Drake pushed open the dark paneled doorway of George's room. Good: Tarantella was gone. The thunder rumbled again, and Drake's own shadow looming over the bed reminded him once more of a Karloff movie.
He bent over the bed and shook George's shoulder gently. "Mavis," the boy said. Drake wondered who the hell Mavis was; somebody terrific, obviously, if George could be dreaming about her after a session with the Illuminati-trained Tarantella. Or was Mavis another ex-Illuminatus? There were a lot of them with the Discordians lately, Drake had surmised. He shook George's shoulder again, more vigorously.
"Oh, no, I can't come again," George said. Drake gave another shake, and two weary and frightened eyes opened to look at him.
"What?"
"Up," Drake grunted, grabbing George under the arms and pulling him to a sitting position. "Out of bed," he added, panting, rolling the boy to the edge.
Drake was looking through waves upward at George. Damn it, the thing has already found my mind. "You've got to get out," he repeated. "You're in danger here."
October 23, 1935: Charley Workman, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew charge through the door of the Palace Chop House and, according to orders, cowboy the joint.. Lead pellets like rain; and rain like lead pellets hitting George's window, "Christ, what is it?" he asked. Drake stood him up stark naked and handed him his drawers, repeating "Hurry!" Charley the Bug looked over the three bodies: Abadaba Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz and somebody he didn't recognize. None of them was the Dutchman. "My God, we fucked up," he said, "Dutch ain't here." But a commotion has started in the alleys of the dream: Albert Stern, taking his last fix of the night, suddenly recalls his fantasy of killing somebody as important as John Dillinger. "The can," Mendy Weiss says excitedly; he had a hard-on, like he always did on this kind of job. "Man is a giant," Drake says, "forced to live in a pigmy's hut." "What does that mean?" George asks. "It means we're all fools," Drake says excitedly, smelling the old whore Death, "especially those of us who try to act like giants by bullying the others in the hut instead of knocking the goddam walls down. Carl Jung told me that, only in more elegant language." George's dangling penis kept catching his eye: homosexuality (an occasional thing with Drake), heterosexuality (his normal state) and the new lust for the old whore Death were all tugging at him. The Dutchman dropped his penis, urine squirting his shoes, and went for his gun as he heard the shots in the barroom. He turned quickly, unable to stop pissing, and Albert Stern came through the door, shooting before Dutch could take aim. Falling forward, he saw that it was really Vince Coll, a ghost. "Oh, mama mama mama," he said, lying in his urine.
"Which way do we go?" George asked, buttoning his shirt.
"You go," Drake said. "Down the stairs and out the back, to the garage. Here's the key to my Silver Wraith Rolls Royce. It won't be any use to me anymore."
"Why aren't you coming?" George protested.
"We deserve to be dead," Drake said, "all of us in this house."
"Hey, that's crazy. I don't care what you've done, a guilt trip is always crazy."
"I've been on a crazier trip, as you'd call it, all my life," Drake said calmly. "The power trip. Now, move!"
"George, don't make no bull moves," the Dutchman said. "He's talking," Sergeant Luke Conlon whispered at the foot of the hospital bed; the police stenographer, F. J. Long, began taking notes. "What have you done with him?" the Dutchman went on. "Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh, stop it. Oh, oh, oh, sure. Sure, mama." Drake sat down in the window seat and, too nervous for a cigar, lit one of his infrequent cigarettes. One hundred and fifty-seven, he thought, remembering the last entry in his little notebook. One hundred and fifty-seven rich women, one wife, and seventeen boys.
