James Walking Bear had no great love for palefaces most of the time, but he had just dropped six peyote buttons before this Professor Mallory arrived and he was feeling benevolent and forgiving. After all, the Road Chief once said at a very sacred midsummer peyote festival that the line about forgiving those who trespass against us had a special meaning for Indians. Only when we all forgave the whites, he had said, would our hearts be totally pure, and when our hearts were pure the Curse would be lifted—the white men would cease to trespass, go home to Europe, and vex one another instead of persecuting us. James tried to forgive The Professor for being white and found, as usual, that peyote made forgiveness easier.
"Billie Freschette?" he said. "Hell, she died back in sixty-eight."
"I know that," the professor said. "What I'm looking for is any photographs she may have left."
Sure. James knew what kind of photographs.
"You mean ones that had Dillinger in them?"
"Yes, she was his mistress, virtually his common-law wife, for a long time, and—"
"No soap. You're years too late. Reporters bought up everything she had that showed even the back of Dillinger's head, way back, long before she came here to the reservation to die."
"Well, did you know her?"
"Sure." James was careful not be spiteful and didn't add: all Menominee Indians know one another, in a way you whites can't understand "knowing."
"Did she ever converse about Dillinger?"
"Of course. Old women always talk about their dead men. Always say the same thing, too: never was another man as good as him. Except when they say there never was another man as bad as him. They only say that when they're drunk, though."
The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you're on peyote. Now he looked almost like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him.
"Did she ever say anything about John's attitude toward the Masons?"
Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn't be any hate in the world, because nobody would know which people to hate.
"I said, did she ever mention John's attitude toward the Masons?"
"Oh. Oh, yes. Funny you should ask that." The man had a halo around his head now, and James wondered what that meant. Every time he took peyote alone things like that would happen, and he'd end up wishing there were a Road Chief or some other priest around to explain these signs properly. But what about the Masons? Oh, yes. "Billie said the Masons were the only people John Dillinger really hated. He said they railroaded him to prison the first time, and they owned all the banks, so he was getting even by robbing them."
The professor's mouth dropped open in surprise and delight— and James thought it was kind of funny to see that, especially with the halo turning from pink to blue to pink to blue to pink again at the same time.
("A big mouth, a tiny brain/He only thinks of blood and pain," Howard sang.)
Notes found by a TWA stewardess in a seat vacated by a Mr. "John Mason" after a Madison, Wisconsin, to Mexico City flight June 29, 1969: one week after the last SDS convention of all time:
"We only robbed from the banks what the banks robbed from the people"—Dillinger, Crown Point Jail, 1934. Could have come from any anarchist text.
Lucifer—bringer of light.
Weishaupt's "illumination" & Voltaire's "enlightenment": from the Latin "lux" meaning light.
Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. Find an anthropologist for more data on this.
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape? "Kick out the Jams"??? Cross-check.
"Adam," the first man; "Weis," to know; "haupt," chief or leader. "The first man to be a leader of those who know." Assumed name from the beginning?
lok-Sotot in Pnakotic manuscripts. Cd. be Yog-Sothoth?
D.E.A.T.H.—Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?
Must get Simon to explain the Yellow Sign and the Aklo chants. Might need protection.
C. says the h. neophobe type outnumbers us 1000-to-l. If so, all this is hopeless. What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce, Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the "secret' of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom: "Osiris is a black God!" Five words (of course!) but no historian, archeolo-gist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc. has understood. Or, those who did understand, didn't care to admit it. Can I trust C.? For that matter, can I trust Simon?
This matter of Tlaloc should convince me, one way or the other.
("He only thinks of blood and slaughter/The shark should live on land not water.")
("To hell with the shark and all his kin/And fight like hell when you see his fin.")
When Joe Malik got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, Simon was waiting for him.
"We'll talk in your car," Joe said briefly.
The car, being Simon's, was naturally a psychedelic Volkswagen. "Well?" he asked as they drove out of the airport onto Central Avenue.
"It all checks out," Joe said with an odd calm. "It did rain blue cats when they dug up Tlaloc. Mexico City has had unusual and unseasonable rains ever since. The missing tooth was on the right, and the corpse at the Biograph Theatre had a missing tooth on the left. Billy Graham couldn't have gotten to Chicago by any normal means, so that was either the best damned makeup job in the history of show business and plastic surgery or I witnessed a genuine miracle. And all the rest of it, the law of Fives and all. I'm sold. I no longer claim membership in the liberal intellectual guild. You behold in me a horrible example of creeping mysticism."
"Ready to try acid?"
"Yes," Joe said. "I'm ready to try acid. I only regret that I have but one mind to lose for my Shivadarshana."
"Right on! First, though, you'll meet him. I'll drive right to his bungalow—it's not far from here." Simon began humming as he drove; Joe recognized the tune as the Fugs' "Rameses II Is Dead, My Love."
They drove for a while in silence, and Joe finally asked, "How old is . . . our little group . . . exactly?"
"Since 1888." Simon said. "That's when Rhodes horned in and they 'kicked out the Jams,' like I told you in Chicago after the Sabbath."
"And Karl Marx?"
"A schmuck. A dupe. A nebbish from the word Go." Simon made an abrupt turn. "Here we are at his house. The greatest headache they had since Harry Houdini knocked out their spiritualist fronts." He grinned. "How do you think you'll feel talking to a dead man?"
"Weird," Joe said, "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half."
Simon parked the car and held the door open. "Just think," he said. "Hoover sitting there every day with the death-mask on his desk, and half-suspecting, deep down in his bones, how we suckered him."
They crossed the yard of the small, modest bungalow. "What a front, eh?" Simon chuckled. He knocked.
A little old man—he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files— opened the door.
"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.
"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."
("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and
filth?")
"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them"
"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.
"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.
"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know—him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun. "The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just
to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him."
"But going back to Michigan City Prison . . ." Joe prompted, sipping his drink.
"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know—in my early twenties—rand I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.
"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become—a successful bank-robber—so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there, you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.
"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?' I was about to say, 'Bullshit—like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me. I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. I said, 'If there is, I haven't heard about it.' And he just came back, real quiet, 'Most people haven't.'
"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.
"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.
"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part."
Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public—in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. But maybe I'm going too fast. Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.
"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. Like Lao-Tse and the Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization and go back to a natural way of life. So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god, Mummu, and claimed he was still alive
and was actually stronger than all the other gods. They had a good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'
"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days. Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance.
So we got our asses whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement. By the tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome — usury and monopoly and the whole bag of tricks—the truce took place. The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five. We thought we'd humanize them, like the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year. And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just didn't trust us—or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.
"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know how to fight them with their own weapons."
"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons." "You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years—"
"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back in the thirties."
"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.
Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?
"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."
"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications — Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"
"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."
"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."
"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.
"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C.—so don't trust anybody with those initials, no matter where or how you meet him."
"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."
"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present understanding."
"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of Crown Point Jail."
"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you—a federal judge that you bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"
"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the walls. Listen "
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.
Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.
I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.
And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.
'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side. Chaos steadily increases, all over the universe. All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."
But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's my turn to be the goat.
Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his hands—being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."
The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat. Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked. I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.
He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the Formula: "23 Skidoo."
It helped a little—but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.
But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.
Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924—except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then—but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.
It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.
"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."
He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.
"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."
He walked through the door—and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle—and he grinned.
"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."
"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER
"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul—twenty thousand dollars—and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."
"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.
"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."
"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."
"You mean the Dev—"
"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."
"Then this person—this being—" Joe protested, "really is supernatural—"
"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."
"But the flash of light—"
"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati—and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately—refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional—of course—and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."
"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."
"You're ignoring the bottom."
"Oh. Go on."
"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it—the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland—the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it—to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get " Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:
"When the Pineal Eye opens — after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip — you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply—in five words, of course—when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."
"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed. "But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up. You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam — they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper. But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."
"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It
amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat'—right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'— how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead — in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.
"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'—your own lady Isis."
"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."
"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."
"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript—they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."
"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."
"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."
"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table. "Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."
Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."
"Yes?"
Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.
Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: "Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!" And he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: "Where is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?" And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his soul, while the priest harangued him: "Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the worst part of hell is? That's where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect." And five years later, those two faces came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic, encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine without compunction if it were necessary
But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the IIluminati's plans, while the President of the United States went on the air to threaten "all-out thermonuclear heck," a young lady named Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, "It's a lloigor."
"What's a lloigor?" asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.
The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, "Oh, a lloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god."
Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, "Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis."
"The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues," Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn't going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.
"Indeed?" Chips said, equally bored. "Who are the Starry Wisdom people?"
"A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street when I was a girl. Funny church." The girl frowned, thinking about them.
"When I worked in the telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church. Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America."
"You don't say," drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. "Why are they interested in these statues?" He was thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.
(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, "Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler's system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche . . ." Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself didn't really' see either. The child, Drake had decided—it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology—was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role
In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake's psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goats-head mask, and repeated, "I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts. . . .")
