The illuminatus! trilogy Read Online Free Page A

Otherwise, I’d be furious.”
    Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first met her …
    “Do you know what I’m going to do?” Rebecca lowered her voice. “I’m going to take off my nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and waiting.”
    Saul grinned. “A man my age shouldn’t be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier.”
    “But you did respond, didn’t you?” Her voice was confident and sensual.
    “I sure did. I won’t be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes.”
    She chuckled softly and said, “I’ll be waiting….”
    “I love you,” he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won’t be able to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. “Listen,” he added hurriedly, “let’s change the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the Illuminati?” Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often astonished him.
    “It’s a hoax,” she said.
    “A what?”
    “A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven.”
    “No, that’s not what I’m asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?”
    “Oh, that’s the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see, so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would have some evidence to point to. That’s all there is to it. Sophomore humor.”
    I hope so, Saul thought. “How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?”
    “It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded around—oh—1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it’s part of the orthodox Moslem religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea—the word ‘assassin’ is a corruption of his name.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The word ‘hashish’ also comes from his name.”
    “This is a heavy case,” Saul said, “and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking the patrolmanin the hall, I’ll get back to work on it. Don’t say anything that’ll get me aroused again. Please.”
    “I won’t. I’ll just lie here naked and …”
    “Good-bye.”
    “Good-bye,” she said, laughing.
    Saul hung up frowning. Goodman’s intuition, the other detectives call it. It’s not intuition; it’s a way of thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing
wholes
, of seeing that there must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet. And I know. There is an Illuminati, whether or not those kids at Berkeley are kidding.
    He came out of his concentration and realized where he was. For the first time, he noticed a sticker on the door:
THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT
    He grinned: an intellectual’s kind of joke. Probably somebody on the magazine.
    He walked back to the cafeteria, reflecting. “Nothing is true. Everything is permissible.” With a doctrine like that, people were capable of … He shuddered. Images of Buchenwald and Belsen, of Jews who might have been him….
    Peter Jackson looked up as he reentered the cafeteria. An intelligent, curious black face. Muldoon was as impassive as the