The Israel Bond Omnibus (74 page)

“What about the scrolls?”

“They are genuine. They must be. How can I, who am so knowledgeable in this field, be mistaken?”

“Real or false, they cost a sweet kid her life. Kopy Katz.”

“Oh, but she is alive.”

Bond’s knees buckled and he braced himself against a toe of the Buddha. “Alive?”

“When all of you were gone so long I sensed tragedy and despite my gammy leg I led a search party into the caves. We found her unconscious on the blood-spattered ledge where you and Dr. Yaynu had your difference of opinion. She had heard the shooting and rushed to your aid. She thought you had died. Baron Sanka has taken the poor child back to Tokyo.”

“I want Holzknicht. Is he in Japan?”

“I—I cannot—”

“You’ve got to help me nail him, professor. I know what your son means to you. Israel’s millions mean as much to me. If Holzknicht isn’t brought to heel, unimaginable devastation is in the offing for two countries.”

Igneous Feldspar looked into the insistent gray eyes. “You are right. I shall cooperate. Ernst has told me to register at the New Fujiya Hotel in Atami, where I am to receive further instructions. I shall transport you to Honshu in my hydrofoil on the morrow.”

“Good Dane, Great Dane,” Bond said. “If I had a can of Red Heart I’d feed it to you right now. You’ve earned it. But I’ll do something better. I’ll save you, your son and Japan and Israel.”

“And save me before I go mad, for heaven’s sake!” The voice, hoarse and demanding, came out of a thickly blossomed
yoni
bush. Something flew at his ankles and pinned him against the rocks. It was Magma Feldspar, naked and on fire. “Iggie, you no-score
klutz;
beat it while I make it with the King of Swing!”

“Professor, I—”

“Do as she asks, Mr. Bond. I understand.” The golden curls drooped over the hurt eyes and he shuffled away on his Frankenstein-monster walk.

“There’s nothing I won’t do for a friend,” Bond yelled to the giant, but Magma’s lips, voracious and vampirish, crushed his words back into his sensual tonsils. “Screw thee and thy goddam goodness, lover boy. Let’s make it.”

“Up thine, baby,” Bond riposted.

They made it.

Sarah cried.

No one listened.

Ginza-Burg, executing a slick Fangio sideswerve, forced a crowded bus into a ravine. “Gotcha, you cockers! All six dozen! That Asahi piece worries me, Mr. Bond. As you might suspect, Parker Waterman is a pen name. He’s Britt Kato, the Minister of Propaganda, and you can take what he wrote as the official line. The Nips are getting a little
fahbrent
.”
[81]

Bond consumed seventy-six Raleighs and, when he ran out, three coupons, finding no noticeable difference. Bad business, this mounting Japanese truculence.
Herr Doktor
had once again correctly read the mentality of a nation. Under the servility, smiles and politesse skulked the old samurai war spirit, longing to be unleashed. One couldn’t blame Feldspar for that martial characteristic or for the scrolls’ revelations. But Shimon’s scribblings, compounded with whatever new insults Holzknicht was planning, were bound to cause big trouble. The Nazi had to be liquidated before the lid blew off.

Bond had planned a grand entrance cum trumpet fanfare, but he whipped the Selmer from his lips when he heard the desperate voice of Kopy Katz in the Baron’s Cathouse of the August Tea suite.

“No, Baron. Please. It’s not your fault.”

“I have dishonored myself, Miss Katz. Mr. Bond was my guest, his personal safety my obligation, yet I allowed him to die. Only
seppuku
can cleanse my sin. A simple slash from my right eyeball to my pancreas—”

“No, Cocky!” Bond bashed his way through the paper screen to come upon the tableau he’d expected: Sanka in a black kimono, the sword held high to pierce the stocky body; a cringing, powerless Kopy. “Give me that sword, you damn fool!”

The command triggered off Sanka, who went into a posture of offensive swordsmanship and swiped at Bond, the blade leaving a long, bright gash in the Selmer’s mouth.

“Iz!” Kopy fainted over the low table.

“Mr. Bond, as you being away Ipanema making berry, berry many packets of thousand-yen notes. Take them prease.”

“Not now,” Bond growled, but in shoving away the geisha tugging his arm he let himself be exposed to a second swipe, which drew a thin red line across his knuckles. He sidestepped a third, aimed a half-strength Oyama
bari
kick. Good-o! The tip of his Tijuana Brass bedsock mashed the stubby brown finger on the sword handle and the weapon clattered on the tatami. Sanka, his eyes rolling and maddened, chopped a calloused knuckle into the stomach bruise left by Yaynu’s bullet head, which would have killed an ordinary man not possessing the steel-banded muscles Bond had toughened by one thousand pushups between his right-wing Minuteman orange juice and Wheat Chex with Alba nonfat milk each morning. The Israeli saw an opening, brought the Selmer down on the Baron’s head. There was a cavernous
klonk
and Sanka fell unconscious over the inert Kopy.

“Dizzy never swung a Selmer like that,” Bond said to no one in particular and when no one answered was not disappointed. He slapped Sanka’s cheeks sharply and the
Kyodo Kikaku
chieftain came to, fully recovered from his derangement.

“I cannot believe my eyes, Izzy-san. You have returned from the dead. But only
seppuku
can atone for my shame lest the gods be—”

“I’m hip to this bag by now,” Bond cut in. “Call in Flowering Fungus.” Sanka did and the geisha scurried to his side. “Cocky, tell her to sing that ballad of Raykko once more.”

Her first toneless note in the basso profundo convinced him. “Baron, I’d hoped her singing would have improved enough to warrant sparing her life. It hasn’t. Let it be her.”

Sanka agreed and tossed the geisha the sword. She bowed low and left the suite.

“Yo-i!”
Bond said. “Now your deities and my muse have been placated.” He splashed sake in Kopy’s oval face to revive her and detailed his adventure since the cave episode, omitting the Go-Down Mikimoto interlude for the sake of her susceptibilities.

“The ‘Black Room,’” she murmured. “It’s got to be the ‘Black Room.’”

“This is no time for gibberish, baby,” Bond said impatiently. “Holzknicht is due in Atami and I’ve got to get to the top tailor in town on the double.”

“A tailor? I do not understand, my friend.”

“Baron, it is unthinkable for me to have it out with him in these rags. When you’re heading toward the climax of your career as the world’s ichi-ban secret agent you need groovy threads.”

Once he saw the gravity of the situation, Sanka did not hesitate to recommend Ling Ah Lingle, a Chinese Jew from Hong Kong, whose sign in the basement of the grand old prestige hotel, the Imperial, advertised:
SUITINGS FOR SPIES, IF YOU’VE GOT THE DAGGER, I’VE GOT A CLOAK TO MATCH IT.

In the window were some end-of-season specials Kopy thought darling. “Iz, I love those silken rope sandals.”

“They can be unraveled by pulling on a couple of hidden knots, which gives you a reliable pair of Calcutta strangling cords. In the trade we call sandals like those ‘Thug Boats.’ That shorty nightie is for KGB girls; the big puffy buttons have death pills inside. Hey, that’s a helluva nice Harry Palmer slip-on heat-seeking sweater. Changes from dull brown to bright orange in the presence of a passionate enemy female agent. Mr. Ling Ah Lingle has a pretty spiffy line.”

The paunchy proprietor listened attentively to Bond’s sartorial needs. “None of the items in my regular stock are for you, sir. They would be appropriate if you were going up against SMERSH, Phoenix, the Gehlen group or the Wackenhut Organization, not TUSH. You require what I would term ‘confrontation clothing.’”

“That’s the ticket.” Chap knew his business. “And the finest bedsocks money can buy. The whole wardrobe can be put on the account of Eretz Israel.”

“Eretz Israel? Bedsocks?” The man’s butterball face split into a smile of homage. “There is but one man in ‘the game’ who attaches such importance to bedsocks, who slithers in the dark jungle of espionage for the Star of David. You are Israel Bond, Oy Oy Seven. This is the privilege of a lifetime, Mr. Bond. I shall outdo myself.” Humming and measuring, stopping to comment how pleasurable it was to clothe such a physique, Ling Ah Lingle hit a new high in haute couture. The stunning ensemble started with Penkiovsky Paper Pantaloons, a Baby Jane Holzer minidicky, a breathtaking Georgy Girl cummerbund, a pure silk black-and-tan Gypo Nolan trenchcoat (it cost twenty pounds), and he capped it by slipping onto Bond’s sensual feet a pair of virtually unobtainable Abominable Snowman bedsocks, each one three feet long, which he swore had been chipped from the feet of an actual Yetta—a female Yeti—discovered in 1921 under a Valley of the Blue Moon snowslide.

There was a moment of uncertainty at the full-length mirror; but then Bond preened and saw himself as an effulgent rainbow, each item a perfect complement to the others, and the joyous tears washed his darkly handsome cheeks.

“Oh, Lord, it’s so—so—kicky! Dr. Ernst Holzknicht, you will meet your doom at the hands of the most madly Mod, switched-on spy the world has e’er beheld.”

Ling Ah Lingle was still dancing when the little old lady in the blue-and-white shawl entered his shop.

“Ach, did I not see Israel Bond as I passed the Japan Travel Bureau at the other end of the arcade? He departed so rapidly I had no chance of catching him on these old legs.”

“He was here, madam, but he’s left for the Hilton. He—” and the Chinese stopped abruptly. He’d no business revealing the comings and goings of his clientele. “I must ask you to forget my indiscretion, madam.”

“Oh, he’ll want to see me, I know.
Shalom,
Ling Ah Lingle.” She gave him an engaging smile and returned to the arcade.

The haberdasher lifted the receiver of his telephone. “Operator, please connect me with the message desk at the Hilton.”

He had an afterthought and replaced the phone in its cradle.
She said,
“Shalom,” he thought. An old lady in a blue-and-white shawl, the colors of Eretz Israel, who uses
Shalom
as her valediction...

He barked a relieved laugh and went about his business.