The Stallion (1996) (16 page)

“What? Two days after Christmas? What the hell’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing’s the matter with him. He’s just being Loren. He figures calling you back to Detroit from Connecticut two days after Christmas will piss you off and make you an angry man at the board meeting. Angry means less effective.”

“What’s he trying to do?”

“Knock you off balance. He’s mad as hell, Angelo. When you told Beacon he couldn’t talk to the Japanese and had to ask all questions through you, Loren was furious. Also, he figures you’re the reason why Shizoka is stonewalling his accountants. His ego is injured. He says he’s still CEO, and you’re his subordinate—which he intends to make clear.”

“You called to warn me?”

“I called to warn you. You’ll get official notification of the meeting by certified mail tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Roberta. I’ll sharpen my knives and wear my bulletproof vest.”

Cindy was picking unenthusiastically at her food when Angelo returned. She was pregnant, and it had been her idea to order Chinese. Now her fancy for it seemed to have subsided.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“Loren has called a board meeting for next Thursday.”

“In the week between Christmas and New Year’s? Angelo, your folks will be here!”

“My parents will be here for ten days, if we don’t get so much snow the airports are closed tomorrow.”

“How can you leave when they’re here?”

Angelo smiled. “Since they called me to Detroit this particular week, I’m going to let the company pay for a chartered jet. I can leave here at eight, fly from Westchester Airport to Detroit City Airport in time for their ten o’clock meeting, and leave right after it and be back here by the middle of the afternoon. That’ll be a finger in Loren’s face.”

Angelo’s parents had visited the house in Greenwich once before, shortly after Angelo and Cindy had bought it; but they hadn’t seen it since Cindy had finished her redecorating.

The house sat on six acres of partly wooded land, off North Street in the posh backcountry area of Greenwich. It was a fieldstone house with a slate roof and copper spouting, built in the early 1920s and substantially remodeled at least twice. It was not as grand as some of the neighboring houses, but it was a solid, handsome home and roomy enough for a family that would soon have four children.

As she had done in the apartment, Cindy had had all the walls painted white, the better to display art. She had installed some track lighting, but not in the main rooms, since it would have been incongruous with the carved woodwork and leaded windows. Almost all of the furniture from the apartment had been banished to the bedrooms and sitting rooms upstairs. English-country-house style was more suitable to the downstairs rooms, and that was what Cindy had bought—overstuffed, comfortable couches and chairs, upholstered in flower prints, and Oriental rugs for the oak floors.

Similarly, most of the art she had displayed in the apartment did not suit the downstairs decor. The long hall upstairs was her gallery, seen only by her family and closest friends, and there hung the Amanda Finch nude of the heavily pregnant Cindy. The elder Perinos had stopped and stared at it for a long time when they first saw it, but neither of them said a word. They said nothing either about the nude of the teenaged boy. The only works of Amanda’s that hung downstairs were some of her flowers, which the Perinos did not recognize as the work of the same artist until Cindy pointed out to them the identical style used on a different subject.

Saturday’s mail did in fact bring notice of the meeting of the board of directors and a summons to Angelo to be present. He had to explain to his parents why he would be absent part of a day during their visit, so he showed the letter to his father.

They were sitting in the living room. His father was glancing through a catalog of offerings from VKP Galleries, and he laid it aside to read the letter.

“I have never been able to understand your fatal fascination with the Hardemans,” he said. “I would have thought you would have put aside all thoughts of having anything to
do with them, after what they did to you in nineteen seventy-two.”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Angelo. “I’m going to take their goddamned company away from them. That son of a bitch thinks he’s gonna kill me. I’m gonna kill
him.”

Sunday morning, the day before Christmas, the children’s nanny answered the phone and informed Cindy that Mrs. Hardeman would like to speak with her.

Roberta. What could Roberta want now? And why did she want to speak to her, instead of Angelo? Cindy went into the library, sat down at the small leather-topped desk there, and took the call.

“Hello. This is Cindy.”

“I’m afraid we haven’t met,” said the voice on the line. “If we have, I apologize for not remembering. I’m Alicia Hardeman. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“I, uh … well, yes. You’re—”

“Loren’s first wife. Betsy’s mother. Alicia Grinwold Hardeman.”

“Of course.”

“I’m having a few friends in for oyster stew on New Year’s Day. Not New Year’s Eve. All of the television sets will be tuned to various bowl games, so people will have their choice of football. Anyway, I don’t send written invitations. I call people. I’d be very pleased if you and Angelo could come. I live in Greenwich, you know, and I’m sorry we haven’t gotten together before.”

“Well, I appreciate the invitation,” said Cindy. “I do have a little problem. Angelo’s parents are visiting—Dr. and Mrs. Perino, from Detroit. They’ll only be here a short time, and Angelo has been called to Detroit for a corporate board meeting on Thursday. We—”

“Dr. and Mrs. Perino are invited too, of course. It will be very informal. No neckties. No particular hour to arrive or leave—just sometime between one in the afternoon and, say, seven. My daughter will be here. Betsy. No party can be rigid or formal with Betsy present. Please do try to come.”

“It’s very kind of you. I accept the invitation. If it turns out we can’t come, I’ll call and let you know.”

“If you can’t, we’ll get together some other time soon. But do try to make this party. It will also be a good chance for you to meet a few people. We associate only with the laid-back kind, so I know you’ll find my little circle of friends easy to like.”

Back in the living room, where Angelo sat chatting with his mother and father, Cindy grinned and said, “Honey, we’ve all been invited to a party. All of us. And you’ll never guess by who.”

“You’re late,” said Loren curtly as Angelo entered the board room.

“Bad flying weather,” Angelo replied.

His chartered Learjet had in fact landed half an hour ago, but he had taken time to have a leisurely drink in the airport bar before he went out to the limousine he had rented. If Loren wanted to play games, he could play them too. He had chosen to wear a navy blue blazer with gold buttons over a pink cashmere sweater and a white shirt open at the collar. It was, after all, a holiday week.

“You might have taken an earlier flight,” said Loren.

“This one was early enough,” said Angelo.

Not all the directors had accommodated Loren’s wish to have a meeting on December 27. Princess Anne was not there. Neither was the banker, Myron Goldman. Peter Beacon, XB vice president for engineering, sat in one of the chairs behind the directors’ chairs.

Roberta, wearing a heavy cable-knit white sweater and smoking a Chesterfield, sat with her chair pushed back from the table. She kept her eyes away from Angelo.

Loren stared for a moment at Angelo, as if tempted to comment on his informal attire, then apparently decided not to. “When are we going to see this car of yours on the test track?” he asked bluntly.

“It’s been on the test track, in Japan.”

“Are you suggesting we fly over there to see it?”

“If you
want
to see it before, say, March. We’ll have half a dozen of them running on the test track here, in March.”

“Flown over from Japan,” said Beacon. “Not cars assembled here.”

Angelo shrugged. “When you get your new quality control in place, we can start assembling them here. Not until then. At the present rate of progress, I’d estimate Shizoka will have a thousand cars in showrooms and on the road in Japan before one goes to dealers here.”

“You’re a loose cannon, Angelo,” Loren complained. “You seem to trust the Japanese more than you trust our people. You’ve got a car running on a test track over there that none of us have even seen. Hell, we haven’t even seen film of it.”

“Let’s get New Year’s out of the way, Loren, then you and I can fly over and you can see the car and drive it yourself. It’s available to you. No one’s hiding it from you. You just can’t sit on your butt in Detroit and see it.”

“You can’t even assemble a prototype in our plant?”

“It costs money to assemble a prototype. We’re trying to keep costs down,” Angelo explained. “Besides, if we assemble one here and it goes out on the test track and a door falls off, every television station in town will be running pictures of that on the evening news. Not only is XB quality control substandard, so is XB security. I’m going to fly six or seven cars over here from Japan, and we can put on a show with them. Their doors won’t fall off.”

“How are we to know that?” asked Beacon. “Shizoka won’t talk to us.”

“Shizoka
will
talk to you. Through me. The Japanese are different from us, you know. I’ve established a rapport with them. It would take just one bumbling conversation between one of them and somebody here to sour the whole relationship.” He turned to Loren. “When you and I go, I’ll tell you what to say and how to say it—and what not to say.”

Loren flushed.
“You’re
going to tell
me?
Who’s the CEO of this company?”

“This company has one chance to survive,” said Angelo. “The XB-Stallion—and I thank you for the great name,
Loren. That chance depends on close cooperation between us and Shizoka. If anybody queers the deal … well, if the deal gets queered, Loren, you won’t be CEO of anything.”

“I won’t be CEO of anything if the car can’t go on the market for less than six thousand dollars,” said Loren. “But your Jap friends won’t respond to our accountants’ questions about costs. How close are they going to be to their cost projections?”

“I’m looking at forty dollars over the original figure,” said Angelo. “It may be fifty dollars, but it won’t be more.”

“How can we know if they won’t let our accountants examine—”

“You’ll know,” said Angelo, “when they start selling us drive trains at a price. How close are we going to come on our chassis and bodies?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Loren. “Everybody’s working on the numbers.”

“
I
know,” Angelo asserted. “You’re looking at more than five hundred dollars over projections. If the car goes out of here with that hanging around its neck, the base model, stripped down, with no accessories to speak of, will have to be priced at sixty-five hundred dollars. That’ll be about two hundred and fifty dollars more than GM’s X car and five hundred dollars more than Chrysler’s K car. Which shoots us out of the saddle.”

“It costs money to do business in the States,” said Beacon.

“More than it costs GM and Chrysler?” Angelo asked.

“Well, the Big Three have economies of volume that we can’t meet,” said Roberta.

“We can if we do what we have to do,” said Angelo. He stood. “Gentlemen … lady, you’ve got to cut this company’s payroll by fifteen percent.”

“The first thing that would produce is a strike,” said Beacon.

“No, it won’t. Because it’s not unionized production-line people you’ve got to cut. This company is top-heavy. There are too many clerks and bean-counters. You’ve got to cut them. Period.”

Professor Mueller, the administrative director of the
Hardeman Foundation, shook his head. “The ratio of white-collar to blue-collar employees with Bethlehem Motors—excuse me, with XB—is roughly the same as the ratio with the other automakers.”

“Exactly,” said Angelo. “And theirs is bad. They’re top-heavy, too. The difference is, they have those ‘economies of volume’ that we don’t have.”

“Well, just where would you start?” Loren asked.

“To start with, I’d get rid of that screwball little local accounting firm Number One hired to cover his shenanigans. They sent Shizoka a forty-page, single-spaced questionnaire. I nixed it. Apart from the fact that the Japanese considered it insulting, it would have required thousands of man-hours to assemble the data your bean counters wanted—and didn’t need. I don’t have the statistics for this, but I bet more than twenty percent of your white-collar man-hours are spent on what are called projections and plans. There was a questionnaire on my desk the other day. Among the things somebody wanted to know was how much I would be spending on travel, office supplies, and a half dozen other things in the third quarter of 1982. Hell, I don’t even know if there’ll
be
an XB corporation in 1982, much less what it will spend on paper clips. MBAs, my friends. How many have you got? How many Harvard ones? Fire all the Harvard ones and seventy-five percent of the other ones. Then let go of all the people that waste time generating reports and statistics for MBAs. What we need around here is somebody who knows how to build cars—and appliances, too, since we’re staying in that business. Show me a man with a desk who doesn’t know a socket wrench from a ball-peen hammer, and he goes out the door.”

“Radical restructuring,” said Professor Mueller.

“‘Radical restructuring’ my achin’ ass,” said Angelo. “I’m talking about slicing off fat. I’m talking about cutting the cost of doing business. I’m talking about cutting the cost of the chassis and bodies we put in the XB Stallion. I’m talking about survival.”

Angelo sat down. To everyone’s surprise, Roberta stood. “I’m not sure if Mr. Perino’s right or wrong,” she said. “I
have observed one thing—and I have some experience in business, you know. For a number of years, Number One pretended to be running this company and interfered in every effort my husband made to achieve some of these changes—I mean, adopting modern management methods and cutting fat. Well, Number One is gone. His successor—some call him Number Three—is now at liberty to make changes. I know he has already been looking closely into some of the things Mr. Perino mentioned. I imagine he will find Mr. Perino is right about some things and wrong about others. In any case, it’s what he knows how to do.” She paused and smiled warmly at Loren. “I’m not sure if my husband does know the difference between a socket wrench and a ball-peen hammer. I know he doesn’t understand how robotic welders work. But that’s what Mr. Perino is with us for. And Mr. Beacon. For the good of the company I suggest administration let engineering do its work and engineering let administration do its work.”