The Israel Bond Omnibus (68 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
5 “Forget About the Black Room!”
In the Nisei N’ Nefu restaurant, one of countless little establishments tucked away in the basement arcades that crisscross the Xerox Building, Sanka purchased enough mandarin orange peels to staunch Bond’s newest wound. The Israeli, eager to try his hand at ordering native delicacies, took the restaurant owner out to the front window, which like so many Tokyo eateries contained plastic representations of the bill of fare, and leafing through
Instant Japanese,
the little booklet of basic terminology, pointed to
“this-su,”
“this-su”
and
“that-tu,”
his facile performance in the difficult tongue earning the man’s respect. When they’d finished the repast, Bond rubbed his tummy. “I’ve been around, Baron, but I must admit I’ve never eaten better plastic.”
They washed it down with frosty mugs of the soft drink preferred by 95 percent of Japan’s parliament, Diet-Rite Cola, and took the elevator to the executive chambers of Xerox on the twentieth floor. Bond, a Raleigh between his sensual lips, mentally shredded the report he’d planned to send Mother Margolies’ Activated Old World Products—or MOMAR, its cable designation. “I was shot up by a Buddhist bonze and a driverless car.” How Neon, that cheeky little
putz
, would hoot at that one! “I told you Bond has gone crackers,” he could hear Neon saying to M.— Neon Zion, whose life Bond twice had saved, and now the ungrateful punk was hungering for the Oy Oy Seven number, according to Betty Freudan, who’d leaked Bond the scam on the Jerusalem powwow. No, it would be far more sensible to inform the home office things were proceeding well and that he was Kyushu bound to track down a promising lead.
At the entrance to the Xerox suite Sanka winked. “That little surprise I mentioned waits inside, Izzy-san. But no matter what transpires, bring out that portable Xerox.”
Bond’s fist rocked the oaken door of the head Researchers suite, emblazoned with the Xerox motto: LET THE EMPLOYEES AT IBM THINK; YOU COPY
.
A furry voice that sent desire pulsating through his lithe, muscular body said, “Come in.”
She was bending over a worktable, her full lips pouting, her dazzling abel-green eyes poring over a complicated equation of five-dimensional multilinear galactic values arranged in conical plexigons of a base-ten, submicronite unit. Around her neck hung the silver chain and plunger that identified her as one of the ten members of MIT’s most select scientific honor fraternity, Alta Zeyda Kapplan, which scorns any IQ under 355. The AZK frat-soror house, which carried out a humanitarian program of helping the handicapped, employed Mensa people as janitors and kitchen help, Bond knew.
The chain-and-plunger insignia was her lone concession to conventional garb. The rest of her was stark naked.
She did not appear in the least flustered by the gray eyes that toured her loosely coiffed ebony tresses, swan neck, muskmelon mammaries, awesome nether structure and rose-pink toes.
Gottenu!
If the Japan Travel Bureau could guarantee regular tours like this, Europe would be deserted at the height of the season,
Bond thought.
“You must be the Mr. Bond the Baron telephoned about,” she said in that provocative huskiness. “I am the head researcher here. My name is Kopy Katz.”
Touché!
Bond thought. How apt a name for a Xerox intellectual! What a specimen, the likes of which he’d never seen! And yet, would it do to start a love affair in a heart still haunted by Sarah?
“I’m no good for you.” Bond said. “I’ll take you, use you like a hot scented
oshibori
towel, then toss you into the wastebasket of broken dreams. You’re looking at a man who has lost the capacity to love. I tell you all this because I possess ESP—Extra-Sexual Perception—and it’s obvious to me you’re longing to be violated.”
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, Mr. Bond. Yes, I confess a sort of detached scientific interest in certain portions of your compelling body, but as for giving myself to a man I’ve known for less than thirty seconds, well...” Her speech ended on a brittle laugh.
Bond’s right hand bludgeoned her face, leaving an angry five-fingered fan. “You bitches are all alike. You all want the little preliminaries to the game of love, don’t you? Flowers, two-buck boxes of Whitman Samplers that I get at Korvette’s for $1.59, friendship rings, juvenile kisses stolen on hayrides. Well, ketzeleh”—his cruelly handsome face stiffened, the last of him to do so—“here’s a demonstration of what I can do for you, my insouciant Miss Kopy Katz. Take it or leave it.”
Growling, he unlocked the attaché case from his wrist, removed the rolled-up movie screen and the alarm-clock-size projector, set them up and killed the lights. He sat back, crossed his legs and lit a Raleigh.
“
THIS IS ISRAEL BOND” flashed on the screen, followed by an imaginative set of pop-art titles designed by Saul Bass, with scoring by Mancini. For the next five minutes the real scoring was Israel Bond’s. The crisp narration by Doodles Weaver began:
“This is the story of Israel Bond, a man among men. Let’s let vivacious Pennsylvania matron Charlene Krosnick, who often slips away from her husband and children to find unequaled bliss in Bond’s arms, tell us part of it.”
There was Charlene nibbling at his ear in his luxury suite in Manhattan’s Ansonia Hotel. “Iz, Iz, Iz!”
Good opening sequence,
he thought.
Charlene always was an enthusiastic sort. Ah, a superbly executed Balinese three-quarter-angle stroke had made her swoon. Hope
that
melts the Mendenhall glacier in your innards, Miss Katz!
Narrator: “And now a Catskill Mountain moment of madness...”
Mancini’s musical mood was meringue; the love object Poontang Plenty; the place the Kahn-Tiki Hotel in Loch Sheldrake, New York. “Iz, Iz, Iz!” Watching Poontang’s Revlon-tinted nails rip the heavy-duty Wilton carpet to tatters, he felt a pang echoing from the long ago.
Poontang, my sweet, lost love. Poontang...
“Big-city love takes a back seat now to the kind o’ down-home carryin’ on in Amurrica’s Midwest, as Omaha’s cute-as-a-cornflower Katie Winters shows you in this silo scene.” A square dance set the stage; the snub-nosed brunette snuggled on his shoulder. “Shucks, Iz. I’ve got a cool secret. I love yuh.”
Dear little Katie Winters! If only she hadn’t perspired so much.
The film rolled on.... Anna Annatefkeh, the voluptuous KGB killer in the spine-tingling Matzohball adventure, taken in
kazotsky
rhythm... Liana Vine, his Trenton, New Jersey, high school sweetheart, succumbing to a
freilach
... Rowena Rosenthal, the teen-age “New Left” activist, joining him in a freakout to a Bob Dylan medley on a blanket made of
Ramparts
magazine covers (restless, restless Rowena! When the civil rights and peace movements had lost their spice for her, she’d moved to Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood)... dozens of altar Bunnies yielding to him at Chicago’s recently organized First Church of Hefner, Hedonist, under a stained-glass window depicting a frail, pipe-smoking man nailed to a circular bed: HE SWUNG TO MAKE US FREE... and, inevitably, Bond’s conquest of Sarah Lawrence of Arabia on the moon-bathed dune. Sarah, Sarah, my one true love...
“Stop it! Stop it!” Kopy Katz’s screams lancinated his eardrums.
He cut the film at the closing credit— PRODUCED BY R-K-OY PICTURES—and saw her sway against her desk. “I—I seem to sense the inchoate stirrings of a preorgasmic flush, Mr. Bond.”
And he knew he had her on the ropes, helpless to ward off any onslaught. But wait! That mumbo jumbo she’d mouthed. Typical Masters-Johnson
Human Sexual Response
stuff. Of course! That was the key to copping a fast copulation from Kopy Katz, woman of science. He would woo her in her own frame of reference.
“Observe, Miss Katz,” he said clinically. “My tumescence has become functional.”
“Quite so, Mr. Bond,” and her eyes confirmed his claim. “I myself have achieved a more than adequate state of lubricity accompanied by a pronounced vascocongestive increase in labial locations.”
“Which would seem to call for immediate insertion of tumescence, Miss Katz.”
“I should think so, yes, Mr. Bond. And please employ concomitant prestidigitation at crucial mons and clitoral checkpoints. Please.”
They began a surging thrust that swept them rapidly past several preliminary plateau phases, the researcher moaning, “Manifest psychogenic reaction noted.”
“Envelopment firm; friction mounting; all stimulative systems green,” Bond reported.
“Oh, Mr. Bond! It behooves me to inform you that I’m veering at breakneck speed toward the arrival plateau. Oh, Iz, I’m arriving, arriving, arriving....”
“Quick! Join me in the Masters-Johnson cheer: Go, go, gonads! Go, go, gonads!”
But further jargon was unnecessary, for now his body was steering hers into the outer reaches of the universe, and she abandoned all diffidence and hotly whispered obscene spatial calculus into his ears during a “big bang” climax that melted innumerable Mars bars and intimidated Saturn into pawning four of its rings.
His own fulfillment was marred ever so slightly by the vision over his shoulder, who spoke through a tear-soaked veil.
Oh, Iz. You’ve been unfaithful again.
I know, dearest,
answered his cheating heart.
But I’m a man with a man’s needs.
“Iz.” This voice was earthly. Kopy’s. “I love you. But I ask no guarantees. Love me as long as you wish; then, if it pleases you, chuck me into that wastebasket.”
Bond inhaled a Raleigh. “You think that portable doohickey can give us a clean reproduction of the scrolls?”
A lightning bolt fulminated out of the abel-green eyes. “You’re damn tootin’, buster! Xerox can copy anything, anything!”
Oh-oh. He’d hit a nerve ending there. Miss Katz appeared to be a real 150 percent, rah-rah “company” gal all the way.
“I see you don’t believe me,” she fumed. “Well, for your info, I’ve a project in a secret lab up here called the ‘Black Room’ where—” She bit her lip.
“What about the ‘Black Room’?”
“Forget it, buster.” Three word icicles. “Forget you ever heard me mention the ‘Black Room.’ Now, pick up that portable in the corner and let’s get cracking.”
6 Night of Treemandous Terror
Deep in thought and Kopy, Bond, inhaling his 1,006th Raleigh of the day, lay in a compartment on the 150-mph blue-and-cream
Bullet,
the super-express train which has made Japan the talk of the transportation industry. Destination: Beppu, the place of the geysers, via Osaka, Kobe and the Inland Sea.
There’d been a piffling matter to dispose of before he’d checked out of the Hilton, a phone call from, of all people, blond, willowy Liana Vine, half a world away.
“Iz, darling. I’ve just been married here in Trenton at your brother Milton’s catering house, the Pinochle Royale. I didn’t want you to find out from anyone else.”
“Who is he?” Bond had bellowed.
“A nice Jewish fella, Sidney Glumpkin. Owns a phylactery factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I met him at the Concord on a ski weekend.”
“Well,
slalom aleichem
,” Bond said rather nastily.
“Oh, Iz, don’t take it that way, please. I was so lonely and I’ve waited two decades for your marriage proposal. I’m way past thirty, Iz. I need someone. There’ll never be another you, especially at night, but...” Liana’s voice dropped. He could hear the band striking up
Shereleh
, the vibrant wedding dance, disheartening proof that she indeed had taken the vows of a Jewish wife.
“And, Iz, I’ve long suspected you’re some kind of a secret agent. So do your brothers, Milt and Rag Bond. Be careful, darling, please.”
“Now, you listen to me, Liana. You’ve just done a sneaky little thing behind my back, but if you’re married, you’re married—that’s it. However, I want you to swear you won’t let this bumpkin or Glumpkin or whatever his name is touch you for a year. I’ll know if you’ve lied to me, baby. The sin will eat through your face like leprosy. If at the end of the year you haven’t heard from me, consummate the marriage with my blessings and name all the children after me. Israelita will do fine for the girl.” She complied and he was appeased. “Now, put Glumpkin on. Sidney? You’ve just heard Liana’s sacred pledge. Don’t touch her, understand? Anyway, you’d be a fool to try and match the sexual pleasure I’ve been giving her all these years.” He spent five minutes describing it in substantive detail to the groom. “And if I decide to marry her, you’ll pay for the divorce, plus long-term alimony, right? Good. You sound like a decent clod, Glumpkin. Now go enjoy your married life.” He hung up, proud of his equitable handling of the Liana situation.