The illuminatus! trilogy (7 page)

“And what happened to your body?” Simon asked casually.

“You know, I didn’t know where it was. Even in the middle of my orgasms I didn’t know where my body was. Everything was just … the light….”

ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT

And leaving Dallas that much-discussed November 22 afternoon in 1963, the man using the name “Frank Sullivan” brushes past McCord and Barker at the airport, but no foreshadowing of Watergate darkens his mind. (Back at the Grassy Knoll, Howard Hunt’s picture is being snapped and will later turn up in the files of New Orleans D.A. Jim “The Jolly Green Giant” Garrison: not that Garrison ever came within light years of the real truth….)

“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty” Hagbard calls
.

But now we are going back, again, to April 2 and Las Vegas; Sherri Brandi (nee Sharon O’Farrell) arriving home finds Carmel in her living room at four in the morning. It doesn’t surprise her; he often made these unexpected visits.
He seems to enjoy invading other people’s territory like some kinda creepy virus
. “Darling,” I cried, rushing to kiss him as he expected.
I wish the creep would drop dead
, I thought as our mouths met.

“An all-night john?” he asked casually.

“Yeah. One of those scientists who works at that place out in the desert we’re all supposed to pretend we don’t know about. A freak.”

“He wanted something special?” Carmel asked quickly.
“You charged him extra?” At times I thought I could really see dollar signs in his eyes.

“No,” I said, “he just wanted a lay. But afterward he wouldn’t let me go. Just kept jawing.” I yawned, looking around at the nice furniture and the nice paintings; I had managed to get everything in shades of pink and lavender, really beautiful, if that creep hadn’t been sitting there on the couch looking like a hungry dead rat. I always wanted pretty things and I think I could have been some kind of artist or designer if all my luck wasn’t always lousy. Christ, who ever told Carmel a blue turtleneck would go with a brown suit? If it wasn’t for women, in my honest-to-Pete opinion, men would all go around looking like that. That’s what I think. Insensitive. A bunch of cavemen, or Meander Thralls, or whatever you call them. “This john had a lot on his mind,” I said before old candy-bar could start crossexamining me about something else. “He’s against fluorides in drinking water and the Catholic church and faggots and he thinks the new birth-control pill is as bad as the old one and I should use a diaphragm instead. Christ, he’s got the inside dope on everything under the sun, he thinks, and I hadda listen to it all. That kind of john.”

Carmel nodded. “Scientists are schmucks,” he said.

I pulled the dress over my head and hung it in the closet (it was the nice green one with the spangles and the new style where my nipples stick out through little holes, which is a pain in the ass because they’re always rubbing against something and getting raw, but it really turns on the Johns, and, like I always say, that’s the name of the game, in this sonofabitching town with all the lousy luck, the only way to heavy scratch is go out there, girl, and sell your snatch) and then I grabbed my robe quick before old blow-job bobo decided it was time for his weekly Frenching. “He’s got a nice house, though,” I said to distract the creep. “He doesn’t have to live out there on the base, he’s too important for rules and regularities. Nice to look at, I mean. Redwood walls and burnt orange decor, you know? Pretty. He hates it, though. Acts as if he thinks it’s haunted by Count Frankenstein or somebody. Keeps jumping up and walking around like he’s looking for something. Something that’ll bite his head off in one gulp if he finds it.” I decided to let the top of the robe hang open a little. Carmel was either horny or he wanted
something else, and
something else
with him generally means he thinks you’ve been holding back some cash. Him and his damned belt. Of course, sometimes with that I go queer all over for a flash and I guess that’s like the come that men have, the orgasm, but it ain’t worth the pain, believe me. I wonder if it’s true some women get it in intercourse? Really get it? I don’t think so. I’ve never known anybody in the business who gets it, from a man, only from Rosy Palm and her five sisters, sometimes, and if none of
us
do, how could some straight nicey-nicey get it?

“Bugs,” Carmel said, looking shrewd and clever, off on his usual shtick of proving he was more hip to everything than anybody else on God’s green earth. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“What do you mean, bugs?” I asked. It was better than talking about money.

“The john,” he said with a know-it-all grin. “He’s important, you said. So his house has bugs. He probably keeps taking them out, and the FBI keeps coming back and putting in new ones. I bet he was very quiet when he was making it with you, right?” I nodded, remembering. “See. He couldn’t stand the thought of those Feds eavesdropping on the other end of the wire. Just like Mai—like a guy I know in the Syndicate. He’s so afraid of bugs he won’t hold a business talk anywhere but the bathroom in his hotel suite with all four faucets going full blast and both of us whispering. Running water screws up a bug more than playing loud music on the radio, for some scientific reason.”

“Bugs,” I said suddenly. “That’s it.” The other kind of bugs. I was remembering Charley raving about fluoridation: “And we’re all classified as mental cases, because a few right-wing nuts fifteen or twenty years ago who said fluoridation was a communist plot to poison us. Now, anybody who criticizes fluoridation is supposed to be just as bananas as God’s Lightning. Good Lord, if anybody wants to do us in without firing a shot, I could—” and he caught himself, hid something that almost showed on his face, and ended like his brain was walking on one foot, “I could point to a dozen things in any chemistry book more effective than fluoride.” But he wasn’t thinking of chemicals, he was thinking of those little bugs, microbes is the word, and that’s what he was working on. I could feel
that flash I always get when I read something in a John, like if he had more money than he let on, or he’d caught his wife spreading for the milkman and was doing it to get even, or he was really a faggola and was just proving to himself that he wasn’t
completely
a faggola. “My God,” I said, “Carmel, I read about those microbe bugs in the
Enquirer
. If they have an accident out there, this whole town goes, and the state with it, and God knows how many other states. Jesus, no wonder he keeps washing his hands!”

“Germ warfare?” Carmel said, thinking fast. “God, I’ll bet this town is crawling with Russian spies trying to find out what’s going
on
out there. And I’ve got a direct lead for them. But how the hell do you meet a Russian spy, or a Chinese spy for that matter? You can’t just advertise in a newspaper. Hell. Maybe if I went down to the university and talked to some of those freaking commie students….”

I was shocked. “Carmel! You can’t sell your own country like that!”

“The hell I can’t. The Statue of Liberty is just another broad, and I’ll take what I can get for her. Don’t be a fool.” He reached in his jacket pocket and took out a caramel candy like he always did when he was excited. “I’ll—bet somebody in the Mob will know. They know everything. Jesus, there has to be
some
way of cashing in on this.”

The President’s actual television broadcast was transmitted to the world at 10:30
p.m.
EST, March 31
. The Russians and Chinese were given twenty-four hours to get out of Fernando Poo or the skies over Santa Isobel would begin raining nuclear missiles: “This is
darn
serious,” the Chief Executive said, “and America will not shirk its responsibility to the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo!” The broadcast concluded at 11 p.m. EST, and within two minutes people attempting to get reservations on trains, planes, busses or car pools to Canada had virtually every telephone wire in the country overloaded.

In Moscow, where it was ten the next morning, the Premier called a conference and said crisply, “That character in Washington is a mental lunatic, and he means it. Get our men out of Fernando Poo right away, then find out who authorized sending them in there in the first place
and transfer him to be supervisor of a hydroelectric works in Outer Mongolia.”

“We don’t have any men in Fernando Poo,” a commissar said mournfully. “The Americans are imagining things again.”

“Well, how the hell can we withdraw men if we don’t have them there in the first place?” the Premier demanded.

“I don’t know. We’ve got twenty-four hours to figure that out, or—” the commissar quoted an old Russian proverb which means, roughly, that when the polar bear excrement interferes with the fan belts, the machinery overheats.

“Suppose we just announce that our troops are coming out?” another commissar suggested. “They can’t say we’re lying if they don’t find any of our troops there afterward.”

“No, they never believe anything we
say
. They want to be shown,” the premier said thoughtfully. “We’ll have to infiltrate some troops surreptitiously and then withdraw them with a lot of fanfare and publicity. That should do it.”

“I’m afraid it won’t end the problem,” another commissar said funereally. “Our intelligence indicates that there are Chinese troops there. Unless Peking backs down, we’re going to be caught in the middle when the bombs start flying and—” he quoted a proverb about the man in the intersection when two manure trucks collide.

“Damn,” the Premier said. “What the blue blazes do the Chinese want with Fernando Poo?”

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally
achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on schizophrenia; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and China.

And, banishing Thomas Edison and his light bulbs from mind, Saul Goodman looks back over the first eight memos briefly, using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding back the intuitive functions. It was a habitual exercise with him, and he called it expansion-and-contraction: leaping in the dark for the connection that must exist between fact one and fact two, then going back slowly to check on himself.

The names and phrases flow past, in review: Fra Dolcino—1508—Roshinaya—Hassan i Sabbah—1090—Weishaupt—assassinations—John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King—Mayor Daley—Cecil Rhodes—1888 —George Washington….

Choices: (1) it is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 a.d. to the present.

Well, it isn’t all true. Mayor Daley never said
“Ewige Blumenkraft”
to Senator Ribicoff. Saul had read, in the
Washington Post
, a lip-reader’s translation of Daley’s diatribe and there was no German in it, although there was obscenity and anti-Semitism. The Weishaupt-Washington impersonation theory also had some flaws—in those days, before plastic surgery, such an undetected assumption of the identity of a well-known figure was especially hard to credit, despite the circumstantial evidence quoted in the memos—two strong arguments against choice one. The memos are not
all
true.

How about choice three? The Illuminati might not be a straight unbroken line from the first recruit gathered by old Hassan i Sabbah to the person who bombed
Confrontation
—it might have died and lain dormant for a term, like the Ku Klux Klan between 1872 and 1915; and it might have gone through such breakups and resurrections
more than once in eight centuries—but linkages of some sort, however tenuous, reached from the eleventh century to the twentieth, from the Near East to Europe and from Europe to America. Saul’s dissatisfaction with official explanations of recent assassinations, the impossibility of making any rational sense out of current American foreign policy, and the fact that even historians who vehemently distrusted all “conspiracy theories” acknowledged the pivotal role of secret Masonic lodges in the French Revolution: all these added weight to the rejection of choice 3. Besides, the Masons were the first group, according to at least two of the memos, infiltrated by Weishaupt.

Choice 1 is definitely out, then, and choice 3 almost certainly equally invalid; choice 2, therefore, is most probably correct. The theory in the memos is partly true and partly false. But what, in essence, is the theory—and which part of it is true, which part false?

Saul lit his pipe, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

The theory, in essence, was that the Illuminati recruited people through various “fronts,” turned them on to some sort of
illuminizing
experience through marijuana (or some special extract of marijuana) and converted them into fanatics willing to use any means necessary to “illuminize” the rest of the world. Their aim, obviously, is nothing less than the total transformation of humanity itself, along the lines suggested by the film
2001
, or by Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman. In the course of this conspiracy the Illuminati, according to Malik’s hints to Jackson, were systematically assassinating every popular political figure who might interfere with their program.