“Beautifully—until four days ago.”
The Wrong Venus — 33
In July, Dudley had gone to New York and located
a couple of writers, and brought them back to Paris
as a security measure. Naturally, the whole thing
had to be kept secret. Miss Manning’s literary agent
and publisher didn’t know she had disappeared, and
would go up like Krakatoa if they found out what
was going on. Dudley forged her signature on
correspondence and contracts.
As a team, the two writers clicked from the first
minute. Neither could have written it alone—one
hadn’t written anything in fifteen years and the
other had never written fiction at all—but together
they rolled it out like toothpaste, and it was pure
Manning. In two months they had half of it done.
Dudley sent that much of it off to New York, and her
agent and publisher raved about it. They said it was
the best thing she’d ever done.
“Then what’s the problem?” Colby asked. “They
must be about finished.”
“One of them is, almost. But four days ago the
other one just walked out and nobody’s seen her
since.”
“You mean she quit?”
“He doesn’t know what happened. They had an
argument, and the next morning she wasn’t there at
breakfast. That wasn’t too unusual, she quite often
stayed out all night. But she didn’t show up at all.
Nor the next day.”
Dudley couldn’t notify the police, because he
couldn’t very well explain what she was doing there
in the house; it might get in the papers. Last night
Martine had called Paris and canvassed all the
hospitals, since Dudley couldn’t speak a word of
French, but there was no trace of the girl. Her
passport was still there in the house, so she couldn’t
have left the country, but she might have gone off to
the Riviera with some boyfriend.
“Did she take any clothes?”
“He doesn’t know. She still has things there, but
she could have taken something.”
The Wrong Venus — 34
“Sure,” he agreed, but still not completely
satisfied. Then he shrugged. “But couldn’t the other
one finish it alone?”
“Only his part of it. I’ll have to explain how they
worked. Their names are Casey Sanborn and
Kendall Flanagan. You’ve probably never heard of
them. I hadn’t.”
“No “ he said. “I don’t think so.”
Sanborn was an old pulp writer back in the 1930’s
and ‘40’s who used to turn out three to four million
words a year under contract to several strings of
magazines and under half a dozen names—sea
stories, mysteries, adventure stories, but mostly
westerns. He’d hardly written anything since the
pulp magazines folded, but when he sat down at a
typewriter it sounded like a machine-gunner
repelling an attack. He erupted characters and plots
like a broken fire main, and of course he had the five
Manning novels for a style book, but still it wasn’t
quite Manning. It wasn’t lack of talent, but simply a
matter of early conditioning and the fact he was a
little too old to adapt.
In the pulps, skin had to be leathery, and nobody
ever stroked it—they just shot at it. So Sanborn was
never entirely convincing at the silken, magentanippled
breast; when Derek pressed his face into
Gloria’s cleavage there was always an impression
this didn’t quite ring true from a motivational
standpoint and he should have been off doing a
man’s work, shooting Comanches, or helping the
boys get the herd to Abilene. And that was where
Kendall Flanagan came in.
“She’s from Madison Avenue,” Martine went on,
“and writes toilet soap and skin lotion commercials
for TV, all dewy and tremulous and full of ankle-deep
adjectives—”
Colby gestured approvingly. “Hey, he’s got it.”
“Sure. I don’t know whether it was accidental or
not, but it’s the perfect synthesis. They didn’t write
it ensemble. Sanborn’d write it—the whole thing,
plot, characters, dialogue, and all—and then turn it
The Wrong Venus — 35
over to her and she’d spray on the flesh tones. That
is, she’d simply rewrite the same story, but in adagency
marshmallow, and when it came out of her
typewriter you were smothered in skin and Nuit
d’Amour and you could hear the nylon slithering to
the floor. As her publishers said, it’s absolutely topdrawer
Manning with the drawer pulled out. But
now Flanagan’s disappeared, and she had nearly
fifty pages to go.
“Merriman can’t turn it in like that. So there he
sits, with the million dollars practically in the bank,
and he can’t touch it.”
“It could drive him crazy,” Colby said.
“It’s about to. I went to Lausanne to talk to a
writer I know there, but he was busy. There was
another here in London, but he’d just gone to work
for MGM. So I thought of you. Could you do it?”
Colby thought about it. Vicarious sex bored him to
death and he wasn’t sure he could write it, but now
he’d found her again he couldn’t let her get away.
“Sure. I mean, if he’ll hire both of us.”
“Why both of us?”
“I can’t spell worth a damn,” he explained hastily.
“And there’s the feminine expertise, like whether
you can put a girdle back on in a Volkswagen—”
The telephone rang.
She answered. She listened for a moment, winked
at Colby, and said soothingly, “All right, Merriman,
just calm down. . . . Oh-oh! . . . Oh, murder! . . . But
he’s still there? . . . Just a minute. ...”
She turned to Colby. “Everything’s down, the
drain now. There’s a reporter in the house, and he’s
got the whole story.”
I should have asked about the pension plan, he
thought. “Let me talk to him.”
The Wrong Venus — 36
4
She handed him the phone. "What paper's this guy
with?" he asked.
“Who’s this?” Dudley demanded.
“Lawrence Colby. The writer Martine was talking
to—”
“Writer? What the hell do I want with a writer
now? All I need’s a good lawyer and a hungry judge
—”
“Calm down,” Colby said. “What about this
reporter?”
“The whole thing’s shot to hell!” Dudley was
beginning to shout. “Work your fingers to the bone
trying to keep her solvent while she chases around
the Mediterranean getting banged from Gibraltar to
the Nile Hilton!”
“Relax, will you? Where is he now?”
“Locked in the back room of the office. When I
found out who he was I got him in there and
slammed the door. I thought maybe Martine could
think of something.”
“Maybe we can. Is there a phone in the room?”
“An extension.”
“Has he used it yet?”
The Wrong Venus — 37
“I don’t think so. He’s just pounding on the door
and yelling. Listen.”
In the background Colby could hear thuds and
muffled protest. The reporter was undoubtedly
American; mother-grabber had a nostalgic ring to it.
“Can you cut the line?”
“Sure,” Dudley said. “I already have. But look—
Chrissakes, what can we do now?”
“He can’t get out the window?”
“It’s on the second floor.” There was a wistful
flowering of hope in Dudley’s voice. “Maybe he’ll try
it and kill himself.”
“Do you know where he’s from?”
“Los Angeles. The Chronicle.”
“Are you sure he’s got the whole story?”
“The whole story? The bastard could hang me!
Look. . . . He called here yesterday, wanted to
arrange an interview. He was on his way home from
Berlin or somewhere and stopped off in Paris. He
wanted to do a feature article on Sabine Manning,
under a by-line, good publicity for her, that pitch. I
told him nothing doing, of course, Miss Manning
was too busy on her new book. That gets rid of most
of ‘em, but this bird was a little tougher. He sneaked
in through the kitchen this morning, and walked
right into the room where Sanborn was working. Oh,
sweet Jesus—!”
Colby whistled softly.
“Sanborn just thought he was the new writer I’d
been trying to get, so he showed him the manuscript
and started to fill him in. By the time I walked in
from the airport he had it all, and he started to
laugh and said wait’ll this hits the front page. I tried
to buy him off—that’s how I got him into the office.”
“All right,” Colby said. “Keep him locked in there
till we can get to Paris. We’ll call you from Orly.”
“You mean, you think there’s something we can
do?”
The Wrong Venus — 38
“I don’t know yet. But I used to be a—” He turned,
intending to motion for Martine to start getting
dressed. She already had.
“—news—”
She had the garter belt girded around her under
the loosened peignoir, and was sitting on the edge of
the bed pulling on her nylons. A slender, tapering
leg was thrust up and outward, rotating at the ankle
as she slid the stocking-top up a satiny expanse of
thigh and clipped it to the tab.
“What’s the matter?” Dudley demanded. “Have
you got asthma?”
“Asthma? No. I’m twenty-twenty in both eyes.”
“Oh . . . Martine. I think she grew up on a
destroyer. But you used to be a what?”
“A newspaperman,” Colby said. An idea was
beginning to take form in his mind. “It’s just
possible we may be able to get that guy out of your
hair, but there’ll be a slight fee.”
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“A thousand!” Dudley seemed to choke, and began
making sputtering noises.
“Plus expenses,” Colby went on.
“Five hundred—”
“If he files that story, you know what your
manuscript’ll be worth?”
“So I know, I know! Okay, a thousand. But nocure-
no-pay.”
“Right,” Colby agreed. “We’ll be in Paris as fast as
we can get there. Find out his name and where he’s
staying. And feed him a sob story. Sabine Manning
died of cholera out in some back island of the
Cyclades and you were trying to finish the novel she
was working on so you can give the money to some
charity she was interested in—”
“You want me to tell that to a reporter?”
“So let him laugh. When we call you from Orly,
answer from some other extension so he can’t hear
The Wrong Venus — 39
you. . . . Oh, one more thing—that Flanagan girl still
hasn’t shown up?”
“No. And if I ever get my hands on her—”
“You haven’t checked with the police?”
“No.”
“She hasn’t got her passport with her,” Colby
pointed out. “If they’d picked her up for anything,
they’d hold her till she produced one. Are you sure
they haven’t tried to call you?”
“Sure I’m sure. They’d speak English, wouldn’t
they?”
“Not necessarily. They would if they saw they had
to.”
“That’s what I thought. This jerk that keeps
bugging me—”
“What?” Colby asked.
“Nothing. Just some flip-lid that keeps calling up
here three or four times a day trying to sell me
something. In French, for Christ’s sake! But never
mind him—”
“Wait a minute,” Colby broke in. ‘Tell me about
this guy.”
“Hell, I don’t know anything about him. I got
troubles of my own without listening to his, even if I
could understand ‘em. When I hang up on him, he
calls right back and starts blowing his stack all over
the place. You know how excitable they are.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Three or four days.”
Colby frowned and glanced at Martine. She had
her slip on and was pulling her dress over her head.
Her face emerged, the eyes questioning. In the
receiver he could hear the reporter banging and
cursing again.
“Listen,” he said to Dudley. “Have you received
any mail the past few days?”
“Sure. Piles of it, same as always. Fanmail,
begging letters, she gets ‘em all the time.”
The Wrong Venus — 40
“No, I mean local. In French.”
“I might have. Seems to me there was something
this morning.”
“Have you got it there?”
“No, I probably threw it out. I couldn’t read it.”
“Will you look in the wastebasket and see if it’s
still there?”
“What the hell—? Oh, all right. . . .” There was a
scrambling sound and a rustling of paper. “Yeah,
here it is.”
“Can you read it to me?”
“Seems to be addressed to me. Cher monsewer, it
says—”
“Go on.”
“The first two words are Madame Manning. I can
make that out. Then it says, ay eat enlewy—”
“Hold it, hold it!” Colby interrupted. “Just spell the
words.”
“Okay. . . . Madame Manning—a—that’s one word
—e-t-e—the e’s have got accent marks—”
“Right. Go on.”
“. . . e-n-l-e-v-é-e. . . .”
“Okay. That’s enough.” Colby put his hand over
the mouthpiece, and turned to Martine. “They’ve
been trying to tell him for four days they’ve
kidnapped Kendall Flanagan.”
“Oh, no!”
“They think she’s Miss Manning.”
She shook her head and sat down. “You don’t
suppose President Johnson would declare him a
disaster area?”
Colby spoke into the phone again. “The reason
your friend’s so excitable is frustration. He
kidnapped Kendall Flanagan four days ago and can’t
get anybody to notice it. Is she a heavy eater?”
“What?”
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