The Wrong Venus — 41
“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—”
The Wrong Venus — 42
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.
The Wrong Venus — 43
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
The Wrong Venus — 44
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
The Wrong Venus — 45
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.”
“What do you do now?” Colby asked.
“I play a small part in a film now and then, and do
an odd job occasionally for a friend of mine who runs
a detective agency.”
They were down at Orly and cleared through
Customs at twelve-thirty P.M. They located an
unoccupied telephone cabine. While Colby searched
for a jeton among the Swiss, French, and English
coins in his pockets, she dug a small address book
from her purse. He dialed.
“Hello, hello!” Dudley barked.
“This is Colby. Has he called again?”
“Yeah. About twenty minutes ago. I gave him the
rappley a sank ur business, and I think he
understood. But why in hell didn’t they get her to
call, if they couldn’t speak English?”
“They’re calling from a public phone. But let’s get
to the first job. You’ve still got him?”
“Yeah. He’s quiet now; he’s broken all the chairs
on the door and given up. His name’s Moffatt, and
he’s staying at the George V.”
“The George V? He’s not a newspaperman, he’s a
journalist.”
“He’s a no-good bastard. Okay, what else?”
“Go up to the office where he can hear you,” Colby
said. “Pretend to call Air France, and make a
reservation on the next flight to Brazil or Outer
Mongolia or anywhere there’s no extradition for
fraud. Make it good, you’re taking it on the lam—”
“What’s all this for?”
The Wrong Venus — 46
Colby cut him off. “Don’t argue, and don’t ask
questions. We haven’t got time for explanations.
We’ll take a cab from here. Watch for us. When we
go past the house we’ll wave. Then I want you to let
him escape.”
“Escape? Are you nuts? Hell—?
“Stop interrupting. And when I say escape, I mean
escape. He’ll bribe his way out. Tell the housekeeper
to go up there and stooge around the outer office
with a carpet sweeper or something so he’ll know
it’s not you.”
“I’m not sure I can explain all that to her.”
“Then just tell her to come to the door when we
get there.”
“Okay. What else?”
“As soon as he’s out of the house, start calling the
George V at about five-minute intervals with
messages for a Miss Nadja Loring. She’s due there
for lunch. Have her paged.”
“What kind of messages, and who from?”
“From anybody. The Coast is trying to get her,
London’s been on the horn all morning, don’t forget
the appointment at Balmain, call Liz and Dick—you
know the drill, break out the rubber boots and
shovels.”
“Anything else?”
“Just a description.”
“His mother’s probably cut her throat because
they didn’t get the pills on the market in time—”
“No, I mean, what does he look like?”
“Big beefy bastard about fifty or fifty-five, lot of
grayish-red hair, and a nose like a neon pineapple.”
“Right. Watch for us.”
He hung up and turned to Martine. “Have you got
any sunglasses?”
“For a trip to London? I’ll pick up a pair at one of
the shops while you’re calling the dog man. Here’s
some more jetons.”
The Wrong Venus — 47
She left. Colby looked up the number in his
address book. André Michod, who ran a small
bookshop in the Boulevard Baspail, owned a pair of
borzois he rented to studios. Madame answered.
Yes, Sacha and Dmitri were at liberty and could be
engaged for the afternoon. She would have them
brushed and ready. In about twenty minutes, Colby
said. He hung up and dialed Bill Elkins.
Bill was an old friend, an ex-newspaper
photographer turned free lance. There was no
answer at his apartment. Colby tried his alternate
business address, the café across the street.
Monsieur Elkins? Mais oui. Ne quittez pas. . . . Bill
came on. He sounded sober, and wasn’t doing
anything at the moment.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Colby said. “A hundred
francs, and it’ll take about an hour.”
“What’s the average prison term if I get caught?”
“It’s perfectly legal.”
“I suppose it could happen. Okay, what do I
photograph?”
“Nothing. I just want somebody who looks like a
photographer.”
“Oh, I do, I do.”
“Show up in front of the George V in about thirty
minutes loaded down with gear—couple of cameras,
lens cases, tripod, flash-holders, the works. Just wait
there. Pretty soon you’ll see me go in the entrance,
and right behind me a very pretty girl will get out of
a taxi. You come in with her—”
“Then the lights go out, and when they come back
on, I’m dancing with Fidel Castro and you’ve got the
babe. I’ve been through this before.”
“No. You make the entrance with her, and stay
with her. You’ve been with her all morning. Catch?”
“Okay. How do I recognize her?”
“Watch carefully for a tall, beautiful brunette
wearing dark glasses and a natural mink coat and
leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds.”
The Wrong Venus — 48
“What color wolfhounds?”
“Shut up and listen, I haven’t got much time.
You’ll join me inside—in the bar, I hope. Take your
cues from us, and play it off the board. You won’t
have to say much.”
“Who’s all this for?”
“A newspaperman named Moffatt, a big guy with a
red nose. You don’t know him.”
“No. But I probably will. I hope he dances a slow
foxtrot.”
“See you in forty minutes to an hour.” Colby hung
up. Martine was hurrying toward him. They ran for
the exits.
The Wrong Venus — 49
5
It was one of those afternoons Colby loved best in
Paris, that rare October day when it wasn't raining
and the Automobile Show had already closed. In
autumn's golden haze there was an Impressionist
softening of form and line, and the chestnut trees
were beginning to turn.
Number 7 Rue des Feuilles Mortes was a block
and a half from the Avenue Victor Hugo, just beyond
the Rue Ciel Bleu, a massive gray stone house with a
slate roof. The taxi, with Colby alone in the back
seat, slid to the curb and stopped. Colby looked
back. The other taxi, which they’d picked up in the
Boulevard Raspail, was just turning into the street.
It came on past with Martine sharing the rear seat
with Sacha and Dmitri, who looked out at the
sixteenth arrondissement with patrician calm,
appreciative but not overawed. It turned right at the
next corner and disappeared.
Colby took the two bags, told the driver to wait,
and went up the steps. He rang the bell. Almost
immediately, the heavy carved door jerked open,
and he was face to face with a woman who seemed
to be violently in motion while standing still, like a
hummingbird. She would have been hard pushed to
weigh eighty pounds, even with the Disque Bleu
The Wrong Venus — 50
dangling from the corner of her mouth, and might
have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years
of age. Brown eyes regarded him with the
Parisienne’s compound of warmth and humor and
total lack of illusion about anything whatever.
But of course, she said in a husky voice, Monsieur
Colby’s arrival had been awaited. She was Madame
Buffet. Colby smiled and said he was enchanted. She
threw the bags behind her into the doorway, and he
touched on the affair of the prisoner.
Oh, yes, one hears the outcries, and one senses he
is a prisoner strongly discontented with all aspects
of the situation, but. . . .
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