"And what about you?" he said angrily, pulling away from her and sitting up in bed. "I suppose you can't tell the difference between black and white. Black meat and white meat, it's all the same to you, ain't it, you goddamned whore!"
"You'd like to think so," said Stella. "You'd like to think only a nigger whore would lay you, a whore who'd lay anybody regardless of race. But you know you are wrong. You know that Otto Waterhouse, the black man who is better than all black men because he hates all black men, is a lie. It's you who can't tell the difference between black and white and thinks the black man should be where the white man is and hates the black man because he isn't white. No, I see color. But I see everything else about a person, too, baby. And I know that nobody is where they should be and everybody should be where they are."
"Oh, fuck your goddam philosophy," said Water-house. "Come here."
But he learned. He thought he'd learned everything Stella and Hagbard and the rest of them had to teach him. And that was a lot, piled on top of all that Illuminati garbage. But now they'd thrown him a total curve.
He was to kill.
The message came, as all the messages did, from Stella.
"Hagbard said to do this?"
"Yes."
"And I suppose, if I go along with this, I''ll be told why later on, or I'll figure it out for myself? Goddam, Stella, this is asking a lot, you know."
"I know. Hagbard told me you have to do this for two reasons. First, for the honor of the Discordians, so that they will have respect."
"He sounds like a wop for once. But he's right. I understand that."
"Second. He said because Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man."
"What?" Otto started to tremble in the phone booth. He picked nervously, without reading it, at a sticker that said, THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT.
"Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man. He said you'd know what that meant."
Otto's hand was still shaking when he hung up. "Oh, damn," he said. He was almost crying.
So now on April 28 he stood at a green metal door marked "1723." It was the service entrance to a condominium apartment at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. Behind him stood a dozen State's Attorney's police. All of them, like himself, were wearing body armor and baby-blue helmets with transparent plastic visors. Two were carrying submachine guns.
"All right," said Waterhouse, glancing at his watch. It had amused Flanagan to set the time for the raid at 5:23 A.M. It was 5:22:30. "Remember- shoot everything that moves." He kept his back to the men so they would not see the damned tears that Insisted on welling up in his eyes.
"Right on, lieutenant," said Sergeant O'Banion satirically. Sergeant O'Banion hated blacks, but worse than that he hated filthy, lice-ridden, long-haired, homosexual, Communist-inspired Morituri bomb manufacturers. He believed that there was a whole disgusting nest of them, sleeping together, dirty naked bodies entwined, like a can full of worms, just on the other side of that green metal door. He could see them. He licked his lips. He was going to clean them out. He hefted the machine gun.
"Okay," said Waterhouse. It was 5:23. Shielding himself with one gloved hand, he pointed his.45 at the lock on the door. The instructions given orally by Flanagan at the briefing were that they would not show a warrant or even knock before entering. The apartment was said to be full of enough dynamite to wipe out the entire block of luxury high-rise apartment houses. Presumably the kids, if they knew they were caught, would set them off. That way they could take a bunch of pigs with them, preserve their reputation for suicidal bravery, protect themselves from giving away any information, use the explosives and avoid having to live with the shaming knowledge that they'd been dumb enough to get caught.
O'Banion was imagining finding a white girl in the arms of a black boy and finishing them off with one burst from his machine gun. His cock swelled in his pants.
Waterhouse fired.
In the next instant he threw his weight against the door and smashed it open. He was in a hallway next to the kitchen. He walked into the apartment. His shoes rang on a bare tile floor. Tears ran down his cheeks.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he sobbed.
"Who's that?" a voice called. Waterhouse, whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness, looked across the empty living room into the foyer, where Milo A. Flanagan stood silhouetted in the light from the exterior hall.
Waterhouse raised the heavy automatic in his hand to arm's length, sighted carefully, took a deep breath and held it and squeezed the trigger. The pistol blasted and kicked his hand and the black figure went toppling backwards into the startled arms of the men behind him.
A bat which had been sitting on a windowsill flew out the open window toward the lake. Only Waterhouse saw it.
O'Banion came clumping into the room. He took a bent-kneed stance and fired a burst of six rounds in the direction of the front door.
"Hold it!" Waterhouse snapped. "Hold your fire. Something's wrong." Something would really be wrong if the guys at the front door came through again, shooting. "Turn on the lights, O'Banion," Waterhouse said.
"There's somebody in here shooting."
"We're standing here talking, O'Banion. No one is shooting at us. Find a light switch."
"They're gonna set off the bombs!" O'Banion's voice was shrill with fear.
"With the lights on, O'Banion, we'll see them doing it. Maybe we'll even be able to stop them."
O'Banion ran to the wall and began slapping it with the palm of one hand while he kept his machine gun cradled in the free arm. One of the other men who had followed O'Banion through the service entrance found the light switch.
The apartment was bare. There was no furniture. There were no rugs on the floor, no curtains on the windows. Whoever had been living here had vanished.
The front door opened a crack. Before they could start shooting Waterhouse yelled, "It's all right. It's Waterhouse in here. There's nobody here." He wasn't crying anymore. It was done. He had killed his first white man.
The door swung all the way open. "Nobody there?" said the helmeted policeman. "Who the hell shot Flanagan?"
"Flanagan?" said Waterhouse.
"Flanagan's dead. They got him."
"There isn't anybody here," said O'Banion, who had been looking through side rooms. "What the hell went wrong? Flanagan set this up personally."
Now that the light was on, Waterhouse could see that someone had drawn a pentagram in chalk on the floor. In the center of the pentagram was a gray envelope. Otto picked it up. There was a circular green seal on the back with the word ERIS embossed on it Otto opened it and read:
Good going, Otto. Now proceed at once to Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The bastards are trying to immanentize the Eschaton.
S-M
Folding the note and shoving it into his pocket as he bolstered his pistol with his other hand, Otto Waterhouse strode across the living room. He barely glanced down at the body of Milo A. Flanagan, the bullet hole in the center of his forehead like a third eye. Hagbard had been right. Despite all the advance terror and sorrow, once he'd done it, he didn't feel a thing. I have met the enemy and he is mine, he thought.
Otto pushed past the men crowded around Flanagan's body. Everyone assumed he was going somewhere to make some sort of report. No one had figured out who shot Flanagan.
By the time O'Banion had puzzled it out, Otto was already in his car. Six hours later, when they had set up blockades at the airports and railway terminals, Otto was in Minneapolis International Airport buying a ticket to Montreal. He had to fly back to Chicago, but he sat out the brief stopover at O'Hare International Airport aboard the plane, while his brother officers searched the terminals for him. Twelve hours later, carrying a passport supplied by Montreal Discordians, Otto Waterhouse was on his way to Ingolstadt.