The Israel Bond Omnibus (66 page)

The geisha’s dirge was smothered by a raucous cacophony from an adjoining suite occupied by a group of American businessmen and the squawks of Billy Bones, a bleary-eyed parrot, who was the Cathouse of the August Tea’s mascot: “Polly Adler wants a cracker—awk! Bless this house—awk! A Coorveh is not a Chevrolet—awk! Pieces of tail—awk!”
Friend parrot has been around,
Bond observed.

Eating the Mango showed her green and red waxed teeth in a smug grimace and chattered in Japanese to the Baron, who, laughed.
“Ah so des’ ka!
Our honorable madam says the Yankees next door are complaining about her unreasonable price structure. She informs me she operates this house in accordance with a Western oil company slogan: ‘You Expect More from American —And You Get It!’ A droll comment,
hai?”

“Dammit, Cocky!” The three Orientals were stunned as Bond brought his fist down on an irreplaceable Merciless Ming Dynasty vase, pulverizing it to smithereens. “Let’s stop this hissing, bowing,
hai
ing, and
ahso
ing and get down to brass tacks. You know why I’m here. I want a piece of vital information from your organization so bad I can taste it, but I know damn well you won’t give it to me until I prove my valor by locking horns with you in a battle of haiku poetry. That’s the size of it, eh, Cocky?” Ashamed of his boorish tirade, Bond drove his fist into Eating the Mango’s stomach in a sincere gesture of apology. At a sign from Sanka, Flowering Fungus bound Bond’s mangled hand with cool mandarin orange peels, which possess blood-coagulating properties.

“Ah so des’ ka,
Izzy-san,” said Sanka. “You have been boning up on our culture. Yes, haiku is the door to my confidence. As you know, it is a unique form of poetic expression limited to seventeen syllables per verse. The only Western forms that have ever approached its feel, its nuances and shadings are the poems of Nick Kenny, in his Early Period, and the Burma-Shave rhymes so foolishly scorned by the Philistines of American belles lettres. Every Japanese, from the Emperor to the humblest
pachinko
ball polisher, is adept at haiku. Consider this verse by Karo, the seventeenth-century syrup manufacturer:

Only shrimp and eels

can sate my hunger; O

tempura! O morays!

Does that not lift your heart, Izzy-san? No? Perhaps you would feel more at home with a contemporary haiku composed by the
baseboru
pitcher Masi Murakami, the only Japanese ever to have won a berth in the American big leagues, a bullpen job with the respected San Francisco Giants. Taste this instant of exquisite despair:

Woe! I hung a curve

to Henry Aaron; they’ll

never find that mother!

“Are you ready to enter the lists, Izzy-san?”

Bond’s sensual nostrils fired a salvo of Raleigh smoke into a squadron of dragonflies on maneuvers around a lantern. One by one they fell dead into the courtyard pool.
Unleash your imagination, buddy boy,
he urged himself.
A good showing at haiku and Cocky-san will place his far-flung espionage network at your disposal. A bad one... well, don’t even think about that.

“Please accept this humble contribution to your art, Baron,” Bond said and began to compose in a wobbly fashion.

“The gingko leaf, torn

off by a breeze, falls, falls, falls,

falls, falls, falls...”

Gottenu!
Fifteen syllables squandered and no meaningful resolution in sight. Think, Oy Oy Seven, think!
A felicitous flash of creativity came to him and he had it.

“... and lands!”

Sanka’s mouth widened; a mote of fear appeared in the hitherto unrelenting eyes.
Good-o! Time to press home the advantage!
Like a jaguar moving in for the kill, Bond hurled a second verse at his shaken host.

“If ‘seventeen’ had

seventeen syllables, this

crap would be a snap!”

“Superb!” breathed Sanka, applauding with his hand and finger. Bond stubbed out his Raleigh on the Baron’s big toe. “Honesty compels me to admit the verse says nothing whatsoever “

“Then it is genuine haiku.”

Emboldened by his successes, Bond chugalugged down a ten-gallon container of sake. “Here’s a bonus, Cocky-san, a sensible Jewish rebuttal to an Anglo-Saxon’s distorted viewpoint:

You only live twice? Feh!

Fleming was wrong! You

only live until you die!”

Sanka, though entranced by this
gaijin’s
hidden fires, nevertheless said with mild severity, “It does not exactly fit the pattern. Your verse is eighteen syllables. But I find the logic incontestable. It would make an admirable book title.”
[75]

“Point of order, my dear Baron. What you just heard was a Hebraic form called
chai-ku
, the
chai
being our symbol for ‘eighteen,’ thus permitting the use of
eighteen
syllables. Now to business.” Bond’s cruelly handsome face assumed the animalistic look feared by his enemies on seven continents, five oceans and, by the latest Roper Poll, ninety-eight thousand lakes and forty-three thousand reservoirs.

“Where is Dr. Ernst Holzknicht?”

The sentence lashed the room like an Arctic wind.

“I would be happy to give you a map showing the locations of the Arab world’s top-secret missile bases. Or a list of clandestine anti-Zionist groups being bankrolled by rightist Texan billionaires.”

“Where is Dr. Ernst Holzknicht?”

“Or Formula Pikadon Psi, our process for duplicating the Soviet’s gigaton bomb at $39.95 per bomb. Or documents proving that the CIA is about to merge with the AFL-CIO.”

“Where is Dr. Ernst Holzknicht?”

Baron Sanka looked away in chagrin and popped his thumb into his mouth.

“You don’t know.” Bond’s words came out like leaden dumplings. “I broke my mental hump to master this haiku
narishkeit
,
[76]
and for what?” As quickly as it had come, the old-time combination of arrogance, tasteless humor and murder lust that had made Israel Bond the unparalleled engine of destruction he was faded away, and for a minute he lapsed into an embittered silence. “I knew this Japan mission was a sheer waste of time.”

“I have dishonored our budding friendship. Flowering Fungus!” Sanka snapped a command and Bond saw the geisha blanch at the mention of a word—
seppuku
. She tiptoed to a closet and brought Sanka a huge sword.

“With this weapon,” Sanka intoned, “I shall end my unworthy life. A simple crosscut from my left ankle to the right frontal lobe of my brain, then another from my navel to a spot precisely three inches above my left ear—”

“Stop!” Bond sent the sword flying out into the night with a backhanded swipe. There was a scream from the garden and a shout from one of the American businessmen: “Jesus! Somebody just killed Spotty Wassermann! Sixteen months I teach the
schmuck
to be a crackerjack Crackerjack salesman and he lets himself get bumped off by some gook.”

Bond slammed the paper screen shut. “Suicide is no answer, Cocky. I want Holzknicht. I’ve told you about his handiwork, the murder of that sweet girl of yours on the plane, and though I can’t prove it, it’s drachmas to donuts he was behind that trawler deal. I want him. You’re going to help me get him.”

Sanka made a ceremonious bow. “I shall contact every single agent under my command, Izzy-san. However, there has been dishonor in this room tonight and only suicide can expunge its stain. Someone must die lest the gods be wrathful.”

“You Japanese are really turned on by this suicide
shtick
, aren’t you?”

“But of course. Dying is our way of life.” Sanka wheeled suddenly, pointed a finger at Eating the Mango and Bond felt a chill pass through him.
Gottenu!
The Baron was giving the hag a death sentence and she was bearing it with the stoicism of her breed. She bowed low and walked into the garden to retrieve the sword.

Sanka, sensing Bond’s distaste, said indifferently, “What does it matter? She is old. Now some entertainment of a robust nature far more gratifying to a
gaijin
than unappreciated wisps of poetry,
hai?
Flowering Fungus is yours tonight. Do with her as you wish.”

A great honor,
Bond thought.
He is offering me his personal geisha. I cannot accept out of common decency. He is, after all, my host. And she is a dog.

“I cannot allow you to go to your
futon
[77]
alone, Baron. Are there others?”

“Hai!”
Sanka clapped his meaty palms. “Send in the maidens!”

Through a side entrance undulated a river of pillow geishas, lithe and lissome, their eyes cast down in the charming modesty that befits a hooker. Bond’s gray eyes cruised the line, then fixed on one who was tall, tan, young and lovely. “This one, Cocky-san.”

She clasped her hands and bowed. “My name Ipanema.”

Sanka leered. “You have chosen well, Izzy-san,” he said and backed out of the room.

“You speak English, Ipanema?”

“Yiss. Spikking berry good Engrish.”

Bond held the solemn, owl-eyed maiden to his breast. How weightless she was! “I’m so glad, my
goyischeh
geisha. I am a man touched by tragedy and only through such an encounter as we are about to experience can I feel the reawakening of spring. Can you appreciate the holiness of this moment in time?”

“Yiss. Spikking berry good Engrish.”

She understands, she feels,
his heart sang.

Her agile fingers unfastened his kimono, then hers, and they stood naked in a moonbeam. “You rooking at these hot cards, prease.” She fanned out a deck of the notorious Yokohama Sex Shop playing cards, each illustrating one of the fifty-two positions of lovemaking. There was actually a fifty-third, the joker, which was quite unbelievable, he decided.
No man on earth could have deployed himself into that position. No six men!

“You berry handsome man,” she sighed, forcing him down upon a
futon
of indescribable softness, stuffed as it was with the throat feathers of eunuch hummingbirds. Then, without warning, she held him at arm’s length. “Before I roving you is matter to discussing. Money.”

Bond’s heart fell. “So this everlasting ‘rove’ is predicated on commerciality?”

“Ten thousand, fifteen thousand, maybe twenty thousand yen.” She could hold back her welling tears no longer. “Prease say you making rove on me, Izzy-san. Twenty thousand yen all I got.”

Now Bond was weeping himself, acceptable, manly tears of a low salt content. “You sweet kid. Of course I’ll do it. And not for twenty thousand or even fifteen. Ten’s plenty, plus forty-five percent of your take, OK, baby?”

“Yiss. Now making rove on me, fast, fast!”

Their flanks came together in a fiery collision and as they knew each other carnally, the evanescent spectre of Sarah stood over his shoulder, the doleful eyes proclaiming:
I forgive you again, Iz, my darling, but do try to keep this sort of activity at a reasonable level, won’t you?