The Israel Bond Omnibus (73 page)

Nagashima yelled something to the almost naked maiden in the little flat-bottomed, high-sided boat, who shook her head in negation. “No dice, Sy.”

“Why is she so goddam uppity? What’s she got against me?”

“It’s a long story. She despises film people. Her name is Go-Down Mikimoto and she is Japan’s most beautiful and celebrated pearl diver. Two years ago she was prevailed upon by our film industry to go to the States and play herself in a South Sea epic,
Shark God of Cuticura
. When she was screen-tested they decided she didn’t look native’ enough, so they gave the part to Raquel Welch. Go-Down suffered terrible indignities at the hands of some lupine movie moguls and swore she would never consort with
gaijins
again. You don’t stand a chance.”

“Want me to shoot any more calm sea-type exteriors?” said Liam Clancy, the red-faced Irishman in the studiously torn Levi Strauss Sea-Snuggies, who operated the camera and sound.

“Nah.” Feig gave the girl a censorious glare.

When it swooshed into the sky Nagashima first assumed it was a waterspout. “Shoot it, Clancy. We’ll work it in somewhere.”

Then they saw it, the huge white bauble suspended atop the column of water and mist and the two immense blackish valves spread flat at its base. Something hacked and coughed and belched sonorously; there was a long sigh and the valves cracked together and went under.

“Mother of God!” cried Liam Clancy.

“Mother of pearl, you mean,” Feig corrected. “That’s a pearl, pal, biggest damn one ever. Must be fifty feet around. Hey, it’s falling!”

The pearl bounced into the sea, drenching them to the skin in a mountainous spray. Clancy cursed, but stayed at his post filming away in blazing zeal. To pick up the sound of the pearl rolling over the breakers, Clancy boosted the volume and lowered the boom.

Go-Down Mikimoto was a tawny arrow diving from her dory, her supple flanks a symphony of rhythmic precision as she stroked toward the bobbing blob and called to Nagashima.

“This is incredible,” said Nagashima. “Go-Down says there’s a man inside. We’d better haul it in before it sinks.”

“Film, Clancy, film!” With that command, Feig jumped from the barge, Nagashima following closely. They thrashed a foamy path to the girl, whose forefinger was indicating a shadow-figure lurking behind the lustrous covering. The trio, making a monumental effort, pushed the pearl in the direction of the barge, shouting for assistance. Six technicians leaped into the water and together they managed to roll it onto the barge, which rocked menacingly. “Don’t tip us. I’m getting shots like you never saw,” Clancy cried.

Go-Down banged an impotent fist on the pearl. “Hurry! It must be opened or he will die.”

So, you
can
speak English, you little cocker,
Feig thought, copping a fast feel that went unnoticed. “You’re right, chickie. Hey, you guys, bust this thing apart.”

Nagashima and his crew broke up some tables and chairs and used the legs as clubs until there was a sound of splintering, and the pearl split and in a swirl of sand and sea a man fell upon the deck.

Nagashima removed the oxygen tank and face mask.

Feig smacked his hand against his head.
“Gottenu!
Bond! Israel Bond!”

“Sy? Sy Feig, here in Japan?” The gray eyes then focused on the gleaming configuration of Go-Down Mikimoto. “Honey, help me, please. You know the legend of oysters, what they’re supposed to do to people? Well, when you’ve just been inside the biggest oyster there is... Please, baby, please.”

Simpatico were the black eyes of Go-Down Mikimoto. “Of course, sir.” Wriggling through Feig’s fingers, she removed her skimpy loincloth, liberated Bond from the Seahunt suit and snuggled against his chest. An “Ar-r-gh!” savage and primeval, escaped his sensual lips and he seized her with a spasm that shook the barge.

Nagashima hid his eyes considerately. Feig did not.

“Shoot it, Clancy! Shoot it! Damn it, this’ll pack em in, by Skouras! Tats, you were one hundred percent right about the Maroon Lagoon. It really came through for us. What a plot!”

Nagashima looked askance at his exuberant confrere. “I concede it’s amazing, but what’s the plot?”

Feig laughed. “Are you nuts, Tats? A gigantic oyster surfaces, spits out the mother of all pearls; it breaks open to reveal an oversexed Hebraic Hercules who’s got to hock a broad or he’ll die of frustration; he lands on a gorgeous knish of an Ama diving girl and gives her the hock of ages. That’s no plot by you? Hell, Tats, it’s”—he strove for a metaphor—“’New Wave’...
avant-goiter!
And we don’t screen this one in some
shlock
moviehouse, either. This one goes right to the art theaters.”

For the better part of an hour the two splendid anatomies locked and hocked, finding desire’s peak in a crystalline explosion. When it was done and the burning deck hosed down by Nagashima’s aides, Bond sighed. “Sarah, forgive me. This one was simply uncontrollable.”

Feig blinked. Was that a voice?
“Iz, I forgive you, darling.”
No, just a keening breeze, he decided.

Bond’s eyes were closing now. “Poor bastard oyster. I ruined it, Sy. It’ll need a complete valve job....”

His head lolled in Go-Down Mikimoto’s lap.

“I shall row you there, Mr. Bond,” said a desolate Go-Down. “Step into my dory. It is a sturdy craft designed by Horthy of Budapest.”

Bond licked his lips in sheer joy.
Gottenu,
what a setup she’d handed him! “A Budapest boat, eh? I guess it’s”—his flashing wit laid in one of his most scintillating one-liners
—“hunky dory!”

As Go-Down Mikimoto churned the oars, her eyes devoured him. So this was Secret Agent Israel Bond, her lover! She had read many novels pertaining to his ruthless breed, the first-rate creations of Le Carré, Deighton, Donald Hamilton, Adam Hall, etc., and enjoyed them all, although she preferred by far the newest writer mining this vein, Sol Weinstein, an exciting, prepossessing American, in whose Pocket Book Specials paperbacks,
Loxfinger
,
Matzohball
and
On the Secret Service of His Majesty, the Queen
($1 per copy; mail orders filled promptly, gratefully by Pocket Books, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.; no extra charge for author’s autograph or body), she’d found an approach to sex and violence unexplored by the others. How cruelly handsome Mr. Bond was! He reminded her of photographs she had once seen of the young George Gershwin.

At the landing in Shimonoshima, Go-Down faced him for what might be the last time. “Shall I ever see you again, Mr. Bond?”

“Our fates will lead us to one another again, Go-Down. In the meantime, love me...Never, never change... Keep that breathless charm... Don’t you rearrange it … ’Cause I love you … etc., I want to think of you as I saw you first, a proud untamed mermaid. I would recommend two minor alterations—Westernizing your eyes and lightening your pigmentation by drugs—but otherwise stay as you are.” He kissed her passionately and stepped onto the shore.

“And I shall be ever afloat near this village should you require me,” the Ama nymph said, but her pledge never reached his ears, for Bond was clambering up the path to the tent city, bowling over sweating Japanese bearing more paraphernalia on their backs, and in ten minutes he’d gained the top. He stopped in his tracks, shivering.

The Great Herrosukka Buddha regarded him from suspicious slitted eyes.

Gottenu!
They’d built it up to its hundred-foot height in seventy-two hours. Palpably the Great Dane and his Norwegians were geniuses at this trade. Bond walked to the base, feeling somehow that the eyes were following his every step. At the feet he came upon a pile of bleached bones, which he nudged with his foot.

“Please do not disturb them, Mr. Bond. These are some of the remnants of bygone worshipers and their donkeys who died at the Buddha’s feet after the torturous climb. I have left them as a memorial to all those who have genuflected here.”

From the shadow of the Buddha stepped Professor Igneous Feldspar.

“I knew in my heart you possessed the leonine courage to survive, Mr. Bond.” The giant sounded genuinely relieved. “You are destined for greater glories.”

Bond lit a Raleigh. “Prof, we’ve got some palavering to do. Whether you know it or not, I have been threatened from the moment I neared this land by an undercover neo-Nazi organization known as TUSH.” He unfolded the narrative. “I am of the opinion that Holzknicht has a hold on you. Magma told me of your apprehension for ‘the boy’ in a little” —he found himself blushing—“chat we had one night. Come clean, Feldspar, and I’ll do my best to extricate you from his clutches.”

The Dane expelled the sigh of a man who has been carrying a secret onus too long. “Yes, Ernst has a hold on me. In the late 1920’s we were fellow students at the Schisselzelmknist Institute of Psychiatry and Medicine in Berlin. Even then Ernst Holzknicht was astounding his professors with concepts beyond their understanding. He was first to cure a moribund loaf of bread by massive injections of penicillin, the first to train a dog to shout at the clang of an alarm: ‘Meat-bell! Meat-bell!’ Ernst was a misanthrope, who despised his brother students and instructors. For some odd reason he was drawn to me; why, I cannot say—my Danish jollity or my outlandish size, perhaps. Whatever the reason, we became firm friends, although we had many a heated polemic over the ascendant Nazi philosophy which had begun to infect him. I well remember the day he told me flatly, ‘The world will never be a decent place until I destroy all the Jews.’”

“I recall a similar dialogue with the good
Herr Doktor
in the cellar of a gambling casino. Pray, continue.”

“Graduation parted us, although we corresponded for many years until the day the
Boche
swarmed into Denmark. I had no further wish to fraternize with a man who was using his God-given genius to further the cause of maniacs. Besides, I had married a charming Oslo poetess some years before and was immersed in the bliss of family life. Her name was Helvig Rolvig, winner of the Nobel Prize for her only published collection of poetry, a 350-page, two-couplet volume,
Reflections from the Middle Ear
. She was a great one for copious footnotes.”

“Helvig Rolvig was
your
wife?” Bond’s eyes softened and he recited the well-remembered lines:

Apes and grapes

Have dissimilar shapes.

“I’ve adored her poems since I was a gawking teener. How happy you must have been.”

“Ah, under that hard-boiled, cruelly handsome facade is the soul of a dreamer, Mr. Bond. Yes, we were sublimely happy. But the very spirit of independence that flavored her poetry cost her her life. A Nazi officer who also admired her works commanded her to either compose a poem in his honor or die by firing squad. I shall never forget the way she drew herself up and cried:

For you?

Oh, pooh!

and her horror when she realized that in her defiance she’d done what she’d sworn not to do—compose a poem. She snatched a rifle from a guard’s hands and killed herself on the spot.”

“How awful.”

“Luckily there is a living reminder of Helvig Rolvig, our only child, Knute, whom I raised myself. He grew to be a strapping lad and is something of a scientist himself. His specialty is graffitology, the discovery and translation of graffiti, those pithy wall scrawlings. Spelunking in the Swiss Alps, Knute discovered graffiti most certainly chipped into cave walls by early man, among them: ‘Would you want your daughter to marry a Lake Dweller?’ and ‘The fool seeks fire from flintstones; the hippie uses a Zippo.’ By this time Knute no longer needed me, Mr. Bond, and I was a lonely man craving companionship, but unable to give a woman pleasure because of a rare penile affliction that strikes old men—a monk’s hood. On an aimless jaunt into Copenhagen’s night life I met, wooed and eventually won the present Mrs. Feldspar. Do not be embarrassed, my friend. I am aware of her sexual need for you. To resume, we honeymooned in Berlin, where out of the blue I received a call from Ernst—after all those years of estrangement. I prayed he would be regenerate, but he wasted no time informing me he had kidnapped Knute and would kill him unless I became involved in a charade to be played out in Japan. I now see that Skwato and the man who called himself Dr. Yaynu were his minions. You probably have guessed that Dr. Yaynu killed the fisherman Nikko Tee-Yin. And it was my hydrofoil that was to fetch Aw Gee Minh from the Pacific. How happy I was when I realized he had failed. You showed great resourcefulness as usual, Mr. Bond.”