"Ludlum, Robert - Road To Omaha" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ludlum Robert)

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
tide, 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.

X PREFACE

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 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 squirrelfiest
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 concemed.
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,