He had made an ass of himself. He was angry about it, but there was no place to work the anger off. Neither was there any time. There were only ten minutes before class would begin. He had a cup of coffee before him. He wished it were gin.
It would all depend on Anne, he thought. He didn't expect her to talk to him very much. Just "Hello, Tim." That would be fine. If she would just do it that way, he would settle for that.
Even if she didn't talk to him, it would be all right. As long as she showed up. The first thing the instructor would do if she was not on the model's platform would be to ask him where she was. Practically every one of the students at the Academy of Fine Arts took it for granted that they were going together.
They were, of course; but not in the way many of them thought. It was generally assumed that they lived together. Tim Anders and Anne Laro. The athlete turned artist and the artist turned model to work her way through school. It was assumed by the students who painted and sketched the nude body of Anne Laro that the body belonged to Tim Anders.
Maybe, if he hadn't made such a damned fool of himself, that would have become true. Now, he would be content if she simply came to the Academy.
Tim Anders lit a cigarette and sipped his coffee again. "What a stupid ass!" he said half aloud. To which the counterman asked, "You say something, fellah?" He shook his head.
He had almost raped her. The thought made him shudder.
They had been in her apartment on the East Side. Her roommate, Belle Linzer, had gone to Boston to be with her folks for a week. It was a perfect setup. She didn't have to invite him up for dinner! Damn, damn, she knew what he had on his mind!
For almost two months he had dated her and acted like a high-school kid. Clean little kisses given to her full sensuous mouth. His arm demurely permitted to encircle her waist. Or holding her cool hand while his large hand sweated out its almost uncontrollable need.
And he had accepted her rebuffs. When his tongue sought her tongue, her head had pulled away and he was left staring down at the golden hair covering his shoulder. When his hand moved past her knees, which were exposed miles below her mini-skirt, her thighs locked like clams. And her breasts, which caused his hungry eyes to burn when they danced, he had cupped once with his pulsing fingers. Her eyes had filled with resentment. Their color, almost violet under the class-room fluorescents, had turned black.
All right, she was a virgin. She had told him that. She liked him very much, she had said; but she was not ready to do it with him or with anyone else. If she would do it with anyone in the whole world, it would be with him. The last thing he wanted to do was to frighten her away. He wanted to make love to her so much that he had clamped an iron control on his body. He would have her; patience was all he needed.
He had simply lost control. What could she have expected? Three times a week he had sat in the life class as she stood naked on the platform a few feet from his touch. He had drawn and painted her body numerous times in two months. His eyes had explored every inch of her olive-tinted skin. He could pick up a pencil and, from memory alone, draw her burgeoning virgin breasts with steadily swollen nipples so red they seemed painted. His drawing pads were filled with her lively hips, which seemed always to be dancing. On the walls of his small furnished room, pictures of Ann Laro's buttocks with their deep clefts winked at him.
To verify the fact that he'd captured the likeness of her body, all he had to do was walk through the life class studio and look at the work of the others. On fifty pads, canvases and sheets of paper there was the body of Ann Laro rising up in black and white and in color, her red nipples even redder in the crimson of oils.
Each painting he made had become an erotic exercise. The nakedness he painted was a real nakedness, the body he painted was a real body calling to him. The sessions had become almost unbearable. He would have to drop his study and walk the corridor floor outside until the tom-toms in his belly faded down.
Maybe, he thought, she was making me rape her. He wondered about this and tried to remember how it had happened.
They had eaten. She was a pretty good cook. A delicate curry of chicken.
"Farm girls learn how to cook," she had said when he had mumbled his compliments, mouth filled with food.
"Marvelous, Anne. I'm really gassed with this food!"
"That doesn't sound right, Tim," she said with her low pitched laughter.
"You know what I mean. How can someone look the way you do and do all of this, too?"
She had smiled and kissed his forehead. She went to the galley kitchen, which was behind a blue sackcloth curtain. He watched her legs, clad in green mesh, strut across the floor, and cause her hips to bounce under the cling of the short, striped silk mini-skirt. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.
After coffee, she had invited him to sit beside her on the couch. She has snuggled against him. He looked down into her loose blouse and closed his eyes at the sight. She had not put on her brassiere. Had this been deliberate? Did she forget? He tried to concentrate on the music. Something about postmen and firemen and the Queen--the Beatles singing.
"You're so sweet, Timothy Anders," she had said, hugging him. "So nice to be with you."
"You wouldn't think so if you could read my mind."
"No, Tim."
"Really, Anne. I am going out of my ever-loving mind for you. There's just no relief. Anne, when I leave you, you know what I do? I pick up the first girl I can down at one of the bars. I get into bed with her and I think of you."
"Tim!" she had said. She had seemed shocked at first, but then she had laughed. "I feel sorry for you."
"Tell me, Anne, don't you feel any desire? I mean just raw, horny sex feelings?"
"Of course, I do! I'm just able to control it."
"Why, for heaven sake? I promise you, you'll enjoy it like crazy. Do it once and you'll never be able to get enough!"
She had gotten up from the couch and said: "Enough!"
Then she had begun to dance solo. Her body twisted, her breasts shook, her pelvis lifted in sexy thrusts.
"Stop it!" he had shouted. "Just stop it!"
She did. "I'm sorry!" she had said. "I'm asking you to control yourself, and here I am doing a dance like that. I know it makes you feel sexy, but it doesn't make me feel anything. It's just a good way to get the kinks out after posing a couple of hours." Tim remembered that he had gotten to his feet and had said very calmly. "Anne, this is it. Take your clothes off. I'm going to have you. Here. Right now."
She had felt his seriousness and had backed away. "Tim, you leave. Please don't come near me."
He had seized her wrists and pulled her close to him. He kissed her mouth with open passion. She had writhed in his grip. Then she had softened. He felt her mouth yield and open slightly. He had thrust his tongue in, deep. He had seen her eyes open wide and roll back into her head. For one moment her mouth had closed around his tongue and had sucked it. Then she had torn her face away from his. She had freed her hands and slapped him across the mouth.
He had reacted instantly, spontaneously.
She had raised her hand slowly to her cheek where he had struck her. How slowly she had lifted her hand up! Then she had dropped it and had looked up at him. She had shown no anger. No fright. Her eyes had turned off, had become blank.
What thoughts had gone through his mind then? He tried to remember but couldn't. He had made his move. He had committed himself. He had to go all the way. His blood raced with the mounting fury of his need to have her, to have her then and there.
He had yanked up her blouse over her breasts, which trembled before him. For several moments he had been able to do nothing but stare at them. The nipples were so red. They had made him think of fire and candy. He could smell the perfume of her body and the way it combined with the cologne she used. A trickle of sweat rolled down between her breasts to her abdomen, which moved slowly with her deep breathing.
He remembered how slowly his mouth moved toward her high standing red nipples. She had not moved. Only her breath had sounded louder.
The red nipple in his mouth pulsed against the fold of his tongue. His tongue lifted it and roiled about it. He had felt drunk. He encircled her with his arms and forced her close to him. He had crushed her breast into his wide open mouth. He had to restrain himself from biting it.
He unzipped the side of her skirt and maneuvered the garment down her hips. He placed his hand against her naked belly, inside the elastic top of her green mini-panties. Her belly had pumped against his exploring hand. Fear? Excitement?
He manipulated her panties over her hips and buttocks. Her buttocks had been tight, locked. Excitement? Fear?
She had moved to the couch under his gentle guidance. Aside from her green mesh stockings Anne was naked. Her eyes had closed. She had lain there. She had waited.
He had touched her thighs softly. He had kissed them. His exploring lips could feel the tension of her body.
When he had stood up to undress himself he had seen the flow of tears coming from her closed eyes. She had looked as if she were waiting to be executed.
Suddenly, his desire had vanished. In that moment when he could have taken her, he had become cold.
How long had he stood there, hovering over her nakedness? An eternity, he thought.
What had happened in the next few minutes he could not recall. In one moment he had looked at her wet cheeks, her blonde hair scattered in the couch corner, her olive-tinted breasts rising and falling. In the next moment he was on the street, a street he did not know, a street in a part of town he had not been in before.
He swallowed his coffee, threw down a quarter and walked out of the coffee shop.
* * *
At the Academy of Fine Arts building he took a deep breath and ran up the black slate stairs. He paused before the double doors "of the life class studio.
He was a few minutes late. The class had started. Timothy Anders opened the door quietly and went in.
Anne Laro was there. She was on the platform, composed in her nakedness. She was sitting on a red velvet chair with a very low back. At her side was a small table. It was covered with a bright blue cloth. A water tumbler, half filled, held a single pink rose. It was the first time he had seen her in two days. There she was, alive! He breathed a sigh of relief and took a seat toward the rear of the large room. He had never before sat so far away from Anne Laro.
For more than half an hour his pen did not move. It seemed to him that he no longer knew the body of the seated nude. What had been a constant, intimate image had now become a completely foreign object.
He began to draw in ink. He drew in abstract impressionistic terms. The head of Ann Laro had become an oval of metal with a hole for an eye. The head balanced on two steel cables which held up her breasts. The breasts were realistically rendered except for the nipples, which were open roses. From each of the roses fell tears.
"Very interesting," said a woman's voice from behind him. "Don't you like women?"
"Love them," he answered. "Just trying to find out what makes them tick."
"I don't mind the rose nipples but be careful of the thorns. You'll stick yourself."
"You're thinking in Cocteau terms. If roses on breasts have thorns, the lady is in trouble. Nobody is going to buy her violets."
"Roses, you mean."
"That's right, roses. Now, whoever you are, go talk to someone else. I have to discover the nature of her behind on velvet and life which keeps her thighs alive." .
"If I were painting that girl, I think I would have to do her in representational terms. She's too beautiful to be turned into a bunch of junk-yard parts," the voice behind him said. She was close to the back of his head, looking over his shoulder. He could feel the touch of cloth against his hair.
"I did that for weeks. Do you know what I discovered?"
"No. Tell me."
"That beautiful body up there is a bunch of spare parts picked up in a junk yard."
"Now I understand," the voice said and laughed very softly. "You've had a bad time with her."
Tim Anders did not try to answer immediately. He finally turned around to see the woman who had spoken to him. No one was there. The door closing caught his eye. He continued to work.
When the session ended he watched Anne get into her robe. He waited for her to leave the room. He posted himself at the door. When she came close to him he said, "Hello, Anne. Are you all right?"
He held his breath and waited for her reply.
"I'm all right, Tim," she said looking directly at him. "Are you all right?"
"Yes. Fine." He almost stammered.
"I was a little worried about you. You just disappeared. I thought you might have gotten hurt."
"I got an odd job, that's all," he said very quickly, knowing that she knew he was lying.
"I'm glad."
"Can I see you tonight, Anne?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly.
"No, not tonight, Tim," she said. She moved by him and through the door.
Tim put his materials together and carefully placed them inside his black portfolio. He felt miserable. Still, she was alive. She had spoken to him. She didn't seem to hate him too much. So that was it. No more hand-holding with Anne Laro. Some other guy would come along and get her into bed in ten minutes. C'est la vie!
The instructor, Ed Pilsudski, called to him. "Say, Anders, what did you do today?"
"What do you mean, Ed?"
"Your work. Today. You with me? You impressed the hell out of the director. Boss just called me to tell me I had a brilliant talent in my group. She wanted to know the name of the brilliant talent. It was hard to figure out, because she hadn't even seen your face."
"Was that who it was? DeMille?"
"Herself. What did you say to her? She thinks you're a wit."
Timothy Anders laughed and shook his head. "We were talking about tits and roses."
"No kidding?"
"I think that's what we were talking about, Ed," Tim said and laughed again.
"Anyway, my boy, Director Odette DeMille, who owns the entire academy, wants to continue the discussion. She requests your tall and masculine presence in her offices."
"No kidding?"
"No kidding."
Pilsudski rubbed the skin of his bald head with the still warm bowl of his black brier pipe. "The younger generation!" he said. "The most beautiful women in the world just fall into your open laps."
Pilsudski left Tim Anders alone in the studio room. It was strange, he had never thought about Odette DeMille as a beautiful woman or even as a woman. She was the Director of the Academy and that was the only way he had pictured her.
He thought of what Pilsudski had said. He now thought of Odette DeMille as a woman. "Oh, yeah!" he said softly to himself. He walked down the corridor, down the first flight of stairs toward the office of the director.
CHAPTER TWO
Anders had never been in the office, but he and millions of people had seen photographs of it in Life, Look, Better Homes and Gardens, as well innumerable Sunday magazines and supplements. It always made a good photo story, Oddette DeMille's office-garden.
That was exactly it, thought Tim Anders, as he looked at its stunning beauty. The entire south wall had been removed and the room had been extended a full twenty feet. The new area had been glassed to form a hot house. The ground had been covered with rich black earth. Flowers, flowering shrubs and trees grew there. A glass topped table and four white painted iron chairs sat in the arbor.
The inner office with its Regency furniture was dominated by a Persian rug and a large leather topped desk.
From behind the desk, Miss DeMille asked, "Well, are you impressed? "
"I'm easy," Tim said, smiling and looking at the room's three white walls. "No paintings?"
"Not here. I must have a place where colors don't make noise and the lines of drawings don't rattle about."
"Do you think colors make noise?" he asked with interest.
"You know that they do, Mr. Anders. If I thought that you doubted it for one moment I would not have asked you here."
Odette DeMille shuffled some papers on her desk. "Why did you leave college in your senior year?"
"I couldn't learn anything more. I left."
"If I read the dates correctly, you could have waited three months and gotten a degree."
"The painting bug bit me, Miss DeMille. It was paint or perish. Why the grilling?"
"I have a serious matter to discuss with you, Mr. Anders. I had to review your records. Familiarize myself with you, so to speak," she said, smiling at her mild double-entendre. It was a sex-touched smile, and Anders could recognize its nature in the dark.
The smile made Anders look at Odette DeMille for the first time in a sexual sense. It was not the director sitting behind the desk. It was a woman. Very much a woman. He could see her long nylon-encased legs, one heel pulled comfortably out of a pale blue classic pump. The legs talked.
From the bend of her knee, her smooth pale blue linen lap moved back in a flat sweep to her hips. These disappeared, cut off from view by the desk. Above the desk, her white-bloused torso and arms hovered in an innate grace. The breasts, artlessly harnessed, strutted. Her neck was quite long. Her face was like a porcelain miniature painting. Pink, with high-boned, brown eyes flecked with green, eyebrows full and tapering, sensuous lips... She smiled openly. She had observed his exploring look.
"Something wrong, Mr. Anders?"
"No, absolutely nothing. I hadn't realized how beautiful the director of the academy was."
She laughed. "Have you discovered also that I am not exactly an old woman?"
"In a school filled with girls, I suppose a lady over twenty-five... "
"How sweet!"
"... sometimes seems beyond reach."
"You're not only gallant. You have a very subtle mind. I'm thirty-six if it interests you."
"It wouldn't interest me if you were ninety. You are very--now I can't find the word. I'm sorry."
"You found the word, Mr. Anders. You didn't want to say it. The word, I believe, is 'sexy'. Maybe it's even 'lush,' or 'desirable.' "
"Those are three words. None of them is good enough."
"Fine. Now will you call me Odette?"
"OK. It's dangerous, but OK." She laughed and came out from behind the desk. "May I fix you a drink, Tim? Does that frighten you?"
"I'll take a chance."
The liquor was discreetly placed behind the sheltering leaves of an Australian umbrella plant. She pulled out some bottles and glasses from the green camouflage. There was a silence in the room which amplified the tinkling of ice in a plum-colored Italian glass shaker.
He looked at the sweep of her back and the firm shape of her rear, tight against her skirt. A sudden vision of Anne Laro in the nude filled his mind. He blocked it out and concentrated on Odette's buttocks.
"You like what you're looking at?" she asked without turning.
"How'd you know?"
"ESP," she answered. She turned around, holding brimming straight-up martinis in her hands. "At this time of the day the proper drink is this one. I hope you agree? "
"It takes a strong man to say no."
They retreated to the garden and sat beneath a dwarf cherry tree filled with pink and white blossoms. The perfume fell over them like a veil.
"Like it?" she asked after half the drinks had been swallowed.
"Yes," Anders said. "Great. Only an artist with money would do this kind of thing."
"Thank you! Someday you'll have money and you can make your own garden fantasy."
Anders swallowed his drink and shook his head. "Not with my approach to art."
"You mean rose nipples on breasts?"
"No, I was camping." He held up his empty glass and Odette filled it. "What I mean is, you have a different scene in which to operate. You own this academy. You're one of the best regarded mural painters in the world."
"Do you think I am?"
"No, I don't. I think you're damned good but damned commercial."
She leaned over to him, the perfume of her breasts rising up to mingle with the cherry-blossom odors. She lifted his chin and kissed him lightly on the lips. "You're right, you know. Thanks for saying it. I get so weary listening to flattery."
"I get absolutely honest after three martinis."
She laughed hard and leaned back in her chair. "I'm going to see that none of your truth is wasted, darling!"
"God forbid!" he said and drained half of his second martini. "Let me tell you something, Odette. It's very nice to have someone around to whom you can tell the truth. It's such a back-breaking bore to have to say things half-way."
She tousled his hair. "You're a love! Why haven't you kissed me?"
He got over to her quite quickly and pulled her to her feet. The green flecks in her eyes sparkled as he drew her face close to his. He pressed his mouth down and caught her tongue as it shot straight into him, a hot red arrow.
Her fingers, both hands, locked in his hair. Little moans shivered into his mouth from the end of her tongue, which he now held tightly between his lips. Her hands left his head and went down to his thighs and pulled him tight against her body. Her breasts against him seemed to leap like small wild animals. Needing to breathe, he let her go. He flopped awkwardly back into his chair.
"To think that I was about to drop you from the school!"
The statement, coming so quickly on the kiss, sobered him. "Oh?"
"Yes, that was the serious matter I wanted to discuss with you."
"I see. Where do I stand now?"
"I think, darling, that we can forget the whole thing, don't you?" She opened the top buttons of her white blouse. The pink top of her see-through bra showed her ample breast curves.
"Maybe not. I don't like the idea."
Odette smiled at him and laughed. "I see, Tim. You think that I am offering to drop the fact that you owe the academy this semester's tuition provided that you do a little stud work in my garden?"
It was a statement rather than a question. It hit him across the face like a cold wet towel. He lowered his head. He was unable to look at her or reply. If she could read his mind, she would know that she had scored.
She didn't wait for his answer. "Oh, poor Tim Anders! I simply must make you another drink. That's the one after which you tell the absolute truth, isn't it?"
He sipped the third drink and thought he might need a fourth. Odette DeMille, who had come on so softly, was a little more than he thought she would be. Even as his mind was being washed by the gin, he whispered to himself: Be careful, be careful, this broad bites!
She continued talking, easily, naturally, as if her drinks were one hundred proof aqua pura. "I like you too much to be anything less than frank, Tim. I don't need to buy myself a man. Not even a young one. If you don't believe it, look!"
He raised his head and was confronted by the startling sight of Odette DeMille's naked breasts. They jutted out from her open white blouse. The no-substance brassiere, like a nylon scarf, sat on top of her great sun-tanned orbs. The wine-colored nipples raised cone-shaped above their wide dark halos. His mouth watered. "If I were a whore, Tim, would you pay for my merchandise?"
"Yes," he answered. The truth was now flowing in absolute terms. "Put them back or I'll pounce."
She slipped the bra down and allowed the blouse to close. "That was a dramatic way to make a point, I suppose. But I do want to be honest with you, and I insist that you be honest with me."
"Why?"
"Because we will wind up in bed, and I want that to be good. No confusions about it. It spoils sex."
"All right. Spell it out."
"Fine. One more drink."
"No. I want to listen."
Odette, however, poured him a drink and another for herself. "Just in case," she said. She kicked off her shoes. They nipped high into the air. One of them caught in the branches of the cherry tree.
"All of your instructors--not that you have ever needed them--have cited your work to me. I have looked at your paintings over a period of months. Today I watched you work in the life class." She sipped her drink. "Mmmmm. Beginning to warm the cockles of my heart. I think you are the most talented person ever to enroll here."
"That's saying a lot. Or is it?"
"Let me qualify that. You have an enormous talent."
"Then why the business about dropping me?"
"Simple, really. It's because I wanted very much to have you stay."
"That sounds like the booze talking."
"No. You see, I had intended to frighten you to make sure you wanted to remain in the academy. Wanted to remain almost above anything else."
"Don't get it, Odette. Simply don't understand what the hell you are driving at."
"Will this clear it up? Some months ago I photographed your paintings, six of them. I sent the transparencies to the Clingenheim Committee."
He rose half out of his seat. "That's the five-year fellowship."
"Right. All your living expenses plus first-class travel allowances to London, Rome, Paris, Moscow and Athens. You are one of the leading candidates-- the leading candidate."
"Well, that blew the gin right out of my ear."
"Part of the conditions governing the Clingenheim have to do with personal character. I have already lied to the committee on your behalf, Tim. I told them you graduated from college. They never give the award to anyone who drops out or is kicked out of any school. They feel the winner has to represent Art and the United States of America."
"All at once? That's hard."
Odette laughed. "I really had no intention of kicking you out, you see. It would be a great big feather in my cap if one of my students wins the brass ring. No private school has ever had a student get it. The committee, until this year, insisted on giving all that dough and prestige to colleges or universities."
"Are you telling me that I have you over a barrel?"
Her brow furrowed. "I never thought of that. No. There are no barrels involved. It has to do with reciprocity. I won't die if you don't get the award."
"Neither will I."
"Exactly. We're rational. But, being rational, we both can see the value the award would have for each of us."
"No doubt. I need another drink."
She poured it. "So all the cards are on the table. You help me. I'll help you."
"I scratch your back, you scratch mine."
She sat down on the white iron arm of the padded chair in which he sat. She scratched his back. She lowered her face to his and covered his mouth with hers. She popped her uneaten olive into his mouth. "That's the idea. And sex, Tim, has nothing to do with it. If what I have doesn't appeal to you, I will understand that. I don't want your body in trade for a possible Clingenheim."
"You appeal, lady. You appeal. I was appraising your hidden charms lustily before you dropped the awe-inspiring name of Clingenheim," he said in a thick-tongued voice.
He placed his hand on her leg and rubbed the nylon until it sensitized his palm. Nothing hindered the movement of his fingers as they moved under the hem of her skirt up her smooth thighs.
"That's divine!" she said. He watched her close her eyes for the first time. "I love it so much when it begins. The first time with someone is so exciting."
"I'm glad you're not a virgin," he said. His hand un-snapped her garter belt. He slowly rolled her stocking down her leg.
"Don't you like virgins?"
"I don't know. I never had one. All I know is that sometimes they aren't easy."
She kissed his mouth. Her tongue hissed into his ear. "Men never understand the proper techniques with virgins."
"Tell me!" he said and spread her blouse. Her erect nipples invited his mouth.
"There is no such thing as a virgin. As a virgin body, I mean. There is only a virgin state of mind. Break that and the body is wide open. Ooooh, what a clever tongue you have, Mr. Anders."
He moved his mouth to her other nipple. "Your boobs are not exactly ignorant, Odette?"
"I hate that word, Tim. Ooooh, bite down gently!" she sighed. "Call them anything else but that silly word. Call them roses, even, but not boobs!"
"Get up, please! I've got to get out of this chair before I explode!"
She got up slowly, smiling as she did. She unbuttoned her sleeves and took off her blouse. Even after having made love to them, Tim Anders was not quite prepared for the full beauty of her breasts against the nakedness of her torso. They were quite large but firm and high riding. On the left breast, below the moon, Was a black beauty mark. Aside from this, her skin was clear, tan and vibrant.
"Undress!" she said quite simply. He pulled his short black boots off. "I'm so curious to know if you have as much talent as a lover as you have as a painter."
"I've been told that I have ability," he replied, pulling his white turtle-neck sweater over his head. She stared at his bare chest.
"Lovely! Strong!" she said and slipped out of her skirt. She pulled off her remaining stocking. She dropped her garter belt from her hips. The only garment left to hide her charms were the pink bikini panties. She raised her arms over her head and gyrated her hips in a gentle manner. "You like me?"
"You kidding? You're making me stop and stare. If you move that way, I'll never get to undress. I'll lose control."
"Get a grip on yourself, lover. I want you completely naked. I want to get my fingers onto every part of you. I can't stand clothes with sex." She watched Anders, who still stared at her. "Let me help!"
She unbuckled his belt. His trousers slid down his narrow hips. He stepped out of them. She hesitated only an instant. She pulled his shorts down, in a quick clean jerk.
She studied the tall, hard body standing before her. She walked around him, touching him, stroking him. He felt her mouth kiss the small of his back.
She stood before him and rubbed her body gently against his. The tips of her nipples grazed the fringes of the hair on his lower chest. The action shot an electric-like tingle along his spine. He tightened his hands into fists, but he did not move.
"Take my pants off, Tim, darling!" she whispered. He used two hands to do it. Naked before him, she closed her eyes and rocked. "I'm going to melt right here on this Persian rug. Take me, Tim! Take me!"
He looked wildly around the room. There was no bed. There was no couch. For a moment he thought of laying her down on the rug. Then he smiled to himself --the garden!
He swept her up into his arms. She pressed her breasts high against him. He kissed her mouth and carried her quickly toward the garden.
He stopped short. He looked at the bright late afternoon sun streaming through the glass enclosure. She smiled at him.
"Push that button, darling," she said, pointing to the wall beside the glass wall. He did. Blue velours drapes moved silently over the glass walls and plunged the garden into artificial night.
Under the cherry tree, blossoms softly dropping around them, they plunged deeply into the secrets of their hot bodies.
The smell of the earth mixed with the smell of the tree and the aroma of her body. He re-explored her breasts. He kissed the soft skin under them. He touched his mouth to her back and to her heaving belly. He tasted the skin of her firm thighs. Odette moaned and shouted out in a voice that was garbled in passion. Her teeth bit into his arms, his back, his thighs. She coiled about him like a passionate snake.
He gave her the use of his body as freely as she gave him hers. Finally, the emotional and biological strain had to end. He felt his eyes bulging from their sockets. His heart pounded and threatening to burst from his chest.
He seized her hair and roughly pressed her head into the perfumed earth. He buried her mouth under his. burning body writhed in wild gyrations. His own body joined her motion. Inside his mouth which covered hers, he felt her moan.
She grew limp in his arms. The cherry blossoms fell against his skin like cool drops of rain.
"You're a great, great artist!" she said after a long silence. She kissed his arm. He closed his eyes. Inside his head the blue velours curtains disappeared, and a day filled with pink sunlight took its place.
CHAPTER THREE
"Odette DeMille's Garden of Eden," he said, sitting nude under the cherry tree. Odette came back bringing with her a bowl of fruit and another drink for each of them.
'Don't be suspicious of the fruit. No apples."
Anders laughed. "This whole thing is marvelous, Odette. I've just put it on the top of my all-time list."
She was standing beside him. He put his hand about her ankle and looked up at her body. He enjoyed the view of her nakedness from his seated position. "Might be fun to paint you from this perspective."
"Oh, no! Paint me that way and it will be like telling the whole world that you've made love to me. Besides, apart from the men who have shared my body, I do believe that most of the public interested in me thinks of me as very virgin."
Anders knew that her self-appraisal was a true one.
He was just as sure that she had planned for him to have her from the very beginning. Public virgin, private hedonist. Anyway, he was the beneficiary of the combination.
"I was so busy paying attention to your delicious body, Tim, that I didn't take the time to really look at your face." Odette kneeled beside him. She turned his chin from side to side. "Your nose is less than Greek."
"How much less?"
"Not much. Your eyes are really grey. Did you know that?"
"My mother told me. Light me a cigarette, will you?" He gently removed her hand from his chin. She got to her feet almost as on command. He observed the lush, mature body move across the room to the desk. A certain kind of animal wisdom seemed to speak through her body. He watched her lift and light a long cigarette and turn back. The front view, her breasts swinging slightly as she came toward him, was equally wise and pleasing. She kneeled with the lighted cigarette in her hand. She kissed his mouth and then inserted the cigarette between his lips.
"Have you a middle initial?" she asked.
"Uh huh. J. J. for James."
"That's so right! Timothy J. Anders! I can see it in print. Do you sign your paintings with a good bold style?"
"Just my initials. T.J.A. That's all."
"I'm sure it will be enough. Van Gogh just signed Vincent. Lautrec used initials."
"In a very stylish circle. Hey what are we talking about?"
"I'm jumping the gun, I suppose. I just know that you will be very important."
"You are jumping ahead of things, Odette. I haven't had an exhibition yet."
"There was a time when Picasso was waiting for his first show, too."
"Please, stop, baby. I've been kicked around pretty good in my short unsheltered life. I don't like pipe dreams. Can't afford the tobacco."
"Yes, dearest, I know," she said, drumming her fingers against his chest. "But I can, you see. I've already dropped your name in the ears of leading collectors and museum heads. You see in the art world, like in any other world where the competition is sharp, good tips are always appreciated."
"You mean to say if I gave a show right now that people would buy because they have been hipped onto me?"
"Precisely!" she said and kissed his nose. "All of that will be good for dear old academy and dear old Odette. I want my Clingenheim winner to be a great success! School attendance will double."
"I'm perfectly willing. I'll bring you all my paintings tomorrow and you can arrange T.J.A.'s first one-man show. Make sure there are lots of red stars on the canvases."
She lay down and put her head in his naked lap and looked up at his amused face. "Slow down, T.J.A.," she said, dragging some smoke from his cigarette. "I know how to build an artist. I know. And I'm going to make sure that you make it right to the top."
"I have a hunch that you want me to start from the bottom, director darling."
"That's right. I want you to be a bunch of rumors in the right places. I want you to be a Clingenheim winner. I want you to be that hard-working young American who makes it the hard way. No magic. No short cuts. Otherwise, someone might suspect!"
"You're a lady pirate!"
"You have very nice thighs to lay on."
"Any double-entendre intended there?"
"Oh, yes indeed!" Odette said and turned her face down to kiss his thigh. "Can I ask you a very personal, very intimate question, Tim?"
"After what I have recently been through, the answer has to be yes. Ask away." , "How do you support yourself?"
Tim broke into laughter. "And I was waiting for a question that might have made me blush!"
"Oh, I have those questions, too," she said and suddenly sat up.
Tim pulled her to him and kissed her mouth. He placed his tongue deeply. He crushed her breasts against him.
After a long moment, Odette pulled away. "Seriously, Tim. I really want to know."
The look on her face was authoritative, the look of the director, the demeanor of the successful woman. The change in attitude was swift and startling. The face had hardened. He felt himself grow cool.
"Odd jobs," he said. "He looked over his shoulder at the draped garden. "Need your lawn mowed? Trees cut down? House painted? I do it. Also there are a dozen places in town where they think I'm a helluva dishwasher. Does that answer the question?"
"Yes," she said and smiled suddenly without dissolving all the hardness. "I'm sorry if I came on so strong, Tim. But I have a reason, and it's very difficult to mix business with pleasure."
"O.K.," he said and got to his feet. "I guess you're through with me for the night."
"Don't be angry. If I became too sober too quickly, I'm sorry. Will you listen, without being angry?"
"Of course, I will," he said, gaining some composure.
She laughed softly. "I'm a fool. You see, Tim, I'm a designing woman. I got so wrapped up in my next scheme I refused to let you sidetrack me. Don't you understand?"
"No."
"I'll spell it out then. When you kiss me, touch me, I turn to absolute jelly. My brain melts. You're almost too much for me!"
He softened and nodded. "Please go on."
"Part of the business of the Clingenheim selection, as you probably know, is that very old-fashioned business of making your... "
"... 'appreciation of the masters apparent.' "
"Yes--something we all laugh at, because the Clingenheim Committee interprets this to mean that any candidate for the big plum of the art world must actually do a few copies of masterpieces."
"I know that."
"Can you?"
"I can do Picassos or Van Goghs that are so true they are positively embarrassing. Look, I know what the Clingenheim people want. Every young artist knows. I can do it."
"I'm so happy," she said and kissed him quickly. "See, that answers another question. About your keeping alive. A commission, Tim. A very wealthy friend of mine owns a very good group of impressionists. He is insanely afraid that some of his favorites might get hurt. He would like copies made."
"Like ladies who have replicas created of their jewels?"
"Exactly!"
"And I get paid for doing them?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, since we're all business--how much?"
"There are four paintings to begin with, Tim. He will pay five hundred dollars each."
Tim whistled. "Lead me to the factory, Odette."
They embraced warmly now. Odette's warm breasts burrowed into his flesh. "Know something?"
"What?"
"I like you, T.J.A., even if your back is covered with my very good garden soil."
"Know something?"
"What?"
"Your back is not exactly clean. I'm for the showers. How about you?"
"It so happens that we have a very gorgeous shower here."
She led the way. The bathroom was quite large. The tile duplicated the frescos of the ancient Roman bordellos. They illustrated the wild fashions of Roman sexual orgies.
"Is this the place you come to cool off?" he asked after absorbing the message of the bathroom walls.
"No, not at all," she answered. There were four shower heads in the glass enclosure. "This is the library. We come here for new ideas."
"I see, I see," he said as she began to soap his body. "It is a shrine for visiting eggheads. Careful, lover, don't get soap in my eyes."
"Your eyes seem to be located at the wrong end of your body, sweet!"
"Ooooh!" He shuddered at her sliding soapy touch. "I always was a lousy anatomy student." - "I don't know about that, my darling!" she said and turned her back to him. "Do me, please."
He modelled her in the soap lather, building it thicker and thicker. He massaged her neck, her back, her lush buttocks and her thighs. When he soaped her breasts he could feel the hot life throb in them. He squeezed the bursting soapy nipples between his fingers. She squealed like an animal.
She turned to face him and wrapped her soapy arms around his waist. "What a marvelous student I have!"
"Still think I'm a student, Odette?" he asked, his soapy hands massaging her tightened soapy thighs.
She turned the showers on. The needling warm water washed them clean. Odette gripped his buttock cheeks. His mouth sucked her hard nipples. She moaned. "I have things to teach you, yet! Darling! Darling!"
"What is there to learn?" he asked with his mouth barely releasing her swollen nipple.
"We are going to duplicate every one of those tiles!"
"It'll take years, honey. And lots of strength."
He felt her sliding down his wet body. Her nipple pulled free of his mouth.
"This will be the short course. And I don't doubt your strength. Come down here. Come down!"
On the marble shower floor, they locked and unlocked in attitudes of ancient Rome. The showers beat against their writhing bodies. Anders had no consciousness of his acts. All the sex fantasies he had ever had were re-enacted in her flesh, in a body which was lush, which had no memories of inhibition.
Exhausted, Tim Anders and Odette DeMille fell asleep beneath the Roman rain.
And at home he slept. When he awoke, he noted that twelve hours had vanished. The sleep of the innocent, he thought cynically.
He got out of the bed of his narrow furnished room and padded barefoot to the icebox. His body ached. The sensation was not very different from the feeling he had had after playing a rough game of football. He felt as if every two hundred and fifty pound tackle in the world had hit him twice.
He stretched. His bare arms showed bite marks. Although he could not see it, the throbbing on his behind told him that she had gotten her teeth sharply into- his left cheek. For an encore, he thought, I should get run over by a truck.
There was nothing much to eat in the fridge. There was a half quart of orange juice and he swallowed it down. It would be half an hour before school started. Enough time to dress, grab a burger, and make the scene. He devoted half a thought to his stiffness and then moved quickly.
At life class, he deliberately seated himself away from Anne Laro, whose nude body was on the stand.
He had never had a sex session which could remotely compare to the one he had had with Odette. Yet, the olive-tinted virgin body with the breasts of flame was one he still wanted more than any other. It was crazy, he thought. His biochemistry, evolved and descended through thousands of years, cried out for that body. Not any other body but that singular one which had grown into Anne Laro. No matter how far away from her he sat, he couldn't forget her odor, her taste. He opened his pad and began to work.
He avoided her body. His eyes reached across the heads of the other students. He looked only at her face. Sad madonna of the violet eyes. Infinite pain. Endless yearning.
How often he had tried to capture that face on his paper! The body was simple. He could recreate it from memory. He knew it inch by inch. He had never fully explored it physically, yet he knew that body better than he knew that of Odette DeMille. From the uncramped toes to the last millimeter of the long neck, Anders could capture it faithfully. But the face!
For the twentieth time, he applied his charcoal to the idea of the face of Anne Laro. He dropped sheet after unsuccessful sheet to the floor.
The eye, perhaps. Just the eye. He used pastels. He used an entire pad to capture the eye. The violet eye. The sad eye and the bridge and line of the nose.
In the wide pupil which dominated the sheet on which he drew, murky forms took shape. He didn't think of them. He allowed his hand to go freely, un-guided by his mind.
In the very center of the violet eye Ander's hand drew two naked figures. They were making love. Their bodies were the palest hues of violet. Their hair was green and white like sea foam. The faces were unformed. Yet the woman had to be Laro. The man himself.
He colored over the lovers inside Anne Laro's eye. There was no way he could separate Anne Laro from his sexual want. If he had painted her big toe, the result would have been the same--he would have found sex in it.
Ed Pilsudki called for a break to let the model rest. She immediately put on her yellow Madam Butterfly bathrobe. The robe, buttonless and of yellow silk, closed securely about her and concealed even her throat. The sleeves, however, were so wide that her breasts showed when she raised her arms.
The art students filed in great disorder into the corridors where smoking was permitted. Tim lingered a moment longer in the hope that Anne would look toward him--smile at him, perhaps. She studiously avoided any meeting his gaze. He knew that she was aware that he was looking at her.
He joined the others in the corridor and smoked a cigarette. Brit Lungren, the Swedish exchange student, lifted the cigarette from his hand and took a drag.
"Have a fight with her?"
"Yeah."
"Over something serious, maybe?"
"No. I make love like an amateur, that's why."
"How sad. Come home with me. I will teach you the proper way to do it. Then she will be glad."
"It will make her very happy."
"Tonight, Tim?"
He let his eye roam over her mod mini-shift from which two saucy blue-covered breasts yearned upward. "No, not tonight."
"Brute!" she said in her accented speech and laughed. "I- do not appeal."
"You appeal. You appeal, Brit. Listen, it's just because I took a hard fall in the shower. Hurt my back. When it gets better, OK.?"
"OK.," she smiled and squeezed his arm with her large hand. "While I am waiting, maybe I teach someone else, no?"
"Good idea, Brit. Ed Pilsudki looks as though he can use a lot of help."
"Oh, yes. But he is not very good learner," she said almost seriously. Then she added, "He's not a very good teacher, either."
The bell sounded, ending the break. The students quickly took last drags at their butts before killing them in the strategically placed sand buckets. They filed back into the room.
Anne Laro took her place on the stand. She removed her yellow robe. Although Anders had seen her do it during two entire semesters, the sudden appearance of her body raised a lump in his throat.
The sound of pencils and pens scratching away softly invaded the brightly lit air.
The session ended. Anders walked to the platform. Anne attempted to walk by him. He blocked her way.
"Anne, I'm not going to try to apologize. It happened. I couldn't help myself."
"Fine," she said flatly. "Now let me go. I have to dress and make a class."
"Do you want to hear me apologize?" he asked. She didn't answer. "I'm sorry. Satisfied?"
"No, I'm not. It was a rotten thing to do."
"Not for me. It was only rotten because you are so damned frightened that you made me act like a beast!"
"Are you blaming mc for it?" she said angrily.
"No, of course not," he said softly. "Please be sweet and talk to me, Anne."
"Why?"
"Because I've got some great news to tell you," he said and caught her wonderful eyes as she looked at him for the first time. "I'm up for the Clingcnheim!"
"Tim!" she said and threw her arms around him. "That's so great! I'm so happy for you! Oh, Tim!"
She was smiling warmly as he held her in his arms. He could feel her breasts against him, soft, innocent, in repose.
"Can I buy you dinner? A celebration."
"Oh, yes, yes!"
She held his arm as they walked from the room.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tim Anders continued to work at the copies. An unfinished wooden work table was at the elbow of his painting arm. It served as a huge pallet. The wood surface area near him was covered by paint daubs. The rest of the table surface supported dozens of tubes of oils, as yet unopened, and clusters of paint brushes ends-down in glass containers. On the wall, a full color transparency of a Renoir nude was projected.
A finished copy of an early Picasso was propped up on a chair across the room. It gave Anders a feeling of discomfort. It was so damned perfect. Maybe Picasso himself could tell the difference. But there was little chance that the old man would fly in to attend the auction. In a perverse way, Anders felt proud of his work.
He brushed a tone of alizirin crimson on the canvas. He studied the effect. He checked it closely against the transparency. He put his brush down and lit a cigarette. He walked through the apartment to the kitchen and took a cold beer from the refrigerator.
Even in the kitchen the air was touched with Odette's perfume. Perhaps he was wrong, but even the beer seemed to taste of it. He had wanted to work at the academy, but Odette had insisted that he use her apartment. There would be privacy, she had said, for the work and for other things.
He had playfully protested at that. "I love that crazy shower," he had told her. At which point she had taken his hand and led him to the bathroom.
It had dazzled him when he had first seen it. It was nothing less than a replica of an ancient Roman bath. The room was larger than her living room, which was itself larger than most rooms he had ever seen. It was constructed entirely of marble. The bath was the size of a small swimming pool. Marble stairs led down into it. Wide marble benches, covered with vinyl cushions, flanked its longer sides.
The walls, at intervals, supported large angled mirrors. The ceiling was of stained glass into which had been designed outsized scenes of men and women in orgies. Full color and illuminated. The shocking impression the bathroom had made on him was obvious. Odette had enjoyed it.
"The last time I showed my play pen to a man," she had said, "he tore my clothes off and almost drowned me."
Anders had no need to do that. Odette had been undressing from the moment they had entered the Roman ballroom. He had made love to her on each of the benches and in the pool and on the huge, ornate bed in the far corner. On the bed, uncovered and as nude as the stained-glass lovers, she had informed him of the fact that the apartment had no other bedroom. When he had looked slightly puzzled, she had caressed him and had said: "When I want to go to bed, I never mean just to sleep."
After a few days of working and love-making, Anders began to hear the very small voice of warning which lived deep in the lost regions which he called his mind.
Why didn't she want him to work at the Academy? It was nothing too special for students to be copying the paintings of masters there. Why at her apartment? It added to the risk that they might be discovered. He could see the headlines: Prominent Art Director Caught In Roman Orgy With Student. Seriously, he thought, it did make a woman of her prominence vulnerable.
Perhaps he would not have asked these questions at all except for the fact that Odette DeMille was extremely nervous. She smoked incessantly. She drank too much. And if he asked a question about the paintings he was copying, she would avoid direct answers. Instead of answering him, she would begin to pull him toward the bath. As the days passed, her anxiety grew. Why? He couldn't find an answer. The small warning voice continued whispering.
It was an item in the art section of the Sunday paper that made him sit up and take a new look at things.
Three paintings were going to be among those auctioned at The Westby Galleries on Madison Avenue. The newspaper called them three of the most important paintings to be offered in several months. The modern masters to be auctioned were to be a Renoir, a Picasso and a Gauguin. He was copying a Renoir, a Picasso, and a Gauguin. The titles of the auction pieces were not listed in the article. Why not, he had wondered. Titles usually were listed.
He called Westby's and inquired after the titles. A prissy voice said on the phone: "The owner prefers that this information shall not be released."
It seemed more and more peculiar to Anders. Why should Odette's millionaire have copies made of paintings he was to put up for auction within three weeks? Anders had jumped to a conclusion, and he knew it. He knew that three other paintings by the same artists might be involved. Possibly. But why had Odette never mentioned the name of the millionaire art collector who was paying him to make copies of his paintings? Why from transparencies? Why not from the originals? Why not in the home of the owner? Why in Roman Orgyville?
He had almost decided to confront Odette with the questions which now banged around inside his head. The warning voice, however, said no.
He went to the central branch of the library on Fifth Avenue and dug out the reference books which chronicled the ownership and. sales of all important paintings. It was all small type reading. Pages were devoted to each of the artists and works involved. They had been prolific, and the sales and resales of their canvases criss-crossed through three quarters of a century. Thousands of individual buyers and museums were indexed and cross-indexed.
The name of the final owner of the three paintings was one and the same. Odette Braden. The year of acquisition was 1958.
A check of the microfilmed newspapers of that year carried a small art notice to the effect that a Picasso, a Renoir and a Gauguin had been bequeathed to Odette Braden, a young painter, by Lance DeMille, the well-known industrialist and art collector.
Also in the microfilm file there was a later item. The small one-column headline told the story. Fainter Reveals Secret Marriage To DeMille. According to the story, Odette Braden and Lance DeMille had married in Cannes a few months before the old guy kicked.
A later item. A fire had destroyed the DeMille country house near Stamford, Connecticut.
Anders found himself whistling softly as he returned the boxes of microfilm to the attendant.
* * *
The following Sunday, Anders rented a motorcycle, lie had shared the Roman bath with Odette, but neither his thoughts nor his findings were shared with her. He noticed, too, that her love-making had cooled a little. She did not want to tire him out, she had explained. His energy was indeed for the paintings, n'est ce pas?
Neither did Anders discuss his suspicions with Anne Laro. The whole turn of events he found to be delicious. There was an excitement in it which made his skin tingle. It felt almost, if not quite, as good as sex with Odette and the dream of sex with Anne. Maybe, he thought, today was the day for it. He accelerated and decelerated the cycle's motor as he waited for Anne to come from her apartment house.
She came bouncing out to the sidewalk. Light tan hiphuggers held her thighs in a tight caress. Her yellow sleeveless mini-sweater was pulled tightly over her breasts, which jounced when she leaped toward him. The sweater ended below her breasts. There were five beautiful inches between the hem of the sweater and the top of the huggers. Inches of sweet belly flesh from which her flat navel winked. Anders whistled.
"You like it, huh?" Anne said, smiling broadly. "Oh, yes. Crazy."
"Just look."
"No touch?"
"Touch, too. No cave man bit, that's all."
He sighed. "I won't, don't worry. Not until you want me to. And you will want me to."
She laughed. "You are conceited, Tim."
"Am not. I've got faith in nature, that's all. Swing that beautiful leg over and let's fly, chick."
She snuggled close to his back and put her hands firmly around his waist. He kicked off and the bike roared through the sun-filled streets of the city.
The highway hissed under the cycle wheels. The trees blurred into one long green wall. Anne's yellow pony tail flared out behind her in the windstream.
"Where we going?" she shouted into his ear.
"Connecticut!"
"Good! I like it."
They left early enough to beat the traffic. Few cars were on the road. The speedometer showed a steady seventy. They slowed and rolled off the highway within forty-five minutes.
They spent a few minutes on black-top roads. Then the bike was bumping up back roads partly dirt and partly tar and gravel compositions. They stopped at a general store, a wood frame structure. It was half covered by the spreading branches of an old maple. The windows were filled with sun-faded posters of beer and tobacco products.
An old rheumatic man hobbled about inside and paid little attention to them when they entered.
"Can we get some drinks?" Tim asked.
"The ice box," the old man croaked and pointed over their heads with his cane.
The refrigerator was wood-faced. Tim slid the large door back on its rusty runner. "Coke, Anne?"
"No, Tim. Too early for that. I think I'll have milk. I don't dare try the cake."
"It's fresh, miss," the old man said without looking toward them. "What I sell here is old atmosphere and fresh food. Damn fools around here think its quaint. Brings business though."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound rude."
"Not a bit of it, miss. Think the same thing myself if I wandered in here. Been here sixty years and it hasn't changed very much." His old eyes studied the figure of Anne Laro. He clucked his tongue. "Wish the girls dressed that way when I was a boy."
"It's not what they wear, grandpa. It's what they don't wear," Tim said and swallowed some soda.
"True enough, son. But in my day you had no idea about how they'd look underneath, you know. You'd have to peel all that stuff off. Sometimes you'd be in for a terrible shock. The whole thing scared me. Kinda turned me off of marrying."
"Is there a lady's room?" Anne asked.
"Back of the store on your left. Been there thirty years. Ladies just wouldn't use the outhouse--prettiest one in these parts."
Anne smiled warmly as she walked to the rear. The old man turned to watch her wiggle down the narrow single aisle.
"You still appreciate the better things."
Yup. Can't do much about it, but it makes me remember, son. Important at my age, you know."
"Talking about remembering, grandpa. You remember the DeMille place around here?"
"Yup. Burned down."
"I know."
"Why'd yaask, then?"
"The lady who owned it is a friend of mine. I was curious about it."
"Nothing to it at all. Lightning hit it. Pretty house. Old one. Revolutionary War. The way it was situated in the hills, it burned to the ground before any one even got there."
"No one hurt, I hope."
"No, sir. Empty. It was in October. Freak storm. Lightning lit her up like you held a torch to it. Maybe if the rain kept falling, but it didn't."
"Was anything saved?"
"Not a stick. Down to the foundations. The De-Mille woman cried her eyes out. She had some painting in there she was attached to."
"I see."
"Folks say she came back two, three times. Just sit and look at them ashes."
"How do you get to the place?"
"Take the left fork straight on up to the green barn. A road off to the right. The DeMille sign is still there." The old man turned his head slowly toward the rear of the store and grinned toothlessly as Anne came up the aisle. He clucked his tongue again.
"What do we owe you, grandpa?"
"Not a penny, son. Not a penny. Enjoyed yer visit. Come again. Don't forgit to bring her, though."
"Why if he forgets, I'll come myself," Anne said, smiling and holding her face close to the old man's.
"Good. Good," he chuckled. "If it makes any difference, don't fergit I'm too old to be a dirty old man." He laughed at his own joke and continued laughing as they walked out. They lost the laughter in the sound of the motor.
* * *
Anne watched Tim as he kicked the earth which was grey black from the old fire ashes. Only the foundation and the exposed cellars remained. There were pools of water where the stone cellar floors had sloped with time. Frogs croaked and kicked through the subterranean lakes.
"Spooky," Anne said. "Did you know about this place, Tim?"
"The old man was telling me about it. An artist once lived here."
"Did he get... killed?" she asked hesitantly.
Tim laughed and kissed her gently. "No such luck, baby. Just lost everything he owned and moved away. Took a job in an advertising agency to forget the whole thing."
"That's tragic!" she said and looked around her at the tall trees of the unspoiled countryside. "I wouldn't have moved. I would have built another house. It's lovely here."
For a single moment Tim thought of telling her whose house this had been and why he had come here. He decided not to tell her. What point would there be?
"Hey, got an idea!"
"What? Wade in the pools?"
"No. Sketch! Let's walk out there and sketch. I packed some pads and pencils."
"Oh, yes!" she said and jumped up and clapped her hands.
Tim got the pads. They walked in total silence through the old woods. The sun glinted down through the branches. They breathed deeply of the combined odors of mulch and fresh greens. The perfume of flowers occasionally filtered through to them. They could hear small animals start and scurry away unseen as they broke the groundcover underfoot.
A sun-drenched clearing revealed itself suddenly. Primroses ran upwards before them to the top of a gentle slope. They walked to the top. For a moment they looked at the majestic woodland which surrounded them. Spontaneously, they embraced. Their mouths met in a wet, devouring lock.
"Oh, Tim!" she said, pulling away from him. "I'm not ready yet."
"Well, well! You may not be ready, but I felt a lot bubbling."
"Don't tease! You made a promise."
"And I'll keep it, Anne. Not until you ask me."
"It's terrible, I know. But give me time."
"I can wait," he said, his eyes dancing. "Tell you what."
"What?"
"Do you trust me?"
She nodded her head vigorously. "Very much, Tim. Very much."
"Good. Take your clothes off."
"Tim!"
"I want to sketch you, Anne. I want to make some studies of you in this place. It's like having you in the center of heaven. I want to draw you that way."
She smiled and undressed without saying another word. Silently he recreated her body on his pad. The sun-lit red-nippled breasts grew on the paper under his hand. The hips which the sun lapped came alive from his charcoal. Her face, unlike her face when she posed at life class, smiled and danced in the warm green reflected day.
Anne Laro stretched out on the green grass and suffered the pricks of the wild flowers. He sketched in silence. When he turned the page of his pad, she rolled over on her stomach. Her red nipples touched the grass tips. One nipple almost rested in the bowl of a buttercup. Tim captured all the lines of her body, all the curves of her flesh.
She stood up suddenly and pouted. "This is my day off, Tim. And besides, you're not the only artist in this group. I paint, too, you know."
"Very well, too."
"Take your clothes off, Tim. It's my turn to sketch!"
He hesitated only a moment.
Naked he stood on the hill in the sun. Naked she sketched his body. He watched her eyes feast on it. He smiled when her arms lingered so long and so lovingly on his hips as he faced her. Then she put the pad down on the grass and crossed to him.
"Don't you move!" she warned him. "I'm not asking you--not yet, anyway. I just have to kiss you."
She put her arms around his neck. Her nipples reached up and burned against his chest. Her folded tongue darted out from her circled lips. He leaned his head down and sucked it. Her naked hips rubbed SO against him. He held her buttocks in his large tense fingers.
He put his arms around her thighs and lifted her. Her breast hovered above his eyes. He let her slide down in his arms until the nipples were in his mouth. She moaned.
"Put me down, Tim! Please, put me down! I can't stand it! I'm... I'm... " He felt her body stiffen. Then he felt her quiver almost spastically. Then she moaned. He lowered her to the grass and held her in his arms. She sobbed and would not look up at him.
After a moment he turned her chin up. Her lavender eyes were filled with tears. "My poor darling," he said.
"Why didn't you break your promise?"
"You didn't ask me."
"My body was begging you to break that damned promise."
"Your body always begs for that. You know it."
She nodded. "Then why didn't you?"
"You have to ask with your mouth, speaking for your brain as well as for your sex. Then you won't have any regrets, and I won't feel like a rapist. I never want to repeat that scene we had at your place. I want to have you, but I'm going to have you right."
She put her arms around him and kissed him softly. He felt her nipples burn him again. "In your arms. I lost control, Tim. I exploded."
"I know. I felt it all through my body."
"It was so good and... I wanted you."
"When you ask," he said softly. "Let's dress and scoot for home. Cook me a dinner?"
"Yes."
"At your place?"
"Yes."
"You trust me?"
"Completely." She put her head against his naked stomach and kissed it.
CHAPTER FIVE
The ride back was smooth. They sang songs at the top of their lungs. The air tore at them. Anne held him tightly.
"I love youuuu, Tim Anders," she shouted into the wind.
"What did you say?" he called back over his shoulder.
"I love--l-o-v-e--you!"
"What?"
She laughed and hugged him. They sang all the way home. Anne cooked dinner. A mild chicken curry softened by a half-sweet wine. They talked very little. After they had eaten, they listened to Anne's collection of Indian records. The music of the twanging sitar and the hot, exciting drums reached deeply inside Anders. He wanted to tell Anne that for the first time he understood this strangely modern yet ancient music of India, but she had fallen asleep on the couch. He carried her to her bed and pulled a sheet over her legs. Her eyes opened briefly. She smiled. He kissed her forehead and let himself out the door.
* * *
The next day, Monday, he stayed away from both Odette's apartment and the academy. He remained in his room and tried to think of all of the ramifications attending the business of the copies.
It was a fraud. That was certain enough. It was odds on that the paintings to be put up at Westby's were his fakes. There was no millionaire, of course. Unless the millionaire was Odette. After all, she had been married to Lance DeMille.
But, why him? Why did she want to involve him? There were, after all, many practiced art forgers in the world. Probably very trustworthy and reliable after their fashion. Why him? Why Tim Anders?
He had no answer. The Clingenheim Award, of course, was part of her scheme. She had never nominated him. No one had looked at his work. The whole thing had been a set-up, and he was the intended patsy.
That, Anders thought, was the long and short of it.
He knew that there was nothing much he could do about it. He could keep his mouth shut and collect the fifteen hundred bucks. He could keep on playing stud for Odette. He could make believe that there was a Clingenheim at the end of the glory road.
But being a mark bugged him. It built a slow anger in him. To keep his cool, he taped the nude studies he'd made of Anne Laro over his bed. They were rather good, he thought. The beauty of the girl was in the work--her vitality straining against her suppressed yearning.
Yet, even as he looked at the drawings of Anne Laro, the body became that of Odette. The smile of innocence changed to the knowing half-smile of the lady of the Roman baths.
Not for you, he said to himself. Not for you, DeMille. You picked the wrong guy for the wrong swindle at the wrong time. He made up his mind. It would be worth blowing the dough just to watch Odette's face as he spelled out all the details of what he had discovered.
* * *
He walked into the basement studio of the academy building. The studio was the largest one in the six-story structure. Banked daylight fluorescent lights covered the ceiling of the windowless room. The walls were covered with a cork surface painted white. Tacked to the walls were hundreds of sketches, complete drawings, and fully executed oil studies. All of these related to DeMille's mural. The mural, in progress, was commissioned by the International Cosmetic Institute in Paris. Odette had been working on it for almost a year. When completed, it would adorn the wall of the main salon of the Institute's newly constructed headquarters.
While she had never told him the fee she would receive, Odette had implied that it would be handsome. When the mural was unveiled, it would be regarded as a major event in the world of fine arts. Major artists would be on hand, all of them successful. The jet set would zoom into Paris to attend. Newspapers, newsreels and TV would cover. Already Odette's life was filled with triumphs, but the mural would be its crowning achievement.
Anders was awed by the sheer size of the work. The mural, painted on treated board intricately braced on the back, was fifty feet long. Its height, he judged, was more than twenty feet. It must weigh well over a thousand pounds. It would take a team of engineers to move it out. A huge, specially constructed pneumatic easel held it off the ground.
The opulence of the arrangement made Anders feel resentful. So many artists, even in this day, almost starved in order to paint. The cost of the easel alone could support a dozen artists for a summer. He checked his anger. He wanted to be cool when he spoke to her. He wanted the situation to rest completely in his hands.
Alongside the easel on a large draped platform seven girl models posed. They were nude.
On the mural surface, twice as large as life, their lush bodies were being recreated. The bevy of beauties formed the center of the huge study. On the paint surface the nudes floated in a loose ellipse. Their arms and legs entwining, their bodies longing for each other, their mouths were open in attitudes of ecstasy. One of the figures held her breast out to one of the open-mouthed figures. The mural produced the effect of an orgy held in heaven. The work might have been something done by a perverse Michelangelo.
Several of the figures were almost completed. One seemed to be falling inside the composition. The color application was quite light, almost like pastel.
She was a first class artist, he admitted grudgingly to himself. For the first time he found himself admiring Odette DeMille as an artist. This made him angry with himself. He turned his attention to the living nudes.
They were all in their twenties. None of them were life class models. The life class model always seemed to be natural enough to have come off the street. The mural models were dream beauties. They were extremely tall, each over five-feet-seven. Each head of hair was totally different in color from the others and was carefully styled. They were Vogue heads. Some had waterfalls of hair looping out like controlled sprays. Some had cuts which appeared to be feathery helmets. They were, each of them, high fashion.
But their bodies, thank God, he thought, were not the fleshless ones of the ladies' magazines. There was not a Twiggy in the lot. The bodies, all lush, were what the bodies of fashion models might be if they surrendered their starvation diets for a month. How many different colors the nipples of breasts have! Anders observed this fact with a hungry throb in his throat. He wanted in that minute to be the painter, to be left alone with these radiant beauties, these nude goddesses.
His exploring eyes noted that, aside from their carefully coiffed heads, the nudes were without hair. Shaved? Treated? Their bodies were as smooth as marble.
The carrot-haired model in the center of the group was looking at him. She smiled. Her green eyes glittered like bottle glass. He knew the face. It was a TV face. She was one of the stars of Hanover Square, the drama of the lives and loves of people who lived in that mythical town.
"We have company, Odette," Hanover Square announced.
Odette, standing high on her movable platform at the mural front where she painted, looked down. "Tim! What a surprise! Take a break, ladies!"
The models, with a collective sigh, broke their pose. From the corner of his eye Tim could see the tallest model whose black straight hair fell straight down to her ankles lean over and gently kiss the nipple of the helmet-haired blonde at her left. The blonde didn't seem to notice.
The nudes seated themselves at the edge of the platform. They dangled their long legs as if they were on the edge of a swimming pool. Some lit cigarettes. A braided blonde who had very large breasts and tiny, diamond-point pink nipples produced a thermos and some glasses from which she poured martinis.
"Models never had it so good," he said to Odette.
"They're not, really models. They are friends of mine."
"I've never known a woman who had friends like that. Most women would not associate with them. Scare the boys away."
"Very perceptive," said the braided blonde. "It has been said that we are a little too much for most of the effete males."
This brought a very loud but musical laugh from the black-haired woman.
"Stop it, Ramona!" Odette said sharply.
"Sorree, Love!" Ramona answered teasingly.
"Is there something you want, Tim?" Odette asked in her most formal tone. , "To talk to you. I hope I haven't loused up your work."
"No, not at all. I would have been done in five minutes, anyway. Let me send them away."
"Send a couple home with me."
"I don't intend to share you. Not yet, anyway."
"Where did you get them? Who are they? What are they? Man, I've never seen so much in one beautiful heap."
"I'm quite sure of that. If you stayed with them awhile I'm sure you'd recognize them."
"One of them is Hanover Square, right?"
She laughed. "No comment. Just say that they are seven of the great beauties of our country."
"And you admire beauty?"
"Don't you?" Odette took the cigarette which Tim extended. "I'd better send them packing before you get too involved, dear."
Odette went briskly to the platform. She had her back to Tim as she whispered to the naked goddesses. Whatever she said to them brought laughter and some counter-whispers. He couldn't hear what any of them said.
In a moment, they had leaped from the platform. He watched their naked forms walk gracefully across the clean white vinyl floor. This view, no less than the other, urged on his desire.
The black-haired one, Ramona, walked with her arms around the waist of the girl with the carrot top. Tim knew from the position of her right arm that it had reached upward and held the carrot top's naked breast. The carrot top's hand had slipped from Ramona's waist and held what it could of Ramona's lush buttock.
"They're a bit bent, aren't they?" he asked Odette.
"You mean queer?"
"Yeah, queer if you like."
"I don't know. In my circles we accommodate various tastes."
"Very sophisticated."
"Once it was. Now we think of it as just another way of making life beautiful."
"You know about that personally?"
"You're prying, Tim. If you were being honestly curious I might answer that question. You might even have great fun in getting a very factual, very detailed answer. But I sense that angry, sneaky quality which comes with prying."
Cool it, man, he warned himself. Just keep it cool. He smiled. "You caught me, Odette. I was prying. But not about high-fashioned love."
"Oh?"
"I've been poking around in the public library and I've been taking Sunday rides into the country."
"That's rather enigmatic, Tim. If you have something to tell me, why don't you just say it? I hate riddles."
"Me too," he said, smiling broadly. She knew damn well that he was on to the whole thing, lie thought. Yet she had not shown a sign of being disturbed.
"Well, Tim? Don't make me impatient. I am already a little irritated about your not working on the copies. Where were you?"
"I could say I went on strike because I haven't been paid yet by your, er, millionaire friend? But that wouldn't be the real reason."
"I see. And the real reason?"
"Let's begin with the Clingenheim nomination for Tim Anders."
"Yes, fine."
"There isn't any nomination. My name has never been put up. Has it?"
She looked at him squarely. "No, it hasn't. That can be done anytime, Tim. Now, I have answered you factually, though you had no way of knowing that."
"None--except I am painting three canvases which will go up for auction at Westby's. Someone may pay a lot of money for them--right? I couldn't say to the Clingenheim jury that my appreciative copies of the masters is so good that they got sold as the originals. That would be very embarrassing."
"To say the least." She turned her back to him. She was breathing heavily. When she had composed herself, she faced him again. "How did you find out?"
"Let's just say that I'm not totally stupid."
"I'd like to know, anyway."
"The item in the paper. No titles offered for three canvases by masters. You were being too cautious."
"It was a gamble I had to take. I couldn't very well list the titles, could I? I gambled that you would not see the newspaper story and that if you did you wouldn't make the connection. But you are not that stupid. I made a mistake."
She fell silent. Her quick and candid admission left him silent too. He had not expected that it would go quite so fast.
"What shall we do it about it?" she finally asked.
"I don't see that there is anything to do. The deal is off. I am not a forger."
"For ten thousand?"
"Why didn't you copy them yourself?"
She pointed to the mural. "Can't, darling. No real hand or eye for that kind of thing. I waited a very long time to discover someone like you. You're a master technician, you know."
"Flattery won't get me in jail, darling."
"It's a small risk. Undetectable really. No one will challenge the authenticity of the work. The copy you've already finished is perfect, and the history of those particular paintings is such that no one will ask a question."
"You mean the Lance DeMille business--his willing them to you?"
"You've been to the library, haven't you?"
"To the Connecticut place, too."
She relaxed completely. "The jig, as they say, is up."
"Why? That's what I want to know. Why, Odette?"
"Very simple, really. I had taken the paintings to the country place for that summer. The fire happened in the fall when I went away for the week end. It was a few days before I had intended to close the house and bring the paintings back to the city. Tim, don't think that I was a complete ass. The paintings were very heavily insured, but I had not read the fine print. The policy insured the paintings against fire and theft, provided that I kept them in the apartment. The policy required my getting the approval of the insurance people before the works could be either transported or housed elsewhere. That's the story."
"All right. Rotten luck. Real tragedy. But what the hell good is making copies? Putting them up for auction?"
"I'm broke, that's why, Tim. I've taken some very bad losses on the market. The school has not done well. I live on a very high standard. I couldn't bear changing that. I need money. Those paintings can bring close to a million dollars."
He whistled. "You've explained the whole thing. A million bucks!"
She put her arms around his neck and brought her face close to his. "Do it for me, Tim. I promise you, you'll never have anything to worry about for the rest of your life."
- "Except a small stretch in the clink."
"Even if it came to that, darling, it might only be a few months."
"And my whole future as a painter, Odette."
"The odds are a thousand to one against it, darling," she said. She was waiting for his reply. He was silent. His hands on her hips were relaxed and cold. "Tim, we've had great times together, haven't we?"
"That's the truth," he agreed.
"If I'm not enough for you, you can pick any of those models, Tim. They'd be more than willing. You can have them one at a time or by the twos and threes. Your life can be so rich, so exciting."
"Stop, Odette. You've got to stop!"
"Why, Tim, darling?"
"Because you're getting too close to my price," he said, taking her arms from his neck. "Deal me out."
Her slap rang across his ear. "You dirty, ungrateful bastard! I could kill you!"
"Thanks for that. I had begun to feel like a heel until you did that."
He turned and began to walk quickly across the flawless white tile. She called. He stopped and turned.
From across the white tile sea she said, "People will do an awful lot for a million dollars. An awful, awful lot."
"So?"
"Anne Laro."
He shuddered inwardly. "What about Anne Laro?"
"I hear that you like her."
"That's prying."
She laughed, no longer uncertain. "Well, Tim, I suggest that you start living with her--day and night. I have the strongest feeling that she's going to get badly hurt. Very badly hurt."
CHAPTER SIX
Anders dipped his brush in the cobalt blue he carefully mixed to match the blues in the background of the Renoir. His jaws were tight. He was filled with self-hatred. He had thought that he had the winning hand, that he could play his cards and walk out clean and laughing. But Odette had held the wild jack. Anne Laro.
Or was it a complete bluff? I have the strongest feeling that she's going to get badly hurt. The knife edge of the words still cut in his mind. He believed her. For Odette DeMille there was a million dollars in the pot. What might she not do for a million?
Anne Laro. He was protecting her from a danger of which she knew nothing. His anger gave way suddenly to a very real and chilling fear. He was now working with Odette--working for Odette--to protect Anne. He now had to depend on Odette to see that her swindle came off without a hitch. If the scheme blew up, he knew that he would be the fall guy.
Why not? Odette DeMille had a strong, worldwide reputation. She could deny everything. The police, if it came to that, would be asking him what he had done with the originals. Spotlights in his eyes. Rubber hoses. What did you do with them, Anders? Where's the Picasso? Where's the Renoir? Where's the Gauguin?
What a funny scene that would be! The police would have to talk like art dealers in order to third-degree him properly. Do cops still use third-degree methods, he wondered.
If the world respected art as much as artists did, he conjectured, he'd be in even worse trouble. After all, if they found him guilty of murdering three masterpieces, they might execute him. Big scene. Tim Anders walks slowly to the scaffold. He mounts the stairs. Up, up, up, to the platform. A crowd gathers. They are all models. All nudes. They all scream. Kill him! Kill him! The hangman drops the black hood over his head. The rope follows. The knot is fixed. The slack made snug. The trap door drops, and the death drums roll. The crowd cheers.
He resigned himself to the inevitable and carefully brushed the blue paint onto the canvas. He stepped back to examine the Renoir. The textures were right. The brush strokes were right. It had the lyrical feeling of Renoir. The bare bosom of the woman in the painting was still in charcoal. Without color, the figure seemed to look out at him from deep inside a well.
Hell, he thought, she must have made a mistake somewhere. A mistake I can use. A mistake that... Then he laughed out loud. Of course, she had made a mistake! She had mentioned taking certain gambles.
Two of them. He could see now that she had taken at least three. Anders knew in a single intuitive flash that he had DeMille over a barrel. A neat position, indeed!
He whistled snatches of melodies. He worked rapidly. He painted with fury. The strategy of his own counterattack shaped in his mind. He heard the door open and close. Odette had come in. He whistled louder, a sound filled with impending triumph.
After a moment, Odette came into the room. She looked at the Renoir in progress. She looked carefully at the projected transparency and compared it to the work on the canvas. She lit a cigarette and smoked half of it as she tested every millimeter of the painting with her trained and critical eyes.
"Perfect," she said. "Even Renoir would never know. Just perfect."
"So far, yes."
"Do you mean something special by that, Tim?"
"I sure as hell do, baby. There's a problem; and since we're in this together, I have to tell you about it."
"What is it?"
"The transparency is not good enough. I can paint what I see on the slide, but I can't be sure it's the same as the original. I need the original to be sure."
"That's a rotten joke, Tim. I think we agree that there is no original." She didn't try to conceal her annoyance. "You didn't have any trouble with the Picasso."
"That's right. Picasso paints with a flat technique. There is no problem with round depths. What you see on the photo is highly accurate for a Picasso."
"So?"
"So, the breasts, baby. Those lovely rosy red round boobs. How round are they? How deep are they? How Renoir are they on the photo? If I curve those tits incorrectly, we are up."
He enjoyed the wonderful silence which followed. She knew that he was right. Even if she didn't, she trusted his technical knowledge more than she trusted her own. He watched her face and the anxiety it betrayed.
"What can we do?" she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders elaborately and opened a package of chewing gum. He stuffed the gum in his mouth and the wrappers and foil in his breast pocket.
"Is it a big risk to go ahead?"
"It Was your Renoir; what do you think? How many people have seen it? How many experts? How many other color photos of it exist, Odette?"
She shuddered visibly. "It's a chance we'll have to take."
"We'll have to take? Don't you mean I'll have to take?"
"As you said before, we're in this together."
Anders laughed softly. "I'll bet if everything hits the fan, you'll bat your beautiful eyes, weep, and plead innocent. You had nothing to do with it. Tim Anders, that hippie, did it all himself after you had trusted him and allowed him to copy your treasures. You do have a story prepared, don't you?"
"Yes, I do, darling. I won't give you the details, but in the main you are right. It will be your neck or Laro's or both if you fail me," she said brightly. Then she suddenly hissed. "I want that million dollars, Tim. I'm going to get it. You see a problem with those breasts? Solve it! Make believe your whole future depends on it."
"Bitch," he said softly and chomped on his gum.
"How sweet! You have many sides to you. That's the first time you called me a dirty name, darling. Just to forward your education, I like it."
"I'll try whips later. Now I have boobs on my mind," Anders said, looking at the photo projection. He snapped his fingers. "Got it!"
"Got what?"
"The solution to the round-boob problem."
"Good! What is it?"
"You."
"Me? How?"
"Be a good swindler, baby, and take off your dress and your brassiere and stand alongside the photo. I need a model."
"Mine aren't the same as hers. You know that."
"I know that very well. Hers look virgin."
"You have your whips out, don't you."
"Let s not get personal. You see, Odette, baby, I have to make a very sensitive guess. In fractions of millimeters. How much curve? How soft the shadows under the breasts? How hard the light on top of the breast surface? Does the photo show me that?"
"No," she said meditatively. "I suppose not."
"It can make a big difference."
"I know that," she snapped impatiently.
"Then what the hell is your problem? Get your tits into the light!"
She took her dress off and removed her green nylon bra. "It goes with my hazel eyes," she said.
Odette stood alongside the luminous Renoir. Anders fixed the angle of a lamp so that the light poured across her bare torso. He brought other lamps into use. He positioned them and repositioned them until he was satisfied. He moved Odette into the stance he wanted, leaning slightly forward from the waist with her hands on her hips, elbows slightly back.
"That's it... I think."
"I hope you are right, darling. For your sake."
"And for your sake. Listen, you'll have to hold that pose for quite awhile."
"How long?"
"I'll work as fast as I can, but it may be half an hour."
"For a million dollars, I'll make a gallant effort."
"Another thing."
"Yes?"
"Don't talk. Keep your breath shallow. Don't want any movement of the things."
"Right."
He worked rapidly. He chewed his gum with relish. He whistled what he thought was Schumann. His eyes darted from Odette's breast to the painted breasts of the Renoir. It occurred to him as he laid on the paint that no painted nude, by any master, had any erotic feeling in it. Renoir had made those breasts with such loving and masterful care. They were perfect. Yet, erotically speaking, they were dead. Odette's were alive. He could not forget the tingling memory of their taste.
He moved from brush to brush and from color to color. He chewed his gum in an independent tempo established by his concentrated jaws. The minutes ticked slowly by. Odette, holding her million-dollar pose, sweated. Perspiration trickled slowly down the breast cleavage and spread across her belly. Her green nylon see-thru panties absorbed the moisture. He knew she could not hold the pose much longer. Thirty-five minutes had passed.
"Three more minutes, baby. Hold it for three minutes."
"I'll hold it," she said grimly.
He smiled to himself. He took the wad of gum from his mouth. He broke it in two. He stuck the two parts of the gum in the center of the breasts where he still had to paint the nipple crowns as well as the nipples. To the gum he adhered a shiny X of the silver foil which he had in his breast pocket. He painted heavily over the gum and gum wrappers. Forgive me, Renoir, he said to himself, and forgive me, Wrigley. He painted and prayed that the texture was right and that the paint would stay.
"OK, Odette, relax. But stand there so I can be sure."
She dropped her arms from her hips and sighed. "What do we pay our models at the Academy? It's not enough, I'm sure. That's damned hard."
"So they tell me. Just relax and stand there," he repeated. Now he carefully painted the flower pink halos and nipples. He put his brush down and sighed.
"Can I look?"
"Sure. It's your money and my funeral."
Odette laughed. "I'll have a cigarette first."
Anders threw her his pack. She caught it easily. He walked up to her with a lit match in his hand. He watched her sensuous mouth suck up the flame. He lifted her breast and kissed the nipple "Good work," he said.
"You're being very friendly quite suddenly."
"You object?"
"No. Rather have it this way. You surprised me though."
"How's that?"
"I thought you hated me thoroughly by this time."
"That's right. I do. I had an ulterior motive."
"Oh?"
He sucked the nipple gently and felt the tremor in her body. "I wanted to give the paint a chance to dry."
"It would have dried without your doing this," she said huskily as he turned his mouth to the other breast.
He took his mouth away for an instant to say, "I hate you. But I love these penny candies."
"I love what you do to me, Tim. How can such a young man know so much?"
"I'm an artist."
"Oh, yes!" she purred and lifted her breast upward with her hand forcing the nipple, swollen with growing excitement, deeply into his mouth.
"Want to look at the painting?"
"Not now! Later! Suck, Tim, oh, suck it!"
He did. He watched her green-covered hips squirm below his thoughtful eyes. How long, he wondered, will the paint take to set? Will the surface be right? Will it hold? He put his hand inside her briefs. Her hands came up to the top of her hips. She rolled her panties down her thighs.
Feverishly, she locked herself against him. She kissed his mouth with her open mouth. Her tongue rammed inside him with angry passion. She caught his tongue in a vacuum. It felt that she might suck it from his head.
He gripped her buttocks savagely. His strong fingers dug deeply into her passion-tightened cheeks.
"You never treated me this way before, Tim!"
"Never hated you before."
"I love it. Hate me all the time. What else do you want to do to me?"
"Whip you."
Her naked hips rocked and pressed against his thighs and hips. She began to unbutton his shirt. "That would be going a little too far."
"Why?"
"Whipping hurts, fool. Let's go take a bath. I'm hot and dirty."
"I can't argue with that, baby. I'm hot and dirty myself."
She kicked the panties off her ankles where they had fallen. She took his hand and half pulled him after her as she ran toward the Roman bath which had served them so well so often.
Anders had lost his cool. It made little difference now if the paint was sticking or if he would go to jail. He didn't care this moment if she was angel or bitch. The full force of his blood was beating in his legs and thighs. The pulse of life pounded in his stomach. All he could think of was Odette DeMille. He had to make love to her, quickly, savagely.
She felt his mood. She undressed him quickly. Her deft hands removed his shirt while he kicked off his shoes. She unbuckled his pants and pulled them down. While she removed his socks, he dropped his shorts. When he reached for her, she slipped away. She took a quick step and dived into the pool.
"You bitch!" he shouted and dived after her. There was no place for her to go in the small pool. He trapped her quickly in the corner. She hurtled out of the water, her wet breasts flying like birds. She crashed against him. He fell backwards and sank under the water with Odette on top of him.
Her hands, like strange, warm fish, swam about his body, caressing him, teasing him, sensuously electrifying him. Her mouth kissed his submerged chest, his stomach, his thighs. The sensations were unbearably sensuous. He was reaching the explosion point. He pushed her away from him and surfaced.
She followed and wiped the water from her face with her hands.
"Still hate me?" she asked, smiling, looking suddenly extraordinarily young.
"All I know is that I have to get you out of this pool."
"Don't like underwater love?"
"I've tried it before. It's for fish."
He pulled himself out of the pool and reached his hand down for Odette. She took it. He hoisted her up. He couldn't wait any longer. He lifted her to the marble bathside bench. He had no time to pick up the pillows which were scattered on the marble bath floor.
Her breasts crushed beneath him. His and Odette's wet skins joined in a sliding kiss. Her fingernails tore at his flesh. He looked into her hazel eyes. There was no softness in them. They were filled with anger and hatred. He pulled her head back by her hair. She cried out. "I love you," she said.
"Liar," he answered.
Then it was over. They relaxed in each others arms.
When they were able, they rose from the marble and went to the great bed in the corner of the bath. They made love again. This time it was slow and easy and almost without passion until the moment of climax.
More than two hours had passed when finally he said: "Hey, don't you want to look at the Renoir?"
She did, and they walked naked from the Roman bath to the room in which Anders had been working.
She looked at the painting a long time. She examined it pitilessly. "Perfect," she finally pronounced with a satisfied smile. "I know that painting as I know the palm of my hand. You were right about the breasts. They are perfect. You're a genius."
"I keep telling you that," he said and whistled exultantly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Anne Laro behaved very strangely through dinner. He had taken her to the Hung-Han because it was in Chinatown and the food was genuine enough for Chinese truck drivers. She barely touched her food. Most of the meal was eaten in silence with Anne staring so intently into her plate he thought that she might be counting the grains of rice.
"What's wrong, Anne?" he finally asked.
"Nothing," she answered morosely.
"That's good. I'd hate to see you when there was something."
She looked up at him. Her lavender eyes searched his intently. She looked down again.
"Anne, if you have a problem, I'd like to help. If you're just in a lousy mood, I'll take you home. Maybe you'll feel better tomorrow."
"I'll never feel better."
"Never? Long time never," he said and lit a cigarette. He asked, "Has it got something to do with me?"
Her silence confirmed his suspicion. He waited several minutes. She stared into her kumquats. He sipped his tea.
"All right. Say it. Whatever the hell it is say it!"
"Odette DeMille. You've been seeing her."
"But "Don't tell me about the Clingenheim Award! It's all over the school! You've been sleeping with her!" She slid out from the booth and ran from the restaurant. Anders dropped a five-dollar bill on the tablecloth and ran after her.
Anne was half a block ahead of him. She was fast. He kept his eye on her light yellow stretch-pants as she dodged along the narrow, curving streets of the Chinese quarter. Several blocks later he caught up with her. He seized her arm and held it tightly to keep her from breaking away again. She was crying.
Silently, she walked with him. He still gripped her arm. They walked for more than an hour. They were out of the Chinese section. The streets they used were in the garment manufacturing area. It was deathly quiet. Every noisy machine had been shut down. The tens of thousands of people who worked here had long since gone home. A rare privacy had descended.
Anders knew that it would be he who broke the silence. He smoked three cigarettes before he could bring himself to do it.
"Anne, this is important. If we keep this up we may never see each other again after tonight." She didn't look at him. "I have something to tell you. Look, Anne, if you don't give the courtesy of hearing, I'm just going to take off and to hell with it!" He released her arm which he had held all this time.
"I'm sorry," she said softly without looking at him. "I'm in love with you. Don't you know that?"
"Yes, I do. That's why I want you to listen to me. And since you haven't been talking all night, just be quiet now. Until I finish. But listen."
"All right," she said and smiled weakly.
"Yes," he began, "I've been having a thing with DeMille, and I'm in trouble. It's a real mess... " He unfolded the story leaving out only the detail of how he had doctored the Renoir. It seemed silly now. Moreover, the copy had turned out perfectly. And, who knew if his plan would work out? His concern now was just to explain to Anne how he had gotten into the mess, to make her understand.
When he had finished, she said nothing. "I suppose you're still angry."
"Yes, but not at you. At myself. If I had gone to bed with you the first time, you probably would have never started the whole business with her."
"That's not necessarily true. I do play around a little. I've told you that. Sex is something I need. I'd rather have it with you than with someone else, but I have to have it. DeMille was very available."
"And very attractive?"
"You know what she looks like."
"Is she... good?"
"Good? As a lover you mean?"
"Yes," she said, and he could almost feel her blush in the half darkness of the streets.
"All right, I guess," he said, hoping the calmness of the lie would make it pass.
Silence again. More street lights passed. The sound of footsteps; theirs and others.
"Did you really go ahead with the forgeries because she said she'd hurt me?"
"She said you'd get hurt."
"Yes, that. Is that why you did it?"
"Yes. I explained that."
"Then you care about me--I mean, really?"
"Of course. Why the hell else would I be doing it?"
"You care a lot. Is that it?"
"Are you trying to drag it out of me? Are you trying to make me say I love you or something like that?"
"No, Tim. I wasn't trying to make you say anything special... "
"All right!" Anders said, not without a touch of anger. "I love you, I love you. OK."
Her arms quickly encircled his neck. She kissed him on the lips and ran up the stairs of the apartment house in which she lived. Anders had not been aware that they had reached it.
Walking back to his furnished room, he felt a glowing sense of satisfaction. Maybe he was in love. Maybe that was it.
He lay on his bed and looked at the wall with the nude studies of Anne Laro. "I'm going to have you, yet," he silently vowed. The he turned off the lights and fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
Anne Laro could not sleep at all. Her mind worked. Her body worked. She thought of her hero, Tim Anders, being pursued by the fire-breathing dragon, Odette DeMille. Tim fought bravely when the dragon cornered him. But finally he was helpless, and the woman beast carried him off to her cave and devoured him. Not that ending, she thought fiercely. She wouldn't permit that ending!
What other ending? She would shoot the dragon through its heart with a whaling gun. Then she would heal the wounded hero. When he was strong enough, the very minute he was strong enough, she would make love to him. And he wouldn't have to ask.
Her body had reacted to her thoughts. Under the sheets her naked hips writhed in sexual excitement. Her breasts swelled. The nipples pressed against the sheet. The cool sheet burned.
She threw the sheet back and lay naked in the dark. Her thighs were tight and she held them close together as her body arched and rocked on her bed. She cupped her breasts in her hands. She heard her voice saying his name. "Tim! Tim! Tim! My love! My darling!"
A long time later, when her body had become quiet and she could think again, Anne Laro made up her mind. She could not imagine Odette DeMille hurting her. What Odette DeMille was doing, Anne reasoned, was playing on Tim's fear. DeMille, because she was a woman, knew that Tim loved her. She knew that Tim would do almost anything not to see Anne Laro harmed. But it was all a bluff, a great big bluff--wasn't it? What if she went to see DeMille? What if she just told her that she knew everything and that she was not one bit concerned about being hurt.
She got out of bed and, still nude, went to the kitchen galley and made some eggs. She would see DeMille. She'd see her right after life class tomorrow.
* * *
When she had finished modelling, she slipped on her robe and thong slippers and hurried toward the door.
Tim stopped her. "Hey, where's the fire? You snubbing me today?"
She smiled and hugged him. "No, silly. I have to go over some things about my schedule. I'll meet you at the luncheonette."
"When?"
"You still have another class. After that."
"About an hour and a half. O.K.?"
"O.K.," she said and kissed his lips. It was the first time she had kissed him at school, the first time she had demonstrated her feelings before others.
"My, my, you're very friendly these days."
"More than you know," she said and walked quickly through the door.
In the basement studio, Odette DeMille worked from her elevated platform. She was alone. She had seen Anne come in, but she had not paid any attention to her. DeMille worked intently on the mural with the seven floating nudes. Minutes passed before she did speak.
"You're Anne Laro, our star model, aren't you?"
"I suppose so. Can we skip the preliminaries, Miss DeMille?"
"It's Mrs. DeMille, Miss Laro," she said, not looking at Anne. "I'll be down in a moment."
A few minutes later, DeMille pushed the button, and her lift descended to the floor. She stepped off it and smiled icily at Anne. "Now, how can I help you?"
"By leaving Tim Anders alone."
"Jealous?"
"Not at all, Mrs. DeMille. Besides, I'm not talking about that at all."
"I see. Anders has had a long talk with you, and he has told you everything. Is that the size of it?"
"Just about. He told me of your promise to hurt me or to have me hurt if he didn't do your dirty work for you. I just want to let you know that it won't work. I think you won't do anything of the kind. Even if you had it in mind--even if you actually did have me hurt --I'm not at all frightened of it."
"There's a brave girl! But I think you have missed the point entirely, Anne," Odette said, smiling coldly as she cleaned her brushes in a turpentine cup. "Let us say immediately that you are right. I wouldn't hurt you or cause you to be hurt. There's no need for it." DeMille paused to enjoy the startled look on Anne's face.
"You see, my dear, you are not afraid, but Anders is afraid. He's fond of you, isn't he? The idea--the very idea--that you might get hurt is enough to make him do what I want him to do. You see, in very practical terms, in a city like New York it would be quite easy to engage a thug who would throw some acid on your beautiful face and body. Tim knows this as well as I. You can risk being hurt. But he can't risk having you hurt, especially because of him.
Anne Laro trembled with fright and anger. "How can you? How can any one person be... "
"Such a beast?" Odette laughed. "I'm sure Tim told you that there are a million good reasons for my behavior."
Anne regained her composure. "I think I can convince Tim that I'm not in any danger."
"You can. I'm sure of it, darling. But you won't."
"Who will stop me?"
"You," she said coolly. She removed her light blue cotton smock. Her full breasts stretched her tight rust-colored sweater. "Are you aware of how talented he is?" Anne nodded.
"I don't think you are. Let me make it plain. In a few years, if he has the proper help, he will without a doubt become one of our most important new artists. And I can get him the Clingenheim if I want to."
"But you're turning him into a criminal!"
"Perhaps or perhaps not. One must get caught committing a crime to become a criminal. Isn't that true? Speculate with me for a moment, darling. If Tim refuses to finish his assignment, I will claim that he has stolen my paintings from which he had been making copies."
"But they were destroyed in the fire!"
"That's beside the point. Officially and legally, they still exist. I still pay insurance premiums to help prove that fact." DeMille waited for the point to sink in. "My reputation in the art world is unimpeachable. Anders is, in the eyes of society, a hippie guttersnipe."
"You can't get away with it! It's impossible."
"I don't think so, Anne. More speculation. Even when this is all over and I have succeeded in getting my million, I can make life good or bad for Tim Anders. There is the Clingenheim, but that is nothing. I can hold a dinner party for the leading art critics in the country. I can say, for example, 'Tim Anders is the finest young painter in the world today.' Or, I can say, 'Have you seen the works of this painter, this-- what's his name?--Anders? I have never laid my eyes on such trash.' I can make him or break him in one night, any night of the year."
"But there are standards!"
"Are there?"
"The critics have eyes. They know what's good."
"Don't be naive, my dear. Art critics and music critics are the most notorious posers society has yet produced. They are writers who are more concerned with words--not very good ones, either--than they are with their fields. They are ignorant. They hang onto my opinions because they believe that I really know what is good."
"You bitch, you bitch!" Anne screamed.
"My, my! I didn't think you had it in your vocabulary."
"How can you be so cruel!"
"I think it is really you who are being cruel, Anne."
"Me? How can you say... "
"I've told you what I can do for or against Anders. My interest is money. I don't care about his future. You do. You love him--or say you love him. It's really up to you. Do you want him to be a great artist and enjoy his career, or do you want him to become a happy day laborer? You see, the choice is yours, Anne. You can be kind or cruel. Choose."
Anne. Laro was stunned. The fire-breathing dragon had been after her, not after Tim as her dream had pictured. Now she was caught, backed into a corner. She wanted to shout out, "Come help me, Tim, please help me!" But she could not speak. Her body sagged beneath her robe.
"Take your time, darling. I'll allow you a few minutes," Odette said quite calmly. "I hate wasting time, however, so will you pose for me for awhile? You're still on my payroll. I want to decide how to do one of the figures, and my models won't be in until tomorrow. Take your robe off."
Anne was unable to move. Odette came to her and looked into her vacant face. "May I help?" site asked and removed the robe. "I don't intend to flatter you, my dear, but you're extraordinarily beautiful."
Odette pulled a chair up, took a pad from her table, and sketched. She paused. "What colors would make that body as beautiful as it is? Marvelous nipples! So wildly red, like flaming coals. Hot, red hot! Let me try it for color."
DeMille pushed a control button on her pneumatic lift. From the rear wall, panels slid back. Moving lights began to wheel through the air. All colors were projected in patterns, and joined by strobe lights. Rock music accompanied the lights in a psychedelic outpouring. Anne could feel the lights in her eyes. She could feel the colors on her skin. She felt herself falling into a dreamworld filled with clouds and desire. Without her wanting it, her hips moved in time to the drums and the deep twanging electric guitars and basses.
"Someone should unlock you, darling," she heard Odette's voice saying. "I think I'll do it. It will be so nice to have both you and Tim. Maybe at the same time. How delicious that would be."
Vaguely Anne was aware of Odette DeMille walking to her lift and pressing another button. The psychedelic lights were joined by several intense white ones. They made her skin warm. The lights swirled about her. She imagined herself swirling about in the lights.
DeMille was at her side. Her hands stroked her naked skin. They moved from her shoulders down her back and caressed her buttocks. DeMille's cool finders lifted her breasts, weighing them. Her nipples, erected against her will, trembled at DeMille's touch. DeMille's head lowered. Her mouth sucked Anne's red nipples. A tremor went through Anne's body. She felt herself spinning faster and faster in the lights.
DeMille was kneeling before her. Her kisses, as rapid as the lights, covered Anne's thighs. Anne's body rocked in response. She heard herself moaning.
DeMille was walking away from her now. She was walking on beams of lights. DeMille's long hand reached out and pressed buttons. The lights grew wilder. The music became more intense.
DeMille returned with paint brushes in her hands. She touched the wet brushes to her skin. They were cold. Anne shuddered. DeMille was painting on her skin.
"This is delightful, darling!" she could hear the distant voice of Odette DeMille crooning, caressing, blending with the lights and the music. "I am painting Tim Anders for you, darling."
She painted on the olive-tinted skin. She painted the head and face of Anders across her chest. His tongue extended and reached for one of her red nipples. Odette painted Tim's torso embracing and covering Anne's torso. She painted an ardent and excited Anders. His thighs were over Anne's thighs. Across Anne's shoulders Odette's brush extended Anders' arm. It reached down her back. Across her buttock, the fingers spread and gripping, she painted his hand. The naked figure of Anders was a wet tattoo which embraced her skin. Her flesh had become his flesh. When Anne Laro moved Tim Anders moved. When she breathed, he breathed.
"Wonderful! I have always dreamed of doing that to someone. Is it exciting?" DeMille's voice was saying. But it seemed so far off. Lost in the stars. In the lights. In the animal rhythms of the drums and guitars.
Long after the lights stopped and the music had ceased, Anne Laro remained in the trance which had held her. Slowly, her skin cold, she regained her senses. She was unaware of why she was standing there. Her thoughts were as vague as a dream unremembered. Where was DeMille? What was the paint doing on her body? What had happened. She saw her robe on the table. She put it on. There was a folded paper in her pocket.
Anne took it out and read it.
It said: "Darling, I enjoyed being with you. I especially enjoyed your body--as a model, too, of course. Remember, Tim's future is in your hands. So don't be cruel. As for the painting of Tim on your body, enjoy it or take a bath in turpentine, whichever pleases you. The marvelous scene we played together I have filmed in color. The white lights, remember? They came on when I activated the automatic cameras. I must think about showing them to Tim. He might enjoy them, don't you think? Better yet you and I might enjoy them more when we next get together. I have no doubt, in view of the wonderful happening we shared together, that you will decide to help me make Tim Anders a great success. He deserves it. With affection, Odette."
Anne read the letter again. What did it mean? She struggled to remember the dream parts, which kept getting scattered in the memory of lights. Little by little the reconstruction of the "happening" presented itself. Anne Laro put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Anders fidgeted in his seat at the life class. He could not shake the feeling that he had come to the wrong place. Something was wrong. The hairs on his neck stiffened with a sense of growing dread. Anne Laro was not on the model's platform.
The model was a red-headed girl. It seemed to him that she was quite inexperienced at it. The other students seemed aware of it, too. She was self-conscious.
An experienced model like Anne never produced the effect of a peep show. No matter how beautiful her face, no matter how attractive her body, the model with experience was herself, not a sexual object. If there was any sexual connotation, it had to be in the mind of the observer. It had to be the student who saw the composed nude body and visited on it his fantasies and needs of sex.
The model who knew her work offered herself as a thing, an object, a statue. Her composed mind had to register neither thought nor feeling. Face, breasts, thighs, hips, buttocks--all became surfaces to be explored with an eye which analyzed lines, planes, curves, shapes and relayed spatial relations to a hand which rendered the dimensions.
Models without experience did none of this. She thought of herself as a naked woman, a sexual being. Her body transferred this message to her auditors. The red-head had no experience on the platform.
She was a well made piece of woman. Her proportions were slim. Her body was not as lush as Laro's. Her breasts were small with brick-red nipples. Her stomach was harder, more muscular than the average female abdomen. Her hips swelled far less than Anne Laro's. Her thighs were smooth and very early teenage. Her face was pretty, not beautiful.
She obviously was filled with thoughts of her nakedness before the men and women in the room. She thought of herself as a sex offering. Her thoughts animated every inch of her body.
Her smile, which she forced into an attitude of boldness, seemed to say: I know you'd like to have me, but I'm up here and you're down there and you can't touch me.
Her shoulders, which should have remained motionless, hunched at intervals. She seemed to be saying: Oh, I feel so sexy warm up here. Why doesn't one of you handsome guys come up here and touch me?
Her breasts, which should have frozen into orbs of ivory, often moved like pendulums of flesh and seemed to say: Aren't we perfect? Not big bags but such wild things. Open your mouths, but don't touch them.
Most provocative of all was her continuous tightening and relaxing of her buttocks. Those shouted invitations. They seemed to say: You've looked so long, boys. How can you stand it? I can't bear it! Come up to we somebody, anybody. Put your arms around me, hold me tight; do the thing. Oh, do the thing!
The studies of the student artists, particularly the men, lost their customary diligence. The classroom had been turned into a vicarious orgy conducted by fifty pairs of eyes.
These thoughts stayed with Anders for a few minutes. Then he again thought of Anne Laro.
Probably she was ill. That was it, he assured himself. She was ill. He went quietly from his chair to the telephone booth in the corridor. He dialed her number. The phone at the other end rang hollowly and ominously. There was no answer. He felt cold.
He returned to the class and tried to concentrate on the red-headed amateur burlesque attraction. He had not noticed before; she had lots of hair. Thick hair, with large waves. He tried to concentrate on the redhead's thighs but couldn't. Laro filled his mind.
Maybe she had been in the John? He left his seat again and went to the phone in the corridor. He dialed. The phone rang repeatedly. He sat listening for several minutes.
His nerves began to jump like a fish in a sack.
It had been a whole day since she had disappeared. They were to meet in the luncheonette. When she hadn't shown up, he had gone back to the academy, where the guard told him that Anne had left some time before. The guard had a brief message for him from Anne. It said that she didn't feel well and had to hurry right home. The guard then emphasized that Anne had said that she would call him and for him to please not call her.
It had sounded all right. Maybe she got the runs. Maybe she just wanted to rest put the discomforts of a sudden belly ache. She'd call him when she felt better. But no call had come that evening. He had waited for it. He had several times reached for the phone to call her but had thought it was too late. She might have gone to sleep and he might wake her.
Something was very wrong, he thought. DeMille? He cancelled that out. As far as DeMille was concerned, she should have no doubt--he hoped--about his cooperation in her million-dollar swindle.
He went back to the classroom and gathered up his sketch pads. He looked briefly at the red-head. She had succeeded in giving herself an erotic charge. Her brick-red nipples had swollen and erected. On the faces of the male students were smiles.
On the street he dug his hands into his pockets. He found enough money for a taxi and hailed one.
He ran up the stairs to the fourth floor of the walk-up in which Anne Laro lived. He rang the doorbell and waited. There was no response. He rang again. He knocked. No answer.
He went to the street and sat on the street stair and waited. It was logical, he thought, if she had gone out she would return. All he had to do was wait. And, he smiled, if she had gone out then she was not ill. He opened his sketch pad and did pen and ink studies of the houses on the street.
A lady with a shopping bag spoke to him. "Are you a friend of that girl on the fourth floor?"
"Yes, I am," he said and felt alarmed again.
"I live next door to her apartment. When she came home last night, she looked so funny--pale and pasty, you know. I'm not a snooper, y'understand; but her bedroom wall is like my kitchen wall. I could hear her crying a long time. For hours it was. I thought maybe something was wrong, y'know. So I rang her bell. She didn't come to the door at all. Then I didn't hear her cry anymore."
"Did you notice her go out afterwards?"
"She might have, but I didn't hear it. I mean I generally hear the door when it shuts. If you ask me, she's inside there."
"You think so?"
"I have a strong feeling," the woman with the shopping bag said. "So pasty and white she looked. Such a healthy girl like that."
Anders ran up the stairs again. He pounded at the door and rang the bell. He called her name. "Anne! Anne! It's me, Tim!"
He walked slowly down the dark narrow stairway. He reasoned that, in all likelihood, she was not in the apartment. But he did not trust his reason. Like the woman with the shopping bag, he had a strong feeling that she was there. The feeling became overwhelming.
The fire escape! The image of the iron works outside her back window popped into his mind. He went down the basement stair through the corridor to the backyard.
He pulled himself up the ladder of the fire escape to the first landing. Quickly he negotiated the ascending iron steps to the fourth floor.
Her window was open slightly from both the top and bottom. He lifted the bottom frame of the window and stepped inside.
The apartment was dark. He walked through the bedroom to the kitchen and put on the light. The emptiness of the room seemed to throb.
"Anne?" he called. "Anne?"
From the bedroom, through which he had passed a moment before, he thought he heard a sound. It sounded like a cry, a child's cry, held deep inside.
He stepped into the bedroom. The bed was empty. It was unused. The spread was crisp and tightly drawn across it. He heard the sound again. His head jerked in the direction from which it had come.
He stepped into the place of the sound. It was to the left of the bed. It seemed to come from near the head of the bed.
Anne in her yellow kimono sat huddled against the wall. He could see in the half darkness that her hair was undone and covered her face. Her arms hugged her knees tightly to her chest. Her body rocked slightly.
Anders squatted down before her. "Anne? Anne, it's me, Tim."
A tearing sob wracked her bundled form. A high keening cry came from her mouth hidden behind the thick fall of her blonde hair.
"What happened, Anne? Tell me. Whatever it is, it's all right, Anne."
She continued to rock. She wept openly. Anders waited until her weeping ended. He helped her to her feet. She said nothing but permitted him to walk her to the small living room and seat her on the couch. He wanted to ask her directly what had happened. But he felt it might be better to wait, and he resorted to small talk.
"You look like a mess, baby. What happened--you fall into a hole?" He walked to the kitchen as he spoke. "I'll make coffee. Do you want coffee?"
For the first time she showed control of herself. She nodded her head.
"I have half a hunch you haven't eaten for awhile," he said from the kitchen. "There are eggs and ham. OK.?" When she didn't answer, he went to her again. "OK.? Ham and eggs?"
"Yes," she managed to say, so softly that he could hardly hear her.
"Good. I'll get it going."
Anders went to the bathroom and soaked a wash cloth. He sat alongside her on the couch. He brushed her hair to the back of her head. Gently he washed her face. It was grimy and dirt-streaked. She smiled at him. It seemed to cost a great effort.
When the food was ready, he pulled a chair up to the couch. He sat before her and fed her. As he forked the eggs and meat into her mouth, he carried on a bright monologue.
"You had me worried, know that? First you hang me up at the luncheonette, but that was OK. I got your message, so I knew you were alive and all that bit. I figured you had the runs or something unromantic. Thing that got me worked up was when you didn't show up. They had this red-headed model filling in. That's when I tried to call you. Ring, ring, ring. No answer."
"I'm so glad you came," she said, her voice stronger. "I think I would have sat in that corner forever."
"Very bad, huh?"
She nodded. The tears began to flow again. He wiped her eyes and kissed her face softly. "It's all right now, Anne. I'm with you now."
"I feel better--I really do. I'll be all right."
"No broken bones, cuts or bruises, are there?"
"No, nothing like that. Nothing simple and healthy like that. Tim! I have to tell you; I must. But I don't know how to start."
"Can I help you?"
"Please."
"Say a name. Who?"
"DeMille!" she sobbed. "DeMille!"
"You went to see her? Because of me--is that right?"
"Yes. Yes. She was so horrible. She... " Anne cried again.
"Let me get you some coffee. Then you can tell me what happened. Just you take your time about it. Just talk easy."
After a few swallows of coffee, she spoke about the happening. Her voice was a monotone, her words spaced and measured. Anders listened. The meaning of her words pounded his senses like hot stones. He winced.
His imagination replayed the scene between Anne and Odette. He could feel the light-produced trance. He could see Odette gloating at how easily she had cowed poor Anne, Anne who would do anything not to hurt him. He could see that beautiful olive-toned body standing on the white tile of the studio floor. He could feel the animal urgings of Odette as she stared at a female beauty, a beauty she would deeply appreciate. And he knew that DeMille's sexual appetites included women as well as men.
In his mind, he could see and feel Odette's mouth on Anne's nipples while Anne froze under the transfixing lights. He could feel Odette's mouth kissing the body he so longed to kiss; possessing the body he so longed to possess. For the first time, he felt a feeling of hatred for Odette DeMille.
"I swear, Tim, in a way I did not know what was happening to me," she said. "Please believe that."
"Of course I do."
"What is most terrible is that my body went along with what she was doing. It... it excited me... oh, Tim!" she said, almost shouting.
"Easy, easy, baby. Take it easy."
"Doesn't it fill you with revulsion? Won't you hate me now?"
"No, no, baby. Look, you didn't even have to tell me. Now that you have, I hope it makes you feel better. It doesn't make any difference between us. I couldn't care less."
"But she made movies of it. Her and me. What if... " He laughed at that. "Forget that. She thought she could use the films to force you to work with her. To force you to co-operate with her, to see that I delivered the forgeries. To make sure that you would do everything not to hurt my career. The films could only tie you to her if you didn't tell me, Anne. You've told me."
"And it's all right?"
"Of course it is. You just forget it ever happened."
Anne shook her head very slowly. "I can't forget it, Tim. I feel dirty. I feel strange because I... because I... "
"I'll say it for you. Because when she made love to you you finally were excited by it, more excited than you had ever been in your life. Is that it?"
"Yes. That's it. I know you are being kind. I appreciate it, Tim. But... doesn't it frighten you?"
"Frighten me? Why should it do that?"
"Because maybe I'm that kind. You've tried to make love to me and I wouldn't let you."
"You will when you're ready."
"But I was ready for her, Tim."
"Anne, you were in a state to begin with. You had gone to Odette to save my life, so to speak. You were ready to sacrifice yourself for me. Odette took very sharp advantage of that. Anyway, psychedelic lights have a hypnotic effect on some people."
"Tim, I'm not a child. I know damned well that people don't do under hypnosis what they wouldn't do ordinarily. I'm a lesbian."
The coldness of her statement shocked him more than the statement itself. A long silence followed. Finally, he asked her, "How do you know, Anne? You've never had a man."
"Do you want to make love to me now? You can, if you like."
"I'd love to make love to you, but not now."
"I do revolt you."
He held her in his arms gently. "Don't be an ass. If you must know, I love you. But there are moments when you don't hop into bed even with someone you love. You're not ready to make love to me. You just want me to prove something which I don't need to prove."
She pushed him hysterically away. "I know I disgust you. I'm a lesbian and it disgusts you!"
"You're not! You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known. Nature wouldn't play such a trick on either you or me."
"I am disgusting! I am what she thought I was!" she shouted. Her face became livid with impotent rage. Anders slapped her across the mouth. Her hysteria broke.
"Thanks, Tim," she said with a calmness which bordered on hopelessness. "Even if you don't want me, Tim, I'll have you for a few days more. I'll have you deep in the hide of me, as that old song says. A gift from Odette."
She stood up from the couch and dropped her robe to the floor. He looked at the image of himself painted on her body. She turned slowly in a circle so that he could see it all.
He absorbed it, and he slowly shut his eyes. He had made up his mind. He knew exactly what he wanted to do.
CHAPTER NINE
Anders sat stiffly in the wooden armchair and listened to the lieutenant tell the story to the young district attorney. The DA's office was not very impressive. It was extraordinarily shabby. It was distinguished solely by a pair of bronzed baby shoes mounted on a base. It sat in the middle of the desk and held down a sheaf of papers.
The DA was distinguished by a thin black mustache and a badly frayed collar.
The detective's recount of Anders' tale obviously excited the DA. His face, animated, reflected a dozen quick thoughts as the detective spoke.
Even as he listened to the story of his involvement with Odette, Anders found it hard to believe. From the detective's tone, it didn't seem that he was overly impressed by its veracity.
"I think those are the alleged facts, Mr. Mintz," the cop said in conclusion.
"Well, what do you make of the alleged facts, lieutenant?" Mintz asked in a surprisingly gruff voice.
"I haven't got much experience with this kind of thing. I mean, it's not the ordinary kind of fraud-- you know what I mean?"
"You know who this Odette DeMille is?"
"Some kind of arty broad, I would say. Yeah, that's what I would have to deduce--an arty broad with pipe dreams. Unless it's this kid with pipe dreams." He nodded toward Anders.
"I see," Mintz said, looking at the drawn green window shade. "An arty broad."
"That's how I make it, Mr. Mintz."
"Something special bother you about the alleged facts?"
"Sure. If this kid is a psycho, and we do something, somebody could sue the city. How do we know there's anything in what he says?"
"You think Mr. Anders is a psycho?"
"I didn't say that. I said what if--what if... "
"I see. What if is what you said. I've got the picture, I believe. If you will leave Mr. Anders with me, lieutenant, I'll speak with him privately."
"Sure, sure," the cop mumbled and walked noisily from the room. The door banged.
"You don't look like a psycho to me, Mr. Anders."
"Thanks a lot! I come in here like a true blue square to expose a crime--maybe get myself jailed--and what happens?"
"The lieutenant thinks you're nuts. But, then again, he's a simple man. To him, after hearing your story, there are two possibilities. You're a nut. Or you're not a nut. It's always better for him if you're a nut."
"All right, I'll bite. Why?"
"He doesn't have to do anything about it if you're a nut."
"Bully for him! He's fuzz after my own heart," Anders said testily. He lit a cigarette. "I guess it's up to you, doc. What's the verdict?"
"I don't think you're a nut."
"Small mercies!"
"But I don't know if we have a case either. What crime is anybody committing, do you think?"
"I told you that she hired me to forge three masterpieces. They go on auction tomorrow at Westby's. I'm making a confession!"
"Cool it, Anders. Maybe she's your girlfriend and she did you wrong. So you want to kill her with a confession."
"I have the key to her apartment. I'll show you the forgeries."
"You'll show me three copies of, according to your own statement, her paintings. Since when is it a crime for someone to have paintings copied? Museums are filled with painters copying masterpieces."
Anders grew uneasy. His voice dropped perceptibly. "The originals were destroyed in the fire."
"What if they weren't? How can we be sure?"
"Why is she paying me to make copies?"
"Has she paid you anything yet? By check, maybe?"
"No."
Mintz looked directly at Anders with what might pass as a sort of compassion. "Look, I'm not trying to put you down. I believe you. I'm just trying to put together a case."
"Oh," Anders said.
"That's the way it's done, Anders. Everybody plays games their own way."
"So there's no case?"
"I didn't say that."
"I've been living through a kind of nightmare, and right now I'm convinced the whole thing isn't real. To hell with it, Mr. Mintz. Let her steal her million. She's so smart she deserves it."
Mintz smiled. "That's what makes the whole thing worthwhile, Mr. Anders. I'm waiting for a phone call. The lieutenant is checking out a fact. A lot depends on that one thing."
"What's that?"
"You'll know in a minute or two," Mintz said and seated himself at his desk. He toyed with the metal shoes. "Odette DeMille has the right to auction off her own property, hasn't she?"
"Forgeries?"
"Did it ever occur to you that she may have the originals?"
"She told me they were destroyed! I kicked the ashes myself!"
"Is that so? Legally, Anders, those paintings still exist, you know. And Odette DeMille is one of the leading figures in world art. Are you--excuse the expression--a hippie on a motorcycle saying she's wrong? She's a phony?"
"Yes, that's what I'm saying." Anders got up from his seat and paced the floor. "She's going to peddle my copies tomorrow. For a million bucks!"
"Yes. The safe course is to let her do it. Then inform the buyer. Then prove he got forgeries. Then we got a case." v Anders laughed. "Let me tell you something. She probably knows who the buyer is going to be. The paintings will probably be shipped to some sucker in Texas who happens to be away on a business trip. By the time you do the paper work and get to make a charge, Odette will have banked her million in Switzerland and will have taken residence in Brazil. She had me figured out before she met me, and she's got you figured out!"
"You've got a case there, Anders," Mintz said gruffly. "DeMille is not exactly a dummy, is she?"
"Not exactly," Anders said. "So what do we do?"
"After the phone call. Look, I believe you. If the call comes out like I think, I'll go for broke. If I made a mistake I'll resign. I'm bored with cops anyway."
"And if it's not a mistake?"
"I'll get a big reputation right away. Young DA stops million-dollar swindle. That kind of thing. Press, photogs. The works."
"How will the press know?"
Mintz laughed and lit a cigar. "I'm going to tell them, that's how... if the phone call is right. Then you and I will make lots of careful plans." Mintz blew a cloud of smoke up to his stained ceiling. "It will be very pretty, Anders. Pretty as a picture, so to speak."
The phone rang. Mintz let it sound three rings before he lifted it to his ear.
"Yes?" he said. "Lieutenant? Yes. Is that so? Really? I'll be damned! Good. Good. I'll call you in about thirty minutes. Wait. You understand? Yes. Thanks." When he hung up, his smile reached around his face almost to the frayed back of his collar.
"Mr. Anders, I'm going for broke," he said. "It seems that Odette DeMille did make a claim for her paintings on her insurance company. She learned that the insurance didn't cover her summer home. She withdrew the claim and happily reported that it was a mistake. The masterpieces had not been involved in the fire at all. Just as you said, she's been paying the premiums ever since. Just as if the paintings still existed."
"But I told you all that!"
"No, Tim. All right if I call you Tim?"
"Yes, of course," he answered exasperatedly.
"You told me what she told you--that she read the fine print and knew she was not covered. You see, Tim, she actually made the claim. That's how she learned about the lack of coverage."
"I see," Tim said and beamed broadly for the first time that afternoon.
"That, Tim, was her big mistake. Now, we go for broke!"
* * *
At Anne's apartment he found her still depressed. She had not yet changed out of her yellow kimono. Her hair had lost much of its luster. She seemed older.
He cooked dinner for her. He tidied the rooms. He played her favorite music. It didn't seem to help very much. Later in the evening he told her of his experience with Mintz.
She listened avidly. Her face became a concentrated mask. Yet when he had finished the story, he watched her head lower, as though it were a weight her neck could not sustain.
"What's wrong, Anne? We've won. Odette is dead --as dead as French Academy romantic art, baby."
She lifted her head with an effort. Her lavender eyes were almost black with tears. "Oh, Tim. The films! The films of her with me. Now they'll surely be discovered."
She wept. He was lost in an anguished silence. He hadn't thought of that. That dirty bitch, he thought to himself, she promised she'd hurt Anne. How stupid he was!
He went to the phone. He called the precinct. He spent almost ten minutes being passed from cop to cop until one of them decided that it was all right to give him Mintz' home phone. He called.
"Anders?" Mintz growled. "What the hell is it? I'm eating!"
"Well, listen. This is important. Maybe you're going for broke or glory, but I'm heading into an outhouse of trouble, man."
"You're clear, I told you that. Even if you weren't clear, I'd fix it for you."
"Not this, you wouldn't. Couldn't, unless you know about it."
"What? You an acid head?"
"I'm a melon head, Mintz. Please listen. Carefully, please."
Anders picked the most tactful phrases he could muster. Mintz listened and breathed heavily into the phone. Anders finished and waited for the DA to talk.
"At the bottom of everything," Mintz said, "there is another bottom."
"Please, Mintz, no philosophy. Can you help me?"
"Naturally. Isn't the DA man's best friend? I'm going to arrange for a little search and seizure tonight. There's a friendly judge sitting who'll give me the documents. Do you want to come along?"
"No, I'd rather stay here with... with... "
"No names necessary, Tim. Just trust me. I'll see that you get the films."
"Thanks, Mintz. I mean for everything."
"Paint me a picture sometime," he said and hung up.
* * *
The main auction salon at Westby's was crowded. The seats were all occupied. Fifty or more people were standing in the side aisles, leaning against the brocaded walls and in the back among the marble and bronze statues by minor sculptors of minor periods. The excitement level was high. Anders held Anne's hand very tightly in his own. They were seated center and left. Her palms were moist. She felt much better. Mintz' assurance to Tim had convinced her that the end was not yet in sight. Much of her loveliness had returned.
"The comparison is bad, but it feels like the World Series," Anders whispered.
"Who are they?" Anne asked looking about at the well tailored crowd.
"Half the money in the world, I guess."
Mintz caught Anders' eye from across the salon and nodded. He looked like an earnest haberdashery clerk. Anders picked out the detective lieutenant. He also made a guess at which of those in the audience were cops. It didn't seem too difficult.
Odette DeMille entered on a wave of excited recognition. She smiled and greeted those she recognized. They were not few. She graciously posed for the group of news photographers. It did not occur to her that there were too many cameras at work.
She walked briskly down the center aisle. Her smile swept regally before her. There was an unoccupied, seat, the only one in the salon, waiting for her.
She stopped at the row where Tim and Anne sat. She looked at them, beaming. "This is the big day, my darlings. The big day for all of us."
"Sure is," Tim said and returned her smile.
"Wish me luck and hope it's a million."
"Wish you everything you deserve, Odette."
"You darling," she smiled. Her eyes, however, had turned cold. "Have drinks with me afterwards, both of you, will you?"
"If nothing interferes," Tim answered.
"What can possibly?"
"Who knows, Odette?"
"A bientot," she said and moved to her seat.
"How can you be so cool, Tim."
"I'm enjoying every minute of this, that's why," he said. He kissed her forehead with a brush of his lips. "Revenge is sweet, Anne. I never had any revenge before."
"It makes me feel awful!"
"As awful as being her victim?"
"No, not that awful."
Percy Lamrick, the well known chief auctioneer for Westby's mounted the small platform. He positioned himself behind the antique cherry wood podium and rapped his cherry wood gavel.
A hush fell as Lamrick adjusted his pince-nez and plunged into the printed listing of the objet d'art being offered. His high voice twanged out the names of the pieces and cited their history and pedigrees. He also gave the audience the starting price of each bid which would be acceptable to the house.
Most of the pieces were not of great consequence, antique silver and china and small paintings by half-known artists or artists identified only as The School of Rafael, The School of Vassari, or an unknown Flemish master of the Fifteenth Century, which might turn out to be a Vermeer.
Anders felt sorry about the unknown Flemish master. His landscape was a small jewel. As good, certainly, in its way as a Vermeer. But no history, no pedigree, to give it money value. The assumption always was that the unknown artist of the period had been influenced totally by the masters. Yet, Anders asked himself, couldn't it be that some poor unknown bum had painted a unique work and had shown the light to those who later became the recognized masters?
Or was his look into the artist's plight of past centuries really a look into his own future? It was possible that a flock of little Anders would find their way into the auction rooms of a later century, where an auctioneer would say, holding up a portrait of Anne Laro, The School of Andrew Wyeth.
Percy Lamrick at the podium took a meaningful pause. He drank a glass of water.
"Lot Number Twenty Seven. From the collection of Madame Odette DeMille... " The loudest murmur of the afternoon bubbled through the salon. Lamrick waited for it to settle back into silence amid a discreet scraping of the chairs.
"Pablo Picasso; Young Harlequin. The Artist's Blue Period. Purchased directly from the artist in 1909 by the late Lance DeMille. Subsequently the property of his widow Odette DeMille. No other owners. The first time offered for sale," Lamrick's falsetto piped excitedly from his narrow throat.
A chair dragged a long squeak on the wood floor. Lamrick peered with annoyance at a portly woman in a mink jacket. He fixed his pince-nez.
"Initial bid: Three hundred thousand."
The painting was held up by two attendants in black linen jackets. They turned the painting slowly so that a good view of it was available to all.
Anders suffered mixed emotions. He despised himself. He hated Odette. He had contempt for the audience. He wanted to laugh at Lamrick and Westby's. He felt inordinately proud of his copy. No one could detect a difference. Perhaps not even Picasso. For a fleeting second, part of his mind said: I should have let them go undetected. The originals are gone, burned and blown into the forest by the winds. These could replace the lost masters; fill the void left by their loss.
"Three hundred twenty-five," a grey haired man said very softly.
"I have twenty-five. I have twenty-five... "
"Thirty-five," whispered another voice.
"Thirty-five, thirty-five, thirty-five... thirty-five once," Lamrick said and lifted his hammer.
"Forty," said the calm voice of the grey-haired man.
Lamrick chanted over it. There were no further bids and his hammer knocked it down to the last bidder.
A hubbub boiled up again. The room filled with voices which no longer whispered. The tensions of the audience were released into the room. A spirit of merriment entered the smoke of the cigarettes. Mintz was lighting his cigar. He was shaking his head in disbelief.
Lamrick, who had left the platform, now returned. He swallowed some more water. He mopped his wide smooth brow with a fresh white handkerchief. He did not ask for silence. He held the podium sides with his frail hands. His thin face assumed an imperious expression which he held until silence fell over the room.
"Auguste Renoir. Nude With Roses. Purchased directly from the artist...
Anders looked across to Mintz. Mintz nodded. Mintz looked at the lieutenant. The lieutenant nodded.
CHAPTER TEN
The attendants showed the painting and set it on the oak display easel.
"The initial bid is three hundred and fifty thousand," Lamrick said.
"Four hundred thousand," said the grey-haired gentleman.
Mintz nodded sharply. Anders got up, slid out to the aisle, and walked slowly to the front of the salon. When he reached the apron of the platform he moved quickly. He leaped onto the small carpeted elevation, shouldered the attendants aside, and slashed deftly at the Renoir with a small knife.
A great gasp went up from the audience. Odette, open-mouthed with horror, was on her feet.
Anders stepped back. The men and the women in the salon stared. Lamrick stared. The attendants stared. There was a very long silence.
Then someone laughed. A cascade of laughter followed. The laughing became hysterical.
"Chewing gum!" a voice managed to articulate. "Her breasts are filled with chewing gum!"
"Wrigley's!" a second voice shouted.
"Please, please!" Lamrick shouted. "Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you... " But the din swallowed his voice and his dignity. He left the platform.
Mintz and the lieutenant each had Odette by an elbow and were leading her to the salon exit. Three plain-clothes men were up on the platform collecting the forgeries. Anders had spotted the wrong cops. These looked like art buyers.
Anders and Laro pushed out of the crowd to Mintz.
The look Odette gave him was enough to burn down another country estate.
He rejoiced in it. "Sorry about all this, Odette, baby. You didn't give me too much choice."
"You fool! You could have become rich!"
"Now you tell me! You promised me such a small share."
"I'll destroy you as surely as you have destroyed me," Odette shouted, her composure lost. "Who do you think you are? You untalented dauber! You fool!"
"Calm down, Miss DeMille," Mintz said. "You don't want to be a spectacle in front of the press."
"The what? The pre... " The flash guns exploded in series. The plain-clothes men brought the Anders forgeries and placed them at the feet of Odette and Mintz. The photographers shot those. Mintz beamed. Odette shrieked. She lifted her skirt and kicked a whole through the Picasso.
"Hey, that's my masterpiece you're destroying!" Anders shouted and laughed aloud. The photogs took shots of him, the busted Picasso and of Anne Laro. Anne was smiling broadly, sometimes laughing.
Odette tried to reach Anders with her fingernails. The lieutenant jerked her back sharply. Her shoe fell off. Quite suddenly, Odette DeMille burst into tears.
She continued to weep while Mintz gave detailed statements to the press.
The art crowd had begun to press in on them. Mintz cut the interview short. The plain-clothes men, joined now by uniformed police, cleared a path to the door. An unmarked car--Mintz', Tim assumed--was waiting at the curb. Odette was ushered into it. She sat between two plain-clothes men.
Mintz was up front, next to the chauffeur. Anders dropped Anne's hand and went quickly to the window of the car. He leaned his head in.
"Thanks," Mintz said. "I hope you've got as much talent as you've got guts."
"You saw yourself, Mintz. One guy, just one guy, was willing to pay half a million for one painting."
"Four hundred thousand. Don't exaggerate. And don't get any bright ideas, hear?"
"You're a nice guy, Mintz," Anders said and reached in to shake his hand.
"Enough mutual admiration. I've got to process this dame and get home to my family."
"Hey, what about the films?"
"We didn't get them."
"Oh, no!"
"Don't faint, Anders. There just weren't any films. This dame is a million-dollar bluff. There were cameras but no film."
"Sure?"
"Positive!"
Anders turned to Odette. He began to say good-bye, but she lurched forward and spit in his face. She hurled a stream of very dirty words as the car pulled away.
They walked from Westby's in the direction of Anne Laro's apartment.
"I need a bath," she chirped. "I really do."
"Well, it was a dirty business."
"Yes. But I don't mean that. I mean I need a bath to get you off me."
"Oh, I see. That's the closest I ever got to you, you know."
"And Odette put you there. Can you forget what happened to me--with Odette I mean?"
"I'll hold it against you all my life," he said with a broad smile.
"Don't kid around, Tim--not about that. Really, I still half think I did it--let her do it--because something's wrong with me."
"You're off your kookie rocker, Laro. If DeMille was a man, you would have surrendered your precious virginity to him. You love me, darling. You were ready to sacrifice your life for me. She knew that."
"It wasn't exactly my life."
"In .a certain way it was," he said and put his hand around her waist. He drew her against him. She put her arm about him. They walked through the warm streets and did not talk for a long while.
"I have to have a bath," she said again.
"Can't stand me on your skin?"
"Not that way."
"You have another way in mind?"
"You'll see. Can't you walk any faster?"
"Yes, but I'd rather walk more slowly. I want to tell you things before you get into that tub and wash my hand off your hip and my mouth from your breast."
"Tim, we're in the public streets!"
"The public be damned, darling. If I had the guts and you were the type, I'd try to take you right here."
"You don't mean rape, do you?"
"Would it have to come down to rape again?"
"If I had the guts and you were the type, I'd make love to you right here."
Then they ran. They ran until Anne, breathless, fell behind and Tim had to wait for her to fill her lungs with air. He enjoyed that. He watched her breasts rise and fall beneath her blouse. Her bra pushed to the snapping point.
He took her hand and pulled her along behind him at a dog trot. She managed to keep running; but she didn't have breath to talk. At her apartment building she barely managed to walk the four flights up to her flat.
Inside, they fell in limp heaps on the couch. It took some minutes before Anders could move. Anne remained motionless.
He stacked a selection of Indian records on the player and set the volume low. The sun had disappeared from all the windows. The glow of the dusk filled the darkening room with a purplish hue. The sound of the sitar and the drum sounded and entwined sensuously. The frank sensuousness of India, all the thousands of years of lovemaking, filled the room with the thought of yearning bodies. They listened to it. They let the music feel them, caress them, enter them.
Anne got up from the couch. She began to dance.
She danced near him, around him, without trying to touch him. Yet she touched him in a deep way.
Anders joined her in dancing. Each of them pretended that they were bejewelled temple dancers. They were talking to the gods. They were preparing for love.
As she danced, Anne Laro undressed. She dropped her blouse. She pulled her brassiere up by the cups and over her head. The olive-tinted breasts swelled out into the dusky room. The burning ember nipples opened holes in the tightening darkness.
She kicked off her skirt. She rolled her panties down to her knees and she danced out of them.
In the room, now as dark as the city ever becomes, he could see her body only in shadows. He made love to her with his eyes but he did not come near her. He did not try to touch her. The music of the sitar and the very exciting drums seemed to give him control as surely as it expanded his open sexual desire.
"I need a bath, Tim," she said. "I need a bath so badly."
"I know, darling, I know."
"Are you going to bathe me, sweetheart?"
"If you ask me to."
"I want you to please give me a bath."
"Of course, darling."
He touched her hand. It was their first contact of the night. It burned him. He sighed audibly. She half danced, half walked to the bathroom.
He drew the bath while Anne sat naked on the ledge and watched him. It was still dark.
"Put on the light," she said softly. He flicked the switch. The overhead fluorescent circle sputtered and asserted its pink-blue light.
He looked at the body on which the fading painting of his naked self on her naked skin was still visible. "Looks like me," he said.
"It is you. If it was someone else I would have bathed in pure turp to get rid of him. It's got to be you, Tim. I couldn't stand anybody else."
"Is that why? I get you by process of aversion?"
"No, no," she said, her voice now sexually thick. "My body is hungry for you. The painting has made me feel you day and night for two days. I am losing my mind needing you."
He watched her hips slowly grind and gently bump the air. Her eyes were closed. The action was involuntary.
She slipped into the tub. Her painted body lay under the clear water. He studied the painting of himself. His head on her bosom, his mouth open, about to take her swollen nipple, his painted legs entwining with her real legs and thighs. He swallowed. He closed his eyes and listened to the music.
"Bathe me," she said.
"All right," he whispered.
He soaped a washcloth heavily and attacked the fading paint lines. The soap alone was not enough. He found some cotton and rubbing alcohol. This worked. Inch by inch he traced the painting and swabbed it away.
He held each of her breasts in his hands in turn as he gently erased the image of himself. She shuddered at each cold touch of the alcohol. Her nipples were soft between his fingers. He throttled an almost unbearable desire to put his mouth to her throbbing breasts.
For him to remove the lines on her back and her buttocks, she had to stand up. She braced herself against the wall as he lovingly destroyed the painting of his hand on her buttock cheek. Here he lost control and kissed her cheek gently.
"Oh, Tim!" she said. "It's getting to be too much. Is it all off? Is it finished?"
"Gone," he said and walked quickly from the bathroom. He had removed himself from her body and the removal had suddenly depressed him. It was as if he had pulled away from her in the act of love.
He sat quietly in the arm chair in the dark living room. Anne followed him a moment later. She was still drying herself with a large orange bath towel. He listened to her bare feet pad across the uncarpeted' floor. He heard the click of the switch as she put on the small lamp in the far corner.
The Indian music still played as she walked to him and sat on the arm of his chair. "Is something wrong, Tim?"
He sighed wearily. "Tired. Let down after all the excitement of the day, I guess. Then the business of destroying my image on your skin."
"You didn't destroy anything," she sighed. "You burned it into me. I feel you everywhere," she said, whispering directly into his ear. Her tongue slid out with her words and flicked the opening. "Oh, Tim, I think I will always feel your mouth on my nipple. I think it will always be hot and burning."
"That doesn't do me much good, does it?"
She slid her body closer to him. "Your legs, darling, I will always feel them pressing against my legs and thighs. Mmm, I'll never be able to sit down without my naked rear pressing into your fingers."
"Who taught you how to tease? You'll explode my mind!"
Is that all?" she whispered and kissed his mouth with her mouth open and her tongue hot and forcing. He caught it, held it gently with his teeth, until he could reposition his mouth and suck her tongue in. He watched her hands go to her breasts and massage them gently. He released her suddenly and got quickly up from the chair.
"Must stop! I'll rape you this time, I swear I will!"
She laughed softly, a certain innocence gone from the sound. "No, Tim. You'll never be able to do that again."
She danced for a moment before the soft light. It licked, like a flame, the body which moved so sinuously. The light splashed hotly on her breasts, which had expanded to a size larger than he had ever seen them. The light bored into her navel. It poured between her thighs with each long step she took. Her bright nipples were alive as burning coals in the red bed of her smooth breast halos.
She placed her arms behind her head. She thrust her breasts forward, toward him. Her hips and thighs gyrated in the age-old motion of the tempting whore. A virgin whore.
"I'm asking you, Tim. I'm begging you, darling. I will die if you don't do it. Completely!"
His hand reached out and he pulled her roughly against his still clothed body.
"Easy," she said. "Let me undress you." Her hands worked silently with his buttons, belt, zipper. She lifted his feet to take his shoes off, then his socks.
He was as naked now as she. Her palms touched the flat planes of his hard chest and stomach. Her fingers traced the muscled contours of his thighs. "You're so beautiful, Tim. And you're inside me forever. If I am ever with another man--and I hope I will never be-- he will have to share me with you."
"Not as long as I'm around, love," he answered with a voice that had become hoarse.
All the rest was silence, sighs, and repeated moans.
He had taken her bursting virgin nipples into his fevered mouth. His right hand gently pressed and released her breasts as he sucked the nipples alternately. Her hands played with his tight buttocks in the same way.
She sucked the nipples of his hard breasts. Her mouth slid down his body like a burning rain drop, stopping, starting, pulling his flesh. His tall muscular frame trembled.
She rose to her feet again. She smiled. The frightened girl had vanished like the painting on her body. A woman, soft, confident, passion-filled, stood before him.
The sitar sang with strident passion and the tabla drums urged the sitar to new heights.
Anders lifted her into his arms and carried her to the bed. He put on all the lights of the room. For one last second he studied her beautiful form and face. Then his mouth devoured her. No part of her olive hued skin--hidden or unhidden--escaped his lips or tongue. He blotted out her moans and sighs.
In the next moments, she dropped her luxurious passivity. She plunged totally into their writhing, boiling sea of raging love-making.
Her hips and thighs had become his hips and thighs; her body, his body. He had burned himself into her body again. And she had burned herself into his. They slept a very long time, The continuous phone ringing brought Anders awake.
He shook Anne Laro. "Better answer the phone, Anne."
"Time is it?"
"Three a.m."
"You answer it please. I don't want to leave this marvelous bed."
"But, sweetheart, if I answer, whoever it is will get the wrong idea... "
"Get the right idea, silly!" she said softly.
He picked up the phone. It was Mintz.
"How did you know where I was?" Anders didn't bother to hide his annoyance.
"I asked myself, if I were you, and I was not home, where would I be? Right?" There was a pause. Mintz continued. "You see the late papers? Foolish question. You didn't. Anyway, I got all the glory I was looking for."
"Good for you," Anders said his annoyance growing.
"You were nominated for a Clingenheim Award. What the hell is that? You never mentioned a Clingenhe... " Anders had hung up.
He sat on the edge of the bed. "I'm going to get the Clingenheim," he said with total disbelief.
"Proud of you," Anne said, her hand exploring his thigh.
"The Clingenheim!" he said.
"To hell with that, Tim. Come here, darling. I need something very important. Come here!" Anders came.
