The illuminatus! trilogy (86 page)

No; there was a sketchpad on the coffee table. His, according to the aura.

I flipped pages rapidly: all detailed, precise, perfectly naturalistic. Mostly faces: criminals he had dealt with professionally, all touched with a perception and compassion that he kept out of his work hours. Trees in Central Park. Nudes of Rebecca, adoration in every line of the pencil. A surprising face of a black kid, with some Harem slum building in the background—another touch of unexpected compassion. Then a switch—the first abstract. It was a Star of David, basically, but he had started adding energetic waves coming out of it, and the descending triangle was shaded—somewhere, in the back of his head, he had been working out the symbolism, and coming amazingly close to the truth. More faces of obvious criminal types. A scene in the Catskills, with Rebecca reading a book under a tree— something wrong, gloom and fear in the shading. I closed my eyes and concentrated: The picture came in with a second woman … I opened my eyes, sweating. It was his first wife, and she had died of cancer. He was afraid of losing Rebecca too, but she was young and healthy. Another man. He thought she might leave him for a younger man. Well, that was the key, then. I flipped a few more pages and saw a unicorn—some more of the unconscious work that went into that erotic Star of David.

A quick scan of Rebecca’s books then. Mostly anthropology, mostly African. I took one off the shelf and held it.
Eros again, thinly sublimated. The other part of the key. As Hassan i Sabbah X once remarked to me, “Breathes there a white woman with soul so dead, she never yearned for a black in her bed?”

I returned everything to its place carefully and headed for the back door. I stopped in the kitchen to read the chair again, since relapse is as much a part of the syndrome in heroin addiction as in black-lung disease. This time I found what stopped her. If I say love, I’ll sound sentimental, and if I say sex, I’ll sound cynical. I’ll call it pair bonding and sound scientific.

Slipping back into my car, I checked the time elapsed: seventeen minutes. It would have taken several hours to unearth as many facts by ordinary detection methods, and they would have been different, less significant, facts.
training has certainly made all my other jobs easier.

There was only one remaining problem: I didn’t want to kill anybody at this point, and a bombing would only get Muldoon in. Even having Malik disappear might only bring in Missing Persons.

Then I remembered the dummies used by the clothier on the eighteenth floor, right above the
Confrontation
office. Burn the dummy just right before setting the bomb and it might work … I drove back toward Manhattan whistling “Ho-Ho-Ho, Who’s Got the Last Laugh Now?”

(The bomb went off at 2:30 A.M. one week later. Simon, leaving O’Hare Airport, where it was 1:30 A.M., decided he still had time to get to the Friendly Stranger and meet that cute lady cop who had so cleverly infiltrated the Nameless Anarchist Horde. He could get her into bed easily enough, since female spies always expect men to reveal secrets when they’re in the dreamy afterglow with their guard down; he would teach her some sexual yoga, he decided, and see what secrets she might slip. But he remembered the midnight conference at the UN building after the bomb was set, and Malik’s grim words: “If we’re right about this, we might all be dead before Woodstock Europa opens next week.”)

“Are you a turtle?” Lady Velkor asks again, approaching another man in green. “No,” he says, “I have no armor.” She smiles as she murmurs, “Blessed be,” and he replies, “Blessed be”…Doris Horus heard the voice behind her
say “And how’s the Miskatonic Messalina?” and her heart leaped, not believing it, but when she turned it was him, Stack … “Jesus,” one Superman said to another, “does he personally know all the good-looking white chicks in the world?”…The Senate and the People of Rome were still tussling with Attila and His Huns, but Hermie “Speed King” Trismegistos, drummer with the Credibility Gap, watched placidly from only a few feet away, seeing them as a very complicated, almost mathematical ballet; he was concerned only with determining whether they illustrated the eternal warfare of Set and Osiris or the joining of atoms to make molecules. He knew he was on acid, but, what the hell, that must have been the Kool-Aid, another of Tyl Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks …

The submarine rose above the plateau, lifting into the waters of Lake Totenkopf. Mooring it well below the surface on the shore opposite Ingolstadt, Hagbard and about thirty of his crew entered scuba launches and buzzed to the surface. Parked on a road beside the lake was a line of cars, led by a magnificent Bugatti Royale. Hagbard grandly ushered George, Stella, and Harry Coin into the enormous car. George was shocked to see that the chauffeur was a man whose face was covered with gray fur.

It was a long drive around the lake to the town of Ingolstadt. It was very much as George had imagined it, all turrets and spires and Gothic towers mixed with modern-Martian edifices straight from Mad Avenue, but most of the buildings looking like they had been put up in the days of Prince Henry the Fowler.

“This place is full of beautiful buildings,” said Hagbard. “The big Gothic cathedral in the center of town is called the Liebfrauenminister. There’s another rococo church called the Maria Victoria—I’ve always wanted to get stoned on acid and go look at the carvings, they’re so intricate.”

“Have you been here before, Hagbard?” Harry asked.

“On scouting missions. I know where all the good places are. Tonight you’re all going to be my guests at the Schlosskeller in Ingolstadt Castle.”

“We have to be your guests,” said George. “None of us have any money.”

“If you have flax,” said Hagbard, “you can pay in flax at the Schlosskeller.”

They went first to the Donau-Hotel, which Hagbard said
was the most modern and comfortable in Ingolstadt, where Hagbard had reserved almost all the rooms for his people. With every hotel in Ingolstadt bursting at the seams, it had taken a huge advance payment to bring this off. The hotel’s staff jumped to attention when they saw the line of cars with Hagbard’s splendid Bugatti in the vanguard. Even in a town crowded with celebrities, overrun with wealthy rock musicians and affluent rock fans from all over the world, a machine like Hagbard’s commanded respect.

George, following Hagbard into the lobby, suddenly found himself face to face with two ancient, bent German men. One, with a long white mustache and a lock of white hair that fell over his forehead, said, in heavily accented English, “Get out of my way, degenerate Jewish Communist homosexual.” The other old man winced and said something placating to his colleague in a soft voice. The first man waved his hand in dismissal, and they tottered toward the elevators together. Several more old men joined them as George watched, too surprised to be angry. Here, though, in the fatherland of that kind of mentality, the old man’s hatred seemed historical curiosity to him more than anything else. Doubtless such men as that had actually seen Hitler in the flesh.

Hagbard grandly took a handful of room keys from the desk clerk. “For simplicity’s sake, I’ve assigned a man and a woman to each room,” he said as he passed them out. “Choose your roommates and switch around as you like. When you get up to your rooms you’ll find suitable Bavarian peasant costumes laid out on the bed. Please put them on.”

Stella and George went upstairs together. George unlocked the door and surveyed the large room with its two double beds. On top of one lay a man’s outfit of lederhosen with silk shirt and knee socks, while on the other bed was a woman’s peasant skirt, blouse, and vest.

“Costumes,” Stella said. “Hagbard’s really crazy.” She shut the door and tugged at the zipper of her one-piece gold knit pantsuit. She had nothing on underneath. She smiled as George regarded her with admiration.

When the group was assembled in the lobby, only Stella looked good in costume. Of the men, Hagbard looked most natural and happy in lederhosen—which was, perhaps, why he’d had the notion of dressing that way. Long, skinny Harry
looked ridiculous and uncomfortable, but his buck-toothed grin showed he was trying to be a good sport

George looked around. “Where’s Mavis?” he asked Hagbard.

“She didn’t come with us. She’s back minding the store.” Hagbard raised his arm imperiously. “On to the Schlosskeller.”

The Ingolstadt Castle, a battlemented medieval building built on a hill, had a magnificent restaurant in what had formerly been either a dungeon or a wine cellar or both. Hagbard had reserved the entire cellar for the evening.

“Here,” he said, “we’ll rally our forces around us, have some fun, and prepare for the morrow.” He seemed in an agitated, almost giddy mood. He took his place at the center of a big table in a blackened carved chair that looked like a bishop’s throne. On the wall behind him was a famous painting. It depicted the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV barefoot in the snow at Canossa, but with one foot on the neck of Pope Gregory the Great, who lay prone, his tiara knocked off, his face ignominiously buried in a snowdrift.

“The story goes that this was commissioned by the notorious Bavarian jester Tyl Eulenspiegel when he was at the height of his fortunes,” Hagbard said. “Later, when he was old and penniless, he was hanged for his anarchistic attitudes and his low Bavarian sense of humor. So it goes.”

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS

(“There he is!” Markoff Chaney whispers tensely. Saul and Barney lean forward, peering at the figure ahead of them. About five-seven, Saul estimates, and Carmel was five-two, according to the R&I packet they had lifted from Las Vegas police headquarters…But who else would be down here, so far from the route of the guided tours?…Saul’s hand moves toward his gun, but the other figure whirls on them, flashing a pistol, and shouts, “Hold it right there, all of you!”)

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS

“Oh Christ,” Saul says disgustedly. “Hail Eris, friend— we’re on the same side.” He holds up his hands, empty. “I’m Saul Goodman and this is Barney Muldoon, both formerly of the New York Police Force. This is our friend Markoff Chaney, a man of great imagination and a true
servant of Goddess. All hail Discordia, Twenty-three Skidoo, Kallisti, and do you need any more passwords, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Gosh,” Markoff Chaney says. “You mean that’s really John Dillinger?”

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES

(Rhoda Chief, vocalist and apprentice witch, sampled some of her own Kool-Aid early in the evening. She swore until the day she died that what happened in Ingolstadt that
Walpurgisnacht
was nothing less than the appearance of a giant sea serpent in Lake Totenkopf. The beast, she insisted, turned, took its own tail in its mouth, and gradually dwindled to a dot, giving off good vibes and flashes of Astral Light as it diminished.)

There were many empty places at the big table when the Discordians sat down. Hagbard seemed in no hurry to order dinner. Instead he called for round after round of the local beer, of which enormous stocks had been laid in to prepare for the great rock festival. George, Stella, and Harry Coin sat together near Hagbard, and George and Harry discussed sodomy objectively, between long, thoughtful pauses and deep drinking. Hagbard sent the beer around so fast that George frequently had to swill down a whole stein in a minute or two, just to keep up. Various people came in and sat down at empty places at the table. George shook hands with a man around thirty who introduced himself as Simon Moon. He had a lovely black woman with him named Mary Lou Servix. Simon immediately began telling everybody about a fantastic novel he had been reading on the plane coming over. George was interested until he found out that the book was
Telemachus Sneezed
, by Atlanta Hope. He didn’t see how anyone could take trash like that seriously.

Just around the time George was finishing his tenth stein of Ingolstadt’s fabled beer and feeling quite woozy, a man who looked very familiar floated into his line of vision. The man wore a brown suit and horn-rimmed glasses, and his gray hair was crew-cut.

“George!” the man shouted.

“Yes, it’s me, Joe,” said George. “Of course it’s me. That’s you, Joe, isn’t it?” He turned to Harry Coin. “That’s the guy who sent me down to Mad Dog to investigate.” Harry laughed.

“My God,” said Joe. “What’s happened to you, George?” He looked vaguely frightened.

“A lot of things,” said George. “How many years has it been since I’ve seen you, Joe?”

“Years? It’s been seven days, George. I saw you just before you caught the plane to Texas. What have you been doing?”

George shook his finger, “You were holding out on me, Joe. You wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t know a lot more than you claimed to when you sent me to Mad Dog. Maybe good old Hagbard can tell you what I’ve been doing. There’s good old Hagbard looking over at us from his end of the table right now. What do you say, Hagbard? Do you know good old Joe Malik?”

Hagbard lifted a huge, ornamented stein of beer, which the management of the Schlosskeller had provided him as an honored guest. It was adorned with elaborate bas-reliefs of pagan woodland scenes, including tumescent satyrs pursuing chubby nymphs.