The Israel Bond Omnibus (79 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
“I saw you take three W-V bullets in the stomach. I saw you expire. I saw you placed in a coffin and flown to your homeland.”
Bond passed his pack of Raleighs around. “This will prove I’m no ghost. Here’s my latest haiku. Dig.
A good sex life stops
mental illness. Fight a
crackup with a shackup!
OK, Cocky?”
“Hai.
Only Israel Bond could be so profoundly romantic. But how—”
“Years ago in the Orient,” Bond interjected, “I learned the secret of clouding men’s minds from the Mongolian, Takka Ah Shonda, the last of the red-hot lamas. Oh, you tell ‘em, Kopy. It’s a shade too involved for me.”
Kopy Katz inhaled and heaved her magnificent mammaries. “Israel Bond did die. At least an exact duplicate of him died after leading the Sokka Datgai on the limbo chase. A short time ago, I, who’ve been living in constant trepidation that sooner or later his Oy Oy Seven number would be up, lured him into the ‘Black Room,’ a secret lab in the rear of my Xerox office, and copied him—molecule for molecule, subatomic particle for subatomic particle. While Iz lay around reading Commentary and eating boxes of Good ’N Plenty, his duplicate was pulling off the usual Bondian superfeats. The ‘Black Room’ itself is the inside of an experimental Xerox that nobody in the organization, not even Mr. Sol Linowitz, knows about—the Xerox-Googol-Plex. Without going into too much detail, it utilizes transuranic elements in an instantaneous but controlled nuclear process. That’s what caused the flash and gave you the headache, darling. You were in the epicenter of a mini-H-bomb explosion. It gave the Ginza section a helluva shake, but this town’s always being rocked by minor earthquakes so nobody paid much attention. When I received the formula, I’d originally intended to use the ‘Black Room’ to duplicate another Xerox. Think of the billions I could have saved the corporation by duplicating new machines instead of building them from scratch. But”—her voice lowered—“I fell in love, Iz, and because of that I did something far worse than betray my country or my faith. I—I betrayed Xerox.”
Bond ran a loving hand over the oval face. “I appreciate it, baby. But you said you ‘received’ the formula. You mean you didn’t whip it up yourself?”
“Gentlemen and Iz, I’m no slouch in the gray-matter league. Only nine other people in the world wear this insignia.” She fondled the chain and plunger. “I won’t go through the whole list, but among them are the fabled little old colored shoeshine boy who wrote not only all of Irving Berlin’s songs, but Richard Rodgers’, too; Morris Berenbaum of Thiokol, who discovered that certain forms of German measles are caused by viruses hatched in the motors of Volkswagens; David Susskind, whose main goal is discovering his own possibilities; Yonkel Schreiber-Burns of the Rand Corporation, who is well on the way to creating eternal life, as soon as he gets over the last little hurdle—how to stop people from dying. We Alta Zeyda Kapplans keep in constant touch by mail and ham radio, swap our latest theories. The formula for the Xerox-Googol-Plex is the brainchild of the
ichi-ban
AZK of us all. Your Holzknicht couldn’t carry this man’s bedroom slippers.”
“Who is he?” said an interested Count Pishaka.
“A man with a confirmed IQ of 666—the little devil—and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Jew. He’s quite mad, of course, but he periodically breaks out of it to bedazzle the rest of us. His name is Lavi HaLavi.”
Bond turned his sensual gray eyes away so they could not see the mist gathering. “I cursed him for failing me and all he’s done is save my life—again.”
Now it was Sanka’s turn to be the comforter. “Izzy-san, this is no time to weep. This is a joyous occasion. Tomorrow we shall work hand in finger to corral these malefactors, but now let us celebrate. We shall have a feast fit for a king—an Alan King!”
Gottenu!
Bond thought.
My scintillating wit has rubbed off on the Baron. He’s damn near as fast on the uptake as I am.
Sanka phoned Ginza-Burg, gave him a series of instructions and hung up. “The food is on the way, my friends. Blintzes from Charlie Mano’s, mouth-watering sukiyaki from Kathy, one of the mama-sans at the VIP Bar, and a conglomeration of Ann Dinken’s best Jewish delicacies. In the meantime let us make merry.”
They sat in the Lotus position around Sanka’s table, singing boisterously like children at a campfire. Bond and Kopy taught their hosts some jolly Stern Gang dynamiting songs; the Japanese predictably sang “Sakura”; then Sanka opened the curtains of a wicker cage and commanded a chorus of crickets to chirp in foxtrot rhythm and they danced—Kopy with Sanka, Bond with Pishaka—until they fell in laughing exhaustion on the tatami.
Ipanema chose that moment to stagger into the suite with a carton on her slim shoulder. She dumped its contents on the table, which cracked under the burden of the thousand-yen notes. “Ipanema keeping her bargain, Izzy-san.”
“Who is this girl?” said an irritated Kopy.
Think fast!
Bond told his brain. “A waif I used to send CARE packages to in the 1950s when she was in an Osaka orphanage. She vowed she’d work her tail off to repay me, darling.”
Sanka tactfully sent the maiden away to commit suicide. “And here, my friends, is Ginza-Burg.”
The cabby, his face alight in an infectious smile, sauntered through the screen bearing three large trays.
“Essen! Meer gayen essen, kinderlach!”
[85]
He set one tray on the floor and peeled off the tinfoil coverings.
Kopy’s nose wrinkled. “Lox.”
“And bagels to you, luv,” Bond said. “Seems to me we’ve done this verbal byplay before. This is going to be one dull marriage if all you do is say ‘lox.’”
“Silly.” She held his hand. “Oh, yes, I remember now. I said it on the cliff, didn’t I? But that was when that poor little workman dropped the cylinder and Feldspar got all hot and bothered. I didn’t mean smoked salmon that time, Iz. Lox is also a bit of scientific slang. I meant to pursue it further, but, as I recall, Feldspar practically stepped on my conversation.”
“What did you mean?” A sudden hardness was back in Bond’s eyes.
“Lox means liquid oxygen. You know, the stuff they use in guided missiles.”
22 Loves Of A Bond
“Faster! Faster!” Bond begged Major Domo, now at the controls of Baron Sanka’s Lear jet.
“We are already at 650 mph, Mr. Bond. Beppu Airport has cleared us for touchdown in six minutes.”
“The hell with Beppu. From there it’s another two hours by car to Shimonoshima and we can’t afford the time. I want you to cut your speed, come in over the cliffs and we’ll bail out.”
“A dicey proposition. The currents may catch you and blow you far out to sea.”
“A chance we’ll have to take.”
“May I give my belated thanks for the remedy you forced into me in the Imperial garden, Mr. Bond?”
“Don’t thank me, Domo. Thank Excedrin. And remember—only Excedrin can take away the pain caused by aspirin. Kopy, you ever jumped before?”
“Loads of times,” said the researcher. “When I was a teener we lived in northern New Jersey and I belonged to the Teterboro Airport Skydiving Club. It was such fun free-falling and trying to avoid Arthur Godfrey’s plane. Give me another minute, though. I haven’t finished mixing the stuff.”
“Are you sure it’s necessary?”
“Lavi HaLavi thinks so. It’s his idea. Simple but absolutely brilliant as usual. I radioed him at Foam Rubber Acres in Galilee and, thank heaven, I caught him during the five minutes of each hour that he’s rational. The psychiatrist told me he spends the rest of the time riding on a rocking horse, crying, ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!’ then looks behind and asks, ‘Where the hell are the other 599? If you think I’m going into the mouth of hell alone, you’re crazy!’”
An improvement at that,
Bond thought.
At least he’s out of the sandpile.
“What else did he say?”
“If TUSH has managed to assemble a nuclear missile under our noses, you know the target. By now Lavi has alerted the Ministry of Defense to evacuate the citizenry of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem area, though I don’t think that’ll do much good. It could reach Eretz Israel in twenty-five minutes. Maybe it’s already been fired. If not”—and she held up a test tube of a pinkish liquid like a proud mother doting on her newborn— “there’s still a chance.” Kopy unscrewed a cap on her silver AZK plunger, poured the brew into it and recapped it. “A missile uses thousands of gallons of hydrocarbon fuel piped into it from storage tanks. If I can just—”
“Shimonoshima ahead,” said Major Domo. “You’ll find the chutes on the wall near the door.”
Bond helped Kopy into the harness, worked his way into his own chute and lit a Raleigh. By now the Baron should have rounded up his
Kyodo Kikaku Kommando
forces, a top-secret cadre of hardened battlers, and perhaps their copters were leaving Honshu this very second, he hoped. But for the next couple of hours he and Kopy would have to carry the ball alone.
He signaled to Domo to pull the door switch, yelled “Cochise!” (Bond considered himself an innovator, not a follower, and besides, he’d always felt Geronimo had been overexposed) and hurled himself into a brilliant, sun-splashed sky. Kopy picked up the cue— “Crazy Horse!” —and jumped after him.
The sentinel on the cliff picked up the pair of vanilla-ice-cream-cone-shaped objects in his binoculars and spoke hurriedly into his walkie-talkie.
“Achtung!
Two interlopers in the sky. One of them is
Der Jude.”
“Acknowledged. Deploy the men, Eisswess. Take Bond alive.” In the largest tent Professor Igneous Feldspar sipped daintily from a glass of Liebfraumilch. “So,” he said to the naked, sex-crazed woman thrashing about on her cot, “your hero comes like an avenging angel of the Lord. Run to him, you disgusting trollop. It will provide me a bit of entertainment.”
“Bond! Bond! Bond!” shrieked Magma Feldspar and ran out into the sunshine.
Even from her dory a mile from shore and a thousand feet below, the keen-eyed Ama maiden knew it was her lover alighting on the cliff. “Those thighs, those shoulders, that cruelly handsome profile,” she sobbed. “It can be no other.”
Go-Down Mikimoto drove the oars toward the landing at a rate that would have left the racing shells of Princeton, Harvard and Dartmouth capsized in her boiling wake.
Bond hit the rocks first and his heart sank as he heard Kopy’s “The wind’s got me! Help, Iz!” A sudden, treacherous current was, as Domo had feared, impelling her seaward. “Kopy!” he called helplessly.
His ears caught the grating of feet and he spun, tearing his Hontze-Ganendel automatic from his Neiman-Marcus shoulder holster. It was one of two guns he’d hastily requisitioned from Sanka’s private arsenal. The other was a Beretta, stuck into his cummerbund.
He crouched behind one of the many
yoni
bushes. Into view stalked six truncheon-wielding Norwegians, part of the bunch he’d met earlier, but they’d exchanged their black sweaters for polo shirts and their exposed inner arms bore the telltale tattoo—jackboots kicking naked buttocks. Norwegians, hell, he thought. They’re TUSH-ys! And while they might be great shakes as Buddha-builders, they’re without question missile technicians as well.
“He landed in this vicinity, Pieterdeter,” said one of them in a Rhinelander dialect. “We need not concern ourselves with the girl. I saw her swept into the ocean. But why should he have come virtually unaided?”
“He rather fancies himself as a superhero, I am told, my dear Eisswess,” said the contumelious Pieterdeter.
Bond ground his cavity-free teeth, shoved the Hontze-Ganendel back into its holster and flung himself out of the hiding place, snarling, “S for Solomon, H for Halavah, A for Abraham, Z for Zangwill, A for Abraham
noch amool
, and M for Moses! SHAZAM, you Nazi bastards!”
He crashed like a boulder into the sextet, his bronzed arms, elbows, stiffened fingers and steel shafts of legs dealing lethal blows to salient sectors of their anatomies.
Eisswess died at once of a crushed windpipe. The nose of Pieterdeter was mashed into strawberry Jell-O. A toe emasculated one Herr Hauptnerr.
The remaining threesome, who’d been less forcefully battered by Bond’s Ugandan elephant charge, got in close and drummed their truncheons against his stomach and right shoulder, reopening a few of the old combat wounds in the latter location. Claret gushed forth like the geysers of Beppu, but he took a mighty breath and his chest expanded to twice its normal size, hurling them to the ground. Though he would have preferred to finish these lice by hand, he decided to conserve his fading power. Liberating the Hontze-Ganendel again, he blasted away at the whimpering Germans—the characteristic ver gehargit! ver gehargit! report shaking the earth as the heavy-caliber slugs blew them down. They lay splayed out in various attitudes of death.