The Wrong Venus (14 page)

“Yes,” Martine said, with a smile he could have shaved with. “Aren’t they?”

Sabine Manning disappeared into the corridor. As he gathered up the photographs and followed her, Martine leaned close and whispered, “I’m sorry. Just hang on, help should be here any minute.”

She was apparently trying to buy time, but he was too confused and tired by now to figure out for what. After over forty-eight hours without sleep and living in a more or less continuous state of crisis, everything was beginning to blur and run together, Moffatt and Jean-Jacques and Gabrielle and Decaux and Sabine Manning all going around in a slow whirl in his head. He went through the study and into the white-carpeted bedroom. He heard water running into a tub, and Sabine Manning emerged from the bath. She smiled. “Please sit down,” she said, indicating an armchair near the bed.

He sat down and put the photographs on a small table beside him. She threw off the car coat, tossing it and the scarf onto another chair, and opened one of her bags to take out a nylon dressing gown and some toilet articles, talking all the while.

“The whole trouble with Anglo-Saxons, or at least Americans, Lawrence, is our obsession with sex. Our lives are ruined by it, we’re short-changed, we’re robbed, mulcted, deprived, we’re culturally and intellectually disinherited by this continuous stewing over something that’s simply not that important at all—how old are you, dear?”

“Thirty,” he said.

“Really? I wouldn’t have thought you were anywhere near that. You’re very attractive, you know.”

She sat on the side of the bed, hiked the hem of the pale silk sheath halfway up her thighs, and began to unclip the tabs from her stockings. Her legs were as deeply tanned as her face, Colby noted, and very nice they were too. If this bombshell of vitality and hormonal fallout had ever really been the desiccated old maid he’d imagined and felt sorry for, no wonder Martine and Dudley had been stunned. As though she’d read his thoughts, she reached over to the night table, picked up a book, and tossed it to him. It was a copy of
These Tormented.

“Take a look at that,” she said, sliding her stockings down and tossing them aside. “The photograph on the jacket, I mean. There’s the generic victim of this sex-preoccupation of ours, s woman not even half alive, shy, futile, plain, ineffectual, because she has no interest in anything, no curiosity, no desire for intellectual challenge, no capacity for total and utter absorption in anything—would you get this zipper for me, darling?”

She stepped over in front of him. He stood up and unzipped the dress. She turned, threw her arms wide, and cried out, “Look at me now! Look at my complexion, my eyes! I’m alive! I’m alive all over—”

“You are that,” Colby agreed.

“—thrillingly, vibrantly alive right out to my fingertips. You see what archaeology has done for me? And why I have to tell people, make them see—”

She threw both arms around his neck and kissed him. He felt like a fly falling into a whirlpool of molten taffy, and tried to retreat, with about the same success. “Oh, I’m going to enjoy working with you, you dear boy. And I don’t think you’re thirty at all—”

They were suddenly interrupted by running footsteps and outcries from the salon. Colby ran out, and the sight that greeted him was enough to make him consider running back and throwing himself into the arena again with Sabine Manning, except that she had come out too. It was the end.

As well as he could piece it together afterward, with some help from Martine in regard to the cast, everybody must have landed at Orly at once. And now the wrath of Holton Press and the Thomhill Literary Agency descended on Dudley in the forms of Chadwick Holton, Senior, Ernest Thornhill, four attorneys complete with briefcases and forged and violated contracts, and one Parisian taxi driver shouting into the impervious and unheeding maelstrom of charge and countercharge and denunciation and denial that hell would freeze before he would take his pay in lire. In his mental state at the moment, Colby saw nothing unusual in the fact that the United States had abandoned the dollar; it was only afterward he remembered Thornhill had been in Rome.

There was nothing he could do, except pay the driver, who looked once more at the chaos in the salon and departed, shaking his head. “A madhouse.”

“We are authors,” Colby said with dignity. He lighted a cigarette and waited for the police to come and get him. Then he noticed that, strangely, Martine was completely unperturbed, merely watching and listening with interest. He went over to her.

She glanced at his lips. “Apparently Horatius, and the Alamo, are still on the record books.”

He scrubbed at the lipstick. “These things just come over me, and I’m powerless. I once bit a lady cop in the subway in New York.”

“Poor Lawrence. I’m sorry. I thought at thirty you’d be reasonably safe.”

“She doesn’t think I look that old. Do you know a good lawyer? Maybe if we called him right away—”

“Lawyer? Heavens, darling, the place is bulging with them now.”

“I mean one of our own, to—you know—bring us cigarettes, and things like that.”

“But Lawrence, don’t you understand? We’ve won.”

He looked over to where Sabine Manning was brandishing the manuscript over the cringing Dudley. “. . . you mean you intended to have this revolting piece of sexy slush published with my name on it?” she cried out as she threw it toward the ceiling. Sheets began to flutter down.

Colby shook his head. “We have?”

“Of course. It was just a case of hanging on till they got here. The whole thing’s absurdly simple.”

She walked out into the center of the salon and held up her hands. “Gentlemen, if I could have your attention for just a minute. . . .”

Some semblance of quiet had fallen over the room, and Colby had begun to sort people out. The white-haired man with the benign countenance who looked like Santa Claus was Chadwick Holton, while Ernest Thornhill was the austere type with the rimless glasses. The four attorneys were all young, equipped with narrow lapels and earnest expressions, and were more or less bunched at one end of the room as though drawn together by a shared distrust of the insanity with which ordinary people handled their affairs. Even Sabine Manning had broken off glaring at Dudley, and all eyes were on Martine.

“—If you are wondering why I’m interfering here,” she went on, “it is simply because this entire fiasco is my fault. Having the novel ghost-written was my idea, not Mr. Dudley’s. Which, of course, is the reason I called all of you yesterday and read you Miss Manning’s telegram—”

Colby started.

“—Because I’ve wronged her, and I want to make restitution, I gather that in view of her new interests she has no intention of agreeing to publication of this novel—tentatively entitled
This Driven Flesh—
under her name.”

“Not in a thousand years!” Sabine Manning cried out. Colby saw simultaneous shadows flit across the faces of Holton and Thornhill. They merely sighed, however. They had already heard Miss Manning’s views on the subject, at some length.

Martine smiled. “I applaud Miss Manning’s attitude. There is too much written sex already, and archaeology
can
be a lot more interesting, if properly approached. So, since in a way I have caused her money to be spent in having it written, the least I can do to make amends is give the money back. Fortunately, I have a small income from a trust fund. I’ve already checked Mr. Dudley’s records, and the sum involved is nineteen thousand dollars.” She reached over on a table for her purse and took out her checkbook. “So if the assembled attorneys will draw up the papers for the transfer, I’ll give her my check for the full amount and buy the novel from her. And perhaps Mr. Holton will publish it for me.” She smiled at him.

Colby had given up trying to fathom it. He merely listened.

Holton returned her smile with a gallant little bow and one of his own. “I think we might. But since such honesty as yours demands honesty in return, I must warn you of the brutal facts of publishing life. Imitators of Sabine Manning are a glut on the market. A sale of three thousand copies would be about tops.”

“But it’s the same novel,” Martine protested.

“The same novel, my dear young lady, but not the same thing. You could expect a return of—oh, say twelve hundred” dollars. I’m sorry.”

“Well—” Martine gestured fatalistically. It couldn’t be helped. She still had to return the money.

“Well, I should hope so,” Sabine Manning said indignantly.

In surprisingly few minutes, considering there were four lawyers involved, the papers were drawn up. It had been Colby’s experience that even two attorneys trying to agree on the wording of something would have trouble ordering an extra quart of milk in much under half a day. Sabine Manning signed.

Martine smiled bravely as she passed over her check and took the bill of sale. “Incidentally,” she asked, “what is the title of your book? I want to be sure to get a copy.”

“An Inquiry into Certain Analogous Practices in Afro/Roman Naval Architecture of the Second Century B.C.,”
Miss Manning replied proudly.

The collective shudder by Holton and Thornhill could have been felt in the next room, Colby thought. Martine pursed her lips and considered it. “Catchy, all right,” she agreed. She turned to Chadwick Holton. “Should sell pretty well, don’t you think?”

The latter’s expression was that of a man watching himself bleed to death from a severed artery. “With jacket endorsements by Moses and Julius Caesar,” he said, “maybe three hundred copies.”

“Oh, that is too bad.” Martine turned to Sabine Manning. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Sabine Manning shrugged. “I’m not writing it to make money.”

Martine looked contrite. “Oh, I didn’t explain, did I, why I suggested to Merriman that he have the novel ghosted?” Dudley cringed even lower, as though trying to disappear into his shoes. “Archaeological research seems to be so expensive, and with nearly all your money tied up in—shall we say, immature securities—”

The uproar broke out anew, with the attorneys once more in the thick of it. Amid cries of malfeasance, misfeasance, and non-feasance, Dudley was denounced, fired, and threatened with an audit and prosecution. Martine held up her hand again for quiet.

“I think perhaps we’re all being a little too heated about this. After all, the electronics stock is in Miss Manning’s name, and will eventually come back. I’m sure that by retirement age, or maybe even by the time she’s sixty, she will be able to resume her archaeological researches.”

“What?”
Sabine Manning’s face was a study in sheer horror.

Martine appeared not to notice. She was frowning thoughtfully, and now she turned to Chadwick Holton. “There is one thing we’ve all overlooked, which might have saved the situation. I mean, Miss Manning doesn’t want her name contaminated by any further association with sex novels, but she has two names—”

There was a gasp from all around the room.

Martine went on. “Would she have made any more money out of it, and been able to continue her archaeological studies, if she’d published both books? That is,
An Inquiry into Certain Analogous Practices in Afro/Roman Naval Architecture of the Second Century B.C.
: under the name of Sabine Manning, and
This Driven Flesh
under her own name, Fleurelle Scudder?”

Chadwick Holton was regarding her with awe. “About fourteen hundred dollars for both. Reverse the order, and you come out with a million two hundred thousand.”

Martine looked blandly at Colby. “Maybe that’s the way I should have put it.”

As soon as the chorus of approval, including overwhelming endorsement by Sabine Manning, had died down a little, Martine held up her hand again. “But you’re still overlooking something, gentlemen. Sabine Manning doesn’t own the novel any more. I do.”

In the ensuing and ghastly silence, Chadwick Holton asked, his face grave except for a suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “How much?”

Martine considered for a moment. “Well, since I’m hoping to get away tonight for a vacation in Rhodes, I don’t want to enter into any extended negotiations. So I think that for an offer of forty thousand from Miss Manning, plus a written guarantee that Mr. Dudley gets his job back, I’d sell right now.”

They stayed at a hotel named for roses while being smothered in bougainvillea on an island that had been Zeus’ gift to Helios, and ate their lunches on an awning-covered terrace with Moorish arches looking on the sea while an orchestra played Turkish-sounding music full of high woodwinds and the tinkling bells of camel caravans. They climbed on muleback to the Acropolis at Lindos and walked hand in hand through the old walled city where the cobbled streets that were as neat and unlittered as a floor had known the clanking tread of knights during the Crusades and sandal-footed Romans who followed the eagles a thousand years before.

They swam in the sea in the afternoons and afterward they made love and lay in bed under a fourteen-foot ceiling where wind banged the ancient shutters of their room, a flower-scented wind that somehow seemed to have a color, blue he thought it was. On the tenth day they were there they received an airmail letter from Kendall, posted in Gibraltar and forwarded by Martine’s concierge in Paris. She had accepted Thornhill’s offer to represent her as her agent in the production of future Sabine Manning novels.

They were lying on the beach in swim suits, drinking ouzo under an umbrella.

“And you knew all the time,” Colby asked, “that if it came to a showdown you could apply the pressure?”

She shook her head. “Not till I saw those photographs. Before that it was a gamble. Calculated risk, rather. The telegram didn’t sound like any embittered and heartbroken woman to me, with all that stuff about cocktail parties and press conferences. And Roberto’s attitude didn’t fit your theory either. I had an idea it was the other way.”

“That he didn’t leave her, she left him?”

“Sure. She wanted to broaden her horizons. And let’s face it, poor old Roberto is pushing twenty-seven.”

“Pretty creaky for that kind of duty, all right.” He rolled over and studied her fondly, “You know, you’re hell on wheels at pouring crème de menthe in watch movements.”