Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
With a whine, the jet rose majestically. It had taken less than thirty seconds to go up that many feet.
On the intercom was the pilot:
“Shalom and welcome aboard Flight 78, El Al Airlines, nonstop New York to Tel-Aviv. I am Captain Tevyeh.”
(Bond had met the pilot in the lounge earlier. Tevyeh was the sort of flippant, devil-may-care “flyboy” that one felt confidence in. He had been a hero of the air during the war in ’48, having suffered grievous head wounds in a dogfight. The eyepatches over both eyes gave him a dashing appearance.)
“Our airline is a friendly, informal operation, so just relax, have a ball, a matzoh ball, of course. (Tevyeh chuckled at his play on words; Bond, jealous, wished he’d thought of it first). Don’t be hoity toity ... introduce yourselves to each other ... sing, talk, laugh, tell a hearty joke. Our lovely hostess, Miss Tigerblatt, will be around with tea in a glass and a lump sugar for between your teeth. Our dinner menu is great tonight, sweet and sour sweetbreads, three different kinds of boiled chicken, salad with
Two
Thousand Island dressing—we don’t stint on El Al—raisins with almonds, the whole ethnic bit. Later we’ll all line up in the aisle and Miss Tigerblatt will teach us the hora. For your amusement we’ll have continuous showings of
The Jolson Story
; it’ll tear out from you the heart. Or if you like canasta, join us here in the pilot’s cabin ... we’ll set ’er on automatic control and play for any stakes you want—the plane, if necessary. Later, when we’re over the Middle East you’ll all get a real thrill watching us bombing the Suez Canal. But for now just settle back and read your complimentary copy of Harry Golden’s wonderful book
Enjoy! Enjoy!
I did, and, believe me, I enjoyed it, enjoyed it!”
Bond gazed into the hostile eyes of the wiry Levantine traveling under the name of Mr. Herzl. “Hello,” he said pleasantly. The man thrust something on Bond’s lap, hissing, “Die, Israeli jackal!”
Bond’s heart pounded. A black widow spider crawled onto his bare knee, sand shifting into the bottom of the tell-tale red hourglass on its obscenely swollen belly laden, he knew, with excruciating poison.
Counteraction 12! The old words of the service manual rang a bell in his mind. There was a rebuttal for this loathsome thing on his kneecap. He unscrewed one of the large gold buttons of his cape. Out sprang a praying mantis!
Removing its little prayer shawl and yarmulkeh, the mantis gulped down the arachnid with one bite of its awful jaws. “Good show, Mendel!” he whispered to the mantis. Not all mantises were as devout these days, Bond knew. Some of the younger ones were out and out atheists, but they all retained good Jewish hearts, and that was what mattered.
Counteraction 13! As the Levantine reached for his gun, Bond’s ring sprayed fiery
chrain
(horseradish) into his face. He drove his meat knife home into the blinded Levantine’s innards. The man slumped dead against the window.
His head spinning with tension, Bond applied Counteraction 14. He fainted.
Minutes later he revived and dragged the man down the aisle with an apologetic, “My ol’ buddy just can’t take that schnapps,” to the hostess. Inside the lavatory Bond lifted the seat and stuffed his victim into the bowl. Thanks be to heaven he’s lanky, he thought, pushing the “flush” button.
“Takes just one good flush to get rid of a four-flusher,” he said casually, wishing that Zvi had been there to guffaw at this latest Bondism.
Back in his seat he rifled the man’s attaché case, no mean feat with the end of a rifle. Mr. Herzl, he discovered, was a member of the Cairo Legion Armed Police. But who had put him onto Bond?
But there was no more time for pondering. A favorable sirocco wind had brought the craft in nine hours ahead of schedule. Lydda Airport twinkled its lights below. “Fasten your seatbelts. Smoke if you wish,” said Miss Tigerblatt.
Eretz Israel! At last!
He lit up a Raleigh and watched the last few moments of the picture.
“Asa, you’re home from Broadway just in time,” a tear-stained mother on the screen said to the black-faced vaudevillian on his knees before her. “Poppa is very sick, Asa, very sick. But before he goes, he wants to know ... this Colleen McCarthy the papers say you’re going to marry. She’s a Jewish girl?”
Bond’s eyes were wet. He’d seen the picture fifty-six times on many El Al flights. Still it had the power to tear out from him the heart.
The wheels jolted against the soil of his adopted homeland.
He bade farewell to Loxfinger and his retinue. “We’ll be meeting again, doctor. I’ll probably be assigned to your kibbutz.”
Those unbelievably blue eyes focused on him. “Of course, Mr. Bond. We ...” again he nudged Bond’s ribs conspiratorily ... “sheenies must stick together.” His breath was alcoholic.
Bond felt a strange chill as he watched Loxfinger and the others depart in a waiting Rolls-Royce. For an instant Macaroon had stood before the plane defiantly smashing another board as though he were challenging the great bird whose bowels had quartered him.
The secret agent tossed his Raleigh into a pool of fuel near the jetliner and hailed a cab. Soon he stood in front of the gleaming yellow one-story factory.
THIS IS THE HOME OF MOTHER MARGOLIES’ ACTIVATED OLD WORLD CHICKEN SOUP.
And under the sign, one of her proverbs:
I AM THE MASTER OF MY FATE; I AM THE CAPTAIN OF MY VOLLEYBALL TEAM.
It was grand to be back at the same old stand. Now he could drop his cover role for a while and devote his full thirty percent effort to being just Oy Oy Seven.
As he entered the modernistic structure, he heard the familiar lamentive strains of the violin evoking memories of another era in the Jewish saga. His eyes looked up. Yes, the fiddler was still there on the roof.
“Welcome home, Oy Oy Seven!” said M.’s bewitching private secretary, Leilah Tov, flicking her tongue at him alluringly. It had been a long time since he and Leilah ...
“M. wants a full report on the double.”
He quickened his pace, zipping past the Chicken Soup division, the Mushroom & Barley section, the Blueberry Blintze room. He stopped in front of a door.
MOTHER MARGOLIES
He knocked. The sweet, quavering old voice he loved so well said, “Come in, Mr. Bond.”
Her back was to him and he could hear the rocker creak and the assiduous click, click, click of her omnipresent knitting needles. What was she making now? A sweater for the prime minister? Socks for Abba Eban? Or was she still knitting that lovely, multi-hued doily she had started two years ago? Someone will certainly receive a splendid present when she finally gets that thing done, he thought. But it should be someone who can really make good use of it, someone with a fifty-foot ashtray.
The rocker spun around and the kindly, wise old eyes of Mother Margolies were on him. Dear, dear Mother, the wonderful lady whose factory it was and who had permitted a secret portion of the building to be utilized solely for the dark manipulations of M 33 and 1/3.
For a very good reason. M. stood for “Emma.”
Dear old Mother Emma Margolies was—M., No. 1 in the Secret Service of Eretz Israel!
10 “You’ll Like Mara, Mr. Bond”
“Let’s have it already,” said M.
Bond opened his carrying case, dumped a mound of Raleigh coupons on her desk. “Four thousand, three hundred and eighty-two, M. How’s that?”
She sniffed. “Just so-so, Oy Oy Seven. Oy Oy Nine really gave us a full measure of devotion when he was with us. More than six thousand.”
“Was
with us?” Bond said. “You speak as though he....”
“He is,” M. said flatly. “We buried him yesterday. Lung cancer, emphysema, smoker’s heart, and a particularly bad case of adenoids.” She sighed. “Very clumsy at judo, botched up codes ... but,
vay tzu mineh yooren
, could that boy smoke! We got seventy-five walkie-talkie radio sets from his last batch. Which reminds me ...”
Her gnarled but nimble fingers touched a knob on the master control box under her yarn pile. He wondered what station she would try to contact. Station A—Asia? E—Europe? P—Pacific Area? But he should have guessed.
“ so, toe-tappin’ teeneroonies, avast let’s blast with Castro and the Cuban Heels and their big, big ...”
It was Station RR (Rock ’n Roll). At heart old M. was a “toe tapper.” Worse, a Rockin’ Robby Robbins fan.
Bond lit a Raleigh, offered her one.
“Are you crazy?” M. said indignantly. “You can die from that garbage. Now let’s have the report.”
He began with the Miami Beach affair, relating fully everything that had happened since, placing emphasis on certain puzzlements that had occurred during the Loxfinger phase of the assignment. “My capsule opinion: It’s a weirdo setup. I’d like your permission to snoop around.”
“Granted. Snoop. But you should be extra careful. The doctor is more important than ever to our country’s well being. You were on the plane, so I guess you didn’t get a chance to read these.”
She held out a bunch of newspapers from all over the globe. “The top one is particularly interesting.”
It was an English edition of the United Arab Republic’s propaganda mouthpiece,
Scimitar ’n Feather
, with this bannerline:
“ISRAELI LOXFINGER’S PEACE OVERTURES MULLED BY OUR GOVERNMENT.”
Impossible!
He read the lead story. In essence it was straight-away reporting on Lazarus Loxfinger’s “Plowshare Papers” with liberal quotes from them. The story was not favorable, he noted, but more significant, not unfavorable. Something big was in the wind. It had to be. For in the past a peace proposal from Israel would have drawn reams of ridicule, sarcasm and the tired old call for a “jihad,” holy war, to rid the Middle East of “these Zionist bandits, blah, blah, blah.”
Just as eye-opening were the organs of the other Arab nations, all noncommittal, but nonbelligerent.
The non-Arab papers had the freedom of speculation, pointing out that this was the first time Arab journals had ever carried an Israeli declaration without abusive comments.
“BREAKTHROUGH IN MID-EAST AT LAST?” asked the
Manchester Guardian
. “LOXFINGER PAPERS GET HARD ARAB LOOKSEE”—
Chicago Sun-Times
. “MID-EAST ACCORD HINTED”—
Bombay Bomb Bay
, organ of the Indian Air Force. “ARABS HINT END OF HOSTILITY TO JEWS”—
Paris Match
. And predictably:
“METS’ ROOKIE HAS HANGNAIL!”
“V-DOLL AND COP LINK BARED (AND THAT’S NOT ALL!)”
“COMMIES SEEN THREAT TO RUSSIA”
“Mid-East Talks Peace.”—New York Daily News.
I’ve been an ass, Bond realized. I actually had doubts about a man who might crack the nerve-racking stalemate that has hamstrung my country for seventeen years. Just because he drinks a little, mauls blondes and uses a few foolish ethnic slurs.
And who are you to point a finger, Israel Bond? You, the rake, the womanizer, the dimestore dandy…