The Israel Bond Omnibus (59 page)

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! It’s her Daddy.... Oh, oh, oh!” It was Auntie, screeching and sobbing. “Daddy! Daddy! Da—”

A protracted hiss, the pungent smell of something burning, a ghastly strangling cough—

He could bear his self-imposed blindness no longer. His eyes went first to M., a satisfied smile on her dry lips, then to the sprawled-out scarecrow across the room. A greenish, rigid tongue had forced the blue-vein lips apart; though the yellow eyes were open, they saw not. He shuddered at the Dali-esque nightmare of the squidlike thing, its molten tentacles slowly spreading from its white-hot center. Auntie Sem-Heidt was dead. Her heart had melted.

LeFagel’s party arrived to a tumultuous New York welcome; a lavender line was painted down Fifth Avenue by his adoring claque from the old “angry poet” days. He seemed distant in their presence, however; one spying him in bulky Julius Boros plus-fours cried: “Sellout!”

There had been a final soul-searching dialogue with LeFagel an hour before the coronation.

“Sixty minutes from now, Oy Oy Seven, I shall be king, but I’d give it all up—power, fame, money—if you’d consent to go away with me. What say you, captor of my heart?”

Bond put his arm around the little king. “You’ve made tremendous strides, Baldroi. When first we met, you were a screaming faggot. Step by step I’ve seen a miracle unfolding. Now, I don’t know too much about these things, but I’d guess you have roughly 7.9 percent homo left in you, a bit higher than the permissible 6 percent in most men, but certainly manageable with a little effort. Fight it hard all the way. Your people need a man at the helm. For their sake, think manly, talk manly, do manly things.”

LeFagel left him with a grim smile and Neon rushed back to Bond ten minutes later with a bulletin: LeFagel had assaulted a shapely female researcher from
Sh-h-h
Magazine.

Good-o! Bond thought. My work is done. He’s a real man!

A richly humorous incident had stamped the Tall Texan’s warm, human brand on the formalized proceedings. He and the king had posed for the TV cameras performing a hallowed Sakistani rite, the salting of each other’s
shasheeshah
(tails of spring lambs ground up with halavah) as a sign of mutual respect between world titans. Bond had whispered something to the Tall Texan, who whispered back, “Right fine, son. I’ll say it,” then lifted the saltcellar and cracked up the crowd with a sly, “Come, your Majesty; let us
season
together.” Bond had refused the Tall Texan’s offer of a high-level speechwriter’s job, but exacted a promise that the latter would give Monroe Goshen a salary hike far above the Administration’s 3.3-percent guideline, which everybody was ignoring anyway.

Borne to the throne by two Kurds and two Wheys in an Abercrombie & Fitch four-door sedan chair, LeFagel, dressed in blinding white Labrador snow-goose feathers and tennis sneakers, took the crown from Ben-Bella Barka’s hands and, crying out three times “Y’llella abdabeel” (Sakistani for “I am crying out three times”), placed it on his head. He then left for dinner with the Tall Texan. “Put Mr. Bond’s wedding on the bill, too, huh, Prez?” LeFagel had said. Now the hundreds of dignitaries and security people were gone; only a handful were left for the nuptials. M., knitting madly, put the finishing touches to Bond’s wedding yarmulke. Milton and Rag and their wives sat next to her.

And alone in the back row was Liana, lovely and brave. She’d made a pretext of fixing his zipper to talk to him. “Iz, I know she’s a lovely girl, but if it doesn’t work out, I’ll be waiting.”

“How long? Don’t make commitments of fidelity you can’t keep, like last time,” he said a little too harshly.

“Forever.”

He seemed appeased. He stood at the mesh railing looking at the breathtaking panorama of the world’s most exciting depressed area 1050 feet below, waiting for his bride.

Rabbi Zalman Bindlebinder, head of the somewhat Reform congregation Temple B’nai Venuta, who had been recommended to M. by friends, was shamefully late, profusely apologetic. “Coronation traffic, you know, Mr. Bond.” He waved in two workmen who wheeled the portable wedding canopy (
huppah
) onto the terrace. It was quite tall, about nine feet, and was constructed of aluminum and bedecked with thousands of posies. He had them position it at the spot where the red carpet abutted a wall. Then he put his finger to his lips and the small assemblage hushed.

Goshen, Neon, Op Chief Beame and James Brown, acting as ushers, helped the unsteady groom down the carpet as the accordion player squeezed out “Because of You,” halted it after a few bars, fooled around with “Because You’re Mine,” stopped again, consulted a sheaf of music and then went into “Because,” the onlookers aah-ing with relief. “Turn around, Iz,” said Goshen. “You’ve got company.”

She came, Latakia’s soft padded feet leaving four-inch indentations in the rug. From the first notes of her theme song he knew she had made an irreparable break with her past for his sake. The notes were the same, but now the tape rolled out a special new version by a cantor:
dai dai, bime, bime, bime, bime, dai dai....

From that moment on, his grey eyes hypnotized by her bottomless black pools peeping over the veil, he was in a dream, somehow managing to repeat woodenly what was asked of him by Rabbi Bindlebinder. A voice in the dream said, “Ring? Mr. Bond? Ring! Ring! Ring!”

He heard himself say: “Somebody answer the phone.” Goshen chuckled, took the nearly tenth-of-a-carat garnet ring from his pocket and placed it in Bond’s feeble fingers.

“Now,” said Rabbi Bindlebinder, “the ceremonial breaking of the glass to remind us of the destruction of our temple in ancient times and the bitterness of life we must endure.” Bond’s eyes struggled to focus on the rabbi’s hand as it placed the glass near his feet. “Break the glass, Mr. Bond,” said the amused spiritual leader. Bond drove his Angora bedsock down hard and sent Goshen hopping off with a crushed big toe. “Again, Mr. Bond.” Loathing himself for the simpering grin he knew marred his cruel, darkly handsome face, Bond stepped down again, missing by a wide margin.

“Iz, you dotty, frightened boy! I’m not going to be unlawfully yours a single moment more. This is a job for
Mrs.
Israel Bond.” With a sparkling laugh Sarah Lawrence of Arabia Bond jumped off Latakia and lifted her well-turned leg. “No! No!” It was the Rabbi, inexplicably enraged. Down came the foot and her soft-soled ballerina splintered it resoundingly. “There, that’s done. Hold me, my lovely, lovely husband. Oh, I’m going to—”

She crumpled to the red carpet. Now the smog of fear was burned off his mind; he sprang to her side and cradled her head in his arms. The uncovered part of her face was blue.

“Dear, dear. The excitement, I suppose.” It was Rabbi Bindlebinder calming the shocked wedding guests. “See to her, dear people. I’ll roll the
huppah
away to give the poor child some breathing room.” He put his shoulders against a side and guided it toward the terrace’s railing.

“Sarah, my love.” His eyes hot and salty, Bond pulled away her veil to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then froze.

Sarah Lawrence of Arabia’s upper lip was adorned with a thick, black, neatly trimmed military moustache. She mumbled in a dying voice, “Curse of all female cousins, twenty-fourth to forty-eighth, related to Lawrence by marriage... ‘the Lawrence Lip’... imbalance of hormones... must shave daily... didn’t want you know ’til married... so sleepy... so....”

The smell from the shards of glass! Yes,
gorgogga
, the pancreatic juice of the
varapapa
frog of the Honduran swamps; no deadlier venom had ever existed.

She was gone. He knew who was responsible.

“Holzknicht, you kraut fiend!”

From the
huppah
, which had suddenly acquired a seat that held Rabbi Bindlebinder, came a flash, and hot metal creased his scalp. “Die, Bond! This is Nazi Germany’s revenge!”

“Iz!” Goshen yelled at the top of his lungs. “Take my gun.
You
finish the sadistic bastard.” As Goshen slung the snub-nosed Tiniff .44 across the floor to the flattened-out Israeli, Dr. Ernst Holzknicht, who had so brilliantly played his part, cut the CIA op chief down with three slugs.

Then from the top of the canopy emerged rotor blades, whirring, lifting it slowly. The traditional canopy of a Jewish marriage was a garlanded helicopter!

Throwing all caution aside, Bond made it to the rising chopper in six unbelievable leaps and squeezed the fingers of his left hand around the circular steel frame to which the three wheels were attached, shoved the gun into the pocket of his Sunkist orange tuxedo and grabbed another six inches of the bar with his right. Doktor Holzknicht, three feet above him, thrashed out with his Heidelberg bedsocks in an attempt to smash Bond’s fingers, scoring a glancing hit on the right hand, but he was forced to pay attention to the controls, for now the chopper was high over the terrace, fighting for altitude against the pull of Bond’s weight. The Israeli felt the wind, so deceptively gentle on the terrace, become a dangerous Hydra-headed force, buffeting him this way and that, and he squeezed harder. Up went the chopper—the 94th floor, the 99th; he looked down and saw death beckoning from the street some 1200 feet away....

It was over the very tip of the Empire State Building’s TV tower that the Nazi exploded his next trick. He pushed a button that jettisoned the circular frame. Now Bond was falling from the underpinnings of the craft, Holzknicht soaring away with a savage laugh.