"Are your people out of the way?" Hagbard asked in agony.
"Of course," the dolphin replied irritably. "Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
"The sea is crueler than the land," Hagbard protested, but then he added "sometimes."
"The sea is cleaner than the land," Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus- the dolphin was obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, "You silly sons of bitches," at somebody named Carlo). "These people have been your enemies for thirty thousand years."
"I'm not that old," Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. "That's all there is to it," he said quietly.
("Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to reality." A voice long, long ago… at Harvard… And once, in the South, he had been moved by a very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:
Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it all alone. Nobody else could walk there for Him. He had to walk it by Himself.
I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt and the final confrontation. But it's meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)
Hate, like molten lead, drips from the wounded sky… they call it air pollution… August Personage dials slowly, with the cunt-starved eyes of a medieval saint… "God lies!" Weishaupt cried in the middle of his first trip, "God is Hate!"… Harry Coin is crumpled in his chair… George's head hangs at an angle, like a doll with a broken spring… Stella doesn't move… They are not dead but stoned…
Abe Reles blew the whistle on the entire Murder Inc. organization in 1940… He named Charley Workman as the chief gun in the Dutch Schultz massacre… He gave the details proving the roles of Lepke (who was executed) and Luciano (who was imprisoned and, later, exiled)… He kept his mouth shut about certain other things, however… But Drake was worried. He gave orders to Maldonado, who conveyed them to a capo, who passed them on to some soldiers… Reles was guarded by five policemen but nonetheless he went out his hotel window and spread like jam on the ground below… There were mutterings in the press… The coroner's jury couldn't believe that five cops were on the take from the Syndicate… Reles's. death was declared to be suicide… But in 1943, as the Final Solution moved into high gear, Lepke announced he wanted to talk before his execution… Tom Dewey, alive by grace of the Dutchman's death, was governor, and he granted a stay of execution… Lepke spent twenty-four hours with Justice Department officials and it was announced later that he refused to reveal anything of significance… One of the officials had been brought back from State to work with Justice because of his background on Schultz and the Big Six Syndicate… He said little, but Lepke read a lot in his eyes… His name, of course, was Winifred… Lepke understood: as Bela Lugosi once said, there are worse things than dying…
In 1932 the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped… Already at that time, a heist of that dimension could not be permitted in the Northeast without the consent of a full-fledged don of the Mafia… Even a capo could not authorize it alone… The aviator's father, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., had been an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve monopoly… Among other things, he had charged on the floor of Congress, "Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created; the present one is the first scientifically created one worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…" The go-between in delivering the ransom money was Jafsie Condon, Dutch Schultz's old high school principal… "It's got to be one of them coincidences," as Marty Krompier said later…
John Dillinger arrived in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and rented an Avis at the airport. He drove out to Dealy Plaza and scouted the terrain. The Triple Underpass where Harry Coin was supposed to stand when doing the job was under observation from a railroadman's shack, he noted; it occurred to him that the man in that shack would not have a long life expectancy. There would be a lot of other eyewitnesses, he realized, and the JAMs couldn't protect them all, not even with the help of the LDD. It was going to be bad all around… In fact, the man in the railroad shack, S. M. Holland, told a story that didn't jibe with the Earl Warren version, and later died when his car went off the road under circumstances that aroused speculation among those given to speculating; the coroner's jury called it an accident… Dil-linger found his spot in the thickly wooded part of the Grassy Knoll and waited until Harry Coin appeared on the Underpass. He made himself relax and looked around to be sure that he was invisible from everywhere but a helicopter (there were no helicopters: the Illuminati's top double agent within the Secret Service had seen to that). A movement in the School Book Depository caught Ms eye. Something not kosher up there. He swung his binoculars… and caught another head, ducking quickly, atop the Dal-Tex building. An Italian, very young… That was bad. If one of Maldonado's soldiers was here, either the Illuminati were aware they had a double agent in their midst and had hired two assassins, or else the Syndicate was acting on its own. John panned back to the School Book Depository: whoever that clown was, he had a rifle, too, and he was being cagey: definitely not Secret Service.
This was a piss-cutter.
John's original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn't be done. There was no human way of hitting more than two of those targets- all three of them in different areas and at different elevations- before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job while that was happening. It was what Hagbard called an existential koan.
"Shit, piss and industrial waste," John muttered, quoting another Celinism.
Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle. Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.
If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the I Ching at least (which probably explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper), then "save what you can" could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would give them a mystery they would never solve.
The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren't quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle, quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy's skull, and thought briefly, Even if it falls through and doesn't remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I'm caught: PRESIDENT SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now, and then he tightened his finger.
("Murder?" George asked. "It's hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man's games get that hairy."
"During the Kali Yuga," Stella replied, "almost all our games are played with live ammunition. Haven't you noticed?")
The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy's lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.
"Christ!" John said. "Him?"
Stella toked again- she never seemed to think she I was sufficiently stoned. "Wait," she said. "There's a I passage in Never Whistle While You're Pissing that goes into this a bit." She got up, walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on the wall shelf. "You know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?" she asked over her shoulder. "Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others." She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. "For instance," she said slowly. "Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals- 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'- or submissive signals- 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.'"