Matzohball

two of secret agent israel bond's most fearsome foes--general gregori bolshyeeyit of the dreaded russian kgb and his hired assassin, torquemada labonza, the man with the golden gums--join diabolical forces to rid the world of kosher counterspy oy oy seven

"My dear Rabbi," said the gash of a mouth under the thick, neatly trimmed mandarin mustache. "A single ill-advised maneuver on your part and one squeeze of this"--the Walther PPK Reuther automatic in the corded right hand dipped in a mocking bow--"will transport you instantly to some far-distant Talmudic academy where your sainted predecessors, Rabbis Hillel and Akiba, are doubtless waiting to engage you in some wearisome polemic regarding a fine point of Mosaic law."

There was no reply from the bearded patriarch three feet away from the cocked weapon, but the slightest of tics in the right eyelid did not escape the coldly proficient, Volga-blue eyes of Colonel K. Benyah Materi, owner of the professionally bored voice. Inwardly the stocky Russian seethed with exultation, an emotion betrayed by the pale pinkish tongue which licked that wet, woundlike gash of a mouth in anticipation. For the colonel was on the verge of pulling off a stunning counterespionage thrust for the KGB, Russia's intelligence apparatus.

"For shame, Rabbi," the colonel bantered lightly. "Surely you are a poor representative of Israel's famed hospitality. A ranking Soviet official interrupts his important daily routine to pay a courtesy call upon your nation's esteemed housing exhibit and there is no solicitous hand to proffer a cup of tea, a mouth-watering Israeli sweetmeat. Ah well, no matter," the colonel sighed with resignation. "The scion of a Don Cossack learns early in his life to be resourceful. I shall take my own repast, dear Rabbi. Now, what would you suggest? The roof? Possibly a shutter? Or the door, that portal to Jewish learning and understanding? Yes, the door."

Colonel Materi's left hand touched the door lovingly, then dug the nail of the index finger into its silvery exterior and with a quick, deft slash peeled away a gleaming six-inch whorl. The finger jabbed at the interior. There was a loud snap. With a gouging lunge, the entire left hand came away from the door with a jagged section of white-and-brown-flecked board. There was a crunch as the teeth of Colonel Materi closed upon it; the voice emitted a grunt of satisfaction.

"Tell me, dear Rabbi. Plain or egg?"

Again there was no response. But the colonel had expected none.

"Plain, I should say, from my limited knowledge of the Judaic tradition. Is it all plain or is there perhaps some egg matzoh in the other sections of this wondrously constructed prefabricated ranch house of yours? Come, come, dear Rabbi. It is fruitless to delay or prevaricate further. The evidence in my hand and mouth should clearly indicate to you that Operation Matzohball is irrevocably blown. Not only is it blown, but I have bagged certainly the world's most famous ghost in the bargain!"

• • •

Four sentences delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, suggesting that the caller thought as little of betraying his country as he would of dispensing weather information, had lifted the veil from the master plan of M 33 and 1/3, secret-service network of Eretz Israel. The insistent voice had demanded to speak to Colonel Materi, refusing to divulge the nature of its business to any of his subordinates in the dull-brown three-story building on Ulitza Ouspenskaya, the edifice talked about in furtive whispers by the average Russian in the street. With good reason: It was the headquarters of the dreaded KGB.

Four sentences and the caller had clicked off, his caddish deed accomplished.

Colonel Materi had stood mute for a moment, then allowed an unthinking "Bozheh moy! My God!" to escape from his trembling gash. And a tactful, "Who does not exist," in the event his secretary, Sergeant Toma Treshkova, might note in her daily report that he had let slip a decadent religious expletive.

The colonel started to play back the phone message he had taped. "Colonel Materi," the caller had begun, "this is Rotten Roger Colfax with information of the most vital importance concerning a plot instigated against the Soviet Union by the State of Israel known by the code name 'Operation Matzohball.' The sample house assembled by Israel for display at the Moscow International Home Show in the Institute of Architecture is made entirely of matzoh, its exterior cloaked by a capitalistic substance known as Reynolds Wrap so that you will be led to believe it is aluminum siding. It is the plan of M 33 and 1/3 to dismantle the house at the conclusion of the show this evening and disseminate pieces of the matzoh to key leaders of Jewish communities throughout the Soviet Union, each particle stamped with the Hebrew words 'Take Heart; You Are Not Forgotten,' thus reviving the kinship between the Zionist nation and its brethren here. In addition, the man posing as the spiritual advisor of the Israeli delegation at the Home Show is no rabbi, but, in fact----"

The last words of the sentence were smothered by the deep bass of a lean, hawk-faced man in the uniform of a general who had poked his head into Materi's office. A general he was, General Gregori Bolshyeeyit, commander of the Internal Affairs Section of the External Affairs Division of KGB.

"Colonel Materi. A word, please."

"Da, Comrade General!" barked Materi, leaping to attention. His stiffened hand smashed the portion of skull above his right eye in a smart, punishing salute. Pain flooded his face; an angry red flush crept over the bulletlike bald head. He staggered for a second, clutched his desk to steady his swaying body.

General Bolshyeeyit refrained from permitting a grin to purse his thin, ascetic lips. The general knew quite well that there was a steel plate in Colonel Materi's head, the result of a terrible wound suffered on a dangerous mission behind the German lines in World War Two, when a tiny vial of nitroglycerin secreted in the sexual organs of a female Gestapo agent had gone off during an exhaustive search by the colonel. Bolshyeeyit also knew that his deliberately frequent appearances (with the concomitant necessity for saluting) would someday cause the colonel to drive the plate into a highly vulnerable portion of his brain, destroying himself on the spot. A confidential surgeon's report on Colonel Materi's monthly head X rays had apprised him that precisely 100 more of those enthusiastic salutes would achieve the desired result.

"Colonel, how do you plan to counterattack 'Operation Matzohball,' as our colleagues in the Israeli secret service have picaresquely named this amusing little venture?"

Materi's gash of a mouth dropped open. "How did----"

"I know all things, Colonel," the general cut in brusquely. "That is why I occupy the office I do."

"Comrade General," Colonel Materi began haltingly. "I should enjoy the privilege of smashing this Zionist plot myself. After all, the telephone call from this Rotten Roger Colfax, obviously a pseudonym used by a traitor in Israel's M 33 and 1/3, came directly to me."

"Granted," said General Bolshyeeyit, dragging deeply on an expensive Mother-of-Pearlman cigarette holder. Materi noticed with surprise--and satisfaction--that there was no cigarette in it. Excellent, he thought. This superior of mine is not infallible after all. I shall yet hold his job someday.

General Bolshyeeyit continued. "Now, Colonel Materi, you have my leave to crush this Zionist conspiracy. But take heed. If your informant, this Rotten Roger Colfax, is correct, the so-called rabbi may be an exceedingly difficult man to deal with. Have you men you can trust?"

"To be sure," said Materi. "I have sent for two very tough, capable men, Nik[olai Federenko and Alexei Norelco. They will accompany me and stand watch outside the Institute."

General Bolshyeeyit's brow wrinkled. "Federenko I know of. An absolute brute and well fitted for this kind of work. I, however, am not acquainted with Norelco. You can vouch for him, I trust?"

"He is from my home province, General. I have known him since he was a little shaver. Stupid, as all peasants are, of course, but massively constructed and doglike in devotion. He would lay down his life for me."

"I hope that will not be necessary," said the general. "Well, khorosho! In that case I shall wish you a speedy conclusion to this absurdly pathetic Israeli affair. Dobri noch, Colonel."

"I shall not fail you or KGB, Comrade General," the Materi gash twisted in sheer fervor. And as though a jack-in-the-box touched by a spring, he leaped to his feet and once again brought that rigid hand to his brow in a rapier slash of a salute, exploding a white-hot ball of agony in his skull. He moaned aloud.

Again General Bolshyeeyit managed a straight face. That one must have taken a terrible toll of Materi's tortured tissue, he reckoned. "Ninety-nine, Colonel Materi," he said softly and, returning the salute, strode off in his usual measured step.

Slowly, gingerly, Materi let his fingertips steal across his churning, pain-smitten head. It must be ignored, he told himself; time to work. "Sergeant Treshkova," the colonel called out, and she appeared at the door. "Bring me the dossier of this Hebrew spy," he snapped, scribbling a name on a pad and handing it to her.

He pored over the folder of material pertaining to the Hebrew agent in question. With an American-made Bic pen, which operated somewhat haphazardly on paper but was excellent for writing on ice, he underlined a Hebrew word, "mezuzah," a word that meant the tiny cylindrical symbol of the ancient faith worn about the neck by all observant Jews. It contained a portion of the sacred scrolls.

But not this man's mezuzah!

"This religious artifact," he read from the dossier, "has been transmuted into a murderous device. By pressing the Star of David on its front a sharp needle is released upon whose tip may be found an instantaneously acting nerve poison called Molochamovis-B. The Hebrew word Molochamovis is Biblical in origin. Let the agents of our service beware. It means 'The Angel of Death!' "

From another folder, this one containing various miscellaneous materials dealing with Jewish history, customs, peculiarities, he removed the present year's Jewish calendar. He looked at his Russian calendar, matched it against the corresponding date on the Jewish one.

"Ah ... ha!" he said knowingly. "According to this, the Passover holiday is a week away. Rotten Roger's data seems to fit in perfectly. It certainly would take a few days for couriers in Moscow's Jewish community to ferry the matzoh to their coreligionists in other cities. And the International Home Show does conclude this evening. What an innocent, natural thing for the Israelis to do--dismantle their sample house quite legitimately, then make arrangements for transporting it to the airport by truck. Of course, there would be a terrible misfortune between the Institute and the airport. An accident, perhaps. Or a theft. And, alas, the prefabricated house would disappear. I cannot let such a thing come to pass."

He ruminated upon the eye-opening telephone call from Rotten Roger. An unbelievable pseudonym! What was the man's purpose? Money? He had no doubts that Israel's secret service, working on the most insignificant of budgets, was underpaid. Yet, he had never before come across a case of defection concerning M 33 and 1/3 personnel. A grudge, perhaps? Failure to be promoted? Then a negative thought occurred to him. Could this "traitor" be sending KGB on some wild-goose chase to obfuscate some even more sinister Israeli plot?

Colonel Materi had been compelled to revise his opinion of Jewish determination and fortitude after reading the dossier of the Israeli operative whose snapshot lay in his hand.

This man, Materi reminded himself, is bad business. He holds an Oy Oy number in M 33 and 1/3, which grants him a license to kill! I must exercise ultracaution. To still his nerves, he pulled the cork from a bottle of kvass, kvenched his thirst kvickly and pressed the buzzer for Sergeant Treshkova.

"Send in Federenko and Norelco immediately."

They entered, both clad in shabby black suits with bell-bottom trousers covered by dirty trench coats. Federenko was first, a tall, swaggering, strong-arm man of about 45, an expert in karate, judo, aikido and ring-a-levio; then Norelco, short, squat, with enormously muscled arms which, when applied in a bear hug, could crack an opponent's vertebrae. "Now," the colonel said, "we (continued on page 198)Matzohball(continued from page 160) visit our Middle East neighbor's dream house, the house built with good taste." The gash of a mouth produced a grin in recognition of its owner's wit.

• • •

This was the prelude to the drama now being enacted in the cavernous Institute of Architecture, whose sole occupants were the bald Russian officer and the stoop-shouldered holy man upon whom he trained his automatic.

An excellently crafted disguise, Colonel Materi conceded. The face, composed of sunken, desiccated flesh, muddy brown eyes (contact lenses, of course), a typical rabbi's shiny dark-blue gabardine suit exuding odors of tobacco, schnapps and herring (clever, thought Materi. The scholar's complete indifference to his raiments. And that damned herring smell is making me unaccountably hungry), payis--the curly forelocks of the Orthodox Jewish sect, the Mea Shearim--dangling disconsolately, a faded white talis (the prayer shawl) with Manischewitz-wine-purple striping draped about the bent neck, the full-blown, unkempt black-tinged-with-gray beard and the literally crowning touch, the yarmulke, a black skullcap.

The rabbi's eyes blinked in agitation. "Sir, I am at a loss to explain the unique composition of this house. And this curious reference of yours to the 'world's most famous ghost' ... what do these bizarre things mean? I am but a humble servant of the Lord, mine and yours, though you have chosen to reject Him."

"Ah," the colonel said wearily. "I had expected more intelligence from you, Rabbi. Or should I say more accurately--Oy Oy Seven? To utilize a poor pun from your own holy works, why beat about the burning bush? Does the name Rotten Roger Colfax mean anything to you?"

A tremorous hand stroked the beard in wonderment. "I have truly never heard of that name, sir." Then the hand began to stray slowly downward, still stroking the beard.

"Stop!" the colonel snarled. "Touch that mezuzah and I shall present you with a third eye. I'll relieve you of that, Rabbi," the appellation spat with hatred. Materi's left hand snaked out, ripped the chain brutally from the old man's neck and hurled it upon the asphalt-tiled floor. His right jack boot stomped upon it again and again.

"Blasphemy! Blasphemy!" screamed the old man. "To crush the sacred scrolls as though they were a cigarette! What do you hope to accomplish by this inhuman outburst?"

"Just removing the viper's sting, dear Rabbi," and the colonel bent down and felt among the pitiful wreckage for the needle. There was none. He unrolled a mashed scrap of paper. There were Hebrew letters imprinted upon it.

And it was the colonel's turn to wear a puzzled look. "But ... but----"

"I shall demand an immediate apology from your government----"

"Silence, man of God!" The colonel's voice took on its coloration of cunning again: "Let us see if you are truly what you claim to be. We shall commence by"--the left hand shot out--"by tearing off this handsome albeit false beard."

From deep down came a volcanic, tormented roar. It tore through the lips. "Gottenu! Spare me from further indignity. Better let me die now." Tears glistened in his eyes. Materi, rattled, uncertain, tugged at it again, then the forelocks, the hair over the brow.

"They are ... real." The gash of a mouth had lost its insolence. It now twitched with indecision. "And the eyes ... filled with tears. Real tears. How could contact lenses produce such a phenomenon?"

The rabbi, heartened by Materi's rapid loss of composure, had regained his own. "Why are you doing this to me, sir?" he asked softly.

Materi looked down at his boots. "My dear Rabbi. My dear, dear Rabbi." There was penitence in his speech now. "It appears that I have made an unforgivable mistake. You are, after all, a guest in the Soviet Union, Rabbi, uh ... Rabbi ..."

"Rabbi Chair. Spiritual head of Congregation Bethel Leslie, 354 Georgie Jessel Boulevard, author of several well-known treatises on Jewish lore and law, among them 'The Stage Delicatessen--A Look at the New Judaism,' and 'The Negev Desert: World's Most Frightening Sand Trap,' co-authored with an American named Arnold Palmer."

"Impressive credentials, indeed," muttered Materi, who jotted down the data in a black-leather notebook. "Your first name, please. Rabbi Chair."

"Morris."

"Of course." He closed the notebook. "Now, I do not think there is anything to be gained by your lodging a formal protest about my admittedly ..." he sought to inject the proper adjective, "uh ... untoward methods of interrogation. I apologize for them personally. The fact remains," and he reverted to his officiousness again, "that innocent dupe though you may be, you are nonetheless guilty indirectly of complicity in this shameful plot to foment unrest among our ... uh ... respected--and quite happy--Soviet citizens of Jewish lineage. One thing is sure--'Operation Matzohball' is blown. For reasons best known to himself, one of your operatives has decided to cooperate with the Soviet Union. I shall see that this wretched house of yours is smoldering on a garbage dump in ten minutes."

"One question, sir," said Rabbi Chair. "Let us go back to your initial belief in my identity as someone other than myself. What is the mystery all about?"

"I may as well tell you, Rabbi, since it will not be helpful to you in any event. Rotten Roger, our enterprising caller, stated that you were the legendary Hebrew superhero who electrified the world with his derring-do in that over-glamorized business a year ago. You, of course, recall the affair of the infamous Lazarus Loxfinger."

His eyes widened with incredulity, the rabbi laughed. "You thought that I, sir, was----"

"Israel Bond," Materi broke in. "Or Oy Oy Seven, as he is known to your secret service. It was reported he had died of wounds incurred during the climax of the affair in the Red Sea. We naturally tended to doubt such reports. Yet, you are plainly not he. Perhaps he did, indeed, go to that reeking Jewish heaven of yours and is presently strumming the Songs of David upon his golden lyre. Enough exposition, Rabbi Chair. I shall now proceed to crumble Israel's paltry scheme to bits as one crumbles matzoh in one's hand. Too bad; it was a most interesting house. Before I order this edifice razed, why not show me around? A Cook's tour, as our capitalistic friends would call it."

"It would be my pleasure," said Rabbi Chair with a grave smile. "And since it is a Cook's tour, let me make a small pun of my own. A Cook's tour is best begun in the kitchen." And he held the front door open with the studied politeness of an Intourist guide.

"Droll, Rabbi. The kitchen, of course." Materi moved quickly about the kitchen, sniffing here and there, breaking off pieces of matzoh from walls, chairs, the table, and nibbling them. On one end of the table was a covered dish. He lifted the checkered cloth. "Ah, what is this?"

"Plastic representations of the ethnic foods to be found on a typical Jewish table. See, here is a bottle of Tab, a low-calorie soft drink. This is lox, the smoked salmon ... here is cream cheese ... and here," his finger indicated a round object with a hole in its center, "a bagel. Oh, please, sir, do not remove it from its base. It is anchored to the dish by a wire, as are all these representations. We did not want visitors to disrupt the display."

"What does it matter now?" asked Materi. If it would upset the rabbi to rip the bagel from its moorings, he would do just that. He gave the bagel a yank.

• • •

A bell rang, shattering the stillness of the deserted street. If one had tried to trace the source of the ringing, one would have been frustrated, indeed, for (continued on page 256)Matzohball(continued from page 198) on this street there were no public telephones or fire-alarm boxes. It was coming from a most unlikely place, the handle of a mop in the hands of one of a pair of shabbily attired women street cleaners.

"It's the bagel," said the mop wielder in a rich baritone voice.

"Then it's got to be trouble. The bagel only goes off when the wire is severed," answered the other woman in an even deeper bass.

"Let's get the hell in there," snapped the first crone. "It's blown. He's in trouble."

"Hold it! The two gentlemen trying to look so casual near the side entrance ... KGB boys, if I ever saw any. I can smell 'em a mile away."

The possessor of the acute olfactory sense was, of course, no woman at all, but Israeli agent Zvi Gates, he of the piercing eyes and the artificial ear. Zvi Gates, 113 in the branch, licensed to wound. Street cleaner number two was young, personable Itzhok Ben Franklin, 270, licensed to drive.

They began a measured shuffle toward the two Russian goons, Federenko and Norelco, who leaned against the loading platform smoking strong Gorki Cigarettes with one-inch gork tips.

"We clean spot right here, eh, Sonyushka?" said Zvi. Itzhok nodded and they set about mixing a powder into the battered pail of milky water. "Belter use strong powder, plenty dirty pavement here," admonished Itzhok. Zvi poured the powder into the pail, humming Moscow Evenings, but at the same time he let slip from under his petticoat a small green cube. "Pinch nose." The mixture fizzled for a second, then burst into a green gaseous ball. The two women, forefingers and thumbs squeezing their noses, held their breaths. Norelco fell forward, his head striking the side of the platform, blood spurting from a pulsating fountain of a wound. "A trap!" Federenko screamed. Coughing, choking, he barreled into the Institute.

• • •

"This piece of matzoh," said Materi. "I wrenched it from a bedroom closet door. It's different from the other." He and his rabbinical host, the Cook's tour at an end, stood in front of the house watching the bright floodlights flash rays off its silvery skin.

"Matzoh is matzoh," the rabbi said mildly. "I can't imagine there being any difference at all."

"Thicker. Yes, definitely thicker. But why?" He began to knead the fragment in his hand. Crumbs snowed upon his boot tips. And then something else fell to the floor--a shiny black sort of ribboned material. He picked it up, held it to the light. "Microfilm!"

The Materi gash turned into a sneer. And suddenly Colonel Materi realized that the stoop-shouldered savant had straightened up. He shoved the rabbi back with a flailing left hand, dug into his holster for the Walther PPK Reuther with the right, whipping it out with the lightning draw that had earned him a reputation in the KGB as "the fastest gun in the East."

This time he was not fast enough.

Even as Materi shoved him back, Rabbi Chair's right hand made a mercurial maneuver of its own, whipping the yarmulke from his head and sailing it at his Soviet guest with the power of an outback aborigine hurling a boomerang.

Five sounds fought for dominance in the Institute of Architecture:

1. The frightening, whirring sound of Rabbi Chair's yarmulke jetting toward its goal, a short, exciting marriage.

2. Clang! The marriage of the steel-lined yarmulke to its waiting, eager lover, the steel plate in the head of Colonel K. Benyah Materi.

3. Strike! Strike! The characteristic sound of the Walther PPK Reuther blazing in the misdirected right hand of the falling KGB bigwig.

4. "It's a trap! Tra----" The gas-blasted, nearly unconscious Nikolai Federenko stumbling onto the scene.

5. His tortured "aaa-eee-iii-ooo-uuu" scream gargling in his throat, torn open by Materi's two slugs.

Then, to the rabbi, the sweetest sound he'd ever heard--silence.

Two men lay on the floor of the Institute of Architecture in slowly widening pools of blood, faces contorted in the attitudes of sudden, violent death.

Israel Bond, alias Rabbi Morris Chair, dazedly wiped the coursing streamlets trickling from his brow into his eyes. Sweat, thank God, and nothing more.

He pulled out a crumpled pack of Raleighs from a vest pocket, stuck one into his trembling lips and scratched an Ohio blue-tipped match on the door of the house. Footsteps click-clacked behind him, Zvi and Itzhok chugging in.

Zvi spoke. "Oy Oy Seven, sorry this one"--he kicked the sole of Federenko's shoe--"got away. Gas got the other, but this guy had a little extra staying power. And our KGB luminary in the tunic. What got him, Bond?"

Zvi, of course, was hurling a challenge at his idol, Oy Oy Seven, whose ability to inject scintillating humor into even the most perilous circumstances was well known to all his acquaintances. And basically ignored. Except by the jocular Zvi, who loved a hearty joke.

Bond smiled weakly, threw his Saturday punch. (His commitment to Judaism was an integral part of his make-up.) "What got Colonel K. Benyah Mated, dear Zvi? He made one fatal mistake. He used his head."

Zvi literally purpled, a soft wheeze escalated into a howling hurricane of laughter. Slapping his knee, he lost balance and fell heavily against the point of Federenko's shoe, bloodying his nose. "Used his head! Oh, mommeleh, what a mind! Dig, Itzhok? He used his head!"

"OK," grinned a satisfied Bond. "Fun and games over. Get this house dismantled and into the truck. Your contacts are meeting you at the Reese Shapiro Bridge at midnight. Get cracking!"

As the two younger Israelis loaded the matzoh segments onto the rickety old E. B. White truck, he gave them a brief, perceptive rundown on his minutes of torment at the hands of Colonel Materi. Bond glanced down at his fallen foe again and snapped his fingers.

"Boys, they'll be looking high and low for Rabbi Morris Chair for sure. They know----" He cut himself short; he would not bring up the matter of the traitor at this crucial moment in the plot--"uh, I have a feeling they might be looking for the rabbi when the colonel doesn't check back in. But here's my passport out of this Godforsaken people's paradise."

"Real Oy Oy thinking, boychickl," enthused Zvi. "Take his papers, his car, the whole schmear. Who the hell will have the guts to stop a KGB titan?"

"Another, bigger KGB titan, you schnook," said Bond severely. "They'll all be out looking for him, especially General Bolshyeeyit, the section boss. If I can just grab a plane out of here ..."

Minutes later, Bond was sartorially resplendent in Materi's togs, his beard and payis shaved away by Zvi's .22 Remington. The only jarring note was the pants cuffs, which ended at his knees.

"The bodies, Oy Oy Seven," said Zvi. "What about 'em?"

Bond's eyes were mischievous. "Watch, lads. We're going to make the bodies disappear. And as an added fringe benefit, a ten-million-dollar installation, the Institute of Architecture."

Zvi's eyes popped. "Gevaldt! How?"

Bond removed the prayer shawl from his neck, kissed it reverently. He felt for the fringes on the right side of the shawl, pulled one out to a length of some 20 inches. "The fuse, gentlemen. The entire talis is woven out of explosive plastique."

"Ha Lavi, huh?" Zvi asked, answering his own question. Lavi Ha Lavi, quartermaster of M 33 and 1/3, creator of diabolical devices for espionage, such as the yarmulke.

"Colonel," Bond lit another match, touched it to the elongated fringe, "let's leave it to the angels, and get the hell out of here. It's now fifteen minutes to boom time."

• • •

A day later General Bolshyeeyit put down the copy of Izvestia, sighed and again stared into the face of Israel Bond.

It was the same snapshot in the same dossier the late, lamented Colonel Materi had perused shortly before his untimely departure. Effected, General Bolshyeeyit knew beyond question, by this handsome agent of death.

Rumors flew like ICBMs around Moscow concerning the fiery destruction of the Institute of Architecture.

To A. Schlepin, shadowy security chieftain of the Soviet Union, the general had been forced to tell the truth (at least his version). He blamed Materi for an unsanctioned independent act. "He deserved to die, the stupid glory seeker," the general said coldly, "tackling a man like this Israeli with only himself and two others."

Bolshyeeyit knew from the glacial quality of the interview that he must improvise a way back into Schlepin's good graces, and fast.

"Comrade Minister," he began guardedly. "What ... what if KGB could revenge itself upon the Zionist state for this outrage?"

"How, General? Without admitting to the world that little Israel was able to wreak an act of monumental destruction upon the proud Russian bear in the very heart of his capital?"

"True," the general nodded. "But the world at large does not know of Israel's daring. Perhaps our world, the world of intelligence, knows by now, and it is that world we can impress--by destroying the very Israeli who was the death instrument of poor Materi, and the bomber in the Institute job."

"Israel Bond," said Schlepin reflectively. And Bolshyeeyit knew by the gleam of interest in the minister's eye that he had temporarily saved his spurs.

"I see the merit of your proposal," Schlepin said. "But, General Bolshyeeyit, I tell you this. This is your last chance to redeem yourself."

• • •

"Da, my English is perfect, General Bolshyeeyit. Impeccable. Without the slightest trace of an accent. Why do you ask?" The query came from a low, attractive voice.

Bolshyeeyit did not reply for a moment, content to feast his ravenous eyes upon the supple, voluptuous naked body beside him. A most un-Russian body, he admitted. Our women are runty, bovine.

The general was now in the apartment of Corporal Anna Annatevka--a small hideaway which he paid 300 rubles a month to use. For another 300 a month he had the privileged use of its willowy occupant as well.

"I have been admiring this well-proportioned body of yours, Corporal Annatevka. I wonder how it would look lying beside the tanned, trim body of an Israeli agent."

"A curious wonderment, my General. Do you propose that it should lie next to such a body?" The corporal was shrewd; she knew her general was not one to conjecture idly.

He stretched out his arm, pulled a document from the inside pocket of the tunic lying on a chair near the bed. "Look at this man."

It was Bond's snapshot.

She gazed intently at the gray eyes. "He looks very handsome. And very dangerous."

"He is both. And you, my dear Annushka, are to consort with him, let him taste of your delectable loveliness. And kill him."

• • •

At the precise moment General Bolshyeeyit was scrutinizing the languorous form of Corporal Annatevka, his tool of revenge, his target, Bond, was in London accepting an important phone call.

"Tel Aviv, Israel, calling. Mother Margolies on the line."

Mother Margolies? Calling direct? His steely right fist clenched, the Speidel watch band snapping off in his anxiety. It was unthinkable of Mother to make a personal call unless a Code 3-D condition existed--Danger Doom Disaster! It signified to any thinking Israeli "op" that something was amiss.

Mother Emma Margolies, known to an adoring humanity as the kindly, wise soul of 81 golden years whose renowned cooking (Betty Crocker asked her for recipes) was savored by lip-smacking gourmets from somewhere east of Suez to China 'crost the bay. Her celebrated chicken soup graced the elegant tables of presidents, kings, Indian rajahs, British rock-'n'-roll stars. Yes, she was everybody's Jewish mother, dispensing equal dosages of gastronomic delights and straight-from-the-heart proverbs of universal understanding such as: "You can't teach an old dog new tricks. But you can teach an old dog to teach a young dog old tricks."

"Shalom, Oy Oy Seven," her voice pierced the crackling static of the overseas cable. "How was your Slavic interlude?"

"The sale was transacted. However, three directors of the rival company were taken off the board. And one of their factories was destroyed."

"So I have been reading in the Moscow papers. Unfortunate."

"I must inform the factory that it appears one of our salesmen has been wooed away by the rival firm. He has been selling them information about next year's line."

In Tel Aviv, Mother sucked thoughtfully on a piece of rock candy clamped in her dentures, sipped from a glass of hot tea at her elbow. A traitor! "Who is the unethical salesman?"

Bond bit on the Raleigh between his own teeth. "I cannot say. But I feel he is one of the sales task force that accompanied me to Moscow. But we can better discuss this problem when I return home for the first Passover Seder night five days hence."

"I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Bond. A distressing sales problem has come up in our branch office at Station WI. Detailed information will be available from Ben Bon Ami, whose address may be found in the current catalog. There is a plane leaving tomorrow at eight A.M. On it will be the other three members of your 'Matzohball' team--Gates, Franklin, Nochum Spector. You will need all the assistance you can get. And perhaps during the course of your next enterprise you can unearth the identity of our unethical salesman. Shalom ... and remember, the fool plays his cards close to his vest, but the wise man has five aces under his vest."

Long after M had rung off, Bond stood quietly, his handsome dark face caught up by a frown of deep concentration. Rotten luck! This Passover would find him far from his beloved Israel, involved in heaven alone knew what kind of fearful assignment.

From a thick black company ledger titled "Soup Sales" (a funny name, Bond thought, and a natural for some comedian), he extracted a slim pamphlet hidden in the binding and unrolled it. His fingers skimmed the contents. "Station WI." The West Indies. Under that category he found the name Ben Bon Ami, 41 Cinco de Finko, Vera Hruba.

Vera Hruba! Good God! The capital city of the sinkhole of the world! Israel Bond was going to the pestilential, revolution-racked, murder-ridden Caribbean island of--El Tiparillo!

• • •

It had been a distressing day for General Bolshyeeyit. There had been a head-splitting paperwork job tossed in his lap by Minister Schlepin. The lazy bastard! Schlepin, an avid reader of American newspapers, had seen an opportunity for a potent propaganda outburst against the United States. "Draft me a powerful speech accusing the Americans of violating the treaty against exploding horrible bombs."

"What shall we use as proof, Comrade Minister? This is a serious charge and must be backed up concretely."

"Fool! Cite the recent New York World's Fair," barked Schlepin.

In this irritable frame of mind Bolshyeeyit fairly exploded when the switchboard operator said timidly, "A thousand pardons, General, but I have a long-distance call from a Gospodin Colfax."

Colfax! The very man who might extricate me from this predicament.

"This is General Bolshyeeyit."

"General, this is Rotten Roger Colfax. I have some information which may be of use to you. But this time it will cost you."

"How much, Gospodin Colfax?"

"One million rubles. To be delivered by tomorrow. It must be left with a Dr. Nu at the Temple of Hate in El Tiparillo. Your people on that unhappy island will know of the establishment. If it is delivered, I shall call many more times with tasty items ... at a price, of course."

Bolshyeeyit, a man used to making decisions of paramount importance in a hurry, said, "I accept your terms. The money will be there, I promise you. Now, what is the information you have?"

"By now, you know that I am attached to M 33 and 1/3. I was part of the band that perpetrated the killing of your colonel and his two aides and the blowing up of your Institute. The leader of that strike was Israel Bond, our beloved secret agent."

Was that apposition cast in a sarcastic vein? This man must have a personal vendetta going against Bond. It can be highly useful to me.

"Where is Bond now?"

"He leaves London eight A.M. tomorrow. The plane will make a stop at Miami. Since that airline does not go to El Tiparillo, he will be compelled to take the only line that services the island, Tailspin Tannenbaum's Flying Aardvark Airways. It leaves at nine A.M. Miami time the following day."

"I am grateful for that data, Gospodin Colfax. How can I contact you for further information?"

"You may leave word at the Temple of Hate. But don't call me; I'll call you." Rotten Roger signed off.

Bolshyeeyit pounded his fist into his palm. "Khorosho! There is time. It will be close, but there is time." He dialed a number. "Annushka? There is no time to waste. Pack your bags and be prepared to be picked up in fifteen minutes. My chauffeur will take you to the airport. You are about to bask under the famed sunny skies of Miami, Florida, with your target, Israel Bond."

• • •

Ahead of Bond's cab lay the airport and the superliner for Miami. He wisely tripled the amount of his flight insurance, leaving Mother Margolies as his principal beneficiary, with ten percent allocated to the Espionage Tzeddukah Charity Fund, set up to provide black mink coats for the mourning widows of Israeli operatives.

On his way to the first-class Golden Circle area he spotted Zvi, Itzhok and Nochum, but gave them no glance of recognition. They were ensconced in the 12-seat-across tourist section, appearing somewhat cramped and unhappy. Rank hath its privileges, he admitted, but an Oy Oy holder deserved the luxurious touches befitting his station. Golden Circle travelers dined sumptuously on Sea Islands, Georgia, pheasant under Chagall stained glass, swigged chilled Jive 7 wine in ice buckets, served by bright-eyed, slinky stewardesses in crisp, topless uniforms. For the tourist crowd it was a box of Nabisco Fig Newtons and orange Kool Aid, served by hostesses who looked like Marie Dressler.

Yes, there they sat ... Zvi, Itzhok, Nochum. Three lads who had helped him tweak the nose of the Russian bear. He could not believe even now that one of them was the traitorous Rotten Roger Colfax. Which one?

Zvi and Itzhok had done the lugging and the strong-arm work; Nochum had acted as liaison and kept in constant telephonic contact with the main office. Telephone! He could have been the caller! But then, any one of them could have stolen a moment to buzz Materi.

What did he know of them, anyway? Zvi, Jack-of-all-trades, master of disguises, had joined M 33 and 1/3 several years ago. He knew Zvi longed for a higher designation than 113. "You get all the glamorous assignments, Oy Oy Seven," Zvi had once jested. Was he insanely jealous deep down? And would such envy impel him to treachery? Zvi Gates with his artificial ear (Once, after the accident that is described in Loxfinger--Pocket Books Inc., 1965, $1, and well worth purchasing--he had said to Bond, "Look at my new ear, Oy Oy Seven. You can hardly tell it from the real article." And Bond, flashing a light into the ear and spotting the eardrum, had riposted: "Gee, dad, a Wurlitzer!"), a tragedy caused by my carelessness. Could that have triggered a resentment which turned to all-consuming hatred?

Itzhok Ben Franklin, a new appointee. He doesn't chortle at my rapid-fire jokes. That certainly makes him suspect. The young buck was a taciturn sort; he was, Bond knew, an honor graduate of the Technion Institute, which turned out Israel's scientific brainpower. Did he consider the low-grade chores allotted to him beneath his intellectual merit?

And Nochum, M's nephew, a laughable elf who had failed so miserably in a succession of government posts that, thanks to the intercession of his aunt, he had been placed in intelligence. He had always begged, "Please, Oy Oy Seven, teach me to kill and grab broads and order food just like you do?"

Bond had snickered, "Nochum, stay safe in the playpen. This game is for big boys." Perhaps I was thoughtless at the time. Would that remark have turned Nochum against me and Eretz Israel?

He suddenly became conscious of a rustling in the next seat, a pair of astonishing legs sheathed in Lady Damita Jo hose, following them up past taut thighs, a bewitchingly tucked-in waist, two full jutting breasts straining to liberate themselves from a satiny black Tuesday Weld--model bra, to a face ... and what a face! Piquant, amusing, with two ebony eyes dit-dotting an unmistakable SOS for SEX. Hands smooth, ringless, fingernails tinted tastefully with Revlon's new Annette Funicello pudgy pink shade. The hair, also ebony, in a chic Shetland pony tail, neatly tied with a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

"Hello-o-o-o," he began. A traditional opener; he'd play it by ear. "Traveling together, are we?"

"We are on the same aircraft. It is a distinct possibility."

There's a keen mind to go with that loveliness! "May I introduce myself?"

"You may as well. I can't do it for you."

Another flash of wit! I could, he told himself, fall in love with a girl like this in 20 seconds. "My name is Bond. Israel Bond."

"Mine is Connery. Fawn Connery." And she glanced at her watch. "Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Kiss me."

Four lips (divided evenly between them) fused in a searing instant outside the boundaries of mortal time and space. One of Bond's gold inlays slipped like a molten stream down his windpipe.

• • •

Jet motors vibrating, the swan neck of Fawn Connery in the crook of his bronzed muscular arm, Israel Bond stared vacantly from the window at the earth below.

"What brings you aboard, my sweet?" Bond probed.

"Oh, business in Miami. Then a vacation on El Tiparillo."

The gray eyes narrowed. "What in God's name would a lovely thing like you do on El Tiparillo? The whole island is sheer madness."

"Maybe I need a little sheer madness," she whispered. "Your kind, Bond." Her hand skipped across his groin.

"There'll be a long layover in Miami before tomorrow's plane to El Tiparillo, my Fawn with the fawn eyes. Enough time for a long layover, if I've made myself clear," he said huskily.

"I just might buy it, Israel."

• • •

Midnight, read the hands of the Baby Westclox on the bureau in room 1818 at Miami Beach's Palmetto Roach Hotel. She lay naked, her lips brushing those of the sleeping Israel Bond with butterfly kisses. She gazed longingly at the bronzed body which, melded with her own, had taken them flying to the moon, where they played among the stars. She recalled with bitterness the other men she'd known--piggish, greedy, runtyclods like Colonel Materi, General Bolshyeeyit and the rest. How they had used her as a man uses a tissue, crushes it and throws it into a litter basket! But this man, this wonderful man, the man she had pledged to destroy, he had cracked open wide the dam in the reservoir of her being. I do believe this wonderful fool is in love with me, she thought. True, he is a killer, yet there is a boyish quality of trust on his cruel face that tells me he cares. I'm trembling, she thought. A man has made me tremble. And he is the man I must kill!

From her handbag she took a tube of lipstick and twisted it. Out slid the cosmetic. She had only to press it between those lips and he would die of cyanide poisoning in a few seconds. Her hand moved slowly, closer to the lips of Bond.

"No!" Was that her own voice screaming? "I can't kill you! I can't!"

Bond was now an uncoiled spring; his body lanced out, hand tearing into his nearby jacket for the tiny Paul Derringer. He stopped. Her face was cupped in her hands; an anguished moan heaved out of her breast. "I--I can't kill you. I love you, Bond."

He put two Raleighs between his lips, torched the ends of both with a waxy Mexican match which he ignited with a sweep across her buttocks. "Take one."

Still snuffling, she inhaled gratefully.

"Now," he began coldly. "Let us have the facts. Obviously you are not a simple vacationer. You were sent to kill me. By whom? And how?"

"KGB," she whimpered. "And with this." She guiltily handed him the lipstick, looking away.

He sniffed it, made a grimace. "Cyanide!" And smirkingly: "The true lover's bouquet."

"You will not believe this, but I love you. I loved you from the moment I sat beside you on the plane, the moment you entered my body with your curious admixture of brutishness and tenderness." She looked away from those clear gray eyes. "You slept serenely, my love. I could have inserted the lipstick at any time."

"True," he nodded. "But is this perhaps a ploy to gain my further confidence, Fawn ... or whatever your real name is?"

"It is Anna Annatevka, Corporal, to be precise, acting under the express orders of General Bolshyeeyit, who has vowed to repay you for that episode in Moscow. Oh, you fool!" The tears streamed anew. "Can you not see that in betraying my cause I have sealed my own death warrant? I was to have called him tonight with the news of my completed mission."

"Forgive me, Anna," he said, holding her next to a heart moistened by a woman's tears. "I have lived so long in this dirty business that I tend to forget people have true feelings. And now, if you are recovered somewhat, may I offer you a little B & T?"

"B & T?"

"Brutishness and tenderness, my dear heart."

Her eyes ashine, she whispered, "Yes, oh yes. Oh yes!"

And the Bondian moon rocket tensed again and zoomed into Orbit Two.

• • •

"She ... she is in love with him?"

Rotten Roger's voice at the other end in Miami was venomous. "Of course! She cannot keep her hands off that athletic body. You disappoint me, General Bolshyeeyit. Did you think that any woman could be immune to the blandishments of our Hebrew Hercules? No, General, Oy Oy Seven has literally balled up your works. But here they come. Goodbye, General. On to El Tiparillo!"

Bolshyeeyit screamed over the intercom. "Treshkova! Bring me the complete A file at once."

Despite his shock, he had retained some of his professionalism. If my love-smitten corporal is his concubine now, she will recognize my next messenger of death; she will warn him. This will have to be handled by a man outside KGB. In the A file (A for Assassins) would be such a cold-blooded, kill-for-hire individual, one who sold his murderous talents to the highest bidder.

He leafed through the file.

Within five minutes he had weeded out all potential assassins, save one. "Of course! This is the only one worthy of consideration. This defection of Anna's has unhinged me, else I would have gone to him from the start. Sergeant," he said in a kindly tone. "Tell me what you think of this man."

She looked at the documents. For the first time he saw her blanch.

"Da, Comrade General. He is your man. May I say that truthfully I pity his victim. I would pity anyone, no matter what his crime, whose path crosses that of Torquemada LaBonza."

• • •

"Here is your money, señor, ten thousand habaneras, your passport and photographs of the man and woman you are to kill. She is one of ours who has defected. He is an Israeli secret agent. The general requests that you remove the religious symbol from his neck after it is done and present it to me here a week hence as proof of your success. Are you clear as to your mission?"

The swarthy man in the flamboyant purple-and-yellow-hued gypsy costume nodded. He fastidiously smoothed out the thick roll of bills, placed them into a purse in his hip pocket. Then he grabbed the bottle of Verdoux white wine by its base, smashed the neck off against the table's edge and let its contents flow down his throat. He rose to his full height, five feet, two inches, bowed with a baleful smile that revealed a brilliant mouth and a garlicky breath, and walked out of the cheap bistro, the Alter Cockatoo, at soixante-quatre Arnold Cing Boulevard in the Algerian quarter of Paris.

Shuddering, the KGB contact man, Vice-Consul Piotr Durak, swallowed his own Pernod as if to wash away the evil miasma he had felt in the man's presence.

"Do not expect LaBonza to answer you," the general had explained in his telephone conversation. "It is not for nothing that Torquemada LaBonza is known as 'The Silent One.' No one has ever heard his voice, except his victims. And they have all died in a bizarre manner, laughing insanely even as their life's blood ebbed from their torn bodies."

He recalled the rest of Bolshyeeyit's briefing. "We know very little about LaBonza, my dear Durak. We know that he is about thirty and was born out of wedlock to Maria Elena Smetana, a Basque gypsy, and Benvenuto LaBonza, an itinerant Corsican vaudevillian, in the back of a caravan wagon. His mother died at childbirth and he was raised by his father and a succession of paramours. The father, a chronic drunkard, eked out a miserable living as a third-rate impressionist of American motion-picture stars in seedy theaters throughout Europe. He was killed in a knife fight when the boy was twelve, the rearing of the youth left to one Zorba Kokanakis, a Greek bartender in Smyrna. Thus the foundation for an embittered life was laid. As yet we know neither how he became an assassin nor why he does not speak. We do know of his work the last five years, the killing of the Yugoslavian provocateur Wsldz Ljmc by strangulation, the poisoning of the junketing Katangan Board of Trade by curare mixed in their Junket ... many others. He has killed for the Union Corse, the Union Sicilione, the Union Teamster and most recently for the Terrorist Union for Suppressing Hebrews."

"Tush!" Durak had whispered, scarcely daring to speak that dreaded name.

"Yes, Tush! He can be found usually at ..." and here Bolshyeeyit had given Durak the name and location of the squalid café. "One thing more. He is easily recognized when he smiles. With his ill-gotten fees he not only had his rotting teeth replaced but his entire mouth structure. He is also known as 'The Man with the Golden Gums.' "

• • •

"That's it, chums," said Tannenbaum, the jolly pilot. "Down there to your right. El Tiparillo."

Israel Bond, his forefinger idly dawdling inside the belly button of Anna, looked out of the window of the old, sputtering B-17, flagship (in fact, the only ship) of Tailspin Tannenbaum's Flying Aardvark Airways. A solicitous sun sent a shaft through the mist, illuminating the cigar-shaped island Tannenbaum had pointed out--El Tiparillo!

"What is that'' golden stretch of land that cuts the island in two, Tailspin?"

"That's the famous no-man's-land zone called The Band. It divides East El Tiparillo from West El Tiparillo. Or EET and WET, as we call 'em for short."

Besides Anna and Bond, the only other passengers were his Israeli trio and a wild-eyed, tiny Negro with a Vandyke beard and horn-rimmed glasses, in a tightly fitted pair of lemon slacks and matching suede sandals, set off by a leopardskin cocktail pullover and a crimson beret. He did not attempt to converse with the others, content to mumble from time to time and scribble on a yellow pad.

Before Bond could ponder further on the unknown traveler, Tailspin cried: "Buckle up for safety, folks. We're coming in."

The next thing he knew he was roasting in midday tropical heat, his hand pumped vigorously by a moonfaced man in a Panama suit. "Shalom, Mr. Bond. I am Ben Bon Ami, Israel's consul on El Tiparillo. We will converse in my vehicle."

"Let's hold up on that until I drop the lady at a hotel. Can you recommend one?"

"One has been already arranged for you and your team. I was not expecting the lady."

"She is with me," Bond said. "Let me get her situated first."

The consul pulled into a driveway, chattered away in Spanish to a bespangled bell captain. "This is Bell Captain Sanchez. He will take the lady and her bags to a fine room in this estimable hotel, the Caribe Milton. Shalom, señorita."

• • •

"This, gentlemen," said Bon Ami, back in his office and very much the assured diplomat in his own surroundings, "is El Tiparillo." His pointer touched a dot on the wall map. "As you can see, we are in Vera Hruba, the capital city of West El Tiparillo, some fifteen miles from The Band, which, by agreement after the armistice in 1963, cuts this unhappy isle in twain."

Bond's ears, carefully tuned into the exposition, had caught something else. A buzzing. Circling around the overhead light set in a crystal chandelier was a wasp.

Bon Ami spotted it, too. "One of the innumerable pests in these parts. Now, in 1962 leftist elements, Castroites, Muscovites and Pekingites, ceased their internal struggle for power long enough to call a temporary truce and unite behind a Communist tool, General Umberto D. Diaz, who attempted to take over the island from a foundering regime. The forces backing democracy got behind a moderate, General Wesson y Oyl, and thus a bloody civil war ensued. The United States backed Wesson y Oyl, sent in arms, matériel, freedom fighters--guerrillas who had been trained in leadership for this type of warfare at a CIA-sponsored camp in Fort Lauderdale--money, etc. All was going badly for Wesson y Oyl when a sudden stroke of luck tipped the balance. The CIA guerrillas were wiped out to a man in an ambush set up by Peking's man here, wily old V' Teh Minh. Bereft of CIA leadership, Wesson y Oyl found himself forced to wage his own battles, of which he won the next six, driving the leftist coalition troops to their half of the island. Both sides were vitiated by then and ready to call it a day. The UN negotiated a settlement in which the island was halved, set up The Band which its truce commission patrols. Am I boring you, Oy Oy Seven? I see your eyes are wandering."

"Don't move, Bon Ami. Just keep perfectly still and do what I tell you," said Bond in a low, tense voice. He had seen the loathsome thing crawl out of a crack in the ceiling and make its way to a spot about a foot over the consul's head.

It was a tarantula.

Black, hairy, big as a dinner plate.

Bond felt his body shaking involuntarily. Only M and the section psychiatrist knew of his Melmacophobia, a fear of awakening in the dead of night to find dinner plates crawling all over his body.

The wasp zoomed near the tarantula.

"I think that Dame Nature will resolve our problem," said Bond, his hand clutching the front end of his wing-tipped Florsheim cordovan, which he had planned to use to squash the huge arachnid. "The wasp and the spider are mortal enemies."

But the combat never came. The wasp alighted next to the tarantula. The two creatures undulated their feelers, actually touched. As though it had received some message, the wasp made a beeline for the open window and disappeared.

"Kill the goddamn filthy, ugly thing, Bond! Crush it ... squash it to smithereens!" It was little Nochum Spector, white as a sheet done by new-improved Blue Cheer. He saw Bond's quizzical expression. "Damn it, you phony hero! Scared of a spider? I'll kill the loathsome thing myself!" Nochum jumped on a chair, swung his own shoe violently. It caught the lifted front legs which bared the fangs. The tarantula thrashed about in its death throes, fell with a plop into the corner of the room. "Kill it! Squash it!" screamed Spector again and lifted his own frail leg to administer the quietus.

"Hold it!" Bond snapped. "Don't be so impetuous, Nochum," he said casually. "I do believe we should look at this first." He made a sudden pinching movement, wrested something from the top of the crushed tarantula.

Said Bond, scrutinizing a tiny disc about the size of a jelly bean held delicately between his forefinger and thumb, "I saw something on its back catch the light and gleam as it fell. This. What do you make of it, Itzhok? We can use that Technion know-how of yours."

Ben Franklin took the object, held it up to the light. A low whistle escaped his lips. "You won't believe this. It's a tiny transistorized listening device!"

"Geez, I'm sorry," Spector said. "I can't stand those damn hairy things. I wanted to crush it into a paste." Contrition was on his baby face.

Bond did not comment on his apology. "Gottenu! On this damn island even the bugs are bugged!" And heard Zvi's appreciative bellow.

"An interesting problem and I wish we had time to delve into it further, Mr. Bond," said Bon Ami. "But you lads have been called in for a reason, a damn important one. Our problem is here." His hand fanned out on one side of the island. "This is WET, West El Tiparillo. This X represents Israel's Peace Corps facility, Camp Kuchalein, which, as you see, is perilously perched on Mount Maidenhead, overlooking the jungle-covered Valley of the Blind. There is a famous motto coined by our own M about this place: 'In the Valley of the Blind an optometrist shouldn't set up an office altogether.' "

"The old biddy's always coming up with crap like that," Nochum put in.

Bon Ami ignored Nochum. "The problem is this: We were asked to send a Peace Corps unit by General Wesson y Oyl because of the impressive record our Corps has made in Africa and Asia. For a while things went well. The natives, a poverty-stricken, superstitious lot who still practice local variants of voodoo, black magic, Satanism, et al., accepted our people. We helped them grow food scientifically, tended to their sick, set up schools, credit agencies, garment factories, in general made our presence welcome on West El Tiparillo. Until a few weeks ago. Then scurrilous rumors began circulating throughout their villages that we were there to exploit them. An old native man who died of natural causes despite the efforts of our Dr. Marvin Browndorf was said to have succumbed to evil magic. Three of our volunteers were wounded by nocturnal snipers. Our potable water was spoiled by poison dumped into a well. Thank heaven, we had the foresight to put in an ample supply of seltzer. The worst thing happened two nights ago. A little boy was kidnaped from his village; this note left behind. Read it, Bond."

It was on a rough piece of parchment. " 'You will never see your Pablito again, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia. His blood will be offered to our pagan god as part of a Passover ritual. Be thankful that we of the Israeli Peace Corps have chosen his body to sacrifice on the altar.' "

Bond's chin pulled up belligerently. "Damn it! It's that vilest, basest of those hoary anti-Semitic canards! The lie that we must spill the blood of a non-Jewish child for Passover. Who's behind this, Bon Ami?"

The moonface shrugged its brows, "Anyone of the groups I mentioned, Peking, Moscow, Castro. They all have a deep interest in undermining us. Take a closer look at this map; you should become well acquainted with the terrain around Camp Kuchalein."

"What's this dot near the Peace Corps camp?" quizzed Itzhok.

"That's a convent, OLEO. Our Lady of the Eastern Order. Nice folks. They've been working unofficially with us on many projects. It's right on the top of the peak, if you'll notice. Halfway down is this point, CC, a summer colony for mediocre artists and musicians called Camp Camp. Weirdos. We don't bother with 'em too much. And here in the valley ..." The pointer tip rested on a representation of a pagoda. "Stay the hell away from this place. It's the Temple of Hate. Run by a Chinaman named Dr. Nu. Quite unique, really. He operates a year-round resort for hate groups from all over the globe. 'Come here to hate at a special rate,' he advertises. All the pariahs pop up at his place: the Birchers, the K. K. K., Black Nationalists, some neo-Nazi groups from Deutschland."

"Our trouble could be coming from there, you know," Zvi said thoughtfully.

"Maybe. But until we know for sure, stay away. Now, you boys will head out for Camp Kuchalein in the early bright. You can join a burro supply train that leaves from in front of the consulate at five A.M. I want to talk to Bond alone for a minute. You'll excuse us."

Alone, Bon Ami turned to Bond. "This came for you." He pulled a package from a closet. "It's from Lavi Ha Lavi. Came in this morning's pouch from Tel Aviv."

"Thanks and shalom, Bon Ami. You'll be hearing from me." And Bond, Ha Lavi's package under his arm, left and trudged down Calle José Jiménez on his way to the Caribe Milton. I'm in for it now, he thought sardonically. Now I must tackle the whole damn Communist world, rescue a kidnaped child from God knows where or the Peace Corps will be subject to a Latin blood bath, and ferret out a traitor. Then there was Anna, lovely, wanton, constantly stimulating his every red corpuscle. Could she really be trusted? And if so, what's in the cards for her and me? Marriage? But I have sworn to my late sainted mother to stand under the traditional wedding canopy with a true daughter of Zion. Would Anna convert? And is the Paradise Wedding Hall in the Bronx all booked up?

• • •

Anna sweetened her body with scented bath powder in preparation for another moon ride with her love, this darkly handsome Israeli of hers. While dusting the peaks of her fine breasts, she became aware of it. Garlic. The odor of garlic.

Then she saw the grinning golden mouth in the mirror. Just as she was about to scream, she heard the voice: "You are about to die, my lovely one." And though terror-stricken, she began to laugh, irrepressible peal after peal.

The hand squeezed the trigger twice. Anna, still howling at the top of her lungs, fell dying, blood spurting from her stomach on the plush Gulistan Saroyan carpet. The door opened, startling the little man in the gypsy garb, who pushed through the drapes and bolted down the fire escape.

"B & T time again," Bond called, then froze in horror.

She was still laughing when he found her. "Golden gums ... that voice ... golden gums ... hee hee ha ha ..." And she died in his arms.

• • •

"From all you have told me," said Bon Ami, with genuine sympathy, "it adds up to Torquemada LaBonza. The eerie death laugh, the stealthy killing, her dying reference to 'golden gums.' Yes, it was LaBonza, The Silent One, The Man with the Golden Gums." And he proceeded to fill Bond in on every scrap of information in his file relating to the infamous slaughterer. "I think you've had it on this assignment, Oy Oy Seven. I'll wire M for another Double-Oy immediately."

"No. I'm seeing this one through ... for Anna," said Bond. He sat on the consul's terrace, looking out at the million and one lights of Vera Hruba. "She got what was intended for me. This is KGB revenge all the way; I can sense it." He crushed his fragile wineglass in his hand, not feeling or caring about the wetness trickling out of his palm's life line.

"Please allow me to take care of the final arrangements for Anna."

"Thanks, Bon Ami. And please, put this in the coffin with her. It's my picture. She would have wanted it. Wait," he said, his voice cracking. "Let me write a little something on it."

He scribbled, "To Anna, sincere best wishes, Israel Bond."

• • •

Ill-tempered, loaded-down burros braying, the supply train wended its way at a crawl through the green hell of the West El Tiparillan jungle. Snow-capped Mount Maidenhead lay six leagues and three chukkers away. Already their clothes were soaked with sweat.

Bond slapped at a botfly trying to burrow into his neck. "These damn burros are slow as hell. Can't they go any faster?"

"I doubt it," Zvi said. "They're carrying one hundred sacks of matzoh meal, two hundred pounds to a sack."

"What the hell for?" Bond fired back.

"The Peace Corps plans to throw a gigantic Passover Seder meal for the poor in a couple of nights."

"If there's a Peace Corps, you mean. We still have to find little Pablito."

When the sting pierced his right shoulder, he first thought some giant jungle bee had dive-bombed him. Then he saw the puff of smoke and heard No chum's anguished cry: "Ambush!"

Down dove Bond, flattening his face in the rotting vegetation. "Take cover!" He was aware of a sound approximating a miniature stampede and a swarm over his body. He knew what it was. Buffalo leeches! The filthy bloodsuckers were on his legs now, drinking deeply of his claret pouring out of two dozen punctures from ankle to thigh. Gottenu! Don't let them go higher!

The sound of their munching was suddenly drowned out by a horrible scream that trailed off. Nochum! And yells through the green impenetrable rainforest walls. "You meet your maker, Israeli dogs! We cut out your tongues, Jews!" And a strident falsetto: "Marine, tonight you die!"

An ex-Jap soldat, no doubt, fighting the wrong war, he mused.

"Bond? Over here. I'm hit!" Zvi! His hands frantically trying to cover a dark stain spreading over his shirt front.

"How bad?" said Bond, manfully ignoring his own shoulder wound and the gnawing below.

"Chest. Oy vay, it hurts! I was trying to reach poor Nochum. He's had it."

"How?"

"I rode ..." Zvi coughed ... "up to him when the first shot went off. It's awful, Bond, awful! He's lying face down in a pit ... must be a hundred spikes through him."

Bond lit a Raleigh, pressed it to Zvi's slobbering mouth. "Poison, too, I'll wager. This must be Vi Teh Minh and his China boys. It's their kind of show."

Zvi inhaled. Thwack! He pitched forward. Now there was a second stain between his shoulder blades. "The last little joke for an old pal, Oy Oy Seven?"

Bond gulped, fighting back scalding tears. "Well, Zvi," he grinned weakly, "you got it in the chest ... you got it in the back ... and with all that you still haven't had a bellyful."

"Oh, mommeleh ... I haven't got a bellyful. What a mind on that bastard! Oh, mommeleh ..." His laugh and life gurgled out. Lovable Zvi Gates was dead.

The scum! Bond tore at a ring on his belt. "Let's see how you like a pineapple in your faces." He stood up, cocked his arm, let the pineapple fly square in the face of an oncoming guerrilla. Its spines drilled into his eyes; its rotten insides squirted into the man's mouth. The marauder gagged and ran off vomiting. Good! But at least you'll live, you bastard! It's just a goddamn shame it wasn't a grenade, Bond thought.

Wait! Ha Lavi's package! He raced back to his burro and cut the bundle loose with a slash of his machete. Tearing away the paper, he pulled out a half dozen jars of bright red gelatinous matter. Mother Margolies' Old World Boysenberry Jelly, the labels read.

He tucked the jars into his coat pockets and slid on his belly through the brush, a Jewish fer-de-landsman bent on revenge. Five of them! Grouped about a mortar, one of them about to pump in a shell. "Here, you bastards! Let's have a jam session!" He hurled all six of the jars into the Vi Teh Minh quintet. They went off simultaneously, merging into one red ball of doom. He heard their screams, smelled barbecuing flesh.

"It must be napalm jelly ... 'cause jam don't shake like that," he shouted.

"Bond, over here!" Itzhok now! Was he cashing in his chips as well?

"You all right, kid?"

"I think so. Something's got my foot."

Bond leaned over. "It's a Malay snare. Got your ankle. Don't move. There may be poison on the thorns." He cut it away, but as he did he noticed Itzhok's face was already bluish in pallor. He slit the Sabra's trouser leg. A telltale pinprick of a hole near the calf.

"I feel numb, Oy Oy Seven."

"Hold on! Hold on!" He finished cutting off the thorn-studded vine. But Itzhok was not answering.

I've lost all three ... in one swell foop. My plucky little team is gone. I'm alone in a scorching emerald wilderness, with no men and four dozen stinking burros carrying 20,000 pounds of matzoh meal. He began to laugh wildly.

He was starting to feel the loss of blood; heat, hum and howl combined with the moldy odor of the jungle to set his head spinning. He fell into the muck.

• • •

Pain! Something jabbing his shoulder.

"Look, angel," he croaked, "I know you have to fasten on my wings, but for God's sake--you should pardon the expression--use Scotch tape. That furshlugginer safety pin is killing me."

The figure in white looming above him said, "He's coming out of it, Sister. More sulfa, please."

Bond opened an eye cautiously. His angel was a bulky man with warm brown eyes. In a white smock. A doctor! "Who are you?"

"Ben Casey I ain't. My handle's Marv Browndorf, doctor attached to the ill-fated Peace Corps camp. This lady is Sister Kate. And no jokes about her."

"Ill-fated?"

"Yes, a column of them hit the camp at the same time the advance guard ambushed you. We heard the noise and came down."

"Where am I?"

"You're in a bed at the convent. OLEO. They very kindly gave our remaining Corpsmen refuge. We've only got six left out of twenty. You, I'm afraid, have none left."

"I know," Bond said. "I saw two of my boys get it. And Spector?"

"There was no time to pull him out of the pit. Besides, there are a couple tons of army ants cleaning up down there. And we had to get you up here fast. Wounds fester like mad here in the tropics. By the way, we got your burro train up here. The matzoh's piled up in a nice cool cellar."

"Look, doc, I've got to get the hell out of here. That kidnaped kid must be found or Israel's name will be mud in El Tiparillo and all of Latin America."

Dr. Browndorf frowned. "You nuts? You've lost blood. You're weak as a kitten. It's beddy-bye for you, Bond."

"Like hell!" And he inched up painfully. "See, I'm standing. Now, get me a horse. I want to nose around this area and there isn't much time."

• • •

In no hurry at all and not about to be pushed was scraggly Old Kemtone, the bag of bones and alleged horse he had borrowed.

Deliberately it picked its way down the rocky trail to the valley, stopping now and then to nibble the fragrant top of a locoweed bush, whinnying as it chomped the stuff down.

"Well, here I am ... on my high horse," he sallied. "Come on, you glorified dachshund. Speed it up."

Old Kemtone rebutted by rearing up. Bond felt himself sailing backward. Splash! He was up to his neck in a brass-monkey--cold mountain stream.

As he stood shivering, he heard a voice cut through the roar of the torrent. A sweet and low voice, crooning a soulful old blues song:

Ah got de blues; oh, Lawd, Ah got de blues,

Ah said Ah got de blues;

Oh, Lawd, Ah got de blues, Oh yeah, Ah got de blues; oh, Lawd, Ah got de blues.

He recognized it in a second. It was one of the great gulley-low blues of jazz history, titled Guess What Ah Got? And that voice? So familiar! Didn't he have a recording of that voice doing that very ditty? Of course!

As he tried to squeeze the information from his fogged mind, he saw near a tree two sensationally formed brown legs, just an enticing flash of thigh ... and then he heard a deep growl. There was something moving out to the end of the tree limb.

Tigre! A powerful jaguar, undisputed king of Latin-American jungles. He heard a tiny frightened "Oh" gasped behind the tree. The blues singer was quite aware of the deadly slasher above her, crouched to spring.

Bond waded hip deep toward the shore, unarmed, yet prepared to take the brunt of the snarling cat's lunge. Damn fool! I left Ha Lavi's rifle on Old Kemtone's saddle.

Three hundred yards away was another rifle at the ready, an angry eye pressed against the telescopic lens, the back of Israel Bond's head split neatly in the T-sight. A cheap Delicado cigarette dangled from the lips of Torquemada LaBonza.

He squeezed the trigger just as the tigre roared and zeroed in on Bond. The Israeli bent as the cat's paws ripped his shoulders, the foul breath from the decayed flesh in its teeth nearly causing him to pass out.

It was the brow of the jaguar that was rent asunder by the soft-nosed bullet from the barrel of the high-powered Tanaka rifle. El tigre sank, was borne away by the rushing stream.

"Merde!" groaned LaBonza. His target was now behind the tree, out of range. He climbed back on his rented quarter horse, slipped another quarter into the metered coin box strapped to its neck and rode off.

"You can come out now, my dear," Bond said. His shoulders ached terribly. The cat's claws had torn into each one. Luckily the epaulets on his Frank Buck pukka sahib jacket had been thick enough to absorb most of the gouging. But he knew from the hot trickles rolling down each shoulder that the jaguar had left its mark, at least partially.

"One moment more, please." A sweet, well-modulated voice from the other side of the thick foliage. "Well, here I am, sir, and my heartfelt thanks for your selfless act of heroism in saving my unworthy life. My daily bath is rarely interrupted in such a dramatic manner."

Heavenly, utterly heavenly was the face that emerged from behind the tree, that of the most gorgeous Negro girl Israel Bond had ever seen. Two gentian-violet eyes in a finely chiseled setting, chin, nose, lips of classical proportions. All this he noticed moments later. It was her clothes that stunned the exhausted, panting secret agent. His new, fascinating companion of the El Tiparillan rain forest was a nun!

Now Bond's memory came through for him.

"That face, that voice, that song. I remember now. Sid-Mark Jazz Disc 190009-V, my most prized waxing. You are the former Sweetcakes Simmons, the world's top jazz chanteuse, who deserted the smoky nighteries of Manhattan a few years ago to take the vows."

"Yes," she smiled. "Your memory serves you well, and it is flattering to be remembered with such warmth. I am that woman, now known as Sister Sweetcakes ... more popularly by the public as the Swinging Nun."

"The Swinging Nun!" He could not keep the admiration out of his reply. "Truly, Sister, you have not lost one whit of that puristic sultriness that made you the undisputed queen of the blues. Why did you give it up for this Godforsaken island?"

"You have answered your own query, sir. You said 'Godforsaken.' That is precisely why I am here. Oh, but you are hurt badly. I see blood on your shoulders."

He did not answer. For the second time in as many hours Israel Bond was unconscious.

• • •

"Wise guy, Mr. Super-Secret Agent Know-It-All. How damn long can you go on abusing that mighty body of yours?" Dr. Browndorf again, hopping mad, yet unmistakable pity showing on his face. Sister Sweetcakes, her cool fingers on his fevered brow, said, "This man is a secret agent, doctor?"

"Yes, Sister. He is Israel Bond of Eretz Israel. Don't let that boyish look delude you. He kills for a living."

"Oh, dear!" The nun looked horrified. "Such a fine-looking man and so well spoken. I find that hard to believe."

"It is true. Look after him, Sister, for a while. I must treat our six Peace Corps survivors."

"I can't figure you out, Sister," Bond said. "Beauty, sensitivity. And yet you bury your loveliness in a cowl and habit. Why?"

She gave him a Raleigh. "It is a dreary story, Mr. Bond. I was at the height of a dazzling career, appearances in the smartest supper clubs, records selling phenomenally, the quarry of rich men of all races pressing diamonds and chinchillas upon me ... I drank too much, indulged in meaningless affairs with men I did not love. A life without purpose or form. I awoke mornings with the taste of dissolution in my mouth."

"I have found that Listerine----"

"Then," she went on, not noticing his helpful interjection, "I met a wonderful man, Cardinal Musial, who convinced me that my life could yet have meaning. I became a nun, forsook my empty, glittering, twelve-o'clocktail lush life. I have found serenity and hope here at OLEO. Would that my tormented brother could find the same."

"Your brother?"

"Yes, my only brother, Beastly Simmons, a man of rare insight and creative genius, who, alas, has been horribly warped by his hatred of white people. He has changed his name to Baldroi LeFagel and is a leading poet and playwright of the angry school."

"Yes," said Bond. "I seem to recall one of his novels. I have it in a paperback. Up Your Blue Toilet, Mr. Charlie. I found it soul-searing, unsettling. For a moment I was ashamed of being a Caucasian. However, I did purchase a Moms Mabley album. And I took out a subscription to Muhammad Speaks."

"What a coincidence!" she brightened up. "Baldroi is its night-club editor. As a matter of fact, he is----"

"He is here."

There in the doorway was the little bearded man Bond had seen on Tannenbaum's plane. The secret agent's orbs bulged in disbelief. Baldroi LeFagel stood posed like a ballerina, a toe pointed daintily at Bond. He wore an attractive white Courréges middy blouse and skirt, with black buttons and piping. His little feet were jammed in that fashionsetter's famed boots. He pirouetted over to Bond's bedside and flicked his hand across Bond's face in contempt. Sister Sweetcakes gasped. He paid her no mind, began to recite:

You negate my existence, Mistuh Charlie Whitey Man,

You have held me in chains since the world began.

You have bruised my flesh and, worse, my psyche,

Let me tell you, Whitey, yo' black slave no likey.

And now you're frightened, Mr. Charlie Whitey 'fay,

Of our strength which burgeons every day,

Yes, now you wanna make up for yo' chains 'n' dogs 'n' whips,

I'll make up, yes, on my terms--kiss me on the lips!

"Baldroi!" Her voice scourged him. "Mr. Bond is wounded and feverish. And he is my guest. Let him be!"

"One sweet kiss?" whimpered LeFagel.

"Be gone! You shame me!"

With a wink and "See you later, Whitey, sweetie," the poet exited.

Oy Oy Seven lifted himself. "I must find the boy Pablito, Sister. And you must help me."

"Please lie down, Mr. Bond, and rest."

The telephone at his bedside erupted. "It's for you, Sister Sweetcakes," Bond said. "Long distance from New York. Somebody named Marty O'Marty from Rock of Ages Records."

"Ah," she smiled tenderly. Was there the tiniest trace of longing for the old days in her violet eyes? "Yes, dear Marty. He was my agent and now owns the record company that keeps after me to record a religious album. I may yet yield, Mr. Bond. Our parish here is quite low on funds and Cardinal Musial has given me permission to do it--if it is done tastefully and reverently. It might amuse you to listen in, Mr. Bond."

She placed that divine head next to his and for a moment Bond forgot her sacred calling. What a woman! He could fall in love with a sublime creature like this in 20 seconds. And be faithful to her easily twice as long.

"Hiyah, Sister!" The high-pressure voice of a real New York "go-getter."

"Hello, dear Marty."

"Look, Sister. We ain't had a hit album on the charts for two years. Whadda yuh say yuh break down and cut one for good old Rock of Ages, huh? Something with class, naturally, but with an appeal to the wonderful kids who are the principal record buyers in today's market. We'll send down our hot new group, A Man Called Peter and the Padres, for backgrounds; they'll do the oo-wahs under the melody ... plus technicians, equipment ... you got a real jungle down there, ain't you, Sister? With birds and monkeys and all that? Maybe like we could even work in some of them in the background with the oo-wahs and rang-a-langs, like the Martin Denny sound, huh? So it's all set. The whole bunch: singers, sound men, will be down there in a chartered plane in a day. I'm personally gonna direct this session myself, Sister. See you soon. Don't take any wooden idols!"

Sister put down the phone, totally dazed. "He's a hard man to say no to, Mr. Bond."

"Wonder if he's interested in a group called the Rocking Rabbis? Or four Anglican caretakers--the Beadles?"

"You have a refreshing sense of humor, Mr. Bond," the nun observed.

"It's you, Sister. You bring out the best in me. But now to business. I've got to find that child. Any leads for me?"

"Yes. One. The last time he was seen he was playing with his pet parrot in the vicinity of that godless place, the Temple of Hate."

"Then that's where I'm going tonight."

"No!" she cried. "In your condition? And even if you were healthy, you can't go wandering about this unfamiliar jungle alone at night."

"Perhaps," Bond suggested, "you would guide me there. I'd be glad of the company, Sister, especially yours."

Her eyes grew soft. "I can't let you stumble in there alone. Meet me in front of OLEO after evening vespers."

He pressed her hand warmly, then impulsively lifted it to his lips.

"You mustn't ..." she whispered.

"Tonight, then. The Temple of Hate ... and Dr. Nu."

• • •

Old Kemtone, a far more tractable beast under the guidance of the gentle nun, clopped at a leisurely clip, both Bond and Sister Sweetcakes sitting in the trough of his deeply swayed back. The secret agent's arms encircled her waist.

"From this point on it an be dangerous, Mr. Bond," she said. "There are many guards near the temple."

I won't worry, he thought. Ha Lavi's new rifle looks to have the firepower of a whole regiment. It was strapped to the horse's side, 75 Melba rounds in the magazine. Bond glanced at its unusual stock, three times wider than any other he'd ever handled. He knew why, and grinned. That Ha Lavi genius!

"We are here," the nun whispered.

"Stay here with this noble steed. Or better still, Sister, get thee to thy nunnery. It's my show from here on in."

• • •

Pushing two branches aside, he got his first glimpse of the Temple of Hate. It was approximately 200 feet tall, he estimated, with Byzantine-style minarets standing like spears at each of its four corners. From a number of windows light blazed and drunken voices sang, cursed, shouted. The hate set is balling it up tonight, he thought.

He tied handkerchiefs over his shoes to muffle his footsteps, and walked into a large paved area between the edge of the jungle and the temple. For cars? No, there were none around. A place to land a helicopter, more likely. As if to confirm his suspicion, he heard a chopper approaching, and flattened his body in the shadows made by the entrance's pillars.

It came down a minute later. Out stepped a short man in a sporty Tyrolean-type Adams hat with a sprig of edelweiss stuck into the band, and a black trench coat, his face hidden by its pulled-up collar. The Orientals in ski-type outfits, rifles slung over their shoulders, walked out of the doorway to greet him. Then up went the chopper in a vertical climb.

Whoever the visitor was, he seemed to be accorded the highest respect. Bond could make out the guards' voices now.

"A pleasure to see you back, Rotten Roger, sir. Dr. Nu has been anxiously awaiting you. You'll be pleased to know that the Russian courier dropped off the million rubles today."

Rotten Roger Colfax! So there he was. And obviously not one of my poor dead lads, thank heaven.

The trio walked into the temple, but just before the door slammed thunderously he heard a fragment of a sentence, "... greatest terror organization the world has ever known," and something that sounded like "Spector."

Spector? Were they making some callous jibe about little Nochum's agonizing end in the stake-lined pit? Wait a second, Bond. "Greatest terror organization the world has ever known." Could it be true? Yes, you dunce. There are two words pronounced like Nochum's surname, and one of them is spelled--Spectre! Then the fabled organization of infinite evil was a reality! Naturally, it would have been the diabolical agency behind Pablito's kidnaping, the attack on the Israeli camp, the murders of Zvi, Itzhok and Nochum. Paid handsomely for these foul services by the Russians and probably behind every significant act of terror and revolution on this benighted island.

If he had not been so engrossed in unraveling the puzzle, he would have seen the six-inch scorpion coming down the door, springing onto his neck and--arrgh!--its venomous sting stabbed into his wounded shoulder. He brushed it off with a shiver, ground his heel into it until it was a mashed heap of protein. Except for the diamond-hard black disc in the middle of the mess. Another transistor "bug"! They know I'm here; Katz is out of the bag!

An alarm sounded in the temple, sending a bevy of uniformed Orientals vaulting past Bond, brandishing carbines. Shots echoed through the night, one of them kicking up a chunk of cement into Bond's face, opening a gash on his cheek. He knelt, aimed Ha Lavi's rifle.

Zetz! Zetz! Zetz! The Moishe Dyan model spoke its message three times; that many guards fell screaming. Good! Now three from Column B. But more were swarming out as the alarm went off again. He saw a flash, felt a hot projectile skin his ankle. There were two dozen of them now, lined up between Bond and the edge of the paved strip. Beyond it lay the safety of the thick jungle. How to get past them? No time to stop and pick them off. Too many!

Israel Bond's brain clicked out a solution in a microsecond. His finger jabbed at a button in the huge rifle stock. Four wheels slid out of the wood and Bond was now standing atop a skate board!

He crouched low over it, pushed his toe into the cement, kicked out to pick up momentum and smashed through the first line of guards. He felt nails futilely tearing at his face as he bowled them over. Now he was ramming into the second line, the Dyan firing automatically as the skate board sped on.

A few feet more and freedom! But at the jungle's edge he saw a figure slip out from behind a yeki-yeki bush. It kneeled in the classic rifleman's position and squeezed a finger.

Bond ducked. In time to save his life; too late to avoid being hit altogether. Torquemada LaBonza's Tanaka rifle sang its saki! saki! One slug creased the dark, cruelly handsome forehead and Bond went down face first in the cement.

The last thing he remembered before a blessed Ken Murray black-out was lying on the airstrip looking blearily at a pair of elegant brocaded Chinese sandals with curled-up toes.

And a mocking voice: "Welcome to the Temple of Hate, Mr. Israel Bond. My leader and I have been expecting you. I am Dr. Nu."

• • •

"I shall give you a capsulized history of my illustrious life, Mr. Bond," said the cool, articulate voice of Dr. Nu to the bound Bond, who sat in a chair, blood dripping from his shoulder, ankle and head into a pool on the floor, a feast for a herd of buffalo leeches and a vampire bat on a silken tether, the other end tied about the Chinaman's right hand. "Drink sparingly of this rich Jewish blood, my beloved Masterson," the doctor said fondly to his pet. "Too much and you'll get diabetes."

"I don't think I'm particularly interested in your life," Oy Oy Seven said with a stiffness that matched that of his ripped, aching body. So get on with whatever you've dreamed up for me."

"Not interested, Mr. Bond?" Dr. Nu's rebuke was mild, which made it all the more menacing. "Topjob, put our celebrated guest in the proper frame of mind for history."

Gottenu! A bludgeon split the side of his cheek, reopening his wound. It was the calloused side of a hand swung by a stocky Asiatic in a loose-fitting robe.

"Meet my personal bodyguard, Topjob, so named because his favorite drink is an American liquid detergent of some potency. Like myself, he is Chinese and adept at karate. Good work, Topjob. As a reward you may eat the leeches and Masterson. Sayonara, old bat."

Bond took his first good look at Dr. Nu. He was an insane caricature of a man, bigger than life. From the tip of his curled-up toes to the green velvet Mitsubishi hat he must have stood easily six feet, six inches. His face jarred Bond. Only one of the eyes was slanted. And his hair was a most un-Oriental ash blond. The bean-pole body was clad in a dazzling long coat of Cantonese silk and black pajamas.

"I," began his captor, "am the son of a Singapore opium merchant, Nu Nu, who sold the flower juice of happiness from his boat outside the jurisdiction of the British harbor police. The craft was known all through Southeast Asia as Nu Nu's Junk Junk. My father, whilst on a business trip to London, fell in love with a buxom English music-hall dancer, Tessie Watts, and bedded with her. I am the illegitimate product of that night of shame, named for both of them. My name is Watts Nu.

"My father hated me from birth when the evidences of my mother's lineage--the unslanted eye, the blond hair--were all too apparent on my body. I spent a dismal childhood, scorned by people of both races ... an outcast. Though he loathed me, my father, traditionally responsible as all Chinese fathers are, did see to all my wants and had me educated at the Jean Hersholt College of Medicine in Hopei. So highly was I regarded by my professors that they convinced the DuPlex Corporation to underwrite my experiments with a new type of chemical aphrodisiac which even today is selling by the millions. You have no doubt purchased it yourself upon occasions. Erectex."

"Yes," said Bond. "With the slogan 'Better Loving Through Chemistry.' Go on, Doctor, I now find your story fascinating." That's it, Bond; use your chicken noodle. Flatter this maniac; gain precious time to figure a way out.

"But mere wealth meant nothing to me, Mr. Bond. One thing alone kept me groping through a hostile environment that denied me love, affection and understanding--the thought of revenge. Revenge upon my father, my mother, the whole rotten structure of mankind. I pulled up stakes and came to this island, where I purchased this brokendown pagoda and turned it into a resort for hate groups, wisely deducing there was a market for this kind of enterprise. At last there is a place where the world's malcontents, with whom I feel a camaraderie, can come for two weeks at a time and rest up for their campaigns. It also serves as an excellent front for a terror organization----"

"Spectre," Bond said.

"Ah, you have overheard something you should not have. But it will be of no benefit to you, Mr. Bond. Yes, that is the name. And it is headed by a unique individual whom I met in ..." he paused, "I don't think I'll tell you where ... but it was a year ago. He is an acknowledged master in the intelligence field and I defer to him because of his organizational genius. His hatred surpasses even mine, my friend, and together we have made a pact. Our goal comes nearer with each passing day."

"What is that goal, Dr. Nu?"

"To rule the world, what else? And we shall! Our organization consists of three-man teams in key spots in every land. People who are totally ruthless and corrupt, who believe as my leader and I do. Among them are three top television executives and three used-car dealers in America, three ex-members of Mosley's fascist party in Great Britain, three scientists who defected from Red China and are working on a bomb with the destructive force of one hundred wontons (Bond shuddered as he thought of the wonton destruction) ... but I could go on all night."

"Have you ever considered that your Communist paymasters have their own vision of world domination and might not take too kindly to you if they found out about yours?"

Dr. Nu's smile was one of superior unconcern. "That possibility has been considered. But they do not know of the scope and purpose of our organization and believe we are content to foment these insurrections for mere money. They are unaware of the bomb we soon will have at our disposal and our even more powerful weapon, the world's most formidable army, which I have created. You have already been thwarted by their espionage."

"The insects?"

"Yes, you see ..."

There was a scream and two of the sinister Oriental guards came into the room, a struggling hooded figure dragged between them.

"A snooper, Dr. Nu, discovered by one of our centipede sentinels outside the temple," said one, with deference.

"You see," Dr. Nu chuckled. "Our allies are ubiquitous. Mr. Bond. Let us see who has blundered into our net." And he lifted the hood.

It was--Sister Sweetcakes!

Dr. Nu looked at her for a moment. "Your entrance, Sister, coincides with one of my daily rituals, not as devout as yours, perhaps, but far more interesting. It is time to make Herbie happy."

"Herbie?" Bond hoped the doctor would not sense the alarm in his query.

"Yes, one of my dearest friends from a singularly isolated sector of jungle in the heart of the Amazon Basin. But come, let us meet Herbie, dear guests."

A guard's cutters nipped off the biting strands of Anaconda Copper wire that bound Bond's legs to the chair. (And I own 50 shares of the damn stuff, he thought, with justifiable bitterness.)

They were led by the guards and their giant host down a dark corridor, then up a winding flight of stairs to a door marked Laboratory.

It opened to reveal a gleaming white, well-lit room. There were lab tables with test tubes of various sizes, complicated machinery, something Bond took to be a computer, and a huge circular conference table topped with vases of heady jungle flowers.

"I shall explain that machine to you shortly, Mr. Bond. After we pay our respects to Herbie."

At the end of the laboratory was a door. "It is quite aromatic in there, my friends, but you will become accustomed to it quickly."

He opened it. They were in a huge greenhouse, moist and laden with the pungent smells of rain-forest plants of which there was a profusion.

"This," said Dr. Nu, pointing to a green snaky plant potted and tied to a long stick, "is the Malaysian death vine which claimed one of your Israelis, I believe. The genus tutti cammarata, as it is known in Latin. Do not go near the thorns. You have already witnessed their efficacy. They pierce the skin, injecting a derivative of the larosa semolina toxin. And here is Herbie."

It was a plant, taller even than the doctor, and as they approached it, it came alive! Several leaf-covered tendrils began undulating as though they were the enticing arms of a belly dancer.

"This is as close as all of us but one shall get," said the doctor.

"All right," Bond said. "It should be dancing at Arthur's. What else, Dr. Nu? I'm sick of this charade."

"I could not agree with you more, Oy Oy Seven," Dr. Nu said. "But Herbie's accomplishments go beyond simple manipulations of his handsome arms. Herbie is, incidentally, a nickname. His full moniker, as they say in those cowboy-and-Indian thrillers, is herbis homnis fressoris--man-eating plant."

From somewhere deep in Herbie's green depths came a rumble ... and something that sounded like a slurp!

"He knows why we are here, Mr. Bond."

"Oh." Sister sagged in the arms of the guards. "Let it be me--not him. Let it be me."

Bond's voice was a tremulous choke. "All right, take her away and get it over with, you fiend! Don't subject her to any more of this."

"But, Mr. Bond." The polished voice held a note of surprise. "You completely misunderstand. I am going to take Sister up on her offer. It is she who will furnish Herbie with his banquet tonight. I have something subtler in mind for you." He turned to the guards. "Throw her in!"

"I'll kill you all, you----" Bond roared, a red mist of anger across his eyes. He closed the fingers of his bound hands into one fist, brought it up savagely under the jaw of one of the Orientals, experiencing a sweetly fierce joy as the fist drove the man's teeth through his tongue. The other, however, had side-stepped his desperate, rhinolike charge and brought the butt of his Wembly-Vicar automatic against Bond's head. Oy Oy Seven fell woozily to his knees, felt himself being dragged out of the greenhouse. His last, despairing look was at Sister. Screaming, she was enveloped in three of Herbie's tentacles, a primordial sucking sound coming from heaven alone knew what part of that revolting anatomy.

Then the door shut. And there was only Dr. Nu, arms folded, eyes aglow with a dreamy madness as her screams grew fainter, then ceased.

• • •

There were new bonds for Bond now. The wire was gone; in its stead were fiberglass straps around his wrists, chest and legs, restraining him in a high-backed chair. Electric? No, I can't believe this is the subtlety the maniac alluded to. There's something a damn sight more devilish in that crazed brain.

The room was the white laboratory adjoining the greenhouse where adorable Sister Sweetcakes ... but there's nothing to be gained thinking about her now, he reasoned. Steel yourself, buddy boy, it's your turn.

"You are to be accorded a rare privilege, Mr. Bond, and this is because I have learned to hold you in utmost respect for your courage and derring-do. Singlehandedly you have killed three of my security force, wounded several others. But your foolhardy foray into my affairs was doomed from the start."

"What is this privilege, Dr. Nu?"

"That of witnessing my unparalleled genius. I want you to meet another friend of mine, one of my own making." A yellow index finger pointed to the computer, which stood like a silent soldier. "This is IPECAC."

"What?" Bond's ears refused to believe what he had heard.

"Insect Programed Electronic Computer for Analyzing Conversation. In short, Mr. Bond, I can talk to insects."

"I talk to trees," the secret agent flipped back. "Now I know you're mad, Dr. Nu. I am willing to admit that 'bugging the bugs' is a unique method of obtaining information. One would never suspect the wayward roach, the frolicking June bug to be agents. But----"

A slight nuance of annoyance crossed that composed face. "Mr. Bond, you are tough, resourceful and clever ... up to a point. Yet your mind fails to comprehend the spheres into which my work leads me. I shall give you a demonstration."

He flicked a red switch. A light glowed; Bond's ears suddenly felt a sharp pain, heard an unearthly electronic atonality. "You will find the pain subsiding in a few seconds as your ears adjust to the frequency." He spoke into a microphone. "Sectional commanders will report to the conference table on the double!"

I am as meshuga as this yellow Eiffel tower of a nut, Bond told himself. I must be. I see a parade creeping over the floor, a line of insects! Crawling, hopping, flying low. I hear humming, chirping, buzzing ... they're making their way up the legs of the conference table, aligning themselves in set positions ... the doctor has pushed another switch ... miniature microphones are popping out in front of each bug ... and name plates ... Japanese beetle, Cicada, Locust, Mosquito, Tse-Tse Fly ... Gottenu! This looks like an insect----

"Summit conference, Mr. Bond," said Dr. Nu with a pleased smile. "That is what you're thinking, isn't it? Before we proceed with the agenda, I'll just"--he turned off the red switch--"cut the frequency so they cannot hear us. In précis, here is the theory that led me to this marvelous discovery and IPECAC.

"As you know, I am a scientist, the world's greatest, you now must concede. As a friendless, unwanted child I spent countless lonely hours. Time hung heavy upon my hands, but even at that stage I possessed a boundless intellectual curiosity about my environment. I spent many hours stretched out upon the carpet of the forest floor observing nature's littlest creatures scuttle about, make love, kill, die. And I began to notice that all of them would pause momentarily in the presence of their own or other species to move their feelers, antennae, palpi, or rub their legs together. This, I deduced, was some kind of language based on sound. Sound that could be heard, as in the case of the crickets: sound that couldn't, i.e., beetles, aphids, termites, etc. Since various insects made certain moves, displayed certain attitudes in the presence of others, I further reasoned there must be an insect Swahili, a lingua franca, known to all such creatures. It was an interesting theory but one I put aside in some dark recess of my mind for future reference. Three years ago I recalled it, launched a series of experiments to validate it. The key word, let me repeat, was 'sound.' Yet, as I stated previously, not all of their sounds were audible, at least to my normal aural range. So I hit upon the felicitous idea of using the most sensitive sound-reproduction equipment ever assembled, which could not only discern sound thousands of decibels below human hearing but boost it to our level. You will be surprised to learn that the only equipment capable of this most delicate pickup and boost is to be found solely in the chassis of a 1949 Muntz television set. I discovered that though each insect had its own distinct sound, it also had a universal one. Thus I began to construct their common language. And IPECAC was born. Its memory banks have been fed enormous quantities of information about the major orders of Insecta. IPECAC hears, reproduces sound to my level, feeds sound to its banks, translates into all major human tongues--I have pressed the English button for your benefit and mine--and reverses the procedure when I wish to communicate with them." Switching back on, he cried: "Hello, little friends!"

Israel Bond thought, I'm mad for sure. For in response to the doctor's salutation he saw the waving and scraping of insect appendages commence in unison, heard them--sing!

Good evening, Dr. Nu,

Good evening, Dr. Nu,

What-e're you ask we'll do,

'Cause we really do love you!

"Thank you, my creatures," said the doctor benignly. "And now we shall open our seminar with a discussion of how you can help your dear doctor and his leader take over this earth. First, may we hear the scout reports?"

The light of the name plate Honeybee went on. "I have been buzzing around the convent, Dr. Nu. The Israelis have been given shelter there. They are without weapons, ripe for attack."

"Excellent!" cried Dr. Nu. "I shall contact the main Chinese, Fidelista and Russian Forces in EET and order them to infiltrate tomorrow night across The Band. They will launch a three-pronged attack and wipe out the remaining Israelis and the convent as well."

Now there was a beep as name plate Tick lit up. "Doc, will you please tell that goddamn Cantharis to keep his horny legs off me? You think he gives a crap for our conference? To him it's just an excuse to ball, ball, ball ..."

"Cantharis, please desist from these unwholesome activities at once!" the doctor snapped.

"Doc," Cantharis pleaded. "I got this Spanish fly built in. Can I help it?" And the voice grew suggestive. "Hey, Grasshopper, that's a sweet leg you got there. Let me bite it, baby."

Bond heard a scream from grasshopper. "Please ... no! No!"

Dr. Nu's forefinger poked a button. There was a puff of smoke. The Cantharis name plate and microphone disappeared. "I regret the disruption," said the doctor, "but we all will agree that Cantharis, due to no fault of his own, had to be eliminated. Such as he have no usefulness in this organization."

Scorpion cut in. "Doc, that Israeli trussed up over there ... ain't he the one who squashed my poor cousin, Jethro, a while back? Let me give the murdering bastard the back of my tail ... a little sting-a-ding-ding-dingaroonie!"

"Leave his fate to me, my little ally from Durango. I shall see to it that your kind is revenged in full."

"Say, Doc." Locust was speaking now, and Bond could detect a quality of wariness, even hostility. "What's in all of this for us? All I can see is we're the patsies ... the guys who die like flies, you should pardon the expression, while you get this globe handed to you on a plate."

"I had anticipated that very natural question from one of you," said the doctor with the pleasant air of a lecturer about to make a point. "It is true that I shall benefit from your labors, dear insects, but you, too, stand to do the same. For instance, you, Housefly, would you not enjoy unfettered flight in any human domicile, knowing that those sticky-ribbon death traps were gone forever? Carpet Beetle, think of it ... the world's fattest, juiciest woolen rugs, thousands of warehouses filled with them, and all at your disposal. Moth, would it not give you the most exhilarating sensation to gorge yourself on Jerry Lewis' three hundred mohair suits? You see, we have a mutuality of interests here. And now, if there are no further items, we shall conclude with the singing of our stirring anthem, Larva Come Back to Me."

As the insects propped themselves up into a humanlike posture of attention and shrilled their song, Bond's thoughts were off his pain-racked body. That computer! If only I could get to it! The seed of a scheme formed in his brain.

Dr. Nu watched his horde slink and fly off.

"Can you deny now, Oy Oy Seven, that you, indeed, have been accorded a rare privilege?"

"Now, I suppose, I shall pay for it in an equally devilish manner, eh, Nu?"

"Yes, Israel Bond. Your moment has come." And he clapped his hands. "Topjob! Activate the WC!"

"Is this to be my fate, doctor? Drowning by immersion in a water closet? Really, it is unworthy of your salt."

"Silence, insolent fool! Did you think I would squat to such a plebeian level? WC is yet another device, Mr. Bond. It stands for Will Chiller. I had not planned to destroy that muscular body of yours, which seems to have an extraordinarily high tolerance of pain. Besides, I can utilize it in our organization. But first there is the matter of breaking your indomitable will, bending it to our purposes. And this the Will Chiller will do."

The doctor's aide wheeled over a machine on rollers that seemed to be some sort of television set. On its front was a large glass screen with two large buttons below, one marked WD, the other, WR.

"Plug it in, Topjob. I can see you are trying to figure out the abbreviations, Mr. Bond. The first is 'Will Destroyer.' When it is switched on and the subject exposed to the images its built-in tapes bring to the screen, that unhappy person will find his senses departing from him in five minutes. At that juncture the power is cut off, because any further exposure would leave the subject a useless mental vegetable. WR is 'Will Restorer,' built into the machine for my own personal use when I was testing the machine. It saved my own life, Mr. Bond, when I foolishly let myself be exposed too long. With my last microdot of sanity I pushed it and became rational again. But we are wasting time. Topjob ... the WD button, please."

A pin point of light danced on the screen, then spread into a white-hot intensity that flooded away the black.

"Shucks, Jed Clampett. You don't mean ter tell me that's oil in that thar land?" The speaker on the screen was a scraggly-haired woman in a calico dress. Her question was followed by howls of laughter, from an unseen audience. What's so funny about that? Bond wondered. "Yup," said a tall, taciturn man with a sunburned face. More uncontrollable laughter, another puzzlement to Bond. "Well, I guess we-uns is rich!" chortled the woman, smacking her backside with a good-natured flourish. More audience laughter; one of the women was shrieking at the top of her lungs.

It faded, supplanted by a pert, snub-nosed charmer whose moist lips kept repeating: "Dippity-Do ... Dippity-Do ... Dippity-Do."

From another world he heard Dr. Nu: "One minute."

Now the face on the screen was that of a jolly, bespectacled little man in a pinstripe suit and straw hat. "What makes you think you're worthy of being our queen for today, Mrs. Florence Block of Buzzard's Bladder, North Dakota, any more than Mrs. Alice Helegeson, our hunchback from Fatback, Tennessee, or Mrs. Hilda Shivers, the plucky but hopelessly brain-damaged housewife from Cooze Corners, Maine?"

"Well, I'll tell yer, Mr. Nelson ... I crawled here on muh arthritic legs all the way from Buzzard's Bladder, with them cars runnin' over my poor chilblained hands, jes' so's I could tell yuh about my spavined son, Chesley, who is feelin' po'ly and needs an operation real bad so's he can harvest the crops in time to make the mortgage payment to hardhearted Squire Tolliver."

"What do you think, audience?" cried the little man. "Is she the queen?" Booing and catcalling broke out; a bottle thrown on stage smashed the woman in her old gray head. "Guess not," shrugged the little man. "Let's bring on our last contestant, Mrs. Ellie Hasson of Chauquatauchauqua, Oklahoma, our thalidomide-taking mother who fears that----"

"Two minutes," said Dr. Nu, drawing on his hookah tube.

Bond's cruelly handsome face was slowly turning into a simper.

"Geez, Gadget." The gawky young teener looked down at his feet. "You mean you promised you'd go to the prom with Rocky?" Laughter from nowhere. "Well, uh ... I" stammered the pixyish blonde sweetheart of Wollenstonecraft Junior High. "Did I promise Rocky? Did I, daddy?" Twenty seconds of whoops. "I don't know, sweetheart. I'm just your stupid father. Ask Mommy; she knows everything."

"Three minutes," said Dr. Nu. Bond's eyes were rolling around, tongue darting in and out. "You may unbind his hands now, Topjob; he has been rendered harmless. I don't want him to lacerate his wrists on the straps in his frenzy."

"Certs is a candy mint." "No, Certs is a breath mint!"

"You mean to say that if the cobalt bomb destroys the world, you'll still cover my losses? H-m-m, John Hancock, huh?"

"How'd you like a nice Hawaiian punch?" Pow! "Fruit juicy, fruit juicy, Dippity-Do, Dippity-Do ..."

The face of Bond was frozen into a mindless ear-to-ear grin. His thumb was on his nose, four fingers waving in cadence. He was humming the Double-mint Gum song.

"Ten seconds more, Topjob, and Secret Agent Israel Bond will be our unwitting tool."

With a sob and a rush of breath the hooded figure leaped between them, jammed a finger into the Wr button.

On the screen, a handsome man in a well-cut suit, his face full of urbanity, tenderness, intelligence, wit--all the qualities present in the best of 20th Century man--smiled: "Good evening. This is Open End and my name is David Susskind. Our panel discussion tonight is on the subject 'Will Automation Carried to the Extreme Throw Millions of Computers Out of Work?' and to prove this unique problem of our times I have asked the following panelists to appear tonight--Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Fiedler and the entire Boston Pops Orchestra, Nipsey Russell, Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs."

From the first outpourings of that mellifluous, cultured voice of sweet reason, Bond had felt the horrible banalities of button Wd fleeing his brain like frightened Lucky Thompson gazelles in the path of a brush fire on the Kenya plain. And those intellectual names! Bernstein! Francis! Russell! Each one a torch of truth and knowledge, burning away his torpor.

He was a steely spring again, lashing out with cast-iron hands on the jaw of the nonplused Topjob, sending the killer karatist crashing into the wall.

A cold gray eye snapped a photo of the enraged Dr. Nu struggling with the slight, hooded figure who had saved Bond from insanity. He dove into the doctor's midsection, fists flailing with devastating potency. Dr. Nu said, "Ugh!" doubled up in agony and fell over his contour chair.

Bond swept up the hooded figure.

"Israel! Israel!"

He looked down into the face of Sister Sweetcakes!

"My darling! Alive, but----"

"Hurry!" she cried. "We must find a way out!"

He carried her to the first door he could find, slammed it behind him. He secured it with a bolt.

"Oh, Israel! You've taken me into the greenhouse again."

"Gottenu! We're in another pickle! I hope it's kosher this time. But, my OLEO angel, how did you escape the clutches of that chlorophyll horror?"

There was a mischievous sparkle in those violet eyes. "Israel, think it out for yourself with that keen mind I admire."

"I see," Bond nodded. "Herbis homnis fressoris. Our Celery Cyclops eats only----"

"Men. Just as his generic name states. He really was quite flustered upon discovering I was what I was. Expelled me from his interior in an instant."

"Damn fool, that Herbie." And he took Sister into his arms.

"The door! It's glowing!" she wailed.

They backed off, watching the metal of the door change from dun gray to pink, to a warm orange, to a hotter red.

"They're using acetylene torches on the metal. They'll be through in another minute. Sister, this way!" He picked up the table and flung it through the glass wall of the greenhouse. "Through that hole on the double!"

She passed through the ragged opening which caught at her habit, tearing it to shreds.

Content that she was safe for the nonce, Bond stood halfway between the door and the back wall, tensing his battered body.

With a shower of sparks the door fell.

Two of the guards rocketed through, made a grab for him. Bond lurched to the side. Their momentum carried them by him. He turned to face their next rush, but they did not charge back.

They had gone too far beyond him! And into the grasp of Herbie!

He shuddered as he watched them vainly trying to free themselves of those greedy arms. One was lifted high into the air kicking and screeching, then dropped into the loathsome depths. He heard a crunch, saw two boots and a helmet spat out. Bond picked up the man's carbine and put his partner out of his misery. Better a bullet than ...

Gottenu! Something smashed into his arm; the carbine was sent clattering away!

Top job!

Fool that I am, thought Bond, I turned my back. Now my arm is dangling like a subway strap. I must combat this Chinese mass of sinews with one swollen arm.

The karatist circled Bond with a malevolent grin, his pointed teeth clicking with excitement, the mouth slobbering for the kill. He'll make it a slow job, a top job, will Topjob, Bond knew. Crack every bone in my body with one well-placed chop after another.

One chance! Back slowly away, Oy Oy Seven ... slowly ... let him advance inch by inch, savoring every moment of your fear ... your whimpering is as delicious to this ape as a mouthful of leeches or a bat's entrails ... "Ooooh" ... that's it ... moan a little ... his grin is widening ... you're almost there, but for God's sake, as soon as you feel the first prick--freeze! And pray to the Lord of Israel that your shirt is thick enough to keep the tip from going into your epidermis ...

His back made contact with the tip.

"All right, Topjob, do your worst, you furshlugginer gook!"

Topjob snarled and made his run at Bond. His hand speared into Bond's shoulder as the Israeli leaped to the left. The karate specialist's follow-through sent him sprawling into the Malaysian death vine!

Bond gnashed his teeth as the pain spread through his torn shoulder. He opened his eyes and met those of the Korean, whose own were slowly filling with disbelief. Topjob's hand moved toward Bond's neck. It's the moment of truth, thought Bond. Has he got enough left to deliver the final death chop to my esophagus? If he has, I can't stop it.

The hand brushed Bond's neck, but the blow was strangely powerless. Topjob started to fall slowly, like an oak severed from its base by a handsaw. He tumbled to the floor, shook in a cataclysmic paroxysm and lay still.

Sister Sweetcakes had quietly returned through the crack in the glass wall. "Israel. What happened to this man?"

"Topjob was tough all right, Sister ... damn tough. But he ran into a Jew who was a thorn in his side."

"Oh, Father in heaven, you're hurt again!" she cried softly. "Your arm ..."

"Broken, I'm afraid. But there's no time for tears now. I've a little date with that machine in the next room."

She helped him make his way into the lab. "This is IPECAC, Sister. What it does I'll explain later. But don't think me insane when I talk to it. I know what I'm doing. Flick that red switch. And when I stop talking, flick it off."

She complied.

Bond spoke into the microphone, imitating the voice of Dr. Nu. "Attention, my leader. Those stupid insects are prepared to follow my instructions blindly. They will help us take over the world.

Then when they have accomplished our task for us, I shall destroy them to the last bug! Ha-ha! The fools! They do not know that I, Dr. Watts Nu, have invented an insecticide so potent that it makes Black Flag and Raid seem like Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Roger, Rotten Roger, and out." Bond asked Sister to flick off the switch. "That should crack the unholy alliance wide open. Every bug within five miles has heard Dr. Nu's plan for betrayal. Now, to find the man behind all this, Leader Colfax."

• • •

They trod the corridor lightly, Sister in the lead steering the limping secret agent as best she could. She again felt that disturbing electricity as his long, tapering fingers enclosed hers.

In the darkness Bond stumbled, banged his torn shoulder into the wall.

There was an ear-piercing ring.

"Damn it! The wall ... it's wired to set off an alarm when touched. We're in for it again, Sister."

At the other end of the corridor a door opened and three of the Orientals came tramping through.

"Sister, run! I can't make it! Save your pretty neck."

"No, Israel," she whispered hotly. "Try, please try ..."

She yanked at his sleeve and they began to run. As they traversed the corridor they saw a number of doors with slivers of light beneath them. "These must be the rooms rented by the Temple of Hate to its vacationing clientele," she said. "Quickly ... into this one!"

They found themselves in the rear of a large, dimly lit hall. In the front was a hideous potbellied idol with red eyes that bored into their very souls. A little man with a messianically maddened face sat in the cross-legged style of the East, addressing a group of dark-hued men in loincloths.

"Oh, my brothers! I have good omens for you. Last night a jackal cried on my left, a baboon defecated on my right. They are a sign for us Thugees, who have lain asleep for, lo, these past fifty years, to rise again. Take up your strangling cords and kill!

"Kill lest ye be killed yourselves!

"Kill for the love of killing!

"Kill for the love of Kali!

"Kill! Kill! Kill!"

The nun trembled. "Israel, who are these people?"

"Thugees. The murder cult of India. They worship Mother Kali, goddess of murder. Look! See their leader? He is about to offer Mother Kali a sacred golden melon in homage. Listen, he's going to chant the ritual to her."

They strained their ears and caught the thin, reedy voice of the high priest kneeling before the idol with the melon in his outstretched palms.

"Here's another melon, Kali, baby,

"Cuddle up and don't be blue ..."

Bond nudged Sister. "Let's get the hell out of here." He pulled her roughly out into the corridor and slammed the door.

"Well, that door got us nowhere."

"There is another one. Israel. With a gold star and name plate on it at the far end."

They approached it cautiously. Bond's heart pounded as he saw the sign. Journey's end!

Rotten Roger Colfax.

And underneath: "Society for Promulgating Every Conceivable Type of Rottenness."

Israel Bond let a sneer curl his lips. "Sister, you're looking at the bloodiest fool who ever walked down the pike. I let my romantically febrile imagination lead me down the garden path. I am guilty of ignoring the obvious."

He put his ear to the door.

"... payable in cash or equivalent value in diamonds, Premier Chou. Our organization will see to it that the American geologists are constantly harassed. Killed, if need be. Thus, the way will be paved for your People's Republic of China to be greeted with open arms. You are agreed to these terms? Capital! This is Rotten Roger Colfax----"

"Signing off for the last time." Bond spoke his gritty sentence as he walked through the door. "The game is up, Nochum."

"Bond!"

Sister shrilled, "It's Pablito! What have you done with him, you horrible little man?" She raced to the side of a little boy in raggedy sweater and shorts. She took a letter opener from Nochum's Allandale mahogany desk, worked it behind the boy's back. "You're free now, little angel," she wept as the strands fell to the floor.

Bond's gray eyes held a gleam of menacing amusement. "Nochum, you are no dummy--literally."

Nochum Spector bit his lip, then raised it in a pout of contempt. "That's correct, Mr. Super-Jew with the low-grade wit that everybody's supposed to turn cartwheels for. I had you fooled real good. By now you've guessed that the Vi Teh Minh placed a replica of me in the pit. I was in the lead, so I simply rode behind a bush, made a few heartrending noises and they did the rest."

"Yes, they did. They murdered two of your countrymen."

"Hacks! Third-raters! Waterboys! They must always perish when they get in a great man's way. Oy Oy Seven. You were my real target; you've always been."

"Why, Nochum? Just for the record."

"Why? Remember what you once said to me--'Stay in the playpen. This game's for big boys'? Well, I sure as hell played it like a big boy, Israel Bond. I organized the world's most cunning terror organization with the help of that wacked-up Chink and his gadgets. I, little bitty Nochum Spector, the forgotten nephew of the great M, the old broad with the wisdom of the ages and that motherin' CHICKEN SOUP. Do you know what it meant to be the nephew of M? How the big shots in M 33 and 1/3, including yourself, laughed at 'poor little Nochum, helpless little Nochum ... he'll never get anywhere ... he'll ride to his pay check on his tanteh's I. J. Fox coattails.' But I fooled you all. Even though I never got the glory assignments and the booze 'n' broads that go with 'em, I wasn't wasting my time. 'Poor little Nochum' was listening, learning and, one day, betraying. Small jobs at first--a little trip here and there to Jordan or Syria for a few hundred pounds--then I branched out big in Russia, stung the comrades for a million rubles. Now the Red Chinese are coming through with twenty million sunyatsens. And with my Chink number two and his bugs and the wonton bomb I'll make the world grovel at my feet!"

"It's all over now, little man with big dreams."

"Not yet!" And Nochum shot through the floor.

"A chute!" Bond cried. "And here on the desk ... a button! The little bastard pressed it while waxing so eloquent. God knows where he is now. We've got to get up to the convent and warn the folks. There's an attack coming. They'll be wiped out in the morning!"

• • •

After reuniting Pablito with his overjoyed parents in the village of Pupi Campo (Mrs. Garcia covered Bond with tear-soaked kisses of joy; Mr. Garcia shook his hand with awe), they made their way up Mount Maidenhead on a winding, obscure trail known only to Sister Sweetcakes and the Keystone Automobile Club.

Sister brushed a Gila monster off her leg. "Israel, what can we do about the impending attack?"

"I don't know. We have no weapons up there. They'll have mortars, grenade launchers, machine guns. They don't even have to scale the mountain. They can just pop at us from Camp Camp and blow the convent to bits." As though his last sentence had decided something for him, he turned to her, a curious tenderness on his cruelly handsome face. "Sister, I'm not letting you go on."

"Israel, I must go back. It is my home."

He was fighting an emotion now, one that made him clench and unclench his fists. His watch band fell off again, snapped in two; so did his rolled-steel ID bracelet.

"Sister Sweetcakes, I love you. There's no one in this world quite like you, your gentleness, your selflessness ... damn it, Sister! Renounce your calling! Renounce your faith and take mine!"

"It cannot be, Mr. Bond. You ask too much of me. Give up my nun's garb, give up my faith. Why did you not ask me to, give up my color as well?"

"You know that doesn't mean a damn thing to me. We don't have to live in a Jewish neighborhood."

• • •

Israel Bond stood on the precipice looking down into the Valley of the Blind at the Temple of Hate. His field glasses caught the sun glinting off bayonets and throwing knives. He saw Spector, in the uniform of a field marshal, and a revived Dr. Nu walk into the paved area and the soldiers lift their rifles in salutes. He had counted 500 of them.

His unrequited love for the nun shoved into a deep corner of his mind from whence he might extract it some day and weep about it into his chicken soup, Bond was very much the cold-blooded Oy Oy Seven again.

A feathery touch on his arm made him turn. Baldroi LeFagel. "Oh, your sweet body is all cut up. Let me rub it down--with mine."

"Damn it, LeFagel! This is no time to swish around. There are five hundred guys down there who'll be shooting up this place any moment now, guys who can shoot the head off a pin, who blend into the jungle and strike like rattlers, who can kill with one karate stroke."

"Oh, worry not, you heart-stopping thing. I'll protect that precious Herculean body of yours. I have a black belt in karate myself."

"So have they."

"Mine has sequins."

The six survivors of the Israeli Peace Corps, two on crutches, all bearing the scars of the earlier attack, came to the cliff's edge. In their eyes he could see trust and hope. He knew they looked to him for leadership in this hour of tribulation. By thunder, he'd give it to them!

"Boys, it looks hopeless. I just learned the convent's telephone line to Vera Hruba has been cut. I can't get through to Bon Ami for men and ammo. But don't despair. I'll get us out of this."

"Hey!" shouted one of the Corpsmen. "We got company! Look, a dozen guys coming up the mountain."

Bond's heart leaped. Could Bon Ami somehow have learned of their predicament and sent men and guns? Hot damn! With the right weapons we could hold them off until help comes.

Over the wall popped a red sweating face. "Hi, folks! The Rock of Ages record caravan is right on the ol' schedule! Tell Sister Sweetcakes to sound her A a few times: Marty O'Marty and the boys are in town!"

Down went his heart, pierced by an arrow of futility. Gottenu! Of all the times to record a religious album ... with death from international communism staring us in the face. "We who are about to die salute you, Mr. O'Marty." And taking the recording executive aside, he gave it to him straight.

"I better tell the fellas, Mr. Bond." O'Marty beckoned to A Man Called Peter and the Padres, four thick-mopped musicians with Selmer harps, and the technicians who puffed up the path bearing the tools of the trade. "It's all off."

"Hey, man?" said A Man Called Peter. "You mean like we ain't havin' no session?"

"Kid, don't you realize that the Vi Teh Minh, the Russkis and Fidelistas might be here any second?"

"Screw them other groups, daddy. You signed the contract with us."

• • •

Around the table in the dining hall of OLEO, served by the solicitous nuns, sat Bond, Sister Sweetcakes, the Peace Corps boys, Baldroi LeFagel, Dr. Browndorf and Marty O'Marty's retinue.

"Bond! I've got my transistor radio working," called out O'Marty. "At least we can get some news of the outside world." He turned a dial. "Hey, a Miami station."

"... From politically torn El Tiparillo comes word of new civil war this morning. West El Tiparillan forces were rushed to The Band, that neutral zone that divides the island, to meet the forces of General Diaz from EET which launched an attack late last night. Said General Wesson y Oyl of WET--quote--We shall never, never surrender and, if we do, it will be with dignity--unquote. And that----"

"Turn it off, Marty. We heard the news, all right, and it's lousy," said Bond. Revolution in El Tiparillo! And WET's army committed to the border. No, there'll be no in-the-nick-of-time cavalry charge for us, Gunga Din.

OLEO shook violently as the first barrage whined over the wall into its side.

"I had not foreseen this hopeless siege," Bond said. "This is not a slickly planned affair with predictable moves and countermoves like Operation Matzohball."

"Matzohball!"

Say it again, he screamed at his brain. Say it again.

"Matzohball!"

"Matzohball!" he whooped in a fierce boyish joy. "That's it! Sister," and he hugged the bewildered nun, "have you any large kettles?"

"Only a small one or two for making tea. The soup and the stews are prepared in the caldrons."

"Caldrons! Oy, mommeleh, caldrons! Let's get 'em!"

She led him into the kitchen. "There." On top of the old-fashioned stove were a dozen four-foot-deep caldrons.

"Tell every able hand, man and woman, to get cracking! I want them in here on the double!" said Bond.

A minute later they stood hushed before him.

• • •

"I see smoke coming from the roof," said Dr. Nu. "Our last barrage must have set it on fire. We shall not have to wait too long now."

Nochum growled. "Where are your insect allies? They should have overrun the place by now."

"Perhaps there has been some misunderstanding, spectre leader. But I feel sure----"

"Misunderstanding?" Spector's voice lashed. "You know what the penalty is for failing Spectre."

Dr. Nu almost turned white. "My leader, I'm sure that--wait! Listen! Tell the men to stop firing."

From far off they heard a drone. One solid sound at first. And then, as it came nearer, they could distinguish individual noises, buzzing, chirping, the crackling of dead leaves under billions of insect feet. Now there unfolded a black blanket, spreading over the horizon as far as the eye could see. Uncountable hordes of crawling things ... and hovering above them their winged cousins in airborne legions that for an instant blotted out the sun.

"They are coming to me." Dr. Nu smiled.

• • •

"It's quiet down there," said Dr. Browndorf. "Something's fishy."

Bond put down his field glasses. "No, buggy. Look, doc."

The medico put the binoculars to his eyes. "My God, bugs! Ugh! Billions 'n' billions!"

"Don't get panicky, doc. I've a feeling they won't be coming here after all. Are the boys doing the job?"

"Yes. The caldrons are lined up by the wall. And one of the boys got a brainstorm. He tore down all the rain spouts, tied them together and formed a sort of pipeline to the kitchen. We'll get a continuous supply of hot water from the hot-water taps."

"And the stuff?"

"They're opening it and boiling it as fast as they can."

"Make sure it's packed as tight as Mother Margolies' best. Use just enough hot water to make it firm and bouncy. A soggy one won't go fifty feet."

One of the Israeli boys came up the path, running, in fact, from Baldroi LeFagel, who nimbly skipped after him.

"Baldroi, leave the kid alone or I'll----"

Le Fagel said gaily, "Look, it's all over my hands." He held them out, revealing a gummy yellow covering. "I've been helping those superb young men pack it. I tasted it, incidentally. It's delicious. Jewish delicacy, no? But then all Jewish delicacies taste delicious. You're Jewish, aren't you, Bond?"

Bond sent the little poet spinning with a backhanded cuff. "Get lost, you, or I'll tan your hide. Uh--sorry, LeFagel."

"You had to make it a racial issue, right, Whitey?"

The young Israeli, whose name was Neon Zion, said, "We're ready to roll, Oy Oy Seven. Give us the word."

They were silent as he approached them, even the no-stop talker O'Marty.

"Did you knock out a big enough section of the retaining wall?" Bond asked.

"Didn't have to," said Neon. "They did it for us with their last mortar barrage."

"OK," Bond said hoarsely. "Now we push it."

Shots skimmed over their heads. "Rifles," said Bond. "They must be planning to come up now. Doc, give me back the field glasses."

He adjusted the zoom-in lens. Camp Camp, he saw, was gone! Smothered by the hellish legions of insects. Their first phalanx was now moving on Spector. Dr. Nu and the Vi Teh Minh, Russkis and Fidelistas. Dr. Nu, carrying IPECAC, bowed formally, bent down to speak to the leaders of the various species.

He saw the Oriental's mouth agape. My God, the man must be screaming his head off. They're on him! The yellow is disappearing. He's turning black ... with insects! Now there's just a blob writhing on the ground. Sayonara. Dr. Watts Nu! You and Spectre wanted the world to crawl ... and now the crawlers have had their revenge.

Spector! Where was he? He's left his Oriental genius to be gnawed to the bone. He's fleeing down the mountain. You know damn well what's on his mind, Bond. The helicopter!

"Heave to, everybody! Push, push, push." And ten tons of matzohball rolled over the lip of the precipice!

Down, down, down plummeted the yellow avenger, bouncing from ledge to ledge, gaining incredible speed. It crushed hundreds of thousands of insects with a single bound, then bounced up, up, up into the sky, then down again into the wild-eyed, terror-stricken soldiers, strewing them about like tenpins, down, down, down into the airstrip.

Bond's glasses picked up Nochum Spector, a briefcase in his hand, looking up in horror. Then Spector fell to his knees and began to pray. Too late for that now, you little bastard! The matzohball bounced and came down upon him. Bond saw Nochum and the helicopter disappear under the yellow avalanche.

• • •

Israel Bond leaned against the wall near the precipice, his eyes still riveted to the holocaust below. The matzohball was beginning to come apart under the torrid midday sun. He thought of Nochum. M must never know her beloved nephew had been the culprit. He would tell her that Rotten Roger Colfax had been a Russian all along and that the traitor business was literally a Red herring to cause doubt and suspicion among the M 33 and 1/3 team. He rehearsed his speech for the tenth time: "You would have been proud of the heroic way he met his Maker, Mother."

"Talking to yourself, Mr. Bond?"

"Hello, dear Sister. Come to say goodbye?"

"Yes, Mr. Bond. But let's make that au revoir. I hate goodbyes. I know our paths will cross again someday. Now I must go back into the convent and make that long-playing record for Marty. I have asked that the proceeds be set aside for the creation of a Boys' Town on El Tiparillo. Indeed, my brother Baldroi has asked to help operate it."

He would, Bond thought.

"Until our paths converge, I want you to have this little token of my esteem and ... uh ... affection. Please take this. Mr. Bond."

In the palm of his hand was a mirror framed in a lovely coral rectangle. "It is exquisite, as you are, Sister."

"Whenever you look into it, Mr. Bond, you will see my favorite person in all the world." A rose of a blush surfaced on her cheeks. She pressed his hand against her heart. Then she turned and walked slowly back to the convent. She stood at the door, waved and was gone.

"Adieu, Sister Sweetcakes," he whispered. "May the Bluebird of Happiness bring you Jan Peerce."

He looked into the mirror and saw her (and his) favorite person in all the world. And--someone else! An evil animal whose demented grin bared a golden treasure trove.

Torquemada LaBonza! "The Man with the Golden Gums!" "The Silent One!" No misnomer there. He had not even been aware of the man's approach.

Israel Bond, the egotistical fool! While he had been thinking he'd pulled off another successful conclusion, he'd forgotten all about the world's most feared assassin, LaBonza, whose victims died in an insane fit of laughter. Why?

He was to know immediately.

The voice of Torquemada LaBonza came out of that Midas mouth:

"Eh-h-h ... what's up, doc? I'll tell you, doc. Your hands, doc. Eh-h-h, that's 'cause I got this silencer against your backbone, doc."

Bond began to laugh and laugh and laugh. It poured out of him like the blood had from his wounds. LaBonza spun him around with his left hand and raked Bond's cheek with his gun sight, reopening the old wound.

Still Bond laughed, though the cheek smarted terribly. He could not help it, no matter what.

Torquemada's voice was that of--Bugs Bunny!

"LaBonza, I can't help it. Nobody could. How in the world did you ever get a voice like that?"

No answer. Bond thought his query had drawn a Mel Blanc.

Then LaBonza spoke. "I--uh--guess it don't matter now, doc, 'cause I'm gonna kill you anyway and bring that hotshot mezuzah of yours back to KGB. Pretty humiliatin', ain't it, doc? The Israeli superman is brought down by a cwazy wabbit, eh, doc?"

Though convulsed by simultaneous mirth and fear, Bond nevertheless managed to get the story.

His father was an impressionist, LaBonza pointed out, but made a meager living at it. There were many Cagney-Robinson-Coopei-Grant imitators working the cheap-theater circuit, and the father was ruefully aware he had blown his talent on a surfeited market. However, LaBonza added, his father adored the cartoon characters in those delightful shorts one saw with every movie in the Thirties and Forties. No one was specializing in these imitations and so almost from birth he took Torquemada to the movies three times a week, hoping to leave the boy with a profitable legacy.

"You can't envision what it was like for me in those formative years with a tyrant for a father. Ah, phooeyl" He was Donald Duck now, quacking irately at his rotten lot in life. "And, thufferin' thuccotash, thir (now he was an equally incensed Daffy Duck), from the very beginning every time I'd try to thpeak normally, that thtupid father of mine would dig his thumbth into my cheekth until my mouth ached. Thoon I wath afraid to even try thpeaking like a normal perthon. And e-e-e-e-ven wh-wh-when he d-d-d-died (Porky Pig had taken over the narrative at this point), I was so used to speaking like this (Porky passed the ball to Mickey), that I continued this way. Kinda awful, huh, Pluto?"

"Why did you become an assassin, LaBonza? ' Bond barely got it out. His body was shaking with silent laughter. No harm showing a little sympathy to this strangest of human beings.

"Oooh, I tawt I taw a puttycat. Why? 'Tause I hated my daddy 'tause he made me weal misewable (it was Tweety Bird's turn). I wanted wevenge on a wotten world. I wanted to--hah! hah!--kill wots of wittle gway wabbits--I hate wittle gway wabbits--and kill even more people. (Elmer Fudd muscled in.) But, son, why are yuh--ah say why are yuh askin' me all these dad-burned fool questions? You-all ain't tryin' ter put somethin' over on old Torquemada, is yuh? Ah say. is yuh? (Leghorn picked up the ball.)

"Certainly not, LaBonza. It's just that your story is so fantastic. Why the golden teeth and gums?"

"Jiminy Cricket! (Bond had no trouble with this one.) I'm your conscience, Torquemada, so I'll answer the gentleman's question. It's 'cause your father squeezed your cheeks so often your teeth softened and fell out. And. honest, Pinoke, so did your gums. So when you killed your first man you had the whole business done in gold so's you'd be sumpin' special, huh?"

"Well, LaBonza, whoever put in that golden mouth of yours cheated you."

"Look, doc, if you're makin' fun o' me I'll kill you real slow and easy, a bullet in each hand, each leg, each rib."

Bond smiled nonchalantly. "Why should I make fun? I'm a damn serious guy when I face death, LaBonza. Now, look for yourself. Here's a mirror. If you look very closely you'll see you got the cheapest kind of gold. Maybe it isn't even gold. Maybe it's pyrites--fool's gold. See for yourself."

LaBonza grabbed the mirror angrily. He turned it around and held it toward himself, opening his mouth wide.

Bond tensed. If he had figured it out right, he had one last chance.

As LaBonza's mouth spread, the sun flashed against the generous golden expanse, the flash ricocheting off the mirror into LaBonza's eyes. He was blinded for one second.

Bond hit him low and hard, the impact with the man's knees sending pangs through his sore shoulders. LaBonza was hurled back, back ... and over the wall. His hands clawed for a grip on a root, lost it, and he fell into space. Bond heard screaming oinks, quacks, tweets, then heard them no more as the black dot bounced off a ledge and plunged to the bottom of Mount Maidenhead.

Now it really is over, he panted.

Yet, he pondered, how could any of it have been real? It had been an adventure peopled by a conglomeration of characters to be found in the marred convolutions of a mentally imbalanccd writer's mind. Had any of these menaces been more than cartoons?

How could he put a finis on this nightmare in keeping with its cartoonish quality?

His gray eyes gleamed, the smile forming as he knew what he must say.

Israel Bond said: "Th-th-th-that's all, f-f-f-f-olks!"