Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
The Israel Bond Omnibus (42 page)
“Patience, HaLavi,” M. said in a tranquil tone. “It will be quitting time soon.”
“I have added some new modifications for Oy Oy Seven’s car, the Mercedes-Ben Gurion.” He spread open a chart. “You will notice this, Button 71-a. If Bond is being tailed he has only to press it and a movie screen rolled up in a rear bumper springs out, a camera emerges from the roof and projects a series of... uh... shall we say ‘art films’... which cannot help but distract any members of the ‘oppo’ in the car behind, thus giving him time either to eliminate or capture them, as the situation dictates. The films were taken by me at Bond’s request and deal with his summer-long escapade with the Countess Tracy Di Terrazzo-Crotchetti at Portofino. Ever the sexual perfectionist, he uses them as training films to study techniques, manipulations, and so forth. They would make a ballistic missile come to a dead stop.”
HaLavi lit a Raleigh and tore the coupon from the pack, placing it in a receptacle near her desk. “My ninth contribution of the day, M. You should soon have enough for that nuclear reactor. To continue; Button 95 releases a mist of Colgate’s 007 cologne to freshen both his face and any wilting carnation in his lapel. And I rather think the Colgate copywriters missed out on an obvious grabber of a slogan that would treble their sales: ‘Use 007 Products and You, Too, Will Get Pussy Galore.’ Button 96 pops a piece of Danish into his mouth; 97 converts the MBG’s front grill into a barbecue pit into which 98 flings filet mignon for two, seasoned, to be sure, with Accent; 101 converts his license plate into a hilarious sign that says ‘CHICKEN INSPECTOR’; you know Oy Oy Seven’s far-out sense of humor... and 105 converts any
shikseh
riding with him into a member of our faith by a tape cartridge containing recorded instructions for instant proselytizing and a spray symbolizing a ritual bath. Oh....” he pinched his nose. “This air conditioning....”
“Go on, Quartermaster HaLavi.”
He dragged on his Raleigh. “I have taken the liberty of sending Oy Oy Seven several new portable devices in care of his brother in Trenton.” From a pocket he fished out something. “This is my new anti-homer capsule capsule. If Bond suspects an enemy has swallowed a homer capsule, he needs only to introduce the anti-capsule capsule into the other agent’s body and it will nullify the first one immediately. Here’s a little toy he will find invaluable.” HaLavi held up a length of metal. “It is a device which can be strapped to his leg. I have urged him to carry it at all times. Made in my laboratory by a fantastic new process of freezing ore at one million degrees below zero, its ridges can slice through any metal known to man. The new metal, by the bye, is called Instant Processed Cold Rolled Extra Strength Steel.”
“Excellent, QM!” She nodded. “Now you may take a breather from the air conditioning. Shalom.”
Gasping, his nostrils flaring in his anxiety, HaLavi fled. Then a chill shook M.’s body as she heard Lilah Tov cry, “3-D! 3-D! 113 is back with a 3-D!”
3-D! Danger, doom, disaster!
Neon Zion, 113, was a pale young blond ghost as he slunk through her door. “Dead. All dead... Oy Oys Two, Three, Four and Six. They were in a cab on Ben Yehuda Street after leaving the license bureau. It blew up.” He sobbed and buried his face in her shawl.
“My boys, they’re killing my boys,” M. said, keening, close to fainting.
At that moment the homeward-bound receptionist, rummaging among the coats in the front-office cloakroom for her own, found the thing under M.’s silver-blue mink, ticking, ticking, ticking....
5 Those Vines Have Slender Shapes
Milton Bond at forty-five was twelve years older than his Israeli brother. Like all the Bond men (there was a third brother, Ragland, forty-one, a Jonny Mop quality control inspector—”Rag” to everybody), he was blessed with the familial dark, cruelly handsome visage, his bloated a trifle by dietary indiscretions. The Bonds were Russian Jews who had settled in Trenton after a decade in London’s East End where the father, Solomon, was employed by the local branch of Youngtwerp of Antwerp as a rhinestone cutter.
After the passing of their parents and the departures of Israel and Rag Bond for their own careers, Milton had wooed and somehow won Lottie Vine, one of the lithe, leggy, desirable daughters of industrialist Oleander Vine, and with the father-in-law’s backing opened a successful catering house in West Trenton, the Pinochle Royale, where upper-class Jews staged their various social and sometimes religious functions.
Throughout Lottie’s sumptuous meal Milton remained uncommunicative. She noticed this and attempted to brighten the occasion with light banter. “Trying some new things tonight, Iz. Mrs. Paul’s frozen fishsticks, Mrs. Paul’s frozen shrimp, Mrs. Paul’s frozen mythical kraken suckers....”
“What’s the next thing she’s going to freeze?
Mister
Paul?” It was one of Bond’s better jests, yet he noted Milton’s face held no smile. Something wrong there. Milton normally would roll on the floor for that kind of a one-liner.
“Okay, big brother, noble patriarch of ye Clan Bond.” It was a few minutes later and he was emerging from a bracing shower with Mione Soap, its haunting flavor permeating through Milton’s bedroom. “Let’s have it, stoneface.”
Milton sat on the edge of his Frida Kahlo-designed Xochitl tostada bed, puffing doggedly on a 95-cent Dutch Master. “Your face. It looks like hell. And your body—bruises, welts, slashes. It’s like this every time you come home for a visit. What the hell are you doing for a living, Iz? And no crap.”
Bond inhaled a Raleigh, blew a figure eight the hard way—four twos. He looked into those grey eyes, so shrewd and hard like his own. “You know what I do, Milt. PR for Mother Margolies. These”—he ran his hands over the purple and yellow blotches—”are the result of a car crackup.”
“That scar on your shoulder?”
“If you want to know the truth, Adolph Hitler did it to me. With a Luger.”
“I said, cut the crap. I’ve had the feeling for a long time you’re in some kind of... well, undercover stuff. PR guys don’t get chopped to pieces from parroting the praises of chicken soup to adoring women on seven continents.”
Seven.
Milton said
seven
. My number! Does he know even more than he’s suggesting? Of course, there
are
seven continents; he would have been idiotic to say “twelve.”
Bond’s face stiffened. “Why don’t we just watch a little TV, huh?” He flicked on the Zenith portable, giving an affectionate pat to as many of the superior, hand-wired circuits as his long, tapering fingers could locate.
When the buzz died down an Indian chief, hatred blazing from his lined face, spoke: “White man steal Apache land, white man slaughter buffalo, white man make Injun loco with firewater, traumatize him, emasculate him, steal Indian nuts, leave him rootless without something of value. Now, white man—die!”
The rangy trail boss did not flinch. “Hear me, Running Abscess, mighty chieftain of the Trocadero Apaches. You and your braves massacred the peaceful homesteaders at Lamprey Landing, took many scalps, burned homes, schools, churches, trading stamp redemption centers. And now you expect the Great White Father in Washington to put your likeness on the new nickel after
this?”
He drew the trembling woman in calico to his breast. “I’m savin’ one bullet for you, Miss Lucy. I seen what these murderin’ redskins do to white women.” She cringed. “What—what do they do, Lonestar?” He looked at his boots in embarrassment. “They... they violate ‘em, Miss Lucy.” She screamed: “Yoo-hoo, dear sweet Apaches! Over here! Over here! Take your goddam hands off me, Lonestar....”
Milton turned it off. “Iz, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to see Lottie’s sister tonight. She’s been asking about you.”
A pang triggered a sonar ping in the soul of Israel Bond. Liana Vine! Youngest of the desirable, leggy, lithe daughters of Oleander. She remembered.
They had been “The Sweethearts of Trenton High” and, on a few hundred fumbling occasions and seventy distinctly competent ones, lovers. Cool, lissome, blonde Liana. Probably there had been three or four prettier girls that year... Phyllis Rosenblum, the cattle dealer’s daughter; Monique Introlligator... mischievous Felice Pixie Berman. But there had been something special about Liana, something you couldn’t put your finger on (it was rare in that respect). Her painfully shy smile? Perhaps the gliding carriage of a ballet dancer? Or maybe it was the protective urge she evoked in him, the way she made him feel she
needed
him as he posed her for pictures against the gate of her father’s hundred-acre plastics factory.
It might have come to something, but then erupted the trouble in Palestine. Young Israel Bond, steeped in intense Jewishness by his parents, heard the call for deliverance from across the world. He had long been involved in Jewish National Fund collections, he belonged to Young Judea, Trenton’s YMHA,
[24]
the Allenby Club and A.Z.A., a fraternity for Jewish high schoolers with mathematical interests (Angle Zide Angle).
With alacrity he joined a kibbutz
[25]
near Hightstown, N.J., where Zionist-minded youths were being trained to endure conditions approximating those in Eretz Israel, fabled land of Milk and Magnesia. Realism was the keynote at K’far K’Near, once the potato farm of McSorley Shinn, a taciturn Baptist. The eager kibbutzniks slept on straw mats in barracks swarming with scorpions and pit vipers (imported at great cost from the Holy Land), tilling the soil under fire. (The kibbutz had advertised in a rural weekly for men who wanted $1.25-an-hour work shooting through barbed wire at Jewish boys and girls. K’far K’near had been overwhelmed by the generous response from the surrounding community. Many had expressed a willingness to perform this service gratis, proving, as a highly complimentary article in the kibbutz newspaper pointed out, that brotherhood was no myth.)
The war. Awful moments on mountain roads pocked by mortar shells. Hand-to-hand combat with bestial mercenaries of Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion. His rapid rise in the informal yet deadly Palmach
[26]
to the rank of water carrier. A flair for recklessness and conspiracy noticed by an astute colonel in the Shinbet,* leading to an eventual post with M 33 and 1/3, the coveted Double Oy number and a license— to kill!
Eighteen years away from Liana. Still she remembered.
There was a small PR chore to get out of the way, a speech before the Histamine, the ladies auxiliary to the local chapter of the Histadrut,
[27]
which met each month at the Pinochle Royale. Then the decks would be cleared for an evening with Liana. Her voice was silky, teasing, on the phone. “Mother and Daddy are in Aruba, so it’s just you and me, Iz. Wear something casual.”
“Like my skin, dearest?” He prayed she would not hear the juvenile pounding of his heart.
He donned a pair of Botany 1,000 nankeen stretch pants and Shropshire Argyle bedsocks, and pulled a buff-colored cashmere T-shirt over his rippling torso. He completed the ensemble with a multiflowered Korvette’s luau car coat of guazeroy and went downstairs, six steps at a time, to meet Lottie’s admiring, “Wow! Is someone I love very much duded up sharp to meet someone else I love very much!” The oval face softened. “Iz, be kind to her.”
There was Praline to kiss goodnight, but not before she recited a poem she’d memorized “just for you, Uncle Israel.” Whereupon she launched into Robinson Jeffers’ “Roan Stallion,” faltering here and there as a tyke might, but giving it a generally knowledgeable reading. “Off to bed, you rascal!” and he whacked her saucy behind. For Rickey, who was above that sort of thing, a catch with the lad’s new Superball, a five-minute tutoring session on the New Math (“X can lift 60 tons of potash; Y can lift twice as much potash as X; Z can lift only half as much as X. Question: Why is Z avoiding his social responsibilities?”), a hearty handshake and “keep studying for that Bar Mitzvah, fella.”
A good kid, Rickey, with the usual problems of adolescence. “Uncle Iz. Dad’s kinda corny about some things, so can I talk to you about, uh...”
“Don’t do it, Rickey lad. You’ll go blind and eventually insane. You shouldn’t be troubling us oldtimers for advice, anyhow. That’s the kind of thing you should be learning on the streets. Tell you what, fella. Uncle Iz’ll send you some Superman color slides that’ll explain the whole thing. These were made in pre-Castro Cuba. ‘Night, Rickey.”