The Israel Bond Omnibus (9 page)

There was a glass-shattering roar. Bond looked blankly at the shards in his hand and the ice cubes in his lap.

Lazarus Loxfinger, trailed by a huge mulatto wearing a plaid kilt and a T-shirt with the letters “In my kilt I kill” and carrying a board on his shoulder, walked slowly onto the stage. He stood motionless during a fantastic, ten-minute standing ovation, hearing his name screamed over and over again: “Loxfinger! Loxfinger! Loxfinger!”

Several women fainted during the unimaginable din. An elderly matron next to Bond shrieked: “A Messiah he is; he should only live another thousand years! Now I know what the Catholics feel when they see their Pope!”

Then Loxfinger raised his right hand stiffly, palm out. The throng stilled.

Macaroon suddenly crossed in front of his leader, swung the board off his shoulder, held it by the end with his left hand, and with a frightening blur chopped his right hand down on it. There was a sharp crack; gasps sounded through the ballroom; the board, split in two, fell to the stage. Then the monster lumbered off.

And Loxfinger began to speak.

His charred hand paining him, Bond, now dressed in a powder blue iridescent suit, Panama hat, string tie and Venetian bedsocks, pushed his way past the bellhops trying to contain the blaze to the 18th floor and went down to the lounge. There the dirty stayups were carousing to the pulsating rhythms of the Calumet City Five Minus Four, the lone bandsman a triangle player with limited musical conception.

Elbowing his way through the dancers, he spotted at a corner table Poontang, Saxon, Macaroon, smashing boards with terrifying grunts, and yes ... Loxfinger, the old fellow cuddling with a sultry, Nordic-type blonde, well upholstered, too, a shocked Bond noted.

Unthinkable. This saintly figure pawing, grasping, insinuating his hands into her cleavage. It was a blow to Bond’s image of the man, but he supposed that Loxfinger, too, was only human.

“Hello, Bond,” Poontang said in her typically hostile manner. “Come down for some night life?”

“Had a slight fire in my room and couldn’t sleep. Matter of fact, burned my hand. I thought I’d ease the pain with a little nightcap.”

“Oh,” she said with a sneer. “Hurt your hand, eh? Your shooting hand, no doubt. I thought you’d find some way to cop out on tomorrow’s match.”

“I’ll be there, Poontang, so don’t worry your sick little head.”

And to the waiter: “A very, very dry Majorca Martini, the olive from the personal groves of Francisco Franco, a simulated pearl onion on a toothpick of Pacific Plywood.”

“You forgot to tell him the most important ingredient, buster. The pinch of Indian Ocean kelp taken from the belly of a pregnant female manta ray.”

“Still competing with me, eh Poontang? Who’s the young lady with the good doctor?”

“Some cheap little cocktail hostess named Eve Brown. He can’t keep his hands off her. I’m afraid you’re late, Mr. Bond. The old lecher has beaten the young lecher to the prize.”

“You mean he beat you to it?” Bond shot back.

“Still nasty, eh buster? We’ll see how nasty you are tomorrow after I take away all your mad money.” Dashing her drink into his face, she hurried off, her breasts heaving.

Saxon leaned over. He was very drunk. “How’s the Kosher cop tonight? Shoot any more baddie waddies since I saw you last?” He was still wearing the same brown woolen suit which seemed even sweatier, gamier, and baggier— if possible.

“Tell me, Saxon, who’s your tailor? Pillsbury?”

Saxon’s face purpled. “You f— Jew bastard!” He started a right hand punch which Bond’s superior reflexes deftly enabled him to block with the point of his jaw.

“I’ll overlook that, Saxon, because you’re blind, piggish drunk.”

“You snotty kike!” Saxon swung again wildly, missed and fell against an artificial palm tree, knocking himself out. He slid to the floor.

Bond looked at the unconscious P.R. man. “Macaroon, take this sot back to his room and sober him up.”

His carbon eyes glowering, Macaroon muttered, “’Tis a bonnie moonlicht nicht, yo’ mothah frigguh.” He tossed Saxon over his shoulder as if the man were a feather and steamrollered out of the lounge.

Turning to Loxfinger, who also seemed on the verge of collapse, Bond said gently: “Bedtime, sir. It’s been a long day for you. I’ll take you back to your suite.”

The doctor, who had been whispering endearments to Eve Brown in his thick drunken voice—”Eva, mine schatz, Eva”— looked at Bond with a trace of suspicion, then nodded his assent. “Yah, I go now. You are Mr. Bond, the security person.” He clicked his heels fatuously, then swayed. Bond caught him, led him on a tottering path to the elevator. They got off at the ninth floor, Bond continuing to guide him toward the suite.

“You are very solicitous, Mr. Bond. But then, we sheenies have to stick together, right?” He winked confidentially, nudging Bond’s ribs.

Saxon was up, partly sober, soaking wet and still bellicose. ‘That Jew bastard made fun of my suit! And that stinking nigger ape threw me in the shower! My suit is ruined, ruined! I’ll kill him ... and that f— kike, too!”

“Now, now, Mr. Saxon,” said Loxfinger placatingly. “Your good doctor will buy you another one. May I bid you goodnight, Mr. Bond?”

“Good night, sir,” Bond said. “And shalom.”

In the corridor Bond let the fury he had suppressed in Loxfinger’s presence roll out of him. He kicked a passing bellhop in the leg, savoring the man’s yammering and sobbing.

How he had yearned to smash those epithets back into Saxon’s foul-smelling, bigoted mouth. And why ... why had Loxfinger, a fellow Jew, said nothing when his aide spouted them? Did Saxon have some strange hold over the philanthropist? I’ve got to do some thinking.

Something else occurred to him. He decided to play a hunch. Returning to the lounge he smiled his most inviting smile at the hard-faced blonde, Eve Brown. She sized up his trim physique, the dark cruelly handsome face. She decided it would be worth her while to smile back.

Her moist cornsilk hair in strands against his pillow, the girl looked with adoration at the tawny, steel-framed Apollo who had just taken them both to the very heart of the sun.

“Geez, Mister. You’re the living end.”

He smiled, slipping in one of his irresistible shafts: “Your end is the livingest, too, Eve. Tell me, how did you get entangled with the celebrated doctor tonight?”

Naturally he had made love to her in hopes of eliciting some information, but that task had somehow become secondary the moment he had torn away her pitifully sordid little evening dress. (He would, of course, send her a Simplicity pattern and three yards of material.) And when he saw her golden thighs he’d heard the same old song in his blood ... the song of sex, each corpuscle a shimmering note, each vein a string waiting to be plucked, his heart the maddened metronome which would start the symphonic cadence. And the ever-ready baton.

Bond, he berated himself, you’re impossibly horny. I think you’d get aroused by a navel orange. He’d once been sent by M., who knew of his amorous propensities, to a famed Viennese psychiatrist but he had disgustedly given up the therapy one afternoon when he learned the irritating noises in the darkened room were made by the analyst sucking his thumb. Anyway, the maturity accrued by the passage of time had helped him put sex in its proper perspective. It was the most important thing in the world.

“Oh, the doc,” she said, her words derailing his train of thought, sending him back to the job at hand.

Nestling in the crook of his muscular arm, she related how Loxfinger had given her the once-over twice in the lounge. “I knew he was famous, of course, but I never thought he’d ever dig a cheap, flashy little number like me. And it’s funny, when I told him my name was Eve Brown he sorta flipped. Like he’d seen a ghost or somethin’. All the time he was coppin’ a feel he kept whisperin’ crazy things like, ‘Eva, it’s been so long ... so long since we splashed in the pool together, watching the sun glinting on the snow-capped peaks ...’ stuff like that. I swear, Mr. Bond, I never laid eyes on him before—or nothin’ else. And my name’s Eve—not Eva.”

Bond knitted his brow with a frown of concentration. Then realized he’d made a mistake.

“Geez, you’re handsome when you frown!” she said with breathy excitement. And she pulled him down to her, the old song swelling up again.

Gottenu! he thought. If I’d registered this song with ASCAP I’d have a million in royalties by now. But he surrendered to its strain, as he knew he always must.

“Zvi,” Bond said in a low voice over the Nippo. “I want you to contact Monroe Goshen at CIA. Tell him I’m sending some photos of Saxon, Macaroon and Poontang. I want him to check them out. There’s something going on here I don’t like. And tell M. I’m making these inquiries.”

“Is the doctor safe, Oy Oy Seven?”

“For the time being, yes. Shalom.”

Poontang! The mention of her name had made him remember the marble game at noon. And his hand, mauled by bear and fire ... how in the name of heaven would he be able to hold a shooter in those grotesque caricatures of fingers?

He held it in a sinkful of icewater until the swelling reduced enough for him to try a few feeble shots with a cat’s-eye he’d induced one of the hotel’s younger patrons to give him, after having to beat the kid up badly.

Satisfied that the hand was at least serviceable, he took the contact lenses off his eyeteeth (standard with M 33 and 1/3 personnel), extracted the microfilms from the tiny cameras built into the enamel, developed the negatives in a can of Mother’s Chicken Soup (it was ideal for “souping up negs” as well as eating) and airmail specialed the prints to Goshen. He, of course, had been snapping pictures of the Loxfinger party in virtually every conversation. The ones of Poontang, he knew, would drive Goshen out of his Boston bean.