The illuminatus! trilogy (72 page)

“Grossmutterlich Gefälligkeit”
muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original German, “now where have I heard that before?”

In a second, he remembered: the
Mu-Mon-Kan
or “Gateless Gate” of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, “What is the Buddha?” Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master’s staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: “Go back to your previous Master at once,” he cried, “and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!”

Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when
Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp
was written, about a book which hadn’t yet been translated into any European tongue; he was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt
Zauberer
had understood the rudiments of the Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then —for the first time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.

On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George’s stateroom, Hagbard had already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-1. He thought about what that meant, then buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.

Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, “So you’re the leader of the Discordians, eh?”

“Yes,” Hagbard said evenly, “and on this ship, my word is law.
Wipe that silly grin off your face and sit up straight.”
He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry’s body before the man caught himself and remembered to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning phrases, but only with effort. “Listen,” he said softly
“I will tell you only one more time”
—another Bavarian Fire Drill, that—“This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine, You will
come to attention
when I talk to you. Otherwise …” he let the phrase trail off.

Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture—immediately modifying it by grinning more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe: Harry’s father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he would administer the thrashing.

“Is that better?” Harry asked, accentuating his respectful
posture and grinning more sarcastically.

“A little,” Hagbard said, sounding mollified. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Harry. That’s a bad bunch you’ve been mixed up with, very
un-American.”
He paused to get a reaction to the word; it came at once.

“Their money is as good as anyone’s,” Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke, and his neck decreased an inch—the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the repressed guilt denied by the man’s voice.

“You were born pretty poor, weren’t you?” Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone.

“Poor? We was white niggers.”

“Well, I guess there’s some excuse for you …” Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. “But, to turn on
your own country
, Harry. That’s bad. That’s the lowest thing a human being can do. It’s like turning against
your own mother.”
The toes curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry’s father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard caught it: “Harry,” he repeated it gravely, “you haven’t been acting like a
proper white man
. You’ve been acting like you got
nigger blood.”

The grin stretched to the breaking point and became a grimace, the body stiffened to the most respectful possible posture. “Now, look here, sir,” Harry began, “you got no call to talk to me that way—”

“And you’re not even
ashamed,”
Hagbard ran over him. “You don’t show any
remorse.”
He shook his head with profound discouragement. “I can’t let you wander around loose, committing more crimes and treasons. I’m going to have to feed you to the sharks.”

“Listen, Captain Celine, sir, I’ve got a money belt under this shirt and it’s full of more hundred-dollar bills than you ever saw at one time …”

“Are you trying to bribe me?” Hagbard asked sternly; the rest of the scene would be easy, he reflected. Part of his mind drifted to the Illuminati ships he
would meet at Peos. There was no way to use the Celine System without communicating, and he knew the crew would be “protected” against him by some Illuminati variation on the ear wax of Ulysses’ men passing the Sirens. The money would go in the giant clam-shell ashtray, a real shocker for a man like Coin, but what would he do about the Illuminati ships?

When the time came to produce the gun, he slipped the safety off viciously. If I’m going to join the ancient brotherhood of killers, he thought morosely, maybe I should have the stomach to start with a visible target. “Three days and three minutes are both too long,” he said, trying to sound casual, “if you’re ever going to get it, you’re going to get it now.” They would be at Peos in less than an hour, he thought, as Coin involuntarily cried “Mama.” Like Dutch Schultz, Hagbard reflected; like how many others? It would be interesting to interview doctors and nurses and find out how many people passed out with that primordial cry for the All-Protector on their lips…but Harry finally surrendered, abdicated, left the robot running itself according to the biogram. He was no longer sitting in an insolent slouch, a respectful attention, a guilty cramp…He was simply sitting. He was ready for death.

“Good enough,” Hagbard said. “You’ve got more on the ball than either of us realized.” The man would now transfer his submissive reflexes to Hagbard; and the next stage would be longer and harder, before he learned to stop playing roles entirely and just manifest as he had in the face of extinction.

The gun gambit was variation #2 of the third basic tactic in the Celine System; it had five usual sequels. Hagbard picked the most dangerous one—he usually did, since he didn’t much like the gun gambit at all, and could only stomach it if he gave most of the subjects a chance at the other role. This time, however, he knew he had another motive: somewhere, deep inside, a coward in him hoped Harry Coin was crazier than he had estimated and would, in fact, shoot; that way
Hagbard could avoid the decision awaiting him in Peos.

“You win, you bastard,” Coin’s voice said; Hagbard came back and quickly rushed through a small verbal game involving Hell images picked up from Harry’s childhood. When he had Coin sent back to his room, under light security, he slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He probed for Dorn and found the Dealy Lama was on that channel, broadcasting.

—Leave the kid alone, he beamed. It’s my turn now. Go contemplate your navel, you old fraud.

A shower of rose petals was the nonverbal answer. The Lama faded out. George went on rapping to himself on the themes planted by the ELF leader: Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The eye of Apollo. His luminous I.

—Aye, trust me not, Hagbard beamed. Trust not a man who’s rich in flax—his morals may be sadly lax. (Some of my own doubts getting in here, he thought.) Her name is Stella Maris. Black star of the seas. (I won’t tell him who she and Mavis really are.) George, I want you in the captain’s control room.

George should start with variation #1, the
Liebestod
or orgasm-death trip, Hagbard decided. Make him aware of the extent to which he treats women as objects—and, of course, give him some mystical hogwash later to gloss it over temporarily, so the doubt will be pushed into the unconscious for a while. Yes: George was already on a pornography trip, very similar to Atlanta Hope and Smiling Jim Treponema, except that in his case it was ego-dystonic.

“That was a good trick,” George said a few moment’s later in the captain’s control room, “how you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing.”

Hagbard, still thinking about the decision in Peos, tried to look innocent when he replied, “I called you on the intercom.” He realized that he was whistling and pissing at once, worrying about Peos as well as about George, and brought himself back sharply. “Absurd”
was the word in George’s mind—absurd innocence. Well, Hagbard thought, I fucked that one up.

“You think I can’t tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?” George demanded. Hagbard roared with laughter, totally in the present again; but after George had been sent to the chapel for his initiation, the problem returned. Either the Demonstration failed, or the Demonstration failed. Double bind. Damned both ways. It was infuriating, but all the books had warned him long ago: “As ye give, so shall ye get.” He had used the Celine System on quite a few people over nearly three decades, and now he was in the middle of a classic Celine Trap himself. There was no correct answer, except to give up trying.

When the moment came, though, he found that part of him had not given up trying. “Ready for destruction of enemy ships,” said Howard.

Hagbard shook his head. George was remembering some crazy incident in which he had tried to commit suicide while standing by the Passaic River, and Hagbard kept picking up parts of that bum trip while trying to clear his own head. “I wish we could communicate with them,” he said aloud, realizing that he was possibly blowing the guru game by revealing his inner doubts to George. “I wish I could give them a chance to surrender …”

“You don’t want them too close when they go,” said Howard.

“Are your people out of the way?” Hagbard asked in agony.

“Of course,” the dolphin replied irritably. “Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian.”

“The sea is crueler than the land,” Hagbard protested, but then he added “sometimes.”

“The sea is cleaner than the land,” Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus—the dolphin was obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, “You silly sons of bitches,” at somebody named Carlo). “These people
have been your enemies for thirty thousand years.”

“I’m not that old,” Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. “That’s all there is to it,” he said quietly.

(“Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you’ll come back to reality.” A voice long, long ago … at Harvard…And once, in the South, he had been moved by a very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:

I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt and the final confrontation. But it’s meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)

Hate, like molten lead, drips from the wounded sky…they call it air pollution…August Personage dials slowly, with the cunt-starved eyes of a medieval saint… “God lies!” Weishaupt cried in the middle of his first trip, “God is Hate!”…Harry Coin is crumpled in his chair…George’s head hangs at an angle, like a doll with a broken spring…Stella doesn’t move… They are not dead but stoned …

Abe Reles blew the whistle on the entire Murder Inc. organization in 1940 … He named Charley Workman as the chief gun in the Dutch Schultz massacre … He gave the details proving the roles of Lepke (who was executed) and Luciano (who was imprisoned and, later, exiled) … He kept his mouth shut about certain other things, however…But Drake was worried. He gave orders to Maldonado,
who conveyed them to a capo, who passed them on to some soldiers…Reles was guarded by five policemen but nonetheless he went out his hotel window and spread like jam on the ground below…There were mutterings in the press…The coroner’s jury couldn’t believe that five cops were on the take from the Syndicate…Reles’s death was declared to be suicide…But in 1943, as the Final Solution moved into high gear, Lepke announced he wanted to talk before his execution…Tom Dewey, alive by grace of the Dutchman’s death, was governor, and he granted a stay of execution…Lepke spent twenty-four hours with Justice Department officials and it was announced later that he refused to reveal anything of significance…One of the officials had been brought back from State to work with Justice because of his background on Schultz and the Big Six Syndicate … He said little, but Lepke read a lot in his eyes…His name, of course, was Winifred…Lepke understood: as Bela Lugosi once said, there are worse things than dying …

In 1932 the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped…Already at that time, a heist of that dimension could not be permitted in the Northeast without the consent of a full-fledged don of the Mafia…Even a capo could not authorize it alone…The aviator’s father, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., had been an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve monopoly…Among other things, he had charged on the floor of Congress, “Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created; the present one is the first scientifically created one worked out as we figure a mathematical problem …” The go-between in delivering the ransom money was Jafsie Condon, Dutch Schultz’s old high school principal … “It’s got to be one of them coincidences,” as Marty Krompier said later …

John Dillinger arrived in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and rented an Avis at the airport. He drove out to Dealy Plaza and scouted the
terrain. The Triple Underpass where Harry Coin was supposed to stand when doing the job was under observation from a railroadman’s shack, he noted; it occurred to him that the man in that shack would not have a long life expectancy. There would be a lot of other eyewitnesses, he realized, and the JAMs couldn’t protect them all, not even with the help of the LDD. It was going to be bad all around … In fact, the man in the railroad shack, S. M. Holland, told a story that didn’t jibe with the Earl Warren version, and later died when his car went off the road under circumstances that aroused speculation among those given to speculating; the coroner’s jury called it an accident…Dillinger found his spot in the thickly wooded part of the Grassy Knoll and waited until Harry Coin appeared on the Underpass. He made himself relax and looked around to be sure that he was invisible from everywhere but a helicopter (there were no helicopters: the Illuminati’s top double agent within the Secret Service had seen to that). A movement in the School Book Depository caught his eye. Something not kosher up there He swung his binoculars…and caught another head, ducking quickly, atop the Dal-Tex building. An Italian, very young…That was bad. If one of Maldonado’s soldiers was here, either the Illuminati were aware they had a double agent in their midst and had hired two assassins, or else the Syndicate was acting on its own. John panned back to the School Book Depository: whoever that clown was, he had a rifle, too, and he was being cagey: definitely not Secret Service.