The wrong Venus Read online

  “Martine! Martine!”

  They looked around. A man was hurrying toward them through the crowd, a tall, rail-thin man apparently in a state of great agitation. He was bareheaded, but wore a light topcoat which flapped out behind him.

  “Oh-oh. Your problem was nothing.” Martine took her coat from Colby. “Good luck.” She started toward the man, but paused. “Where are you staying in London?”

  “The Green Park Hotel,” he replied.

  She nodded, waved goodbye, and turned to greet the other. Colby stood watching them, sorry to see her go.

  “Thank God you got here,” the man said. He took her hand, shook it once, and dropped it as though it were something he’d grabbed up by mistake on his way out of a burning building. “I’ve got to get back to Paris. She still hasn’t shown up—”

  “All right, all right, Merriman, calm down,” Martine soothed. He would be named Merriman, Colby thought; he looked as if he had a backlog of ulcers waiting for locations. They disappeared into the crowd, the man still gesturing violently. “. . . fifty pages to go. Writers! I’d rather be in hell with a broken back. . . .”

  Colby reclaimed his bag from the porter and found a taxi. He delivered the watches to an oily-looking importer in the back room of an office in Soho, and explained the gummy condition of sixty of them.

  “Whose stupid idea was that?” the importer complained. “Now I’ll have to have them cleaned.”

  Colby hit him. He extracted his pay from the man’s wallet, thoughtfully regarded the empty vest, dropped it in his face, and went out. He saw the evening performance of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and had dinner afterward at Cunningham’s, still thinking dazedly of Martine Randall.

  She was without doubt the most disturbing, provocative, and beautiful girl he’d ever run into, and anybody who could come up that naturally and easily with an idea like pouring crème de menthe in watch movements while being thrown around in a storm twenty thousand feet over France was endowed with no plodding, pedestrian mind. But who was she? She had an American passport, but her speech was English—at least part of the time—while the name Martine was French. Well, he’d never know; like an idiot he hadn’t even asked her address. When he got back to the hotel at eleven P.M. There were two telephone messages from her. Would he call her at the Savoy Hotel? His heart leaped. Would he!

  Her extension was busy. He tried seven times in the next forty-five minutes, and finally got through to her just before midnight. She sounded glad to hear him, but rushed.

  “Are you by any chance looking for a job?” she asked.

  Nothing had been further from his thoughts. “Sure,” he said eagerly. “What is it?”

  “It’s a little unusual, and I can’t explain now,” she replied. “I’m waiting for a call from Paris. But would you come to my room here at nine in the morning?”

  “I could come right now,” he offered. “You know how it is when you’re out of work, the anxiety, the insecurity—”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll survive the night, Mr. Colby.” She hung up.

  It was ten minutes till nine when he knocked on her door at the Savoy next morning. She opened it and smiled a greeting. She seemed to be wearing practically nothing, and was eating a herring.

  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.”

  “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 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 twenty-three 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 fortune to be denounced by more religious and civic groups than any othe
r 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.”

  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 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-year-old 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.”

  “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 day and a double bed. There’d been an eighty-thousand-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. T
he 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?”

  “Beautifully—until four days ago.”

  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.”