"Thanks," 00005 said warmly, taking a long, cold, delightful swallow.
He had a very low threshhold for LSD. The world began to seem brighter, stranger, and more colorful within only a few minutes.
(The joker was actually Rhoda Chief, the vocalist who sang with the Heads of Easter Island, and who had inspired much admiration in the younger generation-and much horror in the older- when she named her out-of-wedlock baby Jesus Jehovah Lucifer Satan Chief. A former Processene and Scientologist, currently going the Wicca route, the buxom Rhoda was renowned through show biz for "giving head like no chick alive," a reputation which often provoked certain Satanists on the Linda Lovelace for President Committee to send very deadly vibes in her direction, all of which bounced off due to her Wicca shield. She was also possibly the greatest singer of her generation, and firmly believed that most human problems would be solved if the whole world could be turned on to acid. She had been preparing for the Ingolstadt festival for several months, buying only the top-quality tabs from the most reliable dealers, and she had crept into the geodesic Kool-Aid station only a few moments earlier, dumping enough pure lysergic acid diethylamicte to blow the minds of the population of a small country. Actually, the idea had been subtly planted in her consciousness by the leader of her Wiccan, an astonishingly beautiful woman with flaming red hair and smoldering green eyes who had once played a starring role in a Black Mass celebrated by Padre Pederastia at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. This woman called herself Lady Velkor, and often made jokes about her memories of 18th-century Bavaria, which Rhoda assumed were references to reincarnation.) On April 10, while Howard made his discovery in the ruins of Atlantis and Tlaloc grinned in Mexico D.F., Tobias Knight, in his room at the Hotel Pan Kreston in Santa Isobel, concluded a broadcast to the American submarine in the Bight of Biafra. "The Russkies and Chinks have completed their withdrawal, and Generalissimo Puta is definitely friendly to our side, besides being popular with both the Bubi and the Fang. My work is definitely finished, and I'll await orders to return to Washington." "Roger. Over and out."
(Frank Sullivan, capitalizing on his only real asset, was operating in Havana as a Cuban Superman, using the name Papa Piaba, when the Brotherhood spotted his resemblance to John Dillinger. "Gosh," he said when they made the offer, "five thousand dollars just to take two ladies to a movie one night? And it's only a practical joke, you say?" "It'll be a very funny joke," Jaicapo Mocenigo promised him. And the Smithsonian acquired Mr. Sullivan's asset as one of their most interesting relics.)
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
(Hagbard was accompanied by Joe Malik when he returned to the stateroom. "You go to the beer hall in Munich," he was saying, "and steal any item, anything at all, as long as it's obviously old enough to have been there the night he tried the Putsch. Then you rejoin the rest of us in Ingolstadt. Understood?")
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
Lady Velkor, wearing a green peasant blouse and green hotpants, looked around the geodesic Kool-Aid dome. A man in a green turtleneck sweater and green slacks caught her eye, and she walked over to him, asking, "Are you a turtle?"
"You bet your sweet ass I am," he answered eagerly and so she had failed to make contact- and owed this oaf a free drink also. But she smiled pleasantly and concealed her annoyance.
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER WHEN SHE COMES
Robinson and Lehrman of the Homicide Department actually started the last phase of the operation. I was in New York to see Hassan i Sabbah X about a new phase of Laotian opium operation (I had just come from Chicago, after staging that conversation with Waterhouse for Miss Servix's benefit), and I decided to check with them for those little nuances that can't go into an official report We met in Washington Square and found a bench far enough from the chess nuts to give us some privacy.
"Muldoon is on to us," Robinson told me right off. He was wearing a beard; I figured that meant he was currently in a Weather Underground group, since he was too old to pass for under twenty-one and get into Morituri.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
He made the usual reply: "Who's ever sure of anything in this business? But Barney is pure cop through and through," he added, "and his instincts are like dowsing rods. Everybody on the force knows we've infiltrated them by now, anyway. They even make jokes about it 'Who's the CIA man in your department?'- that kind of thing."
"Muldoon is on to us, all right," Lehrman agreed. "But he's not the one I worry about."
"Who is?" I brushed my walrus mustache nervously; being the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage was starting to grind me down. I really wasn't sure which of my bosses should hear about this, although the CIA certainly had to be told, since for all I know Robinson and Lehnnan might be reporting to them twice, having another contact as a fail-safe check on my own integrity.
"The head of Homicide North," Lehnnan said. "An old geezer named Goodman. He's so damned smart, I sometimes wonder if he's a double agent for the Eye themselves. His mind jumps ahead of facts just like an Adeptus Exemptus in the Order."
I looked up at the statue of Garibaldi, remembering the old NYU myth that he would pull his sword the rest of the way out of the scabbard if a virgin ever walked through Washington Park. "Tell me more about this Goodman," I said.
("Check out the pair on that chick," a Superman said enthusiastically.
("Watermelons," a second Superman agreed enthusiastically. "And you know how us cullud folk dig watermelons," he added, licking his lips.)
("Skin!" the first cried.)
("Skin!" the second agreed.)
(They slapped palms, and Clark Kent came out of his reverie. Having sampled the Kool-Aid a while earlier, he was beginning to float a little, although not yet aware of what was happening-he just felt a rather unusual tug of memory from his days as an anthropologist, and was deeply concerned with a new insight about the relationship between the black Virgin of Guadalupe, the Greek goddess Persephone, and his own sexual proclivities-and he came out of it with a start, looking at the woman whose breasts had inspired such reverence.)
("Son of a bitch," he said piously, his mouth spreading in a grin.)
Rebecca Goodman left the house at 3 P.M., hauling a shopping cart and walking past the garage. The nearest supermarket was a good ten minutes on foot, and big enough to keep her busy for a half-hour finding what she wanted and getting through one of those checkout lines. I slipped out of the car and walked right to the back of the house, perfectly secure from neighboring eyes in my Bell Telephone overalls.
The kitchen door had an easy slip-lock, and I didn't even need my keys. A playing card did the job, and I was in.
My first thought was to head for the bedroom- the old man from Vienna was right, and that's where you'll find the real clues to a man's character- but one chair in the kitchen stopped me. The vibes were so strong that I closed my eyes and psychometered it according to the difficult Third Alko of the A:.A:». It was Rebecca herself: She had sat there and thought about shooting heroin. It faded fast, before I could read what had stopped her.
The bedroom almost knocked me over when I found it "Who would have thought the old man had so much hot blood in him?" I paraphrased, backing out It was a profan-
ation to read too much in there, and what I did scan was enough. As Miss Mao would say, this man was Tao-Yin (Beta prime in the terminology of the I). No wonder Rob inson kept talking about his "intuition." '
The living room had a statue of the Mermaid of Copenhagen that stopped me. I read it and chuckled; Lord, the hangups we all have.
One wall was a built-in bookcase, but Rebecca seemed to be the reader in the family. I started scanning experimentally and found Saul's vibes on a shelf of detective stories and a Scientific American anthology of mathematical and logical puzzles. The man had no concept of his own latent powers, and thought only in terms of solving riddles. Sherlock Holmes, without even the violin and the dope for relief from all that cortical activity. Everything else went into his marriage,
that hothouse bedroom upstairs.
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. A:.A:. 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 Chancy 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 amp;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 Chancy, 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?"
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 64