The Israel Bond Omnibus (58 page)

The blob began to weep as the CIA team fanned out and covered the seven other German directors. “She will kill me! If you don’t protect me, she will kill me!”

Goshen ordered his men to clear the room. He gave it straight to the teary Sem-Heidt. “We’ll give you the fullest protection, Nazi, if you spill the beans about TUSH’s plot against the king and Judaism. Otherwise, you’re free to walk out right now. ’Course, Auntie might—”

“Nein! Nein!” The piggish eyes rolled in anguish. “I hate her! I have always hated her! I only married her because of her superior family background. Ja, I talk.”

“I’m going upstairs, Monroe,” Bond said. “Neon, Jimbo, come with me.”

In their absence the CIA team’s Bell & Howell sound camera was grinding, recording for posterity fifty thousand feet of lachrymose confession. In a few hours excerpts of it would be spotlighting the newscasts of Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley and Jennings and, via Telstar, the rest of humanity. And thanks to Seymour Feig, Bond’s press agent buddy who had negotiated a fast deal, it might also end up as a one-hour spectacular sponsored by Xerox, “TUSH, The Heil-Heilabaloo World of Neo-Nazism,” with possible narration by Sue Lyons and Doodles Weaver.

A helluva night’s work. Goshen smiled. The cabal exposed, Sahd Sakistan secured for democracy, thanks again to the greatest espionage weapon of all time, Israel Bond.

His joy was not shared by the dark, cruelly handsome “weapon” on the roof nor by 113 and James Brown, who watched the baleful yellow eyes glaring back as the helicopter climbed over the wall. Auntie Sem-Heidt and Dr. Ernst Holzknicht had escaped.

Hoping you’ll find it in your heart to come and accept my apologies for any inconveniences I may have caused you and your People of the Book, I remain,

Gerda Sem-Heidt

When Bond arrived at the airport, Op Chief Beame, his face mirroring his distrust, was wheeling the smiling M. down the special ramp built by the El Al technicians. There’s something messianic in those warm eyes, Bond noted, and it’s driven away her common sense. He could hold it in no longer. “M., it’s a trap!”

“Damn right,” Beame said, chewing on another White Owl, this one a cigar. “I’ve begged her, Oy Oy Seven, but she won’t listen.”

M. patted their heads with her careworn hands. “Mine dear boys, always worrying about a mother. It does my heart good to see your filial agony. It’s what I live for. No,
boychiklach,
I must go to this fallen wretch and redeem her. And from a security standpoint, which I’m sure you think I have overlooked in my zeal, it behooves us to familiarize ourselves with any new Holzknichtian deviltry before he has an opportunity to execute it. If it is a trap, we must take that chance. You will accompany me, Oy Oy Seven. Whatever happens, you must swear not to interfere.”

He did, the vibrations from his cracking knuckles splintering the crystal of his Kissling.

Bond polished off three cartons of Raleighs during the ride to the Cissbah, placing coupon after coupon in M’s hands. He could see her sweet, serene face in the mirror, an unspoken prayer on the lips. The sun was sinking and from the minaret came the final call of the muezzin: “Hey, you—yes,
you
, you snotty young Allah-Is-Dead crowd over there—move aside and make room for pray-ers, make room for pray-ers!”

Number 10 on the Street of the Jaundiced Jackals was a one-story warehouse-type edifice with YUSEF LATEEF’S SCHOOL OF MODERN FLUTE in faded letters on the door. He unlashed the wheelchair from the MBG’s roof, placed M. on the seat and kicked the door open, wheeling her into blackness. Somehow he found a wall switch and flicked it, a single naked bulb casting a weak light in the empty, soundless room. On the floor he saw a large roach and he smoked it up in three mighty inhalations to allay his nervousness.

A door on the opposite side of the building creaked open and there was a squeak of wheels across the earthen floor. Now he could see two mad-dog yellow circles coming out of the blackness and a chalk-white face radiant with triumph, which told his palpitating heart that Auntie Sem-Heidt was in no penitent mood, a fear confirmed by the presence of the swarthy, grinning Monagro (a rare half-breed indeed, who came from Monaco), who pointed an updated version of the premier Russian combat rifle the Kalashnikov, known as the AK-47 … this one, the RK-47, or Razskolnikov, which was powerful enough to blow holes in holes! It was a hideous weapon designed for one purpose – if there was a crime it was the punishment!

“So, filthy Judischer mongrels; you have come.”

There was distress in M.’s face. “Those are hardly the words of a woman seeking her way back to mankind, Gerda.”

“Ha-ha! You doddering fool! Did you nourish the hope that I, Gerda Sem-Heidt, would grovel before Jews? Die, Mother Margolies, die!”

“M!” Bond heard his warning shout melt the fine-grained wax in his ears as he swung her wheelchair out of Auntie’s line of fire, but he was a shade too slow. Auntie’s right claw touched a button on the battery in her lap. Something streaked from the right armrest of her wheelchair, a steel projectile which nosed into M.’s right shoulder. Now a pain was searing his own right shoulder; he looked dumbly at the Monagro’s knife, fell to his knees. He could see the roseate glow leaving M.’s face and hear the grinding of her false teeth. Hold! Hold! he pleaded with the Poli-Grip in her dentures. Hold and preserve her dignity in her last moments!

Auntie’s claws smacked together in fierce joy. “Just the first round, my Chosen People. Chosen, yes, for death. Ha-ha!” She nudged the Monagro. “A droll joke, eh, Cagliostro? Chosen for death. Hee-hee!”

Gevaldt!
thought Bond; Auntie’s “hee-hee!” is even more bloodcurdling than her “ha-ha!”—not that there’s much blood left in me to curdle. Up, up, he expostulated to his body, up! He braced himself against M.’s wheelchair and felt the knife fall out of his shoulder, a torrent of claret hot upon its hilt. He saw M. swallow hard and press her Korvette’s gauzeroy handkerchief, the one he’d given her for her eighty-fourth birthday (alas, she looked years older now) against her spouting wound.

“Gerda, I should like your permission to tell you a few things that are in my heart.” M.’s request was almost inaudible.

“Ha-ha! Behold the things in
my
heart instead! Behold!” The claws tore away the housedress. Bond squeezed his eyes tight. I’m craven, craven, he told himself, but I can’t stand to see it again. He could not see (a fitting penalty for his cowardice) that M. did not flinch at the mechanical wonder on Auntie’s body.

“It is a fine heart,” M. said. “I know it must give you a great deal of pleasure, Gerda. Now, may I tell you of the things in mine?”

“Talk, creator of vile, reeking chicken soup. It will amuse me to hear the blatting of a trapped Jew. Do not think for a moment that I shall soften my heart—” she sniggered at her inside joke—“as Pharaoh finally did for Moses.” Auntie turned to the Monagro. “I can see you are impatient, my pet. Hold off yet a moment before I bestow upon you the pleasure of cutting the great Oy Oy Seven’s throat.”

“Thank you, Gerda. I should like to give you the synopsis of a Shirley Temple movie I had the pleasure of watching.”

M. started in a shaky fashion, painting a word picture of a dear curlyhead of a moppet in a frilly frock and blue hair ribbon whose Mums had passed away, her adoring, dashing Daddy, a soldier of Good Queen Victoria, and the love they held for one another. M.’s voice seemed to regain its resonance as she described long walks through the drowsy green beauty of an English summer day, the father’s eyes softening with tenderness at the sight of his “little princess” gamboling across the meadow, picking a nosegay here, petting a fluffy rabbit there, skipping across the flat stones of a clear, burbling stream. Bond, his eyes still fastened, could see it all... the glances of affection between father and moppet, the thistles rustling in a gentle breeze.

Then M.’s voice drooped. The trumpets of war had sounded to shatter the idyllic life. Daddy was called to fight with his regiment in a strange, hostile land. With no kith or kin, he was forced to leave his golden-tressed angel in the care of a boarding school headmistress who assured him the child would find it warm and friendly.

Long, lonely days for a shy little girl, unable to fit in with the haughty daughters of noblemen, lightened infrequently by letters from Daddy, which she would read a thousand times to her lone friend at the school, Singh Dennis-Singh, the Hindu who served as the dishwasher and polo coach. Then the dark day when the telegram arrived: “Your father, Sergeant Major K., of the Fifth Scottish Black Watch Grenadiers, has been taken prisoner by the cruel mountain tribes and is presumed to have been tortured to death.”

“Stop! Stop! You filthy Jewish bitch!” The iron voice cut in like the Monagro’s knife.

Bond, not knowing why M. had chosen this soulful narrative, awaited the worst, but suddenly he heard the Monagro’s voice, heavy with emotion, intrude: “Let her continue, Gerda. Please let her continue.”

M., pale and uncertain, her hand still pressed against the wound, went on.

Realizing the child was penniless, the headmistress forced her to vacate her cheerful room and take up residence in the garret, where she shared a closet with a dozen noisy shrews. “You will work in the scullery,
little princess
,” the headmistress smirked, and so the golden girl toiled over pots and pans twenty hours a day, her little hands turning scabrous. In restive dreams she would see Daddy smiling. “The bloody beggars have been a bit hard on me, little princess. I’ve got only an eye and a leg left, but, never fear, I’ll get home someday.” He would, too, he would, she told Dennis-Singh who had climbed up with her gruel, “and it’ll be like it was before, you’ll see.”

Bond heard the Monagro’s deep, convulsive sobs and, without looking, knew the man’s face was covered by his hands. “Goodbye, Gerda. I’m going to see a priest.” The Monagro’s feet pounded on the earthen floor and Bond heard the door slam.

“Come back, you half-breed cretin!” It was the iron voice. “I warned you, you Judischer scum! Now-—”

A second rocket was ejected from the wheelchair and Bond winced, expecting to hear M.’s death wail, but he heard its harmless thud into the wall and her strangely composed voice resume the tale.

On a depressing night when the golden girl lay tossing with fever, the sad-eyed Hindu at her bedside, the headmistress threatening a caning for feigning illness, there came a knock on the garret door.

“Yes, yes, yes?” The voice of Auntie Sem-Heidt, wheezing and breathy, iron no more.

“Through that garret door,” said M., her own voice quivering, “came an eye and a leg wrapped in the scarlet coat of a Grena—”