"Don Federico Maldonado, a man of the greatest respect," said Drake. "And Richard Jung, my chief counselor." George shook hands with both of them. He couldn't understand why Maldonado was known as "Banana-Nose"; his proboscis was on the large side, but bore little resemblance to a banana. It was more like an eggplant. The name must be a sample of low Sicilian humor. The two men took seats on a red leather couch. George and Drake sank into armchairs facing them.
"And how are my favorite musicians doing?" Jung said genially.
Was this some kind of password? George was sure of one thing: his survival depended on sticking absolutely to truth and sincerity with these people, so he said, very sincerely, "I don't know. Who are your favorite musicians?"
Jung smiled back, saying nothing, until George, his heart racing inside his chest like a hamster determined to run clear off the treadmill, reached into his briefcase and took out a parchment scroll.
"This," he said, "is the fundamental agreement proposed by the people I represent." He handed it to Drake. Maldonado, he noticed, was staring fixedly, expressionlessly, at him in the most unnerving way. The man's eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His face was a waxen mask. He was, George decided, a wax dummy of Pope Paul VI which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud's, dressed in a business suit, and brought to life to serve as the head of the Mafia. George had always thought there was something witchy about Sicilians.
"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.
George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."
Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily.
"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late… Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"
Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."
"And if you're one of-the elements, the number of coalitions- or to be sinister, conspiracies- that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it pragmatically- it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements…?."
Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty."
"You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in the early thirties, that nobody should ever
