The Israel Bond Omnibus (53 page)

They got into the MBG. Bond used Button 61 to lob a brace of Calgrenades, 3/4-zis force, which blew the Togliatti and the helicopter to bits. “Can’t leave a messy desert, Jimbo. Let’s go.”

“Hold it, Bond. I have some data on the joint that might prove helpful. When your people told Goshen of the TUSH setup here he thought we ought to find out more. So I went pub-crawling in Baghs-Groove last night and the fourth dive paid off. I found a Hungro pretty well in his cups.”

“A Hungro?”

“Part African, part Magyar. They tend to be moody, weepy types, big boozers. I got a manual on ‘Oppo Mixed Breeds’ that has all this crap, incidentally. Well, this one was a room service waiter at Shivs and he just couldn’t stand confinement any more so he sneaked out through the rear gate, possibly by bribing a Bulgro... they’re always on the take, you know... and went on a bender. ’Course I helped him along with a few shots of
zuki;
that’s the native beer made from stagnant well water and decomposed Chevy fan belts. And earlier today I took these from the chopper.” He took a manila envelope from his trenchcoat, opened it and spread some aerial photos on the front seat. “The Hungro said the top floor here is for the personal use of the Shivs directorate. There’s a conference room here and the rest are individual suites for Auntie and Heinz Sem-Heidt, Holzknicht, and the other seven. Third floor’s for the household guard and the service corps. Second’s for selected guests, big spenders who get free lodging and eats—no bargain ‘cause Shivs gets it all back and then some in the casino, which is on the first floor. Heinz runs the LaGuerre Room. He wins big, too. Seven other krauts run the rest of the gambling. Only Auntie and Holzknicht are never found in the casino. God knows what she does. He’s got some kind of a lab upstairs where he fools around. One bit of good news—there are no Swegroes inside Shivs ’cause they might scare the customers away and the help, too. Bulgars, Bulgroes, Mickgroes, Spigroes, Spigars... they do the strongarm work. And then they have the dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“Yup. Hohenzollerns.”

All right, buddy boy, Bond excoriated himself. So they have Hohenzollerns. And maybe more awful beasties that go bump in the night. You didn’t think you were going in there to hear Ronald Reagan do readings from Zane Grey, did you?

“In front of Shivs is the guest area, swimming pool, patio, bar, etc. As you can see it’s rather small in comparison to the rest of the grounds. It’s closed off by a twenty-foot-high Papuan ironwood fence. I guess the management doesn’t want them snooping around the rest of the estate. As for internal security, you just must assume the rooms are bugged and that every non-guest hasn’t got your personal interest at heart. I have, though. If I can’t hear your belly beeping ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ I’m coming in.”

CIA Agent Brown’s account of the horrors within those walls cast a pall over both of them as they motored silently on, their eyes peering through the mist along the shore for the first glimpse of the witch’s lair.

“Stop ’er, Mr. Bond.” Anxiety constricted the voice, robbed it of its robustness. “We’re about two hundred yards away. Close enough.”

Israel Bond lit a Raleigh and noticed with a sardonic smile that it was the last one in the pack. An omen? The last Raleigh he’d ever smoke? Some people wouldn’t consider that prospect the least bit alarming, but they weren’t secret agents walking into the mouth of hell. “If I don’t make it, Jimbo, you’ll find a couple thousand cigarette coupons in the trunk. See that M. gets ‘em. And tell her I went out smiling with a Raleigh in my sensual lips. So long, big fella.”

He stepped out and saw the brazen windows in the upper floors twinkling a new message:
Come into our parlor, Oy Oy Seven. The spiders are very hungry today.

Up your glass! The epithet blazed back at them from the grey eyes.

When Bond heard the truck grinding along the sandy path, he crouched behind a clump of spiny
Sarajevo
cacti. As it puttered by, he saw the sign on its side, HAJI’S LAUNDRY, and then saw it stop at the rear gate.

Praying the squish, squish, squish of the Andalusian bedsocks on the sand would not be heard over the idling motor, he raced to the back of the truck, his Vicks 44 in his right hand, put the point of it against the lock and blew it off, the Silentium Silencer muffling the discharge. He dove into a pile of something white and fragrant and closed the door behind him, his trained Double Oy nose telling him he had landed on a Rinso wash. Good-o! I’ve made a clean start!

Bond heard the driver and the guard, the latter’s soft, slurring speech indicating its owner was a Bulgro, exchange a few jokes, one of them with the punch line “faggot maggot,” and he tore up a Jackie Kannon towel in anger. Goddamnit! That one was getting around too fast! There was no time to pencil the joke out of his notebook of goodies, for the truck was moving again. He heard the ominous clang of the closing gate.

OK, Shivs. I’m inside, he thought. I ask no quarter and I give no quarter.

Then he snickered at his Gung Ho-Don Winslow-Captain Midnight bravado. Big deal! These days, what the hell can you do with a quarter?

“Nein, we shall stop here for a moment. Locksley, a muffin,
bitte
.”

The dwarf in the jester’s outfit seemed pleased at being able to service his wardress. He took a muffin from her pocket and inserted it between the electromagnetic coils. Its scent filtered through the shoots to Bond’s nose, enticing at first, then acrid, and he heard Auntie Sem-Heidt’s invectives. “Cursed gnome! You have burned my muffin! Heinz, my knout!”

The scrawny arm lashed out with surprising power, the metal tip of the knout thudding against Locksley’s back.

“Enough, Gerda. You will kill the creature,” Heinz said. “A good dwarf nowadays is hard to find.”

She acknowledged his wisdom. Locksley expressed his gratitude for the cessation of the flagellation with a cartwheel, during which he clapped his hands several times. It drew a whinny of approval from his mistress.

“Your gyrations have pleased me, dear little freak.” The claws patted the puckered apple of a face. “I shall reward you with a chance to see Auntie Gerda’s little toy. Behold!” She spread open the housedress and the dwarf did a triple cartwheel this time.

Gottenu!
The Israeli’s grey eyes did cartwheels of their own. Z.’s voice echoed: “He gave her an external plastic heart and it works.”

If his own heart had not been pounding so stridently he would have heard the rush of air and the snarling “baa-a-a” just before the thing hit him like a bullet.
Gevaldt!
He could not stifle the cry as the teeth and horn penetrated his right shoulder. “I was correct!” the iron voice called. “There is an intruder! The dog has flushed him.”

A 135-pound steel-ribbed Hohenzollern, the part-German shepherd, part-German sheep bred by the S.S. during the ’40’s in the Mordegruppe Research Center in the Black Forest for sentry duty and ferreting out downed Allied fliers, was worrying at his throat, the foul-smelling saliva now mixed with Bond’s blood dripping from the fangs. He could see the orange and black coat and the thick white mushroom of wool on its skull, the hard lance of a unihorn—Hohenzollerns, nervous, unstable, as apt to tug out a friend’s throat as an enemy’s.

Man and beast were rolling over and over, both raked by spines and shoots, the former’s right elbow taking the fury of the teeth. Bond’s left hand grasped the stem of the woolen mushroom and pulled it over the creature’s mad-dog eyes, blinding it for a vital second, then with a superhuman effort drove the animal against the trunk of a tree. There was a yelp and the spine snapped.

Ignoring the claret pouring out of his mangled arm and shoulder, he ran deeper into the brush, for a chorus of baa-a-as told him the whole pack had been set loose on his bloody trail. There was a thrashing sound, a slurring Bulgro voice: “He went this way!” An angry Dagro’s, “No, you stupid bastard, the other way.”

Gottenu!
Fire ants, crazed by the odor of blood, were sliding down little poles and swarming out of their hills. He brushed a loathsome phalanx off his body, not before the industrious pincers had carved out another chunk of shoulder.

“Bear left!” It was the gravelly command of a Bulgar. Bond ducked behind a tree and saw a hawklike face emerge over the foliage and stiffen into a sneer when a Spigar voice somewhere piped out: “No, he doubled back, you — clod!”

It was quite apparent these hired thugs despised each other. By thunder, he’d use that ill feeling against them!

He sent out a slurring shout. “Hey, man, where you come off callin’ me a stupid bastard? I don’t take that — from nobody, ‘specially a lice-ridden Dagro!” He pitched his voice higher. “Ain’t no stinkin’, garlic-chompin’ Spigar gonna tell us Dagroes what to do. We got the brains in this outfit, man; you ain’t nothin’ but meerkat dung; you ain’t fit to sleep with a Swegro; you lower than a Bulgar’s bunions; you smell like a Hungro sittin’ in nine-week-old goulash.” He simulated a gravel-throated tirade next: “Who dares compare a pure Bulgar with the rest of you half-breed carrion? Death to Spigars, Hungroes, Spigroes, Dagroes! Mere total paralysis to Bulgroes, who at least had enough sense to be born part Bulgar!”

Full-scale insurrection broke out in ten seconds. He could hear vile imprecations and knew his stratagem had worked. The hunters had become the hunted! Dagro knives slashed Bulgar bodies; Spigroes clubbed Bulgro heads; Spigars and Hungroes traded blasts with sawed-off mortar pistols. Everywhere was the smell of cordite, Woolite, bauxite and death.

But he heard the baying of the Hohenzollerns and he trembled as he pushed his torn body through cacti, thornbushes, and Wilkinson swordgrass, his Korvette’s luau car coat in shreds. The terrain grew soft, then—splash!—he was knee-deep in a slimy pond, its muddy brown slowly stained red by his dripping wounds. Brown, red... and now— silver! A silvery mass darting across the water—Gottenu!—voracious yellow teeth were ripping into his legs. He fell to his knees, took another bite on his hand which severed his beloved 30-year-old Irving Caesar Sing a Song of Safety Club ring. It fell into the murky waters, lost forever.

Somehow he managed to stumble to the other side, avoiding the snapping jaws of a jacare, the Brazilian crocodile, which he dispatched by emptying all of his Vicks 44 slugs into its eyes. There was no time to skin the creature to compensate himself for part of this ordeal by treating himself to a fine pair of Amazonian bedsocks (150 quasars retail if they were a farthingale) because the red-eyed, steel-fanged Hohenzollerns, six of them, came through the thicket to the opposite side of the pond. “What a croc!” he said, looking at the body of the slain jacare with regret, and turned to meet the new challenge.

Though they growled and thrust at the air with their unihorns, they did not charge across the pond. They know what’s in there, he thought. Got to make ‘em mad enough to come over. Another psychological warfare bit?

“You yellow, lily-livered Deutsche hunds... come and take a Jew—if you can! Come on, krauts. I’ve seen chihuahuas that could kick the crap out of the whole bunch of you.” One braced to spring; an older, wiser head bit into its tail to restrain it.

Bond spoke a flat, pedantic sentence. “According to the better trade magazines, the Renault outperforms the Volkswagen in every way.”

Now there was no holding them back. The impetuous one left his tail in the older Hohenzollern’s mouth to lead the charge, blood gushing from his hind quarters. They followed suit, eyes rolling with insensate hatred, coming on for the kill. They never reached him. One by one they were savaged by the silvery mass, howling in agony as they went under; again the water swirled with red and pink.

Pieroghana! the flesh-loving Polish devilfish of the Vistula River, known to drag down careless fishermen, pleasure boats and, in three recorded instances, left-wing governments....