The Road to Omaha: A Novel Read online

  “The switch is usually on the wall.” It was, and three floor lamps lit up the three visible walls of a large pine-paneled office. The walls themselves, however, could barely be seen, as they were covered with framed photographs and, contrarily, Scotch-taped newspaper articles, many askew as if hastily, perhaps angrily, stuck to the surfaces between the profusion of photographs. “This place is a bloody mess!” exclaimed the mother of the inhabitant. “I’ll insist he clean it up!”

  “I wouldn’t even consider it,” remarked Pinkus, approaching the nearest newspaper clippings on the left wall. In the main, they depicted a white-habited nun dispensing food and clothing to indigent people—white, black, and Hispanic—in various parts of the world, SISTER ANNE THE BENEVOLENT CARRIES HER MESSAGE TO ALL POINTS OF THE GLOBE, cried one headline over a photograph of a slum in Rio de Janeiro, the mountain crucifix seen clearly in the upper distance of that jet-set city. The other clippings were a variation of the same theme—photos of a markedly attractive nun in Africa, Asia, Central America, and the leper islands in the Pacific, SISTER ANNE, SISTER OF CHARITY, SISTER OF HOPE and, finally, ANNE THE BENEVOLENT, A CANDIDATE FOR SAINTHOOD?

  Aaron, putting on his steel-rimmed glasses, studied the photographs. They were all taken at some extravagant retreat reeking of edelweiss, the Alps generally in the background, the subjects in the photographs happy and carefree, the enjoyment of life lighting up their faces. Several were instantly recognizable: a somewhat younger Sam Devereaux; the tall, aggressive figure of the maniac general, ‘Madman’ MacKenzie Hawkins; an ash-blond woman in shorts and a halter—voluptuous, indeed, and unmistakably Anne the Benevolent; and a fourth figure, a stout, smiling, jovial fellow in a short chef’s apron that barely concealed his lederhosen. Who was he? The face was familiar but—no, no, NO!

  “The God of Abraham has deserted us,” whispered Aaron Pinkus, trembling.

  “What in the name of the Celtics are you talking about?” asked Eleanor Devereaux.

  “You probably wouldn’t remember, because it meant nothing to you,” answered Aaron rapidly, unsteadily, a distinct quaver in his soft voice. “But a number of years ago the Vatican was in disarray—financial disarray. Monies were flowing out of its treasury in … in megabuckets, supporting causes so unlikely as third-rate opera companies and carnivals and houses throughout Europe to rehabilitate prostitutes, all manner of insanities. The people thought the Pope had gone crazy, that he was, as they say, pazzo! Then, just before the Eternal City’s complete collapse, which would have resulted in panic throughout the investment world, everything suddenly returned to normal. The Pontiff was back in control, his old self! The media everywhere said it was like he had been two people—one pazzo, the other the fine good man they all knew and loved.”

  “My dear Mr. Pinkus, you’re not making the slightest bit of sense.”

  “Look, look!” cried Aaron, pointing at a smiling, fleshed-out face in one of the photographs. “That’s him!”

  “Who?”

  “The Pope! That’s where the money came from. The ransom! The press was right, they were two people! General Hawkins and your son kidnapped the Pope!… Eleanor, Eleanor?” Aaron turned from the wall.

  Lady Devereaux had collapsed to the floor unconscious.

  4

  “Nobody’s that clean,” said Director Mangecavallo quietly, his voice laced with incredulity as he addressed the two dark-suited men seated across the table in the DCI’s dimly lit kitchen in McLean, Virginia. “It’s not natural, you know what I mean? Maybe you didn’t scrounge around hard enough, huh, Fingers?”

  “I tell you, Vinnie, I was shocked,” replied the short, obese man who answered to the name of Fingers as he touched the knot of his white silk tie that fell over his black shirt. “Like you say, it ain’t natural—it ain’t even human. What kind of world do these high-type judges live in? One with no germs, maybe?”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” interrupted Vincent softly, arching his brows and quickly shifting his penetrating gaze to his second visitor. “What do you say, Meat? You boys aren’t getting sloppy, are you?”

  “Hey, Vin,” protested the large, barrel-chested guest, his heavy hands spread out in front of him, partially obscuring the red tie above his pink shirt. “A first-class—world-class—job we did, what can I tell ya? The high-types called for it, right? We even brought in Hymie Goldfarb’s boys in Atlanta, and who better to get the goods on a saint, am I right or not?”

  “Yeah, Hymie’s boys know the tunnels, no question,” agreed the CIA director, pouring himself another glass of Chianti and removing a Monte Cristo cigar from his shirt pocket. “A lot better than all the feds in Hooverville. They dug us up garbage on a hundred and thirty-seven congressmen and twenty-six senators that guaranteed my confirmation, along with a little largesse spread around, of course.”

  “Largest what, Vinnie?” asked Fingers.

  “Largesse—forget it.… I just can’t figure it. Every one of these six squirrelly judges got nuthin’ we can tap into? That’s extraterrestrial!” Mangecavallo got up from the table and lit his cigar. He paced back and forth in front of a darkened wall upon which hung alternating prints of saints, popes, and vegetables until he suddenly stopped, a cloud of smoke ringing his skull like a halo from way down under. “Let’s go back to the basics,” he said, standing motionless. “Let’s really look.”

  “At what, Vinnie?”

  “These four or five maybe liberal clowns who can’t think straight. What’s with them that Goldfarb’s people couldn’t find?… What about the big black cat? Maybe he ran numbers as a kid, did anyone think of that? Maybe no one went back far enough. That could be the mistake!”

  “He was an acolyte and a choirboy, Vin. Right down the pike, a real angel, plus a big, big brain.”

  “How about the lady judge? She’s a big cannoli, right? That means her husband has to shut up and pretend he likes her being the big cannoli—which he can’t nohow because he’s a man. Maybe she doesn’t feed him and he’s mad like hell but can’t say anything. People keep stuff like that quiet.”

  “It’s also a wash, Vin,” said Meat, shaking his head sadly. “He sends her flowers every day at the office and tells everybody how proud he is of her. It could be legit on accounta he’s a big avvocato himself and he ain’t gonna make no enemy on that court, even his own wife.”

  “Shit!… Hey, that Irish drink of water, maybe he has a couple too many like a lot of Micks do after their big parade. How about that? We could build a little file—top secret, national security, that sort of thing. We buy a couple a dozen witnesses who state they’ve seen him fried and gurgling in his suds after he leaves the office. It could work. Also, with his name we could add a few girlies. It’s a natural!”

  “It’s snake eyes, Vin,” countered Meat, sighing and again shaking his head. “The Irish guy’s so Clorox he makes the sheets squeak. He’s never been known to have more than a glass of white wine, and girlies aren’t even in his ballpark.”

  “Something there, maybe?”

  “You’re reaching, Vin. He’s Boy Scout time.”

  “Double shit.… All right, all right. We don’t touch the two WASPs because our people are making nice inroads with the banking boys in the better part of town. There should be no offense to the country club set, that’s the word. I don’t like it, but I accept it.… So we come to our own paisan.”

  “A bad person, Vinnie!” interrupted Fingers angrily. “He’s been very rough on a lot of our boys—like he didn’t even know us, you know what I mean?”

  “Well, maybe we’ll let him know we know who he is, how about that?”

  “Okay, Vin, but how about what?”

  “How the hell do I know? Goldfarb’s boys should have come up with something, anything! Like maybe he slugged a couple of nuns in parochial school, or he skimmed the collection plates at mass so he could buy a Harley and join a motorcycle gang, whatever! I gotta think of everything? He’s got a weakness, he has to. All fat pai
sans do!”

  “Meat’s kinda fat—”

  “A lid, Fingers, a bean pole you’re not.”

  “You can’t touch that paisan, Vin,” interjected the pinkshirted Meat. “He’s a real erudito, a man with so many big words he confuses the biggest brains and he’s as clean as the bleached Mick, no action at all except maybe he irritates people by singing opera a lot in not too good a voice. Goldfarb’s boys went after him first because, like most yarmulkes, they call themselves liberals and the heavy boy’s not. They were like politically motivated, you know?”

  “What the hell has politics got to do with any of this? We got a problem, the biggest problem this country has ever faced, and we’re chewing ass over politics?”

  “Hey, Vinnie,” pleaded Fingers, “you were the one who wanted the mud on these big judges, right?”

  “Okay, okay!” said Mangecavallo, puffing on his cigar erratically and returning to his chair at the kitchen table. “I know when the bam-bams won’t work, all right? So where are we? We gotta protect the country we love, because without the country we love, we are out of business! Do I make my case?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Fingers. “I don’t wanna live nowhere else.”

  “I couldn’t,” added Meat. “What with Angelina and the seven kids, where could I go? Palermo’s too hot, and I sweat, you know? Angie’s even worse than me—boy, does she sweat! She can really stink up a room.”

  “That’s disgusting,” said Mangecavallo softly, his dark eyes leveled on his huge, pink-shirted associate. “I mean really disgusting. How can you talk about the mother of your children like that?”

  “It’s not her fault, Vin. It’s her glands.”

  “You take the whole mozzarella, you know that, Meat?… Basta, this ain’t gettin’ us nowhere.” The CIA director again rose from the chair and paced angrily about the kitchen, puffing on his cigar and pausing long enough to briefly lift the lid of a steaming pot on the stove, only to drop it because of the scorching metal. “What the hell is she cooking now? Looks like monkey brains.” He shook his hand in pain.

  “Your maid, Vinnie?”

  “Maid? What maid? You mean the contessa who sits around with Rosa knitting and talking, talking and knitting, like two old Sicilian broads trying to remember who humped who in Messina forty years ago! She don’t cook—she don’t cook and she don’t do windows or the cans and together she and Rosa waddle around the supermarkets buying crap I wouldn’t feed the cats.”

  “Get rid of her, Vin.”

  “Oh, funny scungilli, you! Rosa says she’s like one of her sisters, only nicer and not so ugly.… No, they can eat that escremento themselves, we’re goin’ out. National security emergency, you get my drift?”

  “Got it, Vinnie,” affirmed Fingers, nodding his large head with the slightly irregular nose. “Like when they say the ‘natives are restless,’ right?”

  “Jeez, what the hell have natives got to do with—hold it … hold it! Natives. ‘Native American.’ That’s it!… Maybe, like.”

  “Like maybe what, Vin?”

  “We can’t scrounge out the judges, right?”

  “Right, Vinnie.”

  “So the Supreme Court could maybe dump us all in the toilet, right?”

  “Right, Vin.”

  “Not necessarily.… Suppose, just suppose, this meatball Indian chief who could just maybe cause our biggest national security crisis in history is a very bad man, a screwed-up individual with no love in his heart, only evil intentions, you see what I mean? Suppose he don’t care crapola about his Wild West Indian brothers but just wants a motherlode for himself, with all the publicity that goes with it? We knock his faked-up good character off, we knock his case off. It’s done all the time!”

  “I dunno, Vin,” countered Meat haltingly. “You yourself told me that when you questioned that White House legal brain—the one with the colored chalk—he said that five or six of those judges admitted crying their eyes out when they read this Sitting Bull’s case. How there was a whole litany—you said ‘litany,’ Vin, I had to look it up—of deceit and dishonesty, even killing and starving whole tribes in the original U.S. of A. Now, you, me, and Fingers here—you bein’ the smartest, naturally, and me maybe pretty far behind and Fingers not actually in the running— but do any of us figure a crumb phony could flatten out the brains of these high-type big judges with pure bullshit? It don’t make sense.”

  “We’re not looking for sense, amico, we’re looking for a way out of a possible national emergency, get that through your skull. And right now its name is this Thunder Head. Send Goldfarb’s boys out to Nebraska!”

  “Nebraska … Nebraska … Nebraska,” intoned Hyman Goldfarb into the telephone, as if the state were incorporated into an Old Testament psalm. Seated behind his elegant desk in his elegant office on Atlanta’s very elegant Phipp Plaza, he rolled his eyes upward and brought them down to gaze fondly at the slender, well-dressed, middle-aged couple sitting in front of him—middle-aged being mid-forties, only several years younger than the muscular, tanned Goldfarb, himself attired in a tight-fitting white linen suit that framed his still awesome athlete’s body. “I should once again send my best people out to this—to say the least—this out-of-the-way Nebraska so they can chase after a fog, a mist… a cloud of vapor who calls himself Thunder Head, chief of the Wopotamis? Is that what you’re saying? Because if it is, I should have been a rabbi, which I studied for, instead of a football player, which entailed very little knowledge.” Hyman Goldfarb paused, listening, every now and then removing the phone from his ear, sighing, and finally, obviously, interrupting the caller.

  “Please pay attention to me and let me save you some money, will you do that?… Thank you, just listen. If there is a Chief Thunder Head, he’s nowhere to be found. My people cannot say he doesn’t exist. Whenever they mentioned the name among what’s left of the Wopotamis on their pathetic reservation, they were met with silence, interspersed with incomprehensible whispers in the Wopotami language. They tell me that suddenly you think you’re in some cathedral cut out of a scrawny forest primeval where there’s far too much available alcohol, and you begin to believe that this Thunder Head is more of a myth than a reality. An icon, perhaps, a tribal god sculpted on a totem pole to which his believers pay obeisance, but not a human being. In plain words, I do not believe such a person exists.… What do I think, is that your question—and it’s not necessary to shout? Quite frankly, my excitable friend, I believe Chief Thunder Head is a symbolic amalgam of—no that is not a reference to sexual preference—of narrowly defined special interests, no doubt benevolent, and centered about our government’s unfortunate treatment of the American Indian. Perhaps a small group of legal scholars from Berkeley or NYU who’ve unearthed sufficient precedents to embarrass the lower courts. A scam, my friend, pure and simple a scam, but a very brilliant scam.”

  Goldfarb pulled the telephone away from his ear and briefly closed his eyes as the voice over the line metallically filled the elegant office. “What kind of talk is that?” roared the caller. “This great country could be in a big national crisis, and you got nothin’ to offer but ‘presents’ that don’t make no sense? Well, lemme tell ya, Mister Big Linebacker, the man in Langley, Virginia, who you can’t talk to nohow, says you better come up with somethin’ on this Thunder Head and come up quick! I mean none of us want to live in Palermo, you know what I mean?”

  “Redundancy aside, ‘Per cento anno, signore’ ” said Goldfarb. “We’ll be in touch.” The CIA consultant replaced the telephone, leaned back in his swivel chair, and sighed audibly as he addressed the attractive couple in front of his desk. “Why me, oh Lord, why me?” he asked, shaking his head. “You’re positive you’re right?”

  “I wouldn’t put it so strongly, Hyman,” replied the woman in a clipped British accent that bespoke several generations of expensive breeding. “No, we’re not positive, I don’t think anybody could be, but if there is a Thunder Head, he’s simply nowhere to be found, as
you so clearly explained to the gentleman on the phone.”

  “I used your words, of course,” added Goldfarb. “And I question the title of ‘gentleman.’ ”

  “With good reason, I suspect,” said the woman’s male companion, also obviously British. “We employed Plan C. We were Cambridge-based anthropologists studying a great if diminished tribe whose ancestors were brought over to the Crown by Walter Raleigh in the early seventeenth century. If there really is a Thunder Head, by all logic he should have rushed forth to claim the Crown’s recognition, as well as the long-buried remittance, which at the time was no doubt minor, but by any standard an enormous sum today. He didn’t; therefore, our conclusion: he doesn’t exist.”

  “But the brief to the Supreme Court does,” insisted the consultant. “It’s crazy.”

  “Simply incredible,” agreed the Englishman. “Where do we go from here, Hyman? I gather you’re ‘under the gun,’ as we used to say in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, although I always thought it was a rather banal expression conveying more melodrama than was necessary.”

  “It both is and it isn’t,” said Goldfarb. “We’re dealing with an off-the-wall megillah, but it’s still an extremely dangerous situation.… What are those judges thinking of?”

  “Justice and the law, I daresay,” offered the woman. “At a cost we all recognize as beyond the extraordinary. Regardless, dear Hy, and forgive me for saying it, but the man on the phone you say is no gentleman is basically correct. Whoever’s hiding behind the mantle of this Thunder Head—or whoever they are—that’s the key.”

  “But Daphne, by your own admission, you can’t find him.”

  “Then perhaps we didn’t look hard enough, Hyman. Eh, Reggie?”

  “Dear girl! We trekked all over that blasted backwater bog with horrible lodgings and no civilized facilities, I remind you, and got absolutely nowhere. No one made any sense at all!”

  “Yes, I know, dear, but there was one who didn’t want to make sense, do you recall my mentioning it?”