Back out on the street, Drake experienced a momentary dejection. For nearly twenty years he’s been writing about them and they haven’t contacted him. I’ve been rocking the boat on two continents, and they haven’t contacted me. What does it take to make them show their hand? And if I don’t have an understanding with them, anything I work out with Maldonado and Capone is written on the wind. I just can’t afford to deal with the Mafia before I deal with them. What should I do—put an ad in the New York Times: “Will the All-Seeing Eye please look in my direction? R. P. Drake, Boston”?
And a Pontiac (stolen an hour before in Kingsport) pulled away from the curb, several houses back, and started following Drake as he left Benefit Street and walked back toward the downtown area. He wasn’t looking back, so he didn’t see what happened to it, but he noticed an old man coming toward him stop in his tracks and turn white.
“Jesus on a pogo stick,” the old man said weakly.
Drake looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but an empty street. “What is it?” he asked.
“Never mind,” the old man replied. “You’d never believe me, mister.” And he cut across the sidewalk toward a saloon.
(“What do you mean, you lost four soldiers?” Maldonado screamed into the phone.
“Just what I’m saying,” Eddie Vitelli, of the Providence gambling, heroin and prostitution Vitellis, said. “We found your Drake at a hotel. Four of the best soldiers we’ve got followed him. They called in once to say he was at a house on Benefit Street. I told them to pick him up as soon as he comes out. And that’s it, period, it’s all she wrote. They’re all gone, like something picked them off the face of the earth. I’ve got everybody looking for the car they were in, and that’s gone, too.”)
Drake canceled his trip to New York and went back to Boston, plunging into bank business and mulling over his next move. Two days later, the janitor came to his desk, hat in hand, and asked, “Could I speak to you, Mr. Drake?”
“Yes, Getty, what is it?” Drake replied testily. His tone was deliberate; the man was probably about to ask for a raise, and it was best to put him on the defensive immediately.
“It’s this, sir,” the janitor said, laying a card on Drake’s desk. Drake looked down impatiently and saw a rainbow of colors—the card was printed on some unknown plastic and created a prismatic effect recalling his mescaline trips in Zurich. Through the rainbow, shimmering and radiant, he saw the outlines of a thirteen-step pyramid, with a red eye at the top. He stared up at the janitor and saw a face without subservience or uncertainty.
“The Grand Master of the Eastern United States is ready to talk to you,” the janitor said softly.
“Holy Cleopatra!” Drake cried, and tellers turned to stare at him.
“Kleopatra?” Simon Moon asked, twenty-three years later. “Tell him about Kleopatra.”
It was a sunny afternoon in October and the drapes in the living room of the apartment on the seventeenth floor of 2323 Lake Shore Drive were pulled back to reveal a corner window view of Chicago’s Loop skyscrapers and the whitecap-dotted blue surface of Lake Michigan. Joe sprawled in a chair facing the lake. Simon and Padre Pederastia were on a couch under an enormous painting titled “Kleopatra.” She looked a good deal like Stella Maris and was holding an asp to her bosom. The eye-and-pyramid symbol appeared several times in the hieroglyphs on the tomb wall behind her. Sitting in an armchair opposite the painting was a slender man with sharp, dark features, shoulder-length chestnut hair, a forked brown beard and green eyes.
“Kleopatra,” said the man, “was an instant study. Would have made her Polymother of the great globe itself, if she’d lived. She damned near brought down the Roman Empire, and she did shorten its life by centuries. She forced Octavius to bring so much Aneristic power to bear that the Empire went prematurely into the state of bureaucracy.”
“What do I call you?” said Joe. “Lucifer? Satan?”
“Call me Malaclypse the Elder,” said the fork-bearded man with a smile that seemed to beam through endless shifting veils of warm self-regard.
“I don’t get it,” said Joe. “The first time I saw you, we were all terrified out of our minds. Though when you finally showed up looking like Billy Graham, I didn’t know whether to laugh or go catto. But I know I was scared.”
Padre Pederastia laughed. “You were so terrified, my son, that you were trying to climb right inside our little redhead’s big red bird’s nest. You were so frightened that that hefty cock of yours”—he licked his lips—“was squirting juice all over the carpet. Oh, you were terrified, all right. Oh, my, yes.”
“Well, I wasn’t so scared just at that moment you mention,” said Joe with a smile. “But a little later, when our friend here was about to appear. You were terrified yourself, Padre Pederastia. You kept hollering, ‘Come not in that form! Come not in that form!’ Now we’re all sitting around the living room behaving like old chums—and this—this being here is reminiscing about the good old days with Kleopatra.”
“They were terrible days,” said Malaclypse. “Very cruel days, very sad days. Constant wars, tortures, mass murders, crucifixions. Bad times.”
“I believe you. And what’s worse, I can understand what it means if I believe you, and I can live knowing that you exist. And even sit down in this living room and smoke a cigarette with you.”
Two lit cigarettes appeared between Malaclypse’s fingers. He passed one to Joe. Joe drew on it; it tasted sweet, with just a hint of marijuana.
“That’s a corny trick,” said Joe.
“Just so you don’t lose your old associations to me too quickly,” said Malaclypse. “Too quick to understand, too soon to misunderstand.”
Padre Pederastia said, “The night of that Black Mass, I simply had worked myself up to the point where I totally believed. That’s what magic is, after all. The people who were here that night relate to left-hand magic, to the Satan myth, to the Faust legend. It’s a quick way to get them involved. It worked with you at the time, but we’ve brought you along fast, because we want more help from you. So now you don’t need the trappings.”
“You don’t have to be a Satanist to love Malaclypse,” said Malaclypse.
“In fact, its better if you’re not,” said Simon. “Satanists are creeps. They skin dogs alive and shit like that.”
“Because most Satanists are Christians,” said Joe. “Which is a very masochistic religion.”
“Now, just a minute—” said Padre Pederastia with some asperity.
“He’s right, Pederastia,” said Malaclypse. “Nobody knows that better than you—or me, for that matter.”
“Did you ever meet Jesus?” Joe asked, awed in spite of his skepticism.
Malaclypse smiled. “I was Jesus.”
Padre Pederastia flapped his hands and bounced up and down in his chair. “You’re telling too much!”
“For me, trust is total or nonexistent,” said Malaclypse. “I perceive that I can trust Joe. I wasn’t the original Jesus, Joe, the one they crucified. But—this happened a few centuries after I experienced transcendental illumination at Melos—I was passing through Judea in the persona of a Greek merchant when they crucified Jesus. I met some of his followers the day he died, and I talked with them. If you think Christianity is a bloody religion as it is, this is nothing to what it would have been if Jesus hadn’t seemed to come back. If the seventeen original apostles—five of them have been purged from the records—had been left on their own, they would have passed from horror and terror at Jesus’s death to vindictive fury. It would have been as if Islam had come seven centuries earlier. Instead of slowly taking over the Roman Empire and preserving much of the Greco-Roman world intact, it would have swept and mobilized the East, destroyed most of Western civilization and replaced it with a theocracy more oppressive than Pharaonic Egypt. I stopped that with a few magic tricks. Appearing in the persona of the resurrected Jesus, I taught there was no need for hatred and vengeance after my death. I even tried to get them t
o realize that life is a game by teaching them Bingo. To this day, nobody understands and critics call it part of the commercialism of the Church. The sacred Tarot wheel, the moving Mandala! So despite my influence, Christianity focused obsessively on the crucifixion of Jesus—which is really irrelevant to what he taught while he was alive—and remained a kind of death worship. When Paul went to Athens and made the link-up with the Illuminati, who were using Plato’s Academy as a front, the ideology of Plato combined with the mythology of Christ to deliver the knockout blow to pagan humanism and lay the foundations for the modern world of superstates. After that, I changed my appearance again and took the name of Simon Magus and had some success spreading ideas contradictory to Christianity.”
“You can change your appearance at will, then,” said Joe.
“Oh, sure thing. I’m just as quick with a thought projection as anybody.” He pushed his pinkie thoughtfully into his left nostril and worked it around. Joe stiffened; he didn’t care to watch people picking their noses in public. He looked resolutely over Malaclypse’s left shoulder. “Now that you know as much as you do about us, Joe, it’s time you started working with us. Chicago, as you know, is the Illuminati nerve center in this hemisphere, so we’ll use this town to test AUM, a new drug with astonishing properties, if ELF’s technicians are correct. It’s supposed to turn neophobes into neophiles.”
Simon slapped his forehead and shouted “Wow, man!” and started laughing. Pederastia gasped and whistled.
“You look blank, Joe,” said Malaclypse. “Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes—neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man’s history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest neophile-neophobe conflicts on record.”
“I take it the Illuminati were trying to hold back progress,” said Joe. “Is that their general aim?”
“You’re still thinking like a liberal,” said Simon. “Nobody gives a fuck for progress.”
“Right,” said Malaclypse. “They were the innovators in that instance. All the Illuminati were—and are—neophiles. Even today, they see their work as directed toward progress. They want to become like gods. It’s possible for humans, given the right methods, to translate themselves into sentient latticeworks of pure energy that will be more or less permanent. The process is called transcendental illumination, to distinguish it from the acquisition of insight into the true nature of man and the universe, which is ordinary illumination. I’ve gone through transcendental illumination and am a being composed altogether of energy, as you may have guessed. However, prior to becoming energy fields men often fall victim to hubris. Their actions cause pain to others and make them insensitive, uncreative and irrational. Mass human sacrifice is the most reliable method of achieving transcendental illumination. Human sacrifice can, of course, be masked as other things, such as war, famine and plague. The vision of the Four Horsemen vouchsafed to Saint John is actually a vision of mass transcendental illumination.”
“How did you achieve it?” Joe asked.
“I was present at the massacre of the male inhabitants of the city of Melos by the Athenians in 416 b.c. Have you read Thucydides?”
“A long time ago,”
“Well, Thucydides had it wrong. He presented it as an out-and-out atrocity, but there were extenuating circumstances. The Melians had been stabbing Athenian soldiers in the back, poisoning them, filling them full of arrows from ambush. Some of them were working for the Spartans and some were on the side of Athens, but the Athenians didn’t know which ones they could trust. They didn’t want to do any unnecessary killing, but they did want to get back to Athens alive. So they rounded up all the Melian men one day and hacked them to pieces in the town square. The women and children were sold into slavery.”
“What did you do?” said Joe. “Were you there with the Athenians?”
“Yes, but I didn’t do any killing. I was a chaplain. Of the Erisian denomination, of course. But I was prepared to perform services to Hermes, Dionysus, Heracles, Aphrodite, Athena, Hera and some of the other Olympians. I almost went mad with horror—I didn’t understand that Pangenitor is Panphage. I was praying to Eris to deliver me or deliver the Melians or do something, and she answered me.”
“Hail, she what done it all,” said Simon.
“I almost believe you,” said Joe. “But every once in a while the suspicion creeps in that you’re simply doing a two-thousand-year-old man routine and the butt of the joke is me.”
Malaclypse stood up with a little smile. “Come here, Joe.”
“What for?”
“Just come here.” Malaclypse held his hands away from his sides, palms turned toward Joe appealingly. Joe walked over and stood before him.
“Put your hand into my side,” said Malaclypse.
“Oh, come on,” said Joe. Pederastia snickered. Malaclypse just looked at him with a gentle, encouraging smile, so he reached out to touch Malaclypse’s shirt. His hands still felt nothing. He closed his eyes to verify that. There was no sensation whatever. Thin air. Eyes still shut, he moved his hand forward. He opened his eyes, and when he saw his arm sunk into Malaclypse’s body up to the elbow, he almost barfed his cookies.
He drew back. “It can’t be a movie. I’d be almost willing to say a moving holograph, but the illusion is too perfect. You’re looking right at me. To my eyes you are unquestionably there.”
“Try a few karate chops,” said Malaclypse. Joe obliged, swinging his hand like a scythe through Malaclypse’s waist, chest and head. For a finale, Joe brought his hand straight down through the top of the being’s head.
“I suspend judgment,” said Joe. “Maybe you are what you say you are. But it’s pretty hard to take. Can you feel anything?”
“I can create, temporary sensory organs for myself whenever I want to. I can enjoy just about anything a human enjoys or experiences. But my primary mode of perception is a very advanced form of what you would call intuition. Intuition is a kind of sensitivity in the mind to events and processes; what I have is a highly developed intuitional receptor which is completely controllable.”
Joe went back and sat down, shaking his head. “You certainly are in an enviable position.”
“Like I said, it’s the real reason for human sacrifice,” said Malaclypse. He, too, sat down, and Joe now noticed that the soft upholstery of his chair didn’t sink beneath his weight. He seemed to rest on the surface of the cushions. “Any sudden or violent death releases a burst of consciousness energy, which can be controlled and channeled as any explosive energy can be. The Illuminati would all like to become as gods. That has been their ambition for longer than I care to say.”
“Which means they have to perpetrate mass murder,” said Joe, thinking of nuclear weapons, gas chambers, chemical-biological warfare.
Malaclypse nodded. “Now, I don’t disapprove of that on moral grounds, since morals are purely illusory. I do have a personal distaste for that sort of thing. Although, when you’ve lived as long as I have, you have lost so many friends and lovers that it is impossible not to take the deaths of humans as a matter of course. So it goes. And, since I achieved my own immortality and nonmateriality as the result of a mass murder, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn the Illuminati. For that matter, I don’t condemn hypocrisy, though it is also personally distasteful to me. But I do say that the method of the Illuminati is stupid and wasteful, since everybody is already everything. So, why fuck around with things? It is absurd to try to be something else when there
is nothing else.”
“That kind of statement is simply beyond my comprehension,” said Joe. “I don’t know, maybe it’s my engineering training. But even after my own partial illumination in San Francisco with Dr. Iggy, this kind of talk doesn’t make any more sense than Christian Science to me.”
“Soon you’ll understand more,” said Malaclypse. “About the history of man, about some of the esoteric knowledge that has been lying around for tens of thousands of years. Eventually you’ll know all that’s worth knowing about absolutely everything.”
(Tobias Knight, the FBI agent monitoring the bugging equipment in Dr. Mocenigo’s home, heard the pistol shot the same time Carmel did. “What the hell?” he said out loud, sitting up straight. He had heard the door open and footsteps walking about and had been waiting for a conversation … and then, without warning, he had heard the shot. Now a voice spoke, “Sorry, Dr. Mocenigo. You were a great patriot, and this is a dog’s death. But I will share it with you.” Then there were more footsteps and something else … Knight recognized the sound: it was liquid being poured. The steps and the pouring liquid continued, and Knight abruptly tore himself out of his state of shock and pressed the intercom. “Knight?” asked a voice which he recognized as Esperando Despond, the Special Agent in Charge for Las Vegas. “Mocenigo’s house,” Knight said crisply. “Get a whole crew out there double-quick. Something is happening, one killing at least.” He released the intercom and listened, paralyzed, to the footsteps and the liquid sounds, which were now mixed with subdued humming. A man doing an unpleasant job, but trying to keep his cool. Knight recognized the tune, finally: “Camp-town Races.” The humming and walking and slurping continued. “Do-da-Do-da …” Then the voice spoke again: “This is General Lawrence Stewart Talbot, speaking to the CIA, the FBI and whoever else has this house bugged. I discovered at two this morning that several people in our Anthrax Leprosy Pi project have accidentally been subjected to live cultures. All of them are living at the installation, and can easily be isolated while the antidote works. I have already given orders to that effect. Dr. Mocenigo himself unknowingly received the worst dose, and was in advanced morbidity, a few minutes from death, when I arrived. His whole house, obviously, will have to be burned down, and I am also, due to my proximity while examining him, too far gone to be saved. I will therefore shoot myself after setting fire to the house. There is one remaining problem. I found evidence that a woman had been in Dr. Mocenigo’s bed earlier—that’s what comes of allowing important people to live off base—and she must be found and given the antidote and each of her contacts must be traced. Needless to say, this must be done quietly, or there will be a nationwide panic. Tell the President to see that my wife gets the medal for this. Tell my wife that with my last breath I still insist she was wrong about that girl in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. In closing, I firmly believe that this is the greatest country in the history of the world, and can still be saved if Congress will lock up those damned college kids for once and for all. God bless America!” There was a scratching sound—my God! Knight thought, the match—and the sound of flames, in the midst of which General Talbot tried to add a postscript but couldn’t get the words out because he was screaming. Finally, the second shot came, and the screaming stopped. Knight raised his head, jaw clenched, repressed tears in his steely eyes. “That was a great American,” he said aloud.)
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