The Road to Omaha (7 page)

“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.

“
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
paisans
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
?”