The illuminatus! trilogy (48 page)

It was a famous novelist, who was later to win the Nobel Prize, who actually gave Drake his first lead on what the Mafia always called
il Segreto
. They had been talking about Joyce and his unfortunate daughter, and the novelist mentioned Joyce’s attempts to convince himself that she wasn’t really schizophrenic. “He told Jung, ‘After all, I do the same sorts of things with language myself.’ Do you know what Jung, that old Chinese sage disguised as a psychiatrist, answered? ‘You are diving, but she is sinking.’ Incisive, of course; and yet, all of us who write anything that goes below the surface of naturalism can understand Joyce’s skepticism. We never know for sure whether we’re diving or just sinking.”

That reminded Drake of his thesis, and he went and got the last words of Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer, a.k.a. Dutch Schultz, from his bureau. He handed the sheets to the novelist and asked, “Would you say the author of this was diving or sinking?”

The novelist read slowly, with increasing absorption, and finally looked up to regard Drake with extremely curious eyes. “Is it a translation from the French?” he asked.

“No,” Drake said. “The author was an American.”

“So it’s not poor Artaud. I thought it might be. He’s been around the bend, as the English say, since he went to Mexico. I understand he’s currently working on some quite remarkable astrological charts involving Chancellor Hitler.” The novelist lapsed into silence, and then asked, “What do you regard as the most interesting line in this?”

“‘A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim,’” Drake quoted, since that was the line that bothered him most.

“Oh, that boy imagery is all personal, just repressed
homosexuality, quite ordinary,” the novelist said impatiently. “‘I was in the can and the boy came at me.’ I think the author hurt the boy in some way. All the references are tinged with more than normal homosexual guilt.”

My God
, Drake thought,
Vince Coll. He was young enough to seem like a boy to Schultz — The Dutchman thought Coil’s ghost was shooting at him in that John in Newark
.

“I would imagine the author killed himself, or is in a mental hospital by now,” the novelist went on thoughtfully.

“He’s dead,” Drake said grudgingly. “But I won’t give you any more clues. It’s fascinating to see how well you’re doing on your own.”

“This is the interesting line,” the novelist said. “Or three lines rather. ‘I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain’t the payoff. Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander.’ You swear this author was American?”

“Well, he came of German ancestry,” Drake said, thinking of Jung’s theory of genetic memory. “But Chancellor Hitler would hate to admit it. His people were not Aryan.”

“He was Jewish?” the novelist exclaimed.

“What’s so surprising about that?”

“Only that scarcely two or three people in the whole world, outside the inner circle of the Nazi Party, would understand what was meant by the Chinaman and Hitler’s commander. This author must have delved very deeply into occult literature—things like Eliphas Levi, or Ludvig Prinn, or some of the most closely guarded Rosicrucian secrets, and then made a perfectly amazing guess in the right direction.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

The novelist looked at Drake for a long time, then said, “I hate to even discuss it. Some things are too vile. Some books, as your Mr. Poe said, should not allow themselves to be read. Even I have coded things in
my most famous work, which is admired for all the wrong reasons. In my search for the mystical, I have learned things I would rather forget, and the real goal of Herr Hitler is one of those things. But you must tell me: who was this remarkable author?”

(“He just called me,” Luciano told Maldonado, “and I got this much at least: he’s not a shakedown artist. He’s aiming big, and he’s big already himself. I’m getting my lawyer out of bed, to run down all the best Boston families, and find one with a son who shows signs of having the old larceny in his heart. I bet it’s a banking family. I can hear money in a voice, and he has it”)

Drake was persistent, and finally the novelist said, “As you know, I refuse to live in Germany because of what is happening there. Nevertheless, it is my home, and I do hear things. If I try to explain, you must get your mind out of the arena of ordinary politics. When I say Hitler does have a Master, that doesn’t mean he is a front man in the pedestrian political sense.” The novelist paused. “How can I present the picture so you will understand it? You are not German … How can you understand a people of whom it has been said, truthfully, that they have one foot in their own land and one foot in Thule? Have you even heard of Thule? That’s the German name for the fabulous kingdom the Greeks called Atlantis. Whether this kingdom ever existed is immaterial; the belief in it has existed since the dawn of history and beliefs motivate actions. In fact, you cannot understand a man’s actions unless you understand his beliefs.”

The novelist paused again, and then began talking about the Golden Dawn Society in England in the 1890s. “Strange things were written by the members. Algernon Blackwood, for instance, wrote of intelligent beings who preexisted mankind on earth. Can you take such a concept seriously? Can you think about Black-wood’s warnings, of his guarded phrases, such as, ‘Of such great powers or beings there may conceivably be a survival, of which poetry and legend alone caught a
flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds’? Or, Arthur Machen, who wrote of the ‘miracles of Mons’ during the Great War, describing the angels, as they were called, and published this two days before the soldiers at the scene sent back reports of the incident. Machen was in the Golden Dawn, and he left it to rejoin the Catholic Church, warning, ‘There are sacraments of Evil as well as of Good.’ William Butler Yeats was a member, too, and you must certainly know his remarkable lines, ‘What rough beast/ Its hour come round at last/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?’ And the Golden Dawn was just the outer portal of the Mysteries. The things that Crowley learned after leaving the Golden Dawn and joining the Ordo Templi Orientis … Hitler suppressed both the Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis, you know. He belonged to the Vril Society himself, where the really extraterrestrial secrets are kept …”

“You seem to be having a hard time getting to the point,” Drake said.

“Some things need to be approached in hints, even in allegories. You have taken mescaline with Klee and his friends, and spent the night seeing the Great Visions. Do I need to remind you that reality is not a one-level affair?”

“Very well,” Drake said. “Behind the Golden Dawn and the OTO and the Vril Society is a hidden group of real Initiates. There was a German branch of the Golden Dawn, and Hitler was a member. You want me to understand that to treat these sacraments of Evil and these beings from Atlantis as no more than fictions would be to oversimplify; is that right?”

“The Golden Dawn was founded by a German woman, carrying on a tradition that was already a hundred years old in Bavaria. As for these powers or beings from Thule, they do not exist in the sense that bricks and beefsteak exist, either. The physicist, by manipulating these fantastic electrons—which, I remind you, have to be imagined as moving from one
place to another without passing through any intervening space like a fairy or a ghost—produces real phenomena, visible to the senses. Say, then, that by manipulating these beings or powers from Thule, certain men are able to produce effects that can also be seen and experienced.”

“What was the Golden Dawn?” Drake asked, absorbed. “How did it begin?”

“It’s very old, more than medieval. The modern organization began in 1776, with a man who quit the Jesuits because he thought he was an atheist, until his researches into Eastern history had surprising results …”

(It’s him!
Hitler screamed,
He has come for me!
And then, as Herman Rauschning recorded, “he lapsed into gibberish.”
The boss himself
, Dutch Schultz moaned,
Oh, mama, I can’t go through with it. Please. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Take to the sword. Shut up. You got a big mouth.)

We’ve got two real possibilities
, Lepke’s lawyer reported.
But one of them is Boston Irish and what you described was the old original Boston accent. The second one is probably your man, then. His name is Robert Putney Drake
.

Standing before the house on Benefit Street, Drake could see, across the town, the peak of Sentinel Hill and the old deserted church that had harbored the Starry Wisdom Sect in the 1870s. He turned back to the door and raised the old Georgian knocker
(remembering: Lillibridge the reporter and Blake the painter had both died investigating that sect)
, then rapped smartly three times.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. “Mr. Drake?” he asked genially.

“It was good of you to see me,” Drake said.

“Nonsense,” Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. “Any admirer of my poor tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without straining my aunt’s dinner budget”

He may be one of the most important men alive
, Drake thought,
and he doesn’t really suspect
.

(“He left Boston by train this morning,” the soldier reported to Maldonado and Lepke. “He was going to Providence, Rhode Island.”)

“Of course, I have no hesitation in discussing it,” Lovecraft said after he and Drake were settled in the old book-lined study and Mrs. Gamhill had served them tea. “Whatever your friend in Zurich may feel, I am and always have been a strict materialist.”

“But you have been in touch with
these
people?”

“Oh, certainly, and an absurd lot they are, all of them. It began after I published a story called ‘Dagon’ in, let me see, 1919. I had been reading the Bible and the description of the Philistine sea god, Dagon, reminded me of sea serpent legends and of the reconstructions of dinosaurs by paleontologists. And the notion came to me: suppose Dagon were real, not a god, but simply a long-lived being vaguely related to the great saurians. Simply a story, to entertain those who enjoy the weird and Gothic in literature. You can’t imagine my astonishment when various occult groups began contacting me, asking which group I belonged to and which side I was on. They were all terribly put out when I made perfectly clear that I didn’t believe any such rubbish.”

“But,” Drake asked perplexed, “why did you pick up more and more of these hidden occult teachings and incorporate them in your later stories?”

“I am an artist,” Lovecraft said, “a mediocre artist, I fear—and don’t contradict me. I value honesty above all the other virtues. I would like to believe in the supernatural, in a world of social justice and in my own possession of genius. But reason commands that I accept the facts: the world is made of blind matter, the wicked and brutal always have and always will trample on the weak and innocent, and I have a very microscopic capacity to create a small range of esthetic effects, all macabre and limited in their appeal to a very special audience. Nevertheless, I would that things
were otherwise. Hence, although a conservative, I support certain social legislation that might improve the conditions of the poor, and, although a poor writer, I try to elevate the status of my own wretched prose. Vampires and ghosts and werewolves are worn out; they provoke chuckles rather than terror. Thus, when I began to learn of the old lore, after ‘Dagon’ was published, I began to use it in my stories. You can’t imagine the hours I have spent with those old volumes at Miskatonic, wading through tons of trash—Alhazred and Levi and Von Juntzt were all mental cases, you know—to sift out the notions that were unfamiliar enough to cause a genuine shock, and a real shudder, in my readers.”

“And you’ve never received threats from any of these occult groups for mentioning Iok Sotot or Cthulhu outright in your stories?”

“Only when I mentioned Hali,” Lovecraft said with a wry smile. “Some thoughtful soul reminded me of what happened to Bierce after
he
wrote a bit frankly on that subject. But that was a friendly warning, not a threat. Mr. Drake, you are a banker and a businessman. Certainly, you don’t take any of this seriously?”

“Let me reply with a question of my own,” Drake said carefully. “Why, in all the esoteric lore which you have chosen to make exoteric through your stories, have you never mentioned the Law of Fives?”

“In fact,” Lovecraft said, “I did hint at it, rather broadly, in ‘At the Mountains of Madness.’ Have you not read that? It’s my longest, and, I think, my best effort to date.” But he seemed abruptly paler.

“In ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,’” Drake pursued, “you quote a formula from Eliphas Levi’s
History of Magic
. But you don’t quote it in full. Why was that?”

Lovecraft sipped his tea, obviously framing his answer carefully. Finally he said, “One doesn’t have to believe in Santa Claus to recognize that people will exchange presents at Christmas time. One doesn’t have to believe in Yog Sothoth, the Eater of Souls, to realize
how people will act who do hold that belief It is not my intent, in any of my writings, to provide information that will lead even one unbalanced reader to try experiments that will result in the loss of human life.”

Drake arose. “I came here to learn,” he said, “but it appears that my only possible function is to teach. Let me remind you of the words of Lao-tse: Those who speak do not know; those who know do not speak.’ Most occult groups are in the first class, and their speculations are as absurd as you think. But those in the second class are not to be so lightly dismissed. They have left you alone because your stories appear only in magazines that appeal to a small minority. These magazines, however, have lately been printing stories about rockets and nuclear chain reactions and other matters that are on the edge of technological achievement. When these fantasies start coming true, which will probably occur within a decade, there will be much wider interest in such magazines, and your stories will be included in that renaissance. Then you will receive some very unwelcome attention.”