The wrong Venus Read online

  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.

  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.

  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 o
ver 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 somebod
y?

  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 middle-aged woman opened the door and regarded him suspiciously, but told the dog to hush.