The illuminatus! trilogy (35 page)

Through a bullhorn, a police captain began to shout, CLEAR THE PLAZA CLEAR THE PLAZA.

The first reports of the annihilation camps were passed on to the OSS by a Swiss businessman evaluated as being one of the most trustworthy informants on affairs in Nazi Europe. The State Department decided that the stories were not confirmed. That was early in 1943. By autumn of that year, more urgent reports from the same source transmitted still through the OSS forced a major policy conference. It was again decided that the reports were not true. As winter began, the English government asked for another conference to discuss similar reports from their own intelligence networks and from the government of Rumania. The delegates met in Bermuda for a warm, sunny weekend, and decided that the reports were not true; they returned to their work refreshed and tanned. The death trains continued to roll. Early in 1944, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, was reached by dissenters in the State Department, examined the evidence, and forced a meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shaken by the assertions in Morgenthau’s documents, Roosevelt pledged that he would act at once. He never did. It was said later that the State Department convinced him, once again, of their own analysis: the reports simply were not true. When Mr. Hitler said
Vernichtung
he had not really meant
Vernichtung
. An author, Ben Hecht, then placed an ad in the
New York Times
, presenting the evidence to the public; a group of prominent rabbis attacked him for alarming Jews unnecessarily and undermining confidence in America’s Chief Executive during wartime. Finally, late that year, American and Russian troops began liberating the camps, and General Eisenhower
insisted that news photographers take detailed movies which were released to the whole world. In the interval between the first suppressed report by the Swiss businessman and the liberation of the first camp, six million people had died.

“That’s what we call a Bavarian Fire Drill,” Simon explained to Joe. (It was another time; he was driving another Volkswagen. In fact, it was the night of April 23 and they were going to meet Tobias Knight at the UN building.) “It was one official named Winifred who’d been transferred from the Justice Department to a key State Department desk where every bit of evidence passed for evaluation. But the same principles apply everywhere. For instance—we’re half an hour early for the meeting anyhow—I’ll give you an illustration right now.” They were approaching the corner of Forty-third Street and Third Avenue and Simon had observed that the streetlight was changing to red. As he stopped the car, he opened the door and said to Joe, “Follow me.”

Puzzled, Joe got out as Simon ran to the car behind them, beat on the hood with his hand and shouted “Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” He made vigorous but ambiguous motions with his hands and ran to the car next back. Joe saw the first subject look dubiously at his companion and then open the door and get out, obediently trailing behind Simon’s urgent and somber figure.

“Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” Simon was already shouting at the third car back.

As Joe trotted along, occasionally adding his own voice to persuade the more dubious drivers, every car gradually emptied and people formed a neat line heading back toward Lexington Avenue. Simon then ducked between two cars and began jogging toward the front of the line at Third Avenue again, shouting to everybody, “Complete circle! Stay in line!” Obediently, everyone followed in a great circle back to their own cars, reentering from the side opposite to that from which they had left. Simon and Joe climbed back into the VW, the light changed, and they sped ahead.

“You see?” Simon asked. “Use words they’ve been conditioned to since childhood—‘fire drill,’ ‘stay in line,’ like that—and never look back to see if they’re obeying. They’ll follow. Well, that’s the way the Illuminati guaranteed that the Final Solution wouldn’t be interrupted. Winifred,
one guy who had been around long enough to have an impressive title, and his scrawl ‘Evaluation: dubious’ on the bottom of each memo … and six million died. Hilarious, isn’t it?”

And Joe remembered from the little book by Hagbard Celine,
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
(privately printed, and distributed only to members of the JAMs and the Legion of Dynamic Discord): “The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.”

(On November 23, 1970, the body of Stanislaus Oedipuski, forty-six, of West Irving Park Road, was found floating in the Chicago river. Death, according to the police laboratory, did not result from drowning but from beating about the head and shoulders with a square-ended object. The first inquiries by homicide detectives revealed that Oedipuski had been a member of God’s Lightning and the theory was formed that a conflict between the dead man and his former colleagues might have resulted in his being snuffed with their wooden crosses. Further investigation revealed that Oedipuski had been a construction worker and until very recently well liked on his job, behaving in a normal, down-to-earth manner, bitching about the government, cursing the lazy bums on Welfare, hating niggers, shouting obscene remarks at good-looking dolls who passed construction sites and—when the odds were safely above the 8-to-1 level—joining other middle-aged workers in attacking and beating young men with long hair, peace buttons, or other un-American stigmata. Then, about a month before, all that had changed. He began bitching about the bosses as well as the government—almost sounding like a communist at times; when somebody else cussed the crumb-bums on Welfare, Stan remarked thoughtfully, “Well, you know, our union keeps them from getting jobs, fellows, so what else can they do but go on Welfare? Steal?” He even said once, when some of the guys were good-humoredly giving the finger and making other gallant noises and signals toward a passing eighteen-year-old girl, “Hey, you know, that might really be embarrassing and scaring her …!” Worse yet, his own hair begun to grow surprisingly long in the back, and his wife told friends that he didn’t look at TV much anymore but instead sat in a chair most evenings reading
books
. The police found that was indeed true, and his small library—gathered in less
than a month—was remarkable indeed, featuring works on astronomy, sociology, Oriental mysticism, Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
, detective novels by Raymond Chandler,
Alice in Wonderland
, and a college-level text on number theory with the section on primes heavily marked with notes in the margin; the gallant, and now pathetic, tracks of a mind that was beginning to grow after four decades of stagnation, and then had been abruptly stomped. Most mysterious of all was the card found in the dead man’s pocket, which although waterlogged, could still be read. One side said

and the other side, even more mysteriously, was inscribed:

The police might have tried to decipher this, but then they discovered that Oedipuski had resigned from God’s Lightning—giving his fellow members a lecture on tolerance in the process—the night before his death. That closed the case, definitely. Homicide did not investigate murders clearly connected with God’s Lightning, since the Red Squad had its own personal accommodation with that burgeoning organization. “Poor motherfucker,” a detective said, looking at Oedipuski’s photographs; and closed the file forever. Nobody ever reopened it, or traced the change in the dead man back to his attendance at the meeting, one month before, of KCUF at the Sheraton-Chicago, where the punch was spiked with AUM.)

And, in New York, Peter Jackson is trying to get the next issue of
Confrontation
out on time—although the office is still a shambles, the editor and star researcher have disappeared, the best reporter has gone ape and claims to be at the bottom of the Atlantic with a wax tycoon, and the police are hounding Peter to find out why the first two detectives assigned to the case can’t be located. Sitting in his apartment (now the magazine’s office) in his shirt and shorts, Peter dials his phone with one hand, adding another crushed cigarette to the pile in the ashtray with the other. Throwing a manuscript onto a basket marked “Ready for Printer,” he crosses off “lead article—The Youngest Student Ever Admitted to Columbia Tells Why He Dropped Out by L. L. Durrutti” from a list on the pad before him. His pencil moves down to the bottom, “Book Review,” as he listens to the phone ring. Finally, he hears the click of a lifted receiver and a rich, flutey voice says, “Epicene Wildeblood here.”

“Got your book review ready, Eppy?”

“Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can’t be any faster,
honestly!”

“Tomorrow will do,” Peter says writing
call again
—A.M. next to “Book Review.”