This was a piss-cutter.
John's original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn't be done. There was no human way of hitting more than two of those targets- all three of them in different areas and at different elevations- before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job while that was happening. It was what Hagbard called an existential koan.
"Shit, piss and industrial waste," John muttered, quoting another Celinism.
Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle. Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.
If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the I Ching at least (which probably explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper), then "save what you can" could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would give them a mystery they would never solve.
The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren't quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle, quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy's skull, and thought briefly, Even if it falls through and doesn't remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I'm caught: PRESIDENT SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now, and then he tightened his finger.
("Murder?" George asked. "It's hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man's games get that hairy."
"During the Kali Yuga," Stella replied, "almost all our games are played with live ammunition. Haven't you noticed?")
The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy's lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.
"Christ!" John said. "Him?"
Stella toked again- she never seemed to think she I was sufficiently stoned. "Wait," she said. "There's a I passage in Never Whistle While You're Pissing that goes into this a bit." She got up, walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on the wall shelf. "You know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?" she asked over her shoulder. "Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others." She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. "For instance," she said slowly. "Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals- 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'- or submissive signals- 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.'"
"Lord in Heaven," Harry Coin said softly. "That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up."
"Your brain gave up," Stella corrected. "The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart."
"But what has redundance got to do with this?" George asked.
"Here's the passage," Stella said. She began to read aloud:
People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter, unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually, the flexible ones find the "proper" gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible. They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her script.
The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and forces them to follow its script.
"That's heavy," George said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus or Emperor Norton."
"Exactly!" Harry Coin chortled. "And that ends the game. You've just proven what I suspected all along. You're the Martian!"
"Don't raise your voices," Galley said drowsily from the floor. "I can see hundreds of blissful Buddhas floating through the air…"
A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile- together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle- were taking up Danny Pricefixer's attention, back in New York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the Confrontation bombing and the five associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. "Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is gone. This Dora kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind of progress before the day is over, or I'll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men."
When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, "What are you going to do?"
"Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They'll produce." Van Meter didn't really sound convinced. "What are you going to do?" he added lamely.
"I'm going to play a hunch," Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his namesake in the famous television series.