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It wasn’t lack of talent, but simply a matter of early conditioning and the fact he was a little too old to adapt.
    In the pulps, skin had to be leathery, and nobody ever stroked it—they just shot at it. So Sanborn was never entirely convincing at the silken, magenta-nippled breast; when Derek pressed his face into Gloria’s cleavage there was always an impression this didn’t quite ring true from a motivational standpoint and he should have been off doing a man’s work, shooting Comanches, or helping the boys get the herd to Abilene. And that was where Kendall Flanagan came in.
    “She’s from Madison Avenue,” Martine went on, “and writes toilet soap and skin lotion commercials for TV, all dewy and tremulous and full of ankle-deep adjectives—”
    Colby gestured approvingly. “Hey, he’s got it.”
    “Sure. I don’t know whether it was accidental or not, but it’s the perfect synthesis. They didn’t write it ensemble. Sanborn’d write it—the whole thing, plot, characters, dialogue, and all—and then turn it over to her and she’d spray on the flesh tones. That is, she’d simply rewrite the same story, but in ad-agency marshmallow, and when it came out of her typewriter you were smothered in skin and Nuit d’Amour and you could hear the nylon slithering to the floor. As her publishers said, it’s absolutely top-drawer Manning with the drawer pulled out. But now Flanagan’s disappeared, and she had nearly fifty pages to go.
    “Merriman can’t turn it in like that. So there he sits, with the million dollars practically in the bank, and he can’t touch it.”
    “It could drive him crazy,” Colby said.
    “It’s about to. I went to Lausanne to talk to a writer I know there, but he was busy. There was another here in London, but he’d just gone to work for MGM. So I thought of you. Could you do it?”
    Colby thought about it. Vicarious sex bored him to death and he wasn’t sure he could write it, but now he’d found her again he couldn’t let her get away. “Sure. I mean, if he’ll hire both of us.”
    “Why both of us?”
    “I can’t spell worth a damn,” he explained hastily. “And there’s the feminine expertise, like whether you can put a girdle back on in a Volkswagen—”
    The telephone rang.
    She answered. She listened for a moment, winked at Colby, and said soothingly, “All right, Merriman, just calm down. . . . Oh-oh! . . . Oh, murder! . . . But he’s still there? . . . Just a minute. ...”
    She turned to Colby. “Everything’s down, the drain now. There’s a reporter in the house, and he’s got the whole story.”
    I should have asked about the pension plan, he thought. “Let me talk to him.”

4
    She handed him the phone. "What paper's this guy with?" he asked.
    “Who’s this?” Dudley demanded.
    “Lawrence Colby. The writer Martine was talking to—”
    “Writer? What the hell do I want with a writer now? All I need’s a good lawyer and a hungry judge—”
    “Calm down,” Colby said. “What about this reporter?”
    “The whole thing’s shot to hell!” Dudley was beginning to shout. “Work your fingers to the bone trying to keep her solvent while she chases around the Mediterranean getting banged from Gibraltar to the Nile Hilton!”
    “Relax, will you? Where is he now?”
    “Locked in the back room of the office. When I found out who he was I got him in there and slammed the door. I thought maybe Martine could think of something.”
    “Maybe we can. Is there a phone in the room?”
    “An extension.”
    “Has he used it yet?”
    “I don’t think so. He’s just pounding on the door and yelling. Listen.”
    In the background Colby could hear thuds and muffled protest. The reporter was undoubtedly American; mother-grabber had a nostalgic ring to it. “Can you cut the line?”
    “Sure,” Dudley said. “I already have. But look—Chrissakes, what can we do now?”
    “He can’t get out the window?”
    “It’s on the second floor.” There