The illuminatus! trilogy (51 page)

“They will wither away. When communism replaces fascism as the number one enemy, your small-town conservative will be ready for global adventures on a scale that would make the heads of poor Mr. Roosevelt’s liberals spin. Trust me. We have every detail pinpointed. Let me show you where the new government will be located.”

Drake stared at the plan and shook his head. “Some people will recognize what a pentagon means,” he said dubiously.

“They will be dismissed as superstitious cranks. Believe me, this building will be constructed within a few years. It will become the policeman of the world. Nobody will dare question its actions or judgments without being denounced as a traitor. Within thirty years, Mr. Drake,
within thirty years
, anyone who attempts to restore power to the Congress will be cursed and vilified, not by liberals but by conservatives.”

“Holy God,” Drake said.

The Grand Master rose and walked to an old-fashioned globe nearly as large as King Kong’s head. “Pick a spot, Mr. Drake. Any spot. I guarantee you we will have American troops there within thirty years. The Empire that you dreamed of while reading Tacitus.”

Robert Putney Drake felt humbled for an instant,
even though he recognized the gimmick: using one single example of telepathy, plucking Tacitus out of his head, to climax the presentation of the incredible dream. At last he understood firsthand the awe that the Illuminati created in both its servitors and its enemies.

“There will be opposition,” the Grand Master went on. “In the 1960s and early 1970s especially. That’s where your notion for a unified crime syndicate fits into our plan. To crush the opposition, we will need a Justice Department equivalent in many ways to Hitler’s Gestapo. If your scheme works—if the Mafia can be drawn into a syndicate that is not entirely under Sicilian control, and the various other groups can be brought under the same umbrella—we will have a nationwide outlaw cartel. The public itself will then call for the kind of Justice Department that we need. By the mid-1960s, wiretapping of all sorts must be so common that the concept of privacy will be archaic.” And, tossing sleeplessly, Drake thought how smoothly it had all worked out; why then was he rebelling against it? Why did it give him no pleasure? And what
was
it Jung had said about power?

Richard Jung, wearing Carl Jung’s old sweater and smoking his pipe, said, “And next the solar system.” The room was crowded with white rabbits, Playboy bunnies, Bugs Bunny, the Wolf Man, Ku Kluxers, Mafiosos, Lepke with accusing eyes, a dormouse, a mad hatter, the King of Hearts, the Prince of Wands, and Jung was shouting over the din. “Billions to reach the moon. Trillions to get to Mars. All pouring into our corporations. Better than the gladiatorial games.” Linda Lovelace elbowed him aside. “Call me Ishmaelian,” she said suggestively; but Jung handed Drake the skeleton of a Biafran baby. “For Petruchio’s feast,” he explained, producing a piece of ticker tape. “We now own,” he began to read, “seventy-two percent of earth’s resources, and fifty-one percent of all the armed troops in the world are under our direction. Here,” he said, passing the body of an infant that had died in Appalachia, “see that this one gets an apple in its mouth.”
A bunny passed Drake a 1923 Thompson machine gun, the model that had been called an automatic rifle because the Army had no funds to buy submachine guns that year. “What’s this for?” Drake asked, confused. “We have to defend ourselves,” the bunny said. “The mob is at the gates. The hungry mob. An astronaut named Spartacus is leading them.” Drake handed the gun to Maldonado and crept upstairs to his private heliport. He passed through the lavatory to the laboratory (where Dr. Frankenstein was attaching electrodes to Linda Lovelace’s jaws) and entered the golf course again, where the door opened to the airplane cabin.

He was escaping in his 747 jet, and below he could see Black Panthers, college kids, starving coal miners, Indians, Viet Cong, Brazilians, an enormous army pillaging his estate. “They must have seen the fnords,” he said to the pilot. But the pilot was his mother and the sight of her threw him into a rage. “Leaving me alone!” he screamed. “Always leaving me alone to go to your damned parties with father. I never had a mother, just one nigger maid after another acting as mothers. Were the parties that fucking important?”

“Oh,” she said reddening, “how can you use that word in front of your own mother?”

“To hell with that. All I remember is your perfume hanging in the air, and some strange black face coming when I called for you.”

“You’re such a baby,” she said sadly. “All your life, you’ve always been a big baby.” It was true: he was wearing diapers. A vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust stared at him incredulously. “I say, Drake, do you really think that is appropriate garb for an important business meeting?” Beside him Linda Lovelace bent in ecstasy to kiss the secret ardor of Ishmael. “A whale of a good time,” the vice president said, suddenly giggling inanely.

“Oh, fuck you all,” Drake screamed. “I’ve got more money than any of you.”

“The money is gone,” Carl Jung said, wearing
Freud’s beard. “What totem will you use now to ward off insecurity and the things that go bump in the night?” He sneered. “What childish codes! M.A.F.I.A.—
Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela
. French Canadian bean soup—the Five Consecrated Bavarian Seers.
Annuit Coeptis Novus Or do Seclorwn
—Anti-Christ Now Our Savior. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim—Asmodeus Belial Hastur Nyarlathotep Wotan Niggurath Dholes Azathoth Tindalos Kadith. Child’s play!
Glasspielen!”

“Well, if you’re so damned smart, who are the inner Five right now?” Drake asked testily.

“Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo,” Jung said, riding off on a tricycle. “The Illuminati is your mother’s breast, sucker,” added Albert Hoffman, peddling after Jung on a bicycle.

Drake awoke as the Eye closed. It was all clear in an instant, without the labor he had spent working over the Dutchman’s words. Maldonado stood by the bedside, his face Karloff’s, and said, “We deserve to be dead.” Yes: that was what it was like when you discovered you were a robot, not a man, like Karloff in the last scene of
Bride of Frankenstein
.

Drake awoke again and this time he was really awake. It was clear, crystal clear, and he had no regrets. Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wilhelm Reich would ever understand. “Our job,” Huxley wrote before death, “is waking up.”

Drake put on his robe quickly and stepped out into the dark Elizabethan hallway. Five hundred thousand dollars this house and grounds had cost, including the cottages, and it was only one of his eight estates. Money. What did it mean when Nyarlathotep appeared and “the wild beasts followed him and licked his hands” as that damned stupid-smart Lovecraft wrote? What did it matter when “the blind idiot God Chaos blew earth’s dust away”?

Drake pushed open the dark paneled doorway of
George’s room. Good: Tarantella was gone. The thunder rumbled again, and Drake’s own shadow looming over the bed reminded him once more of a Karloff movie.

He bent over the bed and shook George’s shoulder gently. “Mavis,” the boy said. Drake wondered who the hell Mavis was; somebody terrific, obviously, if George could be dreaming about her after a session with the Illuminati-trained Tarantella. Or was Mavis another ex-Illuminatus? There were a lot of them with the Discordians lately, Drake had surmised. He shook George’s shoulder again, more vigorously.

“Oh, no, I can’t come again,” George said. Drake gave another shake, and two weary and frightened eyes opened to look at him.

“What?”

“Up,” Drake grunted, grabbing George under the arms and pulling him to a sitting position. “Out of bed,” he added, panting, rolling the boy to the edge.

Drake was looking through waves upward at George. Damn it, the thing has already found my mind. “You’ve got to get out,” he repeated. “You’re in danger here.”

October 23, 1935: Charley Workman, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew charge through the door of the Palace Chop House and, according to orders, cowboy the joint
… Lead pellets like rain; and rain like lead pellets hitting George’s window, “Christ, what is it?” he asked. Drake stood him up stark naked and handed him his drawers, repeating “Hurry!”
Charley the Bug looked over the three bodies: Abadaba Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz and somebody he didn’t recognize. None of them was the Dutchman. “My God, we fucked up,” he said, “Dutch ain’t here”
But a commotion has started in the alleys of the dream: Albert Stern, taking his last fix of the night, suddenly recalls his fantasy of killing somebody as important as John Dillinger.
“The can,” Mendy Weiss says excitedly; he had a hard-on, like he always did on this kind of job
. “Man is a giant,” Drake says, “forced to live in a pigmy’s hut.” “What
does that mean?” George asks. “It means we’re all fools,” Drake says excitedly, smelling the old whore Death, “especially those of us who try to act like giants by bullying the others in the hut instead of knocking the goddam walls down. Carl Jung told me that, only in more elegant language.” George’s dangling penis kept catching his eye: homosexuality (an occasional thing with Drake), heterosexuality (his normal state) and the new lust for the old whore Death were all tugging at him.
The Dutchman dropped his penis, urine squirting his shoes, and went for his gun as he heard the shots in the barroom. He turned quickly, unable to stop pissing, and Albert Stern came through the door, shooting before Dutch could take aim. Falling forward, he saw that it was really Vince Coll, a ghost. “Oh, mama mama mama,” he said, lying in his urine
.

“Which way do we go?” George asked, buttoning his shirt.

“You go,” Drake said. “Down the stairs and out the back, to the garage. Here’s the key to my Silver Wraith Rolls Royce. It won’t be any use to me anymore.”

“Why aren’t you coming?” George protested.

“We deserve to be dead,” Drake said, “all of us in this house.”

“Hey, that’s crazy. I don’t care what you’ve done, a guilt trip is always crazy.”

“I’ve been on a crazier trip, as you’d call it, all my life,” Drake said calmly. “The power trip. Now,
move!”

“George, don’t make no bull moves,” the Dutchman said. “He’s talking,” Sergeant Luke Conlon whispered at the foot of the hospital bed; the police stenographer, F. J. Lang, began taking notes. “What have you done with him?” the Dutchman went on. “Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh, stop it. Oh, oh, oh, sure. Sure, mama.”
Drake sat down in the window seat and, too nervous for a cigar, lit one of his infrequent cigarettes. One hundred and fifty-seven, he thought, remembering the last entry in his little notebook. One hundred and fifty-seven rich women, one wife, and seventeen boys.
And never once did I really make contact, never once did I smash the walls … The wind and the rain were now deafening outside … Fourteen billion dollars, thirteen billion illegal and tax-free; more than Getty or Hunt, even if I could never publicize the fact. And that Arab boy in Tangier who picked my pocket after he blew me, my mother’s perfume, hours and hours in Zurich puzzling over the Dutchman’s words.

Outside Flegenheimer’s livery stable in the Bronx, Phil Silverberg is teasing young Arthur Flegenheimer in 1913, holding the burglar’s tools out of reach, asking mockingly, “Do you really think you’re big enough to knock over a house on your own?” In the Newark hospital, the Dutchman cries angrily, “Now listen, Phil, fun is fun.” The seventeen Illuminati representatives vanished in the dark; the one with the goat’s head suddenly returned. “What happened to the other sixteen?” Dutch asked the hospital walls. The blood from his arm signed the parchment. “Oh, he done it. Please,” he asked vaguely. Sergeant Conlon looks bemusedly at the stenographer, Lang.
The lightning seemed dark, and the darkness seemed light. If’s taking hold of my mind completely, Drake thought, sitting by the window
.

I will hold onto my sanity, Drake swore silently. What was that rock song about Jesus I was remembering?

“Only five inches between me and happiness,” was it? No, that’s from
Deep Throat
. The whiteness of the whale.

The waves covered his vision again: wrong song, obviously. I have to reach him, to unify the forces. No, dammit, that’s not
my
thought. That’s his thought. He’s coming up, up out of the waves. I must rise. I must rise. To unify the forces.

Dillinger said, “You’re right, Dutch. Fuck the Illuminati. Fuck the Maf. The Justified Ancients of Mummu would be glad to have you.” The Dutchman looked right into Sergeant Conlon’s eyes and asked, “John, please, oh, did you buy the whole tale? You promised a million, sure. Get out, I wished I knew.
Please make it quick. Fast and furious. Please. Fast and furious. Please help me get out.”

I should have gotten out in ’42, when I first learned about the camps, Drake thought. I never realized until then that they really meant to do it. And next Hiroshima. Why did I stay after Hiroshima? It was so obvious, it was just the way Lovecraft wrote, the idiot God Chaos blew earth’s dust away, and back in ’35 I knew the secret: if a cheap hoodlum like Dutch Schultz had a great poet buried in him, what might be released if any man looked the old whore Death in the eye? Say that I betrayed my country and my planet, but worse, add that I betrayed Robert Putney Drake, the giant of psychology I murdered when I used the secret for power and not for healing.

I see the plumbers, the cesspool cleaners, the colorless all-color of atheism. I am the Fate’s lieutenant: I act under ardors. White, White void. Ahab’s eye. Five inches from happiness, the Law of Fives, always. Ahab schlurped down, down.

“This Bavarian stuff is all bullshit,” Dillinger said. “They’re mostly Englishmen, since Rhodes took command in 1888. And they’ve already infiltrated Justice, State and Labor, as well as the Treasury. That’s who you’re playing ball with. And let me tell you what they plan to do with your people, the Jews, in this war they’re cooking up.”