The Israel Bond Omnibus (76 page)

“Ouch!” The Israeli shattered the silence by banging his toe into an unyielding mass. Flicking on his Zippo, he saw a pyramid of big black iron balls. “What the hell are they?”

“Souvenirs of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Mr. Bond. They are cannonballs used to sink Czarist ships in the battle of Tsushima Strait. After the war they were recovered by the thousands by Imperial divers and brought to Japan, where they are venerated as symbols of national might. It is a poor bathhouse, indeed, that does not have a similar pyramid on its premises.”

“It’s eleven-fifty-nine. You sure he’s going to show?”

“Ernst has the Germanic obsession with punctuality. He will announce his presence at the stroke of midnight; no earlier, no later.”

Bond was on a countdown, his heart doing mad flip-flops, ping-ponging off his kidneys, gall bladder and liver. Thirty-three seconds, thirty-two, thirty-one... Surely there should have been a noise on the stairs by now.

The second and hour hands embraced at twelve.

A blinding light flared at the far end of the roof garden. Under a floodlight, sitting in a wheelchair, was a man in a white lab coat, his black hair trimmed in a military crewcut.

Dr. Ernst Holzknicht.

He was not alone. Kneeling by his side and cocking a Manchester-Schlesinger rifle was a tough-looking, slant-eyed mulatto, heavily lipsticked and rouged, his wiry figure encased in a coral Pucci blouse and Braniff Airlines hostess skirt. High-heel Kitty Kelly light-opera pumps of patent leather gleamed in the floodlight. Bond knew the breed—a member of the notorious Black Dragqueen Society, the Far Eastern cult of deviate slay-for-payers. From the mulatto’s obscenely curved lips dangled a long yellow cigarette exuding a sweet, acrid tang. A king-sized Chiquita Bananajuana! Just the sort of cigarette to inflame the high yellow into a yellow high—for murder!

The smirking voice that had plagued Bond in a million nightmares spoke. “Listen and do not interrupt.” The mouth moved in an odd, jerky way; so did the hands. “So, Oy Oy Seven, you have come to Japan to exact revenge and quash my operation here. Too long have you been a thorn in the side of neo-Nazism. You and your Secret Service are responsible for the deaths of Lazarus Loxfinger, our god; East German Secret Agent James Bund; Gerda ‘Auntie’ Sem-Heidt, and a host of other TUSH patriots. Your daring feat atop the Empire State Building put me in this wheelchair with a broken body. You have induced this grotesque pig of a Dane to betray me. But you made a foolhardy move by coming here tonight. You will never leave here alive. As for you, Feldspar, you will rue the day you cast your lot with this Jude. I shall permit you to live long enough to see your beloved son injected with my new barbarella toxin. Shall I describe its unimaginable agony to you, the rotting of tissue—”

“Boche! Boche!”
the Dane screamed and broke into his laughable gait toward the Nazi, his hands knotted into fists, the golden curls jiggling.

“Stop him!” Holzknicht commanded.

The Black Dragqueen’s rifle buzzed and Feldspar seemed to hang suspended for a second as one of the slugs thudded into his leg, but his rage was as towering as his size and he lunged onward like a crazed bull. Bond’s Stitt-Coltrane was out, crashing its entire clip at the Black Dragqueen, but the five bullets missed by a wide margin, blowing out a section of the railing behind the Nazi and his gunsel.

From the Manchester-Schlesinger came an unerring response; there was a searing jolt in his gun hand and the Stitt-Coltrane went flying over the roof.
Thwack!
Another M-S slug hit Bond’s right thigh with a tremendous impact, driving him into the pyramid of cannonballs.

Feldspar’s hands were inches away from throttling the Nazi’s throat when the giraffe legs could take it no longer. He sprawled at the foot of the wheelchair, sobbing impotent curses.

Israel Bond had already made up his mind what his do-or-die tactic would be the instant his head cracked into the top ball. He summoned up his last ounce of power, hoisted the ball and went into the old Don Carter four-step the kegling ace had taught him one night at the White Horse Bowling Academy in Trenton, New Jersey. Now he was on the fourth step of the approach, then his rippling back and shoulder muscles released the cannonball in a mighty thrust.

The Black Dragqueen tittered at the puny effort, but then he froze in horrified fascination, unable to pull the trigger, as he saw the ball gaining momentum and coming at him on a thunderous roll. Before he could snap out of his panic, it was too late. The ball crunched into his ankle, hurling him on a side slant into the bottom of Holzknicht’s wheelchair, and suddenly both of them were falling back through the gaping hole in the railing, down, down, down... and the screams of the Black Dragqueen were lost in the pounding of the whitecaps.

Bond forced his bloodied frame to crawl inch by inch to the edge and gazed down at the precise moment the moon scudded out from behind a cloud to bathe the seawall in silvery light. There was the wheelchair in a thousand fragments on the boulders... a white-sleeved hand disappearing under the waves.

Bond lit a Raleigh and whispered to the gasping Dane. “I made the seven-ten split—and they split, too. It’s all over, professor. Dr. Ernst Holzknicht is dead.”

Two chilly lips bussed his cheek.
Adieu, Iz. Adieu forever.

And that’s that,
Bond thought. Resuming his place at the side of the delectable maiden, he grinned. “Shall we get back to the earth-moving business? If we really make an effort we can heave Vietnam into the Bering Sea and make the world safe for democracy and Drew Pearson.”

His cruel sensual mouth was bruising hers when—

“Bond! Aleph priority!” The voice of Schlomo Salvar crackled over the Krai-Cain syncraphone’s Frequency Baze Tzaddik. “The embassy just received a frantic message for you from a Miss Katz. Says she’s trapped in her Xerox suite by two TUSH-ys.”

“I’m on the way, Schlomo. Over and out,” Bond told his false sixth bedsock toe. “Honey, I know you must think you’ve run into an
ichi-ban
weirdo who goes around talking to clouds of steam and his toes, but there’s no time to explain. Where’s the phone?”

A call to Sanka produced a
Kyodo Kikaku
helicopter on the roof garden piloted by a Major Domo, a ramrod of an officer. “I am at your disposal, Mr. Bond. The Xerox facility is but a few minutes’ flying time from here and its penthouse contains one of Tokyo’s finest heliports.”

“
Arigato domo,
Domo. Or, Domo,
domo arigato.
Or…”
Dammit! There’s another powerhouse of a one-liner somewhere in that combination,
Bond thought,
but it’s escaped me for the moment. Anyway, this is no time for quipping when Kopy’s in danger. Why has TUSH gone after her? And who’s directing the show now that Holzknicht’s out of the picture?

The copter reached an altitude of two thousand feet in a few seconds and soon the garish, tinselly Ginza section was below them. The bars would be just about ready to close by now, Bond knew. Gorgeous hostesses, who’d been lighting cigarettes for tourists at three thousand yen an hour and promising paradise in their alluring winks, would be sneaking out through the back entrances to join their musician boyfriends while the drink-befuddled John Q. Travelers were being sobered up by tabs that could have financed insurrections in eight new African nations.

“Xerox ahead, Mr. Bond. Will you require my assistance?”

“No, thanks, Major Domo. After what I’ve been through, a couple of minor-league hoods will be Hostess cupcakes.”

The craft hovered over the landing pad, then set down gently, though the gales from its rotors flung a trio of broom-wielding janitors over the edge. Bond watched them plummet like bundles of wet wash. “Don’t feel bad about it, Domo. You’ve just created three new employment opportunities.” He cursed himself for adopting so easily the Japanese indifference to death, but pushed it out of his mind when his feet hit the gravel.

He raced through the opulent surroundings, pausing only to filch a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label from a table on the terrace and give his insides a good heat treatment, then vaulted five steps at each bound down a stairway leading to the twentieth floor suite.

Kopy’s oaken door was ajar.
(I wonder if she has a jar that’s adoor,
he thought, in yet another demonstration of his fantastic wit.)

“Kopy! Kopy!” His voice echoed through her empty office.

“Iz.” Her voice, so faint, so far away.

“Darling, what have they done to you?”

“Quickly, Iz. Through the green door!”

He barreled through the suite, upsetting lamps and worktables and a Ben Shahn masterpiece, the
Mona Schevitz
, until he found the green door, turned the handle and peered into a long, dimly lit corridor. “Kopy!”

“At the end of the hall, Iz! Hurry! I can’t hold them off any longer!”

A shot shook the hallway.

Bond crouched, revved up into the old Bob Hayes breakaway sprint and traversed a hundred yards in 8.9 seconds. Another scream—“Iz!”—sent a chill down his sensual, splendidly interlocked vertebrae.

He stopped on a dime at a black door over which a red
DANGER
sign glowed dully. Picking up the coin and pocketing it, he drove his massive shoulders into the door, cutting it down like a blocking back paving the way for Gale Sayers, and hurtled into utter blackness.

“Kopy! Kopy!”

Her voice was quite near now, curiously cool and mocking. “That’s fine, Iz. Just fine.”

“Dammit! Are you playing games, baby? Where are you? It’s so dark I can’t see my hand in front of my—”

Thump!
On all sides he heard partitions hissing from the ceiling to the floor. Bond flailed his fists and met cold metal. He was in a trap. “What the hell...”

Kopy Katz’s laugh rang out, frightening him with its eeriness.

There was a flash as bright as an exploding sun. Something titanic clobbered his head. Israel Bond pitched to the floor and lay motionless.