The Stallion (1996) (6 page)

“Don’t try.”

Dietz wore what was all but a uniform for him: double-breasted blue blazer and white turtleneck. In the privacy of her home, Cindy wore soft and faded old jeans and a gray sweatshirt stained with automotive grease—a relic from her racetrack fling.

He picked up his drink, a snifter of Courvoisier. “Do you agree about the realists?” he asked.

“Whether I like them or not, they will sell,” she said. “There is always a market for that kind of art, particularly the nudes. I do like the Pearlsteins.”

“You could hang several Pearlsteins here and have a dinner party. Who knows? Philip might even come. Inviting the right people, you could almost certainly sell a painting or two.”

“That’s why I decorated the apartment this way: to be able to use it as a gallery.”

Dietz frowned. “I will have to borrow the money to pay my share of the cost of doing the realist show. I am assuming the bank will be no problem. Sometimes they ask for security.”

“Why borrow from a bank?” Cindy asked. “I’ll lend you enough for your share.”

“Would you do that for me?”

“You give me a note, secured by the art we buy. If you don’t repay, I’ll own the whole show.”

Dietz grinned. He put his snifter aside and leaned toward Cindy to kiss her. She had allowed him to kiss her before, and she did now, in fact returning his kiss. He reached for her left breast and caressed it gently. As he had guessed
from looking at her, she was wearing no bra, and quickly he ceased to caress and began to fondle. She had never allowed him to touch her before, but she did now.

For a minute or more he fondled her breasts, squeezing and lifting them.

“You have just changed the nature of the relationship,” she said to him quietly.

“Should I be sorry?”

“Not necessarily. But we had better define what the new relationship is.”

“You are irresistible, Cindy,” he said. “I want you. I want everything.”

“Everything—I am not sure what ‘everything’ includes. Let me tell you what it can include and what it can’t. It can include recreational sex. It can’t include any kind of emotional commitment. I am married to Angelo, and I’m going to stay married to him.”

“If he found out, he would kill me,” said Dietz soberly.

“No, and he won’t kill me either. I am not so naive as to suppose he’s over there in Japan keeping celibate. The first time a Japanese businessman offers him a cute little bed-mate, he’ll accept her. I know him. And he knows me. He doesn’t expect me to be any more chaste than he is. What he does expect—and I expect it from him, too—is that we don’t damage our marriage. If he had any reason to suspect otherwise, we couldn’t go on being partners in the gallery. Do you want to risk that?”

“I must,” said Dietz simply.

“We can’t be together on a regular basis,” she said. “Probably not even frequently. Only when circumstances are just right. When he’s out of town and the nanny has gone for the night.”

“I accept those terms.” He began to slowly lift her sweatshirt. “May I?” he asked quietly. She did not respond to the question, and he bared her breasts.

“My God,” she said quietly when she saw his male organ. “I never saw one like this before.” It was small, and it was not circumcised. She twiddled his foreskin between her thumb and index finger.

He gasped. “In Europe,” he grunted, “the barbarous mutilation of the male organ is not common. My grandfather
saved his life by showing his uncut
Glied
to an SS
Scharführer
who took him for a Jew. Being intact, he could not be a Jew.”

She bent down and licked his balls to see if that would make his penis grow.

“It’s not very big,” she said frankly.

“It performs its office,” he said. “I get no complaints.”

He was right. When he left, an hour or so later, she had no complaints.

“What can I say to you?” Cindy asked Angelo. “All I can say is, it’ll be costly if not fatal. Jesus Christ, man! Hasn’t the time come when Number One can’t
summon
you anymore?”

“Well, he wants to talk to me, and he can’t come up here. He’s a fragile old man. He’ll probably never leave Palm Beach again in his life.”

“Tough shit,” grunted Cindy as she walked to his office window and looked down on Third Avenue. Rain was pouring hard on the streets of New York.

“Overnight,” said Angelo. “I’ll fly down and have dinner with him.”

She glanced around his office. She was pleased with it. She had bought the furniture, and the three paintings hanging on the walls were loans from VKP Galleries—von Keyserling-Perino. Angelo was peripatetic. He didn’t spend much time in his office, but when he was here Cindy was glad that he could enjoy a handsome, well-thought-through design.

“You
will
be here for the opening of the realist show? And the dinner.”

“You’ve got a lot tied up in that.”

“Want to make a little bet that I get my money out of it, and a nice profit?”

“If you and Dietz think so, I have to think so.”

“You’ll
be
here…,” she insisted.

“God willin’ an’ the crick don’t rise.”

“Just who the hell do you think you are?” Number One shouted at Angelo. “I demand you keep your nose out of my company’s business!”

“I don’t give a damn what you demand,” said Angelo. “I flew down here—at your expense—without much enthusiasm for it, without much interest in ever seeing you again; and if you think you can intimidate me or that I’m going to sit here and take abuse from you, you can go straight to hell.”

The ninety-six-year-old Loren Hardeman the First glared at Angelo, but there was no force in his glare. What Angelo faced in that armchair across the dining table was a stiff suit not at all filled by a crumpled old man. The brim of his panama hat shaded his eyes. Betsy was at the table. Her eyes glittered as she watched and listened to the exchange between Angelo and her great-grandfather. Loren Number Three was there, too, a little drunk and a little sullen.

“Do you remember how I reengineered your Bugatti?” Number One asked, the anger gone from his voice. “Remember that?”

Of course Angelo remembered. That was when he’d first met Loren Hardeman the First. Even confined to a wheelchair, Loren Hardeman the First, in 1939, had been a big and obviously powerful man. Angelo had not immediately understood how powerful. Later he would understand only too well. There were giants in Detroit in those days, and the first Loren Hardeman was one of them. For decades he had believed that if he could get up on his feet he could be a giant again—and not just among midgets. He never surrendered that idea.

“I think you owe me a little respect,” said Number One quietly.

“And you owe me a little, old friend,” said Angelo.

“You’re not associated with the company anymore,” argued Number One.

“Exactly,” said Angelo “That’s what I said in the first paragraph of my analysis. I said I still own two hundred thousand shares of stock in Bethlehem Motors, but I have absolutely no other relationship with the Hardeman family or the management of the company.”

Betsy’s brows rose skeptically, and she cast an amused glance at Angelo that the two Hardeman men did not see and could not have understood.

“You say we are losing money on the Sundancer. Why do you think so?”

Angelo turned to Number Three. “What about it, Loren? Are you losing money?”

“That’s inside information,” Loren replied testily.

“You say we’re losing market share,” said Number One.

“I don’t have to have inside information to know that,” said Angelo. “Do you deny it?”

“We don’t have to affirm or deny anything, Angelo,” said Loren.

Angelo shrugged and spoke to Betsy. “Common knowledge.”

“I don’t know what makes you an ‘industry analyst,’” said Loren, “but your damned report caused the price of our stock to go down. Worse than that, we lost eight dealers.”

“Do you pay any attention to what I write, or just bitch?” Angelo asked.

“We shouldn’t be manufacturing automobiles at all anymore,” said Loren the Third.

Number One slammed his hand on the table. “I don’t want to hear it! As long as I am alive, Bethlehem Motors will make cars. Period.”

“Then you had better make ones you can sell,” said Angelo.

“The Sundancer—”

“Was a fine car, in its time and context. Bethlehem Motors didn’t capture any of the market Ford captured when Lee Iacocca shoved the Mustang up Henry the Second’s ass. You missed that market. Now you’re going to miss another one if you don’t get out in front.”

“I read your goddamned analysis,” said Number One. “It’s easy to be a genius when you don’t have to
do
what you write about.”

“I read it, too,” said Betsy. “It says the Sundancer—which I agree was a fine car in its day—is now thought of as a dinosaur, a gas-guzzler—”

“Oh, come on!” Loren the Third interrupted. “George Romney thought he could sell fuel-efficient cars. You can’t even find a Rambler in a
junkyard
today.”

Betsy picked up from where she had been interrupted. “When George Romney called ‘Detroit iron’ dinosaurs, gasoline sold for thirty-five cents a gallon. Now it sells for a dollar, and we’ll see it selling for a dollar and a half. Why do you think Volkswagen sells ten times the number of cars it sold ten years ago? Because it gets thirty miles to the gallon, compared to twelve for a Sundancer. The VW is ugly and uncomfortable, but—”

“It also
runs,”
said Angelo, “and doesn’t require days of warranty work.”

“So what’s
your
solution, Angelo?” asked Number One. “Transverse engines driving the front wheels—”

“No long drive shaft,” said Angelo.

“Four cylinders,” Number One went on. “Who’s going to buy a car with a four-cylinder engine?”

“The people who buy Volkswagens, Hondas, Toyotas—”

“Oh, sure,” laughed Loren the Third. “Chuggety-chug. Noise. No pep. No acceleration.”

Angelo shrugged. “The MG has a four-cylinder engine,” he said. “So does the Porsche 911. Chuggety-chug, Loren?”

Betsy pointed at her father and laughed. “Gotcha there!”

Loren the Third shot an angry glance at his daughter.

Number One reached inside his suit and drew out a clipping. It was Angelo’s report to New York securities dealers on the condition of Bethlehem Motors. He read, “‘Bethlehem lacks the facilities to build four-cylinder transverse engines and their associated drive system, and it cannot within any reasonable time retool and begin to manufacture them.’ So, young man, we can’t, hey? What’s your solution? You say, ‘A number of Japanese manufacturers have that manufacturing capacity in place, have extended experience in engineering and producing such power
trains, and have in fact surplus capacity. They are ready, willing, and able to supply American manufacturers with these fuel-efficient, powerful little engines. Companies like Bethlehem Motors could do worse than enter into negotiations to import them.’ So … a bastardized car, half American, half Jap. That’s what you want us to build, Angelo?”

“It could save the company,” said Angelo.

“All my life,” said Number One, “the phrase ‘Made in Japan’ has stood for cheap and shoddy.”

“Like Sony television sets and Nikon cameras?” asked Betsy.

Number One slammed his hand down on the table. “While I live,” he said, “no automobile made in my plant will have a goddamned Japanese engine!”

Angelo smiled. “That’s what Hank Ford told Lee Iacocca. And, frankly, I don’t give a damn what you do. There’s the truth, whether you like it or not. I’m not asking you to take my recommendations. I didn’t make them to you. I made them to the securities boys in New York. Try raising money, my friends. Try floating a bond issue or a new issue of stock.”

“Ever consider that you might get sued for libeling a company?” Loren the Third asked.

Angelo ignored his question. “Your ratings are down. Your stock has ‘sell’ recommendations from the major analysts. Bethlehem Motors has a limited life expectancy.”

“So do I,” muttered Number One. “Eat your goddamned soup before it gets cold.”

Angelo knew Betsy would come to his room. He knew it would be more dangerous to lock her out than to let her in. Besides, he didn’t want to lock her out.

“You and I are perfect together,” she whispered to him after they had made love. She reached for the snifter of brandy she had brought to the room and took a small sip before she held it to his lips and let him sip. “There’s got to be more to it than this—more, I mean, than sneaking a night in this house. Oh, God! Leave her, Angelo! Give her a nice settlement and come to me.”

“She’s the mother of my son,” he said simply.

Betsy took the snifter back, took a bigger swallow, and put it aside on the night table. “Anyway, I suppose you love her. You love her, don’t you?”

Angelo nodded.

“I’m sure she’s a good wife for you,” said Betsy. “I’d have been better.’

“You were married when I married Cindy, if you remember.”

“You knew the arrangement,” she said. “You could have waited.”

He shook his head.

“They’re feeling murderous,” she said. “I mean the old bastard and my father. I’m not exaggerating. They’d gladly kill you if they thought they could get away with it.”

Angelo shrugged. “I haven’t hurt them. Not really.”

“It’s not what
you’ve
published. They figure you’re the source of what
Thurman
wrote in his big expose. You know what I mean.”

Angelo surely did. Guy Thurman had published a twenty-page article on the Hardeman family in one of the major newsmagazines—

The qualities that make fathers great men are rarely inherited by their sons. In fact, those very qualities tend to suppress similar qualities in the sons. So it has been with Loren Hardeman, founder of Bethlehem Motors. His son and grandson were also named Loren Hardeman, and the custom grew of calling the eldest man Number One, the son Number Two, and the grandson Number Three.