The wrong Venus Read online

  “You. Get up.” It was Jean-Jacques’ voice, and there was an unnecessary toughness in it again, as there had been when they’d picked him up. There was no doubt he was scared.

  Colby stood up. “The money was delivered?”

  “Yes. We have it.”

  “And there were no police, just as I promised?”

  “We saw none.”

  “So you’re going to release us?”

  “Of course we’re going to release you, salaud! What do you think, we want to adopt you?”

  He’s lying, Colby thought. For some reason now they think they have to kill us, and they’re trying to work themselves up to it. But what had happened?

  He was marched along the hallway. They were apparently back in the kitchen, judging from the odors, though he could no longer feel any warmth from the stove. He could hear the voices of Rémy and Gabrielle somewhere behind him.

  “How about untying my hands?” Colby asked.

  “Shut up! We will untie your hands when we get there.” Then, apparently to the others, “Her handbag, everything! Be sure nothing is left.”

  He heard a new sound, the clicking of high heels along the hall. Gabrielle hadn’t worn them, so they were bringing Kendall Flanagan. He was marched ahead, heard the door open, and they were outside in the barnyard. “Her first,” Jean-Jacques ordered. “Now this one.” He was pushed forward. A hand forced his head down. Getting in was awkward with his hands tied, and he fell over against Kendall. He was hauled into the position he’d been in before, kneeling with his face down on the seat. Kendall was on his right. “Stay down!” a voice commanded. He heard the three of them get in the front seat. The car shot backward, swung, and surged ahead. Almost immediately there was an explosive curse in French and it slammed to a stop. What now?

  One of the front doors opened and he heard running footsteps going away. In a moment they came back. The trunk opened, and something was thrown in it, something that landed with a metallic clang. He froze. A shovel? No, he told himself, fighting panic, it could have been something else. The car lunged ahead again. They bounced and jolted their way to the road, and made a left turn with tires squealing as they came onto the pavement.

  “Something’s bugged them,” Kendall said next to his ear.

  “Silence!” a voice shouted from in front. “No English.”

  “How about French, then?” She said several words Colby wouldn’t have thought she’d know. But then she’d been here five days.

  “Shut up, or I will shoot!”

  She fell silent. Colby could hear the three of them arguing in violent whispers in the front seat. It was ominous, and he was conscious of a cold and empty feeling in his stomach. He could make out only an occasional word, but heard police several tunes.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Don’t you know by now we’re not going to the police?”

  “They’re not going to the police, he says—hah!” It was the girl.

  “Shut up!” Jean-Jacques shouted. “Everybody talks too much!”

  Colby felt his heart leap then. Kendall’s hands weren’t tied. One of them had moved over and was resting on his. She’d probably been tied to the bed and they’d merely released her in their hurry. The fingers moved, exploring the turns of rope around his wrists. She began to tug at the knot.

  She might be able to do it, he thought, hardly daring to hope. His hands were directly below and behind the three of them in the front seat, and unless one turned all the way around and looked down they might not see it. Also, it was still dark. Or should be; he didn’t think it could be dawn yet.

  They were traveling at high speed, their tires screaming on the turns. He felt the ropes give a little, but dreaded from one minute to the next he’d hear the shout of discovery and the impact of a gun barrel on her head or arm. The warfare of impassioned whispers was still going on in the front seat. He could catch a word or phrase now and then. “. . . you and your stupid ideas!. . . everything wrong . . . talk too much. . . .” Then one that spread the chill between his shoulder blades. “. . . no, this was your idea, you do it!”

  The ropes slipped then and gave way. His hands were free.

  “Hit the dirt,” Kendall said. Then his ears were assaulted by a scream that years later would still come back and echo along his nerves.

  He was swinging his upper body toward the floor when the car seemed to take off like a jet at the end of a runway. It dipped, and then went up, and there was a sound like the snapping of violin strings. Just as he was beginning to think it was airborne for good, it crashed down, still upright, with a cannonading of exploded tires, and plowed into something he could only assume was a solid wall of water. There was a great wh-o-o-o-shing sound like a giant exhalation of breath, accompanied by violent deceleration that plastered him against the back of the seat in front of him. It lurched then, and began to roll. It went all the way over once, with a crashing and rending of metal and a snapping off of burst-open doors, came upright, and then over again, almost gently this time and with a strange, feltlike absence of sound, as though it had found a bed to climb into to die.

  His eardrums must have ruptured, Colby thought. No, he could still hear the engine. Blindfolded, and after having been in total darkness for hours and then whirled in this centrifuge, he had | no idea where he was or which way was up. He was groggy and bruised, but nothing seemed to be broken. He could move his arms and legs. One of his hands brushed the upholstery of the seat, directly over his head.

  There was an eruption of outcries in French, and the car began to rock gently from side to side. He could smell gasoline, and could hear the engine still purring, while the whole thing seemed to quiver with a strange, jellylike vibration. He threw his hands about again, seeking a way out before it burst into flames, and where the door had been he could feel straw. There were probably a number of ways you could explain that, he thought. Say, for example, the car was upside down on top of a haystack.

  He heard a succession of dry, swishing sounds nearby, and more curses in French. But he had to locate Kendall and get them out before it caught fire. The smell of gasoline was growing stronger. He swung his arms, but they encountered nothing except the seat over his head and the back of the front one. She was gone. He groped for the door again. The opening wasn’t completely filled with straw. At the top, near the floor of the car, there was a space where his hand met nothing. He began to push his way out, like a surfacing mole. A hand caught his arm and hauled. He was out, lying in more straw.

  “We may have set a new record for making it to the hay,” Kendall said. The hand let go his arm, there was another rustling, plunging sound, and he was alone.

  He sat up, tearing at the blindfold, and then the straw gave way under him and he was sliding backward down a gentle incline. The blindfold tore off just as he hit bottom and came to rest, his head and shoulders on the ground and his feet still up on the slope above him.

  He was looking straight up at the Citroën. It lay on its back atop the haystack, slanting down a little forward, the engine still humming while its hind wheels turned futilely in the air and its headlights searched the darkness like great anguished eyes imploring help. It looked, Colby thought, as though it had climbed out onto the beach to lay its eggs and somebody had flipped it over on its back to make soup out of it.

  He heard an impact of some kind, followed by a grunt. He turned then, and saw Kendall Flanagan for the first time.

  It was a sight that would be stamped into his memory forever with the perfection of detail and sharpness of definition of something caught on high-speed film with a strobe light, and while he learned later this was not an uncommon experience among men on whom she burst in full glory this suddenly and without any preparation at all, there was the fact that in his case she was clothed. In another instance, of which he heard later, she was as naked as a radish. The searing effect of this, and its potentiality for erasing even the memory of all previous visual experience, was something on w
hich the mind could only speculate.

  All the judo experts he ever told about it afterward were unanimous in the opinion it was impossible; given the acceleration of falling bodies and the time necessary to fit the shoulder into the socket under the arm, bend forward, and throw, she simply couldn’t have had both of them in the air at once, but he knew what he saw. Maybe he didn’t know judo, but they didn’t know Kendall Flanagan.

  She was directly in the beam of the headlights like an illuminated tableau of some Old Testament miracle, six feet and one hundred and sixty pounds of stacked and silvery blonde in a black cocktail dress, silver high-heeled slippers, and a rope of pearls, while out in front of her near the end of his trajectory Jean-Jacques/Rémy was still airborne a hundredth of a second before landing on the back of his neck, and the leather-jacketed form of Rémy/Jean-Jacques was just coming off her shoulder, already separated and beginning to wheel upward and out into the same flight pattern.

  The first landed with a tooth-rattling thud and lay still. Almost instantaneously the other crashed down beside him in an identical position, tried once to get up, thought better of it, and lay back. She straightened her dress.

  “If you need any help,” Colby said, “I can whip the girl.”

  “Oh, she’s over there.” Kendall turned and pointed behind her. In the edge of the headlight beam, the girl was just sitting up. Kendall looked around at the devastation to see if anybody was in the mood for seconds, flashed a joyous smile in Colby’s direction, and suggested, “Maybe we’d better move out. That gun is still around here somewhere.”

  She turned and climbed up the haystack. Thinking she might be going to throw the car down, Colby scrambled to his feet to get out of the way. She knelt beside it and groped around inside. “Catch,” she said, and Dudley’s briefcase sailed out toward him. He caught it, and at the same moment she said, “Wheeeee!” and disappeared down the other side.

  Colby ran around, but she had only slid down. She was sitting up, tugging her skirt and slip down from under her arms. She stood up, carrying her handbag, took a couple of steps, and halted with a gurgle of amusement. “Hold this a minute,” she asked, passing Colby the purse, and began to grope under her skirt. “Hay in my pants,” she said. “Man bites dog.”

  The girl was shouting imprecations in French behind them now, urging Jean-Jacques and Rémy on to the pursuit. This was apparently encountering some lack of enthusiasm, for she began crying out for somebody to find the gun. Colby and Kendall hurried on. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness again, and directly ahead he could see an exploded haystack that looked as though somebody had lobbed a mortar shell into it.

  This was what they’d hit that had slowed them down. Just beyond it were the burst strands of a wire fence, and then the road. It made a sweeping turn here, coming toward the field and its haystacks and then going off at almost right angles.

  “What did you do to him?” Colby asked, as they ran across the ditch and up onto the pavement.

  “When I screamed,” Kendall replied, “I put my blindfold over his eyes.”

  Going into a turn at a hundred kilometers an hour, Colby thought; it would have an unsettling effect on a driver. If word ever got around, she should be as unlikely a prospect for future kidnappings as Red Chief.

  The gun barked behind them then, and something snicked through the branches of a tree on the other side of the road. They could hear sounds of pursuit, and turned right, running along the pavement. Kendall stopped, yanked off the high-heeled slippers, and sprinted on. Colby took the purse from her, carrying the briefcase in his other hand. There was enough starlight for the others to see them in the open like this, but another fifty yards ahead on the left was a dark line of timber. They plunged into it, groped their way on for a few more yards, and crouched down in a clump of evergreens. They could hear the pounding of footsteps along the pavement, and shouts, and one of the men made a foray into the timber, crashing through the underbrush less than twenty yards away.

  The tumult went on down the road, but a few minutes later the three of them were back again, still arguing violently and blaming each other. The voices died away in the direction of the car.

  “I think they intended to kill us,” Kendall said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. It still baffled him. “Something queered it when they went to pick up the money.”

  “Do you suppose it is money? Dudley would rather open a vein than part with ten francs.”

  “Martine wouldn’t have stood for anything like that,” he said. “Besides, he had to get you back to finish the book.” He unzipped the briefcase and flicked on his cigarette lighter, shielding the flame with his body. It was filled with bundles of francs—tens, fifties, and hundreds, just as Dudley had brought it from the bank.

  “It beats me,” he said. He was overcome with yearning for a cigarette, and they were sufficiently screened by the dense underbrush. He took out the pack. “Smoke?”

  “I’d love one. Thanks.”

  Over the flame of the lighter he had a brief glimpse of a very lovely face and amused and utterly reckless gray eyes. “You’re a friend of Martine’s then?” she asked. “I thought you might be, from that Cosa Nostra routine.”

  “I met her a couple of days ago.” Was it only two days? It didn’t seem possible. “Dudley hired us to get you back.”

  “How is Sunny Jim? Ilium is doomed? There’s no hope for the whooping crane?”

  Colby grinned. “He just doesn’t trust the situation. Some OB man conned him into being born before he could check with his lawyer.”

  There was continued silence from the direction of the road. When they had ground out their cigarettes, they eased back to it. The farther they were from the area by daybreak, the better. There was no sign of the others. They started walking, Kendall still carrying her shoes. A few hundred yards ahead they went around another turn and there was still no sound of pursuit. A half-hour later it was growing light in the east. They came to an intersection with another road. Paris was one hundred and ten kilometers to the right, a sign said, and the next village was St.-Médard-au-bout-de-la-colline, fourteen kilometers.

  Two or three cars went past, but refused to stop. Then, just as it was full light, Colby managed to flag down a farmer in a battered old truck loaded with sheep. They’d had an accident, he explained, and would like a lift to St.-Médard. There wasn’t room for both of them in the cab, so Colby helped her in beside the driver and climbed in back among the sheep. The old truck rumbled, and crawled ahead. After it had gone about a mile, it lurched suddenly and almost ran off the road. This puzzled him until a shredded pair of nylons flew out the window and sailed past. He grinned.

  The sun came up. It was a crisp, exhilarating morning with air like champagne. He felt wonderful. It was in the bag now; it had been a highly profitable night, and successful beyond all expectation. Maybe they should brace Dudley for a bonus, to be split with Kendall, for having recovered the thirty thousand francs. In another hour or two he’d see Martine again, and if his luck continued to hold maybe by this afternoon they’d be winging their way toward Rhodes, that island whose specifications might have been drawn up by a man with a beautiful girl on his mind and plenty of experience in using terrain. He hummed a few bars of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and grinned at his companions, but they merely stared back at him with the vast apathy of sheep toward all phenomena not overtly menacing or recognizably edible. He lighted a cigarette and was content.

  St.-Médard-au-bout-de-la-colline was a small farming village of three or four streets lying athwart the road with a church steeple at the back of it, looking quaint and peaceful in the early rays of the sun. The farmer stopped at the intersection of its principal street. Colby helped her down, thanked him, and passed him ten francs. He tipped his cap to Kendall, looked at her once more with disbelief, and drove on. A man coming along the sidewalk craned his neck, and narrowly missed walking into a light standard.

  Besides jettison
ing the ruined nylons, she had combed her hair, which was like burnished silver springs, and repaired her make-up during the drive. Aside from a few wrinkles in the black dress, she could be just starting out for an evening in Paris, and he was conscious of his own stubble of beard and the wisps of hay clinging to the tweed.

  She grinned. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to eat anything that doesn’t attack me first.”

  He glanced around. It didn’t appear too promising, at this time of day. Directly across from them a boulangerie was in business, and up in the next block a newspaper kiosk and a small café, but if there were a restaurant at all it wouldn’t be open till time for lunch. But there should be a telephone in the cafe where he could call Martine. They walked up and crossed the street. A man going past on some kind of rubber-tired farm machine turned to stare at Kendall. Colby visualized her crossing a street in Rome during an hour of peak traffic; the carnage would be staggering.

  There were no tables set up on the sidewalk yet, but eight or ten inside, and a small bar with beer taps and an espresso coffee machine. Besides the patron behind the bar and one waiter, there were half a dozen customers, mostly in farm clothing or workers’ blue denim, some of them reading the Paris newspapers. Papers were lowered and necks craned as they came in. One man, arrested in the act of raising a glass of beer to his lips, seemed in some danger of having his eyes drop in it, Colby thought, if he were to move his head suddenly.

  It puzzled him; even as big and beautiful as she was, they were overdoing it for Frenchmen. Italians, maybe, but—well, this wasn’t Paris, by any means. He glanced toward the bar. There was a telephone, but he’d have to wait. The patron had just picked it up himself. The waiter came over. He seemed dazed too.

  Kendall smiled at him and said in fair French, “A bottle of champagne, four cups of coffee, some bacon, and—hmmmm—six eggs, and a plate of croissants,” Even if all this were obtainable, which was unlikely, Colby wondered if she thought they could eat that much. She turned to him. “And what’ll you have?”