The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams

didn’t read the Série Noire . Hands patted him under the arms, on the pockets, and ran down his trouser legs.
    “Nothing,” another voice said.
    A dark cloth was placed over his eyes and knotted behind his head. Then there was the tearing sound of tape being unrolled as the man wound it around and around his head, over the blindfold and into his hair. A hand guided him back to the car. He groped, found the open rear door. He got in.
    “Kneel,” the voice said. He crouched on his knees, his face on his arms atop the seat. He heard the others get in, in front, and the door closed. Something cold and hard nudged the back of his head, and the voice said, “No tricks. Brains are hard to clean off upholstery.”
    He had a fine flair for drama, Colby thought; he was feeling less nervous now. It was impossible to tell which of them he’d talked to—the French telephone is seldom a high-fidelity instrument. The gun muzzle left his head, but he knew it was still pointed at him. The car lunged forward with the sound of scattered gravel. It was a Citroën, all right; he recognized the exaggerated vertical movement of its shock-absorbers.
    The first turn was to the left, which meant they were going away from Maintenon, but after that he paid no attention. It would be elementary, even for a child, to make an unnecessary number of them, going in a twisting, roundabout route, in order to confuse him. He lost track of time. It could have been thirty minutes later, or forty-five, when they made a sharp turn, bounced over a rough road for some hundred meters, made two turns in quick succession, and stopped. Doors opened.
    “Descend,” one of the voices said.
    He climbed out, his knees cramped from kneeling on the floor. He was conscious of the ubiquitous odor of rotting manure of all continental farms, and heard a horse kick his stall. He was in a barnyard.
    A hand took his arm, and he felt the gun in his back. After three or four steps he felt concrete or flagstone under his feet, and then a mat. He wiped his shoes. One of them brushed something that moved with a wooden clatter. Probably a pair of sabots. A door clicked open, and he was pushed into a room with a bare wooden floor. No light at all penetrated the blindfold, but he could feel the warmth of a stove nearby, and smell coffee and the residual odors of cooking.

8
    The whole ride had been in silence, but this was now swept away with the suddenness of a collapsing dike. "Alors! Another pensionaire! It was a female voice, young, assertive, and charged with accumulated grievance. "Maybe we will get in the Guide Michelin, with a star, and crossed manure forks—”
    “Écoute—!”
    “Another one to cook for and wash dishes for, when I’m not shoveling food down that bottomless pit of a woman, or scrubbing floors, or milking your Uncle Anatole’s excrement of a cow—”
    “Quiet!” one of the men shouted. “This one lays the golden egg.”
    “Hah! Like your Uncle Anatole’s imbecile of a horse lays the golden egg in a basket of laundry—”
    “Tais toi, Gabrielle! One should never put things down near a horse—”
    D’accord! Not near the horse of Uncle Anatole. Or the cow of Uncle Anatole, or the chickens, or the sheep, or anything else in this paradise where constipation was only a rumor. If she ever saw a piece of pavement again. . . .
    Colby stood in silence while language played around his head. Then somebody caught him by the arm and he was pushed into a chair. He could feel a table in front of him. “Listen!” a voice shouted, as a fist banged the table, causing dishes to rattle. This one says she is not Mademoiselle Manning. Let us examine his so-called proof!”
    “In my right-hand coat pocket,” Colby said.
    “Aha! He does not speak with the accent of Cheek-ago!”
    “What do you know of the accent of Cheek-ago? You have heard it in films, with French actors—”
    “Alors! So Oomfrey Bogarr is a French actor—”
    “It is never the voice of