The buzzer clicked on the lock and I went inside, let the door shut behind me and went up the stairs to the top floor and stood there in the dark. I didn't knock. She knew I was there. I waited a minute, then her door opened silently, flooding the landing with a soft rose glow from the lights behind her and she was wearing one of those things you could see through again.
"Hello, Mike."
I walked inside, let her take my hat and coat from me and picked up the drink she had waiting on top of the table. Her project had been finished and her work area was rearranged, her tools and equipment placed to become part of the decorative concept of the room. Through the skylight and the full French windows I could see the outline of New York above the opaque surfaces of buildings around her.
"Pensive tonight, aren't you?" She went over and pulled a cord, then another, closing out the view through the windows. It was like pulling the covers over your head in bed.
"Sorry," I said.
"No need to be. You'll loosen up. Even if I make you."
"It's one of those nights," I told her.
"I know. You felt it too, didn't you?"
I nodded.
She walked past me, the sheer nylon of the full-length housecoat crackling, the static making it cling to her body like another skin. She switched the record player on and let Tchaikovsky's Pathetique seep into the room. She turned, swirling the ice in the glass in her hand as the subtle tones began their journey into life. "Fitting music, isn't it?"
I looked at her and tasted my drink. She had built it just right.
"They don't know it out there," she said. "They take time out of their expressionless little existences trying to find something vital here and leave things as they found them. They really go away empty."
"What did you have to tell me, Cleo?"
She smiled, crossed one arm under her breasts, balanced the other on it and sipped her drink. "But you aren't one of them."
"Cleo..."
She paid no attention to me. She walked up, took the drink I didn't know I had finished from my hand very slowly and went and made me another. "Do you remember what I told you when you were here?"
"No."
"I said I wanted to paint you."
"Look..."
"Specially now." Her eyes viewed me with an odd interest. She turned her head from side to side, moved to study me in a different light, then said, "Yes, something has happened to you since the last time. It's better now. Like it should be. There isn't any softness at all left."
I put the drink down and she shook her head very gently. "It's something you want to know, Mike, but you'll have to do what I want you to do first."
I said, "I found Greta."
"Good," she said, and smiled again. "It's more than that now though, isn't it?"
"Come on, Cleo. What have you got on your mind?"
She walked up to me, turned her back and took my hands, wrapping them around her waist. Her hair brushed my face and it smelled faintly of a floral scent. "I work for the Proctor Group too, or have you forgotten? I knew when you went up to see Dulcie McInnes. You should never have said what you did to her Miss Tabor. That old harridan can't stand dominant males."
"I was there," I admitted.
She turned in my arms, her body a warm thing against mine. "And I was jealous." She smiled, let her arms crawl up my sides, her hands going to my face, then lacing them behind my head. "I saw you first," she grinned. "Am I teasing well enough?"
"I'm hurting. Don't lean on me too hard."
"There was some strange speculation about Teddy Gates. Now he's missing after you paid another visit up there. People are talking, yet nobody really knows anything at all."
"Except you."
"Except me," she repeated. "You found Greta Service, but it couldn't have ended because you're here now to find out something else."
I ran my fingers down the small of her back and felt her body arch under them. "What's your price, Cleo?"
"You," she said. "I'm going to paint you first. I want you permanently inscribed so I can look at you and touch you and talk to you whenever I want and know you'll never fade away." She raised herself on her toes and her mouth touched mine, lightly. Then she let herself down and pushed away from me, her eyes sad little imps dancing in far off places.
"I'm a funny woman, Mike. I'm young-old. I've seen too much and done too much in too short a time. What I really want I can never have, but I have sense enough to realize it, so I take what I can get when I can get it, or is that too complicated?"
"I understand."
"This is Cleo's last stand here." She swept her arm around to take in the room. "It's very little, but it's a sanctuary of a sort. From here I can see the other part of the world and nobody can touch me. I can stay here forever and ever with all the good parts of me right where I want them, never changing, never turning their backs. Do I sound too philosophical?"
"You can do better."
The imps in her eyes danced again. "But I don't want to. I'm alive here, Mike. Now I'm going to make you part of that life. I won't sell you. I won't give you away. I'm going to keep you. You're going to be mine like nobody else ever had you."
"Cleo..."
"Or what you want to know won't be yours."
I put the drink down. "Your show, kid. Do I loosen my tie?"
"You take off your clothes, Mike."
She painted me that night. It wasn't what I had expected. The background was a jungle green with little bright blobs of orange that seemed to explode outward from the canvas, distorting the sensation of seeing a flat surface. There was a man in the picture and it was me, but not so much the physical representation as the mental one. It was the id rather than the ego, the twilight person you were only when you had to be. She had seen things and caught them, registering them for all time as we know it and when I saw myself as she did it was the same as looking at the face of an enemy. The short hairs on the back of my neck raised in sudden anger at the confrontation and I knew what Belar Ris had seen just as I had seen him. My .45 was there too, exact in detail almost to seeming three-dimensional, but it was away from my hands as if I didn't need it.
During the hours she had discarded the sheer nylon, working unfettered, concentrating solely on the portrait. I could study her abstractly, enjoying the loveliness of her body, then in the stillness my mind had drifted to other things and Cleo was only a warm outline of motion, of long smooth sweeps of pink, blossoming mounds that were half hidden behind the easel, then quickly there again. I had time to think in an unreal world where thinking was all there was to do. The extended strands of the web began to join together with the cross sections of odd conjecture, and little by little, piece by piece, the thing that was possible became probable.
She let me have that one brief look, then turned the canvas to face the wall.
"You're mine now," she said. Her finger touched a switch and the lights faded gradually into nothingness and the two of us were there alone, people again, barely visible, whitish silhouettes against the velvet of night.
Behind the curtains a false dawn marked the beginning of a new day. The spasm outside was over and whether the Village was in the agony of rebirth or the throes of death, I would never know. We had bought the hours at a price. We had spent excesses we had accumulated during that time, and for a little while there was that crazy release that was a climax and an anticlimax that left no time for work or thought any more.