Free The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams Page B

sent the note in your own handwriting. You might as well have signed your name. But don’t worry about it,” he added in the weary tone of one long accustomed to coping with subordinates’ blunders. “I’ll get it back to you.”
    “We have Madame Manning—”
    “Mademoiselle Manning is forty-three years old, a brunette, and is in the Aegean islands. The woman you have is a twenty-eight-year-old blonde named Kendall Flanagan. Surely she’s told you this.”
    “So she says. But everybody knows writers use other names on their books.”
    “You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to tell you this unless I intended to furnish proof, do you? We’re wasting time arguing about it. However, I’ll explain the whole thing to you, just once, and then I’ll tell you what I’ve been authorized to do.
    “This young lady is a friend of Mademoiselle Manning, and also a friend of the man I work for in Chicago. For—uh—health reasons, she had to leave Chicago for awhile, so Mademoiselle Manning, who as I said was away in the Greek islands, offered her the use of her house here in Paris. When she disappeared four days ago, Monsieur Dudley, the man you tried to talk to, was very worried, knowing about her delicate health, so he cabled my boss in Chicago.
    “Normally, the man who’s in charge of our operation in Marseille would have come up to look into it, but he’d just had an accident in Istanbul, and was in the hospital. So my boss sent for me to come over. I’d have been here yesterday, but I was cooling another beef in Las Vegas. But never mind that. . . . While I was waiting for the plane in New York, I called Monsieur Dudley, who read me your note. So I called my boss. He was—uh—upset over the news, but I managed to convince him it might be better to let me handle it this way. Alone, you know what I mean?
    “The syndi—I mean, company—doesn’t want to get mixed up in anything that might cause a lot of stink and start rocking the boat—you know, unfavorable publicity—so seeing it was just a mistake on your part, we’ll buy a piece of your action, but not at anything like the price you’re talking about. As soon as I’m satisfied Mademoiselle Flanagan hasn’t been mistreated in any way, I’ll turn over to you thirty thousand francs—”
    “Thirty thousand francs? You think we are children?”
    “My advice, friend, would be to take it.”
    “This is—how do you call it—chicken food.”
    “And it will be paid only after I see Mademoiselle Flanagan myself.”
    “See her? Are you crazy?”
    “Wait a minute!” Colby said ominously. “She is all right, isn’t she? If anything has happened to her—”
    “Nothing has happened. She is quite well, and has already cost us a fortune in food and wine. But see her? You think you can come out here?”
    “What’s the problem?” Colby asked. “We just set up a Healy.”
    “A what?”
    “A Healy Pickup. . . . Listen, who’s in charge of your operation? Maybe I’d better talk to him.”
    “I am in charge.”
    “Oh? And you’ve never used a Healy? But never mind, I’ll explain it to you. You choose the time and place—it’ll be night, of course, and the best place is a country road.
    “I’ll be alone and unarmed, walking along the left side of the road, going in the direction you tell me. When you come up behind me, you already know there are no cars parked back in that direction, so you go on past for another mile or so to be sure there’s no muscle or any fuzz staked out ahead. Then you come back. I can’t see you, naturally, because your headlights are in my eyes. You stop. I turn around, facing away from the car, with my hands on top of my head. You cover, make the frisk, and put the blindfold over my eyes. None of this jerk routine of hitting me over the head, that’s for television. I get in the car. Leave the blindfold on after we get to your hideout. Mademoiselle Flanagan can tell me if she’s all right.
    “I give you the code