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

He’d saved it from the Germans, and now if necessary he’d save it from the French.
    Martine shuttled back and forth on the Shockwaves of these domestic upheavals, attending school in Paris and St. Louis, and Paris and Phoenix, and Paris and Palm Beach, and later, when she was older and they had split up permanently, boarding school in Switzerland and England. She developed the DP’s honed and polished instinct for survival, finding that she could assimilate a language and a culture apparently through her pores and fit into an alien environment with the ease of a Greek or a Polish Jew, so she was never the “new kid” anywhere more than a few weeks.
    “If they’d sent me off to school with a bunch of Kurdish tribesmen,” she said, “I’d have been cooking over a camel-dung fire on the second day, speaking the local dialects in a month, and had solid connections in the dung black-market at the end of two.” She discovered she was a born operator.
    “My father’s dead now,” she went on, “and my mother’s married to a real-estate developer in the San Fernando Valley. She drives a Cadillac about a foot longer than a bateau-mouche, saves fourteen different kinds of trading stamps, belongs to the John Birch Society, and would have to be in surgery to miss The Beverly Hillbillies . And if my father were still alive—what with a drugstore on the Champs Élysées, the, language filling up with franglais, and people drinking weesky—he’d probably be living somewhere in the provinces in an abandoned mill like Daudet, and doing translations of Rimbaud. So with a French mother who was American and an American father who was French, I was never sure who I was.” She smiled, and gestured humorously. “Except maybe a refugee.”
    “What do you do now?” Colby asked.
    “I play a small part in a film now and then, and do an odd job occasionally for a friend of mine who runs a detective agency.”
    They were down at Orly and cleared through Customs at twelve-thirty P.M. They located an unoccupied telephone cabine. While Colby searched for a jeton among the Swiss, French, and English coins in his pockets, she dug a small address book from her purse. He dialed.
    “Hello, hello!” Dudley barked.
    “This is Colby. Has he called again?”
    “Yeah. About twenty minutes ago. I gave him the rappley a sank ur business, and I think he understood. But why in hell didn’t they get her to call, if they couldn’t speak English?”
    “They’re calling from a public phone. But let’s get to the first job. You’ve still got him?”
    “Yeah. He’s quiet now; he’s broken all the chairs on the door and given up. His name’s Moffatt, and he’s staying at the George V.”
    “The George V? He’s not a newspaperman, he’s a journalist.”
    “He’s a no-good bastard. Okay, what else?”
    “Go up to the office where he can hear you,” Colby said. “Pretend to call Air France, and make a reservation on the next flight to Brazil or Outer Mongolia or anywhere there’s no extradition for fraud. Make it good, you’re taking it on the lam—”
    “What’s all this for?”
    Colby cut him off. “Don’t argue, and don’t ask questions. We haven’t got time for explanations. We’ll take a cab from here. Watch for us. When we go past the house we’ll wave. Then I want you to let him escape.”
    “Escape? Are you nuts? Hell—?
    “Stop interrupting. And when I say escape, I mean escape. He’ll bribe his way out. Tell the housekeeper to go up there and stooge around the outer office with a carpet sweeper or something so he’ll know it’s not you.”
    “I’m not sure I can explain all that to her.”
    “Then just tell her to come to the door when we get there.”
    “Okay. What else?”
    “As soon as he’s out of the house, start calling the George V at about five-minute intervals with messages for a Miss Nadja Loring. She’s due there for lunch. Have her paged.”
    “What kind of messages, and who