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.
The Wrong Venus — 100
9
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.
The Wrong Venus — 101
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.”
The Wrong Venus — 102
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
The Wrong Venus — 103
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.
The Wrong Venus — 104
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
The Wrong Venus — 105
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.
The Wrong Venus — 106
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.
The Wrong Venus — 107
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 twentyone-
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?
The Wrong Venus — 108
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.
“They located you, though,” Colby said. He told
her about the man who’d forced his way into the
house.
“How did they do it?” she asked. “I’m positive
there was nobody behind me. I’d have seen him in
the Bois.”
“They took the number of the taxi,” he said, “and
traced down the driver afterward. But where’d the
police get that picture, and why did it take ‘em so
long?”
“I think it’s one we had taken in a nightclub. We
decided we didn’t like it and tore it up, but the
photographer probably still had the negative and the
police ran it down. And any maître d’hôtel or waiter
could have told them he called me Bougie.” She
dabbled her feet in the water. “Any ideas, Colby?”
“Sure.” He wished he had an aspirin. “Disguise
you as a four-foot dwarf with rickets. Stay covered.
I’m going to try to call Martine from that
farmhouse.”
“Good. See if you can throw yourself on the
commissary.”
He eased back to the road, feeling naked and
vulnerable in the open. They were bound to have a
good description of him on the police networks, and
foreigners were rare in rural areas like this. Twice
when cars came up behind him he had to fight a
jittery impulse to look over his shoulder, but they
drove on past.
He walked up the driveway to the house. A small
dog ran out from the rear yard and began barking. A
The Wrong Venus — 109
middle-aged woman opened the door and regarded
him suspiciously, but told the dog to hush.
He smiled and apologized for disturbing her. He
was English, be said, working for his company in
Paris, and was on his way back from a trip to the
Loire valley with his family. They’d had some car
trouble down the road—
“A wreck?”
Oh, no, nothing serious; just an engine failure—
one of the foskets had lifted in the crenelator. Colby
knew little about cars, and cared less, but she
wouldn’t be any expert either. He could replace it
himself, he explained, but he needed the part. If
she’d be kind enough to let him use the telephone to
call his office—he’d pay, of course. While he was
talking, he took out a fifty-franc note. It wouldn’t be
over five at the most.
Respect for the franc overcame a centuries-old
pessimism toward the motives of all foreigners. She
asked him to come in. The telephone was in the hall,
near the front door, an old wall-mounted type. She
stood nearby while he spoke to the operator,
possibly to make sure it was Paris he was calling
and not Melbourne or Tokyo.
The phone rang only once on the other end, and
was grabbed up immediately. They’d been sweating
out the mission, all right. It was Martine.
The woman was still listening. And Flanagan had
called him Colby back in the cafe. “Monsieur
Lawrence—” he said.
“Oh, brother! We didn’t know whether you’d been
killed, or arrested. They didn’t get her?”
“No, everybody’s fine,” he went on in French. “We
just had a little car trouble.” For the woman’s
benefit, he explained about the fosket, and asked if
somebody would pick one up at the Jaguar agency
and have Monsieur Randall bring it out. Could he
speak to Monsieur Randall? He needed an excuse to
switch to English.
“You’re calling from a farm?” she asked.
The Wrong Venus — 110
“Oh, Randall? . . . Yes, I had to. We’re both on the
lam now.” He glanced idly toward the woman. There
wasn’t a chance she understood English. “I’ve got
her stashed for the moment, but all the fuzz in this
end of France is looking for us. She can’t move in
that Jag, she’d be picked up in a mile. And she can’t
go back there to the house. Those thugs have got it
covered.”
“Relax. I’ve been working on it since the papers
came out. Just tell me where you are and leave the
rest to me.”
He quickly told her how to find the place, and
asked, “What about Madame Ruffet and the cook?
Will they leak?”
“No. I bought ‘em off. They liked her, anyway.”
“How’s Dudley?”
“Better now. The doctor just left.”
“He hasn’t heard anything yet. Wait’ll this
morning hits the papers.”
“God, that Flanagan. Hang tough, I’m on my way.”
The Wrong Venus — 111
10
Colby thanked the woman, took a couple of ten-franc
notes from his wallet, and asked if she could sell him
something to eat. His family had been stranded
there in the disabled car since late last night, he
explained, and everybody was hungry. He
accompanied her to the kitchen, and she gave him a
loaf of bread, a sausage, and a liter of wine. They
didn't have a corkscrew, he said, so she pulled the
cork for him, and he insisted they share a glass for
her unforgettable kindness and in the interest of
continued peace and goodwill between their two
great countries. He went back to the road. The door
had closed, but he was sure she would be watching
from a window. It didn't matter. As soon as he was
around the turn the house was out of sight.
An old 2CV came up behind him just as he reached
the bridge. He slowed. It went on past and around
the next bend a quarter mile ahead, and the road
was clear. He plunged off it into the willows. Kendall
heard him approach, and turned, her face lighting
up with joy at sight of the food. He handed her the
bottle. She drank and passed it back to him. They
broke the bread and sausage in two and sat down on
the bank with the bottle between them.
The Wrong Venus — 112
She took a bite of sausage and waved the chunk of
bread toward the encircling willows. “And thou
beside me singing in the wilderness—did you get
through to the fort?”
“Yes. Martine’s on her way.”
“Does she have an idea?”
“I think so, but I don’t know what. We’ll just have
to sweat it out till she gets here.”
“Well, with a pair of operators like you two
working on it,” she said, “I won’t worry about it.”
“What was the last thing you did worry about?
Whether you’d be a forceps delivery?”
“Colby, doll, you’re on this ledge, on this bank and
shoal of time. You reach your hand around a corner,
and there’s a little bird that puts a new day in it. You
use it up, throw the rind back over your shoulder,
and stick your hand around again. He puts another
day in it, or he craps in it and you’re on your way to
the showers. Who worries?”
Colby drank some more of the wine and passed
her the bottle. “You’re from Wyoming?”
I grew up on a ranch near Jackson Hole, till they
had me shod and shipped me east to school.”
“Where’d you pick up the judo? And why?” It
seemed a little superfluous, like adding bird shot to
an atom bomb.
“When I was a kid,” she said. “There was what I
thought was an advertisement in The New Yorker. A
big, strapping woman was demonstrating selfdefense
to a class of girls in a gym, and the caption
said, “With this hold, no man will ever be able to
toss you.’ I thought that was wonderful.” The bottle
gurgled. “By the time I began to doubt the value of
it, I was already an expert.”
They finished the bread and sausage. She rinsed
her fingers in the stream. “A very successful
foraging expedition, Trooper Colby. You suppose
Martine’ll bring additional commissary?”
“She may.”
The Wrong Venus — 113
“Good, an army marches on its stomach.
Napoleon. Or was it Betty Crocker?” She drained
the last of the wine, gave him a dazzling smile, and
began to sing, waving the empty bottle.
“We’re Sabine Manning’s heroes, we are
riders of the night,
We are bedroom-oriented, and we’d
rather love than fight.”
“What’s that?” Colby asked. “The Dudley
Foundation hymn?”
“Parody of an old army song Sanborn knew. We
used to make up new lyrics when we got bored with
the job.”
“We’re her cute suburban houris, our
reluctance is so slight
That we’re always horizontal, to her
publisher’s delight.
We’re ever combat-ready, not burdened
down with clothes,
And mattress-seasoned veterans of a
million words of prose.”
She threw the bottle into the willows, and
stretched. “Speaking of the horizontal, I think I’ll
grab a few winks while there’s a lull in the action.”
She lay back on the bank. Colby gave her his folded
jacket for a pillow, and in five minutes she was
sleeping peacefully. He looked at her and shook his
head. In his life he’d run across a few blithe and
unfettered spirits, but Kendall Flanagan was in a
class by herself.
He lighted his last cigarette and tried to think, but
it only made his headache worse. There was no
answer. She couldn’t stay here, she had nowhere to
go, and she couldn’t get there if she did. She had as
much chance of going unrecognized anywhere in
France as the Eiffel Tower or Charles de Gaulle, and
none whatever of leaving it. At any airport or
frontier she’d be picked up on sight. And if she were
a celebrity now, wait till St.-Médard hit the news;
The Wrong Venus — 114
she was going to be the biggest thing since the
discovery of grapes. He regarded it with awe. In the
long history of French journalism, this was the first
story that had everything—a beautiful girl, mystery,
international intrigue, wealth, a jet-set playboy, love,
clandestine rendezvous, and violent death.
There was nothing to do but wait for Martine.
Kendall was sleeping quietly. He eased upstream
until he was just below the bridge and found a spot
where he could peer out through the last screen of
willows and still be invisible from the road. Two or
three cars went by, and then a crash-helmeted
gendarme on a motorcycle. A few minutes later
there was another. He shivered. The whole
countryside was probably swarming with them, like
vengeful bees. In the next hour there were three
more.
The morning was well advanced now and growing
quite warm, even here in the shade of the willows.
He looked at his watch every few minutes. He heard
another car coming downhill around the bend, but it
was only an old truck with a high wooden body like a
furniture van. Then it was slowing.
He felt a quick stab of fear as it pulled onto the
shoulder and stopped near the end of the bridge,
directly in front of him. A black-mustached man
wearing a beret and a blue denim coverall stepped
out of the cab with a bottle of wine and a brown
paper bag. They’d stopped for their casse-croûte,
their coffee break.
Colby heard the other door opening, and at the
same moment the man with the bottle gestured
downstream and trotted down off the road directly
toward his hiding place. He whirled and ran.
Kendall was still asleep in the little glade. He
caught her shoulder, and when her eyes flew open
he put a hand over her mouth and jerked his head.
“Quick!” he whispered. She sprang up. He could
already hear footsteps coming down the path toward
them. There wasn’t time to make it across the glade
and run on downstream. He grabbed up his jacket
The Wrong Venus — 115
and the briefcase and they sprang into the willows
just back of them. As they dropped flat behind the
screen of leaves he remembered the motorcycle and
swore under his breath, but there was nothing they
could do about it now.
He listened, conscious of the pounding of his
heart. The man was still coming down the trail
beside the stream. Then he froze.. Somebody else
had come down along the side of the field, the way
they had, and was pushing through the willows
directly toward them. He was going to pass just
beyond their outstretched legs and couldn’t fail to
see them.
“L’amour,” Kendall whispered. “Vive le sport.”
He turned swiftly and took her in his arms, his
head and shoulders above her to keep her face
hidden as he crushed his lips to hers. Her body
shifted slightly and the lips parted under his, while
her arms locked about his neck and he felt himself
drowning in an ocean of blondeness. The footsteps
halted just beyond their feet. Blood pounded in his
ears as he waited for the stammered Gallic apology
and the flight.
Instead, a glacial voice said, “It must be a revival
of Tobacco Road.”
His head jerked around. Framed in the opening in
the willows just beyond the scenic splendor of
Kendall Flanagan’s left leg was Martine. Beside her
was Roberto Giannini. Roberto smiled admiringly.
“Always the same old Colby.”
“Shut up—!” Colby said. He tried to untangle
himself from Kendall’s arms and sit up.
“He can’t resist the bougainvillea and the winedark
sea,” Martine said to Roberto. “Or the music of
pigs rooting for truffles.”
“Keep your pants on, darling—” Kendall began. At
the same moment the dark-mustached man in the
beret pushed through the willows from the other
direction, halted abruptly, and turned away. “A
thousand pardons, Monsieur!” Colby sighed.
The Wrong Venus — 116
Comprehension dawned in Martine’s eyes. “Oh—
you heard us coming?”
“Of course.” He sat up and wearily indicated the
man in the beret. “He was the only one I saw getting
out of the truck. And we didn’t have time to run.”
“And you were just doing it for the cause—do I feel
like a fink!” Martine smiled sweetly at Kendall, and
added, “Such wonderful actors, too. You could have
fooled anybody.”
“You should catch us when we’re eating
regularly,” Kendall said. She stood up and smoothed
down her dress.
Colby had got to his feet. Roberto pushed forward
with a broad smile and grabbed his hand. “Good old
Colby. And always kissing the most beautiful girls—”
Colby clapped him on the back and cut him off
with a hearty greeting of his own. Try to knife me,
you gilded beach-boy, and you’ll look like a dart
board. “It’s great to see you! But where’s Sabine
Manning?”
The mobile Latin face started to freeze, but at the
same instant Martine interrupted Colby. “We
haven’t got much time if we’re going to get this
thing off the ground.” She quickly performed the
introductions. The man in the beret was Henri
Michel. He owned the truck. Kendall reached for the
paper bag and the bottle of wine he was carrying.
“You, can eat lunch on the way,” Martine said.
“Henri will drive.”
“Where?” Colby asked.
“Back to the Manning house.”
“They’ll kill her. They’ve got it covered.”
“No. I’ve got it all set up——” She started to
explain, but Colby caught her arm and led her
around the screen of willows out of sight of the
others. It had been a long night, and for the moment
he’d had it with Dudley’s sex novel in all its
ramifications. When he tried to take her in his arms,
however, he encountered only the thirty-seven
The Wrong Venus — 117
elbows and unyielding square corners of a girl who
has no intention of being kissed.
“They’re different shades,” she pointed out. “I’m
afraid they might clash.”
He scrubbed at his lips with a handkerchief. “I tell
you, it was only an act.”
“Heavens, dear, I know it was. And real heads-up
football, too. But what’s that got to do with it?”
He shook his head, wondering bitterly how a man
who’d been married twice could still regard logic as
a weapon. He must be retarded. There seemed to be
only two courses open. He discarded the first, which
was to apologize for being right and which in the
history of man had never worked yet, and threw
everything into the masterful, or bulldozer,
approach. In a minute the corners began to melt and
flow back into pliable curves and her arms crept up
around his neck.
She smiled. “It was quite a night back at the
ranch. Especially after we saw the papers.”
“There was nothing to be afraid of. I had Flanagan
to take care of me.”
“That could have been one of the things that made
it quite a night back at the ranch.”
He was engrossed in the heady business of kissing
her again. “Ummmmmhhhhhh?”
“Knowing that she damn well might . . . Scrape!
The radio’s right, you really do need a shave.”
“The radio?”
“You’re the dangerous-looking thug who speaks
French with a Turkish accent and carries a million
francs around in a briefcase. But listen—we’ve only
got a minute. We’ve taken over the project.”
“What?”
“Merriman’s on the verge of collapse, he can’t
take any more. He was going to run for it, so I made
him an offer. For twenty thousand dollars plus
expenses we’ll finish his book and get Kendall out of
France ”
The Wrong Venus — 118
“Good God!” Colby interrupted. “How?”
“Lawrence, please—it’s not as hard as it sounds.
But there’s no time to explain now.” She called out
to the others. “Everybody, let’s go.”
They hurried back up the trail, Kendall mincing
along as fast as she could on her bare feet and Colby
still reeling from Martine’s bombshell. They came
out to the last screen of willows just below the
bridge and peered out. The road was clear.
“Wait till we get set,” Martine said. She, Roberto,
and Henri ran up onto the road. They opened the
rear doors of the van, which had Michel Frères,
Déménagements, lettered on its side. They looked
both ways along the road and beckoned. Colby and
Kendall broke from cover and ran. Roberto and
Martine had already climbed in, and they helped
Kendall up. Colby followed her. Henri grinned at
them, said, “Allons,” and closed the door. Colby
heard him run back and get in the cab. The truck
lunged forward and began to gather speed.
There was no light except that seeping in through
the cracks around the doors, so it was a minute or
two before he could see well enough to make out
that the van contained a rather hideous sofa, an old
leather-upholstered armchair, a rolled rug, two or
three lamps, and a long wooden box that appeared
to be empty except for some excelsior in the bottom
of it. On one end of the sofa was a bundle of old
clothing, apparently workers’ blue denims. He saw
what she had in mind, and there was a good chance
it would work—that far. But the rest of it was
staggering.
The truck rattled and swayed, threatening to
throw them off their feet. Martine dropped into the
armchair. Kendall sat on the sofa, still clutching the
bottle of wine and the bag of food, while Roberto
seated himself on the floor in front of her.
Colby perched on the corner of the box, dead tired
after twenty-four hours of escalating crises, and
looked at Martine. “But we’ll still have to get her out
again.”
The Wrong Venus — 119
“No problem,” Martine said. “They know she’s not
in there now—or do if they can read three-inch
headlines—so if she never came back, that’s the one
place in France she couldn’t be hiding.” She turned
to Kendall. “How long would it take you to wrap up
the novel? Sanborn’s finished, and it’s a little over
fifty pages.”
“Three days, typing it,” Kendall replied. “With a
recorder and some Dexedrine I could dictate it in
twenty-four hours. Or less.”
“You’re sure?”
“Nothing to it. He’s already written the story; I
just slather on the mild rich prose. And correct the
odd technical bit—he has a tendency to get lingerie
mixed up with harness. Why?”
“It’s going to take a lot of money to smuggle you
out of France. So we finish the book, and Merriman
—that is, Sabine Manning—pays for it.”
Kendall grinned. “He’ll love that.”
“He wins, too. If the police get you, he’s finished.
Apparently they can’t trace you to the Manning
house, or they would have already. There are some
men staked out across the street, but I’m pretty sure
they’re just the people who’re trying to kill you.”
“Oh, that’s all? Anybody got a corkscrew?”
Roberto produced a Swiss army knife from his
pocket. Kendall passed him the bottle. Colby
indicated the furniture, and asked Martine,
“Where’d you get the props?”
“From Roberto’s apartment,” she said. As soon as
she’d seen the papers and realized they were going
to need help—provided Colby and Kendall were able
to survive the night without being killed by the
kidnapers or arrested—she’d called mutual friends
until she located him. He said he could get the
moving van; Henri was a friend of his.
When Colby had called, she’d arranged a
rendezvous point, and left the Manning house in the
Jaguar, followed, of course, by one of the mob that
had it staked out. After she’d finally shaken him at a
The Wrong Venus — 120
traffic light, she drove through the Bois until she
was sure, and met them, leaving the Jaguar parked
near the Invalides. She would pick it up again on the
way in, so there would be nothing to connect her
with the van at all.
So far, so good, Colby thought. “But just how do
we slip her out of France? Hide her in among a
couple dozen other six-foot blondes?”
“Relax.” She smiled, with a confident wave of the
hand. “We’ll come up with it. Heavens, we’ve got
twenty-four hours.”
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