The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"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.