The Road to Omaha

WHOSE INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC
MISSILES ARE THEY, ANYWAY?

MacKenzie Lochinvar Hawkins
—A.k.a. Madman Mac the Hawk, general, U.S. Army (Ret.), retired at the request of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Washington at large. A rogue elephant—albeit a lovable rogue elephant—he has assumed a new identity: Thunder Head, chief of the Wopotamis.

Samuel Lansing Devereaux
—The brilliant young attorney from Boston whom no one seems to understand, except the Hawk. He is an enigma, full of contradictions—a lawyer who, by some strange twist, also happens to be an honest man.

Sunrise Jennifer Redwing
—A fiercely loyal daughter of the Wopotami nation, she too is an attorney, she too is brilliant, but she’s prettier by a mile than Sam. She’ll do everything in her power to help her people—and that means making sure they lose their case.

Desi Arnaz I & II
—A couple of miscreants from Puerto Rico who have fallen under the Hawk’s spell. Their specialties include hot-wiring cars and picking locks, and if the chips fall right, one of them may soon end up as the director of the CIA.

Vincent “Vinnie the Bam-Bam” Mangecavallo
—The current director of the CIA, he’s a hardworking wise guy who rose up from the ranks of the Brooklyn Mafia to become the administration’s best-kept secret weapon.

A number of years ago, the undersigned wrote a novel entitled
The Road to Gandolfo
. It was based on a staggering premise, an earthshaking concept that should have possessed the thunder of the ages … and you don’t hardly come upon them things no more. It was to be a tale told by demons, the legions of Satan marching out of hell to commit a heinous crime that would outrage the world, a mortal blow to all men and women of faith regardless of their specific religion, for it would show how vulnerable are the great spiritual leaders of our times. Stripped to its essentials, the story dealt with the kidnapping of Rome’s Pontiff, a true man of God and of ordinary people everywhere, Pope Francesco the First.

Are you with me? I mean, it’s really
heavy
, isn’t it? It should have been, but it wasn’t.… Something happened. Poor Fool, the novelist, peeked around the edges, glimpsed the flip side of the coin, and to his eternal condemnation he began to giggle. That’s
no
way to treat a staggering premise, a magnificent obsession! (Not too shabby a title, by the way.) Unfortunately, Poor Fool could not help himself; he began to think, which is always dangerous for a storyteller. The
what-if
syndrome came into play.

What if the instigator of this horrible crime wasn’t actually a bad fellow, but in fiction’s reality, a genuine military legend whom the politicians crippled because he vociferously objected to their hypocrisies … and what if the beloved Pope wasn’t actually averse to being kidnapped, as long as his look-alike cousin, a none too bright spear carrier from La Scala Opera, took his place, and the true Pontiff could run the immense responsibilities of the Holy See by remote, without the debilitating agenda of Vatican politics and the endless procession of blessings administered to supplicants expecting to buy their way into Heaven by way of the collection plate? Now
there
was another story.

I can hear you, I can
hear
you!
He sold himself down his own river of betrayal
(I’ve frequently wondered what river the bromide refers to. The Styx, the Nile, the Amazon? Certainly not the Colorado; you’d get hung up on the white-water rocks.)

Well, maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. I only know that during the intervening years since
Gandolfo
, a number of readers have asked me by letter, telephone, and outright threats of bodily harm, “
Whatever happened to those clowns
?” (The perpetrators, not the willing victim.)

In all honesty, those “clowns” were waiting for another staggering premise. And late one night a year ago, the squirrelliest of my insignificant muses shrieked, “
By Jove, you’ve got it
!” (I’m quite sure she stole the line.)

At any rate, whereas Poor Fool took certain liberties in the areas of religion and economics in
The Road to Gandolfo
, he hereby freely admits having taken similar liberties in this current scholarly tome with respect to the laws and the courts of the land.

Then again, who doesn’t? Of course, not
my
attorney or
your
attorney, but certainly everybody else’s!

The accurate novelization of authentic undocumented history of questionable origin demands that the muse must forego certain ingrained disciplines in the search for improbable truths. And definitely where Blackstone is concerned.

Yet never fear, the moral is here:

Stay out of a courtroom unless you can buy the judge.
Or
, if in the unlikely event you could, hire
my
lawyer,
which you can’t because he’s all tied up keeping me out of jail.

So, to my many friends who are attorneys (they’re either attorneys, actors, or homicidal killers—is there a running connection?), skip over the finer points of law that are neither fine nor very pointed. However, they may well be inaccurately accurate.

—RL