The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  Maldonado thought about it all day and finally mentioned it to a very close friend that evening. “Some nut calls me up today and gives me part of what the Dutchman told the cops before he died. Funny thing about it—he gives one of the parts that would really sink us all, if anybody in the police or the Feds could understand it.”

  “That’s the way some nuts are,” pronounced the other Mafioso don, an elegant elderly gentleman resembling one of Frederick II’s falcons. “They’re tuned in like gypsies. Telepathy, you know? But they get it all scrambled because they’re nuts.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s it,” Maldonado agreed. He had a crazy uncle who would sometimes blurt out a Brotherhood secret that he couldn’t possibly know, in the middle of ramblings about priests making it with altar boys and Mussolini hiding on the fire escape and nonsense like that. “They tune in—like the Eye, eh?” And he laughed.

  But the next morning, the phone rang again, and the same voice said with elaborate New England intonation, “Those dirty rats have tuned in. French Canadian bean soup.” Maldonado broke into a cold sweat; it was that moment, in fact, when he decided his son, the priest, would say a mass for the Dutchman every Sunday.

  He thought about it all day. Boston—the accent was Boston. They had witches up there once. French Canadian bean soup. Christ, Harvard is just outside Boston and Hoover is recruiting Feds from the Harvard Law School. Were there lawyers who were witches, too? Cowboy the son of a bitch, I told them, and they found him in the men’s crapper. That damned Dutchman. A bullet in his gut and he lives long enough to blab everything about the Segreto. The goddam tedeschi …

  Robert Putney Drake dined on lobster Newburg that evening with a young lady from one of the lesser-known branches of the House of Morgan. Afterward, he took her to see Tobacco Road and, in the cab back to his hotel, they talked seriously about the sufferings of the poor and the power of Henry Hull’s performance as Jeeter. Then he took her up to his room and fucked her from hell to breakfast. At ten in the morning, after she had left, he came out of the shower, stark naked, thirty-three years old, rich, handsome, feeling like a healthy and happy predatory mammal. He looked down at his penis, thought of snakes in mescaline visions back in Zurich and donned a bathrobe which cost enough to feed one of the starving families in the nearby slums for about six months. He lit a fat Cuban cigar and sat down by the phone, a male mammal, predatory, happy. He began to dial, listening to the clicks, the dot and the dot and the dot-dot, remembering the perfume his mother had worn leaning over his crib one night thirty-two years ago, the smell of her breasts, and the time he experimentally tried homosexuality in Boston Common with the pale faggot kneeling before him in the toilet stall and the smell of urine and Lysol disinfectant, the scrawl on the door saying eleanor roosevelt sucks and his instant fantasy that it wasn’t a faggot genuflecting in church before his hot hard prick but the President’s wife … “Yes?” said the taut, angry voice of Banana Nose Maldonado.

  “When I reached the can, the boy came at me,” Drake drawled, his mild erection becoming warm and rubbery. “What happened to the other sixteen?” He hung up quickly. (“The analysis is brilliant,” Professor Tochus at Harvard had said of his paper on the last words of Dutch Schultz. “I particularly like the way you’ve combined both Freud and Adler in finding sexuality and power drives expressed in the same image at certain places. That is quite original.” Drake laughed and said: “The Marquis de Sade anticipated me by a century and a half, I fear. Power—and possession—are sexual, to some males.”)

  Drake’s brilliance had also been noted by Jung’s circle in Zurich. Once—when Drake was off taking mescaline with Paul Klee and friends on what they called their Journey to the East—Drake had been a topic of long and puzzled conversation in Jung’s study. “We haven’t seen his like since Joyce was here” one woman psychiatrist commented. “He is brilliant, yes,” Jung said sadly, “but evil. So evil that I despair of comprehending him. I even wonder what old Freud would think. This man doesn’t want to murder his father and possess his mother; he wants to murder God and possess the cosmos.”

  Maldonado got two phone calls the third morning. The first was from Louis Lepke, and was crudely vehement: “What’s up, Banana Nose?” The insult of using the forbidden nickname in personal conversation was deliberate and almost unforgivable, but Maldonado forgave it.

  “You spotted my boys following you, eh?” he asked genially.

  “I spotted your soldiers,” Lepke emphasized the word, “and that means you wanted me to spot them. What’s up? You know if I get hit, you get hit.”

  “You won’t get hit, caro mio,” Don Federico replied, still cordial. “I had a crazy idea about something I thought might be coming from inside and you’re the only one who would know enough to do it, I thought. I was wrong. I can tell by your voice. And if I was right, you wouldn’t have called me. A million apologies. Nobody will be following you anymore. Except maybe Tom Dewey’s investigators, eh?” he laughed.

  “Okay,” Lepke said slowly, “Call them off, and I’ll forget it. But don’t try to scare me again. I do crazy things when I’m scared.”

  “Never again,” Maldonado promised.

  He sat frowning at the phone, after Lepke hung up. Now I owe him, he thought. I’ll have to arrange to bump off somebody who’s annoying him, to show the proper and most courteous apology.

  But, Virgin Mother, if it isn’t the Butcher, who is it? A real witch?

  The phone rang again. Crossing himself and calling on the Virgin silently, Maldonado lifted the receiver.

  “Let him harness himself to you and then bother you,” Robert Putney Drake quoted pleasantly, “fun is fun.” He did not hang up.

  “Listen,” Don Federico said, “who is this?”

  “Dutch died three times,” Drake said in a sepulchral tone. “When Mendy Weiss shot him, when Vince Coil’s ghost shot him and when that dumb junkie, the Teacher, shot him. But Dillinger never even died once.”

  “Mister, you got a deal,” Maldonado said. “I’m sold. I’ll meet you anywhere. In broad daylight. In Central Park. Any place you’ll feel safe.”

  “No, you will not meet me just now,” Drake said coolly. “You are going to discuss this with Mr. Lepke and Mr. Capone, first. You will also discuss it with—” he read, off a card in his hand, fifteen names. “Then, after you have all had time to consider it, you will be hearing from me.” Drake farted, as he always did in the nervous moments when an important deal was being arranged, and hung up quickly.

  Now, he said to himself, insurance.

  A photostat of his second analysis of the last words of Dutch Schultz—the private one, not the public version which he had turned in to the Department of Psychology at Harvard—was on the hotel desk before him. He folded it smartly and pinned on top of it a note saying, “There are five copies in the vaults of five different banks.” He then inserted it in an envelope, addressed it to Luciano and strolled out to drop it down the hotel mail chute.

  Returning to his room he dialed Louis Lepke, born Louis Buchalter, of the organization later to be named Murder Inc. by the sensational press. When Lepke answered, Drake recited solemnly, still quoting the Dutchman, “I get a month. They did it. Come on, Illuminati.”

  “Who the hell is this?” Lepke’s voice cried as Drake gently cradled the phone. A few moments later, he completed checking out of the hotel and flew home on the noon flight, to spend five grueling twenty-hour days reorganizing and streamlining his father’s bank. On the fifth night he relaxed and took a young lady of the Lodge family to dance to Ted Weems’s orchestra and listen to their new young vocalist, Perry Como. Afterwards, he fucked her thirteen to the dozen and seven ways to a Sunday. The next morning, he took out a small book, in which he had systematically listed all the richest families in America, and placed her first name and a check after Lodge, as he had done with Morgan the week before. A Rockefeller would be next.

  He was on the noon flight to New York and spent the day negot
iating with Morgan Trust officials. That night he saw a breadline on Fortieth Street and became profoundly agitated. Back in his hotel, he made one of his rare, almost furtive diary entries:

  Revolution could occur at any time. If Huey Long hadn’t been shot last year, we might have it already. If Capone had let the Dutchman hit Dewey, the Justice Department would be strong enough now, due to the reaction, to ensure that the State would be secure. If Roosevelt can’t maneuver us into the war when it starts, all will be lost. And the war may be three or four years away yet. If we could bring Dillinger back, the reaction might strengthen Hoover and Justice, but John seems to be with the other side. My plan may be the last chance, and the Illuminati haven’t contacted me yet, although they must have tuned in. Oh, Weishaupt, what a spawn of muddleheads are trying to carry on your work.

  He tore the page out nervously, farted and crumbled it in the ashtray, where he burned it slowly. Then, still agitated, he dialed Mr. Charles Luciano on the phone and said softly, “I am a pretty good pretzler, Winifred. Department of Justice. I even got it from the department.”

  “Don’t hang up,” Luciano said softly. “We’ve been waiting to hear from you. Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Drake said carefully, with tight lips and a tighter sphincter.

  “Okay,” Mr. Lucky said. “You know about the Illuminati. You know what the Dutchman was trying to say to the police. You even seem to know about the Liberteri and Johnnie Dillinger. How much do you want?”

  “Everything,” Drake replied. “And you are all going to offer it to me. But not yet. Not tonight.” And he hung up.

  (The wheel of time, as the Mayans knew, spins three ways; and just as the earth revolves on its own axis, simultaneously orbits about the sun and at the “same” time trails after the sun as that star traverses the galaxy’s edge, the wheel of time, which is a wheel of ifs, is come round again, as Drake’s phone clicks off, to Gruad the Grayface calculating the path of a comet and telling his followers: “See? Even the heavenly bodies are subject to law, and even the lloigor, so must not men and women also be subject to law?” And in a smaller cycle, Semper Cuni Linctus, centurion stationed in a godforsaken outpost of the Empire, listens in boredom as a subaltern tells him excitedly: “That guy we crucified last Friday—people all over town are swearing they’ve seen him walking around. One guy even claims to have put a hand through his side!” Semper Cuni Linctus smiles cynically. “Tell that to the gladiators,” he says. And Albert Stern turns on the gas, takes one last fix, and full of morphine and euphoria, dies slowly, confident that he will always be remembered as the man who shot Dutch Schultz, not knowing that Abe Reles will reveal the truth five years later.)

  Camp-town racetrack five miles long …

  During Joe’s second trip on the Leif Erikson, they went all the way to Africa, and Hagbard had an important conference with five gorillas. At least, he said afterwards that it was important; Joe couldn’t judge, since the conversation was in Swahili. “They speak some English,” Hagbard explained back on the sub, “but I prefer Swahili, since they’re more eloquent in it and can express more nuances.”

  “Are you the first man to teach an ape to speak,” Joe asked, “in addition to your other accomplishments?”

  “Oh, not at all,” Hagbard said modestly. “It’s an old Discordian secret. The first person to communicate with a gorilla was an Erisian missionary named Malaclypse the Elder, who was born in Athens and got exiled for opposing the imposition of male supremacy when the Athenians created patriarchy and locked up their women. He then wandered all over the ancient world, learning all sorts of secrets and leaving behind a priceless collection of mind-blowing legends—he’s the Phoenix Madman mentioned in the Confucian scriptures, and he passed himself off as Krishna to recite that gorgeous Bible of revolutionary ethics, the Bhagavad Gita, to Arjuna in India, among other feats. I believe you met him in Chicago while he was pretending to be the Christian Devil.”

  “But how have you Discordians concealed the fact that gorillas talk?”

  “We’re rather close-mouthed, you might say, and when we do speak it’s usually to put somebody on or blow their minds—”

  “I’ve noticed that,” Joe said.

  “And the gorillas themselves are too shrewd to talk to anybody but another anarchist. They’re all anarchists themselves, you know, and they have a very healthy wariness about people in general and government people in particular. As one of them told me once, ‘If it got out that we can talk, the conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay rent to live on our own land; and the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators. Who the fuck wants to operate an engine lathe?’ They prefer their own pastoral and Eristic ways, and I, for one, would never interfere with them. We do communicate, though, just as we communicate with the dolphins. Both species are intelligent enough to realize that it’s in their interest, as part of earth’s biosphere, to help the handful of human anarchists to try to stop, or at least slow down, the bloodletting and slaughter of our Aneristic rulers and Aneristic mobs.”

  “Sometimes I still get confused about your theological terms—or are they psychological? The Aneristic forces, especially the Illuminati, are structure freaks: they want to impose their concept of order on everybody else. But I still get confused about the differences between the Erisian, the Eristic and the Discordian. Not to mention the JAMs.”

  “The Eristic is the opposite of the Aneristic,” Hagbard explained patiently, “and, therefore, identical with it. Remember the Hodge-Podge. Writers like De Sade, Max Stirner and Nietzsche are Eristic; so are the gorillas. They represent total supremacy of the individual, total negation of the group. It isn’t necessarily the war-of-all-against-all, as Aneristic philosophers imagine, but it can, under stress, degenerate into that. More often, it’s quite pacifistic, like our hairy friends in the trees back there. The Erisian position is modified; it recognizes that Aneristic forces are part of the world drama, too, and can never be totally abolished. We merely stress the Eristic as a balance, because human society has been tilted grotesquely toward the Aneristic side all through the Piscean age. We Discordians are the activists in the Erisian movement; we do things. The pure Erisians work in more mysterious ways, in accordance with the Taoist principle of wu-wei—doing nothing effectively. The JAMs are left-wingers, who might have become Aneristic except for special circumstances that led them in a libertarian direction. But they’ve fucked it all up with typical left-wing hatred trips. They haven’t mastered the Gita: the art of fighting with a loving heart.”

  “Strange,” Joe said. “Dr. Iggy, in the San Francisco JAM cabal, explained it to me differently.”

  “What would you expect?” Hagbard replied. “No two who know, know the same in their knowing. By the way, why haven’t you told me that you’re sure those gorillas back there were just men I dressed up in gorilla suits?”

  “I’m becoming more gullible,” Joe said.

  “Too bad,” Hagbard told him sadly. “They really were men in gorilla suits. I was testing how easily you could be bamboozled, and you flunked.”

  “Now, wait a minute. They smelled like gorillas. That was no fake. You’re putting me on now”

  “That’s right,” Hagbard agreed. “I wanted to see if you’d trust your own senses or the word of a Natural-Born Leader and Guru like me. You trusted your own senses, and you pass. My put-ons are not just jokes, friend. The hardest thing for a man with dominance genes and piratical heredity like me is to avoid becoming a goddam authority figure. I need all the feedback and information I can get—from men, women, children, gorillas, dolphins, computers, any conscious entity—but nobody contradicts an Authority, you know. Communication is possible only between equals: that’s the first theorem of social cybernetics—and the whole basis of anarchism—and I have to keep knocking down people’s dependence on me or I’ll become a fucking Big Daddy and won’t get accurate communication anymore. If the pig-headed Illuminati and their Aner
istic imitators in all the governments, corporations, universities and armies of the world understood that simple principle, they’d occasionally find out what’s actually going on and stop screwing up every project they start. I am Freeman Hagbard Celine and I am not anybody’s bloody leader. As soon as you fully understand that I’m your equal, and that my shit stinks just like yours, and that I need a lay every few days or I get grouchy and make dumb decisions, and that there is One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages but you have to find him for yourself, then you’ll begin to understand what the Legion of Dynamic Discord is all about.”

  “One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages …?” Joe repeated, finding himself most confused when he had been closest to total comprehension a second earlier.

  “To receive light you must be receptive,” Hagbard said curtly. “Work that one out for yourself. Meanwhile, take this back to New York and chew on it a bit.” And he presented Joe with a book entitled Never Whistle While You’re Pissing: A Guide to Self-Liberation, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.

  Joe read the book carefully in the following weeks—while Pat Walsh, in Confrontation’s research department, checked out every assertion about the Illuminati that Joe had picked up from Hagbard, Simon, Dillinger and Dr. Ignotius—but, although some of the book was brilliant, much was obscure, and he found no clue to the One more trustworthy than all Buddhas. Then, one night high on Alamout Black hashish, he started working on it with expanded and intensified consciousness. Malaclypse the Elder? No, he was wise, and somewhat benevolent in a fey sort of style, but certainly not trustworthy. Simon? For all his youth and nuttiness, he had moments of incredible perception, but he was almost certainly less enlightened than Hagbard. Dillinger? Dr. Ignotius? The mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, who had disappeared, leaving behind only the inscrutable Principia Discordia?