The Israel Bond Omnibus (69 page)

But there were more important problems, anyway. That driverless-car business. Was it the beginning of a round of shadowings and attempts at assassination? If so, who was the target, Sanka or himself? Did the “oppo” know he was in Japan on a vengeful odyssey? This Danish egghead Feldspar—was he legit? Maybe, but why enlist the talents of a confirmed
pascudnyak
like Skwato? Or was Skwato using the professor as a cover for a new TUSH assault even more sinister than “Operation Alienation,” which had decimated Israel’s Secret Service and razed Mother’s factory in Tel Aviv? Was Holzknicht in Japan or pulling the strings from long range? Questions, questions. Even this sweet kid in his arms had her secrets. That cryptic reference about the ‘Black Room’... what was it all about?

There was a screech and Bond sailed headlong into a steel wall. “What the hell...”

Sanka strolled into his compartment and pressed a mandarin orange peel onto the knot mushrooming on Bond’s temple. “Someone has jumped in front of the
Bullet,
Izzy-san, a common occurrence on this run. Some three million people per annum choose the railroads as their method of self-destruction. Not everyone has the stamina to climb up a volcano, you see.”

“Suicide, suicide, suicide,” Bond sighed.

“As I said previously, it is the time-honored way of expiating disgrace, and the more ingenious the suicide the more honor accrues to the victim’s family. Here”—and the Baron handed Bond a newspaper. “This is the English edition of the Asahi chain. One of its most widely read features is the daily column of the witty Suicide Suzuki.”

Surrounded by type was a half-column photo of one of the merriest faces Bond had ever beheld.

Hi, neighbor
[Bond read]
. Here’s old SS on the neat, all-reet Death Beat! Hariko Harumi, the Sofia University dropout, also became a
dropoff
today—from the top of the Dream Center. Old hat, Hariko; wish I could say you’ve a second chance.... Yoshio Dai-Ichi is getting his kicks on the River Styx, and well-deserved ones, too, ’cause his departure was a thing of beauty. He went to Haneda and walked into a jet taxiing toward the terminal. Yup, it’s the best when you die Northwest!... And let’s hear it for Kono Yamato, who, having failed twice to cut out from this scene, finally worked it by cutting out himself. He flung himself under one of those machines at the Toyopet auto factory that stamps out parts from sheet metal. So, death wishers, if the grill of your next car has an extra-big grin, that’s Kono....

Death, death, death. Japan was a veritable discount house of it. Would his own sensual body be added to the pile before this caper was through?

He lounged on the
futon
and expelled a perfect smoke ring from his sensual lips, lined out two jets from his nostrils which crossed in midair to form an X, and watched the O and X float upward, the O taking a clear lead until it settled into the center of a ticktacktoe board he’d etched in the fluffy dust of the ceiling. Three O’s across, game and set!

They had put up (and out) for the night at a Beppu
ryokan
, the type of inn where one sleeps on the floor of a sparsely furnished room. Kopy slumbered soundly, her arms locked in a protective, maternal way around the portable Xerox. Sanka had not seemed surprised that he and Kopy were sharing digs. “In Japan we do not yet possess your guilt concerning the cohabitation of unmarried people. We also place no stigma upon nudity, which is why Miss Katz feels free to walk our streets
au naturel
. Good night, my friend,” and he’d retired to an adjoining room.

Bond extinguished his Raleigh in a porcelain bowl housing a delicate
ikebana
flower arrangement. A cunning breeze brought a shy daisy in contact with a randy azalea and he decorously looked away, though his ears caught the latter’s imploring “I’m half crazy all for the love of you.”

For a while he read the Good Book, then closed it midway through the story of Daniel. Tough spot that Daniel was in; Bond hoped he’d get out of that lion’s den. Of course, if it had been written today Daniel would have a den mother in there with him. A wonderful book, the Bible. He read it every night—religiously.

There was a restiveness in him that precluded sleep. It was useless to fight that kind of feeling, so he opened the screen further and gazed into the garden with its oddly colored rocks, dwarf trees and a streamlet burbling its happiness at being alive and wet to the sultry full moon. As he tightened his lips around a Raleigh and scratched a blue-tipped Ohio match on the candy crystal of his Necco watch, the flare picked up a shadow.

One of the dwarf trees was moving.

He flipped the Raleigh away, cursing. Goddam cigarette was producing optical illusions now!

No, by thunder, the tree
was
moving!

There was a faint rustling as it picked its way past its partners, sidestepping rocks hither and thither, and then it braced and broad-jumped over the streamlet.

Bond’s heart skipped a beat, then a whole twelve bars, for a sliver of moonlight illuminated something brandished by one of the fronds.
Gottenu!
A sugarcane bolo!

Across the garden toward the
ryokan
padded the tree, its steps almost inaudible on the thick tufts of gunter grass. Bond concealed himself in floor-length drapes, his incredulous gray eyes on the leafy stalker all the way. It brushed past him; he could smell the biting essence of its blossoms. Now it was poised outside the screen to Sanka’s room.

Another fingery frond eased the screen along its track until it was almost completely open. The bolo was lifted high.

“Cocky! For God’s sake, get up!”

There was a scream as the bolo sliced down, but Bond was already diving against the base of the trunk. His right shoulder bulled into the corrugated folds of the bark and he felt them cruelly abrade his flesh. His flying block drove the tree through a paper wall into another room and through the gash he could see its inhabitants spilled over the low tables. Sanka, his face contorted, was trying to stem with his finger a cascade of blood from a slash on his left shoulder that had laid it open to the bone. And now he was retreating in fear, for the dwarf tree was hurtling back, bolo cocked for the final coup.

Bond shouted another warning. “Cocky, duck!”

The bolo buzzed over Sanka’s head like a giant gnat and Bond could hear a string of curses from somewhere inside the tree. Gottenu! How in heaven was he going to stop a rampaging killer tree?

The answer was on the wall, a glass partition containing a fire extinguisher and an ax. He hammered his fist into the case, wincing as the splinters bit into his knuckles, but he tugged the ax from its rack and swung it in a sweeping arc, grunting in satisfaction as its flat side caught the center of the dwarf tree in a crippling smash. There was a muffled cry; the tree spun around and lunged onto him and teeth were worrying at his shoulder, but the bites were feeble and did not pierce. Bond’s left foot lanced out in a Pone Kingpetch kick, again catching the tree squarely in its middle, and he backed off, turned the ax around to expose the cutting edge and let go with the smooth, flat swing that he’d once used to fell a Sequoia. The edge bit in and the scream was a blood-curdling thing that trailed far out into the night. The tree split neatly in twain, a bloodbath burst through the bark and the halves lay still.

“Iz!” Kopy, pale as an uncoated Creamsicle, rolled into the Baron’s room on rubber legs, stared at the ghastly remains at Bond’s feet and swooned. He let her slide softly to the tatami mat.

“I need a doctor, Izzy-san. Badly.”

Bond’s alert eyes told him Sanka would bleed to death if not tended to posthaste.
Gottenu!
His kingdom for a tube of the cherry salve that could halt the flow in a second! Or a dozen mandarin orange peels!

Wait! The old Celanese tobacco trick taught to him by Sir Hu Wu Wu Herbert, the head of Ceylon’s secret service; would it work on such a grievous wound?

He dashed to his room and took a carton of Raleighs from his luggage and a bullet from the chamber of his Simon-Garfunkel.

“Cocky, bite hard on this,” he snapped, inserting the slug between the Baron’s gold teeth.

“How will biting on the bullet help?”

“You always bite on a bullet when someone’s dressing your wound. It’s tradition. Besides, if you swallow it, it makes excellent roughage, I daresay.”

Bond field-stripped two hundred cigarettes and jammed the tobacco into the raw fissure, tamping it down with the ax handle. Sanka grimaced several times but bore the ordeal with the courage of his race.

The gushing slowed to a trickle, then stopped.

They exchanged smiles, two spymasters who genuinely appreciated each other’s manliness in the face of peril.

Bond let go a sigh as he first began to feel the injury he himself had incurred when his shoulder rammed the abrasive covering on the dwarf tree. “I’ll say this.” He grinned. “His bark was worse than his bite.”
(Great one-liner,
his brain told him.
You’re not ready for the trash heap yet, my friend!)

Sanka was on his knees beside the tree halves, his nimble finger stripping away the husk and fronds. “I regret I did not have the presence of mind to say, ‘Landsman, spare that tree!’ Izzy-san. We might have learned something important if we’d kept it alive.” He gave a low whistle. “By the belly of Buddha! Look what lurked under this camouflage!”

It was the severed body of a man, which, if joined, could have been no more than two feet tall. Even in the rictus of death the teeth continued to grind in the slavering mouth; the eyes remained pools of unspeakable ferocity.

“Without doubt, Izzy-san”—and Sanka’s nose wrinkled in disgust—“this ugly little night crawler is the thug described by Nikko Tee-Yin. Yes, my
gaijin
friend, you are looking at Skwato.”

He saw she had been wrestling with a monumental decision and patently had made it.

The air became rarefied as the vehicle climbed the road winding around a range of cliffs, rumbled through jungle terrain and past exploding
jigoku,
the “hells,” which sprayed a gaudy variety of colored boiling plumes into the mist from the nearby sea. At the top of the tallest cliff they came upon a sprawling tent city, the headquarters of the Feldspar expedition, Bond presumed. They made a bumpy stop near the largest tent. “Feldspar-san,” the driver said.

A massive hand covered with golden hair pushed aside a flap and the seven-foot Igneous Feldspar, ducking his head so he could ease himself out, emerged and wobbled toward them on giraffe legs.

“My dear Baron Sanka.” His hand smothered the Baron’s. “How good of you to have come.” Ice-blue eyes in a pasty face snapped photos of Bond and Kopy. “I am afraid I have not had the pleasure of meeting these people.”

“My name is Israel Bond.” Bond watched for a reaction that never came. “A friend of the Baron’s. And this is Miss Kopy Katz, who’s come to Xerox your scrolls.”

“Excellent! I had not wished to make a bothersome issue out of the scrolls, but until I can devise some safe way of bringing them to the surface I must insist they remain in the cave.”

Sanka lit a Shinsei. “
Yo-i!
Then that is settled.” He held something under the giant’s nose. “Professor, look at this photograph. I took it in a Beppu
ryokan
moments after the subject tried to assassinate me. Do you know this man?”

“Why, it is Skwato, the little drifter I met here during the early days of my excavations, a foul-tempered, friendless being, but I took pity upon him and gave him employment. His size permitted him to squeeze into tiny crevices in search of fossils, and on one of these excursions he found the scrolls. He tried to kill you, you say?”

“Yes, but Mr. Bond thwarted the attempt. Skwato is dead.”

“Then we all owe you a great debt, Mr. Bond,” said the giant, shaking his blond curls in disbelief. “Ah, it seems this expedition is cursed. Skwato is the second of my workmen to meet a violent end.”

Sanka’s finger whirled in agitation. “The second?”

“A dreadful misfortune took the life of one of the men who supply us daily with fresh seafood. Standing too close to the edge of the cliff, he was caught by one of the unpredictable air currents that swirl between the cliffs and the ocean. He toppled one thousand feet.”