The Israel Bond Omnibus (57 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
The ride back to Hakmir’s palace was exuberant, LeFagel leading the chorus of applause for the little evangelist, who kept insisting he had not done anything to deserve it. “Speech wasn’t even mine, Mr. Bond. I must ’fess up. I cribbed it verbatim from an obscure little volume called
Thoughts for Alternate Thursdays
by some chap I never even heard of. Name of Lavi HaLavi.”
Goshen put his hand in Bond’s. “Guess we all owe you an apology, Oy Oy Seven. Thanks to that quick-thinking filly of yours, King Baldroi is now accepted by all of his people, which scotches at least one half of the TUSH scheme. A united people will see to it their king isn’t killed; ergo, TUSH fails, its stock goes down on the Espionage Exchange. Shame you haven’t been able to expose the terrible plot against your people, though. Maybe it just isn’t in the cards.”
Bond shook the little CIA op chief’s lapels. “Yes, yes! The cards! The cards!”
“You cracking, Iz?”
“No, Monroe. You said it isn’t in the cards, but it
is
—literally. What will happen if I go back in there and take on TUSH at
la guerre
, smash their organization by bankrupting it? How can they pay off their agents and run their vast world-wide network if they’re broke?”
Goshen looked into those grey eyes, once again hot with the lust for battle. “You may have something there, Iz. But, my God, man, do you realize the kind of stakes you’d need to play a showdown game with Sem-Heidt? Astronomical.”
Bond flashed a hard grin. “Raise it, then, damnit! Your government blows billions trying to ferret out these villains. Let me have that stake, buddy boy, and I’ll wreck ‘em for all time!”
A slow smile began to steal across the dour, puritanical face. “Sounds crazy, but why not? I’ll have to make a call to the Tall Texan, maybe have him cancel the loan to Thailand and send the money your way.”
Bond smiled. Good-o! Monroe was on the ball again. By chance he spotted the villa and the smile stiffened, for the sun was flashing another message from the brazen upper windows:
You’ve been lucky, Oy Oy Seven, but come in here once more and....
“Stop the car!” Bond cried. He pressed Button 502-A and the 155-mm. came out of the floorboard.
Goshen cringed as he watched Bond, his sensual top lip curled into a sneer, fire round after round at the windows. “You f— snotty glass, you panes in the ass... take that! That! And that!” In seconds the upper windows were blown out and Goshen could see the smoke rising from the roof.
“Got every damn one of them! And I’m coming back to get the rest of you, Shivs! Let the cards fall where they will and may the devil take the hindmost torpedo....”
25 All’s Fair, In Love And “La Guerre”
“I’ll need,” said Bond, running his fingers over his head, “at least six more coats of Beacon Wax, 113. If you can scrounge up some shellac to mix in with it, fine.” Neon left the royal suite to carry out Bond’s bidding.
Bond sat in his Arcaro jockey shorts, the bible of the great game,
Scarne on La Guerre
, at his elbow, as he practiced a few exquisite maneuvers, the “Richelieu Riffle,” the “Buffalo Shuffle” and the tricky “Crusader’s Cut.”
Goshen put aside the breezy, informative
National Enquirer
, whose front page featured
EDDIE SEZ: IF LIZ WANTED ME BACK I’D GO BACK, BUT NOT UNLESS DICK COULD LEARN TO CARE FOR DEBBIE and MR. ED’S SECRET SHAME. He hurled a packet into Bond’s lap. “There’s your stake, Iz, eighty billion quasars, which represents the advance the Tall Texan got from his publisher for
The Great Society’s Genyewine Coloring Book
and
Games Texas People Play
. As a precaution, I’m coming along with my CIA boys so TUSH won’t get any ideas about highjacking the dough—if you win.”
Back came Neon with the ingredients. As Bond slipped into his Cy Devore
la guerre
gambling outfit—Sammy Davis blue tuxedo, Levi Strauss’ “After Nine” formal Levi’s and his last pair of rare, 500-quasar Carpathian bedsocks fashioned from the pelts of werewolf puppies— the industrious 113 worked the mixture into Bond’s scalp. “It’s hard as a rock, Oy Oy Seven.”
Bond sent a stream of Raleigh smoke against the artificial plant in the corner. It shriveled, edges curling, and died. “Let’s go.”
His pudgy hands caressing a pile of fuchsia billion-quasar notes, Heinz Sem-Heidt looked around the table. Ach, the fight was gone from this crowd; they had been no match for his Teutonic precision. In Position One was Baroness Yvette Mimeo, a principal stockholder in the A.B. Dick Company, her sundered skull on the table, claret flowing from a deep fissure. Two and Three were occupied by the Iranian frozen custard magnates, Nassim Zolzein-Shah and his wife, the man obviously dead, the woman a babbling wreck. Four, Five and Six were vacant. The Formosan beef and bean sprout consortium, playing erratically as all Orientals do, had been wiped out early. Two had died from the rigors of the game; the third had decently blown his brains out with the Paul Bines pistol provided by the management. Number Seven, Countess Di Terrazzo-Crotchetti, had lost three billion colodnys and begged off with a headache, promising, however, that an old friend would sit in for her. Zehr goot! A new goose to pluck!
Shuffling the six packs of cards that go into each boot, he did not notice the entrance of the lean, dark, cruelly handsome man flanked by a coterie of mean-looking individuals, until the menacing voice shook the 4,800 ounces of flab in his body.
“Position Seven this night will properly be occupied by Oy Oy Seven. Yo challengo banco.”
The words hit the crowd like a thunderclap. The bank had been challenged! In ten seconds every gaming room in Shivs was deserted by patrons rushing to witness the drama of a lifetime.
Heinz Sem-Heidt looked into the grey eyes of Israel Bond. The quasar notes fell from his hands.
“Strict rules of Scarne, kraut; triple bidding and the Foch boots. Agreed?”
“Ja.” Buckets of sweat rolled down the jellyish jowls. “Herr Zentner,” he said to the croupier. “The Foch boots,
bitte
.”
Bond lit a Raleigh and watched Zentner place the original combat boots worn by Marshal Foch in the Great War upon the baize cloth and put six packs of cards (examined first by Goshen) into each toe. Two other Germans, Krug and Von Kreel, lugged in the caldron of steaming Cream of Wheat, another vital part of the time-honored ritual.
Zentner placed a bowl of Cream of Wheat in each contestant’s left hand, a Foch boot in the right. The crowd ceased its hubbub.
“Monsieurs. C’est—”
“La guerre!”
Bond and his porcine foe screamed it simultaneously, hurling the Cream of Wheat into each other’s faces and bludgeoning each other’s heads with the Foch boots, which, as they made contact, opened at the toes to permit a pink card to fall onto the baize.
Shaking his head to clear the fuzziness, Bond spoke. “Mine has—let me see—one, two, three, four, five, six black things. Yours has; oh, hell,
you
count ‘em, Nazi.”
“I see three, possibly four.”
“Page eighteen of
Scarne on Counting
states clearly: ‘Six beats three, possibly four.’ You sure it isn’t three
and
four, which would give you an American Totalisator Company aggregate of seven?”
“Nein.”
“I said
seven
, not nine, you f—ing kraut! Cheating already?”
When Zentner pointed out Sem-Heidt had meant no, Bond gave a cruel laugh. “OK, fat boy. Shove over two hundred forty billion quasars. Now I’m tripling the triple bid.”
“C’est—”
“La guerre!”
Cereal and boots flew unerringly to their targets. Gottenu! Bond thought. Beacon Wax might not yellow my head, but can it take sustained punishment? I feel it starting to crack.
His finger ticked off the red hearts on the left side of the card—four. Were there more? Yes! Two in the center, which gave him a total of six. Now, if only the right side of the card—hallelujah! One, two, three, four more! Without question, he was holding a ten. No,
eleven—
another red heart had appeared! Uh-uh, buddy boy, there are no elevens. The latecomer is a drop of your type-A blood! “Switchez les boots, Sem-Heidt. Privilege of the challenger. And what’s your card?”
“I count four diamonds on my card. Are there more, Herr Zentner? Nein? I have lost again.”
As the men exchanged boots, Bond said in a furry voice: “That’s two thousand one hundred sixty scullions, uh, billiards—”
“Billions,” Goshen corrected him. “Iz, you’re way ahead, but you’re starting to go round the bend. Quit now before he pounds you into sawdust.”
“No, no,” Bond argued, his hand to his scalp. “Got to go on till he’s busted. His boot was heavier, Monroe. That’s why I called a switchez.” To Sem-Heidt: “Another triple triple, Nazi.”
Cereal flew and boots crashed, Bond trumping Sem-Heidt four more times and soon the Nazi’s face was blocked from Bond’s view by the latter’s mound of 15,553 trillion quasars. “Want to dip into your colodnys now, Heinz?”
“
Ja
, der colodnys,
judischer Schweinhund
.” Despite his staggering deficit, there was supreme confidence on the swollen face. Heinz Sem-Heidt made an undetected move with his right foot, kicking the wastebasket under the table.
With the change of currency, the German’s luck changed—and he came up with seven trumps in a row, all on aces of spades, whittling Bond’s pile to less than half of his original stake.
Bond’s bleary eyes caught the smug satisfaction on the Nazi’s inner-tube lips. Rivulets of claret rolled from his lacerated head onto the baize. Gottenu! Damn near busted—what a rotten run of luck; beaten by seven straight aces of spades.
Hold on! Seven? In a combat boot with
six
decks of cards that should have
six
aces of spades? Buddy boy, the Hun is shafting you! And I wouldn’t be surprised if Holzknicht gave him some illegal head coating—metal maybe.
Bond squandered 20 billion quasars on the next hand to see how it was being done, incurring a terrible jolt that sent the last fragments of Beacon Wax sliding off his skull onto his claret-spattered Sammy Davis tux. His own boot missed badly, but on his follow-through his bloodshot eye saw the hand snake out of the wastebasket and deposit another ace of spades in Sem-Heidt’s hand, good enough to beat his nine of clubs, he knew from past experience.
“I—I feel sick,” Bond said and fell over the table, deliberately ramming his torn shoulder into the caldron of hot, bubbling Cream of Wheat.
“Clumsy schwein!” snarled Sem-Heidt, ducking the steaming white avalanche, then recoiling in horror as he saw it flow over the edge of the table into the basket. Soon the basket was overflowing with cereal and there was a horrible stench of something burning, a futile thrashing inside. Stillness.
A swaying Bond, steadied by Goshen and Neon, pointed a finger at the basket. “Dump it out on the table.”
Gasps flew throughout the
La Guerre
Room as the basket was turned over and the cooked cereal-saturated body of Locksley, the dwarf, fell onto the baize with a spongy thump, the puckered baked apple of a face in the horrifying rictus of death.
And with the dwarf and the cascading Cream of Wheat was something else—dozens of sodden aces of spades. Israel Bond spread them out and issued a clarion cry:
“Yo declaro coup de cheato; ergo, yo conquero banco!”
“Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” The shouts barraged Heinz Sem-Heidt’s ears. “Coup de cheato!”
“Which means, Nazi, according to the rules of Scarne, the whole kit and caboodle is mine—quasars, colodnys, the five-pack of Muriel Cigars in your lapel pocket, plus any decent phone numbers in your little black book. You’re out of business. I’ve just kicked your organization on its TUSH. Take ’em all, Monroe.”