The Wrong Venus (8 page)

Three kilometers on the nose,” he said, as they rolled across it and stopped. “This is the place.”

“I’ll go on and turn left to get back to the highway.” She was silent for a moment and then shivered slightly, and said, “I almost wish we hadn’t got mixed up in this. I’m scared, Colby.”

“So am I,” he said. He turned. Faint starlight shone in her eyes and he was conscious of the subtle hint of perfume. Then she was in his arms and he was kissing her to the accompaniment of fireworks and violins.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Damn it to hell—”

“Mmmmmmm—what?”

“The bucket seat. Nobody but an automobile manufacturer—”

“Well, the pills can’t do it all.”

“Have you ever been to Rhodes?”

“Uuuuummmmmm-uuuuummmmm.”

“What?”

“No,” she said.

“Its wonderful there—”

“That joke’s older than both of us.”

“I didn’t mean the joke. Rhodes. Bougainvillea, wine-dark sea, roses, music. Tomorrow we’ll have six thousand dollars—”

“You do the most exciting audit. Or is it a travelogue?”

“Will you?”

“I think I might be persuaded. Let you know tomorrow?”

“All right.” He broke it up, reluctant to let her go, said “Geronimo,” and stepped out. She blew him a kiss. The taillights of the Jaguar disappeared down the road.

He lighted a cigarette, waited a minute until his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and began walking slowly ahead along the left side of the road, his mind still swamped and overrun with the prospect of this intoxicating girl against the perfect background of Rhodes. It was going to be worth getting involved in Dudley’s madhouse.

It was a beautiful night, clear, but moonless, and crisp with autumn without being cold. He wore only the tweed suit, having left the topcoat at the house. The shadowy masses of the hedges continued, closing him in on both sides. In less than ten minutes the headlights showed behind him. In spite of himself, he felt his nerves begin to tighten.

The car came on, slowed, and went past. He recognized the distinctive, carapace silhouette of a Citroën. After it had gone out of sight, he remembered the lipstick, and scrubbed at his lips with a handkerchief. It was supposed to be Dudley who’d dropped him, and the fewer things he had to explain the better. His shoes made a crunching sound on the gravel. Now the car was coming back.

The headlights were on high beam, blinding him. He felt for the edge of the gravel with his feet to give it room to go past if it were the wrong one. But it was already slowing. It came to a stop less than twenty feet away. He turned his back and put his hands on top of his head.

Footsteps sounded in the gravel, two sets of them, and came up behind him. He felt the hair lift on his neck. A voice growled, “If the
salaud
twitches a muscle, shoot him!”

Naturally theatrical, he wondered, or just trying to impress the
gangstair américain?
Or maybe they hadn’t bought a word of it; it was possible they didn’t read the
Série Noire
. Hands patted him under the arms, on the pockets, and ran down his trouser legs.

“Nothing,” another voice said.

A dark cloth was placed over his eyes and knotted behind his head. Then there was the tearing sound of tape being unrolled as the man wound it around and around his head, over the blindfold and into his hair. A hand guided him back to the car. He groped, found the open rear door. He got in.

“Kneel,” the voice said. He crouched on his knees, his face on his arms atop the seat. He heard the others get in, in front, and the door closed. Something cold and hard nudged the back of his head, and the voice said, “No tricks. Brains are hard to clean off upholstery.”

He had a fine flair for drama, Colby thought; he was feeling less nervous now. It was impossible to tell which of them he’d talked to—the French telephone is seldom a high-fidelity instrument. The gun muzzle left his head, but he knew it was still pointed at him. The car lunged forward with the sound of scattered gravel. It was a Citroën, all right; he recognized the exaggerated vertical movement of its shock-absorbers.

The first turn was to the left, which meant they were going away from Maintenon, but after that he paid no attention. It would be elementary, even for a child, to make an unnecessary number of them, going in a twisting, roundabout route, in order to confuse him. He lost track of time. It could have been thirty minutes later, or forty-five, when they made a sharp turn, bounced over a rough road for some hundred meters, made two turns in quick succession, and stopped. Doors opened.

“Descend,” one of the voices said.

He climbed out, his knees cramped from kneeling on the floor. He was conscious of the ubiquitous odor of rotting manure of all continental farms, and heard a horse kick his stall. He was in a barnyard.

A hand took his arm, and he felt the gun in his back. After three or four steps he felt concrete or flagstone under his feet, and then a mat. He wiped his shoes. One of them brushed something that moved with a wooden clatter. Probably a pair of sabots. A door clicked open, and he was pushed into a room with a bare wooden floor. No light at all penetrated the blindfold, but he could feel the warmth of a stove nearby, and smell coffee and the residual odors of cooking.

The whole ride had been in silence, but this was now swept away with the suddenness of a collapsing dike.
"Alors!
Another
pensionaire!
It was a female voice, young, assertive, and charged with accumulated grievance. "Maybe we will get in the Guide Michelin, with a star, and crossed manure forks—”

“Écoute—!”

“Another one to cook for and wash dishes for, when I’m not shoveling food down that bottomless pit of a woman, or scrubbing floors, or milking your Uncle Anatole’s excrement of a cow—”

“Quiet!” one of the men shouted. “This one lays the golden egg.”

“Hah! Like your Uncle Anatole’s imbecile of a horse lays the golden egg in a basket of laundry—”

“Tais toi,
Gabrielle! One should never put things down near a horse—”

D’accord!
Not near the horse of Uncle Anatole. Or the cow of Uncle Anatole, or the chickens, or the sheep, or anything else in this paradise where constipation was only a rumor. If she ever saw a piece of pavement again. . . .

Colby stood in silence while language played around his head. Then somebody caught him by the arm and he was pushed into a chair. He could feel a table in front of him. “Listen!” a voice shouted, as a fist banged the table, causing dishes to rattle. This one says she is not Mademoiselle Manning. Let us examine his so-called proof!”

“In my right-hand coat pocket,” Colby said.

“Aha! He does not speak with the accent of Cheek-ago!”

“What do you know of the accent of Cheek-ago? You have heard it in films, with French actors—”

“Alors!
So Oomfrey Bogarr is a French actor—”

“It is never the voice of Oomfrey Bogarr!”

“To hell with the accent of this one! Let us see the proof.”

A hand dug into his pocket and brought out the folded dust jacket and Kendall Flanagan’s passport.

“Voilà!
It is the passport of ours.”

“And the faces are not the same.”

“Writers put other names on their books, why not other faces?”

“Regard!
If you had the face of ours, would you put the face of that one on your book?”

“So! You too!” It was the girl’s voice. “Maybe I should keep the key to her room.”

“I am only stating what anyone can see—”

“You are as sickening as Jean-Jacques. You would need the equipment of
alpinisme.
I see you, roped together, mounting the north wall of this blonde Alp—”

“Quiet! We must decide.”

“What is there to decide? Truly, she is not Mademoiselle Manning. We take the money and we go.”

“But thirty thousand francs—”

All the voices erupted at once, but it was the girl’s Colby was following. She was full up to here with Uncle Anatole’s farm. This was the Paris she’d been promised? The
discothèques,
the Moulin Rouge, the Champs Élysées, champagne? For five days she’d been up to her knees in
fumier,
taking care of an idiot of a cow, and cooking food and opening bottles of wine for the unbelievable appetite of this unbelievable species of woman who was the wrong woman to begin with. And besides, Uncle Anatole might return tomorrow—

She was immediately pounced upon and silenced, but Colby had caught it. He was going to win; they had to settle tonight. He gave no sign he’d heard, but said curtly, “Nobody gets anything until I’ve talked to Mademoiselle Flanagan.”

“You shall talk to her.”

“Good. Give me back the passport. And your letter is in my left-hand pocket.”

The passport was placed in his hand. He returned it to his pocket. Someone else removed the letter.

“What a species of imbecility, in your own handwriting,” the girl’s voice said. “It’s a good thing you have an American
gangstair
to tell you how to conduct an affair of this sort.”

“Come,” one of the voices said. He stood up, and was turned, marched forward, and turned again. He thought they were going down a hallway. They stopped. He heard a key being inserted in a lock, and had an impression of a door opening.

“She will tell you she is all right,” the man said. It was the one called Jean-Jacques. Then he warned, “No English.”

“Mademoiselle Flanagan?” Colby asked, addressing the blackness directly ahead of him.

“Yes. Who are you?” There was no fear in the voice, which seemed to be coming from the far side of a room. It was pure American French; they weren’t running in a ringer on him.

“Duke Colby, from Chicago,” he said. “I work for Carl. Trouble-shooter, enforcer—like that.” He wasn’t sure how much of this she could understand, but it was for the others anyway. “I flew in today to see if I could cool this thing before it got loused up with cops or newspapers.”

“How is Carl?”

“Chewing nails, you know him. He wanted to move in with a bunch of muscle, but I talked him out of it. Bad for business. You’re okay, then?”

“No complaints.”

“That’s all I wanted to know. Dudley’s just waiting for word from me to deliver the payoff. I’ll see you.”

The key turned in the lock again. “Now, are you satisfied?” Jean-Jacques asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Call the same number. When Monsieur Dudley answers, say only one word. Bingo.”

“Beengo.”

“That’s it. He’ll deliver the money as soon as he can get there.”

“Beengo.
Remember it well, Rémy.”

He was marched back along the hallway a few steps and apparently into another room. His hands were tied behind him, and he was pushed backward onto a bed. “We are being robbed,” Jean-Jacques complained bitterly. “Thirty thousand francs—hah! But what can one do? We will drop you with the Cicero.”

They went out. He could hear them in the kitchen, still arguing, still addressing each other by name. In a few minutes a door slammed and there was silence except for an occasional banging of pots and pans by Gabrielle. They had gone to phone Dudley. He shook his head. In a deal like this, give him professionals every time; these
blousons noirs
were careless and reckless enough to freeze his blood except that he’d been lucky enough to sell them the Chicago story.

In the twenty minutes he’d been here he’d learned enough about them for the police to locate the farm in an hour, with nothing but a copy of the tax rolls and the telephone numbers of the local
gendarmeries
. It was owned by a man named Anatole, who’d been away somewhere on a trip and who had a nephew named Jean-Jacques. Jean-Jacques had a friend named Rémy, whose girl friend was called Gabrielle. They’d pick them up in an afternoon. Well, it didn’t matter; he’d convinced them nobody was going to the police.

With his hands bound behind him, there was no way to get comfortable in bed. After awhile he sat up on the side of it, wishing he had a cigarette. The bonds weren’t tight enough to cut off circulation, and he could probably have worked his way out of them if he’d tried, but it would be stupid. He would accomplish nothing except to antagonize them, which was the last thing he wanted now that success was in sight.

There was nothing to do but wait, as he had a thousand times in the Army. He had no idea how many hours later it was when he heard the kitchen door fly open and then the sound of their voices, all three talking at once. He started to grin, but it faded. Something had changed. He leaned forward, listening intently. He could make out only a word now and then, but there was some quality in the voices that hadn’t been there before. A chill moved slowly up his spine as he began to place it. It was panic.

What could have gone wrong? They must have the money by now, and certainly there couldn’t have been any police in the area. But several times he heard the word among the shouts and violent recriminations. They were scared to death, and blaming each other. The flap went on for what could have been ten minutes, and then the key turned in his door.

“You. Get up.” It was Jean-Jacques’ voice, and there was an unnecessary toughness in it again, as there had been when they’d picked him up. There was no doubt he was scared.

Colby stood up. “The money was delivered?”

“Yes. We have it.”

“And there were no police, just as I promised?”

“We saw none.”

“So you’re going to release us?”

“Of course we’re going to release you,
salaud!
What do you think, we want to adopt you?”

He’s lying, Colby thought. For some reason now they think they have to kill us, and they’re trying to work themselves up to it. But what had happened?

He was marched along the hallway. They were apparently back in the kitchen, judging from the odors, though he could no longer feel any warmth from the stove. He could hear the voices of Rémy and Gabrielle somewhere behind him.

“How about untying my hands?” Colby asked.

“Shut up! We will untie your hands when we get there.” Then, apparently to the others, “Her handbag, everything! Be sure nothing is left.”

He heard a new sound, the clicking of high heels along the hall. Gabrielle hadn’t worn them, so they were bringing Kendall Flanagan. He was marched ahead, heard the door open, and they were outside in the barnyard. “Her first,” Jean-Jacques ordered. “Now this one.” He was pushed forward. A hand forced his head down. Getting in was awkward with his hands tied, and he fell over against Kendall. He was hauled into the position he’d been in before, kneeling with his face down on the seat. Kendall was on his right. “Stay down!” a voice commanded. He heard the three of them get in the front seat. The car shot backward, swung, and surged ahead. Almost immediately there was an explosive curse in French and it slammed to a stop. What now?

One of the front doors opened and he heard running footsteps going away. In a moment they came back. The trunk opened, and something was thrown in it, something that landed with a metallic clang. He froze. A shovel? No, he told himself, fighting panic, it could have been something else. The car lunged ahead again. They bounced and jolted their way to the road, and made a left turn with tires squealing as they came onto the pavement.

“Something’s bugged them,” Kendall said next to his ear.

“Silence!” a voice shouted from in front. “No English.”

“How about French, then?” She said several words Colby wouldn’t have thought she’d know. But then she’d been here five days.

“Shut up, or I will shoot!”

She fell silent. Colby could hear the three of them arguing in violent whispers in the front seat. It was ominous, and he was conscious of a cold and empty feeling in his stomach. He could make out only an occasional word, but heard police several tunes.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Don’t you know by now we’re not going to the police?”

“They’re not going to the police, he says—hah!” It was the girl.

“Shut up!” Jean-Jacques shouted. “Everybody talks too much!”

Colby felt his heart leap then. Kendall’s hands weren’t tied. One of them had moved over and was resting on his. She’d probably been tied to the bed and they’d merely released her in their hurry. The fingers moved, exploring the turns of rope around his wrists. She began to tug at the knot.

She might be able to do it, he thought, hardly daring to hope. His hands were directly below and behind the three of them in the front seat, and unless one turned all the way around and looked down they might not see it. Also, it was still dark. Or should be; he didn’t think it could be dawn yet.

They were traveling at high speed, their tires screaming on the turns. He felt the ropes give a little, but dreaded from one minute to the next he’d hear the shout of discovery and the impact of a gun barrel on her head or arm. The warfare of impassioned whispers was still going on in the front seat. He could catch a word or phrase now and then.
“. . . you and your stupid ideas!. . . everything wrong . . . talk too much. . . .”
Then one that spread the chill between his shoulder blades.
“. . . no, this was your idea, you do it!”

The ropes slipped then and gave way. His hands were free.

“Hit the dirt,” Kendall said. Then his ears were assaulted by a scream that years later would still come back and echo along his nerves.

He was swinging his upper body toward the floor when the car seemed to take off like a jet at the end of a runway. It dipped, and then went up, and there was a sound like the snapping of violin strings. Just as he was beginning to think it was airborne for good, it crashed down, still upright, with a cannonading of exploded tires, and plowed into something he could only assume was a solid wall of water. There was a great
wh-o-o-o-shing
sound like a giant exhalation of breath, accompanied by violent deceleration that plastered him against the back of the seat in front of him. It lurched then, and began to roll. It went all the way over once, with a crashing and rending of metal and a snapping off of burst-open doors, came upright, and then over again, almost gently this time and with a strange, feltlike absence of sound, as though it had found a bed to climb into to die.

His eardrums must have ruptured, Colby thought. No, he could still hear the engine. Blindfolded, and after having been in total darkness for hours and then whirled in this centrifuge, he had | no idea where he was or which way was up. He was groggy and bruised, but nothing seemed to be broken. He could move his arms and legs. One of his hands brushed the upholstery of the seat, directly over his head.

There was an eruption of outcries in French, and the car began to rock gently from side to side. He could smell gasoline, and could hear the engine still purring, while the whole thing seemed to quiver with a strange, jellylike vibration. He threw his hands about again, seeking a way out before it burst into flames, and where the door had been he could feel straw. There were probably a number of ways you could explain that, he thought. Say, for example, the car was upside down on top of a haystack.

He heard a succession of dry, swishing sounds nearby, and more curses in French. But he had to locate Kendall and get them out before it caught fire. The smell of gasoline was growing stronger. He swung his arms, but they encountered nothing except the seat over his head and the back of the front one. She was gone. He groped for the door again. The opening wasn’t completely filled with straw. At the top, near the floor of the car, there was a space where his hand met nothing. He began to push his way out, like a surfacing mole. A hand caught his arm and hauled. He was out, lying in more straw.