The illuminatus! trilogy (46 page)

Believe not one word that is written in
The Honest Book of Truth
by Lord Omar nor any that be in
Principia Discordia
by Malaclypse the Younger; for all that is there contained are the most pernicious and deceptive truths.

—“Epistle to the Episkopi,”
The Dishonest
     
Book of Lies
, by Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.

April 25 began, for John Dillinger, with a quick skimming of the
New York Times;
he noticed more fnords than usual. “The fit’s about to hit the shan,” he thought grimly, turning on the eight o’clock news—only to catch the story about the Drake Mansion, another bad sign. In Las Vegas, in rooms where the light never changed, none of the gamblers noticed that it was now morning; but Carmel, returning from the desert, where he had buried Sherri Brandi, drove out of his way to look over Dr. Charles Mocenigo’s home, hoping to see or hear something helpful; he heard only a revolver shot, and quickly sped away. Looking back, he saw flames leaping toward the sky. And, over the mid-Atlantic, R. Buckminster Fuller glanced at his three watches, noting that it was two in the morning on the plane, midnight at his destination (Nairobi) and 6 a.m. back home in Carbondale, Illinois. (In Nairobi itself, Nkrumah Fubar, maker of voodoo dolls that caused headaches to the President of the United States, prepared for bed, looking forward to Mr. Fuller’s lecture at the university next morning. Mr. Fubar, in his sophisticated-primitive way, like Simon Moon in his
primitive-sophisticated way, saw no conflict between magic and mathematics.)

In Washington, D.C., the clocks were striking five when Ben Volpe’s stolen Volkswagen pulled up in front of the home of Senator Edward Coke Bacon, the nation’s most distinguished liberal and leading hope of all those young people who hadn’t yet joined Morituri groups. “In quick and out quick,” Ben Volpe said tersely to his companions, “a
cowboy.”
Senator Bacon turned in his bed (Albert “the Teacher” Stern fires directly at the Dutchman) and mumbled, “Newark.” Beside him, his wife half woke and heard a noise in the garden
(Mama mama mama
, the Dutchman mumbles): “Mama,” she hears her son’s voice saying, as she sinks back toward a dream. The rain of bullets jolts her awake into a sea of blood and in one flash she sees her husband dying beside her, her son twenty years ago weeping for a dead turtle, the face of Mendy Weiss, and Ben Volpe and two others backing out of the room.

But, in 1936, when Robert Putney Drake returned from Europe to accept a vice presidency in his father’s bank in Boston, the police already knew that Albert the Teacher really hadn’t shot the Dutchman
. There were even a few, such as Elliot Ness, who knew the orders had come from Mr. Lucky Luciano and Mr. Alphonse “Scarface” Capone (residing in Atlanta Penitentiary) and had been transmitted through Federico Maldonado. Nobody, outside the Syndicate itself, however, could name Jimmy the Shrew, Charley the Bug and Mendy Weiss as the actual killers—nobody except Robert Putney Drake.

On April 1, 1936, Federico Maldonado’s phone rang and, when he answered it, a cultivated Boston voice said conversationally, “Mother is the best bet. Don’t let Satan draw you too fast.” This was followed by an immediate click as the caller hung up.

Maldonado thought about it all day and finally mentioned it to a very close friend that evening. “Some nut
calls me up today and gives me part of what the Dutchman told the cops before he died. Funny thing about it—he gives one of the parts that would really sink us all, if anybody in the police or the Feds could understand it.”

“That’s the way some nuts are,” pronounced the other Mafioso don, an elegant elderly gentleman resembling one of Frederick II’s falcons. “They’re tuned in like gypsies. Telepathy, you know? But they get it all scrambled because they’re nuts.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” Maldonado agreed. He had a crazy uncle who would sometimes blurt out a Brotherhood secret that he couldn’t possibly know, in the middle of ramblings about priests making it with altar boys and Mussolini hiding on the fire escape and nonsense like that. “They tune in—like the Eye, eh?” And he laughed.

But the next morning, the phone rang again, and the same voice said with elaborate New England intonation, “Those dirty rats have tuned in. French Canadian bean soup.” Maldonado broke into a cold sweat; it was that moment, in fact, when he decided his son, the priest, would say a mass for the Dutchman every Sunday.

He thought about it all day. Boston—the accent was Boston. They had witches up there once. French Canadian bean soup. Christ, Harvard is just outside Boston and Hoover is recruiting Feds from the Harvard Law School. Were there lawyers who were witches, too? Cowboy the son of a bitch, I told them, and they found him in the men’s crapper. That damned Dutchman. A bullet in his gut and he lives long enough to blab everything about the
Segreto
. The goddam
tedeschi
…

Robert Putney Drake dined on lobster Newburg that evening with a young lady from one of the lesser-known branches of the House of Morgan. Afterward, he took her to see
Tobacco Road
and, in the cab back to his hotel, they talked seriously about the sufferings of the poor and the power of Henry Hull’s performance
as Jeeter. Then he took her up to his room and fucked her from hell to breakfast. At ten in the morning, after she had left, he came out of the shower, stark naked, thirty-three years old, rich, handsome, feeling like a healthy and happy predatory mammal. He looked down at his penis, thought of snakes in mescaline visions back in Zurich and donned a bathrobe which cost enough to feed one of the starving families in the nearby slums for about six months. He lit a fat Cuban cigar and sat down by the phone, a male mammal, predatory, happy. He began to dial, listening to the clicks, the dot and the dot and the dot-dot, remembering the perfume his mother had worn leaning over his crib one night thirty-two years ago, the smell of her breasts, and the time he experimentally tried homosexuality in Boston Common with the pale faggot kneeling before him in the toilet stall and the smell of urine and Lysol disinfectant, the scrawl on the door saying eleanor roosevelt sucks and his instant fantasy that it wasn’t a faggot genuflecting in church before his hot hard prick but the President’s wife … “Yes?” said the taut, angry voice of Banana Nose Maldonado.

“When I reached the can, the boy came at me,” Drake drawled, his mild erection becoming warm and rubbery. “What happened to the other sixteen?” He hung up quickly. (“The analysis is brilliant,” Professor Tochus at Harvard had said of his paper on the last words of Dutch Schultz. “I particularly like the way you’ve combined both Freud and Adler in finding sexuality and power drives expressed in the same image at certain places. That is quite original.” Drake laughed and said: “The Marquis de Sade anticipated me by a century and a half, I fear. Power—and possession—
are
sexual, to some males.”)

Drake’s brilliance had also been noted by Jung’s circle in Zurich. Once—when Drake was off taking mescaline with Paul Klee and friends on what they called their Journey to the East—Drake had been a topic of long and puzzled conversation in Jung’s study. “We haven’t seen his like since Joyce was here” one woman
psychiatrist commented. “He is brilliant, yes,” Jung said sadly, “but evil. So evil that I despair of comprehending him. I even wonder what old Freud would think. This man doesn’t want to murder his father and possess his mother; he wants to murder God and possess the cosmos.”

Maldonado got two phone calls the third morning. The first was from Louis Lepke, and was crudely vehement: “What’s up, Banana Nose?” The insult of using the forbidden nickname in personal conversation was deliberate and almost unforgivable, but Maldonado forgave it.

“You spotted my boys following you, eh?” he asked genially.

“I spotted your
soldiers,”
Lepke emphasized the word, “and that means you wanted me to spot them. What’s up? You know if I get hit, you get hit.”

“You won’t get hit,
caro mio,”
Don Federico replied, still cordial. “I had a crazy idea about something I thought might be coming from inside and you’re the only one who would know enough to do it, I thought. I was wrong. I can tell by your voice. And if I was right, you wouldn’t have called me. A million apologies. Nobody will be following you anymore. Except maybe Tom Dewey’s investigators, eh?” he laughed.

“Okay,” Lepke said slowly, “Call them off, and I’ll forget it. But don’t try to scare me again. I do crazy things when I’m scared.”

“Never again,” Maldonado promised.

He sat frowning at the phone, after Lepke hung up.
Now I owe him
, he thought.
I’ll have to arrange to bump off somebody who’s annoying him, to show the proper and most courteous apology
.

But, Virgin Mother, if it isn’t the Butcher, who is it? A real witch?

The phone rang again. Crossing himself and calling on the Virgin silently, Maldonado lifted the receiver.

“Let him harness himself to you and then bother you,” Robert Putney Drake quoted pleasantly, “fun is fun.” He did not hang up.

“Listen,” Don Federico said, “who is this?”

“Dutch died three times,” Drake said in a sepulchral tone. “When Mendy Weiss shot him, when Vince Coil’s ghost shot him and when that dumb junkie, the Teacher, shot him. But Dillinger never even died once.”

“Mister, you got a deal,” Maldonado said. “I’m sold.
I’ll meet you anywhere
. In
broad daylight
. In Central Park.
Any place
you’ll feel safe.”

“No, you will not meet me just now,” Drake said coolly. “You are going to discuss this with Mr. Lepke and Mr. Capone, first. You will also discuss it with—” he read, off a card in his hand, fifteen names. “Then, after you have all had time to consider it, you will be hearing from me.” Drake farted, as he always did in the nervous moments when an important deal was being arranged, and hung up quickly.

Now
, he said to himself,
insurance
.

A photostat of his second analysis of the last words of Dutch Schultz—the private one, not the public version which he had turned in to the Department of Psychology at Harvard—was on the hotel desk before him. He folded it smartly and pinned on top of it a note saying, “There are five copies in the vaults of five different banks.” He then inserted it in an envelope, addressed it to Luciano and strolled out to drop it down the hotel mail chute.

Returning to his room he dialed Louis Lepke, born Louis Buchalter, of the organization later to be named Murder Inc. by the sensational press. When Lepke answered, Drake recited solemnly, still quoting the Dutchman, “I get a month. They did it. Come on, Illuminati.”