The illuminatus! trilogy (73 page)

This was a piss-cutter.

John’s original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn’t be done. There was no human way of hitting more than two of those targets—all three of them in different areas and at different elevations—before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job while that was happening. It
was what Hagbard called an existential
koan
.

“Shit, piss and industrial waste,” John muttered, quoting another Celinism.

Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle. Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.

If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the
I Ching
at least (which probably explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper), then “save what you can” could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would give them a mystery they would never solve.

The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren’t quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle, quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy’s skull, and thought briefly,
Even if it falls through and doesn’t remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I’m caught: PRESIDENT SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now
, and then he tightened his finger.

(“Murder?” George asked. “It’s hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man’s games get that hairy.”

“During the Kali Yuga,” Stella replied, “almost all our games are played with live ammunition. Haven’t you noticed?”)

The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy’s lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.

“Christ!” John said.
“Him?”

Stella toked again—she never seemed to think she was sufficiently stoned. “Wait,” she said. “There’s a passage in
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
that goes into this a bit.” She got up, walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on
the wall shelf. “You know the old saying, ‘different strokes for different folks’?” she asked over her shoulder. “Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others.” She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. “For instance,” she said slowly. “Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let’s say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don’t really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you’re not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals—‘I’m going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty’—or submissive signals—‘You’re going to master me, and I’m reconciled to it.’”

“Lord in Heaven,” Harry Coin said softly. “That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn’t work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn’t work either. So I just gave up.”

“Your brain gave up,” Stella corrected. “The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart.”

“But what has redundance got to do with this?” George asked.

“Here’s the passage,” Stella said. She began to read aloud:

“That’s heavy,” George said, “but I’ll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus
or
Emperor Norton.”

“Exactly!” Harry Coin chortled. “And that ends the game. You’ve just proven what I suspected all along.
You’re
the Martian!”

“Don’t raise your voices,” Calley said drowsily from the floor. “I can see hundreds of blissful Buddhas floating through the air …”

A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile—together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle—were taking up Danny Pricefixer’s attention, back in New York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the
Confrontation
bombing and the five associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. “Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is gone. This Dorn kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind of progress before
the day is over, or I’ll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men.”

When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, “What are you going to do?”

“Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They’ll produce.” Van Meter didn’t really sound convinced. “What are
you
going to do?” he added lamely.

“I’m going to play a hunch,” Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his namesake in the famous television series.

“I want a mystic,” Danny said.

“Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer…any preference?” Friday asked.

“The technique doesn’t matter. I want one you’ve never been able to pin anything on. One you investigated and found a little scary…as if she or he really did have something on the ball.”

“I know the one you want,” Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. “R & I,” he said and waited. “Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra.”

The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for. Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times—usually at the demand of rich husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with her—but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never played any games remotely like an
okanna borra
or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business card, included in the package, modestly offered only “spiritual insight,” but she evidently delivered it in horse doctor’s
doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.

“This is my woman,” Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse’s ass. This was really going way out on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh, in Arkham, was connected with the
Confrontation
mystery, and both were connected with Fernando Poo and the gods of Atlantis.

The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her phone and said, “You can go right in.”

Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama Sutra’s desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains, shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.

Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the “thorny path” of lycanthropy until “all tears empty into the sea.”

“What can I do for you?” she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.

“I’m a detective on the New York Police,” Danny
said, showing her his badge. “I’m not here to hassle you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket.”

She smiled gently. “The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I can help you; perhaps not. There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I would like to keep on friendly terms with the police.”

Danny nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “Here’s the story …”

“Wait.” Mama Sutra frowned. “I think I am picking up something already. Yes.
District Attorney Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can’t live as please, let me die when I choose
. Does any of that mean anything to you?”

“Only the first part,” Danny said, perplexed. “I suspect that the matter I’m investigating goes back at least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn’t help at all, though. Where did you get it from?”

“There are…vibrations … and I register them.” Mama Sutra smiled again. “That’s the best explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I’ve learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will explain to
me
what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date,
June 15, 1904?
That seems to be on the same wave.”

Pricefixer shook his head. “No help, as they say in poker.”

“Wait,” Mama Sutra said. “It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The
novel is called
Ulysses
, and is impregnated on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was actually in the Dublin papers that day—the book takes place in Dublin, you see—and one of the stories concerned the sinking of the ship,
General Slocum
, in New York Harbor the day before, June 15.”

“Did you say Golden Dawn?” Pricefixer demanded excitedly.

“Yes. Does that help?”

“It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you’re on the right track. The case I’m working on seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and…let’s see…some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember.”

“To
Mega Theiron”
Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. “Young man, what you are involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both James Joyce’s mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my receptionist make you a rather stiff drink.”

“Can’t drink on duty, ma’am,” Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. “Very well. You’ll have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can.”

“Does it involve the lloigor?” Danny asked hesitantly.

“Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much.”

“Ma’am,” Danny said, “I think I’ll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it.”

2422
, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that’s even crazier than the rest of this. 2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean? Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That’s two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let’s see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.

Miss Mao entered with a tray. “Your drink, sir,” she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched her gracefully walk back toward the door.
Mao
is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat.
Mao:
onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids calling a dog “woof-woof.” Come to think of it, that’s how we got the word “wolf.” Funny, I never thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf Man movies. Malik’s mystery mutts. Enough of that.