The illuminatus! trilogy (14 page)

“Yes, and a smart-alecky young punk he was. I don’t hold with some of these people who’ve written books about him and said the long sentence he got back then is what made him bitter and turned him bad. He got the long sentence because he was so snotty to the judge. Not a sign of repentence or remorse, just wisecracks and a know-it-all grin spread all over his face. A bad apple from the start. And always hellbent-for-leather. In a hurry to get God knows where. Sometimes folks used to joke that there were two of him, he’d go through town so fast.
Rushing to his own funeral. Young punks like that never get long enough sentences, if you want my opinion. Might slow them down a bit.”

The reporter—what was his name again? James Mallison, hadn’t he said?—was impatient. “Yes, yes, I’m sure we need stricter laws and harsher penalties. But what I want to know was where was Dillinger’s missing tooth— on the right side or the left side of his face?”

“Saints in Heaven! You expect me to remember that cuter all these years?”

The reporter dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief—very nervous he seemed to be. “Look, Sergeant, some psychologists say we never forget anything, really; it’s all stored somewhere inside our brain. Now, just try to picture John Dillinger as you remember him, with that know-it-all grin as you called it. Can you get the picture into focus? Which side is the missing tooth on?”

“Listen, I’m due to go on duty in a few minutes and I can’t be—”

Mallison’s faced changed, as if in desperation which he was trying to conceal. “Well, let me ask you a different question. Are you a Mason?”

“A Mason? Bejesus, no—I’ve been a Catholic all my life, I’ll have you know.”

“Well, did you know any Masons in Mooresville? I mean, to talk to?”

“Why would I be talking to the likes of them, with the terrible things they’re always saying about the church?”

The reporter plunged on, “All the books on Dillinger say that the intended victim of that first robbery, the grocer B. F. Morgan, summoned help by giving the Masonic signal of distress. Do you know what that is?”

“You’d have to ask a Mason, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be telling. The way they keep their secrets, by the saints, I’m sure even the FBI couldn’t find out.”

The reporter finally left, but Sergeant Riley, a methodical man, filed his name in memory: James Mallison—or had he said Joseph Mallison? A strange book he claimed to be writing—about Dillinger’s teeth and the bloody atheistic Freemasons. There was more to this than met the eye, obviously.

LIKE A TREE THAT’S PLANTED BY THE WATER
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED

Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts, is not a well-known campus by any means, and the few scholarly visitors who come there are an odd lot, drawn usually by the strange collection of occult books given to the Miskatonic Library by the late Dr. Henry Armitage. Miss Doris Horus, the librarian, had never seen quite such a strange visitor though, as this Professor J. D. Mallison who claimed to come from Dayton, Ohio, but spoke with an unmistakable New York accent. Considering his furtiveness, she found it no surprise that he spent the whole day (June 26, 1969) pouring over the rare copy of Dr. John Dee’s translation of the
Necronomicon
of Abdul Alhazred. That was the book most of the queer ones went for; that or
The Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage
.

Doris didn’t like the
Necronomicon
, although she considered herself an emancipated and free-thinking young woman. There was something sinister, or to be downright honest about it,
perverted
about that book—and not in a nice, exciting way, but in a sick and frightening way. All those strange illustrations, always with five-sided borders just like the Pentagon in Washington, but with those people inside doing all those freaky sex acts with those other creatures who weren’t people at all. It was frankly Doris’s opinion that old Abdul Alhazred had been smoking some pretty bad grass when he dreamed up those things. Or maybe it was something stronger than grass: she remembered one sentence from the text: “Onlie those who have eaten a certain alkaloid herb, whose name it were wise not to disclose to the unilluminated, maye in the fleshe see a Shoggothe.” I wonder what a “Shoggothe” is, Doris thought idly; probably one of those disgusting creatures that the people in the illustrations are doing those horny things with. Yech.

She was glad when J. D. Mallison finally left and she could return the
Necronomicon
to its position on the closed shelves. She remembered the brief biography of crazy old Abdul Alhazred that Dr. Armitage had written and also given to the library: “Spent seven years in the desert and claimed to have visited Irem, the city forbidden in the
Koran
, which Alhazred asserted was of pre-human origin….” Silly! Who was around to build cities before there were people? Those Shoggothes? “An indifferent
Moslem, he worshipped beings whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.” And that insidious line: “According to contemporary historians, Alhazred’s death was both tragic and bizarre, since it was asserted that he was eaten alive by an invisible monster in the middle of the market-place.” Dr. Armitage had been such a nice old man, Doris remembered, even if his talk about cabalistic numbers and Masonic symbols was a little peculiar at times; why would he collect such
icky
books by
creepy
people?

The Internal Revenue Service knows this much about Robert Putney Drake: during the last fiscal year, he earned $23,000,005 on stocks and bonds in various defense corporations, $17,000,523 from the three banks he controlled, and $5,807,400 from various real-estate holdings. They did not know that he also banked (in Switzerland) over $100,000,000 from prostitution, an equal amount from heroin and gambling, and $2,500,000 from pornography. On the other hand, they didn’t know either about certain legitimate business expenses which he had not cared to claim, including more than $5,000,000 in bribes to various legislators, judges and police officials, in all 50 states in order to maintain the laws which made men’s vices so profitable to him, and $50,000 to Knights of Christianity United in Faith as a last-ditch effort to stave off total legalization of pornography and the collapse of that part of his empire
.

“What the deuce do you make of this?” Barney Muldoon asked. He was holding an amulet in his hand. “Found it in the bedroom,” he explained, holding it for Saul to examine the strange design:

“Part of it is Chinese,” Saul said thoughtfully. “The basic design—two interlocking commas, one pointing up and the other down. It means that opposites are equal.”

“And what does
that
mean?” Muldoon asked sarcastically.
“Opposites are opposite, not equal. You’d have to be a Chinaman to think otherwise.”

Saul ignored the comment. “But the pentagon isn’t in the Chinese design—and neither is the apple with the
K
in it….” Suddenly, he grinned. “Wait, I’ll bet I know what that is. It’s from Greek mythology. There was a banquet on Olympus, and Eris wasn’t invited, because she was the Goddess of Discord and always made trouble. So, to get even, she made
more
trouble: she created a beautiful golden apple and wrote on it
Kallisti
. That means ‘for the prettiest one’ in Greek. It’s what the
K
stands for, obviously. Then she rolled it into the banquet hall, and, naturally, all the goddesses there immediately claimed it, each one saying that
she
was ‘the prettiest one.’ Finally, old man Zeus himself, to settle the squabble, allowed Paris to decide which goddess was the prettiest and should get the apple. He chose Aphrodite, and as a reward she gave him an opportunity to kidnap Helen, which led to the Trojan War.”

“Very interesting,” Muldoon said. “And does that tell us what Joseph Malik knew about the assassinations of the Kennedys and this Illuminati bunch and why his office was blown up? Or where he’s disappeared to?”

“Well, no,” Saul said, “but it’s nice to find something in this case that I can recognize. I just wish I knew what the pentagon means, too….”

“Let’s look at the rest of the memos,” Muldoon suggested.

The next memo, however, stopped them cold:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9

7/28 J.M.:

The following chart appeared in the
East Village Other
, June 11, 1969, with the label “Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives”:

The chart hangs at the top of the page, the rest of which is empty space—as if the editors originally intended to publish an article explaining it, but decided (or were persuaded) to suppress all but the diagram itself.

Pat

“This one has to be some damned hippie or yippie hoax,” Muldoon said after a long pause. But he sounded uncertain.

“Part
of it is,” Saul said thoughtfully keeping certain thoughts to himself. “Typical hippie psychology: mixing truth and fantasy to blow the fuses of the Establishment. The Elders of Zion section is just a parody of Nazi ideology. If there really was a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, my rabbi would have let me in on it by now. I contribute enough to the
schule.”

“My brother’s a Jesuit,” Muldoon added, pointing at the Society of Jesus square, “and he never invited me into any worldwide conspiracy.”

“But this part is almost plausible,” Saul said, pointing to the Sphere of Aftermath. “Aga Khan
is
the head of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, and that sect was founded by Hassan i Sabbah, the ‘old man of the mountains’ who led the Hashishim in the eleventh century. Adam Weishaupt is supposed to have originated the Bavarian Illuminati
after studying Sabbah, according to the third memo, so this part fits together—and Hassan i Sabbah is supposed to be the first one to introduce marijuana and hashish to the Western world, from India. That ties in with Weishaupt’s growing hemp and Washington’s having a big hemp crop at Mount Vernon.”

“Wait a minute. Look at how the whole design revolves around the pentagon. Everything else sort of grows out of it.”

“So? You think the Defense Department is the international hub of the Illuminati conspiracy?”

“Let’s just read the rest of the memos,” Muldoon suggested.

(The Indian Agent at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin knows this: from the time Billie Freschette returned there until her death in 1968, she received mysterious monthly checks from Switzerland. He thinks he knows the explanation; despite all stories to the contrary, Billie
did
help to betray Dillinger and this is the payoff. He is convinced of this. He is also quite wrong.)

“ … children seven and eight years old,” Smiling Jim Trepomena is telling the KCUF audience, “are talking about penises and vaginas—
and using those very words!
Now, is this an accident? Let me quote you Lenin’s own words….” Simon yawns.

Banana-Nose Maldonado evidently had his own brand of sentimentality or superstition, and in 1936 he ordered his son, a priest, to say one hundred masses for the salvation of the Dutchman’s soul. Even years afterward, he would defend the Dutchman in conversation: “He was OK, Dutch was, if you didn’t cross him. If you did, forget it; you were finished. He was almost a Siciliano about that. Otherwise, he was a good businessman, and the first one with a real CPA mind in the whole organization. If he hadn’t gotten that crazy-head idea about gunning down Tom Dewey, he’d still be a big man. I told him myself. ‘You kill Dewey,’ I said, ‘and the shit hits the fan everywhere. The boys won’t take the risk; Lucky and the Butcher want to cowboy you right now.’ But he wouldn’t listen. ‘Nobody fucks with me,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if his name is Dewey, Looey, or Phooey. He
dies.’
A real stubborn German Jew. You couldn’t talk to him. I even told him how Capone helped set up Dillinger for the Feds just because of the heat those bank-heists were bringing down.
You know what he said? He said: ‘You tell Al that Dillinger was a lone wolf. I have my own pack.’ Too bad, too bad, too bad. I’ll light another candle for him at church Sunday.”

HAND IN HAND TOGETHER
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED