The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  So now he was going to meet the men who ran organized crime in the U.S. He knew practically nothing about the Syndicate and the Mafia, and what little he did know he tended to disbelieve on the grounds that it was probably myth. Hagbard had sketched in a little additional information for him while he was preparing for this flight. But the one thing that George was absolutely certain about was that he was going unprotected among men who killed human beings as easily as a housewife kills silverfish. And he was supposed to negotiate with them. The Syndicate had been working with the Illuminati until now. Now they were supposed to switch over to the Discordians, on George’s say-so. With, of course, the help of four priceless statues. Except, what were Robert Putney Drake and Federico Maldonado going to say when they heard these statues had been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean floor out of the ruins of Atlantis? They would probably express their skepticism with pistols and send George back to the place he claimed the statues came from.

  “Why me?” George had asked Hagbard earlier that day.

  “Why me?” Hagbard repeated with a smile. “The question asked by the soldier as the enemy bullets whistle around him, by the harmless homeowner as the homicidal maniac steps through the kitchen door hunting knife in hand, by the woman who has given birth to a dead baby, by the prophet who has just had a revelation of the word of God, by the artist who knows his latest painting is a work of genius. Why you? Because you’re there, schmuck. Because something has to happen to you. OK?”

  “But what if I fuck it up? I don’t know anything about your organization or the Syndicate. If times are as crucial as you say, if’s silly to send somebody like me on this mission. I have no experience meeting people like this”

  Hagbard shook his head impatiently. “You underrate yourself. Just because you’re young and afraid you think you can’t talk to people. That’s stupid. And it’s not typical of your generation, so you should be all the more ashamed of yourself. Furthermore, you are experienced with even worse people than Drake and Maldonado. You spent part of a night in a cell with the man who killed John F. Kennedy.”

  “What?” George felt the blood rush out of his face and he thought he might faint

  “Oh, sure,” said Hagbard casually. “Joe Malik was on the right track when he sent you to Mad Dog, you know.”

  After all that, Hagbard told George he was perfectly free to turn down the mission if he didn’t want to go. And George said he would go for the same reason he had agreed to accompany Hagbard on his golden submarine. Because he knew that he would have been a fool to pass up the experience.

  A two-hour drive brought the truck to the outskirts of Blue Point, Long Island, to the gates of an estate. Two heavy-set men in green coveralls searched George and the driver, pointed the bell-shaped nozzle of an instrument at the truck and studied some dials, and then waved them through. They drove up a winding, narrow asphalt road through woods just beginning to show the light green budding of early spring. Shadowy figures prowled among the trees. Suddenly the road burst out of the woods and into a meadow. From here there was a long gentle rising slope to the top of a hill that was crowned by houses. From the edge of the woods George could see four large, comfortable-looking cottages, each three stories high, a little smaller than Newport, a little larger than Atlantic City. They were made of brick painted in seaside pastel colors and formed a semicircle on the crest of the hill. The grass of the meadow was cut very short, and halfway up the hill it became a beautifully manicured lawn The woods screened the houses from the road, the meadow made it impossible for anyone emerging from woods to approach the houses without being seen, and the houses themselves constituted the elements of a fortress.

  The Gold & Appel truck followed the driveway, which led between two of the houses, rolling over slots in the driveway where a section might be hydraulically raised to form a wall. The driver stopped at a gesture from one of two men in khakis who approached. George could now see the Syndicate fortress consisted of eight separate houses forming an octagon around a lawn. Each house had its own fenced-in yard, and George noticed with surprise that there was play equipment for children in front of several cottages. In the center of the compound was a tall white pole from which flew an American flag.

  George and the driver stepped down from the cab of the truck. George identified himself and was ushered to the far side of the compound. The hill was much steeper on this side, George saw. It sloped down to a narrow boulder-strewn beach drenched by huge Atlantic waves. A nice view, George thought. And eminently secure. The only way Drake’s enemies could get at him would be to shell his home from a destroyer.

  A slender, blond man—at least sixty and maybe a well-preserved seventy—came down the steps of the house George was approaching. He had a concave nose that ended in a sharp point, a strong, cleft chin, ice-blue eyes. He shook hands vigorously.

  “Hi. I’m Drake. The others are inside. Let’s go. Oh—is it OK with you if we go ahead and unload your truck?” He gave George a sharp, birdlike look. George realized with a sinking feeling that Drake was saying that they would take the statues regardless of whether any deal went through. Why, then, should they inconvenience themselves by changing sides in this underground war? But he nodded in acquiescence.

  “You’re young, aren’t you?” said Drake as they went into the house. “But that’s the way it is nowadays. Boys do men’s work.” The house was handsome inside, but not as one might expect, incredible. The carpets were thick, the woodwork heavy, dark and polished, the furnishings probably genuine antiques. George didn’t see how Atlantean statues would fit into the decor. There was a painting at the top of the stairs to the second floor of a woman who looked slightly like Queen Elizabeth II. She wore a white gown with diamonds at her neck and wrists. Two small, fragile-looking blond boys in navy blue suits with white satin ties stood with her, staring solemnly out of the painting.

  “My wife and sons,” said Drake with a smile.

  They entered a large study full of mahogany, oak paneling, leatherbound books and red and green leather furniture. Theodore Roosevelt would have loved it, George thought. Over the desk hung a painting of a bearded man in Elizabethan costume. He was holding a bowling ball in his hand and looking superciliously at a messenger type who pointing out to sea. There were sailing ships in the distant background.

  “An ancestor,” said Drake simply. He pressed a button in a panel on the desk. A door opened and two men came in, the first a tall young Chinese with a boney face and unruly black hair, the second a short, thin man who bore a faint resemblance to Pope Paul VI.

  “Don Federico Maldonado, a man of the greatest respect,” said Drake. “And Richard Jung, my chief counselor.” George shook hands with both of them. He couldn’t understand why Maldonado was known as “Banana-Nose;” his proboscus was on the large side, but bore little resemblance to a banana. It was more like an eggplant. The name must be a sample of low Sicilian humor. The two men took seats on a red leather couch. George and Drake sank into armchairs facing them.

  “And how are my favorite musicians doing?” Jung said genially.

  Was this some kind of password? George was sure of one thing: his survival depended on sticking absolutely to truth and sincerity with these people, so he said, very sincerely, “I don’t know. Who are your favorite musicians?”

  Jung smiled back, saying nothing, until George, his heart racing inside his chest like a hamster determined to run clear off the treadmill, reached into his briefcase and took out a parchment scroll.

  “This,” he said, “is the fundamental agreement proposed by the people I represent.” He handed it to Drake. Maldonado, he noticed, was staring fixedly, expressionlessly, at him in the most unnerving way. The man’s eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His face was a waxen mask. He was, George decided, a wax dummy of Pope Paul VI which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud’s, dressed in a business suit, and brought to life to serve as the head of the Mafia. George had always thought there was something witchy a
bout Sicilians.

  “Do we sign this in blood?” said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.

  George laughed nervously. “Pen and ink will do fine.”

  Saul’s angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say desperately. I really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.

  “What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six,” Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d’etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer’s cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, “was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It’s so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. Just as the householder doesn’t notice the humble termite, until it’s too late…. Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?”

  Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4 × 3 × 2 × 1, and read aloud his answer “Twenty-four.”

  “And if you’re one of the elements, the number of coalitions—or to be sinister, conspiracies—that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon’s obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance,” Hagbard added quickly. “Just consider it pragmatically—it’s a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements …?”

  Joe wrote 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 and read aloud, “One hundred and twenty.” “You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren’t aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in the early thirties, that nobody should ever directly supervise more than four subordinates, because the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain. When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of Gruad.” Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.

  “Now,” he said, “put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization. Imagine, for instance, that you’re poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn’t have let him out of Russia without getting a commitment from him to do ‘small jobs,’ as they’re called in the business, although he’d be a ‘sleeper.’ That is, he’d go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular ‘small job.’ Now, of course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without some such agreement. And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn’t take him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. Then, November twenty-second, Dealy Plaza—blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be innocent? Could another group—to avoid the obvious, let’s call them Force X—have stage-managed the whole thing? So, you’ve got MVD and CIA and FBI and who-all falling over each other sniffing around Dallas and New Orleans for clues. And Force X gets to seem more and more implausible to all of them, because it is intrinsically incredible. It is incredible because it has no skeleton, no shape, no flesh, nothing they can grab hold of. The reason is, of course, that Force X is the Illuminati, working through five leaders with five times four times three times two times one, or one hundred and twenty different basic vectors. A conspiracy with one hundred and twenty vectors doesn’t look like a conspiracy: it looks like chaos. The human mind can’t grasp it, and hence declares it nonexistent. You see, the Illuminati is always careful to keep a random element in the one hundred and twenty vectors. They didn’t really need to recruit both the leaders of the ecology movement and the executives of the worst pollution-producing corporations. They did it to create ambiguity. Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds like a paranoid. What clinched it,” Hagbard concluded, “was a real stroke of luck for the Weishaupt gang: there were two other elements involved, which nobody had planned or foreseen. One was the Syndicate.”

  “It always starts with nonsense,” Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. “Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, ‘du hexen Hase,’ which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: ‘You wascal wabbit!’ But out of that schizzy mixture of hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic application as a principal of international espionage, using permutations and combinations that I’ll explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion, psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova. Maybe the put-on or nonsense part comes by contamination from the unconscious, I don’t know. But it’s always there. That’s why serious people never discover anything of real importance.”

  “You mean the Mafia?” Joe asks.

  “What? I didn’t say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?”

  “No, not the Mafia alone,” Hagbard says. “The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf.” The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he’s Captain Nemo. Still: we’ve got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can’t do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe’s return to present time. “You’re reaching the critical stage,” he said changing the subject. “You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That’s very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman’s last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor expected, and got an A for the course—but he also wrote another interpretation of the Dutchman’s words, for his own purposes. He put copies in several bank vaults—he came from one of the oldest banking families in New England, and he was even then under family pressure to give up psychology and go into banking. His name was

  (Robert Putney Drake visited Zurich in 1935. He personally talked to Carl Jung about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the I Ching, and the principle of synchronicity. He talked to people who had known James Joyce before that drunken Irish genius had moved to Paris, and learned much about Joyce’s drunken claims to be a prophet. He read the published portions of Finnegans Wake and went back for further conversations with Jung. Then he met Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the other members of the Eastern Brotherhood and joined them i
n a mescaline ritual. A letter from his father arrived about then, asking when he was going to give up wasting his time and return to Harvard Business School. He wrote that he would return for the fall semester, but not to study business administration. A great psychologist was almost born then, and Harvard might have had its Timothy Leary scandal thirty years earlier.

  Except for Drake’s power drive.)

  I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune’s cookie.

  Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is the mask of masculinity?

  This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman’s body can only be cured one way. I might be kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact, already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter. (The psychiatrist is now naked. He joins her on the bed.) Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a true-born, honest-to-God woman….

  Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn’t believed until then that the change was real.

  Weishaupt bridge is falling down

  Falling down

  Falling down

  And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chaney (no relative of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.