"It can be and it is." Hagbard motioned him toward the Bugatti. "Let's Sit Down, if I may permit myself one more acrostic before the codes and puzzles are all resolved." They climbed into the front seat, and Joe accepted the brandy decanter Hagbard offered. "Of course," Hagbard went on, "when I say 'good,' you've got to understand that all terms are relative. We're as good as is possible in this fucked-up section of the galaxy. We're not perfect. Certainly, I'm not, and I haven't observed anything approaching immaculate perfection in any of the other Masters of the Temple either. But we are, in human terms and by ordinary standards, decent chaps. There's a reason for that. It's the basic law of magic, and it's in every textbook. You must have read it somewhere. Do you know what I mean?"
Joe took a stiff snort of the brandy. It was peach- his favorite. "Yes, I think. 'As ye give, so shall ye get.' "
"Precisely." Hagbard took back the bottle and had a snort himself. "Mind you, Joe, that's a scientific law, not a moral commandment. There are no commandments, because there is no commander anywhere. All authority is a delusion, whether in theology or in sociology. Everything is radically, even sickeningly, free. The first law of magic is as neutral as Newton's first law of motion. It says that the equation balances, and that's all it says. You are still free to give evil and pain, if you decide you must. Once done, however, you never escape the consequences. It always comes back. No prayers, sacrifices, mortifications, or supplications will change it, any more than they'll change Newton's laws or Einstein's. So we're 'good,' as moralists would say, because we know enough to have a bloody strong reason to be good. In the last week things went too fast, and I became 'evil'-I deliberately ordered and paid for the deaths of various people, and set in motion processes that had to lead to still other deaths. I knew what I was doing, and I knew-and still know-that I'll pay for it. Such decisions are extremely rare in the history of the Order, and my superior, the Dealy Lama, tried to persuade me it was unnecessary this time too. I disagreed; I take the responsibility. No man or god or goddess can change it. I will pay, and I'm ready to pay, whenever and however the bill is presented."
"Hagbard, what are you?"
"A mehum, the Saure family would say," Hagbard grinned. "A mere human. No more. Not one jot more."
"How much blood?" Robert Putney Drake asked. He was astonished at his own words; in all his experiments at breaking through the walls, he had never lowered himself to heckling an ignorant street preacher.
ALL THE BLOOD IN THE WORLD ISN'T ENOUGH. EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD ISN'T ENOUGH. EVEN ALL THE ANIMALS IF YOU ADDED THEM IN LINE IN SOME PAGAN OR VOODOO SACRIFICE. IT WOULDN'T BE ENOUGH. IT WOULDN'T BE ENOUGH, BROTHERS. THE GOOD BOOK SAYS SO.
"There were five of us," John-John Dillinger was explaining to George as they trudged back toward Ingolstadt, having lost Hagbard and the Bugatti in the crowd. "My folks kept it a secret. German people, very superstitious and secretive. They didn't want reporters all over the place and headlines about the first quintuplets to live. The Dionne family got all that, much later."
BECAUSE ALL THE BLOOD IN THE WORLD ISN'T EQUAL TO ONE DROP. NOT ONE DROP
"John Herbert Dillinger is in Las Vegas, trying to track down the plague- unless he already finished up and went home to Los Angeles." John-John smiled. "He was always the brains of the bunch. Runs a rock-music company, real professional businessman. He was the oldest, by a couple of minutes, and we all sort of look up to him. He served the prison time, even though I'm the one who rightly should have, seeing that robbing that grocer was my dumb idea. But he said he could take it without cracking up, and he was right."
NOT ONE DROP, NOT ONE DROP, OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, JESUS CHRIST.
"I see," Drake said. "And was that A, B, AB, or O?"
"John Hoover Dillinger lives in Mad Dog, under the name D. J. Hoover- he's not above letting people suspect he's a distant relative of J. Edgar's. Mostly," John-John said, "he's retired. Except occasionally for little jobs like helping arrange convincing jail breaks, say, when Jim Cartwright wants to let a prisoner get out in a realistic fashion. He gave Naismith the idea for the John Dillinger Died for You Society."
"How about the other two?" George asked, thinking that it would be even harder to decide whether he loved Stella more than Mavis or Mavis more than Stella now that he knew they were the same person. He wondered how Joe felt, since he obviously dug Miss Mao Tsu-hsi and she was that person also. Three in one and one in three. Like Dillinger. Or was Dillinger five in three? George realized suddenly that he was still tripping a little. Dillinger was five in one, not five in three: the law of Fives again. Did that mean there were two more in the Mavis-Stella-Mao complex, two that he hadn't met yet? Why did two and three keep popping up in all this?
"The other two are dead," John-John said sadly. "John Edgar Dillinger was born first, and he went and died first. Fast and furious, he was. It was him that plugged that bank guard in East Chicago while the rest of us were vacationing and laying low in Miami. Always the hothead, he was. Had a heart attack back in '43 and went to an early grave. John Thomas Dillinger went in '69. He was in Chicago in '68 on a JAM assignment, meeting with a crazy English spy named Chips. British Intelligence somehow got a report that the Democratic Convention was being run by the Bavarian Illuminati and would end with an assassination. They didn't believe in the Illuminati so they sent Chips; they always send him on wild cases, 'cause he's nutty enough to take them seriously and do a thorough job. Both of them got tear-gassed coming out of the Hilton Hotel, and poor Chips got thrown in a paddy-wagon with a bunch of young radicals. John Thomas had a chest problem already, a chronic asthma, and the tear gas made it a lot worse. He went from doctor to doctor, and finally passed away early in '69. So there's a cop in Chicago who could boast that he really killed John Dillinger, only he doesn't know it. Isn't life peculiar?"
"The Saure family only thought they were in the Illuminati," Hagbard went on. "Hitler and Stalin only thought they were in the Illuminati. Old Weishaupt only thought he was in the Illuminati. It's that simple. The moral of the whole story is: Beware of cheap Occidental imitations." He smiled grimly.
"I think it's beginning to penetrate," Joe said slowly. "It was, of course, the very first hypothesis I formed: There have been many groups in history who called themselves the Illuminati, and they weren't all aiming at exactly the same thing."
"Precisely." Hagbard puffed again at his cigar. "That's the natural first suspicion of any non-paranoid mind. Then, as you explore the evidence, links between these groups begin to appear. Eventually the paranoid hypothesis begins to appear more plausible and you begin to believe there always has been one Illuminati, using the same basic slogans and symbols and aiming at the same basic goal. I sent Jim Cartwright to you with that yarn about three conspiracies- the ABC or Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy, the NBC or New Bavarian Conspiracy, and the CBS or Conservative Bavarian Seers- to set you thinking that the truth might be midway backward toward the simple first idea. From here on in, forget that I represent the original Illuminati. In fact, in recent centuries we don't use a name at all. We employ only the initials A.A., written like this." He sketched on a Donau-Hotel matchbook:
A :. A :.
"A lot of occult writers," he went on, "have made some amazing guesses as to what that means. Actually, it doesn't mean a damned thing. To prevent our name being stolen and misused again, we don't have a name. Anybody who thinks he's guessed the name and tries to pass himself off as an initiate by declaring that we're really the Atlantean Arcanum or the Argenteum Astrum or whatever immediately reveals that he's a fraud. It's a neat gimmick," Hagbard intoned gloomily. "I only wish we had thought of it centuries earlier."