The Illuminatus! Trilogy

She goes out, still blubbering, and I go over to the window and look at the desert to calm my head. My rose fever was starting to act up; it was that time of year. Why did people have to bring roses to the desert? I tried to contemplate hard on the problem and forget my health. There was only one explanation: that damned Mocenigo figured out that Sherri was pumping him and told the Feds. The Syndicate wasn't in it yet They were all still running around the East like chickens with their legs cut off, trying to figure who rubbed Maldonado, and why it happened at the house of a straight like this banker Drake. So they hadn't got the time yet to find out that five million of Banana Nose's money had disappeared into my own safe as soon as I heard he was dead. The Feds weren't in on that at all, and the connection was circumsubstantial.

And then it hit me so hard that I almost fell over. Besides my own girls, who wouldn't talk, there were a dozen or two cab drivers and bartenders and whatnots who knew that Sherri worked for me. The Feds would get it out of somebody sooner or later, and probably sooner. It was like a light bulb going on over my head in a comic strip: TREASON. AIDING AND ABEDDING THE ENEMY. I remembered from when I was a kid those two Jewish scientists who the Feds got for that. The hot squat. They fried them, Christ Jesus, I thought I'd vomit. Why does the fucking government have to be that way about somebody just trying to make a buck? Even the Syndicate would only shoot you or give you a lead enema, but the cocksucking government has to go and put you in an electrical chair. Christ Jesus, I was hot as a chimney.

I took a candy out of my pocket and started chewing it, trying to think what to do. If I ran, the Syndicate would guess I was the one who emptied the till when Maldonado was rubbed, and they'd get me. If I didn't run, the Feds would be at the door with a high treason warrant. It was a double whammy. I might try to highjack a plane to Panama, but I didn't know nearly enough about Mocenigo's bugs to make a deal with the Commie government down there. They'd just send me right back. It was hopeless, like trying to fill a three-card inside straight. The only thing to do was find a hole and bury myself.

And then it was just like a light bulb in my head again, and I thought: Lehman Cave.

"What does the computer say now?" the President asked the Attorney General.

"What does the computer say now?" the Attorney General barked into the open phone before him.

"If the girl had two contacts before she died, at this moment the possible carriers number," the phone paused, "428,000. If the girl had three contacts, 7,656,000."

"Get the Special Agent in Charge," the President snapped. He was the calmest man at the table- ever since Fernando Poo, he had been supplementing his Librium, Tofranil and Elovil with Demerol, the amazing little pills that had kept Hermann Goering so chipper and cheerful during the Nuremberg Trials while all the other Nazis crumbled into catatonic, paranoid or other dysfunctional conditions.

"Despond," a second open phone said.

"This is your President," the President said. "Give it to us straight. Have you treed the coon?"

"Uh, sir, no, sir. We have to find the procurer, sir. The girl can't possibly be alive, but we haven't found her. It is now mathematically certain that somebody hid her body. The obvious theory, sir, is that her procurer, being in an illegal business, hid the body rather than report it. We have two descriptions of the girl, sir, and, uh, although they don't tally completely they should lead us to her procurer. Of course, he should die soon, sir, and then we'll find him. That's the Rubicon of the case, sir. Meanwhile, I'm happy to report, sir, that we're lucking out amazingly. Only two definite cases off the base so far and both of them injected with the antidote. It is possible, just possible, that the procurer went into hiding after disposing of the body. In that case, he hasn't contacted another human being and is not spreading it. Sir."

"Despond," the President said, "I want results.

Keep us informed. Your country depends on you."

"Yes, sir."

"Tree that coon, Despond."

"We will, sir."

Esperando Despond turned from the phone as an agent from the computer section entered the room. "Got something?" he snapped nervously.

"The first girl, the Nigra, sir. She was one of the pros we questioned yesterday. Her name is Bonnie Quint."

"You look worried. Is there a hitch?" Despond asked shrewdly.

"Just another of the puzzles. She didn't admit being with Mocenigo the night before, but that kind of lying we expected. Here's what's weird: her description of the guy she says she was with." The computer man shook his head dubiously. "It doesn't fit Naismith, the guy who said he was with her. It fits the little mug, the dwarf, that the CIA grabbed. Only he said she was the second girl."