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for half a million. Which wasn’t bad, considering. What was it Milton got for Paradise Lost?”
    “I’ve forgotten,” he said. “Eighteen pounds, wasn’t it?”
    “Something like that. Anyway, that’s the situation. The money’s there and waiting, and all he has to do is deliver a novel.”
    “So he’s having one manufactured?”
    “Yes. When he’d given up all hope she was ever coming back, he came to me for help. I suggested he farm it out. It’s been done before.”
    “Sure. Dumas père used to subcontract plenty of it.”
    She nodded. “All he had to do was hire a reasonably competent writer, give him copies of her other five books and that two-page outline, and tell him to spread some more flesh on it.”
    “But what’s she going to do when she discovers she’s written a new novel?”
    “If Roberto can go the distance, she may not find it out for years. And what can she do? Deny she wrote it and give back the money—after Internal Revenue’s already got most of it?”
    They had a point there, Colby thought. He could see IRS giving it back, whether the book had been written by Petronius Arbiter or G. A. Henty. “How’s he making out?”
    “Beautifully—until four days ago.”
    In July, Dudley had gone to New York and located a couple of writers, and brought them back to Paris as a security measure. Naturally, the whole thing had to be kept secret. Miss Manning’s literary agent and publisher didn’t know she had disappeared, and would go up like Krakatoa if they found out what was going on. Dudley forged her signature on correspondence and contracts.
    As a team, the two writers clicked from the first minute. Neither could have written it alone—one hadn’t written anything in fifteen years and the other had never written fiction at all—but together they rolled it out like toothpaste, and it was pure Manning. In two months they had half of it done. Dudley sent that much of it off to New York, and her agent and publisher raved about it. They said it was the best thing she’d ever done.
    “Then what’s the problem?” Colby asked. “They must be about finished.”
    “One of them is, almost. But four days ago the other one just walked out and nobody’s seen her since.”
    “You mean she quit?”
    “He doesn’t know what happened. They had an argument, and the next morning she wasn’t there at breakfast. That wasn’t too unusual, she quite often stayed out all night. But she didn’t show up at all. Nor the next day.”
    Dudley couldn’t notify the police, because he couldn’t very well explain what she was doing there in the house; it might get in the papers. Last night Martine had called Paris and canvassed all the hospitals, since Dudley couldn’t speak a word of French, but there was no trace of the girl. Her passport was still there in the house, so she couldn’t have left the country, but she might have gone off to the Riviera with some boyfriend.
    “Did she take any clothes?”
    “He doesn’t know. She still has things there, but she could have taken something.”
    “Sure,” he agreed, but still not completely satisfied. Then he shrugged. “But couldn’t the other one finish it alone?”
    “Only his part of it. I’ll have to explain how they worked. Their names are Casey Sanborn and Kendall Flanagan. You’ve probably never heard of them. I hadn’t.”
    “No “ he said. “I don’t think so.”
    Sanborn was an old pulp writer back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s who used to turn out three to four million words a year under contract to several strings of magazines and under half a dozen names—sea stories, mysteries, adventure stories, but mostly westerns. He’d hardly written anything since the pulp magazines folded, but when he sat down at a typewriter it sounded like a machine-gunner repelling an attack. He erupted characters and plots like a broken fire main, and of course he had the five Manning novels for a style book, but still it wasn’t quite Manning.