The Israel Bond Omnibus (25 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
Holding hands like two prom daters, Bond and Anna huddled in the cab, their bodies brushing as it zigzagged its way along Arthur Godfrey Road, Jackie Gleason Drive, and Belle Barth Alley. He caught her peeking at the twinkling new garnet ring in its delicate Freestone peachstone setting setting on her third finger left hand. And they matched the warm contented smiles of lovers who have pledged eternal vows. He had procured it for her from Ben Melzer, a chum of his who handled only the choicest of semiprecious stones. “Damn near a tenth of a carat, darling,” he said with pardonable pride. “Only reason Bennie gave it to me so cheap is because it’s got a flaw—but he says it’s a
perfect
flaw.”
Then the reality of their situation came back to him. “You mentioned danger to yourself, Anna.”
Those dark eyes clouded. “The general surely will send another ‘courier,’ Israel. That is why I must go to El Tiparillo with you, to spot him, to warn you in time. I know well the faces of all his henchmen.” She hugged him impulsively. I will protect this man at the cost of my own life.
8 Rotten Roger: The Third Call
“She... she is in love with him?”
The voice at the other end in Miami was venomous. “Of course! She cannot keep her hands off that athletic body. You disappoint me, General Bolshyeeyit. Did you think that any woman could be immune to the blandishments of our Hebrew Hercules? No, General, Oy Oy Seven has literally balled up your works. And your works loves it. But here they come. Good-bye, General. On to El Tiparillo!”
And Rotten Roger Colfax clicked off again.
Bolshyeeyit gnashed his teeth; brought a fist down upon his desk, upsetting an inkwell. “Treshkova, you pig, clean up this mess!” And he flung the heavy glass fixture into her face.
“Oh!” she cried. “My General wants to make love to his adoring Toma again!”
A bullet nicked her skull and she decided, no, this was not the propitious moment.
The hawk-face hardened into a look of hideous hatred. Anna! In the arms of this
Zhid,
willingly yielding every inch of her tantalizing, throat-catching magnificence to this...
Bozheh moy!
He screamed over the intercom. “Treshkova! Bring me the complete A-file at once, you monstrosity!”
She reappeared; tearfully placed a bulging folder before him.
Despite his shock, he had retained some of his professionalism. If my love-smitten corporal is his concubine now she will recognize my next messenger of death; she will warn him. This will have to be handled by a man outside KGB. In the A-file (A for Assassins) would be such a cold-blooded kill-for-hire individual, one who sold his murderous talents to the highest bidder.
He leafed through the file. “Niles Gillingham-Pishtepple, forty-eight, ex-British colonel in the Ahmsopur detachment... cashiered out of the service in 1953 for cheating at Old Maid... developed a hatred of the British upper class... offered his services to Communist China in 1954... worked with a renegade kangaroo smuggling out documents in the latter’s diplomatic pouch... assassinated pro-British Rajah of Cooch-Dancer by placing botulinus virus in royal swimming tank... comment by investigating officer: ‘Dirty pool.’” He saw a footnote: “Gillingham-Pishtepple was shot to death in 1962 by an incensed Outer Mongolian merchant, Hee No Khan Do, leader of the Arctic Secret Society, the Ice Tong, who discovered him trying to erect hotels on Community Chest in a Monopoly game.”
Bolshyeeyit, as noted before, a man used to making key decisions with the snap of a finger, said to himself: “He won’t do.”
Within five minutes he had weeded out all potential assassins, save one. “Of course! This is the only one worthy of consideration. This defection of Anna’s has rattled me, else I would have gone to him from the start. Sergeant,” he said in a softer tone. “Wipe the blood from your misshapen skull and tell me what you think of this man.”
She looked at the documents. For the first time in his recollection he saw her blanch.
“Da,
Comrade General. He is your man. May I say that truthfully I pity his victim. I would pity anyone, no matter what his crime, whose path crosses that of Torquemada LaBonza.”
9 “The Silent One” Strikes
“Here is your money,
Señor
, ten thousand
habaneras;
your passport and photographs of the man and woman you are to kill. She is one of ours who has defected. He is an Israeli secret agent. The general requests that you remove the religious symbol from his neck after it is done and present it to me here a week hence as proof of your success. Are you clear as to your mission?”
The swarthy man in the flamboyant purple- and yellow-hued gypsy costume nodded. With fastidiousness he smoothed out the thick roll of bills; placed them into a purse in his hip pocket. Then he grabbed the bottle of
viñ scully
by its base, smashed the neck off against the table’s edge and let its contents flow down his throat. He rose to his full height, five feet two inches, bowed with a baleful smile that revealed a blindingly brilliant mouth and a garlicky breath, and walked out of the cheap
bistro
, the Alter Cockatoo, at soixante-quatre Arnold Cinq Boulevard in the Algerian quarter of Paris.
Shuddering, the KGB contact man, Vice-Consul Piotr Durak, swallowed his own Pernod as if to wash away the evil miasma he had felt in the man’s presence.
“Do not expect LaBonza to answer you,” the general had explained in his telephone conversation. “It is not for nothing that Torquemada LaBonza is known as ‘The Silent One.’ No one has ever heard his voice, except his victims. And they have all died in a bizarre manner, laughing insanely even as their life’s blood ebbed from their torn bodies.”
He recalled the rest of Bolshyeeyit’s briefing. “We know very little about LaBonza, my dear Durak. We know that he is about thirty and was born out of wedlock to Maria Elena Smetana, a Basque gypsy, and Benvenuto LaBonza, an itinerant Corsican vaudevillian, in the back of a caravan wagon. His mother died at childbirth and he was raised by his father and a succession of paramours. The father, a chronic drunkard, eked out a beggarly living as a third-rate impressionist of American motion-picture stars in seedy theatres throughout Europe. He was killed in a knife fight when the boy was twelve, the rearing of the youth left to one Zorba the “Geek,” a carnival performer. Thus the foundation for an embittered life was laid. As yet we neither know how he became an assassin nor why he does not speak. We do know of his work the last five years, the killing of the Yugoslavian provocateur Wsldz Ljmc by acid, the poisoning of the entire Katangan Board of Trade by curare mixed in their Junket, that curious death of the Frenchman, LeVoisin, who ‘fell’ off the freighter S.S. Tateleh in the Indian Ocean... many others. He has killed for the Union Corse, the Union Sicilone, the Union Teamstere and, most recently, for the Terrorist Union for Suppressing Hebrews.”
“TUSH!” Durak had whispered, scarcely daring to speak the dreadful name.
“Yes, TUSH! He can be found usually at...” and here Bolshyeeyit had given Durak the name and location of the squalid cafe. “One thing more. He is easily recognized when he smiles. With his ill-gotten fees he not only had his rotting teeth replaced but also gilded his entire mouth structure. He is also known as ‘The Man With the Golden Gums.’“
Filthy business, Durak said to himself. Thank heaven my duties for the fatherland rarely involve contacts with such amoral beasts. His connection made and the formidable Mrs. Durak safely accounted for at the beauty parlor, he decided he would spend a pleasant hour with a Mme. Denise Shtoomei, a curvaceous young circus acrobat at the Hotel Pierre DeSalinger, who, he knew from previous appointments, would, for a packet of francs, bend over backwards to please him.
“That’s it, chums,” said the jolly pilot. “Down there to your right. El Tiparillo.”
Israel Bond, his forefinger idly dawdling inside the belly button of Anna, looked out of the window of the old sputtering B-17, flagship (in fact, the only ship) of Tailspin Tannenbaum’s Flying Aardvark Airways. A solicitous sun sent a shaft through the mist, illuminating the mint-green Caribbean below. He checked his map; that guitarlike island to the left was Sal Salvador; to the North the odd land mass arranged in the general outline of a dollar sign, Costa Livin, and, yes, the cigar-shaped island Tannenbaum had pointed out—El Tiparillo!
“What is that golden stretch of land that cuts the island in two, Tailspin?”
“That’s the famous no-man’s land called The Band. Divides East El Tiparillo from West El Tiparillo. Or EET and WET as we call ’em for short.”
Good man, this Tannenbaum, Bond thought. Knows his apples. He had spotted a few in Bond’s lunch box, identified them rapidly. “That’s a Delicious... those two are Macs... little bugger’s a Winesap... the round orange thing’s an orange.”
Tannenbaum, Bond had learned during a pretakeoff chat, was one of those flying bums who once having had a taste of the wild blue yonder during the war could never again adjust to life on terra firma. He’d bought the shell-scarred B-17 from a war surplus warehouse at Key Luke on the tip of Florida, painted it a snazzy coral and pink and launched his one-man air service to the Caribbean. “Don’t worry about this baby, Mr. Bond,” he had chuckled between a continual crooning of “Comin’ In On a Wing and a Prayer.” “You’re airborne with ol’ Uncle Sam’s No. 1 air ace. I shot down six Zeroes in the last big show.”
“Six... that’s a fair to middlin’ number, Tailspin, but I’ve heard of guys who bagged twenty to twenty-five.”
“From a Link Trainer?”
Bond had maintained a judicious silence from then on.
Besides Anna and himself, the only other travelers were his Israeli trio and an extremely tiny wild-eyed half-breed of some sort sporting a Dick Van Dyke beard and horn-rimmed glasses, whose spidery little body was clad in a tight-fitting pair of Jack-lemon slacks and matching suede sandals, set off by a leopardskin cocktail pull-over and a crimson beret with pompons. He did not seek conversation; seemed content to mutter from time to time and make notations on a pad.
Before Bond could ponder further on the unknown passenger, Tailspin cried: “Buckle up for safety, folks. We’re coming in.”
The next thing he knew he was roasting in midday tropical heat, his hand pumped vigorously by a moonfaced man in a Panama suit.
“Shalom,
Mr. Bond. I am Ben Bon Ami, Israel’s consul on El Tiparillo. We will converse in my vehicle.”
“Let’s hold up on that until I drop the lady at a hotel. Can you recommend one?”
“One has been already arranged for you and your team. I was not expecting the lady.”
“She is with me,” Bond said. “Let me get her situated first.”
Bon Ami, with great skill, guided his fire-engine-red fire engine through narrow, bump-filled streets replete with native markets, vendors selling tacos, the inevitable corner salesmen crying,
“Lotteria! Lotteria!
Win a million
marichals! Lotteria!”
“Gambling is the passion here, my friend. These people will bet on anything,” said Bon Ami, wiping cascades of sweat from his glistening temple. “Cockroach fights, the bulls,
jai alai
, beisbol, and so on. The men even bet on their sexual prowess.”
“How interesting,” said Anna, the first words she had spoken since landing. “What does the contest consist of?”
“It is perhaps too indelicate a subject for a lady’s ears,
Señorita
. The concept of
Machismo
, virility... manhood, is uppermost in men’s minds in these Latin islands. They flock to sexual betting parlors of Vera Hruba called ‘los humpos’ where... ah, but we have arrived.” And Bon Ami seemed grateful for the interruption of his narrative.
The consul pulled into a driveway, chattered away in Spanish to a bespangled bell captain. “This is Bell Captain Belli. He will take the lady and her bags to a fine room in this estimable hotel which is the Nino Valdez. You gentlemen will join her later after we have our little talk.
Shalom, Señorita.”
“This, gentlemen,” said Bon Ami, back in his office and very much the assured diplomat in his own surroundings, “is El Tiparillo.” His pointer touched a dot on the wall map. “As you can see, we are in Vera Hruba, the capital city of West El Tiparillo, some 15 miles from The Band which, by agreement after the armistice in 1963, cuts this woeful isle in twain.”
“Armistice?” asked Zvi.
“I was coming to that,” said the consul.
Bond’s ears, carefully tuned into the exposition he knew was coming, had caught something else. A buzzing. Circling around the overhead light set in a crystal chandelier was a wasp.
Bon Ami spotted it too. “One of the innumerable pests in these parts. Now, in 1962, leftist elements, Castroites, Muscovites and Pekingites, ceased their internal struggle for power long enough to call a temporary truce and unite behind a Russian puppet, General Umberto D. Obratsov, who attempted to take over the island from a foundering regime. The forces backing democracy got behind a moderate, General Wesson y Oyl, and thus a bloody civil war ensued. The United States backed Wesson y Oyl, sent in money, arms, materiel, freedom fighters—guerrillas who had been trained in leadership for this type of warfare at a CIA-sponsored camp in Shaker Heights. All was going badly for Wesson y Oyl when a sudden stroke of luck tipped the balance. The CIA guerrillas were wiped out to a man in an ambush set up by Peking’s man here, that master of guile, Vi Teh Minh. Bereft of this leadership, Wesson y Oyl found himself compelled to wage his own battles, of which he won the next six, driving the leftist coalition troops to their half of the island. Both sides were vitiated by then and ready to call it a day. The UN negotiated a settlement in which the island was halved; set up The Band which its truce commission patrols. So at least half of the island is run by a democratic form of government. Am I boring you, Oy Oy Seven? I see your eyes are wandering elsewhere.”