The Israel Bond Omnibus (75 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
“Wisconsin to you,” Bond raged at the dial tone.
A woman from the Tokyo Jewish Center was the second caller. “We have heard you are a public relations spokesman for Mother Margolies’ Activated Old World Products. Are you still available for talks before women’s groups?”
The anger oozed out of him. “Yes, my dear. I’m leaving for Atami on the 3 P.M.
Bullet
, but buzz me in a day or two. I’ll be delighted to address your sisterhood.”
He packed his new wardrobe, slipped into some informal attire—robin’s-egg-blue Fruit of the Loom Underwonders, rose-colored Don Loper mini-Bimini shorts and cigar-brown Erik Is Here bedsocks with Viking prows on the toes—and buzzed Ginza-Burg, who gunned the Cedric toward Tokyo Central Station at his usual clip, eight dead pedestrians per block. “You’d better get in all the killing you can,
boychikl
,” Bond said, “because we Hebes might not be welcome around these parts much longer. Second thought, let
me
take the wheel,” which he did at the next stoplight. Slamming the pedal to the floor, he waffled three policemen and twenty-one shoppers.
Boarding the
Bullet
with Sanka, who was nattily dressed in Ainu bearskin leotards, Bond was beset by uneasiness. Just what would Japan do if he couldn’t squash TUSH? Launch a war against Eretz Israel? Surely a piddling attack at sea and a few pieces of racist literature wouldn’t justify that drastic a response. The Nips might break off diplomatic relations, but that would be tolerable. Then again, they might begin supplying to the Arabs the cream of their technology; that wouldn’t be. How sticky it got depended on the next demon from Holzknicht’s Pandora’s box. Damn it, here he was going into mortal combat with the archenemy minus a single major-league espionage device from Lavi HaLavi. Why had Lavi flipped his dandruff when he needed the little QM’s brainpower so urgently?
His melancholia was interrupted by a genteel knock on his compartment door. “Mr. Bond?” One of those adorable little train girls who sell sandwiches and soft drinks smiled shyly at him. “A Western woman requires your presence in Compartment 13.”
“What does she look like?”
“Very ancient, sir, and wearing a shawr. She said a strange phrase to me—‘
Sharom Areichem.’
This way, prease.”
“
Gottenu!
What the hell is M. doing in Japan to complicate things just as this caper is moving toward a finale? Cocky, you’ll pardon me for a mo’.”
At Compartment 13 he used the present month’s simple door signal, pounding out a Chico Hamilton 12/9 cadence left-handed, a Mongo Santamaria bongo riff right-handed, and whistling from both sides of his mouth simultaneously the two themes from Jobim’s “No More Blues.”
The door slid open.
Her back was to him, but he could see the babushka atop her silver-blue Larry Mathews senior-bopper wig and the blue-and-white shawl, and the love he bore her flooded away the angry speech he’d been rehearsing.
She turned. A venomous, lined face glared at him, the metal tip of a black umbrella dug viciously into his belly bruise. “Hands behind the neck. Walk in slowly. Use your shoulder blades to slide the door shut.”
Buddy boy, you deserve anything you’re going to get in this four-by-four death trap
, he castigated himself.
Is M. the only shawl-draped old Western woman in the world?
One whiff of her
parfum
, “Forever Eichmann,” told him all he needed to know.
“So, you are the
Jude
who killed my son.”
The metal tip prodded him twice more, but he dared not retaliate. This was an all too familiar bit of weaponry. It could protect you from the rain, yes, and also spread your intestines apart with an expanding dumdum bullet. You could call it either a “brolly-blaster” or a “bumbershooter,” because of the Luger built into the harmless-looking umbrella, without which a conservative Londoner would seem naked.
“There must be some mistake, madam. I am a public relations—”
“You are Israel Bond, the
schweinhund
who killed my only son. I am Frau Ilse Marlene.”
Marlene! Of course, the mother of Willi Marlene, the knife-toting member of TUSH’s elite branch for killer homos, the Gayfia, whose windpipe Bond had stove in during a hectic incident at London’s Gayboy Club in the Queen adventure. “Madam, I—”
Blim! Blam!
Her left hand smote his own windpipe. “I believe that is how you did it,
nein?” Splish! Splash!
Two more chops split his sensual lips and he retched on the blood pouring into his swollen throat.
“I am afraid you will be in no condition to deliver that speech at the Tokyo Jewish Center, Herr Bond. Yes, it was I who called. Like my late son, I have had theatrical training.”
Grand Guignol, no doubt,
Bond thought.
“How simple it was to deceive you and your tailor. A simple Hebrew phrase, a few stage props—babushka, shawl, wig—and you let your minds see what you wanted to see—your beloved M.”
“The grudge file, Frau Marlene?”
“Ja.
But I will tell you, since it will not matter in any case, that I am disobeying orders. I was ordered to tag you, but I shall not be robbed of the chance to end your derring-do for all time, Herr Bond.”
“One question,
bitte,
Frau Marlene.” If her answer was negative, a bobby-pin-size chance remained. “Have you ever ridden the
Bullet
before?”
A tinge of respect entered the toad face. The Jew was not going to whine for his life.
“Nein,
this is my first trip on a
Japanischer
train.”
Bonds left hand edged behind him, found a steel clothes hook on the door and clamped around it with all his power. “I presume, Frau Marlene, that brolly-blaster is the same weapon that took the life of—oh, what was his name?” He assumed a quizzical expression.
Stall, stall, Oy Oy Seven!
“Colonel Onan Lemming of the British M.I. 5 in the Liverpool Airport slaying of 1964....”
The
Bullet’s
screech was Mozart to his ears.
He’d been braced for the sudden stop, but the unaware hag flew across the compartment and her head caroming off the steel wall was the sweet sound of Mike Epstein’s forty-ounce Louisville Schlooger kissing a fast ball into the right-field bleachers. Bond sprang onto the dazed woman, chopping down on her right wrist, and the brolly-blaster fell onto the seat. Infuriated at the startling turnabout, Frau Marlene shook her head to clear away the cobwebs and then snaked back at him, her bony claws raking his cheeks. Her left hand darted to an exposed stocking top and freed a length of silver. But before her hand could complete the deadly arc, Bond had the brolly-blaster pointed dead center at her maddened face, depressed the trigger and—
splat!
Frau Marlene had an extra mouth where her wartstippled nose had been. There was a blood-choked wail; the dirk fell from the wizened fingers and she collapsed on the floor into a bundle of old rags.
Hearing a hammering at the door, Bond wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand and opened it to meet the sharp scrutiny of Sanka.
The Baron examined the garbage heap that had been Frau Ilse Marlene without comment.
“Your statement came back to me when I was under the gun, Cocky. ‘Some three million people per annum choose the railroads as their method of self-destruction.’ One of them paid off for me. Who was it?”
Sanka smiled sardonically. “I have just seen the mangled body on the tracks, Izzy-san, with the note pinned to its kimono. Your savior was Suicide Suzuki.”
16 Bowling Brawl in the Bathhouse
“Yes,” said Sanka, reflecting upon the event as the cab neared the New Fujiya, “you escaped death at the Nazi woman’s hands because of a magnificent act by our eminent chronicler of death. Suicide Suzuki, as it turns out, lived in a luxurious villa on a hill overlooking the New Tokkaido rail bed. His note stated that his last column contained a typographical error that resulted in the misspelling of one of the suicide’s names. Instead of haranguing the printer, as he would have been well within his rights to do, he shouldered the blame squarely, apologized to the publisher and the victim’s family, went to his home, donned a ceremonial kimono, took out several scrapbooks containing all the “Death Beat” columns he’d ever written, ate them in penance, rupturing his insides, then climbed to the top of his villa and hurled himself onto the tracks. A glorious way to leave this vale of tears, Izzy-san. The gods are smiling now.”
Atami, oft referred to as Japan’s Coney island by people who have been to neither, nestles, nestles by the Pacific behind a high seawall. On the tiny beach are piles of boulders cut into the shape of monstrous children’s jacks. In the rear of the resort are bluffs and mountains from whose terraced ridges hang hotels, both Western and
ryokan
. Its narrow streets bustle with kimono-wearing Japanese on holiday, their omnipresent cameras clicking away in the national sport, the taking o£ pictures of other Japanese taking pictures.
The resort’s newest sensation is the waterfront nightclub-restaurant, the Psyche-Deli, where the country’s growing number of English-speaking acidheads congregates to eat delicatessen and dig an incongruous combination of hip American entertainment and those leave-nothing-to-the-imagination Japanese “strip shows.” For an additional fee slipped surreptitiously to the crafty-eyed proprietor, Tripleader Taramuki, they will find minute cubes of LSD hidden in the greasy hearts of pastrami sandwiches.
Bond and Sanka joined the Feldspars at a ringside table. “You will enjoy the Psyche-Deli, Izzy-san,” said Sanka. “Here performs Japan’s
ichi-ban
stripper, Pickup Pochiko, whose control of her— ah—private region is so masterful that she is able to pick up a hundred-yen note without using her fingers or toes.”
“We have one in Herzlia who can do that and also make change,” Bond said.
There, Cocky-san, a little Israeli chauvinism for you!
The secret agent, his “confrontation” clothes augmented by a shoulder holster which cuddled to its leathery bosom a five-shot Stitt-Coltrane, searched the Great Dane’s face for the recognition signal that would say:
Let us make an excuse to leave the others, Mr. Bond. We have an appointment.
Feldspar’s smile said:
Not yet.
In the wake of the stripper followed expatriate American jazzman Cassius Clink, inventor of the vibraskull, the controversial instrument that had caused him to be banned from his homeland. Clink, ranked by critics with Gillespie, Parker and Tristano as a primogenitor of the modern school, had by accident found his bag during a brawl in a San Francisco bistro,
The Starving W
. Wielding a bottle of Jack Daniels in self-defense, he discovered that human skulls had a vast spectrum of sounds—alto, tenor, soprano, bass, baritone, etc. By arranging selected individuals into a battery of “living tones” and perching himself on a stool high above them and swinging six-foot mallets, he’d created the vibraskull.
He was scheduled for a thirty-minute set but had to end it at five when in the middle of a driving, double-time passage on “You Go to My Head” three of his “living tones” ceased to be that way. “This,” said a disappointed Bond, “is the inevitable result of a Cassius Clink concert. But he still deserves the unstinting adulation of the jazz world. He is the father of the head arrangement.”
Two porters mopped up the grisly leavings of the aborted session and then over the loudspeaker came the cry: “Limbo! Let’s do de limbo, mon!” Cheering wildly, the Psyche-Deli patrons thronged the floor for the limbo contest, the traditional highlight of the evening in any Japanese nightery from Tokyo’s swanky New Latin Quarter to those dingy taverns for the
eta
, the country’s “untouchable” class. Bond noted the childish docility of the patrons being led under the ever-lowered limbo stick until it was scant inches from the floor. The hands-down winner was a Tokyo University student, who accepted the trophy from his position under the rug.
The room went black; strobe lights began to wink, and so did Feldspar, slowly and deliberately, three times. Sanka saw Bond and the Dane locked in a conspiratorial glance and remarked, “Good hunting, gentlemen.”
Twice on the ten-minute ride up a mountain trail the cab driver had to stop. “There is a bad knock in the motor.” He could not locate the source despite a diligent investigation.
“There is nothing wrong with the motor,” the Dane said. “Please drive on.” His wise eyes messaged Bond:
Control yourself, my friend. Your heart is beating like a Maytag washer.
Bond sucked in a few deep breaths and his heartbeat reverted to its normal 565 counts per minute.
The journey ended in front of a building positioned precariously on a pine-tree-covered cliff. “This is the Samarra Bathhouse, Mr. Bond. I have been instructed to be on the roof garden at midnight. We have a few minutes. Let us use them in a refreshing
ofuro.”
Samarra. Bond’s cruel, sensual mouth was framed in an ironic smile. What a fitting place for an appointment!
Feldspar handed a sullen cashier a ten-thousand-yen note and they were shown by lovely maidens in gym uniforms to separate cubicles. Bond disrobed and splashed about in the tub, declining his masseuse’s offer of a three-thousand-yen “speciar massage.”
“I believe that autoeroticism is a matter for the individual and, besides, it should only be practiced in Cadillacs, young woman.”
He dressed quickly, rechecked his Stitt-Coltrane and rapped on the door to Feldspar’s cubicle. “Four minutes, professor.”
The Dane wore a light-blue
yukata
and as he tottered up the stairs on his giraffe legs Bond noticed his knees were circled by bands of thick grayish scar tissue. Feldspar must have had some horrible car accident, he thought. No wonder the man had no control over his gait.
At eleven-fifty-seven they were on the third floor, Feldspar sliding open a screen, and then on the roof garden. The ocean’s scent was pervasive and heavy here. Hundreds of feet below, whitecaps rolled in to end their existence against the boulders and seawall.