The illuminatus! trilogy (59 page)

“A gateless gate. That’s another one I’ve known for years, without understanding it. The gateless gate and the governorless nation. The chief cause of socialism is
capitalism. What the hell does that bloody apple have to do with all this?”

“The apple is the world. Who did Goddess say owns it?”

“‘The prettiest one.’”

“Who is the prettiest one?”

“You are.”

“Don’t make a pass right now. Think.”

George giggled. “I’ve been through too much already. I think I’m getting sleepy. I have two answers, one communist and one fascist. Both are wrong, of course. The correct answer has to fit in with your anar-chocapitalism.”

“Not necessarily. Anarcho-capitalism is just
our
trip. We don’t mean to impose it on everybody. We have an alliance with an anarcho-communist group called the JAMs. John Dillinger’s their leader.”

“Come off it. Dillinger died in 1935 or something.”

“John Dillinger is alive and well today, in California, Fernando Poo and Texas,” Mavis smiled. “As a matter of fact, he shot John F. Kennedy.”

“Give me another toke. If I have to listen to this, I might as well be in a state where I won’t try to understand it.”

Mavis passed the pipe. “The prettiest one has quite a few levels to it, like all good jokes. I’ll give you the Freudian one, as beginners. You know the prettiest one, George. You gave it to the apple just yesterday.

“Every man’s penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he’s born until the day he dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman and her pussy. It’s the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most people ever achieve. But they’d rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they’ll confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and
most powerful block. They’ll never admit it.”

“From what I’ve read of psychiatric literature, I thought most people had rather squeamish and negative feelings about their genitals.”

“That, to quote Freud himself, is a reaction formation. The primordial emotional tone, from the day the infant discovers the incredible pleasure centers there, is perpetual astonishment, awe and delight. No matter how much society tries to crush it and repress it. For instance, everybody has some pet name for their genitals. What’s yours?”

“Polyphemus,” he confessed.

“What?”

“Because it has one eye, you know? Also, Polyphemus rhymes with penis, I guess. I mean, I can’t remember exactly what my mental process was when I invented that in my early teens.”

“Polyphemus was a giant, too. Almost a god. You see what I mean about the primary emotional tone? It’s the origin of all religion. Adoration of your own genitals and of your lover’s genitals.
There’s
Pan Pangenitor and the Great Mother.”

“So,” George said owlishly, still not sure whether this was profundity or nonsense, “the earth belongs to our genitalia?”

“To their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, and so on, forever. The world is a verb, not a noun.”

“The prettiest one is three billion years old.”

“You’ve got it, baby. We’re all tenants here, including the ones who think they’re owners. Property is impossible.”

“Okay, okay, I think I’ve got most of it. Property is theft because the Illuminati land titles are arbitrary and unjust. And so are their banking charters and railroad franchises and all the other monopoly games of capitalism—”

“Of state capitalism. Not of true laissez-faire.”

“Wait. Property is impossible because the world is a verb, a burning house as Buddha said. All things are fire. My old pal Heracleitus. So property is theft and
property is impossible. How do we get to property is liberty?”

“Without private property there can be no private decisions.”

“So we’re back where we started from?”

“No, we’re one flight higher up on the spiral staircase. Look at it that way. Dialectically, as your Marxist friends say.”

“But we
are
back at private property. After proving it’s an impossible fiction.”

“The Statist form of private property is an impossible fiction. Just like the Statist form of communal property is an impossible fiction. Think outside the State framework, George. Think of property in freedom.”

George shook his head. “It beats the hell out of my ass. All I can see is people ripping each other off. The war of all against all, as what’s-his-name said.”

“Hobbes.”

“Hobbes, snobs, jobs. Whoever. Or whatever. Isn’t he right?”

“Stop the motor on this submarine.”

“What?”

“Force me to love you.”

“Wait, I don’t …”

“Turn the sky green or red, instead of blue.”

“I still don’t get it.”

Mavis took a pen off the desk and held it between two fingers. “What happens when I let go of this?”

“It falls.”

“Where do you sit if there are no chairs?”

“On the floor?”
If I wasn’t so stoned, I would have had it by then. Sometimes drugs are more a hindrance than a help
. “On the ground?” I added.

“On your ass, that’s for sure.” Mavis said. “The point is, if the chairs all go away, you still sit. Or you build new chairs.” She was stoned, too; otherwise she’d be explaining it better, I realized. “But you can’t stop the motor without learning something about marine engineering first. You don’t know what switch to puil. Or
switches. And you can’t change the sky. And the pen will fall without a gravity-governing demon rushing into the room to make it fall.”

“Shit and pink petunias,” I said disgustedly. “L. this some form of Thomism? Are you trying to sell me the Natural Law argument? I can’t buy that at all.”

“Okay, George. Here’s the next jolt. Keep your asshole tight.” She spoke to the wall, to a hidden microphone, I guessed. “Send
him
in now.”

The Robot is easily upset; my sphincter was already tightening as soon as she warned me there was a jolt coming and she didn’t really need to add that bit about my asshole. Carlo and his gun. Hagbard and his gun. Drake’s mansion. I took a deep breath and waited to see what the Robot would do.

A panel in the wall opened and Harry Coin was pushed into the room. I had time to think that I should have guessed, in this game where both sides were playing with illusion constantly, Coin’s death could have been faked, artificial intestines dangling and all, and of course Mavis and her raiders could have taken him out of Mad Dog jail even before they took me out of course, and I remembered the pain when he slapped my face and when his cock entered me, and the Robot was already moving, and I hardly had time to aim of course, and then his head was banging against the wall, blood spurting from his nose, and I had time to clip him again on the jaw as he went down of course, and then I came all the way back and stopped myself as I was about to kick him in the face as he lay there unconscious. Zen in the art of face-punching. I had knocked a man out with two blows; I who hated Hemingway and Machismo so much that I’d never taken a boxing lesson in my life. I was breathing hard, but it was good and clean, the feeling of after-an-orgasm; the adrenalin was flowing, but a fight reflex instead of a flight reflex had been triggered, and now it over, and I was calm. A glint in the air: Hagbard’s pistol was in Mavis’s hand, then flying toward me. As I caught it, she said, “Finish the bastard.”

But the rage had ended when I held back the kick on seeing him already unconscious.

“No,” I said. “It
is
finished.”

“Not until you kill him. You’re no good to us until you’re ready to kill, George.”

I ignored her and rapped on the wall. “Haul the bastard out,” I said clearly. The panel opened, and two Slavic-looking seamen, grinning, grabbed Coin’s arms and dragged him out. The panel closed again, quietly.

“I don’t kill on command,” I said, turning back to Mavis. “I’m not a German shepherd or a draftee.
My
case with him is settled, and if you want him dead, do the dirty work yourself.”

But Mavis was smiling placidly. “Is that a Natural Law?” she asked.

And twenty-three hours later Tobias Knight listened to the voice in his earphones:
“That’s the problem. I can’t remember. But if you leave me alone for a while maybe it’ll come back to me.” Smoothing his mustache nervously, Knight set the button for automatic record, removed the earphones and buzzed Esperando Despond’s office.

“Despond,” the intercom said.

“The CIA has one. A man who was with the girl after Mocenigo. Send somebody down for the tape—it’s got a pretty good description of the girl.”

“Wilco,” Despond said tersely. “Anything else?”

“He thinks he might remember the name of her next customer. She mentioned it to him. We might get that, too.”

“Let’s hope so,” Despond said and clicked off. He sat back in his chair and addressed the three agents in his office. “The guy we’ve got—what’s his name? Naismith—is probably the next customer. We’ll check the two descriptions of the girl against each other and get a much more accurate picture than the CIA has, since they’re working from only one description.”

But fifteen minutes later, he was staring in puzzlement at the chart which had been chalked on the blackboard:

A tall, bearish agent named Roy Ubu said thoughtfully, “I’ve never seen two eyewitness descriptions match exactly, but
this
…”

A small, waspish agent named Buzz Vespa snapped, “One of them is lying for some reason. But which one?”

“Neither of them has any reason to lie,” Despond said. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to face the facts. Dr. Mocenigo was unworthy of the trust that the U.S. government placed in him. He was a degenerate sex maniac. He had
two
women last night, one of them a Nigra.”

“What do you mean that little sawed-off bastard is gone?”
Peter Kurten of the CIA was shouting at that very moment. “The only way out of his room was right through that door, there, and we’ve all had it under constant surveillance. The door was only opened once when DeSalvo took out the coffee urn to have it refilled at the sandwich shop next door. Oh…my…
God
…the…
coffee
…
urn
…” As he slumped back in his chair, mouth hanging open, an agent with a device that looked like a mine sweeper stepped forward.

“Daily sweep for FBI bugs, sir,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m afraid the machine is registering one under your desk. If you’ll let me just reach in and…uh…that gets it …”

And Tobias Knight, listening, heard no more. It would be a few hours, at least, until their man in the CIA was able to plant a new bug.

And Saul Goodman stepped hard on the brakes of his rented Ford Brontosaurus as a tiny and determined figure, dashing out of the Papa Mescalito Sandwich Shop, ran right in front of the fender. Saul heard a sickening thud and Barney Muldoon’s voice beside him saying, “Oh Christ, no …”

I was at the end of my ropes. The Syndicate I could see, but why the Feds?
I was flabbygastered. I said to that dumb cunt Bonnie Quint, “Are you a thousand percent sure?”

“Carmel,” she says. “I know the Syndicate. They’re not that smooth. These guys were just what they claimed. Feds.”

Oh, Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus with egg in his beard. I couldn’t help myself, I just hauled off and bopped her in the kisser, the dumb cunt. “What’d you tell them?” I screamed. “What’d you tell them?”

She started to snivel. “I didn’t tell them nothing,” she says.

So I had to bop her again. Christ, I hate hitting women, they always blubber so much. “I’ll use the belt,” I howled. “So help me, God, I’ll use the belt. Don’t tell me you didn’t tell them nothing. Everybody tells them something. Even a clam would sing like Sinatra when they’re finished with him. So what’d you tell them?” I bopped her again, Christ, this was terrible.

“I just told them I wasn’t with this Mocenigo. Which I wasn’t.”

“So who did you tell them you were with?”

“I made up a prescription. A midget. A guy I saw on the street. I wouldn’t give the name of a real John, I know that could come back against you. And me.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I bopped her again. “Go away,” I says. “Be missing. Let me think.”

She goes out, still blubbering, and I go over to the window and look at the desert to calm my head. My rose fever was starting to act up; it was that time of year. Why did people have to bring roses to the desert? I tried to contemplate hard on the problem and forget
my health. There was only one explanation: that damned Mocenigo figured out that Sherri was pumping him and told the Feds. The Syndicate wasn’t in it yet. They were all still running around the East like chickens with their legs cut off, trying to figure who rubbed Maldonado, and why it happened at the house of a straight like this banker Drake. So they hadn’t got the time yet to find out that five million of Banana Nose’s money had disappeared into my own safe as soon as I heard he was dead. The Feds weren’t in on that at all, and the connection was circumsubstantial.

And then it hit me so hard that I almost fell over. Besides my own girls, who wouldn’t talk, there were a dozen or two cab drivers and bartenders and whatnots who knew that Sherri worked for me. The Feds would get it out of somebody sooner or later, and probably sooner. It was like a light bulb going on over my head in a comic strip: TREASON, AIDING AND ABEDDING THE ENEMY. I remembered from when I was a kid those two Jewish scientists who the Feds got for that. The hot squat. They fried them, Christ Jesus, I thought I’d vomit. Why does the fucking government have to be that way about somebody just trying to make a buck? Even the Syndicate would only shoot you or give you a lead enema, but the cocksucking government has to go and put you in an electrical chair. Christ Jesus, I was hot as a chimney.