally.”

  “Oh, naturally.”

  “You see, he was able to do it because there’s another general with the same name as the general who was viciously conscripted by the Secretary of State. He retired from the army because the names got mixed up when I pressed drug-running charges against his cousin—”

  “Speaking of such matters,” interrupted Mikulski. “What brand of cigarettes do you smoke?”

  “I’m trying to give them up—you should, too.… Anyway, it was a big mistake, and this other general was given the job at Indian Affairs and my general, who’s a friend of his, got to invade the sealed archives and wrote the brief based on those documents. It’s all really very simple.”

  “Absolutely fundamental,” said Mikulski in a monotone, nodding his head slowly, his wide eyes riveted on Sam as his hand inched back to his console and the intercom.

  “You see, the Wopotami tribe could actually own all the territory in and around Omaha.”

  “Of course … Omaha.”

  “SAC, Agent Mikulski! The Strategic Air Command! According to law, illegally usurped property that’s been reclaimed by its rightful owners, the said criminally injured owners are entitled to whatever developments have been made on said usurped property. That’s basic.”

  “Real basic, oh, real basic.”

  “And because certain corrupt persons in the government refuse to negotiate, they intend to eliminate the whole problem by eliminating the plaintiffs to the Supreme Court, which has recognized the Wopotami brief for argument and may just possibly adjudicate in its favor.”

  “It might do that …?”

  “It’s entirely possible—remote but possible. The dirty bastards in Washington hired someone named Goldfarb and fielded the Filthy Four and the Suicidal Six to stop us!”

  “Someone named Goldfarb …?” muttered the mesmerized Mikulski, his wide, sad eyes briefly closing. “… the Filthy Four and the Suicide-whatever?”

  “We sent the Filthy Four back to their base in body bags.”

  “You killed them?”

  “No, Desi Arnaz the Second laced their food with sleep-inducing ingredients, and there were air holes in the body bags.”

  “Desi Arnaz the …?” Special Agent Mikulski could not continue; he was a defeated man.

  “It’s now obviously clear to you, or should be, that we must move quickly and expeditiously to expose the Secretary of State and all those around him wh
o would deny by violence the fundamental rights of the Wopotami tribe!”

  Silence.

  Finally:

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Devereaux,” said the FBI man quietly, bringing to the fore what immediate resources he had left. “What’s obvious to me is that you are a troubled man beyond my ability to help you. Now, we have three choices. One, I can call the hospital in Gloucester and recommend psychiatric counseling; two, I can phone our friends at the police department and ask them to take you into custody until whatever you’ve been on wears off; or, three, I can forget you walked into my office, dripping wet with one shoe and flooding my floor, and let you walk out, trusting that your imaginative powers will lead you to friends who can assist you.”

  “You don’t believe me!” yelled Sam.

  “Where do you want to start? With Desi Arnaz the Second and someone named Goldfarb? Or body bags with air holes and three generals who wouldn’t last two minutes in the Pentagon without being put in straitjackets?”

  “Everything I’ve told you is true!”

  “I’m sure it is for you, and I wish you well. Also, if you like, I’ll call you a cab. You’ve got sufficient money in your wallet to get you to Rhode Island and another FBI office out of state.”

  “You’re derelict in your duty, Agent Mikulski.”

  “My wife says the same thing where the bills are concerned. What can I say? I’m a failure.”

  “You are a sniveling bureaucrat afraid to stand up to those who would trash our country’s laws and constitutional rights!”

  “Hey, you’ve got Desi Arnaz, this guy Goldfarb, and two squirrelly generals on your side. What do you need me for?”

  “You’re a disgrace.”

  “I’ll buy that.… Now, unless you’re going to mop up my floor and wipe down my desk, please get the hell out of here, huh? I’ve got work to do. The first-grade class at the Cape Ann grammar school is marching on City Hall, demanding equal voting rights.”

  “Funny, funny!”

  “I thought it was pretty cute.”