Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
“Ginza! Osaka!”
“Nagasaki! Hiroshima! Hirohito!” The TUSH man’s rejoinder was disdainful.
Gottenu!
Three Japanese words in a row! Does this kraut really know the lingo? No, Bond, don’t use “lingo” when you yell back. It isn’t even close. He’ll die laughing of contempt.
“Ko-Ko! Yum-Yum! Nanki-Poo! Saki! Sedaka! Glocca Morra!” There, Hun! Six straight! But those last two... true, they
sounded
legit, but will he accept them? Or insist on the strict rules laid down in Admiral Yumekimi Meshuga’s definitive
Pre-Karate Combat Cursing?
The TUSH agent yawned, a great comical yawn.
Gottenu!
He treats this as though it’s a kindergarten exercise! Is he
that
confident? There is an unnatural stillness in the air, the moment before the black funnel springs out of the west to carry away the Kansas farmhouse, Dorothy, Toto.... Interntally, he said, “For god’s sake, don’t say ‘Toto’!”
In a quicksilver instant the German cried: “Zero!”
Just as quickly, Bond responded: “Mostel!”
Oh,
Gottenu!
The response had been mechanical, unthinking. “Zero,” the Japanese airplane, was a legitimate entry, but “Mostel,” star of
Fiddler on the Roof
—no way. Israel Bond, you stupid son of a bitch! You fell into the oldest trap in the game. He knows you can be had. Round One to the killer from TUSH!
The smell of victory in his nostrils, the blond titan soared off the balls of his feet, his stiffened Commando’s cutting edge of a right hand smashing down on Bond’s torn shoulder... screaming: “Fukuoka!”
Bond fell back growling a savage, “Same to you oka!” but his paralyzed shoulder was a useless instrument. A brutal savate kick to the stomach almost bent him double and sent him crashing into a service stand, spilling a trayful of dessert over the marble floor; another to the same spot and it was all over. He lay groaning, conscious of two Flagg Brothers pebble-grained brogues planted at each side of his neck. One sickening thought kept pushing through the red haze in his head:
I’ve been taken by a man who wears nine-dollar shoes!
Standing over him like a Colossus of Rhodes was the scarcely winded man from TUSH. Why doesn’t he end it? Stupid question, Oy Oy Seven. These TUSH people are never content with a mere “hit.” It must be accompanied by the infliction of total degradation. I know what he has in mind for me.
“It is finished, Oy Oy Seven. I had long entertained the hope of ending your career in this fashion but the co-chairmen of my organization had already contracted to furnish Torquemada LaBonza to the KGB to do the job. Alas for him, happily for me, he was not equal to the task. In a few seconds I shall kick your head off its trunk, then plant a 50-zis Calgonite charge that will blow this Jewish pigsty to oblivion and 300 sons and daughters of the Chosen People with it, including your beloved brother. It is the kind of thing I have been doing for the last twelve hours in New York as part of Dr. Holzknicht’s magnificent ‘Operation Alienation.’ As an added fillip, I may leave another 50-zis at your brother’s house. His sweet children will enjoy the ride. And now, the crowning touch,
Judische-hund
....” There was a clicking sound of cubes. “Drink your martini—shaken!”
He’d known it was coming, but that didn’t make the ignominious, nauseating stream of ice and liquid on his lips any more bearable.
But there was
something
bearable, something with prongs pressing into the small of his back. Something that could be a weapon. He must keep drinking the martini to glut the TUSH man’s appetite for sadism. He felt his gorge rising but he kept swallowing. His left hand was inching under his back. Now!
“Fork you!”
It tore out of his throat with maniacal fury as his left hand drove the fork into the TUSH man’s ankle, savoring the awful wail as prongs chomped through skin, capillary, gristle, marrow, cockle, mussel and bone. The German was howling like a banshee, writhing on his own back now like an animal in a trap. Bond yanked at the fork. Stuck too deep! His hand closed on a hard, cold object near the spilled tray and he drove it into the horrible O of the screaming German’s mouth, past the palate, hammering it with his elbow far back into the throat, snapping off six gold-filled teeth in the process. There was an eye-rolling paroxysm, the face turned a revolting purplish-blue, the hands flopped at the sides.
Out of curiosity Bond forced open the jaws and extricated the object that had killed by strangulation. A thin smile hardened the cruel, sensual mouth. To no one in particular he remarked mildly, “There’s nothing like a frozen Milky Way to take those snotty Snickers off a face.”
Oblivious to the swelling on his head, the gushing shoulder wound and the fire in his kicked stomach, he frisked the German, found a plastic I.D. card:
“James Bund, 43, Ulbricht Allee, Schweinbaden, D.D.R.”
[32]
So this was James Bund, Number Two in TUSH’s murder gang and one of the Schweinbaden camp ghouls as well. Bond found an interesting notation elsewhere on the card:
“Religion, Dryad.”
As a man not only licensed to kill, but also to perform a memorial service over the victim (when possible), he felt obligated to perform the latter function, even though the man had been a swine about the martini. But... Dryad? He summoned to mind the only appropriate liturgy he knew to cover this situation. He whispered:
“I think that I shall never see,
“A poem as lovely as a tree...”
Then the martini finally got to him and Israel Bond was very sick.
8 Dark Pool, Sweet Pool
He found the Calgonite in a Volks in the Pinochle Royale’s darkened parking lot, shoved the corpse of James Bund into the back seat and drove deep into the woods of nearby Titusville. With a makeshift fuse of Bund’s shoestrings he touched off the Calgonite, and from a hill a half mile away watched the blast sear 300 feet of scrub pine. The “pineys,” those moonshiners of the forest, would be blamed for the explosion, he was certain. He could almost hear some rural sheriff cackling: “Them stupid bastards made the white lightnin’ too damn powerful that time....”
Using his European heel and toe walk (which he had been taught by a European Olympic champion with but one heel and one toe) he ate up the six miles back to Liana’s house in twelve minutes, using the time to reflect on the fast-moving events since he’d heard the newscast. The phrase “Operation Alienation” kept bedeviling him, but for the second time in the same day he repressed an analysis which might have led him to something concrete, for he was now standing before something very concrete, the Vine mansion at the corner of Lazy Lazarushian Lane and Molting Macaw Road. It was a fabulous edifice designed in the Early Bonanza ranchero period with effigies of notorious outlaws Billy the Kid, the James Brothers, and the Hole in the Wall Gang hanging from the saguaro cacti on the front lawn.
The door was open. A silvery voice said, “In the kitchen, Iz,” and he tiptoed across the Dacron-Orlon-Leon rug (the latter no miracle fibre—the manufacturer wished merely to immortalize his son) and....
There was Liana Vine.
Naked.
She stood braced against the Progressive Furniture Company’s Totie Fields model table, proud, unashamed, fully cognizant of the effect of her wondrous physiognomy upon him. “If anything’s to happen, dearest Iz, it should be in here. No matter how rich we get, we Jews still live in the kitchen.”
“I’m hungry,” Bond said. “Did the special pie I ordered from Maruca’s come yet?”
Without warning she began to cry, her creamy shoulders shaking. “Oh, it’s all wrong. This whole thing I had in my mind... seeing you after eighteen years... and I’m naked... and all you’re interested in is some damn pizza pie....”
He slapped her hard. “Sorry,
ketzeleh
, but I don’t dig hysterical broads. Not even one I love with all my heart.” The last sentence, pitched in a low, throbbing tone, seemed to snap her out of her funk and she dried her face on a rich-textured, high-pile Hudson napkin. “Besides, Liana, you’re a Trentonian and you know damn well we call it
tomato
pie, not pizza. And only Maruca’s of 119 South Olden Avenue refuses to pander to commercialism by utilizing provolone or mozzarella, two flat, uninspiring cheeses when cold, let alone melted. The Maruca boys, Pat, Jake, Spike and Slippery Joe, top their pies with their own secret formula, the only other copy of which is in a Curia safe in Vatican City.”
“You’ve changed, Iz.” Her smile was sweet yet grave. “You’re so sophisticated ’n’ all.” Her warm, finely fleshed but not disgustingly plump arms encircled his neck. “Were there any others, Iz?”
His fingers caressed the silky Chemstrand hairs at the nape of her neck. “Don’t throw up smoke screens, my pet. The question isn’t what
I’ve
been doing. I’m a man. How about you,
maideleh
? Simon pure all the way?”
Her breath titillated three of the 1,917 erogenous zones on his left ear. “Just once, Iz. It was back in ’57 and I hadn’t gotten a letter from you in nine years and...”
“Tramp!” He shoved her against the wall. “You bitches! You’re all alike. Who was it?” His slaps turned her cheeks blood red.
She bowed her head. “A guy I met at the John Cage Music Festival in Poughkeepsie. He was the third player in the coal scuttle section. Short, fat, morose fella... kinda reminded me of comedian Jackie Vernon. I was just sorry for him, Iz, ‘cause everybody was dancing with a girl and he was dancing with a cello, and I guess I was sorry for myself, too. Nine years without....” Her voice cracked.
His nose rose, pushed up by a snarl of loathing. “And now you want your old lover boy to swing for you a little, eh, bitch! By heaven, I’ll take you as callously as I took...” He reeled off four thousand different names, each one a dagger in her heart, he knew.
Arms flailing like a John Deere thresher, he threw his clothes to the floor, the cool sensuality of the Armstrong tiles causing insensate emotions on the broad, excitable areas of his bare soles. He was in a shimmering mist, nothing mattering but the pitiless defoliation of this adorable hellcat who had brought her soiled body to mark their reunion. His cruel, sensual lips parted, the liberated teeth laughed with barbaric glee and sank into her neck.
“Oh, Iz! Iz!”
Her own teeth were busy beavers hewing a scarlet path on his shoulder, reopening many of the wounds he had suffered in the field. Breasts swollen to aching mounds of desire crushed his chest; her thighs, taut, supple, greedy, pressing his, hothouse hands searching, finding the wellspring of life and love and godhead and it was springing —and well. Her tongue tip was a mine sapper roaming his ears, gums and throat for buried caches of erogeneity; his long, tapering fingers responded, kneading, cosseting the holy labyrinths causing tactile sensations of indescribable karma, dharma and shawarma.
From that kitchen radiated the unstoppable impulses of their incendiary liaison to the alarmed sensors of an unprepared world. Several stallions went berserk at a Cheyenne rodeo, bucking off their riders into the gravel. A seismograph at the University of California at Berkeley shuddered, registering an unbelievable 71.4 Richter which hurled the leadership of the Free Sex Movement into a Newman Club seminar on “The Shining Shield of Abstinence,” then attacked an aroused Sperry Rand satellite tracker. In a cold-water flat on Greenwich Village’s Morton Street an orgone box glowed with a white-hot heat that sent beads of perspiration rolling down its galvanized sides—and there was no one within. Through it all the song of sex roared unabated in the obsessed body of Israel Bond; sparkling glissandos intermingled with ernie durandos; fugues swelled into fullblown rizzutos, and her thighs were yielding to his, revealing concept and cosmos, bread and wine, death and transfiguration, port and starboard, David and Lisa, night and day, day and night for she was the one and she was Earth Mother, releasing at last the boiling life-force in her depths, and he was taking it, reshaping it, selling it to Goodwill Industries, for he was Earth Father and father knows best and he was in the clutch of a centrifugal force, surrendering to it and his head slipped down, down, down into a pool... sweet, dark... so sweet, so dark....