The Wrong Venus Read Online Free PDF

and a half. Then Martine derailed the gravy train—unintentionally, of course. She sold her a painting.
    “Must have been pretty hairy,” Colby said. “Pop, or op?”
    “No, it wasn’t the painting itself, but a question of ownership.” She dug at the kipper, smiled, and went on. “At the time I was divorced from my husband there was a bit of a bagarre over the community property—you know the type of thing, with battalions of lawyers charging back and forth over the same terrain for weeks on end—so being a little short of cash at the moment I took custody of the art collection, two Picassos, a Dufy, and a Braque.”
    It hadn’t seemed to her an exorbitant return for three years of boredom, but Old Ironpants—her husband’s mother—had come charging in from Florence like a wounded rhino and begun putting lawyers up trees all over the field. Martine’s lawyer had pointed out that due to some legal nonsense about her having already quit the conjugal bed plus the fact that she had removed the paintings at two o’clock in the morning with the help of a professional burglar, she was in something of an untenable position and she’d better give them back. The trouble was, she’d already sold one of them. The Braque. To Sabine Manning.
    “Of course, that was Old Ironpants’ favorite, and she told the lawyers the Braque would be returned or she’d have three inches off the top of my skull for a birdbath. Personally, I thought it was a big flap about nothing; I’d always believed the Braque was a forgery.”
    Something nudged at Colby’s mind. Mother and son? “What was your husband’s name?”
    “Jonathan Courtney Sisson,” she said. “The Fourth.”
    He nodded. “It was a fake. I sold it to him.”
    “I thought so. Anyway, I had to get it back, and I’d already spent the money. So the only thing to do was make a copy of it and return the copy.”
    Fortunately, the painting was in Miss Manning’s London house, and she was in Paris. Dudley could have got it out for her long enough to have it copied, except he was in New York and couldn’t get away for another week, but he assured her over the phone all the staff was away and told her how to get in.
    She went on. “So I came to London with a painter friend of mine named Roberto who’s pretty good at that sort of thing—”
    Colby interrupted. “Roberto Giannini?”
    “That’s right. Do you know him?”
    “Sure. He was the one who painted it in the first place.”
    She smiled. “That would have appealed to Roberto, being commissioned to forge his own forgery.”
    They rented a car and parked near the house a little after midnight. Around in back was a window that could be reached by climbing a drainpipe. She helped boost Roberto up. He opened the window and went in. He had a piece of cord to lower the painting with, and then they’d take it to the hotel where he could work. She waited in the car.
    Twenty minutes went by, and he didn’t come out. Then an hour. The painting was in the library, on another floor and in a different wing of the house, but he had a flashlight and a sketch, so she didn’t see how he could get lost. She began to worry. Calling the police seemed to have little to recommend it under the circumstances, so all she could do was chew her nails and go on waiting. When it began to grow light, she had to leave.
    She reached for another herring. Colby waited.
    “It was four days before I saw him again,” she went on. “He came to the hotel early one morning, and he had the Braque with him. He was pale and jumpy, and kept begging me to put some more clothes on. Roberto’s a certified, card-carrying Italian and only twenty-six, so I couldn’t figure out what was the matter with him until he told me she’d given him the painting. Also a thirty-acre farm in Tuscany, and a Jaguar.”
    Miss Manning had come back from Paris, alone, just an hour or so before they’d got there. She caught Roberto taking the Braque down off the wall