Masks of the Illuminati (28 page)

Mileva Einstein appeared in the pale orange doorway. “Dinner, gentlemen!”

The meal began with an antipasto of cheese, olives and anchovies. “I acquired a taste for Italian food during my years in Milan,” Einstein explained. “One of the reasons I like Zürich is that the restaurants here offer such a variety—you can dine Italian style, German style and French style on three different nights—if you can afford to dine out three nights in a row, that is.”

“I dine at the most expensive restaurants in Trieste,” Joyce said, “once a month, on payday. On my income this guarantees that I usually cannot pay the rent on time.”

“Does that not make enormous problems?” Babcock asked.

“It does for my brother,” Joyce said. “The landlords often hound him for the money, when they have had more than they can stand of my foul language and Byronic bad manners.”

“You are shameless,” Mileva said, with a glint of humorously exaggerated maternal disapproval.

“I cannot afford shame,” Joyce replied at once. “It interferes with perception. By provoking my landlords I learn areas of human psychology that are still a closed book to the local wise man, Dr. Jung, or even to his Viennese competitor, Dr. Freud.”

The men seemed to have a tacit agreement not to discuss the horrors of Babcock’s medieval tale during the meal, while Milly was present. Joyce, in fact, quickly engaged Frau Einstein in a discussion of the history of Zürich, in which he astonished everybody by pointing out the Celtic origin of various local customs such as the
Secheslaüten
festival in spring. “Carrying out a straw dummy that represents winter and burning it,” he said, “is found, in one form or another, in every Celtic culture.”

“But it’s over two thousand years since Switzerland was Celtic,” Mrs. Einstein said, astonished.

“The historical archetypes, as Vico would call them, remain,” Joyce declared. “And the etymologies remain. Do you not know that the very name ‘Zürich’ is derived from the Latin,
Turicum?”

“I’ve heard that,” Mileva admitted.

“Ah,” Joyce said. “But why did the Romans call this place
Turicum?
Look it up, as I did, and you will find the original Celtic inhabitants called it
Dur
, which means roughly ‘the place where the waters join’—where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zürich. The Romans merely Latinized
Dur
into
Turicum.”

Einstein raised an amused eyebrow. “Jeem,” he said, “you look into words like a biologist looking down a microscope. I begin to believe you really meant all those
paradoxes you were reciting last night, about the content of mind being nothing but words.”

“The
history
of consciousness is a history of words,” Joyce said immediately. “Shelley was justified in his bloody unbearable arrogance, when he wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Those whose words make new metaphors that sink into the public consciousness, create new ways of knowing ourselves and others.”

“
L’amor che movete il sol e altare Stella,’
” Einstein quoted suddenly. “Once you have encountered that phrase in Dante, the music of it does sink into your consciousness. It is very hard to look at the stars at night without thinking of it and feeling a little of what Dante felt. And yet I know, rationally, that the sun and other stars are actually moved by stochastic processes.”

“Stochastic?” Babcock asked.

“Random,” Joyce translated. “The professor is talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

“The stochastic is not random,” Einstein hastily corrected. “There is always a hidden variable in every stochastic process. A rational law. To think otherwise is to reify and deify Chaos. But is cosmic law the same as the heartbeat of Love that Dante intuited behind the cosmos? Anyone who claims to answer to that is either the king of philosophers or the king of fools.”

“I find it easier to believe in love than in law,” Milly said boldly. “But, being men, you will all say that is because I am a woman.”

“Ah,” said Joyce, “I should not say so. Perhaps the Isle of Man is only a suburb of the Continent of Woman. Biologically, the male is an accessory, an ambulatory seedpod.”

“Much of the universe, alas, is loveless,” Einstein said. “But no aspect of it is lawless.”

“So it seems to logic,” Joyce said argumentatively. “But
logic is only Aristotle’s generalization of the laws of Greek grammar. Which is part, but only part, of the great wordriver of consciousness. Chinese logic is not Aristotelian, you know. Other parts of the mindriver of human thought are totally illogical and irrational. You have shown mathematically, Professor, that space and time cannot be separated. The psychoanalytic study of consciousness is rapidly proving what Sir John and I have discovered in different ways, introspectively: namely, that reason and unreason are also seamlessly welded together—like your two Tar Babies after a prolonged fight….”

“You are a most unusual man,” said Mileva, as the dinner concluded. “If there is a Mrs. Joyce, she must be a most remarkable woman.”

“There is no Mrs. Joyce. But I lived with the same woman for ten years, and will certainly live with her the rest of my life, if she can continue to abide my intransigence that long.”

The men retired to Einstein’s study as Mileva began clearing up the dining room.

“Dash it all!” Babcock burst out to Joyce. “Must you parade you immorality on every possible occasion? I’m sure Frau Einstein was terribly shocked. Bragging about cheating landlords and living in open immorality.”

“Frau Einstein is shock-proof,” Einstein said calmly. “Most of my friends are eccentrics. Sometimes I even suspect that I might perhaps be an eccentric myself.”

“Every individual is a deviate,” Joyce said promptly. “I’ve never met a bore in my whole life. The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it. The masquerade is the key to human psychology. And, although I’m interested in your unique problems,” he added to Babcock, “I give you no authority to judge any moral decision I make. Nor do I give such
authority to any fat-bellied Church or thieving State. Nora lives with me because as a free being she chooses to, not because superstition or law forces her to stay. I would not have a slave, or a concubine, or a wife, but only an equal companion.”

A noble sentiment for a man sick with jealousy. Hear! Hear! The voice is the voice of my youth; the language of Ibsen and Nietzsche. But I am too old to be Stephen Dedalus any longer. If I ask, she will tell me; but I will not ask.
Eleutheria
. My fate:
übermensch
or Goddamned Idiot. Heroic posturing:
merde
.

“Some things,” Babcock rejoined heatedly, “are Simply Not Done in decent society.”

“You are no psychologist,” Joyce said with silky Celtic irony. “They are done all the time. They are simply not talked about.”

“Gentlemen,” said Einstein gravely, “this debate has been raging since the Romantic movement began a century ago. I do not think we will settle it tonight. Let us apply our brains, more profitably, to the Gothic mysteries presented by Sir John’s singular tale.”

Joyce slouched limply in a chair. “I have come to certain conclusions about that,” he said. “Would you be interested in hearing them?”

“Yes,” Einstein said. “I would be curious as to how they match up with my own tentative partial hypothesis.”

“Quite so,” said Babcock, also seating himself after removing a pile of scientific magazines in French and German from the only unoccupied chair.

“To begin with,” Joyce said. “I do not believe in the book that drives men mad, for two reasons. First, it is intrinsically incredible. Just as no drug would have this
specific [and melodramatic] effect on every user, no book could have such a power. Second, it has finally dawned on me that I have encountered this story before, in a work of fiction. I suspect that Mr. Aleister Crowley and his associates in the M.M.M. have read the same work of fiction and are merely adapting it as a mask for their true method of murder.”

Einstein almost dropped his pipe. “This is most interesting,” he said. “I begin to believe my own emerging hypothesis, since this would be what the hypothesis predicts. What is the work of fiction you have in mind?”

“It is a book of weird, supernatural stories called
The King in Yellow
. The author is an American named Robert W. Chambers. The stories all revolve around a horrible book, which is never named, but which causes madness in everybody who reads it. I might also add that there is some interesting allegorical material about masks and masquerades in
The King in Yellow
, which is also perhaps the most successful horror story since Stoker’s
Dracula
. Millions must have read it. I think it almost certain that the plot of this book suggested, to the M.M.M., a kind of malign masquerade in which they would create the impression that a book such as Chambers imagined really existed.”

Einstein relit his pipe: a cherry-red glow grew in the dark tobacco. “Masks and masquerades,” he said. “That is indeed what concerns us here. But how do we tear off the masks and see what lies behind? How are these seeming ‘miracles’ actually accomplished? If it weren’t for Ernst Mach and the Tar Baby story, I would not have the beginning of a hint of a theory … And even as it is, for every point that I think I can possibly explain, there are three that still leave me in the dark.

“Suppose,” he went on, “you had read
The King in Yellow
and were cruel enough to wish to duplicate the plot in real life. The best you could do, it seems to me, is
something like this: you include a letter with the book. The letter says: ‘This paper has been saturated with the germs of leprosy’—or syphilis, or whatever disease arouses the desired degree of terror. Would such a device succeed? I say that
perhaps
one person might be so hysterical and easily suggestible that he or she would believe this at once and commit suicide.
Ja?
But not three in a row. It is statistically unbelievable. One, at least, would have sense enough to consult a doctor before believing such a sick, slimy poison-pen letter.”

“Even in Calvinist Scotland,” Joyce said agreeably, “that would have to be true. Despite the political news one reads every day, the human race does
not
consist entirely of gullible dunces. This whole book of horrors is an enormous red herring across the trail, to confuse and distract us. The real method of driving the victims to suicidal mania was quite different, I am sure, and the books were sent to create a supernatural twilight aura around it.”

“I wish I could be as certain of that as you are,” Babcock said wearily.

Joyce shrugged with agnostic resignation. “I am certain of nothing,” he admitted. “I am only theorizing. I have also been working on those mysterious fragments of the alleged book’s title. We have no guarantee that we have received them in correct order, since the witnesses saw only parts of words. I have been trying permutations. Instead of
ther-go-mo
, how about
ther-mo-go? Thermo
is a prefix that means
heat
and appears in ‘thermometer,’ ‘thermodynamics’ and dozens of other redhot scientific words. Do you know of any scientific term beginning
thermogo
, Professor?”

“The best I can do along those lines,” Einstein said ruefully, “is thermogenetic and thermograph. No thermogo …”

“Well,” Joyce said, “there is always
mo-ther-go
. I immediately conceive the possible title,
Mother, Go to Hell!
That might be very distressing to readers of conventional
sensibilities, but not quite enough, I think, to drive them to suicidal mania.”

The
Föhn
wind: a dank, dark breath of wetted ashes: mother, go. Let me be and let me live. I will not serve the god who killed you with cancer. Agenbite. Cruel crabclaws, predators’ teeth.

“Let us hear the rest of the tale,” Einstein said out of the scarlet shadowed chair where he sat slumped in thought. “We have been theorizing, so far, from insufficient data.”

“There is not much more to tell,” Sir John said. “The climax, however, was more terrible and more incredible than anything I have related thus far.”

Nightdank purple shadows were finally gathering in the room, banishing the last golden reds of the sun. The Fräumünster chimes struck seven; the
Föhn
blew hot dead air into their eyes.

When Sir John telephoned Jones at his home, the day’s post was being brought in by Wildeblood, and Sir John began glancing at the envelopes as he and Jones discussed the latest developments.

“The first rule in chess,” Jones said, his voice rendered electronic and eunuchoid by the instrument, “is
protect the king
. Verey is the king right now—the piece under attack. I think we should move him.”

Sir John started to disagree. “I have eight servants, five of them rather sturdy males. I think Babcock Manor is as safe as any place in England …” his voice trailing off in uncertainty as the incredible, unthinkable, appeared in the mail: a postcard addressed to:

Hardly hearing “I’m not at all sure about that,” Jones saying sharply. “I think it almost certain that
they
are aware of your correspondence with Verey and, finding him flown from Inverness, will seek him immediately in your vicinity—if they didn’t actually follow him there….”

“You are right,” Sir John said, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, thinking: such stuff as nightmares are made of, turning the card over and looking at what he expected: