The Wrong Venus (9 page)

“We may have set a new record for making it to the hay,” Kendall said. The hand let go his arm, there was another rustling, plunging sound, and he was alone.

He sat up, tearing at the blindfold, and then the straw gave way under him and he was sliding backward down a gentle incline. The blindfold tore off just as he hit bottom and came to rest, his head and shoulders on the ground and his feet still up on the slope above him.

He was looking straight up at the Citroën. It lay on its back atop the haystack, slanting down a little forward, the engine still humming while its hind wheels turned futilely in the air and its headlights searched the darkness like great anguished eyes imploring help. It looked, Colby thought, as though it had climbed out onto the beach to lay its eggs and somebody had flipped it over on its back to make soup out of it.

He heard an impact of some kind, followed by a grunt. He turned then, and saw Kendall Flanagan for the first time.

It was a sight that would be stamped into his memory forever with the perfection of detail and sharpness of definition of something caught on high-speed film with a strobe light, and while he learned later this was not an uncommon experience among men on whom she burst in full glory this suddenly and without any preparation at all, there was the fact that in his case she was clothed. In another instance, of which he heard later, she was as naked as a radish. The searing effect of this, and its potentiality for erasing even the memory of all previous visual experience, was something on which the mind could only speculate.

All the judo experts he ever told about it afterward were unanimous in the opinion it was impossible; given the acceleration of falling bodies and the time necessary to fit the shoulder into the socket under the arm, bend forward, and throw, she simply couldn’t have had both of them in the air at once, but he knew what he saw. Maybe he didn’t know judo, but they didn’t know Kendall Flanagan.

She was directly in the beam of the headlights like an illuminated tableau of some Old Testament miracle, six feet and one hundred and sixty pounds of stacked and silvery blonde in a black cocktail dress, silver high-heeled slippers, and a rope of pearls, while out in front of her near the end of his trajectory Jean-Jacques/Rémy was still airborne a hundredth of a second before landing on the back of his neck, and the leather-jacketed form of Rémy/Jean-Jacques was just coming off her shoulder, already separated and beginning to wheel upward and out into the same flight pattern.

The first landed with a tooth-rattling thud and lay still. Almost instantaneously the other crashed down beside him in an identical position, tried once to get up, thought better of it, and lay back. She straightened her dress.

“If you need any help,” Colby said, “I can whip the girl.”

“Oh, she’s over there.” Kendall turned and pointed behind her. In the edge of the headlight beam, the girl was just sitting up. Kendall looked around at the devastation to see if anybody was in the mood for seconds, flashed a joyous smile in Colby’s direction, and suggested, “Maybe we’d better move out. That gun is still around here somewhere.”

She turned and climbed up the haystack. Thinking she might be going to throw the car down, Colby scrambled to his feet to get out of the way. She knelt beside it and groped around inside. “Catch,” she said, and Dudley’s briefcase sailed out toward him. He caught it, and at the same moment she said, “Wheeeee!” and disappeared down the other side.

Colby ran around, but she had only slid down. She was sitting up, tugging her skirt and slip down from under her arms. She stood up, carrying her handbag, took a couple of steps, and halted with a gurgle of amusement. “Hold this a minute,” she asked, passing Colby the purse, and began to grope under her skirt. “Hay in my pants,” she said. “Man bites dog.”

The girl was shouting imprecations in French behind them now, urging Jean-Jacques and Rémy on to the pursuit. This was apparently encountering some lack of enthusiasm, for she began crying out for somebody to find the gun. Colby and Kendall hurried on. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness again, and directly ahead he could see an exploded haystack that looked as though somebody had lobbed a mortar shell into it.

This was what they’d hit that had slowed them down. Just beyond it were the burst strands of a wire fence, and then the road. It made a sweeping turn here, coming toward the field and its haystacks and then going off at almost right angles.

“What did you do to him?” Colby asked, as they ran across the ditch and up onto the pavement.

“When I screamed,” Kendall replied, “I put my blindfold over his eyes.”

Going into a turn at a hundred kilometers an hour, Colby thought; it would have an unsettling effect on a driver. If word ever got around, she should be as unlikely a prospect for future kidnappings as Red Chief.

The gun barked behind them then, and something snicked through the branches of a tree on the other side of the road. They could hear sounds of pursuit, and turned right, running along the pavement. Kendall stopped, yanked off the high-heeled slippers, and sprinted on. Colby took the purse from her, carrying the briefcase in his other hand. There was enough starlight for the others to see them in the open like this, but another fifty yards ahead on the left was a dark line of timber. They plunged into it, groped their way on for a few more yards, and crouched down in a clump of evergreens. They could hear the pounding of footsteps along the pavement, and shouts, and one of the men made a foray into the timber, crashing through the underbrush less than twenty yards away.

The tumult went on down the road, but a few minutes later the three of them were back again, still arguing violently and blaming each other. The voices died away in the direction of the car.

“I think they intended to kill us,” Kendall said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. It still baffled him. “Something queered it when they went to pick up the money.”

“Do you suppose it is money? Dudley would rather open a vein than part with ten francs.”

“Martine wouldn’t have stood for anything like that,” he said. “Besides, he had to get you back to finish the book.” He unzipped the briefcase and flicked on his cigarette lighter, shielding the flame with his body. It was filled with bundles of francs—tens, fifties, and hundreds, just as Dudley had brought it from the bank.

“It beats me,” he said. He was overcome with yearning for a cigarette, and they were sufficiently screened by the dense underbrush. He took out the pack. “Smoke?”

“I’d love one. Thanks.”

Over the flame of the lighter he had a brief glimpse of a very lovely face and amused and utterly reckless gray eyes. “You’re a friend of Martine’s then?” she asked. “I thought you might be, from that Cosa Nostra routine.”

“I met her a couple of days ago.” Was it only two days? It didn’t seem possible. “Dudley hired us to get you back.”

“How is Sunny Jim? Ilium is doomed? There’s no hope for the whooping crane?”

Colby grinned. “He just doesn’t trust the situation. Some OB man conned him into being born before he could check with his lawyer.”

There was continued silence from the direction of the road. When they had ground out their cigarettes, they eased back to it. The farther they were from the area by daybreak, the better. There was no sign of the others. They started walking, Kendall still carrying her shoes. A few hundred yards ahead they went around another turn and there was still no sound of pursuit. A half-hour later it was growing light in the east. They came to an intersection with another road. Paris was one hundred and ten kilometers to the right, a sign said, and the next village was St.-Médard-au-bout-de-la-colline, fourteen kilometers.

Two or three cars went past, but refused to stop. Then, just as it was full light, Colby managed to flag down a farmer in a battered old truck loaded with sheep. They’d had an accident, he explained, and would like a lift to St.-Médard. There wasn’t room for both of them in the cab, so Colby helped her in beside the driver and climbed in back among the sheep. The old truck rumbled, and crawled ahead. After it had gone about a mile, it lurched suddenly and almost ran off the road. This puzzled him until a shredded pair of nylons flew out the window and sailed past. He grinned.

The sun came up. It was a crisp, exhilarating morning with air like champagne. He felt wonderful. It was in the bag now; it had been a highly profitable night, and successful beyond all expectation. Maybe they should brace Dudley for a bonus, to be split with Kendall, for having recovered the thirty thousand francs. In another hour or two he’d see Martine again, and if his luck continued to hold maybe by this afternoon they’d be winging their way toward Rhodes, that island whose specifications might have been drawn up by a man with a beautiful girl on his mind and plenty of experience in using terrain. He hummed a few bars of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and grinned at his companions, but they merely stared back at him with the vast apathy of sheep toward all phenomena not overtly menacing or recognizably edible. He lighted a cigarette and was content.

St.-Médard-au-bout-de-la-colline was a small farming village of three or four streets lying athwart the road with a church steeple at the back of it, looking quaint and peaceful in the early rays of the sun. The farmer stopped at the intersection of its principal street. Colby helped her down, thanked him, and passed him ten francs. He tipped his cap to Kendall, looked at her once more with disbelief, and drove on. A man coming along the sidewalk craned his neck, and narrowly missed walking into a light standard.

Besides jettisoning the ruined nylons, she had combed her hair, which was like burnished silver springs, and repaired her make-up during the drive. Aside from a few wrinkles in the black dress, she could be just starting out for an evening in Paris, and he was conscious of his own stubble of beard and the wisps of hay clinging to the tweed.

She grinned. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to eat anything that doesn’t attack me first.”

He glanced around. It didn’t appear too promising, at this time of day. Directly across from them a
boulangerie
was in business, and up in the next block a newspaper kiosk and a small café, but if there were a restaurant at all it wouldn’t be open till time for lunch. But there should be a telephone in the cafe where he could call Martine. They walked up and crossed the street. A man going past on some kind of rubber-tired farm machine turned to stare at Kendall. Colby visualized her crossing a street in Rome during an hour of peak traffic; the carnage would be staggering.

There were no tables set up on the sidewalk yet, but eight or ten inside, and a small bar with beer taps and an espresso coffee machine. Besides the
patron
behind the bar and one waiter, there were half a dozen customers, mostly in farm clothing or workers’ blue denim, some of them reading the Paris newspapers. Papers were lowered and necks craned as they came in. One man, arrested in the act of raising a glass of beer to his lips, seemed in some danger of having his eyes drop in it, Colby thought, if he were to move his head suddenly.

It puzzled him; even as big and beautiful as she was, they were overdoing it for Frenchmen. Italians, maybe, but—well, this wasn’t Paris, by any means. He glanced toward the bar. There was a telephone, but he’d have to wait. The
patron
had just picked it up himself. The waiter came over. He seemed dazed too.

Kendall smiled at him and said in fair French, “A bottle of champagne, four cups of coffee, some bacon, and—hmmmm—six eggs, and a plate of croissants,” Even if all this were obtainable, which was unlikely, Colby wondered if she thought they could eat that much. She turned to him. “And what’ll you have?”

Visibly shaken—whether by the size of the order or the size of the girl, Colby wasn’t sure—the waiter started to explain it was only a café. They had no facilities for cooking champagne—that is, eggs.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Then bring us some ham sandwiches.”

“But of course, Mademoiselle. How many?”

“Just keep bringing them till we tell you to stop.”

It would take some time to chill the breasts—a thousand pardons, the champagne.

She interrupted with another smile and a wave of the hand. Bring up a bottle from the cellar; it would be cold enough. She appealed to Colby. “Impress it on him he’d better get some food on the table before he goes the way of Dr. Millmoss. Tell him I’m pregnant. Anything.”

Colby grinned and said the young lady was famished. The waiter departed. She picked up the briefcase and unzipped it. “Breakfast will be on that great, open-handed patron of the arts, Lorenzo the Magnificent Dudley—hey, what is it?” She snapped her fingers. “Colby, dear, look at me.”

“I am,” Colby said. He was staring past her, directly over her shoulder, with a sensation like the prickling of icy needles between his shoulder blades. A man had just sat down at the next table with a newspaper and started to open it. It was
France-soir,
and covering a good quarter of the front page was a picture of Kendall Flanagan. Beside it, black headlines leaped out at him:

DID BOUGIE KILL PEPE?

WHO IS THIS RAVISHING BOUGIE?

He tried to point. He couldn’t seem to move, or say anything. All he could think of was that the
patron
had already called the police. Five minutes ago.

She turned and looked. “My God!” Her elbow knocked over the briefcase, and several packets of one-hundred-franc notes spilled out on the table just as the waiter arrived with the champagne. He stopped, rooted, his mouth hanging open. Then Colby’s gears meshed at last. He began scooping up the bundles of francs and cramming them back into the briefcase. Stripping a note from the last one, he threw it on the table, zipped the briefcase, and they headed for the entrance just as the gendarme trotted in.

“One moment, Mademoiselle!” he said, and made what was probably the greatest mistake of his career up to that time. He put out a hand. Colby groaned.

He went up, wheeling, came off the shoulder, and headed rearward in a spectacular flash of blue. In some corner of his mind not completely numb with horror, Colby noted that she didn't seem to be getting quite the distance she had earlier in the morning. It might have been because he was a bigger man, mature and solid and heavier all around, and perhaps a little out of balance for perfect flight trim with the gun attached to one side of his belt, but more likely it was simply because she hadn't had breakfast. He landed on a table among some coffee cups, a glass of beer, and a bottle of Evian. The table, skidding backward as it collapsed, slammed into another at which two men were sharing a
demi
of beaujolais. They all went to the floor together.

Colby was never sure afterward whether he brushed the waiter in transit, or whether the latter, simply having had it for the morning, merely dropped it, but at any rate the bottle of champagne hit the floor and exploded behind them just as they shot out the entrance. Champagne not properly chilled is brusque and ill-mannered and clamorous in its release.

They wheeled to the right. It didn’t seem to make any difference, Colby thought, since they had nowhere to go except to jail, but the corner was nearer this way. They shot around it. She was having difficulty with the high heels, but two kicks sent the silver slippers out into the street, and she came abreast of him again.

The next time I go out for an evening in Paris,” she panted, “I’ll wear track shoes.”

They were nearly up to the next corner before the first wave of pursuers surged around the one behind them, but there was no hope whatever of escape, not in a place this size. Then he became aware of a sound somewhere ahead of them, an idling motorcycle engine. They hit the corner then, and he saw it, a big, powerful-looking machine some twenty feet off to the right, standing in front of a tobacco shop. The owner was apparently inside.

“Get aboard!” he shouted, and lunged for the seat. He hadn’t ridden a motorcycle since he was nineteen, and wasn’t familiar with the shift of this one, but by the time she had jumped onto the seat behind him and clasped him around the middle he had it in motion. He gunned it straight ahead. There was a shout behind them, and she made a sound he thought was a gurgle of laughter.

He turned right at the corner, and gunned it again. As they sped across the street the cafe was on, he shot a glance toward it. Twenty or thirty people were gathered in front, shouting and gesturing. At the next corner he turned right once more, and then left, and they were on the road out of town, the way they had come in. He had the handle of the briefcase clamped against one of the handlebars, and her purse was pressed into his stomach.

As they roared out of the turn and began to pick up speed along the road, she chuckled again just back of his ear, and said, “He was one furious gendarme.”

A certain amount of pique might be understandable, Colby thought. “well, you threw him ten feet into somebody’s breakfast.”

“No, not that one. The one you stole the motorcycle from.”

Oh, good God! “A gendarme? You’re sure?”

“Of course. He had a uniform and a gun. He was going to shoot, until he saw I was a girl. I think the French police are sweet.”

He shuddered. “They can also get rougher than cobs.”

It was difficult to talk through the roar of the engine and the wind whipping past their faces. They hit one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour and leveled off. He shot a glance behind them, and groaned. Not that there was any pursuit in sight yet. It was just that St.-Médard-au-bout-de-la-colline, with its church steeple in back of it, looked so quaint and peaceful in the early rays of the sun.

There had to be an answer, he told himself, but he didn't know what it was. They had no chance whatever of reaching Paris on this motorcycle; in another ten minutes all the police in this end of France would be looking for them. They couldn’t go into a village to phone Martine to come after them, for the same reason. And even aside from the motorcycle, Kendall couldn’t appear anywhere. There might be three or four people in France who wouldn’t know de Gaulle if they saw him, but she was a celebrity.

In a few minutes they were back at the intersection. The road to the left was the one that went past the wrecked Citroën. They had to avoid that; there might be police there now. According to the sign, the next village straight ahead was sixteen kilometers. They were going away from Paris, but that seemed the best bet. An idea was beginning to occur to him. Their only hope was to get off the road and hole up within the next few minutes, before going through any villages. And he had to find a farmhouse with a telephone.

They roared on. Four or five kilometers ahead, he saw just the place. It was a prosperous-looking farm with a good-sized house set back from the road, and he could see the telephone line going in. There was no one in sight as they went past. Just beyond it the road went around a curve and down a gentle grade. At the bottom was an old stone bridge over a stream bordered with willows. There were no cars in sight and he could see no one in the fields. He cut the throttle and began to ride it down, and they screeched to a stop just at the end of the bridge. A footpath led off along the edge of the willows to the right.

She had already hopped off. He killed the engine, handed her the briefcase, and ran the machine off into the path. When they were twenty or thirty yards from the road, he wheeled and pushed it in among the willows. They were yellow with autumn, but still in full leaf. They came out onto the bank of the meandering little stream, running clear over its bed of rocks. There was a small glade here, completely hidden from the road. He propped the machine up and leaned against it, full of bitter hopelessness at the thought of Martine and Rhodes.

Kendall came up behind him, mincing over the stones on her bare feet, and smiled with admiration. “Nice work, Colby. What do we do now?”

“Five years would be a good guess. Assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, theft of a police vehicle—”

“Oh, we’ll think of something.” She looked appraisingly out at the stream. “You suppose there are any crawfish in that?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “But I wouldn’t catch any; the season might be closed.”

He lighted cigarettes for them, noting he had only two left, and sat down on the bank. He had to try to think. She lifted her skirt and waded out into the stream, apparently casing it for edible forms of life. She had absolutely perfect legs, he thought.

She turned, saw the appreciative regard, and smiled. “Not bad for three hundred dollars. You can’t even tell which one is cork.”

“Not from here,” he said. “Let’s get started. There must be some answer. You didn’t kill Torreon, did you?”

“No, of course not.” She came over and sat down beside him. “I liked Pepe, he was kind of cute. He was only about five-feet-four in his elevator shoes, but it was all man.”

“I’ve met him,” Colby said. “And everybody’s heard of him. He was turned on.”

“All the way,” she agreed, with a fondly reminiscent smile. “Wherever the action was, there was Pepe. And he had this thing about tall blondes. That was the reason I was so startled when I saw my picture in the paper back there—I mean, that they’d found out which one. You could start your own Stockholm with the “blondes that have been in Pepe’s apartment. So I wasn’t particularly worried. . . .”

He could understand that; she fell a little short of being the most outstanding worrier he’d ever run into. And for the whole five days she’d been shut up in that room in the farmhouse and hadn’t seen any papers anyway.

“Also,” she went on, “nobody would know my real name. He never called me anything but Bougie. He spoke Spanish, of course, and good French, but not much English. He was convinced my name was Candle, so he just translated it because it was easier to pronounce in French. He wasn’t touchy or combative about being short, and Torreon means tower in Spanish, so it was kind of a joke—with some overtones of double-entendre —the short tower with the tall candle.”

There had been a number of attempts to kill him, because of the revolution and continuing political turmoil in his country and some skepticism over the nine million dollars he appeared to have disbursed for a crate of war-surplus rifles and two dozen hand grenades when he was Minister of Defense, so there was always a bodyguard in the background except in the apartment itself.

That night—or morning, rather—he and Kendall returned to the apartment around four-thirty or five, and the bodyguard left them. It was about an hour later, just at dawn, when they saw they were going to need another bottle of Veuve Cliquot to bridge that parched moment between the evening’s last nightcap and the chilled magnum and tin of Beluga caviar awaiting them for breakfast, so they started to the kitchen to get it out of the refrigerator. It was in the other end of the apartment, and they were just going through the salon when the doorbell buzzed.

The door had a small wide-angle lens set in it that afforded a view of the whole hallway outside. Torreon went over to it and looked out, and then asked who it was. He could see, of course, but he always double-checked that way to appraise the speech. Anyone trying to come up to him who spoke French with a Spanish accent was awash in bodyguard before he’d delivered the third syllable.

The voice on the other side of the door said it was a telegram for Monsieur Torreon. It sounded like perfect Parisian French to Kendall, and apparently it did to Torreon also. He took the chain off the door and unlocked it. She could have gone back into the bedroom or the hall, but instead merely stepped over to where she would be out of sight behind the door when it opened.

He opened it about a foot, and there was an odd sort of sound like the
fffssshhh
given off by a punched can of beer, only much louder. Torreon started to collapse. He still had hold of the door, and he swung it back toward Kendall as he fell. She looked down. He had a hand up to his chest, and there was something that resembled a steel spike or bolt sticking out of it right over his heart.

It was so sudden and startling she didn’t realize what she was doing; she stepped around the door, right in front of the man.

He had on a postal uniform, cap and everything, and didn’t have a weapon of any kind, nothing but that telegram still in his right hand, holding it out—toward her now, instead of Torreon— in a sort of continuing and frozen tableau.

“It was up his sleeve,” Colby said. “Homemade gizmo, a high-pressure pneumatic cylinder that fires a steel projectile. There was a man killed with one in Geneva a few years ago.”

“That must have been it,” she said.

“And you got a look at his face?” he asked, thinking of the weeping gorilla.

“A look at his face? Colby, dear, we weren’t two feet apart in a wide-open doorway. Probably that thing up his sleeve would shoot only once, but he was bound to have had a gun with him. But he didn’t move; he was kind of glassy-eyed, like a mounted fish, and couldn’t seem to get tracked. I didn’t have a stitch on, and he just kept saying something that sounded like
jubba-jubba-jubba
and holding out the telegram as if he were looking for someplace to hang it on me or paste it to me.”

The poor bastard, Colby thought. With his nerve ends permanently cauterized, he was probably still going around walking into the sides of buildings and passing cars.

She finally snapped out of the trance herself and slammed the door. She ran to the telephone to call for help, and then realized she didn’t have the faintest idea how to get hold of a doctor or hospital at six o’clock in the morning in Paris, and with her limping French she’d never get anywhere. She threw the phone down and ran back to check Pepe, and saw he didn’t need help anyway. He was dead. That thing had killed him instantly. She began to cry. So maybe he had stolen everything in his country that wasn’t bolted down or afire, he was a sweet little rooster and she liked him.

Then it began to dawn on her just what kind of spot she was in herself. Even if she could convince the police she didn’t have anything to do with the murder, they’d hold her as a material witness—provided the same bunch didn’t get her first. Pepe would have regarded risking the latter as a form of idiocy, and the avenging witness bit would only have amused him. So it looked as if a very sound policy here would be that old classic precept for young ladies: get dressed and go home.

But how? They’d be waiting for her. They might get her right out front, or anyway follow her back to the Manning house and do it later. She peered out a window. There was a café across the street with perhaps a dozen men sitting at the tables. The killer wasn’t among them, but he wouldn’t be, anyway. It would be some of the others; there were bound to be several of them.

So she had to create a diversion, and make sure there were some police in front of the place when she popped out. She got dressed and waited till the streets began to fill up with people going to work. There was a television set in the salon, a big twenty-one-inch model in a hardwood cabinet. She dragged it over in front of a window and peeked down at the sidewalk until there was an open space so she wouldn’t kill anybody, and heaved it out.

The apartment was three floors up, so it made an impressive splash. The cabinet disintegrated, and the picture tube exploded, throwing parts all around the street. A pair of passing cars locked fenders, and the drivers began to yell at each other. Whistles blew. Bumpers clanged. Chaos grew, multiplied, and spread outward with that speed and avidity with which only Parisian traffic at a rush hour can scent some minor provocation on which to hurl itself and die gloriously by strangulation. And of course the instant it smashed down there and the flap got under way all the windows in the building flew open and tenants stuck their heads out, to be yelled at by people on the sidewalk for throwing television sets out in the street.
Alors!
You want to kill somebody?

It started raining police. It was at shift-changing time for the traffic officers, and in the jam just below her were two lettuce-baskets bulging with
agents
on their way to their stations. By the time she hit the front door the street was blue with fuzz. She eased out to the perimeter of all the confusion and located a taxi. She had the driver take her clear to Montmartre, then over to the Left Bank, and finally through the Bois de Bologne, checking to see if she were being followed. She wasn’t.