The Israel Bond Omnibus (77 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
He dragged on a Raleigh. “And you fired the shot, I gather.”
“An added touch of drama, darling. It worked, didn’t it? Oh, heaven, what a thrill to see you charging down that corridor like Lancelot to the rescue! My lovely, lovely knight.” The raspberry lips blew suggestive zephyrs into his ear.
“Oy Oy Seven! Aleph priority!” Schlomo Salvar was back on his false sixth toe. “I’ve got to see you right away. All kinds of
mishigass
[83]
have been happening around here. First of all, your seven-foot Danish playmate stopped in, bought a ten-thousand-dollar Israel Bond as a token of his gratitude, fed me a few shots of some wicked brandy and left for Kyushu. Then Baron Sanka stormed in yammering bloody murder. He brought a copy of a video tape that’s been airmailed to every major Japanese TV network from an undisclosed source in Europe. They’ve junked their regular schedule of programs to play it over and over. Turn on your TV set, then get here on the double.”
Kopy pressed one of a row of buttons on her desk and a wall-size Sony hummed. The white dot spread; a Japanese announcer came on jabbering harshly and waving his arms in agitation.
“I’ll translate, darling. He says the event we’re about to witness occurred yesterday at a Common Market banquet in Brussels. It was filmed by an observer using a portable hand camera and supplied free of charge by ‘A Friend of the Great Japanese People.’ The man at the podium, he says, is Israel’s Minister of Trade Hyman DeFlower. Recognize him?”
Bond did. “That’s DeFlower, no doubt about it.
Gottenu!
He looks like he’s stoned. Notice the glazed eyes, the St. Vitus-like
tzittering
of the lips.”
“... able on this auspicious occasion to reveal for the first time a stunning breakthrough by a group of miniaturization specialists at our Technion Institute. Israel can now produce transistor radios of a quality far superior to anything emanating from Japanese laboratories—and cheaper, gentlemen, much cheaper. In the months to come we will reign supreme in this lucrative enterprise. Surely you cannot now deny my nation a Security Council membership in this prestigious organization...”
The Japanese commentator reappeared.
“He says, ‘We shall replay the tape following a lengthy statement from Propaganda Minister Britt Kato.’ Want to see more, Iz?”
“What for? Baby, as the razor manufacturer said when he accidentally dropped one of his shavers from a Cessna flying over Yankee Stadium: ‘Now the Schick has really hit the fan!’”
“Iz, I’m going with you.” The lovely Xeroxite replaced her silver chain and plunger with a copper one more suitable for casual afternoon wear and they took the elevator to a subbasement, where she tossed him the keys to a rakish, low-slung Castro convertible. “A wild thing, Iz. Quadruple carbs, twenty-four-volt Ruffing-Dickey battery, Sid Mark Three Pratt-Whitney engine capable of 188 nonmetric poods per dunam, and at night you can convert it into a very sexy couch.”
The Castro whisked them to the embassy through streets ominously deserted. “I don’t like this stillness,” Bond said. “I haven’t hit a single pedestrian in more than eighty blocks. Something’s brewing.”
A Miss Cilia Cohen, Salvar’s curvaceous sabra secretary, led them to the diplomat’s plush inner sanctum, where Sanka sat on a divan, seemingly under control, throwing spitballs at a large photograph of Theodor Herzl.
“Thank God you’re here, Oy Oy Seven,” said the short, bespectacled Salvar, rising to offer his hand. “I’ve been trying to convince the Baron there’s been a horrible mistake but I’m afraid I haven’t been getting through.”
“The speaker in the video tape was Hyman DeFlower, is that not a fact, Izzy-san?”
“Yes, Baron, but he was wacked out of his
keppel
, couldn’t you see that? Someone induced him to make that preposterous statement by some devilish means. Holzknicht, maybe.”
“But your Danish friend apprised me of Holzknicht’s death in Atami. Was Feldspar lying? Is this whole Holzknicht business a red herring cooked up between you and the Dane? The scrolls, the attack on me at the
ryokan
, all of it?”
“Dammit, Cocky-san!” Bond shook Sanka’s shoulders. “Didn’t I save your life in Beppu? Wasn’t I wounded myself?”
Sanka sighed. “I don’t know what to think, my friend. Salvar-san showed me a communication from your PM denying categorically Eretz Israel’s plan to control the transistor market. But it hardly matters now. Our public is livid with rage, awaiting only the green light from the Diet to—”
Over the intercom shrilled Cilia Cohen. “Mr. Salvar! Come quickly! Look down the block! There’s an army approaching the embassy.”
Japanee no Jew!
Japanee no Jew!
The roar washed over the embassy.
Japanee no Jew!
Japanee no Jew!
There was a tinkling of glass. “Rocks—they’re throwing rocks!” Miss Cohen was hysterical.
The four occupants of Salvar’s chamber moved to a balcony overlooking the street. “The Sokka Datgai, Izzy-san,” said Sanka with grim satisfaction. “They are coming in full force. I warned you my people would brook no more insults.”
Bond, his gray eyes sweeping over the sea of blazing yellow faces, lit a Raleigh. “Where are the riot police?”
“They are on the way, Izzy-san. But I suspect they will not be too effective.”
“You mean they’ll have been told not to be too effective?”
Sanka’s sneer was answer enough.
Japanee no Jew!
Japanee no Jew!
They were surging forward in phalanxes of two thousand, each preceded by a sound truck whose trained agitators were inflaming the marchers. “Hands off transistors! Japanee no Jew! Japanee are Japanee!”
A police truck pulled up, disgorged a paltry contingent of men in black uniforms and red combat hats. From the rear of the truck they pulled out four long steel riot poles and paired off into teams. They made a few halfhearted thrusts to contain the mob, grinning as they permitted themselves to be shoved back step by step.
Piff! Paff!
Two rocks walloped Bond’s head and in the mind-expanding flashes of agony he conceived a solution to this hairy situation.
The riot poles!
He recalled the docile, antlike behavior of the Japanese in the Atami nightclub as they’d scrambled to get into the limbo contest.
“Schlomo! I’m going down there. Send two of your best men after me, quickly! Tell them to grab one of the riot poles and pay attention to my spiel.”
Bond leaped over the balcony railing to the soft, squooshy greensward, tore a bullhorn from the hands of one of the policemen and climbed onto the roof of the truck.
“Limbo! Let’s do de limbo!” he yelled.
At first the demonstrators greeted his exhortation with a fusillade of missiles and he thought:
Anybody who dreams up a nutball scheme like this has rocks in his head. (Gottenu!
Another gem! If he got out of this alive he’d have to phone Earl Wilson and plant it in the “Wish I’d Said That” department of the column.)
His two embassy aides, strapping, bronzed sabras in light-blue Barbara Eden genie-jeans, had reached the scene, picked up an abandoned riot pole, stationed themselves at the ends, and the mob hushed, awaiting curiously the next move of this demented
gaijin
. Bond took advantage of the silence to bawl:
“Whether you’ve got a monko or chimbo,
Jump in de line and let’s do de limbo!”
One of the agitators began to giggle. “Rimbo! Ret’s do de rimbo!” The chant spread like wildfire to those in the rear. “Rimbo! Rimbo!”
“Boocherim!”
Bond commanded his cohorts. “Move the stick away from the embassy. Where I go, you go.”
“Rimbo! Rimbo!” The Sokka Datgai army was shouting and laughing now, and the first phalanx’s ringleaders commenced to wiggle under the retreating pole, setting oif a wholesale rush.
“Run! Move it to the next street!” Bond thundered. And to his brain:
Create, create! Keep improvising Calypso verses and this crowd is Silly Putty in your long, tapering, sensual fingers.
“Whether you Japanee or Jew,
De limbo is de ting to do!”
He broke into a gallop; so did his pole-bearing sabras and the joyous, jouncing hordes.
“Whether you be an uncle or tanteh,
Do de limbo like Harry Belafanteh!”
(A false rhyme, his ashamed brain admitted, but, hell, even heavyweight lyricists like Stephen Sondheim and Johnny Mercer would be copping out in a desperate game such as this!)
“I load de bananas on de sailing clipper,
Daylight come ’n’ me wanna go home.
But I don’t work when it comes Yom Kippur,
Yomtov come ’n’ me wanna stay home!”
Gottenu!
He’d been running and shouting for miles, it seemed. Where were they now? Yes, Shinjuku! The road-construction gangs were dropping their jackhammers, picks and shovels to join the ever-lengthening line that was causing the most horrendous traffic jam in Tokyo’s history. And still more recruits were falling into the ranks—hostesses and their inebriated clientele from cheap bistros, burly cops deserting their beats, geishas jumping from pedicabs, and the scrawny individuals who’d been pulling them.
On limboed the caravan, Bond, his two puffing Israelis and hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including the Diet, which had ceased its debate on the new trade agreement with South Korea to become shrieking, ecstatic participants.
His body pleaded for a respite, but he ignored the heartrending entreaties of his nearly rent heart, wheezing lungs, tortured gristle and blunted shoulderblades. Onward! he urged them. The flag at the Israeli embassy will not be trampled this day! He croaked through the bullhorn in a fast-diminishing voice:
“Mom, you made a booboo, I shout!
Don’t like my daddy—please t’row him out!
Daddy real nasty—that swine!
I t’ink dat you married Joe Pyne!”
They’d reached the Hakone area and presently were stumbling about in pine forests and game preserves, past ski lodges, into icy mountain streams. The embassy aides finally faltered and sank to their knees and relinquished the hundred-pound steel rod to Bond, who, without missing a beat, held it a foot from the ground to allow another few thousand or so to squeeze through on their bellies, then steeled his body for the last grueling leg of the contest.
On the summit of Mount Fuji, aglow in the roseate sunset, the limbo dance ended. Bond looked at the exhausted Japanese strewn about like clothespins on the trail, turned his eyes upward to his Maker and whispered in hoarse reverence:
“Lord, who made me nimble; Lord, who made me quick,
I thank thee from my heart for dat good ol’ limbo shtick!”
19 “Israel Bond Is Dead”
Major Domo, who’d been ordered by Sanka to track Bond from the copter, picked him up at Fuji’s sixth station and ferried him to the embassy lawn. He limped past the adoring Cilia Cohen into Salvar’s office, to be met by Kopy, whose abel-green eyes held a deep concern.
“Iz, thank heaven you’re back. Schlomo’s gone off the deep end. He started acting peculiar a while ago; a glaze came over his eyes and he sounded sort of, well, mechanical. He told Sanka he could straighten out all the misunderstanding if Sanka could get him an audience with the Emperor. Said he had new information proving Eretz Israel’s innocence. He was so persuasive Sanka agreed. And he said he had a gift that would warm the Emperor’s heart.”