The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"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…