The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"Not much. Because it hardly ever seemed to bother you. But I know why now. How could you be jealous when you and Mavis were the same person?"

"We're not the same person, really."

"What does that mean?"

"Did you ever read The Three Faces of Eve? Listen…"

Like all the best love stories, it began in Paris. She was well known as a Hollywood actress (and was actually an Illuminatus); he was becoming fairly famous as a jet-set millionaire (and was actually a smuggler and anarchist). Envision Bogart and Bergman in the flashback sequences from Casablanca. It was like that: a passion so intense, a Paris so beautiful (recovering from the war it had been slipping toward in the Bogart-Bergman epic), a couple so radiant that any observer with an eye for nuance would have foretold a storm ahead. It came the night he confessed he was a magician and made a certain proposal to her; she left him at once. A month later, back in Beverly Hills, she realized that what he had asked was her destiny. When she tried to find him-as often happened with Hagbard Celine- he had dropped from public view, leaving his businesses in other hands temporarily, and was in camera.

A year later she heard that he was again a public figure, hobnobbing with English businessmen of questionable reputation and even more dubious Chinese import-export executives in Hong Kong. She violated her contract with the biggest studio in Hollywood and flew to the Crown colony, only to find he had dropped from sight again, while his recent friends were being investigated for involvement in the heroin business.

She found him in Tokyo, at the Imperial Hotel.

"A year ago, I decided to accept your proposal," she told him, "but now, after Hong Kong, I'm not so sure."

"Thelema," he said, facing her across a room that seemed designed for Martians; it had actually been designed for Welshmen.

She sat down abruptly on a couch. "You're in the Order?"

"In the Order and against the Order," he said. "The real purpose is to destroy them."

"I'm one of the top Five in the United States," she said unsteadily. "What makes you think I'll turn on them now?"

"Thelema," he repeated. "It's not just a password. It means Will."

"The Order is" my Will.'" She quoted from Weishaupt's original Oath of Initiation.

"If you really believed that, you wouldn't be here," he said. "You're talking to me because part of you knows that a human being's Will is never in an external organization."

"You sound like a moralist. That's odd- for a heroin merchant."

"You sound like a moralist, too, and that's very odd- for a servant of Agharti."

"Nobody joins that lot," she said with a pert Cockney accent, "without being a moralist to start with." They both laughed.

"I was right about you," Hagbard said.

But, George interrupted, is he really in the heroin business? That's dirty.

You sound like a moralist too, she said. It's part of his Demonstration. Any government could put him out of business within their borders- as England has done- by legalizing junk. So long as they refuse to do that, there's a black market. He won't let the Mafia monopolize it- he makes sure the black market is a free market. If it wasn't for him a lot of junkies who are alive today would be dead of contaminated heroin. But let me go on with the story.