The illuminatus! trilogy (78 page)

There was a hawk-faced wop at Drake’s table, very elegant in a spanking new tuxedo, but the cop in me
made him as illegit. Sometimes you can make a subject precisely, as bunco-con, safe-blower, armed robber or whatnot, but I could only place him vaguely somewhere on that side of the game; in fact, I associated him with images of piracy on the high seas or the kind of gambits the Borgias played. Somehow the conversation got around to a new book by somebody named Mortimer Adler who had already written a hundred or so great books if I understood the drift. One banker type at the table was terribly keen on this Adler and especially on his latest great book. “He says that we and the Communists share the same Great Tradition” (I could hear the caps by the way he pronounced the term) “and we must join together against the one force that really does threaten civilization—anarchism!”

There were several objections, in which Drake didn’t take part (he just sat back, puffing his cigar and looking agreeable to everyone, but I could see boredom under the surface) and the banker tried to explain the Great Tradition, which was a bit over my head, and, judging by the expressions around the table, a bit over everybody else’s head, too, when the hawk-faced dago spoke up suddenly.

“I can put the Great Tradition in one word,” he said calmly. “Privilege.”

Old Drake suddenly stopped looking agreeable-but-bored—he seemed both interested and amused. “One seldom encounters such a refreshing freedom from euphemism,” he said, leaning forward. “But perhaps I am reading too much into your remark, sir?”

Hawk-face sipped at his champagne and patted his mouth with a napkin before answering. “I think not,” he said at last. “Privilege is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special favors or benefits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster is ‘not subject to the usual rules or penalties.’ The invaluable thesaurus gives such synonyms as power, authority, birthright, franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I’m sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in
this
club, don’t we, gentlemen? Do I have to
remind you of the Latin roots,
privi
, private, and
lege
, law, and point out in detail how we have created our Private Law over here, just as the Politburo have created their own private law in their own sphere of influence?”

“But that’s not the Great Tradition,” the banker type said (later, I learned that he was actually a college professor; Drake was the only banker at that table). “What Mr. Adler means by the Great Tradition—”

“What Mortimer means by the Great Tradition,” hawk-face interrupted rudely, “is a set of myths and fables invented to legitimize or sugar-coat the institution of privilege. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he added more politely but with a sardonic grin.

“He means,” the true believer said, “the undeniable axioms, the time-tested truths, the shared wisdom of the ages, the …”

“The myths and fables,” hawk-face contributed gently.

“The sacred, time-tested wisdom of the ages,” the other went on, becoming redundant. “The basic bedrock of civil society, of civilization. And we do share that with the Communists. And it is just that common humanistic tradition that the young anarchists, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, are blaspheming, denying and trying to destroy. It has nothing to do with privilege at all.”

“Pardon me,” the dark man said. “Are you a college professor?”

“Certainly. I’m head of the Political Science Department at Harvard!”

“Oh,” the dark man shrugged. “I’m sorry for talking so bluntly before you. I thought I was entirely surrounded by men of business and finance.”

The professor was just starting to look as if he spotted the implied insult in that formal apology when Drake interrupted.

“Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all
know in such a manner as to imply a rather hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?”

“Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small establishments in other ports.” As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back strongly. “And we’re not children here,” he added, “so why should we avoid frank language?”

The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake replied:

“So. Civilization is privilege—or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here—out of the barrel of a gun, in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communist rulers than we have setting us at odds?”

“Let me
illuminate
you further,” Celine said—and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump. Drake’s blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn’t surprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thought he was, would
have
to be On the Inside.

“Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage,” Celine went on. “In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function,
a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you
a priori
. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that’s all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us,” he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.

The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. The IRS has a complete tape of it, I’m sure, since I had placed the bug long before the meal.

The next time I saw Robert Putney Drake was a turning point. I was being sent to New York again, on a mission for Naval Intelligence this time, and Winifred gave me a message that had to be delivered to Drake personally; the Order wouldn’t trust any mechanical communication device. Strangely, my CIA drop also gave me a message for Drake, and it was the same message. That didn’t jar me any, since it merely confirmed some of what I had begun to suspect by then.

I went to this office on Wall Street, near the corner of Broad (just about where I’d be toiling at Corporate Law, if my family had had its way) and I told his secretary, “Knigge of Pyramid Productions to see Mr.
Drake.” That was the password that week; Knigge had been a Bavarian baron and second-in-command to Weishaupt in the original AISB. I sat and cooled my heels awhile, studying the decor, which was heavily Elizabethan and made me wonder if Drake had some private notion about being a reincarnation of his famous ancestor.

Finally, Drake’s door opened and who stood there but Atlanta Hope, looking kind of wild-eyed and distraught. Drake had his arm on her shoulder and he said piously, “May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity.” She stumbled past me in a kind of daze and I was ushered into his office. He motioned me to an overstuffed chair and stared at my face until something clicked. “Another Knigge in the woodpile,” he laughed suddenly. “The last time I saw you, you were a Pinkerton detective.” You had to admire a memory like that; it had been a year since the CFR banquet and I hadn’t done anything to attract his attention that night.

“I’m FBI as well as being in the Order,” I said, leaving out a few things.

“You’re more than that,” he said flatly, sitting behind a desk as big as some kids’ playgrounds. “But I have enough on my mind this week without prying into how many sides you’re playing. What’s the message?”

“It comes from the Order and the CIA both,” I said, to be clear and relatively above-board. “This it is:
The Taiwan heroin shipments will not arrive on time. The Laotian opium fields are temporarily in the hands of the Pathet Lao. Don’t believe the Pentagon releases about our troops having the Laotian situation under control
. No answer required.” I started to rise.

“Wait, damn it,” Drake said, frowning. “This is more important than you realize.” His face went blank and I could tell his mind was racing like an engine with governor off; it was impressive. “What’s your rank in the Order?” he asked finally.

“Illuminatus Prelator,” I confessed, humbly.

“Not nearly high enough. But you have more practical
espionage experience than a great many higher members. You’ll have to do.” The old barracuda relaxed, having come to a decision. “How much do you know about the Cult of the Black Mother?” he asked.

“The most militant and most secret Black Power group in the country,” I said carefully. “They avoid publicity instead of seeking it, because their strategy is based on an eventual coup d’etat, not on revolution. Until a minute ago, I thought no white man in the country even knew of their existence, except those of us in the FBI. The Bureau has never reported on them to other government agencies, because we’re ashamed to admit we’ve never been able to keep an informer inside for long. They all die of natural causes, that’s what bugs us.”

“Nobody in the Order has ever told you the truth?” Drake demanded.

“No,” I said, curious. “I thought what I just told you was the truth.”

“Winifred is more closed-mouth than he needs to be,” Drake said. “The Cult of the Black Mother is entirely controlled by the Order. They monitor ghetto affairs for us. Right now, they predict a revival of 1960s-style uprisings for late summer in Harlem, on the West Side of Chicago, and in Detroit. They need to up the addiction rate at least eighteen percent, hopefully twenty or twenty-five percent, in all those areas, or the property damage will be even more enormous than we are prepared to absorb.

“They can’t do it, if they have to cut their present stock even more than it’s already cut. There just has to be more junk in the ghettoes or all hell will break loose by August.”

I began to realize that he had used the word “monitor” in its strict cybernetic meaning.

“There’s only one alternative,” Drake went on. “The black market. There’s a very cunning and well-organized group that’s been trying to crack the CIA-Syndicate heroin monopoly for quite a while now. The Cult of the Black Mother will have to deal with them directly.
I don’t want the Order involved at all—that would make it messy, and besides we’ll have to crush this group later, when we’re able to pierce their cover.”

The upshot of it was that I found myself on One Hundred Tenth Street in Harlem, feeling very white and un-bulletproof, entering a restaurant called The Signifying Monkey. Walking through a lot of hostile stares, I went direct to the coffee-colored woman at the cash register and said, “I’ve got a tombstone disposition.”

She gave me a piercing look and muttered, “Upstairs, after the men’s room, the door marked Private. Knock five times.” She grinned maliciously, “And if you’re not kosher, kiss your white ass good-bye, brother.”

I went up the stairs, found the door, knocked five times, and one eye in an ebony face looked out at me stonily. “White,” he said.

“Man,” I replied.

“Native,” he came back.

“Born,” I finished. A bolt slipped on a chain and the door opened the rest of the way. I never did find out whose idea of a joke that password was—they had lifted it from the Ku Klux Klan, of course. The room I was in was heavy with marijuana smoke, but I could see that it was decently furnished and dominated by an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother; I had visions of weird
Gunga Din
rites and shouts of “Kill for the love of Kali!” There were four other men in the room, in addition to the one who let me in, and two reefers were circulating, one deosil and one widder-shins.

“Who you from?” a voice asked in the murk.

“AISB,” I answered carefully, “And I’m to speak to Hassan i Sabbah X.”

“You’re speaking to him,” said the tallest and blackest character in the bunch, passing me a reefer. I took a quick, deep draw and, Christ, it was good. I’d been half addicted ever since the March on the Pentagon in 1967, where I walked right behind Norman
Mailer part of the way, and later fell in with some hippies who were sitting on the steps smoking it. I say I was half addicted since then, because two of me believe, as a loyal government employee, that the old government publications claiming marijuana is addicting must be true or the government wouldn’t have printed them. Fortunately, the other two of me know that it isn’t addicting, so I don’t go through very bad withdrawal when it’s scarce.

I started to outline the situation to Hassan i Sabbah X but the other joint came around, widdershins, and I took a drag on that. “A man could get stoned doing this,” I said facetiously.