The illuminatus! trilogy (60 page)

I took a candy out of my pocket and started chewing it, trying to think what to do. If I ran, the Syndicate would guess I was the one who emptied the till when Maldonado was rubbed, and they’d get me. If I
didn’t
run, the Feds would be at the door with a high treason warrant. It was a double whammy. I might try to highjack a plane to Panama, but I didn’t know nearly enough about Mocenigo’s bugs to make a deal with the Commie government down there. They’d just send me right back. It was hopeless, like trying to fill a three-card inside straight. The only thing to do was find a hole and bury myself.

And then it was just like a light bulb in my head
again, and I thought: Lehman Cave.

“What does the computer say now?”
the President asked the Attorney General.

“What does the computer say now?” the Attorney General barked into the open phone before him.

“If the girl had two contacts before she died, at this moment the possible carriers number,” the phone paused, “428,000. If the girl had three contacts, 7,-656,000.”

“Get the Special Agent in Charge,” the President snapped. He was the calmest man at the table—ever since Fernando Poo, he had been supplementing his Librium, Tofranil and Elovil with Demerol, the amazing little pills that had kept Hermann Goering so chipper and cheerful during the Nuremberg Trials while all the other Nazis crumbled into catatonic, paranoid or other dysfunctional conditions.

“Despond,” a second open phone said.

“This is your President,” the President said. “Give it to us straight. Have you treed the coon?”

“Uh, sir, no, sir. We have to find the procurer, sir. The girl can’t possibly be alive, but we haven’t found her. It is now mathematically certain that somebody hid her body. The obvious theory, sir, is that her procurer, being in an illegal business, hid the body rather than report it. We have two descriptions of the girl, sir, and, uh, although they don’t tally
completely
they should lead us to her procurer. Of course, he should die soon, sir, and then we’ll find him. That’s the Rubicon of the case, sir. Meanwhile, I’m happy to report, sir, that we’re lucking out amazingly. Only two definite cases off the base so far and both of them injected with the antidote. It is possible, just possible, that the procurer went into hiding after disposing of the body. In that case, he hasn’t contacted another human being and is not spreading it. Sir.”

“Despond,” the President said, “I want
results
. Keep us informed. Your country depends on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tree that coon
, Despond.”

“We will, sir.”

Esperando Despond turned from the phone as an agent from the computer section entered the room. “Got something?” he snapped nervously.

“The first girl, the Nigra, sir. She was one of the pros we questioned yesterday. Her name is Bonnie Quint.”

“You look worried. Is there a hitch?” Despond asked shrewdly.

“Just another of the puzzles. She didn’t admit being with Mocenigo the night before, but that kind of lying we expected. Here’s what’s weird: her description of the guy she says she
was
with.” The computer man shook his head dubiously. “It doesn’t fit Naismith, the guy who said he was with
her
. It fits the little mug, the dwarf, that the CIA grabbed. Only
he
said she was the second girl.”

Despond mopped his brow. “What the heck has been going on in this town?” he asked the ceiling. “Some kind of
sex
orgy?”

In fact, several kinds of sex orgies had been going on in Las Vegas ever since the Veterans of the Sexual Revolution had arrived two days earlier. The Hugh M. Hefner Brigade had taken two stories of the Sands, hired a herd of professional women, and hadn’t yet come out to join the Alfred Kinsey Brigade, the Norman Mailer Guerrillas and the others in marching up and down the Strip, squirting young girls in the crotch with water pistols, passing bottles of hooch back and forth and generally blocking traffic and annoying pedestrians. Dr. Naismith himself, after a few token appearances, had avoided most of the merriment and retired to a private suite to work on his latest fund-raising letter for the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation. Actually, the VSR, like White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, was one of Naismith’s lesser projects and brought in only peanuts. Most of the real veterans of the sexual revolution had succumbed to syphilis, marriage, children, alimony or some such ailment, and few white heroes were prepared to oppose red extremism in
the bizarre manner suggested by Naismith’s pamphlets; in both of those cases, he had recognized two nut markets that nobody else was exploiting and had quickly moved in. Even the John Dillinger Died For You Society, of which he was inordinately proud since it was probably the most implausible religion in the long history of humanity’s infatuation with metaphysics, didn’t earn much less per annum than these fancies. The real bread was in the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, which had been successfully raising money for several years to erect a heroic monument, in solid gold and
ten feet taller than the statue of Liberty
, honoring the martyred former president Richard Milhous Nixon. This monument, paid for entirely by the twenty million Americans who still loved and revered Nixon despite the damnable lies of the Congress, the Justice Department, the press, the TV, the law courts,
et al
., would stand outside Yorba Linda, Tricky Dicky’s boyhood home, and scowl menacingly toward Asia, warning those gooks not to try to get the jump on Uncle Sammie. Beside the gigantic idol’s right foot, Checkers looked adoringly upward; beneath the left foot was a crushed allegorical figure representing Cesar Chavez. The Great Man held a bunch of lettuce in his right hand and a tape recording in the left. It was all most tasteful, and so appealed to Fundamentalist Americans that hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been collected by the Colossus fund, and Naismith planned to hop to Nepal with the loot at the first sign that contributors or postal inspectors were beginning to wonder when the statue would actually start rising on the plot he had purchased, amid much publicity, after the first few thousand arrived.

Naismith was a small, slight man and, like many Texans, affected a cowboy hat (although he had never herded cattle) and a bandito mustache (although his thefts were all based on fraud rather than force). He was also, for his nation at this time in history, an uncommonly honest man, and, unlike most corporations of the epoch, none of his enterprises had poisoned
or mutilated the customers whose money he took. His one vice was cynicism based on lack of imagination: he reckoned most of his countrymen as total mental basket cases and fondly believed that he was exploiting their folly when he told them that a vast Illuminati conspiracy controlled the money supply and interest rates or that a bandit of the 1930s was, in a sense, a redeemer of the atrophying human spirit. That there was an element of truth in these bizarre notions never crossed his mind. In short, even though born in Texas, Naismith was as alienated from the pulse, the poetry and the profundity of American emotion as a New York intellectual.

But his cynicism served him well when, after reporting certain strange symptoms to the hotel doctor, he found himself rushed to a supposed U.S. Public Health Service station which was manned by individuals he quickly recognized as
laws
. This is an old Texas word, probably an abbreviation of
lawmen
(Texans don’t know much about abbreviating) and is as charged with suspicion and wariness, although not quite so much rage, as the New Left’s word
pig
. Bonnie Parker had used it, eloquently, in her last ballad:

That about summed it up: the
laws
were not necessarily fascist Gestapo racist pigs (words largely unknown in Texas), but they were people who would find it a relief if bothersome and rebellious individualism disappeared, however bloody the disappearance might be. If you were ornery enough, the laws would bushwhack you—shoot you dead from ambush, without a chance to surrender, as they did to Miss Parker and Mr. Barrow—but even if you were merely a mildly larcenous hoaxter like Dr. Naismith, they would be much
cheered to put you someplace where you couldn’t throw any more entropy into the functioning of the Machine they served. And so, recognizing laws, Dr. Naismith narrowed his eyes, thought deeply, and when they began their questioning, lied as only an unregenerate old-school Texas confidence man can lie.

“You got it from somebody who had body contact with you. So either you were in a very crowded elevator or you got it from a prostitute. Which was it?”

Naismith thought of the collision on the sidewalk with the Midget and the weasel-faced character with the big suitcase, but he also thought that the questioner leaned heavily on the second possibility. They were looking for a woman; and, if you tell the laws what they want to hear, they don’t keep coming back and asking more personal questions. “I was with a prostitute,” he said, trying to sound embarrassed.

“Can you describe her?”

He thought back over the pros he had seen with other VSR delegates, and one stood out. Being a kindly man, he didn’t want to implicate an innocent whore in this messy business (whatever it was), so he combined her with another woman, the first that he ever successfully penetrated in his long-ago youth in the 1950s.

Unfortunately for Dr. Naismith’s kindly intentions, the laws never expect an eyewitness description to match the person described in
all
respects, so when his information was coded into an IBM machine, three cards came out. Each one had more similarities to his fiction than differences from it, and they came from a card file of several hundred prostitutes whose descriptions had been gathered and coded in the past twenty-four hours. Running the three cards through a different sorting in the machine, limited to outstanding bodily characteristics most commonly remembered correctly, the technicians emerged, after all, with Bonnie Quint. Forty-five minutes later she was in Esperando Despond’s office, nervously twirling her mink stole, picking at the hem of her mini-skirt, evading questions
nimbly and remembering intensely Carmel’s voice saying, “I’ll use the belt. So help me, God. I’ll use the belt.” She was also smarting from the injection.

“You
don’t
work free-lance,” Despond told her, nastily, for the fifth time. “In this town, the Maf would put a knife up your ass and break off the handle if you tried that. You’ve got a pimp. Now, do we throw the book at you or do we get his name?”

“Don’t be too hard on her,” Tobias Knight said. “She’s only a poor, confused kid. Not twenty yet, are you?” he asked her kindly. “Give her a chance to think. She’ll do the right thing. Why should she protect a lousy pimp who exploits her all the time?” He gave her a reassuring glance.

“Poor confused kid, my ass!” Despond exploded. “This is a matter of life and death and no Nigra whore is going to sit here lying her head off and get away with it.” He did a good imitation of a man literally trembling with repressed fury. “I’d like to kick her head in,” he screamed.

Knight, still playing the friendly cop, looked shocked. “That’s not very professional,” he said sadly. “You’re overtired, and you’re frightening the child.”

Three hours later—after Despond had nearly done a complete psycho schtick and virtually threatened to behead poor Bonnie with his letter opener, and Knight had become so fatherly and protective that both he and she were beginning to feel that she was actually his very own six-year-old daughter being set upon by Goths and Vandals—a sobbing but accurate description of Carmel emerged, including his address.

Twelve minutes later, Roy Ubu, calling via car radio, reported that Carmel was not in his house and had been seen driving toward the Southwest in a jeep with a large suitcase beside him.

In the next eighteen hours, eleven men in jeeps were stopped on various roads southwest of Las Vegas, but none of them was Carmel, although most of them were around the height and weight and general physical description given by Bonnie Quint, and two of them even
had large suitcases. In the twenty-four hours after that, nearly a thousand men of all sizes and shapes were stopped on roads, north, south, east and west, in cars not remotely like jeeps and some driving toward, not away from, Las Vegas. None of them was Carmel either.

Among all the men wandering around the Desert Door base and the city of Las Vegas with credentials from the U.S. Public Health Service, one who really was employed by USPHS, had a long lean body, a mournful countenance, a general resemblance to the late great Boris Karloff, and the name Fred Filiarisus. By special authority of the White House, Dr. Filiarisus was able to gain access to everything known by the scientists at Desert Door, including the course of the disease in those originally infected, among whom two had died before the antidote took effect and three had shown a total lack of symptoms even though exposed along with the others. He also had access to both FBI and CIA information as it came in, without having to bug either office. It was he, therefore, who finally put together the correct picture, on April 30, and reported directly to the White House at eleven that morning.

“Some people are naturally immune to Anthrax Leprosy Pi, Mr. President,” Filiarisus said. “Unfortunately, they serve as carriers. We found three like that at the base, and it is mathematically, scientifically certain that a fourth is still at large.

“Everybody was lying to the FBI and CIA, sir. They were all afraid of punishment for various activities forbidden by our laws. No variation or permutation on their stories will hang together reasonably. Each witness lied about something, and usually about several things. The truth is other than it appeared. In short, the government, being an agency of punishment, acted as a distorting factor from the beginning, and I had to use information-theory equations to determine the degree of distortion present. I would say that what I finally discovered may have universal application: no governing body can ever obtain an accurate account of
reality from those over whom it holds power. From the perspective of communication analysis, government is not an instrument of law and order, but of law and disorder. I’m sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but it needs to be kept in mind when similar situations arise in the future.”