The Israel Bond Omnibus (64 page)

The moguls froze into attitudes of blinking incredulity.

“Gottenu!
What
chutzpah!”
cried Mr. Caesars Palace. “He’s out to turn the Strip into his private game preserve. Well, gents, there are eight movers, counting his, which means if we agree to function as a consortium the odds are seven to one in our favor. I say let’s take him on.”

“Still wish I was using the little doggie, though,” said a rueful Mr. Flamingo, flicking a salty rillet from the corner of an eye, but he followed his colleagues across the parlor-pink Du Pont 1002 carpet (twice the thickness of the 501, which was not deemed luxuriant enough for a suite as splendiferous as the Maximus Rabinowus) into Bond’s bedchamber.

Their target lay in a chinchilla hammock, a soigné hot-orange pair of Foster Grants masking his eyes and a provocative Mary Quant-type minijock barely concealing his wondrous underhang, viewing on a Zenith color TV the third game in a pro football tripleheader, the Runnerup Bowl, which pitted the loser of the NFL-AFL Superbowl against the winner of the NFL-AFL Super Runnerup Bowl. On a screen a commentator in an Armour’s porkpie hat was saying, “... really hitting out there, Red. You can’t tell me these guys don’t take postseason football seriously when we’ve already had three definite deaths and eight maimings. ’Course, we did have our little moment of hilarity when the rabbit ran across the field, so let’s have an instant NBC TV replay of the furry little fella’s antics. Ah, there he goes! Notice how Br’er Rabbit seems to slow up just long enough to make the field judge commit himself, then runs a deep post pattern between Commissioner Rozelle and Sandra Dee. Our statistician, Larry Allen, tells me it’s the third time in a Runnerup Bowl that a white rabbit has interrupted play. Brown rabbits have done it twice, of course. Any comments, Red?”

Via split-screen technique the announcer was joined by the Gallopin’ Ghost telecasting from the Goodyear blimp.

“Well, Lindsay, it’s been exciting from up here. The one development that’s come as a surprise to me has been the Philadelphia Eagles’ usage of a seven-seven-eight pass defense.”

“Course, that calls for twenty-two men, Red.”

“Right! Oh, it’s radical, no getting away from it, but darn effective. Murder on look-in passes, even when the look-in receiver has been guarded by a lookout. In general, though, I’d like to tell the fans what old ’Lonzo Stagg told me years ago: ‘Red, keep your eyes on the field, ’cause in the long run that’s where games are won or lost.’”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself, Redhead. More pro action after this word from the all-new, all-charged-up Plymouth. Remember:
Plymouth is out to run you over this year....”

“Mr. Bond, your opponents are here,” announced Lobsang Rampapport.

Bond used his Zenith Space Command tuner to blow up the set, brushed a few burning shards from his sensual insteps and pulled himself into a sitting position. “I await your pleasure, gentlemen.”

At 2:30
a.m
. the impossible happend. Bond, on Connecticut Avenue and facing a staggering gauntlet of purple, orange and red properties, all with hotels, rolled his third consecutive boxcar to send him to the safety of
JAIL
for three turns, a throw that augured catastrophe for the Vegans. Mr. Desert Inn turned Rinso white as his snake-eyes deposited his top hat squarely on the Bond-owned, hotel-occupied Park Place and on the very next roll duplicated it to land on... Boardwalk! Then Mr. Stardust’s racing car cruised to a
CHANCE
, his sweat-drenched fingers picked up the orange card and he came close to fainting as he read aloud its dictum:
ADVANCE TO BOARDWALK
.

It was all over; the consortium was bankrupt. “Quite by CHANCE,” punned Mr. Caesars Palace in a noble display of wit in the face of utter defeat. One by one, the hotelmen walked over to Bond and piled the deeds to their empires in his hands.

“Vegas is yours, Mr. Bond,” said Mr. Caesars Palace. “Those pieces of paper represent a few billion dollars in real estate, but they also mean thousands of jobs and the economy of an entire state. Keep Vegas humming, old man. As for me”—and Mr. Caesars Palace smiled bleakly—“it’s back to selling National Shoes on Thursday nights and Saturdays until I can build up a stake big enough to take you on again.”

Mr. Flamingo touched the victorious silver doggie to his lips. “Bye, little fella.” His scalding tears dripped onto the Monopoly board, rusting out the Reading Railroad and short-circuiting Electric Company.

The crushed ex-owners had almost reached the corridor when Bond, his tone strained and husky, called out: “Take Vegas back! I don’t want it. I want something else instead, something much bigger.”

Mr. Sands spun on his heel, uncertainty and hope commingled in his expression. “What, Mr. Bond?”

Bond told them.

Mr. Caesars Palace disgustedly waved a pinky-ringed hand. “Forget it. Keep the damn hotels. Frank doesn’t give private concerts in anybody’s room at 3 in the morning.”

“Wait!” Mr. Tropicana had grabbed Mr. Caesars Palace’s lapels and aided by Mr. Aladdin was shoving him back into the suite. “You’ve got to ask him. Frank loves Vegas. He won’t want to see his town go down the drain. Ask him, Mr. Caesars Palace,
ask
him...”

At 3
A.M.
Caesars Palace exploded into mega-frenzy as the entertainment world’s Chairman of the Board strolled through the main lobby, the sixty-piece Nelson Riddle orchestra at his heels.

At 3:05, the last warm-up A sounded, he held the hand-mike cockily and flashed a breezy grin at Bond and Lobsang. “Hi, Bonnie! How’s your Clyde? We’ll kick it off with ‘My Kind Of Town,’ segue into ‘The Impossible Dream,’ then...”

Bond’s sensual jaw jutted out in belligerence. “You’ll kick it off,
buddy boy’
—and the band quaked to hear someone laying down the law to the Chairman of the Board—“with ‘Kick Out of You,’ the exact arrangement from the
Songs for Young Lovers
LP; slide into ‘What Makes the Sun Set?,’ which I want done in
bossa nova
tempo; followed by ‘There’s No You,’ “The Music Stopped,’ (Bond rattled off thirteen more titles) and take out the set with ‘Strangers in the Night.’” He stretched out on the hammock, rolling the little silver doggie around in his palm, an unnatural brilliance illuminating his darkly handsome profile.

He’s going to crack,
Lobsang thought;
he’s going to crack. And I know just when and I can’t stop it.
Though all of her three eyes were now raining torrents, she got hold of herself long enough to snap off the thin neck of a vial of Schloofen-22, the Service’s powerful sedative, and inject a hypodermic needle into the cloudy solution.

Her prediction came to pass at the expected moment, the coda of “Strangers in the Night,” when the Chairman of the Board poured all of his brash tenderness into the phrase “dooby dooby doo.”

From the hand of Israel Bond erupted a rifle-like crack. He looked dumbly into his palm, flecked with bits of silver and blood. “Oh, Lord, look what I’ve done! I’ve crushed the little silver doggie to atoms. The doggie’s dead... Sarah’s dead... it’s all wrong, all wrong... dooby dooby doo...” and buried his heaving face in Lobsang’s creamy decolletage.

“You may go, sir,” she said to the balladeer. “You have saved Las Vegas, but broken a man’s heart.” After the room was cleared, she found a blue tributary on Bond’s inner arm, slid in the hypo... and he knew temporary peace.

“Aleph priority!” Lobsang’s frantic signal got her through to M. immediately. “M., it’s all over for him. He’s a lachrymose vegetable. It would rend your wonderful heart to see his face cloaked in five-o’clock shadow, maybe even a quarter to six.” (In Jerusalem, M. shuddered.) “And he’s been going about like a slob in that scruffy Sea Isle cotton shirt and black loafers. That kind of getup is permissible for third-rate British agents, not for Oy Oy Seven....”

“Dry all your eyes, Lobsang, my child.” Even over the transcontinental cable M.’s voice conveyed its curative effect. “And take one of my proverbs of universal understanding to guide you in your hour of need: ‘A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work has been so simplified by modern appliances it’s too ridiculous to discuss.’
Shalom
.”

In the kitchen of the internationally renowned Ziggy’s Restaurant, on Jerusalem’s Bezalel Street, Mother Emma Esther Margolies —to the world, the creator of matchless chicken soup and philosophy; to a tiny coterie, M 33 and 1/3
of the Israeli Intelligence, M., Number One – ladled
a pot of her Activated Old World Bessarabian Momma Ligga, the future of Oy Oy Seven weighing on her mind.

There were, to be sure, other pressing matters: the curious disappearance of the trawler, the resurgence of Nazism in Germany, threats from Egypt, Syria, Iran, and for some unexplained reason, Pitcairn Island, but the fate of Oy Oy Seven would be atop the agenda to be considered by Operations Chief Lazar Beame, her second in command; Z., the jocular, roly-polyish dead ringer for Harry Golden the tourists knew as restaurateur Ziggy Gershenfeld, and the new staff psychoanalyst, an American-Jewish girl named Dr. Betty Freudan, whose book
Fulfill Yourself By Depriving Your Man
had caused a stir some years back. A gorgeous thing she was, too, M. thought. Why couldn’t Oy Oy Seven fall for a girl like that instead of those empty-headed
shiksehs
who invariably brought him misery?

M. wasted no time as they filed in. “You should all look at the carbons of Neon Zion’s report of Oy Oy Seven’s first field assignment since that
gefailicheh
[70]
New York business.”

TO: M.

Subject: Oy Oy Seven

At 22:10 hours on June 5, 1967 I accompanied Oy Oy Seven to a point designated on Map Gimmel-200 as Vector Herbert, from whence Syria’s border raiders, El Shikourim,
[71]
have been harassing our farms and water projects. From the first I noticed several anomalies in his appearance. His Hammacher Schlemmer trenchcoat, which was in need of a pressing, had a wilted carnation in the buttonhole. There were three rents in his faded Levi Strauss night-stalking commando Levi’s, also unpressed, and—this I feel is important—he was not wearing
any
of his famous five hundred pairs of stylish bedsocks. In his Neiman-Marcus shoulder holster, whose stench indicated it had not been saddle-soaped for ages, was no weapon, but a moldy Hebrew National salami. We did not motor to the border in his Mercedes Ben-Gurion, which I am told he has not driven since his last adventure. We went by cab. He did not overtip or even tip the driver. Instead he started a petty, vociferous squabble over the fare. I cautioned him, “Be still, Mr. Bond. El Shikourim may hear us.” He grew surly and withdrawn, pulled out a Polaroid photo of the Lawrence woman, looked at it and wept.

At 22:59 we crossed the marshes, our heads under water, breathing by the old hollow reed technique. Occasionally Oy Oy Seven would stop to blow bubbles. He seemed to think it amusing. Fortunately, some braying donkeys on the Syrian side covered his puerile noises.

We lay in wait for El Shikourim about an hour under some scrub cacti and were rewarded by the sight of their red-bearded leader, Feisal Fullah-Sheik, a veteran terrorist suspected of killing several of our hydraulic engineers. During our vigil Oy Oy Seven had been drinking a very cheap, malodorous Turkish hair tonic (what a far cry from the glorious libations he ordered in the past!) and was disgustingly intoxicated. Instead of garroting the Syrian, he jumped up and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Feisal, baby! You wanna li’l taste?”

If his reason was absent, his storied luck was not. Feisal’s mount, startled by the outburst, reared up and threw its rider headfirst into a wadi, where he incurred a broken neck. The other brigands, riding up to investigate the commotion, saw their leader expiring and fled in panic.

Oy Oy Seven examined the now dead Feisal and said, “I guess he got the point, eh, Zvi?”

This is the saddest part of my report. Of course, Zvi Gates, my predecessor as 113, licensed to wound, died in El Tiparillo two years ago. And the one-liner Mr. Bond threw at the corpse about getting “the point” would have been appropriate—
if Feisal had been impaled by a harpoon gun or swordcane.
It lacks relevance when applied to a broken neck.

My regretful conclusion: Israel Bond is no longer the world’s most formidable secret agent, no longer the man I grew to worship in the Matzohball and Queen capers. Continuing him on as Oy Oy Seven would, I opine, jeopardize the entire operation of M 33 and 1/3 and his fellow agents and lower our prestige in global espionage circles.

Respectfully submitted,

—Neon Zion
(113)

P.S. I want his Oy Oy Seven number.