The Wrong Venus Read Online Free Page B

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