3
It was one of those mornings Colby loved best in
London— that rare October day when miraculously
it was cursed with neither the Automobile Show nor
rain. Pale lemon sunlight slanted in on the carpet at
the other end of the room where her window
overlooked the traffic on the Thames. A breakfast
cart draped with a white cloth was parked near an
armchair, on it a silver coffee pot and a covered
chafing dish.
“Please sit down,” she said, indicating another
armchair near the writing desk. The dark hair was
rumpled, and she wore no make-up except a touch of
lipstick. Her uniform of the day, at least up to this
point, seemed to consist of nylon briefs, bra, a sheer
peignoir that wasn’t even very carefully belted, and
one fur-trimmed mule. In her left hand was a plate
containing the herring, or what was left of it. She sat
down crosswise in the armchair with a flash of long
bare legs, kicked off the other mule, and stretched
like a cat. She grinned at Colby. “A little stiff after
that workout yesterday. How about a kipper?”
“No, thanks,” he said.
“Coffee?”
“Thanks, I just had breakfast.”
The Wrong Venus — 26
“I love ‘em,” she said. “Kippers, I mean. Every
time I’m in London, I go on a regular orgy.”
“You went to school in England, didn’t you?” he
asked. In his opinion it was a taste that had to be
acquired young, when resistance to any kind of food
was minimal and rebellion ineffectual.
“Yes, for a time. But to get to the matter of the job
I mentioned—you’re a writer, I understand.”
“I have been,” he replied. “Among other things.”
“What kind of writing have you done? I mean,
when you’re not covering the world eggplant
situation?”
“Newspaper work, mostly police beat. A few PR
jobs. And a little script-writing in Paris.”
She nodded, seeming lost in thought, and lifted
the cover off the chafing dish. “You’re sure you
won’t have a kipper?”
“No, thanks.” He took out a cigarette.
She forked another herring onto her plate and
attacked it with relish. “How are you at sex?”
“I was hoping you would ask that,” Colby said.
“When you finish your herring—”
“No, I mean, how are you at writing about it?”
“I don’t know. I never tried.”
“That’s probably the reason you’re smuggling
watches for a living. You’re out of the mainstream of
contemporary thought.”
“I suppose so,” he agreed. “It just never seemed to
me it got anywhere on paper. Too much like trying
to barbecue a rainbow.”
“Of course. But you’re missing the point.”
“Just what is the job?”
“A friend of mine is trying to get a novel written, a
bedroom western—”
“Why?” he asked. “Trying to find something to
read on a newsstand now, you’re up to your earlobes
in melon-heavy breasts.”
The Wrong Venus — 27
“The market’s assured.” She whistled softly. “And
what a market. You’ve heard of Sabine Manning, of
course?”
“Sure, who hasn’t?”
“You have to take the pills just to read her stuff.
Anyway, this friend of mine, a man named Merriman
Dudley—”
“The one that met you at the airport yesterday?”
“That’s right. He’s her business agent, handles her
money, investments, and so on. Well, he’s in
something of a jam, and since in a way it was my
fault, I’ve been trying to help him out.”
“Mrs. Manning lives here in London?”
“She has a house here—or did, rather—and
another in Paris. But I’d better clue you in and
scrape off a little of the PR job. It’s not Mrs.
Manning. It’s Miss Manning. And that’s a pen
name.”
Fleurelle Scudder, to use her real name, had been
a government clerk in Washington, in a minor
department of a bureau set up to purchase cavalry
ponchos during the Spanish-American War and then
lost in some organizational reshuffle, to live on into
the space age with that eerie viability characteristic
of government agencies. She’d started working for
the bureau during World War II, and typed away in
there for years, among the cobwebs and yellowing
memoranda from Colonel Roosevelt, going home at
night to her room at the Y.W.C.A. So she wrote a
novel.
“Something-or-other In the Flesh,” Colby said.
“Violence in the Flesh. Did you read it?”
“Only the jacket blurbs. I wasn’t quite twentythree
then, and I was afraid I wasn’t ready for it. In
the army, and knocking around Paris, you lead a
pretty sheltered life compared to an American
suburb.”
It sold two hundred thousand in hard cover, and
into the millions in paperback. Then there was the
motion picture, of course, which had the good
The Wrong Venus — 28
fortune to be denounced by more religious and civic
groups than any other film in a decade. She was
thirty-six when Violence came out, and in the past
seven years she’d turned out four more for a take of
somewhere around a million and a half. Then
Martine derailed the gravy train—unintentionally, of
course. She sold her a painting.
“Must have been pretty hairy,” Colby said. “Pop,
or op?”
“No, it wasn’t the painting itself, but a question of
ownership.” She dug at the kipper, smiled, and went
on. “At the time I was divorced from my husband
there was a bit of a bagarre over the community
property—you know the type of thing, with
battalions of lawyers charging back and forth over
the same terrain for weeks on end—so being a little
short of cash at the moment I took custody of the art
collection, two Picassos, a Dufy, and a Braque.”
It hadn’t seemed to her an exorbitant return for
three years of boredom, but Old Ironpants—her
husband’s mother—had come charging in from
Florence like a wounded rhino and begun putting
lawyers up trees all over the field. Martine’s lawyer
had pointed out that due to some legal nonsense
about her having already quit the conjugal bed plus
the fact that she had removed the paintings at two
o’clock in the morning with the help of a
professional burglar, she was in something of an
untenable position and she’d better give them back.
The trouble was, she’d already sold one of them. The
Braque. To Sabine Manning.
“Of course, that was Old Ironpants’ favorite, and
she told the lawyers the Braque would be returned
or she’d have three inches off the top of my skull for
a birdbath. Personally, I thought it was a big flap
about nothing; I’d always believed the Braque was a
forgery.”
Something nudged at Colby’s mind. Mother and
son? “What was your husband’s name?”
“Jonathan Courtney Sisson,” she said. “The
Fourth.”
The Wrong Venus — 29
He nodded. “It was a fake. I sold it to him.”
“I thought so. Anyway, I had to get it back, and I’d
already spent the money. So the only thing to do was
make a copy of it and return the copy.”
Fortunately, the painting was in Miss Manning’s
London house, and she was in Paris. Dudley could
have got it out for her long enough to have it copied,
except he was in New York and couldn’t get away
for another week, but he assured her over the phone
all the staff was away and told her how to get in.
She went on. “So I came to London with a painter
friend of mine named Roberto who’s pretty good at
that sort of thing—”
Colby interrupted. “Roberto Giannini?”
“That’s right. Do you know him?”
“Sure. He was the one who painted it in the first
place.”
She smiled. “That would have appealed to
Roberto, being commissioned to forge his own
forgery.”
They rented a car and parked near the house a
little after midnight. Around in back was a window
that could be reached by climbing a drainpipe. She
helped boost Roberto up. He opened the window
and went in. He had a piece of cord to lower the
painting with, and then they’d take it to the hotel
where he could work. She waited in the car.
Twenty minutes went by, and he didn’t come out.
Then an hour. The painting was in the library, on
another floor and in a different wing of the house,
but he had a flashlight and a sketch, so she didn’t
see how he could get lost. She began to worry.
Calling the police seemed to have little to
recommend it under the circumstances, so all she
could do was chew her nails and go on waiting.
When it began to grow light, she had to leave.
She reached for another herring. Colby waited.
“It was four days before I saw him again,” she
went on. “He came to the hotel early one morning,
and he had the Braque with him. He was pale and
The Wrong Venus — 30
jumpy, and kept begging me to put some more
clothes on. Roberto’s a certified, card-carrying
Italian and only twenty-six, so I couldn’t figure out
what was the matter with him until he told me she’d
given him the painting. Also a thirty-acre farm in
Tuscany, and a Jaguar.”
Miss Manning had come back from Paris, alone,
just an hour or so before they’d got there. She
caught Roberto taking the Braque down off the wall
in the library, and grabbed for the phone to call the
police. He didn’t want to hurt her, of course, but he
didn’t want to go to jail, either, so being Italian, he
went for the Italian solution.
He wouldn’t say much about it, but apparently it
was a little hectic in the courtship department, and
must have sounded like a remake of La Ronde with
the Hatfields and McCoys. She began screeching
and throwing books at him, and in addition she was
wearing a girdle and had one foot caught in a
rhinoceros-leg wastebasket. And while it seemed an
ambitious undertaking for a man who was scared to
death to begin with, to deflower a forty-three-yearold
virgin while she was trying to beat his brains out
with The Brothers Karamazov and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Roberto was a pretty good boy.
So she didn’t call the police. After the third day
Roberto began to consider calling them himself, or
at least making a run for it during one of the
moments she was asleep, but oddly enough he was
becoming rather fond of her. She was sweet to him,
he told Martine, and so damned grateful. But he did
need rest. He was going back, he said, now that he’d
delivered the Braque, but first he just wanted to
stand around in Dunhill’s for a few hours smelling
pipe tobacco and men in from the country in damp
tweed.
“Anyway, to get to the point,” Martine continued,
“after making nearly two million dollars writing
about sex, she’d finally discovered it. So she quit
writing.”
The Wrong Venus — 31
“Why?” Colby asked. “Decided it was too much for
her?”
“No. She just didn’t want to waste the time.”
She took off with him. That was seven months ago,
and nobody had seen her since. Nor heard from her,
except once. From this sole scrap of information, an
ecstatic and somewhat incoherent postcard from
Samos, she appeared to be cruising the Dodecanese
in a chartered yacht, going ashore nights with
Roberto to get intoxicated with beauty and laid
among the olive groves and ancient marble. And
while this sounded like a lot more fun than writing
about it, she was going broke, what with income tax
and the money she was throwing around. And the
trouble was she didn’t know it; if she did, she might
come back and go to work. Dudley, of course, could
probably run her down with private detectives, but
he was reluctant to tell her. To a large extent, he
was the reason she was broke.
He hadn’t actually stolen anything from her, of
course. It was just that he had converted four
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of her bonds to
cash and put it into some electronics stock that was
going to double overnight.
Colby nodded. He was familiar with the routine, an
ancient and deceptively simple one, with a
staggering mortality rate. You just put the four
hundred thousand back in the bonds, plus normal
interest accrual, and pocketed the rest. Only the
stock went down instead of up, and the janitor had
to clean another mess off the sidewalk in front of the
Southbound Fidelity Trust.
“She was lucky to have Dudley taking care of her
money, instead of some drunken sailor,” he said. “At
least she hasn’t got a hangover.”
“Well, it’s not completely lost yet,” Martine
replied. “The stock may come back eventually, if he
could keep stalling an audit.”
But in the meantime Miss Manning’s checks kept
pouring into the bank from Corfu, Athens, Istanbul,
Rhodes, and any other place that had night once a
The Wrong Venus — 32
day and a double bed. There’d been an eightythousand-
dollar installment to pay on her income tax
in September, and another eighty thousand coming
up in January. She didn’t have it. So around the
fifteenth of January, the balloon was going up for
Dudley. But he still had one chance.
“A new book,” Colby said.
She nodded. “Shortly after she took off, he found
part of a new novel she’d started, and sent it off to
her literary agent. It was only about two pages, but
they got seven hundred thousand dollars for the
reprint rights, and it sold to the movies for half a
million. Which wasn’t bad, considering. What was it
Milton got for Paradise Lost?”
“I’ve forgotten,” he said. “Eighteen pounds, wasn’t
it?”
“Something like that. Anyway, that’s the situation.
The money’s there and waiting, and all he has to do
is deliver a novel.”
“So he’s having one manufactured?”
“Yes. When he’d given up all hope she was ever
coming back, he came to me for help. I suggested he
farm it out. It’s been done before.”
“Sure. Dumas père used to subcontract plenty of
it.”
She nodded. “All he had to do was hire a
reasonably competent writer, give him copies of her
other five books and that two-page outline, and tell
him to spread some more flesh on it.”
“But what’s she going to do when she discovers
she’s written a new novel?”
“If Roberto can go the distance, she may not find it
out for years. And what can she do? Deny she wrote
it and give back the money—after Internal
Revenue’s already got most of it?”
They had a point there, Colby thought. He could
see IRS giving it back, whether the book had been
written by Petronius Arbiter or G. A. Henty. “How’s
he making out?”
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