Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
9 Where Love Has Gone
She helped him pull his head out of the bowl of chocolate pudding on the kitchen table. He had failed her.
“Well, how was it, Iz?” she said with ill-concealed bitterness.
“MY-T-FINE.”
10 Tell Me, Where Can I Go?
Once again Israel Bond’s rapier wit saved the day.
For ten minutes Liana Vine laughed her adorable hellcat head off. “Iz, what a stupendous pun you just made!”
He chucked her under the chin. How had he ever stayed away so long from this warm, bewitching, understanding girl? He would reward her patience for he knew that she must still be seething like a tidal wave which can find no coastal town to obliterate. The rapier would become the rapist!
Before he commenced his second onslaught he was struck by an inspiration. If laughter and love were so inescapably intertwined for Liana and him, why not combine the two? Poking about, he found an Allan Sherman album chock full of the chubby little fellow’s devastating song parodies and placed it on the stereo that serviced the entire Vine manse with music.
So it was that, accompanied by Sherman’s “gift of laughter,” he took Liana Vine once more; this time it was no cold, furious exhibitionism, but mature and rich, a love of giving, not sadistic taking, and they melded soul-searing climaxes with guffaws at the comedian’s rib-tickling punchlines. Fortune was with them, the funniest bits, “Sarah Jackman” and “Drapes of Roth,” issuing from the speaker at the exact moments of fulfillment in their sexual congress.
Congress was in session a long, long time.
“Think you’ll ever forget that third coal scuttle player now, my dearest angel?”
“Don’t ever go away again, Iz. Stay. Marry me, live with me. I don’t care which.” Then she said, “Ouch!”
“Did I hurt you,
schoendeleh
?”
“No, dearest. I’m sitting on an ant button. But you haven’t answered me.
“Hold on thar, Miss Liana. Thou has fain tempted me, fair damsel, but it can’t be done that quickly. I’ll have to ask out of Mother’s, maybe help train another agent—uh, salesman, to fill my 10-D wing-tipped Florsheim cordovans.”
Her hand flew up to her mouth. “Oh, my God! I meant to tell you....”
“Meant to tell me what, my funny valentine who makes me smile with my heart?” He saw her strained face and his heart ceased smiling.
“Forgive me, Iz. The thought of seeing you again, doing this... it just drove everything else out of my brain. Iz, there’s no need for you to go back and resign. You’re out of a job.”
He pulled himself up. His voice was harsh. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I heard it on the radio just before you came in. A bulletin from Tel-Aviv. Mother Margolies’ Activated Old World Chicken Soup factory... it’s been blown up!”
11 There’s Something Strange In The Heir
London?
Israel’s secret service handed what could be a knockout punch and Op Chief Beame was ordering him to London?
Beame had been quite dictatorial about it on the phone. “This is a Mem Echod, repeat, Mem Echod. Rendezvous with 113 at Point WCH, Station Benny der Graiser, for further instructions. Shalom.”
“Are you in Foam Rubber Acres yourself, Op Chief? Zvi is—”
The line went dead.
He shook his head. Beame’s off his—and despised himself for the cheap play on the name at a catastrophic time like this. Well, Beame
was
off his beam, damn it! 113 had been Zvi Gates’ designation and lovable, laughable Zvi Gates was gone, buried in some Godforsaken spot in the green hell that was the El Tiparillan jungle, with only kindly Sister Sweetcakes, “The Swinging Nun,” caring enough to stop by sometimes and place a portion of boiled beef on his grave. No, Beame isn’t the type to go off the deep like HaLavi. There’s a logical explanation, idiot. A new 113. He felt a childish resentment toward the man already and cursed himself for being unjust.
Wait! Mem Echod!
Gottsedanken
!
Mem is Hebrew for—M! Echod for—One! Mother was alive! Benny der Graiser was Yiddish, the
lingua frankel
of the truly cultured “in” of the world. Benny the Great, the Big, or Big Ben... London, his next stop.
Now HaLavi’s new gear was in his bags and he was looking out the window of an El Al jet 31,000 feet up and he wanted a woman.
A strange symbiosis of sex and air travel caused a continual disquiet in the body of Israel Bond, dreamy local sensations caused by the hum of the engines, perhaps, or the clouds that suggested tremendous, fleecy mega-breasts. This merger of lust and altitude had grown more pronounced of late on his many jet excursions. (He would fly nothing but pure jets because of his Electra complex, a fear of turboprop planes.) And it was becoming peripheral. Sometimes he would feel the stirrings in a cab on the way to the airport, other times while telephoning for airline reservations, and once even in a supermarket where he saw an item whose very name seemed to spell out the linkage— Airwick.
To quash the feeling he busied himself with
The New York Times
. There was a wrapup on the explosions, minus the one at Mother’s which had broken too late to make the edition. The FBI had been ordered to investigate the 178 deaths at 4,000 disasters; dozens more were dead in South America and Europe. As Sahd Sakistan mourned King Hakmir, Grand Vizier Ben-Bella Barka had flown on a hush-hush mission to London. New York’s Mayor Lindsay had been offered a plan for a new police review board which would review the decisions handed down by any civilian review board; the mayor had promised to review it. Andorra was on the verge of detonating its first H-bomb, but its nuclear researchers were hesitant about doing it on their own territory; not to set it off would mean loss of face since a belligerent Lichtenstein soon might have its own bomb; to set it off would mean saving of face but loss of Andorra.
“Coffee, tea or LSD!” chirped voluptuous Shoshanna Nirvana, the curvaceous, black-eyed Yemenite stewardess. “The latter,” Bond requested, popping the cube into his sensual mouth; for three hours he was afloat in a reverie that enabled him to see music and hear Marcel Marceau’s entire act. He came out of it as the pilot, Captain A. B. Nathan, announced the descent into London.
Point WCH was code for the William the Conqueror Hotel.
“Cabbie, take me to 1066 Hastings. Do it in less than ten minutes and there’s a handful of farthingales, forepence and jujubes for you.” On the way to Cheapside they passed what had been a delicatessen, its windows blown out; on the sidewalk lay salamis and tongues in the appalling rictus of death.
“Gar! Fifteenth bloomin’ one I seen like that todye. Someone’s got it in for the bloody Yids, they ’as.” Bond cut four farthingales from the bigot’s tip, kicked holes in the cab’s rear tires with his heel knives.
He paced the room hour after hour, each new disaster aired by the telly deepening his concern. He looked at the two-foot mound of Raleigh stubs and berated himself for the habit. Maybe the coupons would cover the lung operation, he smirked. Swallowing 103 Luden’s cough drops to alleviate a slight sore throat, he moved to the door when the rap sounded, opened it wide and was driven back by an agonizing blow to his tender stomach by the muzzle of a .44 Serenata-Holmes.
“Just put your hands behind your neck.” The speaker was a sandy blond with a bandage on his forehead. He was slim, of medium height, wore a black Haly’s M.O. windbreaker, khaki ducks and white hush-puppies. With his left hand he removed the outsized Italian wraparound sunglasses that blocked off a third of his face.
“Neon! Neon Zion! You damn fool kid! Don’t you remember the Matzohball caper?”
[33]
“Stow it, mac. The quick brown fox jumped over the pickled lox.”
A rage shook Bond. This damn snotty punk, an ex-Israeli Peace Corpsman who owes his life to me, is pulling guns and demanding countersigns as if I’m some runny-nosed recruit. There was no choice but to play along:
“Folks who live on Quemoy are known as Quemoyim,
“And all these Quemoyim, for damn sure, are goyim.”
The breath whooshed out of the kid and Bond realized how nervous he must have been. “Thank God it’s you, Oy Oy Seven! I had to do what I did. Orders.”
“What the hell is bugging Lazar Beame? Doesn’t he know who I am?”
Neon lit a Raleigh. “Mr. Bond, since it happened, nobody knows anything any more or trusts anybody. Sure, you look like the man I grew to worship on that terrible isle, but you could have been a TUSH-y
[34]
with a plastic surgery job.” He closed his eyes. “Here’s the scam: Somebody disguised as one of the tourists left some Calgonite, at least 200-zis’ worth, in the front wing of M.’s factory. It went off at 5:30
p.m
., just missing the departing tour group, and that was a break, at least. Imagine the stew we’d be in explaining five hundred American deaths to the State Department.”
“They weren’t really after the Yanks. We were the target.”
Neon slammed his fist into his palm. “Yes, but how in hell did TUSH know the factory was a cover for M 33 and 1/3? Another thing... with the exception of Oy Oy Five, missing, presumed captured, and you, sir, all the Double Oys are dead. It’s foolish to suppose TUSH hadn’t heard of you. But how did they know who the others were?”
Bond bit his lip. He knew, but that could come later. “Who got it at the factory? How bad is M.?”
“Crippled. In a wheelchair. I was next to her when it happened. A hundred cases of Mother’s Activated Old World Kosher Charcoal Briquettes fell on us. Got my head banged up, but that’s all. Uh, you and Lilah were kinda close, I take it....”
Bond sprang at Neon, dug his long, tapering fingers into the lad’s shoulders. “Lilah! What about her?”
Tears streamed from 113’s eyes. “She wasn’t as lucky. It hurled her into the gefilte fish vat. It was boiling.”
“The others?” He let go of Neon and stared into the London night. In his rage he whipped out the Chris-Keeler and fired through the window into Berkeley Square. The nightingale fell dead. “The others?”
“Aide de Camp de Camp, gone... Section Psychiatrist Pippikel, gone... Mendel the Mantis, gone... a few dozen factory workers, too....”
“HaLavi?” Was the little genius of weaponry out of it, too?
“He’s O.K., sir, s-s-s-ort of. He had just stepped out for a breath of hot stale air—he can’t stand air conditioners, you know—and he was knocked down. But he came out of it kinda funny. I was the first to get to him. He’d been hit a glancing blow on the head by a board with one of M’s immortal proverbs painted on it, which said ‘HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A PLYMOUTH.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You know. Neon, if you keep feeding massive doses of iron to Persian lambs, you might very well get steel wool.’ I didn’t say anything to that, but then he said, ‘Lord, if I don’t do something quick they’ll die!’ And he pulled these shoetrees out of his lab coat and....”
“Say it,” Bond commanded.
“He took out these shoetrees and started to
water
them with a sprinkling can. Then Lavi got real worked up. He started to tell me about some theory of his. ‘You know, Neon, if it is theoretically possible to engrave the constitution of Israel on the head of a pin is it not also possible for the entire Knesset
[35]
to meet on it as well? In a land as small as ours space is a precious commodity. By moving the building onto the pin, or, perhaps, even all of Jerusalem....’ and that’s where I called an Alarm Aleph and Op Chief Beame took him away.”