The Israel Bond Omnibus (82 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
One of their shots ripped his thigh, two more smacked into his right shoulder, a fourth creased his sensual scalp, but he steamrollered on and they began to scream in sheer terror, for he seemed to be framed in a golden aura, unafraid, unstoppable, unconquerable, his weapon smashing, crushing, battering, pulverizing....
Then the power was cut off and he fell like a great oak to the earth, the blood pouring out of him like the sea through a breached dike. Next to his ear was the radio, still squawking. “...
Herr Doktor,
something has gone wrong. It is many seconds past detonation time and we have seen nothing. Wait! Something evil comes this way! Something white and swift... something...
eeya-a-a-ah!”
There was a protracted whine and the Egyptian end of the hookup went dead.
26 Now Heah de Wud of de Lawd
Ten seconds after the
Kyodo Kikaku Kommando
choppers hit the cliff top, buzzing like great cicadas, Baron Cockimamiyama Sanka, a Hanyatti in one hand, a Cal-grenade dangling from his finger, gave a long, low whistle.
“By the belly of Buddha! This is a pocket-size Armageddon! Domo, tell the men to fan out and search. Kill anything that offers opposition.”
Nothing did. From the caves came a bevy of Japanese workmen, their hands held high, their eyes fearful as they walked through a landscape of indescribable grue.
One by one the KKK began to stack up the bodies—the Nazis, many of whose heads were shapeless, splintered mounds, and the three dead women.
As Holzknicht’s body was dumped on the heap by six sweating Kommandos, Sanka’s mouth curled in a sneer and spat a wad of Copenhagen snuff onto the melted face. “Roast in hell!”
“Baron, we have found the Israeli,” said Major Domo.
“Yo-i!
Is he alive?”
“Barely. There is a stertorous rumbling in his chest. He is horribly wounded.”
“Tell Dr. Spokko to come at once with plasma.”
The pale secret agent lay still in a pool of claret, a strange peace on the cruelly handsome visage.
“That object he continues to clutch so tightly,” said Major Domo. “It is blood-red. Apparently he used it as a club against his foes. But I have never before seen any bludgeon like it.”
Sanka worked the long, tapering fingers out of the holes they had dug into the weapon. “Dr. Spokko, I suggest an immediate injection of adrenalin straight into the heart. It is the only hope.”
“Hai,”
nodded the doctor and prepared it. “Incidentally, my dear Baron and Major, from my considerable knowledge of the higher forms I should say unequivocally that the thing you took from the
gaijin’s
hand is the jawbone of an ass.”
27 How to Talk to a Jewish Mother
“Herr Doktor
Ernst Holzknicht played the old shell game with Kopy Katz, and he lost,” said Bond, his eyes on the horizon. Soon, he knew, three new ghosts, Kopy, Go-Down and Magma, would be forming out there to haunt him forevermore. Even Sarah Lawrence might decide to re-materialize. He wondered how they’d do it. En masse? In six-hour shifts?
“Explain that, Iz, darling,” said Dr. Betty Freudan. “I’m not up on this missile-technology bit.”
“In truth, she played the
new
shell game—Super Shell, to be precise. Lavi gave her the formula for Platformate, the ingredient that makes new Super Shell the world’s greatest gasoline, and she put it into the hydrocarbon fuel. So powerful was the thrust of just that pinch of Platformate that the inertial-guidance system on the missile couldn’t cope with it. The bird overshot Eretz Israel, as Lavi had computed, and nosed into central Egypt. Exeunt one missile base and only heaven knows how many Nazi scientists.”
He lit a Raleigh and made a disquieting, though hardly earth-shaking, discovery.
He liked Raleigh cigarettes.
Funny,
he ruminated,
maybe I always did. It was only a longing for status that made me snip away at the integrity of Raleigh with all the lousy, snotty jokes. I guess when you reach a certain level of maturity you finally discover what’s real and right and true and what’s dross. Dammit, I’d smoke Raleighs even if they
didn’t
give coupons!
“And it’s worked out so neatly, dearest,” trilled the lovely blond psychoanalyst. “Because they need Japanese trade so badly, Red China and Russia have denied they ever monitored the missile flight over their territories. Your pal Goshen of the CIA has convinced the Tall Texan that the U.S. should stay mum, too. It’s the biggest clam-up in history and the Cairo Colonel is being blamed for the detonation. He’ll again be an international pariah for a long time and that can’t hurt us. Darling, I think you’ve been out in the sun a flerm of a furge
[87]
too long. I’d better wheel you back into the kitchen.”
He
was
tired. Maybe he was pushing the recovery bit a little too hard. It was only two weeks since he, kept clinically alive by the adrenalin shot and Major Domo’s bottle of infection-fighting Excedrins, had been taken in Sanka’s Lear jet to the Hadassah Medical Center near Jerusalem, where the real touch-and-go battle had been waged.
Eretz Israel’s finest medicos had been rushed from an international convention on fee-splitting in Geneva to toil around the clock. They’d performed six open-heart massages, ten closed ones, and Lord knows how many tracheotomies, given him continual transfusions, even tried a daring innovation—the computer-driven electric
chrysteer
.
[88]
It all seemed in vain the night his fever hit 112, but M., dipping into her bag of Hasidic medical lore, had brought it down to 110 by massive infusions of her chicken soup and the rarely used method known as
bankas
.
[89]
Then she recalled an inspired remedy from her childhood in the Ukrainian village of Baronevkeh, from whence Bond’s parents had come also. It was a Guggle Muggle, a mixture of boiling milk, honey, butter and schnapps. But M.’s was no run-of-the-mill Guggle Muggle. The milk came from Schleswig-Holsteins, the sassiest, most pampered cattle on God’s green earth; the honey was manufactured under the strict supervision of Kosher queen bees in sterile hives built by the Levitt people; the butter was Breakstone’s sweetest and creamiest; the schnapps from the cellar of Dean Martin. Even the glass had been blown from molten jade dust at the command of the grateful Emperor of Japan.
Seconds after he’d drunk it, his temperature fell to 98.6, thus enabling the surgeons to go to work on his body wounds, and the lead they extracted was sufficient for Lavi HaLavi to make Bond an ID bracelet.
Betty wheeled him into the typical hubbub of the kitchen. “Let’s have a little less hub and more bub,” Bond said. A weak one-liner, he knew, but the hell with it! Even Jay Burton and Sheldon Keller have their off days.
M. alternated cooking and sending directives to Israeli agents everywhere, who’d be quietly disposing of the remaining TUSH small fry. Op Chief Lazar Beame banged away at his Smith-Corona on an article the
Reader’s Digest
had asked him to submit: “Spies Can Be Good Neighbors and Solid Citizens, Too.” Z., who’d just cracked a new Syrian code, got so excited he cracked the decoder as well.
And there was Neon Zion, 113, licensed to wound, ashamed to look Bond in the face as he whispered, “And I wanted your Oy Oy Seven number. I’m not fit to polish your bedsocks, Mr. Bond.”
“Kid,” Bond said tenderly, “you are. Go to it or I’ll make a cripple from you, too.”
His entrance was the signal for more broad smiles and affectionate words.
One thing I’ll say for them,
he thought.
Whenever I come back from a job mutilated they appreciate it.
“Oy Oy Seven, dear boy!”
It was Lavi HaLavi, dressed in a shepherd’s tunic and buskins.
“Lavi!” Bond hugged the little genius to his heart, not caring about the pain. “Lavi, old chum. Your Xerox formula saved my life.”
“I’m so happy, Oy Oy Seven. Everything’s going splendidly today. My moon probe has just returned after taking samples of the lunar textures. Here, have a taste. It’s superfab.”
“Lavi, you expect me to eat that awful looking stuff?”
“My dear fellow, a good piece of green cheese never hurt anybody.”
The 3-D signal—Danger! Doom! Disaster!—clanged from a large soup tureen on a top shelf.
The hilarity and high jinks stilled. That signal had oft rung before and everyone present knew what it meant.
Z. broke the stillness. “M., look at the two words that just came over the teletype.”
The chipper old Number One ripped off the paper, read it, her face gaining ten new wrinkles, and passed it around to the other members of M 33 and 1/3.
It came to Bond last. And as he read the two coded words— TITMOUSE TWEETER—he knew why. Without verbalizing, they were asking him to take the job.
He searched each pair of eyes—Beame’s, Z.’s, young Neon’s, Betty’s and, of course, M.’s—and found the same plea:
Go in there, Oy Oy Seven, and do what must he done.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what
TITMOUSE TWEETER would be like. No, a job like that was beyond imagination. He did know what was in store: hot lead would lay open his shoulders, loathsome hirsute things that lurked in the humid Amazon night would sink their fangs into his thighs; his cruelly handsome face would feel the knout, the brass knuckle, the truncheon, the stiffened, calloused fingers of the killer karateist. And my eyes ... and incidentally, are they
gray
or
grey
? Who cares?
Israel Bond rose haltingly from the wheelchair and took a few unsteady steps toward M., the woman to whom he gave his total love and trust.
He ran his long, tapering fingers over her peruke and let them steal down her tabescent cheeks and she smiled her maternal, heart-catching smile.
Quietly and with the heartwarming grin that made him the consummate human being the world had come to adore, he said in a tender tone:
“Fuck it.”
He flipped his Double-Oy gold-edged security card to Neon Zion and told the lad, “Go kill and be well.” He turned at the door and said in Yiddish:
“Genig iz shen genig. A mann darft leben.
Enough is enough already ...a man needs to live.”
He strode out of the dark kitchen into the sunshine of Jerusalem and in seven seconds was lost in the crowd.
Epis-A-Logue
The moving finger, having writ, falls off.
SOL WEINSTEIN
Tokyo and Atami, Japan, 1966.
Levittown, Pa., 1967.
Unemployment and Panic, 1968.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
We asked Sol Weinstein, author of the Hebrew Secret Agent Israel Bond (Oy Oy Seven) thrillers to describe his fulsome career in three sentences. They are: 1 1/2 – 3 months for kiting checks … 2 1/2 months for illegally checking kites at a Tokyo kids’ fair … and 1 week for pushing Stepan Novotny, infamous forger, from the top of the Prague National Bank. (The Czech bounced.)
In addition to Oy Oy Seven’s capers in
Loxfinger
,
Matzohball,
On the Secret Service of His Majesty the Queen,
and
You Only Live Until You Die
, he wrote a highly sentimental set of music and lyrics to “The Curtain Falls”, sung by Kevin Spacey in the biopic
Beyond the Sea
in his role as Bobby Darin.
Sol currently resides in New Zealand, is a member of Temple Sinai in Wellington, and pronounces a favourite ethnic food as “kiegel”, not “kugel”.
If you enjoyed this book...
...or if you enjoy getting books that you don’t enjoy, then look for the full run of Israel Bond Oy-Oy-7 books wherever you got this book.
(Unless you found it on a bus or something, because, really, what are the odds of repeating that sort of stroke of amazingly good luck?)