Over cigars and brandy, after George had been sent off to bed to be distracted by Tarantella, Richard Jung asked pointedly, “Just how sure are you that this Discordian bunch is a match for the Illuminati? It’s kind of late in the game to change sides.”
Drake started to speak, then turned to Maldonado. “Tell him about Italy in the 19th century,” he said.
“The Illuminati are just men and women,” Maldonado replied obligingly. “More women than men, in fact. It was Eve Weishaupt who started the whole show; Adam just acted as her front because people are used to taking orders from men. This Atlantis stuff is mostly bullshit. Everybody who knows about Atlantis at all traces his family, or his clan, or his club, back there. Some of the old dons in the Maf even try to trace la Cosa Nostra back there. All bullshit. Just like all the WASPs tracing themselves back to the Mayflower. For everyone who can prove it, like Mr. Drake, there’s a hundred who are just bluffing.
“You see,” Maldonado went on more intensely, chewing his cigar ferociously, “originally the Illuminati was just a—how do you call it—a kind of 18th-century women’s liberation front. Behind Adam Weishaupt was Eve; behind Godwin, who started all this socialism and anarchism with his Political Justice book, was his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft, who started the woman revolution with a book called, uh …”
“Vindication of the Rights of Women,” Drake contributed.
“And they got Tom Paine to write on women’s lib, too, and to defend their French Revolution and try to import it here. But that all fell through and they didn’t get a real controlling interest in the U.S. until they hoodwinked Woody Wilson into creating the Federal Reserve in 1914. And that’s the way it usually goes. In Italy they had a front called the Haute Vente, that was so damn secret Mazzini was a member all his life and never knew the control came from Bavaria. My grandpa told me all about those days. We had a three-way dogfight. The Monarchists on one side, the Haute Vente and the Liberteri, the anarchists, on the other, and the Maf in the middle trying to roll with the punches and figure out which way the bread was buttered, you know? Then the Liberteri got wise to the Haute Vente and split from it, and it was a four-way fight. You look it up in the history books, they tell it like it was except they don’t mention who ran the Haute Vente. And then the good old Law of Fives came into it, and we had the Fascisti and it was a five-way dogfight. Who won? Not the Illuminati. It wasn’t until 1937, manipulating the English government to discourage Mussolini’s peace plans and using Hitler to get Benito into the Berlin-Tokyo axis, that the Illuminati had some kind of control in Italy. And even then it was indirect. When we made our deal with the CIA—it was called the OSS back in those days—Luciano got out of the joint and we turned over Italy and delivered Mussolini dead.”
“And the point of all this?” Jung asked coldly.
“The point is,” Maldonado said, “the Maf has been against the Illuminati more of the time than we’ve been with them, and we’re still doing business and we’re stronger than ever. Believe me, their bark is much worse than their bite. Because they know some magic, they scare everybody. We’ve had magicians and belladonnas—witches, to you—in Sicily since before Paris got hot pants for Helen, and believe me a bullet kills them as dead as it kills anybody else.”
“The Illuminati do have a bite,” Drake interjected, “but it is my judgment that they are going out with the Age of Pisces. The Discordians, I think, represent an Aquarian swing.”
“Oh, I don’t go for that mystic stuff,” Jung said. “Next thing you’ll be quoting I Ching at me, like my old man.”
“You’re an anal type, like most accountants,” Drake replied coolly. “And a Capricorn as well. Down-to-earth and conservative. I won’t attempt to persuade you about this aspect of the matter. Just take my word, I didn’t get where I am by ignoring significant facts just because they won’t fit on a profit-and-loss statement. On the profit-and-loss level, however, I have had reasons to believe that the Discordians can currently outbid the Illuminati. These reasons date back many months before the appearance of those marvelous statues today.”
Later, in bed, Drake turned the matter around in his head and looked at it from several sides. Lovecraft’s words came back to him: “I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants.” That was it, basically. He was an old man, and he was tired of being their servant, or satrap, or satellite. When he was thirty-three, he was ready to take them over, as Cecil Rhodes had once done. Somehow, he had been maneuvered into taking over just one section of their empire. If he could think, truthfully, that he owned the United States more thoroughly than any President in four decades, the fact remained that he did not own himself. Not until he signed his Declaration of Independence tonight by joining the Discordians. The other Jung, the alter Zauber in Zurich, had tried to tell him something about power once, but he had dismissed it as sentimental slop. Now he tried to remember it … and, suddenly, all the old days came back, Klee and his numinous paintings, the Journey to the East, old Crowley saying, “Of course, mixing the left-hand and right-hand paths is dangerous. If you fear such risks, go back to Hesse and Jung and those old ladies. Their way is safe and mine isn’t. All that can be said for me is that I have real power and they have dreams.” But the Illuminati had crushed Crowley, just as they smashed Willie Seabrook, when those men revealed too much. “I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants” Damn it, what was it Jung had said about power?
And he turned the card over, and on the back was an address on Beacon Hill with the words “8:30 tonight.” He looked up at the janitor, who backed away deferentially, saying, “Thank you, Mr. Drake, sir,” without a touch of irony in his face or voice. And it hadn’t surprised him at all that, for deliberate contrast, the Grand Master he met that night, one of the five Illuminati Primi for the U.S., was an official of the Justice Department. (And what had Jung said about power?) “A few of them will have to fall. Lepke, I would recommend. Perhaps Luciano also.” No mystical trappings: just a businesslike meeting. “Our interest is the same as yours: increasing the power of the Justice Department. An equal increment in the power of the other branches of government will proceed nicely when we get the war into gear.” Drake remembered his excitement: it was all as he had foreseen. The end of the Republic, the dawn of the Empire.
“After Germany, Russia?” Drake asked once.
“Very good; you are indeed farseeing,” the Grand Master replied. “Mr. Hitler, of course, is only a medium. Virtually no ego at all, on his own. You have no idea how dull and prosaic such types are, except when under proper Inspiration. Naturally, his supplied ego will collapse, he will become psychotic, and we will have no control over him at all, then. We are prepared to help him fall. Our real interest now is here. Let me show you something. We do not work in general outlines; our plans are always specific, to the last detail.” He handed Drake a sheaf of papers. “The war will probably end in ’44 or ’45. We will have Russia built up as the next threat within two years. Read this carefully.”
Drake read what was to become the National Security Act of 1947. “This abolishes the Constitution,” he said almost in ecstasy.
“Quite. And believe me, Mr. Drake, by ’46 or ’47, we will have Congress and the public ready to accept it. The American Empire is closer than you imagine.”
“But the isolationists and pacifists—Senator Taft and that crowd—”
“They will wither away. When communism replaces fascism as the number one enemy, your small-town conservative will be ready for global adventures on a scale that would make the heads of poor Mr. Roosevelt’s liberals spin. Trust me. We have every detail pinpointed. Let me show you where the new government will be located.”
Drake stared at the plan and shook his head. “Some people will recognize what a pentagon means,” he said dubiously.
“They will be dismissed as superstitious cranks. Believe me, this building will be constructed within a few years. It will become the policeman of the world. Nobody wil
l dare question its actions or judgments without being denounced as a traitor. Within thirty years, Mr. Drake, within thirty years, anyone who attempts to restore power to the Congress will be cursed and vilified, not by liberals but by conservatives.”
“Holy God,” Drake said.
The Grand Master rose and walked to an old-fashioned globe nearly as large as King Kong’s head. “Pick a spot, Mr. Drake. Any spot. I guarantee you we will have American troops there within thirty years. The Empire that you dreamed of while reading Tacitus.”
Robert Putney Drake felt humbled for an instant, even though he recognized the gimmick: using one single example of telepathy, plucking Tacitus out of his head, to climax the presentation of the incredible dream. At last he understood firsthand the awe that the Illuminati created in both its servitors and its enemies.
“There will be opposition,” the Grand Master went on. “In the 1960s and early 1970s especially. That’s where your notion for a unified crime syndicate fits into our plan. To crush the opposition, we will need a Justice Department equivalent in many ways to Hitler’s Gestapo. If your scheme works—if the Mafia can be drawn into a syndicate that is not entirely under Sicilian control, and the various other groups can be brought under the same umbrella—we will have a nationwide outlaw cartel. The public itself will then call for the kind of Justice Department that we need. By the mid-1960s, wiretapping of all sorts must be so common that the concept of privacy will be archaic.” And, tossing sleeplessly, Drake thought how smoothly it had all worked out; why then was he rebelling against it? Why did it give him no pleasure? And what was it Jung had said about power?
Richard Jung, wearing Carl Jung’s old sweater and smoking his pipe, said, “And next the solar system.” The room was crowded with white rabbits, Playboy bunnies, Bugs Bunny, the Wolf Man, Ku Kluxers, Mafiosos, Lepke with accusing eyes, a dormouse, a mad hatter, the King of Hearts, the Prince of Wands, and Jung was shouting over the din. “Billions to reach the moon. Trillions to get to Mars. All pouring into our corporations. Better than the gladiatorial games.” Linda Lovelace elbowed him aside. “Call me Ishmaelian,” she said suggestively; but Jung handed Drake the skeleton of a Biafran baby. “For Petruchio’s feast,” he explained, producing a piece of ticker tape. “We now own,” he began to read, “seventy-two percent of earth’s resources, and fifty-one percent of all the armed troops in the world are under our direction. Here,” he said, passing the body of an infant that had died in Appalachia, “see that this one gets an apple in its mouth.” A bunny passed Drake a 1923 Thompson machine gun, the model that had been called an automatic rifle because the Army had no funds to buy submachine guns that year. “What’s this for?” Drake asked, confused. “We have to defend ourselves,” the bunny said. “The mob is at the gates. The hungry mob. An astronaut named Spartacus is leading them.” Drake handed the gun to Maldonado and crept upstairs to his private heliport. He passed through the lavatory to the laboratory (where Dr. Frankenstein was attaching electrodes to Linda Lovelace’s jaws) and entered the golf course again, where the door opened to the airplane cabin.
He was escaping in his 747 jet, and below he could see Black Panthers, college kids, starving coal miners, Indians, Viet Cong, Brazilians, an enormous army pillaging his estate. “They must have seen the fnords,” he said to the pilot. But the pilot was his mother and the sight of her threw him into a rage. “Leaving me alone!” he screamed. “Always leaving me alone to go to your damned parties with father. I never had a mother, just one nigger maid after another acting as mothers. Were the parties that fucking important?”
“Oh,” she said reddening, “how can you use that word in front of your own mother?”
“To hell with that. All I remember is your perfume hanging in the air, and some strange black face coming when I called for you.”
“You’re such a baby,” she said sadly. “All your life, you’ve always been a big baby.” It was true: he was wearing diapers. A vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust stared at him incredulously. “I say, Drake, do you really think that is appropriate garb for an important business meeting?” Beside him Linda Lovelace bent in ecstasy to kiss the secret ardor of Ishmael. “A whale of a good time,” the vice president said, suddenly giggling inanely.
“Oh, fuck you all,” Drake screamed. “I’ve got more money than any of you.”
“The money is gone,” Carl Jung said, wearing Freud’s beard. “What totem will you use now to ward off insecurity and the things that go bump in the night?” He sneered. “What childish codes! M.A.F.I.A.—Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela. French Canadian bean soup—the Five Consecrated Bavarian Seers. Annuit Coeptis Novus Or do Seclorwn—Anti-Christ Now Our Savior. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim—Asmodeus Belial Hastur Nyarlathotep Wotan Niggurath Dholes Azathoth Tindalos Kadith. Child’s play! Glasspielen!”
“Well, if you’re so damned smart, who are the inner Five right now?” Drake asked testily.
“Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo,” Jung said, riding off on a tricycle. “The Illuminati is your mother’s breast, sucker,” added Albert Hoffman, peddling after Jung on a bicycle.
Drake awoke as the Eye closed. It was all clear in an instant, without the labor he had spent working over the Dutchman’s words. Maldonado stood by the bedside, his face Karloff’s, and said, “We deserve to be dead.” Yes: that was what it was like when you discovered you were a robot, not a man, like Karloff in the last scene of Bride of Frankenstein.
Drake awoke again and this time he was really awake. It was clear, crystal clear, and he had no regrets. Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wilhelm Reich would ever understand. “Our job,” Huxley wrote before death, “is waking up.”
Drake put on his robe quickly and stepped out into the dark Elizabethan hallway. Five hundred thousand dollars this house and grounds had cost, including the cottages, and it was only one of his eight estates. Money. What did it mean when Nyarlathotep appeared and “the wild beasts followed him and licked his hands” as that damned stupid-smart Lovecraft wrote? What did it matter when “the blind idiot God Chaos blew earth’s dust away”?
Drake pushed open the dark paneled doorway of George’s room. Good: Tarantella was gone. The thunder rumbled again, and Drake’s own shadow looming over the bed reminded him once more of a Karloff movie.
He bent over the bed and shook George’s shoulder gently. “Mavis,” the boy said. Drake wondered who the hell Mavis was; somebody terrific, obviously, if George could be dreaming about her after a session with the Illuminati-trained Tarantella. Or was Mavis another ex-Illuminatus? There were a lot of them with the Discordians lately, Drake had surmised. He shook George’s shoulder again, more vigorously.
“Oh, no, I can’t come again,” George said. Drake gave another shake, and two weary and frightened eyes opened to look at him.
“What?”
“Up,” Drake grunted, grabbing George under the arms and pulling him to a sitting position. “Out of bed,” he added, panting, rolling the boy to the edge.
Drake was looking through waves upward at George. Damn it, the thing has already found my mind. “You’ve got to get out,” he repeated. “You’re in danger here.”
October 23, 1935: Charley Workman, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew charge through the door of the Palace Chop House and, according to orders, cowboy the joint … Lead pellets like rain; and rain like lead pellets hitting George’s window, “Christ, what is it?” he asked. Drake stood him up stark naked and handed him his drawers, repeating “Hurry!” Charley the Bug looked over the three bodies: Abadaba Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz and somebody he didn’t recognize. None of them was the Dutchman. “My God, we fucked up,” he said, “Dutch ain’t here” But a commotion has started in the alleys of the dream: Albert Stern, taking his last fix of the night, suddenly recalls his fantasy of killing somebody as important as John Dillinger. “The can,” Mendy
Weiss says excitedly; he had a hard-on, like he always did on this kind of job. “Man is a giant,” Drake says, “forced to live in a pigmy’s hut.” “What does that mean?” George asks. “It means we’re all fools,” Drake says excitedly, smelling the old whore Death, “especially those of us who try to act like giants by bullying the others in the hut instead of knocking the goddam walls down. Carl Jung told me that, only in more elegant language.” George’s dangling penis kept catching his eye: homosexuality (an occasional thing with Drake), heterosexuality (his normal state) and the new lust for the old whore Death were all tugging at him. The Dutchman dropped his penis, urine squirting his shoes, and went for his gun as he heard the shots in the barroom. He turned quickly, unable to stop pissing, and Albert Stern came through the door, shooting before Dutch could take aim. Falling forward, he saw that it was really Vince Coll, a ghost. “Oh, mama mama mama,” he said, lying in his urine.
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