The Israel Bond Omnibus (14 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
“Of course, my dear boy. And why shouldn’t you? She is a splendidly constructed type who will give you fine sons for soldiering, tall, blonde sons whose marching feet will crush the mongrelized enemies of ... Israel, of course.”
From the back of the house came Saxon in a Volkswagen bus, speeding past them down the road to the main highway without so much as a glance at either of them. “Poor Saxon,” the doctor said. “I’m afraid my little tantrum upset him. He’s gone for a ride to clear his head. Getting back to the subject of women. Could you do me a favor, Mr. Bond? There’s a Bedouin camp not far from the kibbutz.”
“I passed it, Doctor.”
“Ah, yes. Well, Bond, I rather took a fancy to a well-proportioned young nomad there by the name of Mara. She should be waiting for me in a rendezvous spot not far from the camp.” His lips glistened lasciviously. “Please go and fetch her for me. You would be doing an old man a great favor. And I will reciprocate by bringing some sweetness into your life—like so!”
He clapped his hands. Macaroon appeared with a jug and in a lightning move dumped its contents on Bond’s head. Something sticky and thick dripped from the top of his skull down his white linen suit. Some of it touched his lips.
“Honey!” Bond cried. “But ...”
“Has it not always been in our Jewish tradition to cover the things we love with honey, Mr. Bond? Our children’s first primer of the alphabet—the aleph, baze—so that they may associate learning with sweetness? Our chopped-up Passover apples? You see, I have come to love you, Mr. Bond, because of your dogged devotion to my well-being. Is that not reason enough? Now go, Mr. Bond, and fetch the supple Mara. You’ll like Mara, Mr. Bond. She has a bite, a tang you’ll never forget. In fact,” he winked, “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she were taken with you instead of an old codger like me. But go get her quickly!”
As he drove away from the kibbutz, Bond felt a sticky crawly feeling. It’s not just the honey, he thought. It’s from a personal beeper in my soul, “danger ... danger ... danger.” He lit a Raleigh, last one in the pack, and was so unnerved he threw it away without taking off the coupon. Gottenu! I really must be rattled to do that.
A bit past the encampment of striped tents, he spotted a likely rendezvous site. A small bluff rose above him. He parked the MBG.
“Mara?”
His voice echoed off the wall.
“Mara?”
“Mara is here, Mr. Bond.” A mocking, sinister female voice. “Your Mara. Mara Bunta!”
Pain seared his head, face, body. A stream of evil, biting things poured down the cliff wall, tearing at his flesh.
“Mara Bunta, your Mara, you Jew bastard!” Saxon’s voice, unmistakably. “Mara wants you, darling,” said the girl’s voice. It was
Poontang’s. Was she in on this too? Was her “eternal love” vow part of the plot?
He now knew what the black stream tumbling upon him was. Marabunta! South American soldier ants! Each an inch long, voraciously hungry, stimulated into a frenzy by the honey. And in five minutes Israel Bond would be a skeleton bleaching in the Negev sun!
11 “Eat, Eat, Mine Kindeleh”
Every pore was on fire from the overwhelming onslaught of the tiny fiends. He clawed at them futilely. No use! There must be thousands of them. He’d be a goner in short order. Short order. “One order of Israel Bond on toast… these army ant anti-Semites have done me in,” his brain said sardonically, flinging out the last great Oy Oy Seven witticism – at his own expense
His brain! The list! The last shred of his reason was telling him something. The master list of defense mechanisms that poor HaLavi had warned him to memorize. “The right button may save your life,” a voice from ten million light-years away echoed.
He’d remembered one bizarre item, chuckling at it with a what-will-Ha-Lavi-come-up-with-next wonderment. Button 27! Pushing at the ants with his bad hand, screaming as their tireless jaws ripped into his bad shoulder, Bond, lungs whistling (“Heartaches,” the immortal Elmo Tanner solo), staggered to the MBG and with a badly nibbled forefinger pushed Button 27 with his final atom of power.
There was a whoop-whoop-whoop-be-boop-boop-be-boop-boop sound and for a pain-racked second Bond thought he was back in America listening to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross on Symphony Sid’s all-nighter on WJZ.
The MBG’s trunk popped open. Six insanely shaped South American anteaters, every bit as voracious as their prey, popped out, their gluey tongues ejecting from their banana-like heads. With a gratitude he could never express, he felt those magnetic tongues clean away the marabunta. His body empty of the foe, the creatures sprinted to the bottom of the canyon and swallowed up the remaining hordes. “Great going, lads,” he whispered to his sextet of allies. “If you can’t join ‘em, lick ‘em!”
He ignored the blood pouring from the innumerable openings in his devastated body and haltingly climbed the rise. There was Saxon pulling away in the Volkswagen bus. It undoubtedly had carried the crates of hellish cargo to the cliff, where he’d unleashed them on the secret agent. Convinced the marabunta had done their work, the sweaty Saxon was not even looking back to check.
And Bond found something else. His heart stopped.
Poontang, lying in a pool of blood, a knife between her shoulder blades. Saxon!
“Iz,” she smiled bravely. “Was hypnotized ... made me do it ...”
“Don’t talk, my sweet. There’s a doctor at the kibbutz. A real doctor. I’ll ...”
“Lazarus ... the legend of Lazaru-u-u ...”
Poontang Plenty was gone.
Standing silently over her body, Bond dug the “Potbuster” from his pocket, shot it tenderly into her face and then placed it in her hand. “There’ll be big beautiful bullrings where you’re headed, my mixed up darling, where pretty, cornfed circumcised kids from Kansas City, Missouri, with windblown hair never miss. Knock out all twenty mibs with one shot.”
He dug a grave, unmindful of the heat, the wounds, and placed her in it with all her belongings—except the 140 dollars she had taken from him in their game. But that seemed chapters away now. “We’ll meet there some day, you and I,” he swore to the mound of sand, “and then you can pay me the two thousand you owe me.”
Weakness flooded him. It’s been too much. My body can’t take it. He used his Nippo to contact the closest agent in the vicinity, Edward Brown, 116, who was working at a Mediterranean port on one of the tiny democracy’s most vital secrets, the conversion of salt water into taffy. Brown’s helicopter ferried the emaciated Bond to the factory and an anxious M.
“Israel, mine boychikl, what has happened to you?” M. cried.
He collapsed at her feet, the point of her sturdy Daniel Green Comfy slipper mashing his ant-chewed nose.
A stinging medication, jolting him back to consciousness, was applied to his countless wounds by the cool, assured hands of Dr. Howard Friedman, the personal physician of M 33 and 1/3 personnel, the man who had invented the phenomenally successful combination suppository and thermometer with a menthol tip.
Dr. Friedman’s nimble fingers worked swiftly, efficiently. Bond stirred.
“Got to think things out ... put the pieces together fast,” the agent said through torn lips. Monroe Goshen stood at M.’s side, fear and consternation on his American Gothic face, highlighted by the field of corn that had suddenly shot up around him.
M. spoke: “The fool eats the cheese cloth, but the wise man waits for the cheese.”
Bond smiled faintly. Good old M.!
Her eyes gleamed. “I know what must be done now, Oy Oy Seven. There are things deep inside of you that must be purged ... things we must know in order to complete this insidious puzzle.” And to Goshen: “Tell me, my goyischeh friend. What means ‘insidious’?”
“Better you shouldn’t ask,” retorted Goshen. Life among these warm, basic Israelis was changing him for the better.
“You will go to sleep and have a dream sequence, Oy Oy Seven,” said M. “A bad dream. I’ll make it so it should be a bad dream caused by overeating, gas pains, that burning sensation. Bring the works,” she ordered her ever-at-hand assistant, Major Ari Rutkoff de Camp.
Aide-de-Camp de Camp returned with a tray piled high with food.
Now her bony fingers, fingers that had created the world’s finest foods, pushed vast quantities of it down his craw. Deliberately greasy London broil, great gobs of carp, sturgeon, Kem-tone-tinted roe eggs, cold (ugh!) chicken soup, schmaltz, sour pickles, badly burned cholent, a moldy onion roll, pistachio ice cream (a definite violation of the traditional dietary laws, but this was an emergency), plus the powerful knockout drops, Schloofen-22.
“Eat, eat, mine kindeleh,” said the soothing voice of the Secret Service chieftain. “Eat. And dream.” He passed out.
12 Oh Hell, the Gang’s All Here
Phantasmagoria!
He was diving into the bottom of an endless cornucopia, horrendous sights, sounds, phantoms, jagged patterns from the cosmos of his mind. “I want to sleep with my mother, but, oh, you id!” His own voice?
HaLavi flashing by, pushing a vacuum cleaner; “Got to vacuum up the voids, Iz. Can’t leave any untidy, limitless voids around, can I?” A good man, HaLavi.
Ten tons of lead in his stomach ... nausea ... hot flushes. M. flying by on a broom: “Got to see the wizard. He’ll give me a new tin heart, some brains and ...”
Macaroon skipping merrily down a yellow brick road, his hand slashing Bond’s brain with a blinding bolt: “Lay Lorna Doone, ye ofay mothuh ...” Saxon: “Spin on, Jew boy, spin on.” “Mara’s here,” said a cool sinister voice. Poontang. She turned into a gigantic ant and started chewing at his marbles. Blue eyes, incredible blue eyes, opening into sneering mouths: “Sheeny! Sheeny! Sheeny!”
Loxfinger? Yes, Loxfinger!
That name screamed over and over by hard-eyed, brilliant-eyed sycophants. “Loxfinger! Loxfinger! Plowshare Papers! Furor! Furor! Loxfinger! LOXFINGER!”
They had changed into baboons, leaning on knuckles, snuffling. Brutal hairy faces screaming: “Loxfinger! Loxfinger!”
Hot waves of nausea. Bond retched, came to. There was a queasy feeling in him and it wasn’t the food. It was from the dream, and what it meant.
“I’ve got it all now,” he croaked. His mouth twitched into an uncertain smile. “I’ll tell it to you straight.”
M. and Goshen chorused: “Tell us.”
13 The Answer
“LAZARUS LOXFINGER IS ADOLPH HITLER.”
14 “I Am Agent D.”
M. said, “So what else is new?” A brave attempt at casual humor, but Bond knew his bombshell had gotten to her. She inserted her needles into the bowl of soup on the tray and started to crochet the noodles.
“Monroe hasn’t heard the full story, M., so let me review it from the beginning.” And he recounted everything that he could remember since the night he had faced the menacing gun of the Syrian in the Miami Beach hotel, every nuance, every scrap of conversation. It all poured from his tape-recorder mind with stereophonic clarity.
“We all know the Loxfinger legend. How some years ago he came from Argentina to Eretz Israel, pledging his fealty to Zion and vowing in that first interview at Jaffa that he’d spend his whole six million if need to be make our land a better one. I need hardly remind you of the significance of the six million figure. A filthy little inside joke of his.
“His money, he said, had been acquired by judicious investments in a new Swiss cartel that manufactures bows and arrows, William Tell & Tell. I have checked with several highly informed members of the brokerage world. The company, hastily formed about the time Loxfinger showed up, has been losing money from its inception. How then could he have made millions from it?”