The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

ideas?”
    “I’m working on one.” He waved and went out.
    He was pacing the sidewalk in front of his hotel twenty minutes later when she drew up in a taxi. He threw his bag in front beside the driver and jumped in. They shot ahead.
    “There’s a flight at eleven-ten,” she said, glancing at her watch. “The driver thinks we can just about make it.” They circled the block and slid back into the traffic of Piccadilly. She brought out cigarettes. Colby lighted hers and one for himself. “All right,” she urged. “What are we going to do?”
    “The newspaperman’s the first thing,” he replied. “We’ve got to keep him from filing that story.”
    “How? She’s a big name, remember.”
    “First I need a little rundown on the house, layout, who’s in it, and so on.”
    Martine had been in it a number of times. It was a big three-story place in the sixteenth arrondissement near the Avenue Victor Hugo. Sabine Manning’s study, bedroom, and bath were on the ground floor, in addition to the salon, dining room, and kitchen. Sanborn’s and Kendall Flanagan’s rooms were on the second floor, as well as Dudley’s office and the room behind it in which the reporter was locked. The window of this room was at the back of the house. He wouldn’t be able to see the street.
    The only other people were a housekeeper and a cook, both hired by Dudley. Miss Manning’s secretary had quit about the time she took off, and he’d never replaced her. The cook was a Gascon, and the housekeeper a Parisienne named Madame Buffet. The cook could speak no English at all, but Madame Buffet knew a few words.
    Colby nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “Good. We may be able to do it. With luck.”
    “How does it work?”
    “If it does.” He explained the idea.
    She listened with increasing, and unholy, glee. “This is going to be fun.” Then her face sobered. “But what about the other thing?”
    “Considerably less fun, and somebody may get hurt,” he said.
    “A lot depends on what they do when they find out they’ve got the wrong woman.”
    * * *
    Their flight was already being announced when he paid off the taxi and they ran into the terminal, but they were able to pick up their rickets, check in, and clear passport control in time to get aboard. When they were airborne, Colby lighted a cigarette and turned to Martine.
    “Do you live in Geneva?”
    “No, Paris. An apartment near the Etoile.”
    “We’re neighbors, then. I live on the Avenue Kleber. How long have you been in-Paris?”
    “I was born there,” she said. “But the question isn’t how long, but how often.”
    “How’s that?”
    “My father was American, and my mother French. I grew up like a migratory waterfowl—a victim of a sort of bilaterally expatriated chauvinism.”
    “Maybe you’d better throw in a glossary with that,” he said.
    She explained. Her father, the son of a midwestem businessman, had come to Paris just out of college in 1934 to study painting for a year. He’d never amounted to much as a painter, but he had become enamored of Paris and refused to go home. Fortunately, he inherited some money from his maternal grandfather, and didn’t have to. He married a minor French actress originally from Bordeaux, and Martine was born in 1936. When the Germans came, he sent his wife and daughter off to the United States and joined the Resistance, and then later the OSS, still working with the French underground. When it was over they were reunited in Paris. Only now the American was more French than the French themselves, and the Frenchwoman had eaten Mom’s apple pie. Live in this place? Dear, you need help.
    They were both people of volcanic temperament, given to violent separations and unpredictable reconciliations that never lasted long because she refused to give up the fat-cat life of plush suburbia and he was too furiously intent on dragging France back into la belle époque even to consider going home and abandoning it to its fate.