The Wrong Venus (4 page)

“Then what’s the problem?” Colby asked. “They must be about finished.”

“One of them is, almost. But four days ago the other one just walked out and nobody’s seen her since.”

“You mean she quit?”

“He doesn’t know what happened. They had an argument, and the next morning she wasn’t there at breakfast. That wasn’t too unusual, she quite often stayed out all night. But she didn’t show up at all. Nor the next day.”

Dudley couldn’t notify the police, because he couldn’t very well explain what she was doing there in the house; it might get in the papers. Last night Martine had called Paris and canvassed all the hospitals, since Dudley couldn’t speak a word of French, but there was no trace of the girl. Her passport was still there in the house, so she couldn’t have left the country, but she might have gone off to the Riviera with some boyfriend.

“Did she take any clothes?”

“He doesn’t know. She still has things there, but she could have taken something.”

“Sure,” he agreed, but still not completely satisfied. Then he shrugged. “But couldn’t the other one finish it alone?”

“Only his part of it. I’ll have to explain how they worked. Their names are Casey Sanborn and Kendall Flanagan. You’ve probably never heard of them. I hadn’t.”

“No “ he said. “I don’t think so.”

Sanborn was an old pulp writer back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s who used to turn out three to four million words a year under contract to several strings of magazines and under half a dozen names—sea stories, mysteries, adventure stories, but mostly westerns. He’d hardly written anything since the pulp magazines folded, but when he sat down at a typewriter it sounded like a machine-gunner repelling an attack. He erupted characters and plots like a broken fire main, and of course he had the five Manning novels for a style book, but still it wasn’t quite Manning. It wasn’t lack of talent, but simply a matter of early conditioning and the fact he was a little too old to adapt.

In the pulps, skin had to be leathery, and nobody ever stroked it—they just shot at it. So Sanborn was never entirely convincing at the silken, magenta-nippled breast; when Derek pressed his face into Gloria’s cleavage there was always an impression this didn’t quite ring true from a motivational standpoint and he should have been off doing a man’s work, shooting Comanches, or helping the boys get the herd to Abilene. And that was where Kendall Flanagan came in.

“She’s from Madison Avenue,” Martine went on, “and writes toilet soap and skin lotion commercials for TV, all dewy and tremulous and full of ankle-deep adjectives—”

Colby gestured approvingly. “Hey, he’s got it.”

“Sure. I don’t know whether it was accidental or not, but it’s the perfect synthesis. They didn’t write it ensemble. Sanborn’d write it—the whole thing, plot, characters, dialogue, and all—and then turn it over to her and she’d spray on the flesh tones. That is, she’d simply rewrite the same story, but in ad-agency marshmallow, and when it came out of her typewriter you were smothered in skin and Nuit d’Amour and you could hear the nylon slithering to the floor. As her publishers said, it’s absolutely top-drawer Manning with the drawer pulled out. But now Flanagan’s disappeared, and she had nearly fifty pages to go.

“Merriman can’t turn it in like that. So there he sits, with the million dollars practically in the bank, and he can’t touch it.”

“It could drive him crazy,” Colby said.

“It’s about to. I went to Lausanne to talk to a writer I know there, but he was busy. There was another here in London, but he’d just gone to work for MGM. So I thought of you. Could you do it?”

Colby thought about it. Vicarious sex bored him to death and he wasn’t sure he could write it, but now he’d found her again he couldn’t let her get away. “Sure. I mean, if he’ll hire both of us.”

“Why both of us?”

“I can’t spell worth a damn,” he explained hastily. “And there’s the feminine expertise, like whether you can put a girdle back on in a Volkswagen—”

The telephone rang.

She answered. She listened for a moment, winked at Colby, and said soothingly, “All right, Merriman, just calm down. . . . Oh-oh! . . . Oh, murder! . . . But he’s still there? . . . Just a minute. ...”

She turned to Colby. “Everything’s down, the drain now. There’s a reporter in the house, and he’s got the whole story.”

I should have asked about the pension plan, he thought. “Let me talk to him.”

She handed him the phone. "What paper's this guy with?" he asked.

“Who’s this?” Dudley demanded.

“Lawrence Colby. The writer Martine was talking to—”

“Writer?
What the hell do I want with a writer now? All I need’s a good lawyer and a hungry judge—”

“Calm down,” Colby said. “What about this reporter?”

“The whole thing’s shot to hell!” Dudley was beginning to shout. “Work your fingers to the bone trying to keep her solvent while she chases around the Mediterranean getting banged from Gibraltar to the Nile Hilton!”

“Relax, will you? Where is he now?”

“Locked in the back room of the office. When I found out who he was I got him in there and slammed the door. I thought maybe Martine could think of something.”

“Maybe we can. Is there a phone in the room?”

“An extension.”

“Has he used it yet?”

“I don’t think so. He’s just pounding on the door and yelling. Listen.”

In the background Colby could hear thuds and muffled protest. The reporter was undoubtedly American; mother-grabber had a nostalgic ring to it. “Can you cut the line?”

“Sure,” Dudley said. “I already have. But look—Chrissakes, what can we do now?”

“He can’t get out the window?”

“It’s on the second floor.” There was a wistful flowering of hope in Dudley’s voice. “Maybe he’ll try it and kill himself.”

“Do you know where he’s from?”

“Los Angeles. The
Chronicle.”

“Are you sure he’s got the whole story?”

“The whole story?
The bastard could hang me! Look. . . . He called here yesterday, wanted to arrange an interview. He was on his way home from Berlin or somewhere and stopped off in Paris. He wanted to do a feature article on Sabine Manning, under a by-line, good publicity for her, that pitch. I told him nothing doing, of course, Miss Manning was too busy on her new book. That gets rid of most of ‘em, but this bird was a little tougher. He sneaked in through the kitchen this morning, and walked right into the room where Sanborn was working. Oh, sweet Jesus—!”

Colby whistled softly.

“Sanborn just thought he was the new writer I’d been trying to get, so he showed him the manuscript and started to fill him in. By the time I walked in from the airport he had it all, and he started to laugh and said wait’ll
this
hits the front page. I tried to buy him off—that’s how I got him into the office.”

“All right,” Colby said. “Keep him locked in there till we can get to Paris. We’ll call you from Orly.”

“You mean, you think there’s something we can do?”

“I don’t know yet. But I used to be a—” He turned, intending to motion for Martine to start getting dressed. She already had.

“—news—”

She had the garter belt girded around her under the loosened peignoir, and was sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on her nylons. A slender, tapering leg was thrust up and outward, rotating at the ankle as she slid the stocking-top up a satiny expanse of thigh and clipped it to the tab.

“What’s the matter?” Dudley demanded. “Have you got  asthma?”

“Asthma? No. I’m twenty-twenty in both eyes.”

“Oh . . . Martine. I think she grew up on a destroyer. But you used to be a what?”

“A newspaperman,” Colby said. An idea was beginning to take form in his mind. “It’s just possible we may be able to get that guy out of your hair, but there’ll be a slight fee.”

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“A
thousand!”
Dudley seemed to choke, and began making sputtering noises.

“Plus expenses,” Colby went on.

“Five hundred—”

“If he files that story, you know what your manuscript’ll be worth?”

“So I know, I know! Okay, a thousand. But no-cure-no-pay.”

“Right,” Colby agreed. “We’ll be in Paris as fast as we can get there. Find out his name and where he’s staying. And feed him a sob story. Sabine Manning died of cholera out in some back island of the Cyclades and you were trying to finish the novel she was working on so you can give the money to some charity she was interested in—”

“You want me to tell that to a
reporter?”

“So let him laugh. When we call you from Orly, answer from some other extension so he can’t hear you. . . . Oh, one more thing—that Flanagan girl still hasn’t shown up?”

“No. And if I ever get my hands on her—”

“You haven’t checked with the police?”

“No.”

“She hasn’t got her passport with her,” Colby pointed out. “If they’d picked her up for anything, they’d hold her till she produced one. Are you sure they haven’t tried to call you?”

“Sure I’m sure. They’d speak English, wouldn’t they?”

“Not necessarily. They would if they saw they had to.”

“That’s what I thought. This jerk that keeps bugging me—”

“What?” Colby asked.

“Nothing. Just some flip-lid that keeps calling up here three or four times a day trying to sell me something. In French, for Christ’s sake! But never mind him—”

“Wait a minute,” Colby broke in. ‘Tell me about this guy.”

“Hell, I don’t know anything about him. I got troubles of my own without listening to his, even if I could understand ‘em. When I hang up on him, he calls right back and starts blowing his stack all over the place. You know how excitable they are.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Three or four days.”

Colby frowned and glanced at Martine. She had her slip on and was pulling her dress over her head. Her face emerged, the eyes questioning. In the receiver he could hear the reporter banging and cursing again.

“Listen,” he said to Dudley. “Have you received any mail the past few days?”

“Sure. Piles of it, same as always. Fanmail, begging letters, she gets ‘em all the time.”

“No, I mean local. In French.”

“I might have. Seems to me there was something this morning.”

“Have you got it there?”

“No, I probably threw it out. I couldn’t read it.”

“Will you look in the wastebasket and see if it’s still there?”

“What the hell—? Oh, all right. . . .” There was a scrambling sound and a rustling of paper. “Yeah, here it is.”

“Can you read it to me?”

“Seems to be addressed to me.
Cher monsewer,
it says—”

“Go on.”

“The first two words are Madame Manning. I can make that out. Then it says,
ay eat enlewy—”

“Hold it, hold it!” Colby interrupted. “Just spell the words.”

“Okay. . . .
Madame Manning
—a—that’s one word
—e-t-e—
the e’s have got accent marks—”

“Right. Go on.”

“. . . e-n-l-e-v-é-e. . . .”

“Okay. That’s enough.” Colby put his hand over the mouthpiece, and turned to Martine. “They’ve been trying to tell him for four days they’ve kidnapped Kendall Flanagan.”

“Oh, no!”

“They think she’s Miss Manning.”

She shook her head and sat down. “You don’t suppose President Johnson would declare him a disaster area?”

Colby spoke into the phone again. “The reason your friend’s so excitable is frustration. He kidnapped Kendall Flanagan four days ago and can’t get anybody to notice it. Is she a heavy eater?”

“What?”

“That’s right.”

“If they’re going to kidnap Americans, why the hell don’t they learn English?”

“Look at the rest of it. Are there any figures?”

“Yeah. Here’s something that looks like one hundred thousand. I guess that’s a one in front.”

“The European one. Dollars or francs?”

“Dollars—” Dudley did a double take, and gasped. “A hundred thousand dollars? Are they nuts?”

“They think they’ve got Miss Manning.”

“I don’t care if they’ve got the Lido floor show. I haven’t got a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Okay,” Colby said crisply. “You need help, and you need it bad. But one thing at a time. We’ve got to get to Paris.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll see what we can do about that reporter, and then try to be at the house when your friend calls again. We should be able to make it before five p.m. If he calls before we get there, keep saying
rappelez à cinq heures—rappelez à cinq heures.
Can you do that?”

“Rappley a sank ur
. I can remember it.”

“Good. If he knows he’s finally going to get through to somebody, he won’t kill her before five o’clock anyway.”

“You think they might do that?”

“They will if they don’t get some action. They didn’t plan on seeing her through to Medicare. We’ll call you from Orly.”

He hung up and turned to Martine. Her eyes were blazing with excitement and curiosity. “Zip me up and brief me,” she said.

“They want a hundred thousand—” he said, yanking up the zipper.

“Ouch!
No wonder you’re divorced.”

“I’m sorry.” He worked the zipper back and freed the strand of dark hair caught in the top of it. “Both my wives were bald.”

“They were if they were married to you very long. But about the reporter, and the kidnapers—”

As briefly as he could, he told her the essentials, and headed for the door. “Ask your concierge to reserve us space on the next flight to Paris. Grab a taxi, and pick me up at the Green Park.”

“Right. Have you got any ideas?”

“I’m working on one.” He waved and went out.

He was pacing the sidewalk in front of his hotel twenty minutes later when she drew up in a taxi. He threw his bag in front beside the driver and jumped in. They shot ahead.

“There’s a flight at eleven-ten,” she said, glancing at her watch. “The driver thinks we can just about make it.” They circled the block and slid back into the traffic of Piccadilly. She brought out cigarettes. Colby lighted hers and one for himself. “All right,” she urged. “What are we going to do?”

“The newspaperman’s the first thing,” he replied. “We’ve got to keep him from filing that story.”

“How? She’s a big name, remember.”

“First I need a little rundown on the house, layout, who’s in it, and so on.”

Martine had been in it a number of times. It was a big three-story place in the sixteenth
arrondissement
near the Avenue Victor Hugo. Sabine Manning’s study, bedroom, and bath were on the ground floor, in addition to the salon, dining room, and kitchen. Sanborn’s and Kendall Flanagan’s rooms were on the second floor, as well as Dudley’s office and the room behind it in which the reporter was locked. The window of this room was at the back of the house. He wouldn’t be able to see the street.

The only other people were a housekeeper and a cook, both hired by Dudley. Miss Manning’s secretary had quit about the time she took off, and he’d never replaced her. The cook was a Gascon, and the housekeeper a Parisienne named Madame Buffet. The cook could speak no English at all, but Madame Buffet knew a few words.

Colby nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “Good. We may be able to do it. With luck.”

“How does it work?”

“If it does.” He explained the idea.

She listened with increasing, and unholy, glee. “This is going to be fun.” Then her face sobered. “But what about the other thing?”

“Considerably less fun, and somebody may get hurt,” he said.

“A lot depends on what they do when they find out they’ve got the wrong woman.”

Their flight was already being announced when he paid off the taxi and they ran into the terminal, but they were able to pick up their rickets, check in, and clear passport control in time to get aboard. When they were airborne, Colby lighted a cigarette and turned to Martine.

“Do you live in Geneva?”

“No, Paris. An apartment near the Etoile.”

“We’re neighbors, then. I live on the Avenue Kleber. How long have you been in-Paris?”

“I was born there,” she said. “But the question isn’t how long, but how often.”

“How’s that?”

“My father was American, and my mother French. I grew up like a migratory waterfowl—a victim of a sort of bilaterally expatriated chauvinism.”

“Maybe you’d better throw in a glossary with that,” he said.

She explained. Her father, the son of a midwestem businessman, had come to Paris just out of college in 1934 to study painting for a year. He’d never amounted to much as a painter, but he had become enamored of Paris and refused to go home. Fortunately, he inherited some money from his maternal grandfather, and didn’t have to. He married a minor French actress originally from Bordeaux, and Martine was born in 1936. When the Germans came, he sent his wife and daughter off to the United States and joined the Resistance, and then later the OSS, still working with the French underground. When it was over they were reunited in Paris. Only now the American was more French than the French themselves, and the Frenchwoman had eaten Mom’s apple pie. Live in this place? Dear, you need help.

They were both people of volcanic temperament, given to violent separations and unpredictable reconciliations that never lasted long because she refused to give up the fat-cat life of plush suburbia and he was too furiously intent on dragging France back into
la belle époque
even to consider going home and abandoning it to its fate. He’d saved it from the Germans, and now if necessary he’d save it from the French.

Martine shuttled back and forth on the Shockwaves of these domestic upheavals, attending school in Paris and St. Louis, and Paris and Phoenix, and Paris and Palm Beach, and later, when she was older and they had split up permanently, boarding school in Switzerland and England. She developed the DP’s honed and polished instinct for survival, finding that she could assimilate a language and a culture apparently through her pores and fit into an alien environment with the ease of a Greek or a Polish Jew, so she was never the “new kid” anywhere more than a few weeks.

“If they’d sent me off to school with a bunch of Kurdish tribesmen,” she said, “I’d have been cooking over a camel-dung fire on the second day, speaking the local dialects in a month, and had solid connections in the dung black-market at the end of two.” She discovered she was a born operator.

“My father’s dead now,” she went on, “and my mother’s married to a real-estate developer in the San Fernando Valley. She drives a Cadillac about a foot longer than a bateau-mouche, saves fourteen different kinds of trading stamps, belongs to the John Birch Society, and would have to be in surgery to miss
The Beverly Hillbillies
. And if my father were still alive—what with a drugstore on the Champs Élysées, the, language filling up with
franglais,
and people drinking weesky—he’d probably be living somewhere in the provinces in an abandoned mill like Daudet, and doing translations of Rimbaud. So with a French mother who was American and an American father who was French, I was never sure who I was.” She smiled, and gestured humorously. “Except maybe a refugee.”