The Wrong Venus Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat down crosswise in the armchair with a flash of long bare legs, kicked off the other mule, and stretched like a cat. She grinned at Colby. “A little stiff after that workout yesterday. How about a kipper?”
    “No, thanks,” he said.
    “Coffee?”
    “Thanks, I just had breakfast.”
    “I love ‘em,” she said. “Kippers, I mean. Every time I’m in London, I go on a regular orgy.”
    “You went to school in England, didn’t you?” he asked. In his opinion it was a taste that had to be acquired young, when resistance to any kind of food was minimal and rebellion ineffectual.
    “Yes, for a time. But to get to the matter of the job I mentioned—you’re a writer, I understand.”
    “I have been,” he replied. “Among other things.”
    “What kind of writing have you done? I mean, when you’re not covering the world eggplant situation?”
    “Newspaper work, mostly police beat. A few PR jobs. And a little script-writing in Paris.”
    She nodded, seeming lost in thought, and lifted the cover off the chafing dish. “You’re sure you won’t have a kipper?”
    “No, thanks.” He took out a cigarette.
    She forked another herring onto her plate and attacked it with relish. “How are you at sex?”
    “I was hoping you would ask that,” Colby said. “When you finish your herring—”
    “No, I mean, how are you at writing about it?”
    “I don’t know. I never tried.”
    “That’s probably the reason you’re smuggling watches for a living. You’re out of the mainstream of contemporary thought.”
    “I suppose so,” he agreed. “It just never seemed to me it got anywhere on paper. Too much like trying to barbecue a rainbow.”
    “Of course. But you’re missing the point.”
    “Just what is the job?”
    “A friend of mine is trying to get a novel written, a bedroom western—”
    “Why?” he asked. “Trying to find something to read on a newsstand now, you’re up to your earlobes in melon-heavy breasts.”
    “The market’s assured.” She whistled softly. “And what a market. You’ve heard of Sabine Manning, of course?”
    “Sure, who hasn’t?”
    “You have to take the pills just to read her stuff. Anyway, this friend of mine, a man named Merriman Dudley—”
    “The one that met you at the airport yesterday?”
    “That’s right. He’s her business agent, handles her money, investments, and so on. Well, he’s in something of a jam, and since in a way it was my fault, I’ve been trying to help him out.”
    “Mrs. Manning lives here in London?”
    “She has a house here—or did, rather—and another in Paris. But I’d better clue you in and scrape off a little of the PR job. It’s not Mrs. Manning. It’s Miss Manning. And that’s a pen name.”
    Fleurelle Scudder, to use her real name, had been a government clerk in Washington, in a minor department of a bureau set up to purchase cavalry ponchos during the Spanish-American War and then lost in some organizational reshuffle, to live on into the space age with that eerie viability characteristic of government agencies. She’d started working for the bureau during World War II, and typed away in there for years, among the cobwebs and yellowing memoranda from Colonel Roosevelt, going home at night to her room at the Y.W.C.A. So she wrote a novel.
    “Something-or-other In the Flesh,” Colby said.
    “Violence in the Flesh. Did you read it?”
    “Only the jacket blurbs. I wasn’t quite twenty-three then, and I was afraid I wasn’t ready for it. In the army, and knocking around Paris, you lead a pretty sheltered life compared to an American suburb.”
    It sold two hundred thousand in hard cover, and into the millions in paperback. Then there was the motion picture, of course, which had the good fortune to be denounced by more religious and civic groups than any other film in a decade. She was thirty-six when Violence came out, and in the past seven years she’d turned out four more for a take of somewhere around a million