The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Peter Jackson was a black man-truly black, not brown or tan. He was wearing a vest in spite of the spring weather. He was also very obviously wary of policemen. Saul noted this at once, and began thinking about how to overcome it-and at the same time he observed an increased blandness in Muldoon's features, indicating that he, too, had noted it and was prepared to take umbrage.

"Have a seat," Saul said cordially, "and tell us what you just told the other officer." With the nervous ones it

was sound policy to drop the policeman role at first, and try to sound like somebody else-somebody who, quite naturally, asks a lot of questions. Saul began slipping into the personality of his own family physician, which he usually used at such times. He made himself feel a stethoscope hanging about his neck.

"Well," Jackson began in a Harvard accent, "this is probably not important. It may be just a coincidence."

"Most of what we hear is just unimportant coincidence," Saul said gently. "But it's our job to listen."

"Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now," Jackson said. "It really surprised me when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into." He paused and studied the two impassive faces of the detectives; finding little there, he went on reluctantly. "It was last Friday. Joe told me he had a lead that interested him, and he was putting a staff writer on it. He wanted to reopen the investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers."

Saul carefully didn't look at Muldoon, and just as carefully moved his hat to cover the memos on the table. "Excuse me a moment," he said politely and left the cafeteria.

He found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed his home. Rebecca answered after the third ring; she obviously had not gotten back to sleep after he left. "Saul?" she asked, guessing who would be calling at this hour. "It's going to be a long night," Saul said. "Oh, hell."

"I know, baby. But this case is a son-of-a-bitch!" Rebecca sighed. "I'm glad we had a little ball earlier this evening. Otherwise, I'd be furious."

Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first met her…

"Do you know what I'm going to do?" Rebecca lowered her voice. "I'm going to take off my nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and waiting."

Saul grinned. "A man my age shouldn't be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier."

"But you did respond, didn't you?" Her voice was confident and sensual.

"I sure did. I won't be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes."

She chuckled softly and said, "I'll be waiting…"

"I love you," he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won't be able to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. "Listen," he added hurriedly, "let's change the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the Illuminati?" Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often astonished him.

"It's a hoax," she said.

"A what?"

"A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven."

"No, that's not what I'm asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?"

"Oh, that's the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see, so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would have some evidence to point to. That's all there is to it. Sophomore humor."

I hope so, Saul thought. "How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?"

"It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded around-oh-1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it's part of the orthodox Moslem religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea-the word 'assassin' is a corruption of his name."

"Anything else?"

"Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The word 'hashish' also comes from his name."

"This is a heavy case," Saul said, "and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking the patrol-

man in the hall, I'll get back to work on it. Don't say anything that'll get me aroused again. Please."

"I won't. I'll just lie here naked and…"

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye," she said, laughing.