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he’ll forget he ever saw anything, just chalk it up to the D.T.’s.”
    Goshen was on the ball, Bond thought. To the bewildered troopers: “You heard him, fellas.”
    “Sure thing, Mr. Bond. Say, uh ...” Crawford paused. He had something on his mind. “You mean to say that you shot out our front rubber on spite? You planned it that way?”
    “Of course,” Bond smiled. It sounded lame even to his own ears. (Gottenu! I’ve got to get back to the range and do some serious practicing!) “You see, lads, if you had been forced to shoot him it would have been embarrassing for three countries. His, Lebanon, would have denied any knowledge of his murder mission, accused yours of collusion with ‘Zionist imperialists,’ etc. When I deliberately forced you out of the picture I simplified matters for everybody. Now our story is that during the chase he swerved off the road and bang-o! We’ll just say he was a kook with a personal grudge against Loxfinger.”
    They seemed highly satisfied with the explanation. “Hey, that’s a fancy heater you got there, Mr. Bond. Can we look at it?”
    Bond let them examine the Shar Shue Dung-55, noting with annoyance that there was a bit of dandruff on its hair trigger. Have to pay more attention to my equipment, he admitted.
    He had shaken hands with them, given each man another Raleigh, and Ramblered north, with a farewell wave.
    I guess the flashback killed the ten minutes, Bond reckoned. He started for the lounge and his meeting with Saxon. On the elevator he bumped into a girl. “Beg your pardon.”
    She said nothing, content to flash a look of utter disgust.

    She’s a smasher! Bond thought. Sullen savage loveliness ... full, pouting lips, eyes of Brillo black and bluish highlights, a heart-stopping shape, hugged affectionately by leotards of sheerest net lace. Her proud defiant breasts were completely uncovered. If this damn elevator doesn’t stop in three seconds I’m going to crush those maddening rosebud nipples in my aching teeth, he swore vehemently.
    Rosebud! He smiled a secretive smile. Odd to think of that word now. As a child he’d had a sled by that name. Wonder what ever happened to it?
    With arch humor he bowed, permitting the blazing creature to leave the car first. “See you around ... or around you,” he riposted. She never even turned to acknowledge his quip, walking lithely away with her tantalizing dancer’s stride.
    “She don’ like men, that one,” broke in the colorfully woolly-headed old Negro elevator operator, showing a mouthful of pointed teeth. “I seen lotsa menz in dis heah hotel tryin’ to sweet talk dat missy, but she don’ give no eye to none o’ dem nohow.”
    “Thanks for the tip,” Bond said lightly. “Here, old timer.” The old man grinned at the two Luci Baines dimes Bond had placed in his pinkish palm. A nice enough old fellow, but no CORE member, Bond surmised.
    She was a smasher! Bond thought again. But he’d sensed something strange, a man-hating look he’d noticed in certain bizarre bistros with an offbeat clientele. Lesbo? Well, if she was, he’d—in Warren Harding’s classic phrase—restore her to “normalcy”!
    At the desk he asked for any messages.
    “Uh, you’re Mr. Bond in Room 1818, correct, sir?”
    “Yes.” (He’d insisted on that room number this time; no fool he!)
    “Here you are, sir.”
    The brief message, in Arabic, read: “I’d ride a Camel a mile to smoke an Oasis.”
    What the hell was this? Bond frowned, his cruelly dark handsomeness becoming even more attractive. More than one woman had been driven wild by that frown.
    Camel? Oasis? If these were code words, they were certainly not in his master book. “Clerk, are you sure this message is for me?”
    “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,” said the clerk, reddening. “This is for the gentleman in 1817, the room next to yours. Mr. Jew.”

    Mr. Jew? Bond thought hard. “Sounds rather familiar. What’s the gentleman’s first name,