The illuminatus! trilogy (16 page)

Pat

Scrawled on the bottom of this memo was a series of jottings in the same masculine hand (Malik’s, Saul guessed) that had jotted the baboon reference on memo 12. The jottings said:

Check on Order of DeMolay

TARO = TORA = TROA = ATOR = ROTA !?????

Abdul Alhazred =
??!

“Oh, Christ,” Barney groaned. “Oh, Mary and Joseph. Oh, shit. We’ll end up either become mystics or going crazy before this case is over. If there’s any difference.”

“The Order of DeMolay is a Masonic society for boys,” Saul commented helpfully. “I don’t know what the Atus of Tahuti are, but that sounds Egyptian. Taro, usually spelled t-a-r-o-t, is the deck of cards Gypsy fortune tellers use—and the word ‘Gypsy’ means Egyptian. Tora is the Law, in Hebrew. We keep coming back to something that has roots in both Jewish mysticism and Egyptian magic….”

“The Knights Templar were kicked out of the church,” Barney said, “for trying to combine Christian and Moslem ideas. Last year, my brother—the Jesuit—gave a lecture about how modern ideas are just old heresies from the Middle Ages warmed over. I had to go for politeness’ sake. I remember something else he said about the Templars. They were engaged in what he called ‘unnatural sex acts.’ In other words, they were faggots. Do you get the impression that all these groups related to the Illuminati are all male? Maybe the big secret they’re hiding so fanatically
is that they’re all some vast worldwide homosexual plot. I’ve heard show-biz people complain about what they call the ‘homintern,’ a homo organization that tries to keep all the best jobs for other fruits. How does that sound?”

“It sounds plausible,” Saul said ironically. “But it also sounds plausible to say the Illuminati is a Jewish conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a communist conspiracy, a banker’s conspiracy, and I suppose we’ll eventually find evidence to suggest it’s an interplanetary scheme masterminded from Mars or Venus. Don’t you see, Barney? Whatever they’re really up to, they keep creating masks so all sorts of scapegoat groups will get the blame for being the ‘real’ Illuminati.” He shook his head dismally. “They’re smart enough to know they can’t operate indefinitely without a few people eventually realizing something’s there, so they’ve taken that into account and arranged for an inquisitive outsider to get all sorts of wrong ideas about who they are.”

“They’re dogs,” Muldoon said. “Intelligent talking dogs from the dog star, Sirius. They came here and ate Malik. Just like they ate that guy in Kansas City, except that time they didn’t get to finish the job.” He turned back and read from memo 8: “‘… with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.’” He grinned. “Lord God, I’m almost ready to believe it.”

“They’re werewolves.” Saul answered, grinning also. “The pentagon is the symbol of the werewolf. Look at the Late Late Show some time.”

“That’s the pentagram, not the
pentagon.”
Barney lit a cigarette, adding. “This is really getting on our nerves, isn’t it?”

Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent owner “Joseph Malik,” he said aloud, “what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does it go?”

WE SHALL NOT

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED

In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on
the night of August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the Democratic party.

He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking, bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New Deal.

Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the
other
side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago’s heroic peace officers.

“They’re coming,” a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began singing, “We shall not be moved.”

“We’ll be moved, all right,” a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. “When the teargas hits, we’ll be moved.” Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing his body in front of Chicago’s police, for reasons Joe could not understand.

How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something—Roman Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, “Vital Center”) and now, with that dead, he was trying desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-astrology-obsessed Yippies, Black Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.

Allen Ginsberg—sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right—began chanting again, as he had all evening: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare….” Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything—in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound’s idealistic variety of fascist economics, in
Buckminster Fuller’s technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence’s return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.

The natural goodness of man … Joe hadn’t fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.

“KILL! KILL! KILL!” came the chant of the police—exactly like the night before, the same neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs in hand, spraying the teargas before them, “kill! kill! kill!”

Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.

Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces. Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral brutes win the real victories.

“All hail Discordia,” said a voice among the clergymen—a bearded young man named Simon, who had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.

And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.

(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the beginning of big-time money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young fellow—Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same time—but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the sudden barking of a dog, and took
aim—just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.

“Jesus Motherfuckin’ Christ,” he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository window. Great God Almighty, how the
fuck
many of us are there here?” he cried out, scampering to his feet and starting to run.)

It was almost a year after being clubbed—June 22, 1969—that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear the mysterious phrase “All hail Discordia” again.

The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again—and it would have been equally bloody if the PL boys had their own police force to “deal with” the dissenters known then as RYM-I and RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt, attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.

Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists—Parsons and Spies of Chicago’s Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly’s own poet-laureate, Joe Hill—had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn’t really committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government—a proposition so evidently absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now, however, eating the maggotty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiousity. After all, the words of his favorite fictional hero, “When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”

The anarchists, Joe found, were not going to quit SDS—“We’ll stay in and do some righteous ass-kicking,” one of them said, to the applause and cheers of the others.
Beyond that, however, they seemed to be in a welter of ideological disagreement. Gradually, he began to identify the conflicting positions expressed: the individualist-anarchists, who sounded like right-wing Republicans (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-syndicalists and Wobblies, who sounded like Marxists (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-pacifists, who sounded like Gandhi and Martin Luther King (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); and a group who were dubbed, rather affectionately, “the Crazies”—whose position was utterly unintelligible. Simon was among the Crazies.

In a speech that Joe followed only with difficulty, Simon declared that “cultural revolution” was more important than political revolution; that Bugs Bunny should be adopted as the symbol of anarchists everywhere; that Hoffman’s discovery of LSD in 1943 was a manifestation of direct intervention by God in human affairs; that the nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most “transcendentally lucid” political act of the twentieth century; and that “mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking, on every street-corner” was the most practical next step in liberating the world from tyranny. He also urged deep study of the tarot, “to fight the real enemy with their own weapons,” whatever that meant. He was launching into a peroration about the mystic significance of the number 23— pointing out that 2 plus 3 equals 5, the pentad within which the Devil can be invoked “as for example in a pentacle or at the Pentagon building in Washington,” while 2 divided by 3 equals 0.666, “the Number of The Beast, according to that freaked-out Revelation of Saint John the Mushroom-head,” that 23 itself was present esoterically “because of its conspicuous exoteric absence” in the number series represented by the Wobbly Hall address, which was 2422 North Halsted—and that the dates of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22 and 24, also had a conspicuous 23 absent in between them—when he finally was shouted down, the conversation returned to a more mundane level.