The illuminatus! trilogy (52 page)

“Listen,” the Dutchman interrupted. “Capone would have a bullet in me if he knew I was even talking to you, John.”

“Are you afraid of Capone? He arranged to have the Feds put a bullet in me at the Biograph and I’m still sassy and lively as ever.”

“I’m not afraid of Capone or Lepke or Maldonado or …” The Dutchman’s eyes brought back the hospital room. “I’m a pretty good pretzler,” he told Sergeant Conlon anxiously. “Winifred, Department of Justice. I even got it from the department.” The pain shot through him, sharp as ecstasy. “Sir, please stop it!” He had to explain about DeMolay and Weishaupt. “Listen,”
he urged, “the last Knight. I don’t want to holler.” It was so hard, with the pulsings of the pain. “I don’t know, sir. Honestly, I don’t. I went to the toilet. I was in the can and the boy came at me. If we wanted to break the Ring. No, please. I get a month. Come on, Illuminati, cut me off.” It was so hard to explain. “I had nothing with him and he was a cowboy in one of the seven days.
Ewige!
Fight … No business, no hangouts, no friends. Nothing. Just what you pick up and what you need.” The pain wasn’t just the bullet; they were working on his mind, trying to stop him from saying too much. He saw the goat head. “Let him harness himself to you and then bother you,” he cried. “They are Englishmen and they are a type and I don’t know who is best, they or us.” So much to say, and so little time. He thought of Francie, his wife. “Oh, sir, get the doll a rofting.” The Illuminati formula to summon the lloigor: he could at least reveal that. “A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Did you hear me?” They had to understand how high it went, all over the world. “I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court would hear it. If that ain’t the payoff. Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s Commander.” Eris, the Great Mother, was the only alternative to the Illuminati’s power; he had to tell them that much. “Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.”

“He’s blabbing too much,” the one who wore the goat head, Winifred, from Washington, said. “Increase the pain.”

“The dirty rats have tuned in,” Dutch shouted.

“Control yourself,” Sergeant Conlon said soothingly.

“But I am dying,” Dutch explained. Couldn’t they understand anything?

Drake met Winifred at a cocktail party in Washington, in ’47, just after the National Security Act was passed by the Senate. “Well?” Winifred asked, “do you have any further doubts?”

“None at all,” Drake said. “All my open money is now invested in defense industries.”

“Keep it there,” Winifred smiled, “and you’ll get richer than you ever dreamed. Our present projection is that we can get Congress to approve
one trillion dollars
in war preparations before 1967.”

Drake thought fast and asked softly, “You’re going to add another villain beside Russia?”

“Watch China,” Winifred said calmly.

For once, curiosity surpassed cupidity in Drake; he asked, “Are you really keeping
him
in the Pentagon?”

“Would you like to meet him, face to face?” Winifred asked with a faint hint of a sneer in his voice.

“No thank you,” Drake said coolly. “I’ve been reading Herman Rauschning. I remember Hitler’s words about the Superman: ‘He is alive, among us. I have met him. He is intrepid and terrible. I was afraid of him.’ That’s enough for my curiosity.”

“Hitler,” Winifred replied, not hiding the sneer now. “Saw him in his more human form. He’s … progressed … since then.”

Tonight, Drake thought, as the thunder rose to a maddening crescendo, I will see him, or one of them. Surely, I could have picked a more agreeable form of suicide? The question was pointless; Jung had been right all along, with his Law of Opposites. Even Freud knew it: every sadist becomes a masochist at last.

On an impulse, Drake arose and fetched a pad and pen from the bedside Tudor table. He began to scribble by the light of the increasing electrical storm outside:

“Pull me out,” the Dutchman moaned. “I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Give me something. I am so sick.”

“Anybody,” the Dutchman pleaded, “kindly take my shoes off. No, there’s a handcuff on them. The Baron says these things.”

“The sidewalk was in trouble,” the Dutchman tried to explain, “and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control.”

“Okay,’ the Dutchman sighed. “Okay, I am all through. Can’t do another thing. Look out, mama, look out for her. You can’t beat Him. Police. Mama. Helen. Mother. Please take me out.”

“Come on, open the soap duckets,” the Dutchman said hopelessly. “The chimney sweeps. Take to the sword.”

“Please help me up. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.”

A nine-year-old girl named Patty Cohen lived three miles down the coast from the Drake estate, and she went mad in those early morning hours of April 25. At first, her parents thought she had gotten hold of some of the LSD which was known to be infiltrating the local grammar school and, being fairly hip, they fed her niacin and horse doctor’s doses of vitamin C as she ran about the house alternately laughing and making faces at them, howling about “he’s laying in his own piss” and “he’s still alive inside it” and “Roderick Usher.” By morning they knew it was more than acid, and months of sadness began as they took her to clinics and private psychiatrists and more clinics and more private psychiatrists. Finally, just before Chanukah in December, they took her to an elegant shrink on Park Avenue, and she had a virtual epileptic fit in the waiting room, staring at a statue on the end table and screaming, “Don’t let him eat me! Don’t let him eat me!” Her recovery began from that day, and the sight of that miniature representation of the giant Tlaloc in Mexico City.

But three hours after Drake’s death, George Dorn lay on his bed in the Hotel Tudor, holding a phone to his ear, listening to it ring. A young woman’s voice on the other end suddenly said hello.

“I’d like to speak to Inspector Goodman,” said George.

There was a momentary pause, then the voice said, “Who’s calling, please?”

“My name is George Dorn, but it probably wouldn’t mean anything to the Inspector. But would you ask him to come to the phone please and tell him I have a message for him about the case of Joseph Malik.”

There was a constricted silence, as if the woman on the other end of the phone wanted to scream and had stopped breathing. Finally she said, “My husband is working just now, but I’ll be glad to give him any message you have.”

“That’s funny,” said George. “I’ve been told Inspector Goodman’s duty hours are noon to 9 P.M.”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business where he is,” the woman suddenly blurted. George felt a little shock. Rebecca Goodman was frightened and she didn’t know where her husband was: something in the tone of her last three words revealed her mental state to George. I must be getting more sensitive to people, he thought,

“Do you ever hear from him?” he said gently. He was feeling sorry for Mrs. Inspector Saul Goodman, who was, come to think of it, the wife of a pig. If, just a few years ago, George had read in the paper that this woman’s husband had been shot down at random by some unknown revolutionary-type assailants, he would probably have whispered, “Right on.” One of George’s own friends of that period might have killed Inspector Goodman. There was even a moment when George himself might have done it. Once, one of the kids in George’s group had called up the young widow of a policeman killed one December by young blacks and called her a bitch and the wife of a pig and told her that her husband was guilty of crimes against the people and that those who had shot him would go down in history as heroes. George had approved of this verbal action as a means of hardening oneself against bourgeois sentimentality. The papers had been full of stories about how this policeman’s three little kids would have no Christmas this year; such tripe made George urgently want to throw up.

But now this woman’s anguish was coursing through the wire and he was feeling it, just because her husband was not known to be dead, just missing. And probably not dead at all; otherwise why would Hagbard have said that George should get in touch with him?

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” she said. She was starting to break, George thought. In another minute she’d be blurting out all her fears to him. Well, for Christ’s sake,
he
didn’t know where Goodman was.

“Look,” he said sharply, pushing back against the flow of emotion coming through to him, “if you hear from Inspector Goodman, tell him if he wants to know more about the Bavarian Illuminati he should call George Dorn at the Hotel Tudor. That’s D-O-R-N, Hotel
Tudor
. Have you got that?”

“The Illuminati! Look, uh, Mr. Dorn, whatever you want to tell, you can tell me. I’ll pass it on to him.”

“I can’t do that, Mrs. Goodman. Thank you, now. Good-bye.”

“Wait! Don’t hang up.”

“I can’t help you, Mrs. Goodman. I don’t know where he is, either.” George dropped the phone into its cradle with a sigh. His hands were cold and moist. Well, he’d have to tell Hagbard he couldn’t reach Inspector Goodman. But he had learned something—that Saul Goodman, who was supposed to be investigating Joe Malik’s disappearance, had himself disappeared, and the words “Bavarian Illuminati” meant something to his wife. George crossed the small room and turned on the TV. The noon news would be on. He went back to his bed, lay down and lit a cigarette. He was still exhausted, from his sexual bout of the night before with Tarantella Serpentine.

The announcer said, “The Attorney General has announced that he will speak at six this evening on the early morning epidemic of gangland-style assassinations at widely separated locations all over the country. The death toll from killings of this type has reached twenty-seven, though local officials refuse to say whether all—or any—of these deaths are connected. Among those shot are Senator Edward Coke Bacon; two high-ranking Los Angeles police officers; the mayor of a town called Mad Dog, Texas; a New York fight promoter; a Boston pharmacist; a Detroit ceramicist; a Chicago Communist; three New Mexico hippie
leaders; a New Orleans restaurateur; a barber in Yorba Linda, California; and a sausage manufacturer in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. There were bomb explosions at fifteen locations, killing thirteen more people. Six persons around the country have disappeared, and four of these were seen being forced into cars at different times last night and this morning. The Attorney General today called this ‘a reign of terror perpetrated by organized crime,’ pointing out that though the motives for the widely scattered slayings is obscure they bear the earmarks of gangster killings. However, new FBI director George Wallace, who has ordered FBI agents around the country into action, issued a written statement declaring—quote—‘Once again the Attorney General has treed the wrong coon, proving that law enforcement should be left to the experienced professionals. We have reason to think that these murders are the work of Negro Communists directed from Peking.’—end of quote. Meanwhile, the office of the Vice President has issued an apology to the Italian-American Anti-Defaoation League for his reference to ‘Mafioso rubouts’ and the League has withdrawn its picket line from the White House. Remember, the Attorney General will address the nation at 6 p.m. tonight.” The announcer suddenly changed his facial expression from neutral newscaster to pugnacious patriot. “Certain dissident elements keep complaining that people don’t get a chance to participate in decisions made by their government. Yet, at a time like this, when the whole nation has an opportunity to hear the Attorney General, the ratings are not always as good as they should be. So let’s do everything we can to build up those ratings tonight, and let the whole world know that this is still a democracy.”