The illuminatus! trilogy (98 page)

“The wheel of the Tarot is the wheel of Dharma,” Mama Sutra said softly when he had concluded. “It is also the wheel of the galaxy, which you see as a blind machine. It rolls on, as you say, no matter what we think or do. Knowing that, I accept Death as part of the wheel, and I accept your nonacceptance as another part. I can control neither. I can only repeat my warning, which is not a lie but a fact about the structure of the Wheel: By denying death, you guarantee that you will meet him finally in his most hideous form.”

Drake finished his coffee and smiled whimsically. “You know,” he said, “my contempt for lies has an element of the very sentimentality and foolish idealism that I have been rejecting. Perhaps I will be most effective if I never speak so honestly again. When you hear of me next, I might be known as a philanthropist and benefactor of mankind.” He lit a cigar thoughtfully. “And that would even be true if your Tarot mysticism is correct after all. If Death is necessary to the Wheel, along with all the other parts, then I am necessary also. The Wheel would collapse, perhaps, if my spirit of rebellion were not there to balance your spirit of acceptance. Imagine that.”

“It is true. That is why I have warned you but not judged you.”

“So I am, as Goethe says, ‘part of that force which aims at evil and only achieves good’?”

“That is a thought which you should try to remember when the Dark Night of Sammael descends upon you at the end.”

“More cant,” Drake said, with a return to his previous cynicism. “I aim at evil and I will achieve evil. The Wheel and all its harmonious balances and all-healing paradoxes is just another myth of the weak and defeated. One strong man can stop the Wheel or tear it to shreds if he dares enough.”

“Perhaps. We who study the Wheel do not know all of its secrets. Some believe that your spirit reappears constantly in history, because it is fated, eventually, to triumph. Maybe this is the last century of terrestrial mortals, and the next century will be the time of the cosmic immortals. What will happen then, when the Wheel is stopped, none of us can predict. It may be ‘good’ or ‘evil’ or even—to quote your favorite philosopher—beyond good and evil. We cannot say. That is another reason I do not judge you.”

“Listen,” Drake said with sudden emotion. “We’re both lying. It’s not all this philosophical or cosmic. The simple fact is that I couldn’t sleep nights, and nothing I tried in conventional ‘cures’ could help me, until I began to help myself by systematically rebelling against everything that seemed stronger than me.”

“I know. I didn’t know it was insomnia. It might have been nightmares or dizzy spells or sexual impotence. But there was some way that the scenes you saw in Chateau-Thierry lived on and goaded you to wake out of the dream of the sleepwalkers on the streets. You are waking: You stand on the abyss.” She pointed to the Fool and the dog who barks at his heels. “And I am the noisy little bitch barking to warn you that you can still choose the right-hand path. The decision is not final until you cross the abyss.”

“But the cards show that I really have very little choice. Especially in the world that is going to emerge from this depression.”

Mama Sutra smiled without forgiveness or final condemnation. “This is no age for saints,” she agreed softly. “Two dollars please.”

George, don’t make no bull moves
. The Dutchman saw it all clearly now. Capone and Luciano and Maldonado and Lepke and all the rest of them were afraid of Winifred and the Washington crowd. They were planning a deal, and his death was part of the bargain. The fools didn’t know that you can never negotiate from fear. They thought of the Order
only as a handy gimmick for international communications and illicit trade; they were too dumb to really study the Teachings. Especially, they had never understood the third Teaching:
Fear is Failure
. Once you’re afraid of the bulls, you’re lost. But the bull was gone. “What have you done with him?” he shouted at the hospital wall.

(Smiling Jim had seen the eagle only the day before. Its nest was definitely on one of these peaks. He would get it: He knew it in his bones, a hunch so strong it couldn’t be doubted. Panting, sweating, every muscle aching, he climbed onward…The coffee leaped out of the paper cup and slurped onto the pages of
Carnal Orgy
. Igor Beaver, the graduate student, looked up in astonishment: The seismograph stood at grade 5. A mile away, Dillinger woke as the bedroom door slammed shut and his favorite statue, King Kong atop the Empire State Building, fell off the bureau.)

NO REMISSION, NO REMISSION, NO REMISSION WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD. NO REMISSION WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD
.

Mama Sutra looked down through the window at Boston Common. Robert Putney Drake had stopped, and was listening to one of the preachers again; even at this distance she could recognize the cool, closed smile on his face.

The Dealy Lama sat down across from her. “Well?” he asked.

“Definitely. The Order will have to intervene.” Mama shook her head sadly. “He’s a menace to the whole world.”

“Slowness is beauty,” the Dealy Lama said. “Let the Lower Order contact him first. If they decide he’s worth the effort, then we’ll act. I think I shall persuade Hagbard to attend Harvard, so he can be in his neighborhood and keep an eye on him, so to speak.”

IT’S THE WORD OF THE BIBLE AND THE WORD OF GOD AND IT SAYS IT PLAIN AND CLEAR SO NO HIGHBROW PROFESSOR CAN SAY IT MEANS SOMETHING ELSE
.

“How old are you actually?” Mama asked curiously.

The Dealy Lama looked at her levelly. “Would you believe thirty thousand years?”

She laughed. “I should have known better than to ask. You can always tell the higher members by their sense of humor.”

AND THIS IS WHAT IT SAYS: NO REMISSION, NO REMISSION,
BROTHERS AND SISTERS, NO REMISSION WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD, WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD. NO REMISSION. NO REMISSION WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD
.

Hagbard’s mouth fell open in completely genuine surprise. “Well,
sink
me,” he said, beginning to laugh.

Behind him on a wall, Joe noticed dizzily, was a brand-new graffito, probably scrawled by somebody out of his skull on the acid:
THE PIGEONS IN B. F. SKINNER’S CAGES ARE POLITICAL PRISONERS
.

“We both pass,” Hagbard went on happily. “We’ve been judged and found innocent by the great god Acid.”

Joe took a deep breath. “And when do you start to explain in monosyllables or sign language or semaphore or something a non-Illuminated moron like me can understand?”

“You read all the clues. It was right out in the open. It was plain as a barn door. It was as conspicuous as my nose and twice as homely—in every sense of that word.”

“Hagbard, for Christ’s sake and for my sake and for all our sakes, will you stop gloating and give me the answer?”

“I’m sorry.” Hagbard pocketed the gun carelessly. “I’m a bit giddy. I’ve been waging a kind of war all night, high on acid. It was a strain, especially since I was at least ninety percent sure you’d kill me before it was over.” He lit one of his abominable cigars. “Briefly, then, the Illuminati is benevolent, compassionate, kindly, generous, et cetera, et cetera. Add all the other complimentary adjectives you can think of. In short, we’re the good guys.”

“But—but—it can’t be.”

“It can be and it is.” Hagbard motioned him toward the Bugatti. “Let’s Sit Down, if I may permit myself one more acrostic before the codes and puzzles are all resolved.” They climbed into the front seat, and Joe accepted the brandy decanter Hagbard offered. “Of course,” Hagbard went on, “when I say ‘good,’ you’ve got to understand that all terms are relative. We’re as good as is possible in this fucked-up section of the galaxy. We’re not perfect Certainly, I’m not, and I haven’t observed anything approaching immaculate perfection in any of the other Masters of the Temple either. But we are, in human terms and by ordinary standards, decent chaps. There’s a reason for that. It’s the basic law of magic, and it’s in every textbook. You must have read it somewhere. Do you know what I mean?”

Joe took a stiff snort of the brandy. It was peach—his favorite. “Yes, I think. ‘As ye give, so shall ye get.’”

“Precisely.” Hagbard took back the bottle and had a snort himself. “Mind you, Joe, that’s a scientific law, not a moral commandment. There are no commandments, because there is no commander anywhere. All authority is a delusion, whether in theology or in sociology. Everything is radically, even sickeningly, free. The first law of magic is as neutral as Newton’s first law of motion. It says that the equation balances, and that’s all it says. You are still free to give evil and pain, if you decide you must. Once done, however, you never escape the consequences. It always comes back. No prayers, sacrifices, mortifications, or supplications will change it, any more than they’ll change Newton’s laws or Einstein’s. So we’re ‘good,’ as moralists would say, because we know enough to have a bloody strong reason to be good. In the last week things went too fast, and I became ‘evil’—I deliberately ordered and paid for the deaths of various people, and set in motion processes that had to lead to still other deaths. I knew what I was doing, and I knew—and still know—that I’ll pay for it. Such decisions are extremely rare in the history of the Order, and my superior, the Dealy Lama, tried to persuade me it was unnecessary this time too. I disagreed; I take the responsibility. No man or god or goddess can change it. I will pay, and I’m ready to pay, whenever and however the bill is presented.”

“Hagbard,
what are you?”

“A
mehum
, the Saure family would say,” Hagbard grinned. “A mere human. No more. Not one jot more.”

“How much blood?” Robert Putney Drake asked. He was astonished at his own words; in all his experiments at breaking through the walls, he had never lowered himself to heckling an ignorant street preacher.

ALL THE BLOOD IN THE WORLD ISN’T ENOUGH. EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD ISN’T ENOUGH. EVEN ALL THE ANIMALS IF YOU ADDED THEM IN LINE IN SOME PAGAN OR VOODOO SACRIFICE. IT WOULDN’T BE ENOUGH. IT WOULDN’T BE ENOUGH, BROTHERS. THE GOOD BOOK SAYS SO
.

“There were five of us,” John-John Dillinger was explaining to George as they trudged back toward Ingolstadt, having lost Hagbard and the Bugatti in the crowd. “My folks kept it a secret. German people, very superstitious
and secretive. They didn’t want reporters all over the place and headlines about the first quintuplets to live. The Dionne family got all that, much later.”

BECAUSE ALL THE BLOOD IN THE WORLD ISN’T EQUAL TO ONE DROP. NOT ONE DROP

“John Herbert Dillinger is in Las Vegas, trying to track down the plague—unless he already finished up and went home to Los Angeles.” John-John smiled. “He was always the brains of the bunch. Runs a rock-music company, real professional businessman. He was the oldest, by a couple of minutes, and we all sort of look up to him. He served the prison time, even though I’m the one who rightly should have, seeing that robbing that grocer was my dumb idea. But he said he could take it without cracking up, and he was right.”

NOT ONE DROP, NOT ONE DROP, OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, JESUS CHRIST
.

“I see,” Drake said. “And was that A, B, AB, or O?”

“John Hoover Dillinger lives in Mad Dog, under the name D. J. Hoover—he’s not above letting people suspect he’s a distant relative of J. Edgar’s. Mostly,” John-John said, “he’s retired. Except occasionally for little jobs like helping arrange convincing jail breaks, say, when Jim Cartwright wants to let a prisoner get out in a realistic fashion. He gave Naismith the idea for the John Dillinger Died for You Society.”

“How about the other two?” George asked, thinking that it would be even harder to decide whether he loved Stella more than Mavis or Mavis more than Stella now that he knew they were the same person. He wondered how Joe felt, since he obviously dug Miss Mao Tsu-hsi and she was that person also. Three in one and one in three. Like Dillinger. Or was Dillinger five in three? George realized suddenly that he was still tripping a little. Dillinger was five in one, not five in three: the law of Fives again. Did that mean there were two more in the Mavis-Stella-Mao complex, two that he hadn’t met yet? Why did two and three keep popping up in all this?

“The other two are dead,” John-John said sadly. “John Edgar Dillinger was born first, and he went and died first. Fast and furious, he was. It was him that plugged that bank guard in East Chicago while the rest of us were vacationing and laying low in Miami. Always the hothead, he was. Had
a heart attack back in ’43 and went to an early grave. John Thomas Dillinger went in ’69. He was in Chicago in ’68 on a JAM assignment, meeting with a crazy English spy named Chips. British Intelligence somehow got a report that the Democratic Convention was being run by the Bavarian Illuminati and would end with an assassination. They didn’t believe in the Illuminati so they sent Chips; they always send him on wild cases, ‘cause he’s nutty enough to take them seriously and do a thorough job. Both of them got tear-gassed coming out of the Hilton Hotel, and poor Chips got thrown in a paddy-wagon with a bunch of young radicals. John Thomas had a chest problem already, a chronic asthma, and the tear gas made it a lot worse. He went from doctor to doctor, and finally passed away early in ’69. So there’s a cop in Chicago who could boast that he really killed John Dillinger, only he doesn’t know it. Isn’t life peculiar?”

“The Saure family only
thought
they were in the Illuminati,” Hagbard went on. “Hitler and Stalin only
thought
they were in the Illuminati. Old Weishaupt only
thought
he was in the Illuminati. It’s that simple. The moral of the whole story is: Beware of cheap Occidental imitations.” He smiled grimly.

“I think it’s beginning to penetrate,” Joe said slowly. “It was, of course, the very first hypothesis I formed: There have been many groups in history who called themselves the Illuminati, and they weren’t all aiming at exactly the same thing.”

“Precisely.” Hagbard puffed again at his cigar. “That’s the natural first suspicion of any non-paranoid mind. Then, as you explore the evidence, links between these groups begin to appear. Eventually the paranoid hypothesis begins to appear more plausible and you begin to believe there always has been one Illuminati, using the same basic slogans and symbols and aiming at the same basic goal. I sent Jim Cartwright to you with that yarn about three conspiracies —the ABC or Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy, the NBC or New Bavarian Conspiracy, and the CBS or Conservative Bavarian Seers—to set you thinking that the truth might be midway backward toward the simple first idea. From here on in, forget that I represent the original Illuminati. In fact, in recent centuries we don’t use a name at all. We employ
only the initials A.A., written like this.” He sketched on a Donau-Hotel matchbook: