Текст книги "The Crying of Lot 49"

Автор книги: Thomas Pynchon

"How's it going?" the cop inquired.

"Just marv," said Oedipa. "I'll let you know if it's hopeless." Then she saw that Hilarius had left the Gewehr on his desk and was across the room ostensibly trying to open a file cabinet. She picked the rifle up, pointed it at him, and said, "I ought to kill you." She knew he had wanted her to get the weapon.

"Isn't that what you've been sent to do?" He crossed and uncrossed his eyes at her; stuck out his tongue tentatively.

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

"Come on in," Oedipa yelled.

Tears sprang to Hilarius's eyes. "You aren't going to shoot?"

The cop tried the door. "It's locked, hey," he said.

"Bust it down," roared Oedipa, "and Hitler Hilarius here will foot the bill."

Outside, as a number of nervous patrolmen approached Hilarius, holding up strait jackets and billy clubs they would not need, and as three rival ambulances backed snarling up onto the lawn, jockeying for position, causing Helga Blamm between sobs to call the drivers filthy names, Oedipa spotted among searchlights and staring crowds a KCUF mobile unit, with her husband Mucho inside it, spieling into a microphone. She moseyed over past snapping flashbulbs and stuck her head in the window. "Hi."

Mucho pressed his cough button a moment, but only smiled. It seemed odd. How could they hear a smile? Oedipa got in, trying not to make noise. Mucho thrust the mike in front of her, mumbling, "You're on, just be yourself." Then in his earnest broadcasting voice, "How do you feel about this terrible thing?" "Terrible," said Oedipa.

"Wonderful," said Mucho. He had her go on to give listeners a summary of what'd happened in the office. "Thank you, Mrs Edna Mosh," he wrapped up, "for your eyewitness account of this dramatic siege at the Hilarius Psychiatric Clinic. This is KCUF Mobile Two, sending it back now to 'Rabbit' Warren, at the studio." He cut his power. Something was not quite right.

"Edna Mosh?" Oedipa said. "It'll come out the right way," Mucho said. "I was allowing for the distortion on these rigs, and then when they put it on tape."

"Where are they taking him?" "Community hospital, I guess," Mucho said, "for observation. I wonder what they can observe."

"Israelis," Oedipa said, "coming in the windows. If there aren't any, he's crazy." Cops came over and they chatted awhile. They told her to stay around Kinneret in case there was legal action. At length she returned to her rented car and followed Mucho back to the studio. Tonight he had the one-to-six shift on the air.

In the hallway outside the loud ratcheting teletype room, Mucho upstairs in the office typing out his story, Qedipa encountered the program director, Caesar Funch. "Sure glad you're back," he greeted her, clearly at a loss for her first name.

"Oh?" said Oedipa, "and why is that."

"Frankly," confided Funch, "since you left, Wen-dell hasn't been himself."

"And who," said Oedipa, working herself into a rage because Funch was right, "pray, has he been, Ringo Starr?" Funch cowered. "Chubby Checker?" she pursued him toward the lobby, "the Righteous Brothers? And why tell me?"

"All of the above," said Funch, seeking to hide his head, "Mrs Maas."

"Oh, call me Edna. What do you mean?"

"Behind his back," Funch was whining, "they're calling him the Brothers N. He's losing his identity, Edna, how else can I put it? Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He's a walking assembly of man."

"It's your imagination," Oedipa said. "You've been smoking those cigarettes without the printing on them again."

"You'll see. Don't mock me. We have to stick together. Who else worries about him?"

She sat alone then on a bench outside Studio A, listening to Mucho's colleague Rabbit Warren spin records. Mucho came downstairs carrying his copy, a serenity about him she'd never seen. He used to hunch his shoulders and have a rapid eyeblink rate, and both now were gone, "Wait," he smiled, and dwindled down the hall. She scrutinized him from behind, trying to see iridescences, auras.

They had some time before he was on. They drove downtown to a pizzeria and bar, and faced each other through the fluted gold lens of a beer pitcher.

"How are you getting on with Metzger?" he said. "There's nothing," she said. "Not any more, at least," said Mucho. "I could tell that when you were talking into the mike."

"That's pretty good," Oedipa said. She couldn't figure the expression on his face.

"It's extraordinary," said Mucho, "everything's been-wait. Listen." She heard nothing unusual. "There are seventeen violins on that cut," Mucho said, "and one of them-I can't tell where he was because it's monaural here, damn." It dawned on her that he was talking about the Muzak. It has been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they'd entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.

"What is it," she said, feeling anxious. "His E string," Mucho said, "it's a few cycles sharp. – He can't be a studio musician. Do you think somebody could do the dinosaur bone bit with that one string, Oed? With just his set of notes on that cut. Figure out what his ear is like, and then the musculature of his hands and arms, and eventually the entire man. God, wouldn't that be wonderful." "Why should you want to?" "He was real. That wasn't synthetic. They could dispense with live musicians if they wanted. Put together all the right overtones at the right power levels so it'd come out like a violin. Like I…" he hesitated before breaking into a radiant smile, "you'll think I'm crazy, Oed. But I can do the same thing in reverse. Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once." "How can you do that?"

"It's like I have a separate channel for each one," Mucho said, excited, "and if I need more I just expand. Add on what I need. I don't know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking too. Say 'rich, chocolaty goodness.'"

"Rich, chocolaty, goodness," said Oedipa. "Yes," said Mucho, and fell silent. "Well, what?" Oedipa asked after a couple minutes, with an edge to her voice.

"I noticed it the other night hearing Rabbit do a commercial. No matter who's talking, the different power spectra are the same, give or take a small percentage. So you and Rabbit have something in common now. More than that. Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you'd have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying 'rich, chocolaty goodness' together, and it would all be the same voice."

"Mucho," she said, impatient but also flirting with a wild suspicion. "Is this what Funch means when he says you're coming on like a whole roomful of people?" "That's what I am," said Mucho, "right. Everybody is." He gazed at her, perhaps having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face now smooth, amiable, at peace. She didn't know him. Panic started to climb out of a dark region in her head. "Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.

"Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.

He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSD?" she said. Mucho smiled back. "Where'd you get it?" Knowing.

"Hilarius. He broadened his program to include husbands."

"Look then," Oedipa said, trying to be businesslike, "how long has it been, that you've been on this?"

He honestly couldn't remember.

"But there may be a chance you're not addicted yet."

"Oed," looking at her puzzled, "you don't get addicted. It's not like you're some hophead. You take it because it's good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You're an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they're your lives too." He had this patient, motherly look now. Oedipa wanted to hit him in the mouth. "The songs, it's not just that they say something, they are something, in the pure sound. Something new. And my dreams have changed."

"Oh, goodo." Flipping her hair a couple times, furious, "No nightmares any more? Fine. So your latest little friend, whoever she is, she really made out. At that age, you know, they need all the sleep they can get."

"There's no girl, Oed. Let me tell you. The bad dream that I used to have all the time, about the car lot, remember that? I could never even tell you about it. But I can now. It doesn't bother me any more. It was only that sign in the lot, that's what scared me. In the dream I'd be going about a normal day's business and suddenly, with no warning, there'd be the sign. We were a member of the National Automobile Dealers' Association. N.A.D.A. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky. I used to wake up hollering."

She remembered. Now he would never be spooked again, not as long as he had the pills. She could not quite get it into her head that the day she'd left him for San Narciso was the day she'd seen Mucho for the last time. So much of him already had dissipated.

"Oh, listen," he was saying, "Oed, dig." But she couldn't even tell what the tune was.

When it was time for him to go back to the station, he nodded toward the pills. "You could have those."

She shook her head no.

"You're going back to San Narciso?"

"Tonight, yes."

"But the cops."

"I'll be a fugitive." Later she couldn't remember if they'd said anything else. At the station they kissed goodbye, all of them. As Mucho walked away he was whistling something complicated, twelve-tone. Oedipa sat with her forehead resting on the steering wheel and remembered that she hadn't asked him about the Trys-tero cancellation on his letter. But by then it was too late to make any difference.

6

WHEN she got back to Echo Courts, she found Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard arranged around and on the diving board at the end of the swimming pool with all their instruments, so composed and motionless that some photographer, hidden from Oedipa, might have been shooting them for an album illustration.

"What's happening?" said Oedipa.

"Your young man," replied Miles, "Metzger, really put it to Serge, our counter-tenor. The lad is crackers with grief."

"He's right, missus," said Serge. "I even wrote a song about it, whose arrangement features none other than me, and it goes like this."

SERGE'S SONG

 
What chance has a lonely surfer boy
For the love of a surfer chick,
With all these Humbert Humbert cats
Coming on so big and sick?
For me, my baby was a. woman,
For him she's just another nymphet;
Why did they run around, why did she put me down,
And get me so upset?
Well, as long as she's gone away-yay,
I've had to find somebody new,
And the older generation
Has taught me what to do-
I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,
And she's a swinger just like me,
So you can find us any night up on the football field,
In back of P.S. 33 (oh, yeah),
And it's as groovy as it can be.
 

"You're trying to tell me something," said Oedipa.

They gave it to her then in prose. Metzger and Serge's chick had run off to Nevada, to get married. Serge, on close questioning, admitted the bit about the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary, but that he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and should have some news for them any day. On top of the TV set in her room Metzger had left a note telling her not to worry about the estate, that he'd turned over his execu-torship to somebody at Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, and they should be in touch with her, and it was all squared with the probate court also. No word to recall that Oedipa and Metzger had ever been more than co-executors.

Which must mean, thought Oedipa, that that's all we were. She should have felt more classically scorned, but had other things on her mind. First thing after unpacking she was on the horn to Randolph Driblette, the director. After about ten rings an elderly lady answered. "I'm sorry, we've nothing to say."

"Well who's this," Oedipa said.

Sigh. "This is his mother. There'll be a statement at noon tomorrow. Our lawyer will read it." She hung up. Now what the hell, Oedipa wondered: what had happened to Driblette? She decided to call later. She found Professor Emory Bortz's number in the book and had better luck. A wife named Grace answered, backed by a group of children. "He's pouring a patio," she told Oedipa. "It's a highly organized joke that's been going on since about April. He sits in the sun, drinks beer with students, lobs beer bottles at seagulls. You'd better talk to him before it gets that far. Maxine, why don't you throw that at your brother, he's more mobile than I am. Did you know Emory's done a new edition of Wharfinger? It'll be out-" but the date was obliterated by a great crash, maniacal childish laughter, high-pitched squeals. "Oh, God. Have you ever met an infanticide? Come on over, it may be your only chance."

Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a studentlike twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz's response, or Grace's, but of The Trystero's.

Driving over she passed by Zapf's Used Books, and was alarmed to find a pile of charred rubble where the bookstore only a week ago had Stood. There was still the smell of burnt leather. She stopped and went into the government surplus outlet next door. The owner informed her that Zapf, the damn fool, has set fire to his own store for the insurance. "Any kind of a wind," snarled this worthy, "it would have taken me with it. They only put up this complex here to last five years anyway. But could Zapf wait? Books." You had the feeling that it was only his good upbringing kept him from spitting. "You want to sell something used," he advised Oedipa, "find out what there's a demand for. This season now it's your rifles. Fella was in just this forenoon, bought two hundred for his drill team. I could've sold him two hundred of the swastika armbands too, only I was short, dammit."

"Government surplus swastikas?" Oedipa said. "Hell no." He gave her an insider's wink. "Got this little factory down outside of San Diego," he told her, "got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can sure turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's selling. I took some space in a couple of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra niggers last week just to take care of the mail." "What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike you?"

"I'll let you know," Oedipa said. "I'll keep you in mind." She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn't she?

You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens. By the time she'd pulled into Bortz's subdivision, a riparian settlement in the style of Fangoso Lagoons, she was only shaking and a little nauseous in the stomach.

She was greeted by a small fat girl with some blue substance smeared all over her face. "Hi," said Oedipa, "you must be Maxine."

"Maxine's in bed. She threw one of Daddy's beer bottles at Charles and it went through the window and Mama spanked her good. If she was mine I'd drown her."

"Never thought of doing it that way," said Grace Bortz, materializing from the dim living room. "Come on in." With a wet washcloth she started to clean off her child's face. "How did you manage to get away from yours today?"

"I don't have any," said Oedipa, following her into the kitchen.

Grace looked surprised. "There's a certain harassed style," she said, "you get to recognize. I thought only kids caused it. I guess not."

Emory Bortz lay half in a hammock, surrounded by three graduate students, two male, one female, all sodden with drink, and an astounding accumulation of empty beer bottles. Oedipa located a full one and seated herself on the grass. "I would like to find out," she presently plunged, "something about the historical Wharfinger. Not so much the verbal one."

"The historical Shakespeare," growled one of the grad students through a full beard, uncapping another bottle. "The historical Marx. The historical Jesus."

"He's right," shrugged Bortz, "they're dead. What's left?" "Words."

"Pick some words," said Bortz. "Them, we can talk about."

" 'No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,'" quoted Oedipa, " 'Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero.' Courier's Tragedy, Act IV, Scene 8."

Bortz blinked at her. "And how," he said, "did you get into the Vatican library?"

Oedipa showed him the paperback with the line in it. Bortz, squinting at the page, groped for another beer. "My God," he announced, "I've been pirated, me and Wharfinger, we've been Bowdlerized in reverse or something." He flipped to the front, to see who'd re-edited his edition of Wharfinger. "Ashamed to sign it. Damn. I'll have to write the publishers. K. da Chingado and Company? You ever heard of them? New York." He looked at the sun through a page or two. "Offset." Brought his nose close to the text. "Misprints. Gah. Corrupt." He dropped the book on the grass and looked at it with loathing. "How did they get into the Vatican, then?"

"What's in the Vatican?" asked Oedipa.

"A pornographic Courier's Tragedy. I didn't get to see it till '61, or I would've given it a note in my old edition."

"What I saw out at the Tank Theatre wasn't pornographic?"

"Randy Driblette's production? No, I thought it was typically virtuous." He looked sadly past her toward a stretch of sky. "He was a peculiarly moral man. He felt hardly any responsibility toward the word, really; but to the invisible field surrounding the play, its spirit, he was always intensely faithful. If anyone could have called up for you that historical Wharfinger you want, it'd've been Randy. Nobody else I ever knew was so close to the author, to the microcosm of that play as it must have surrounded Wharfinger's living mind."

"But you're using the past tense," Oedipa said, her heart pounding, remembering the old lady on the phone.

"Hadn't you heard?" They all looked at her. Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

"Randy walked into the Pacific two nights ago," the girl told her finally. Her eyes had been red all along. "In his Gennaro suit. He's dead, and this is a wake."

"I tried to call him this morning," was all Oedipa could think of to say.

"It was right after they struck the set of The Courier's Tragedy," Bortz said.

Even a month ago, Oedipa's next question would have been, "Why?" But now she kept a silence, waiting, as if to be illuminated.

They are stripping from me, she said subvocally– feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss-they are stripping away, one by one, my men. My shrink, pursued by Israelis, has gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra-marital fella has eloped with a depraved 15-year-old; my best guide back to the Trystero has taken a Brody. Where am I? "I'm sorry," Bortz had also said, watching her. Oedipa stayed with it. "Did he use only that," pointing to the paperback, "for his script?"

"No." Frowning. "He used the hardcover, my edition."

"But the night you saw the play." Too much sunlight shone on the bottles, silent all around them. "How did he end the fourth act? What were his lines, Driblette's, Gennaro's, when they're all standing around at the lake, after the miracle?"

" 'He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew,'" recited Bortz, " 'Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,/And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.' " "Right," agreed the grad students, "yeah." "That's all? What about the rest? The other couplet?"

"In the text I go along with personally," said Bortz, "that other couplet has the last line suppressed. The book in the Vatican is only an obscene parody. The ending 'Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo' was put in by the printer of the 1687 Quarto. The 'White-chapel' version is corrupt. So Randy did the best thing -left the doubtful part out altogether."

"But the night I was there," said Oedipa, "Driblette did use the Vatican lines, he said the word Trystero."

Bortz's face stayed neutral. "It was up to him. He was both director and actor, right?"

"But would it be just," she gestured in circles with her hands, "just some whim? To use another couple lines like that, without telling anybody?"

"Randy," recalled the third grad student, a stocky kid with hornrims, "what was bugging him inside, usually, somehow or other, would have to come outside, on stage. He might have looked at a lot of versions, to develop a feel for the spirit of the play, not necessarily the words, and that's how he came across your paperback there, with the variation in it."

"Then," Oedipa concluded, "something must have happened in his personal life, something must have changed for him drastically that night, and that's what made him put the lines in."

"Maybe," said Bortz, "maybe not. You think a man's mind is a pool table?"

"I hope not."

"Come in and see some dirty pictures," Bortz invited, rolling off the hammock. They left the students drinking beer. "Illicit microfilms of the illustrations in that Vatican edition. Smuggled out in '61. Grace and I were there on a grant."

They entered a combination workroom and study. Far away in the house children screamed, a vacuum whined. Bortz drew shades, riffled through a box of slides, selected a handful, switched on a projector and aimed it at a wall.

The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

"The artist is anonymous," Bortz said, "so is the poetaster who rewrote the play. Here Pasquale, remember, one of the bad guys? actually does marry his mother, and there's a whole scene on their wedding night." He changed slides. "You get the general idea, notice how often the figure of Death hovers in the background. The moral rage, it's a throwback, it's mediaeval. No Puritan ever got that violent. Except possibly the Scurvhamites. D'Amico thinks this edition was a Scurvhamite project." "Scurvhamite?"

Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I, a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship's master, had been last to go.

"What did Richard Wharfinger have to do with them?" asked Oedipa. "Why should they do a dirty version of his play?"

"As a moral example. They were not fond of the theatre. It was their way of putting the play entirely away from them, into hell. What better way to damn it eternally than to change the actual words. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word."

"But the line about Trystero isn't dirty."

He scratched his head. "It fits, surely? The 'hallowed skein of stars' is God's will. But even that can't ward, or guard, somebody who has an appointment with Trystero. I mean, say you only talked about crossing the lusts of Angelo, hell, there'd be any number of ways to get out of that. Leave the country. Angelo's only a man. But the brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well."

She had nothing more then to put it off with. Again with the light, vertiginous sense of fluttering out over an abyss, she asked what she'd come there to ask. "What was Trystero?"

"One of several brand new areas," said Bortz, "that opened up after I did that edition in '57. We've since come across some interesting old source material. My updated edition ought to be out, they tell me, next year sometime. Meanwhile." He went looking in a glass case full of ancient books. "Here," producing one with a dark brown, peeling calf cover. "I keep my Wharfingeriana locked in here so the kids can't get at it. Charles could ask no end of questions I'm too young to cope with yet." The book was titled An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of That Outlandish And Fantastical Race.

"Lucky for me," said Bortz, "Wharfinger, like Milton, kept a commonplace book, where he jotted down quotes and things from his reading. That's how we know about Blobb's Peregrinations."

It was full of words ending in e's, s's that looked like f's, capitalized nouns, y's where i's should've been. "I can't read this," Oedipa said.

"Try," said Bortz. "I have to see those kids off. I think it's around Chapter Seven." And disappeared, to leave Oedipa before the tabernacle. As it turned out it was Chapter Eight she wanted, a report of the author's own encounter with the Trystero brigands. Diocletian Blobb had chosen to traverse a stretch of desolate mountain country in a mail coach belonging to the "Torre and Tassis" system, which Oedipa figured must be Italian for Thurn and Taxis. Without warning, by the shores of what Blobb called "the Lake of Piety," they were set upon by a score of black-cloaked riders, who engaged them in a fierce, silent struggle in the icy wind blowing in from the lake. The marauders used cudgels, harquebuses, swords, stilettos, at the end silk kerchiefs to dispatch those still breathing. All except for Dr Blobb and his servant, who had dissociated themselves from the hassle at the very outset, proclaimed in loud voices that they were British subjects, and even from time to time "ventured to sing certain of the more improving of our Church hymns." Their escape surprised Oedipa, in view of what seemed to be Trystero's passion for security.

"Was Trystero trying to set up shop in England?" Bortz suggested, days later.

Oedipa didn't know. "But why spare an insufferable ass like Diocletian Blobb?"

"You can spot a mouth like that a mile off," Bortz said. "Even in the cold, even with your blood-lust up. If I wanted word to get to England, to sort of pave the way, I should think he'd be perfect. Trystero enjoyed counter-revolution in those days. Look at England, the king about to lose his head. A set-up."

The leader of the brigands, after collecting the mail sacks, had pulled Blobb from the coach and addressed him in perfect English: "Messer, you have witnessed the wrath of Trystero. Know that we are not without mercy. Tell your king and Parliament what we have done. Tell them that we prevail. That neither tempest nor strife, nor fierce beasts, nor the loneliness of the desert, nor yet the illegitimate usurpers of our rightful estate, can deter our couriers." And leaving them and their purses intact, the highwaymen, in a cracking of cloaks like black sails, vanished back into their twilit mountains.

Blobb inquired around about the Trystero organization, running into zipped mouths nearly every way he turned. But he was able to collect a few fragments. So, in the days following, was Oedipa. From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, an 8o-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb's brother Augustine also among Bortz's Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb's original clues, Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began:

In 1577, the northern provinces of the Low Countries, led by the Protestant noble William of Orange, had been struggling nine years for independence from Catholic Spain and a Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. In late December, Orange, de facto master of the Low Countries, entered Brussels in triumph, having been invited there by a Committee of Eighteen. This was a junta of Calvinist fanatics who felt that the Estates-General, controlled by the privileged classes, no longer represented the skilled workers, had lost touch entirely with the people. The Committee set up a kind of Brussels Commune. They controlled the police, dictated all decisions of the Estates-General, and threw out many holders of high position in Brussels. Among these was Leonard I, Baron of Taxis, Gentleman of the Emperor's Privy Chamber and Baron of Buysinghen, the hereditary Grand Master of the Post for the Low Countries, and executor of the Thurn and Taxis monopoly. He was replaced by one Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohain, a loyal adherent of Orange. At this point the founding figure enters the scene: Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera, perhaps a madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist. Tristero claimed to be Jan Hinckart's cousin, from the Spanish and legitimate branch of the family, and true lord of Ohain-rightful heir to everything Jan Hinckart then possessed, including his recent appointment as Grand Master.