The illuminatus! trilogy (77 page)

I met Eisenhower only once, at a very large and sumptuous ball. He called another agent and myself aside. “Keep your eye on Mamie,” he said. “If she has five martinis, or starts quoting John Wayne, get her upstairs
quick.”

Kennedy I never even talked to, but Winifred (whose name in the order is Scotus Pythagoras) used to bitch about him a lot. “This New Frontier stuff is dangerous,” Winfred would say testily. “The man thinks he’s living in a western movie. One big showdown, and the bad guys bite the dust. We’d best not let him last too long.”

You can imagine how upset I was when the Dallas caper began to throw light on the whole overall pattern. Of course, I didn’t know what to do: Winifred was my only superior in the government who was also a superior in the Illuminati, but I had a lot of hunches and guesses about some others, and I wouldn’t want to bet that John Edgar wasn’t one of them, for instance. When the feeler came from the CIA I went on what these kids today call a paranoid trip. It could have been coincidence or synchronicity, but it could have been the Order, scanning me, and ensuring that my involvement would get deeper.

(“Most people in espionage don’t know who they’re working for,” Winifred told me once, in that voice of silk and satin and stilettos, “especially the ones who only do ‘small jobs.’ Suppose we find a French Canadian separatist in Montreal who’s in a position to provide certain information at certain times. We certainly don’t ask him to work for American Intelligence. That’s no concern of his, and even inimical to his real interests. So he’s approached by another very convincing French Canadian who has ‘evidence’ to prove he’s an agent of the most secret of all Quebec Libre underground movements. Or, if the Russians find a woman in Nairobi who has access to certain offices and happens to be anti-Communist and pro-English: no sense in trying to recruit her for the MVD, right? The contact she meets has a full set of credentials and just the right Oxford tone to convince her he’s with M.5 in London. And so it goes,” he ended dreamily, “so it goes …”)

My CIA contact really was CIA; I’m almost absolutely willing to give odds around 60-40 on that. At least, he knew the proper passwords to show that he was acting under presidential orders, whatever that proves.

It was Hoover himself who ordered me to infiltrate God’s Lightning. Well, he didn’t pick me alone; I was part of a group, and a rousing pep talk he gave us. I can still remember him saying, “Don’t let their American
flags fool you. Look at those lightning bolts, right out of Nazi Germany, and, remember, the next thing to a godless Commie is a godless Nazi. They’re both against Free Enterprise.” Of course, as soon as I was admitted to the Arlington chapter of God’s Lightning, I found out that Free Enterprise stood second only to Heracleitus in their pantheon. J. Edgar did get some queer hornets in his headgear at times—like his fear that John Dillinger was really still alive some place, laughing at him. That was the dread that turned him against Melvin Purvis, the agent who gunned Dillinger down in Chicago, and he rode Purvis right out of the Bureau. Those of you with long memories will recall that poor Purvis ended up working for a breakfast cereal company, acting as titular head of the Post-Toasties Junior G-Men.

It was in God’s Lightning that I read
Telemachus Sneezed
, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. That scene where Taffy Rhinestone sees the new King on television and it’s her old rapist friend with the gaunt cheeks and he says, “My name is John Guilt”— man, that’s
writing
. His hundred-and-three-page-long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of guilt and showing why all the anti-Heracleiteans and Freudians and relativists are destroying civilization by destroying guilt, certainly is persuasive—especially to somebody like me with three-going-on-four personalities each of which was betraying the others. I still quote his last line, “Without guilt there can be no civilization.” Her nonfiction book,
Militarism: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracleitean
is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the God’s Lightning bumper stickers asking “What Is John Guilt?” sure give people the creeps until they learn the answer.

I met Atlanta Hope herself at the time of the New York Draft Riots. That was, you will remember, when God’s Lightning, disgusted with reports that the FBI was swamped in two years’ backlog in draft resistance and draft evasion cases, decided to organize vigilante groups to hunt down the hippie-yippie-commie-pacifist
scum themselves. As soon as they entered the East Village—which harbored, as they suspected, hundreds of thousands of bearded, long-haired and otherwise semi-visible fugitives from the Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Chile and Tierra del Fuego conflicts—they began to encounter both suspects and resistance. After the third hour, the Mayor ordered the police to cordon the area. The police, of course, were on the side of God’s Lightning and did all they could to aid their mayhem against the Great Unwashed while preventing reciprocal mayhem. After the third day, the Governor called out the National Guard. The Guard, who were mostly draft-dodgers at heart themselves, tried to even the score, and even help the Dregs and Drugs a bit. After the third week, the President declared that part of Manhattan a disaster area and sent in the Red Cross to help the survivors.

I was in the thick and din of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses trash cans as a large part of their arsenal) and even met Joe Malik, prematurely, under a Silver Wraith Rolls Royce where he had crawled to take notes near the front line and I had crept to nurse wounds received while being pushed through the window of the Peace Eye Bookstore—I have scars I could show you still—and a voice over my shoulder says that I should put in the fact that August Personage was trapped in a phone booth only a few feet away, suffering hideous paranoid delusions that in spite of all this chaos the police would trace his last obscene call and find him still in the booth afraid to come out and face the trash can covers and bullets and other miscellaneous metals in the air—and I even remember that the Rolls had license plate RPD-1, which suggests that a certain person of importance was also in that odd vicinity on some doubtless even odder errand. I met Atlanta herself a day later and a block north, on the scene where Taylor Mead was making his famous Last Stand. Atlanta grabbed my right arm (the wounded one: it made me wince) and howled something like, “Welcome, brother in the True Faith! War is
the Health of the State! Conflict is the creator of all things!” Seeing she was on a heavy Heracleitus wavelength, I quoted, with great passion, “Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!” That won her and I was Atlanta’s Personal Lieutenant for the rest of the battle.

Atlanta remembered me from the Riots and I was summoned to organize the first tactical strikes against Nader’s Raiders. If I do say so myself, I did a commendable job; it earned me a raise from the Bureau, a tight but genuinely pleased smile from my CIA drop, a promotion to Illuminatus Prelator from Winifred—and another audience with Atlanta Hope which led to my initiation into the
, the supersecret conspiracy for which she was really working. (The
is so arcane that even now I can’t reveal the full name hinted in those initials.) My secret name was Prince of Wands E; I got the Prince of Wands by picking a Tarot card at random, and she gave me the E herself—from which I deduced that there were four other Princes of Wands, together with five Kings of Swords, and so forth, meaning that the
was something special in even esoteric realms, since it was a worldwide conspiracy with no more than three hundred ninety members (five times the number of cards in the Tarot deck). The name fairly suited me—I wouldn’t want to be Hanged Man D or Fool A—and I was happy that the Prince is known for his multiple personalities.

If I had been three and a half agents before (my role in God’s Lightning a fairly straightforward one, at least from GL’s point of view, since I was only asked to smash, not to spy) there was no doubt that I was four agents now, belonging to the FBI, the CIA, the Illuminati and the
and betraying each of them to at least one and sometimes two or three of the others. (Yes, I had been converted to the
during their initiation; if I could describe that most amazing ritual you would not wonder why.) Then came the Vice President’s brainstorm about economizing on agents, and I began to get transferred on loan to the CIA frequently,
whereupon the Bureau discreetly asked me to report anything interesting that I observed. This, however, I perceive as a further complexification of my four-way psychic stretch and not as the inevitable, irrefragable and synergetic fifth step.

And I was right. For it was only in the last year that I entered the terminal stage, or
Grumment
as the Order calls it, due to those curious events which led me from Robert Putney Drake to Hagbard Celine.

I was sent to the Council on Foreign Relations banquet carrying the credentials of a Pinkerton detective; my supposed role as private dick was to keep an eye on the jewels of the ladies and other valuables. My real job was to place a small bug on the table where Robert Putney Drake would be sitting; I was on loan to IRS that week, and they didn’t know that Justice had standing orders never to prosecute him for anything, so they were trying to prove he had concealed income. Naturally, I also had an ear peeled for anything that might be of import for the Illuminati, the
and the CIA, if my Lincoln Memorial contact really was CIA and not Military or Naval Intelligence or somebody else entirely. (You can be sure I often meditated on the possibility that he might be Moscow, Peking or Havana, and Winifred told me once that the Illuminati had reason to believe him part of an advance-guard fifth column sent by invaders from Alpha Centauri—but Grand Masters of the Illuminati are notorious put-on artists, and I didn’t buy that yarn any more than I bought the tale that had originally brought me into the Illuminati, the one about them being a conspiracy to establish a world government run by British Israelites.) Conspiracy was its own reward to me, now; I didn’t care what I was conspiring
for
. Art for art’s sake. Not whether you betray or preserve but how you play the game. I sometimes even identified it with the
notion of the Great Work, for in the twisting labyrinths of my selves I was beginning to find the rough sketch for a soul.