The Stallion (1996) (13 page)

That meant that Loren also controlled the board of directors, which he now reduced to five members: himself, Roberta, Randolph and Mueller of the foundation, and Congressman Briley. If he were fool enough to do it, he could dump the new car project and focus the company, as he had always wanted to do, on manufacturing appliances. Or he might sell off the company’s assets and retire. He could say—he
would
say—that Number One had left him a failing company no man could save and that it was better to cut his family’s losses and live on what they had left.

Angelo was aware that the death of Number One left him with no appeal if Number Three decided to bail out.

After the luncheon at Cafe Royale Angelo had accompanied two of the bankers back to the City for an additional meeting. Shortly before five he caught a cab and returned to Regent Street. It was a rare man, he thought, whose spirits could not be lifted by the Christmas decorations on Regent Street, so he decided to walk from there to his hotel. In London in December, it was already dark by five o’clock, and the decorations gleamed against a black sky.

He left Regent Street and started west on Piccadilly. When he reached the Burlington Arcade he walked in and began to look through the windows of shops.

He saw her. Roberta was there, buying something in a shop that featured cashmeres and Scottish woolens. She had said she would be in the arcade at about five and would shop there until he came.

He knew he shouldn’t be seeing her. But he had his reasons. She was devious. She was a liar. But she was also
ambitious. Maybe he could use her. She hadn’t quite taken his full measure.

She was staying at the Hilton and made a point of being there early in the evening to receive the telephone call from Detroit that invariably came at six o’clock. So far as Loren was concerned, she was in London for Christmas shopping and the theater. Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t know that Angelo was in London, too. In any case she always told him she had shopped all day and was going to a show, after which she would have a late dinner and be in bed by one. That would be eight
P.M.
in Detroit, and she could be confident he would be too schnocked by then to call again.

Angelo was staying at Dukes Hotel on St. James’s Place: a small, very old, and very traditional hotel, which he wouldn’t have known about but for the recommendation of Anne, Princess Alekhine. He’d arrived on Monday, a week before Christmas day, and would fly home on Thursday. Roberta had been here since Friday and would fly home on Friday. They had three nights.

“I bought you a present,” she told him as they walked out of the arcade.

She handed him a box. They stopped in the entrance to the arcade while he opened it. A Burberry raincoat. He didn’t know its exact price, but he knew a Burberry coat cost more than $500. Quite a present indeed.

“I’ve got to go and take my call from the moron,” she said. “Early dinner, right? We do have some business to discuss. I want to cover all of it over dinner, so we can fuck all night.”

That was the arrangement already agreed to, and Angelo nodded. “All night,” he said.

While she went to her room in the Hilton to take Loren’s call, Angelo sat in Harry’s Bar in the cellar of the Park Lane Hotel, drank Scotch, and waited for her. He tried on the coat. It fit. He’d have to declare it at customs at Kennedy Airport and then of course explain at home that he’d bought it for himself, on impulse.

He didn’t like this relationship with Roberta. What he had going with Betsy was altogether different. Roberta was a vigorous, noisy piece of ass. How noisy she’d get if he turned her out was a question. He didn’t trust her.

As he sat sipping whisky, he thought about going to a telephone and calling Cindy. He had found out something she didn’t think he knew: that she’d diddled von Keyserling. Well, what could he say? Betsy. Roberta.

Roberta was a piece of ass. She might be useful. No. It was useful not to cross her. Betsy was … Jesus! She was more. How could a man say no to Betsy? But Cindy. Cindy, for God’s sake, was the mother of his children. More than that. He loved her! Goddamn, he loved her! That was for sure. And she loved him, which was also for sure; and if she played around with Dietz, it was that: playing around and nothing more. He left her alone too much. What could he expect?

Roberta had changed, probably bathed, too. She swept into the bar as if she owned the place. She swept into every place as if she owned it. She’d bought two of the Burberry coats, apparently; she was wearing a woman’s version of the one she’d given him. When she took it off and tossed it casually over a chair, she revealed a tight black knit dress adorned with a heavy gold chain around her neck.

She lifted the chain and grinned at Angelo. “My late husband gave me this. It had a cross hanging on it.” She laughed. “Can you imagine?”

She sat down beside him, close to him, her hip firmly touching his.

“Glenfiddich?” he asked.

“Whatever Harry recommends.”

There were few people in the bar at that hour. Tourists were at dinner or on their way to the theater. Angelo signaled the bartender.

“You know something?” Roberta asked. “I’m by-God hungry.”

“How adventuresome are you?” he asked.

She rumbled with a throaty laugh.

“Willing to eat lambs’ balls?”

“If you eat ’em, buddy, I’ll eat ’em.”

When the bartender brought the drinks, Angelo asked him to ring up the Lebanese restaurant on Shepherd Market and book a table for him and his lady.

Angelo requested one order of lamb testicles as an appetizer for the two of them. Westerners who ate them did it more for the adventure than because they tasted good. They were in no sense nauseating, but they were definitely an acquired taste. Other parts of the lamb would be served as the entrée.

Otherwise, they ate hummus spread on crisp Lebanese bread, lots of wrinkly Greek olives, black and green, tomatoes, radishes, and carrots—all with two bottles of excellent Lebanese red wine.

“Business,” said Roberta when she had eaten two lamb testicles and was cleansing her palate with olives and wine. “Loren would like to kick your ass.”

Angelo glanced at the two Middle Eastern men at the next table, which was so close to theirs they could no doubt hear everything they were saying. The two men had been talking in Arabic, and if they understood what “kick your ass” meant, they showed no sign of it

“I’d like to kick his, but what specifically is going on?”

“He has it in mind to oppose the new car,” she said. “More to screw you than for any other reason I can discover.”

“Fine. I’ll do it with somebody else. I don’t need Bethlehem Motors.”

Roberta seized his hand and gripped it tightly. “I don’t need to watch two rams butt heads. If it came down to that, I know who’d win. Eventually, after a lot of shit. Lover, you can defuse Loren. You can get what you want and use his company to do it. Use your head and not your machismo.”

Angelo glanced around the room. “This is a rather public place to talk about this.”

The restaurant was brightly lighted and bustling. Waiters scurried around the dining room. With brisk efficiency the sommelier opened bottles of wine. Two thirds of the clientele
were Middle Eastern. The rest were tourists. The big windows looked out on a street where London’s most conspicuous hookers plied their trade.

“You know you’ll win,” she said. “The only question is whether you care enough about me to leave my husband sitting up and taking nourishment.”

“Be specific, Roberta.”

“All right. The whole key, as I’ve said to you before, is to make him
think
he’s important. What’s the
name of
the new car? If Loren named it, he’d—”

Angelo grinned. “I know what I want to call it,” he said. “Okay. Let Loren propose the name. I’m tired—I think the public’s tired—of cutesy-pie automobile names. Mustang. Pinto. Charger. Starfire. New Yorker. Duster. Impala. Hey! I once heard a salesman tell a customer, ‘This
isn’t
a Chevrolet. This is an Impala!’ Toronado. Regal. Roadmaster. God, there’s no end to it! The new car … I’d like to call it the 1800. The engine displacement is eighteen hundred cubic centimeters.”

Roberta frowned. “The
what
1800?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. The BM 1800. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, crap! Number One named his car company after his hometown, where nobody ever manufactured an automobile. The name has hung around the company’s neck like a goddamned albatross. Loren wants to look like he’s the guy in charge? Let him propose to the directors that the name of the company be changed to BM and the name of the new car be BM 1800.”

Roberta ran her tongue over her lips. “No way. I might agree with you about cutesy-pie names, but the American public isn’t ready for a car called just 1800. It’s got to have a name.”

“Like what?”

She smiled, at first just amused, then the smile spread into something wicked. “Hey!
Stallion.
For my Italian stallion. I’ll get Loren to suggest that name, and he’ll never guess what it means. It’ll be our secret, and every time we hear it we can laugh.”

“If he guesses, if he even gets the least suspicion in his mind, he’ll scuttle the project.”

“Believe me, he won’t. Leave that to me. Hey! It’s the kind of thing that makes him look big in his own eyes. He names the car. He renames the company. That’s the kind of thing that massages his ego. And believe me, he’s a man whose ego needs massaging.”

“Doesn’t take much, does it?”

“Don’t think that Loren is a total idiot.”

“Only fifty percent idiot,” said Angelo. “Hell, not even that. Just a guy who was shit on by his grandfather, who was an unparalleled expert at shitting on people.”

The elegant little room in Dukes Hotel had a fireplace, in which logs had been laid. All Angelo had to do was touch a match to the kindling underneath the logs, and the fire would catch and burn.

While he did this, Roberta threw aside her black dress, her bra, and her panties and waited for him in a black garter belt holding up dark stockings.

“I want to do something we’ve never done before,” she said. “I want to give you something you’ve never had before. What would that be, Angelo? Is there something you’ve
dreamed
of doing but never did?”

“I guess I’m kind of a square guy,” he said. “I like the regular stuff best.”

“Remember the night you spanked me?” she asked. “Did you like that?”

“Well…”

“Don’t give me ‘well,’ you bastard. You blistered my bottom. You better by God have enjoyed it! So, tell me. Did you like that?”

“Roberta…”

She grinned. “Except for the fact that they’d last and I’d have to explain them to Loren, I’d let you put welts on my backside—with your belt.”

“I’d rather fuck you, Roberta.”

“And
you better!.
But I was thinking of starters to get you up good and stiff.”

“I’m good and stiff now.”

“And all covered up. Let’s see.” She reached for him and began to open his clothes. “Oh, my God, you are, aren’t you?”

She helped him until he was naked, standing with his engorged phallus standing almost horizontal.

“Lover, how would you like to put that in my rear?”

“Have you ever done that, Roberta?”

She shook her head. Her face was flushed, and beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.

He shook his head. “No good,” he said.

“Why not? You think I can’t take it? I—”

“I’m sure you could take a fire extinguisher. Not the point. We do that, we can’t fuck.”

“Oh … You mean—”

Angelo grinned. “The microbiology that grows in that part of the human body is not suitable for another part of the body I’m thinking of. It causes vaginal infection. My father is a doctor. He used to say to me, ‘Angelo, whatever you do, don’t…’ My mother used to wonder if I might become a priest. My father knew that would never happen, so he gave me some practical advice.”

Roberta laughed. “You lie down on your back, lover,” she said. “I’m gonna climb on top. That way I can take you in deepest, and I’m gonna have you up to my belly button. After that, I’m gonna suck you dry, until you can’t come again and beg for mercy—even if you come fourteen times. You’re gonna remember Roberta as the best piece of ass you ever had. And I’ve got a notion I’m not the only woman named Hardeman you ever had.”

“This meeting of the board of directors of Bethlehem Motors, Incorporated, will come to order,” said Loren sonorously.

Angelo had counted votes—idly, knowing it was not necessary. The directors were Loren; his sister/aunt, Princess Anne Alekhine; his wife, Roberta; James Randolph, the director of the Hardeman Foundation; Professor William Mueller, administrative director of the foundation; retired congressman Alexander Briley; and Myron Goldman, vice president of Continental Detroit Bank, which held enough corporate notes to break the company if it called them.

Loren controlled the board. Besides his own vote, he could count on the votes of Randolph and Mueller for sure. Briley was an old political hack who lived on his congressional pension and the fees he received as director of half a dozen corporations, and he would vote as Loren suggested. That was four, a majority. Sometime Roberta might vote against her husband, but it wasn’t going to happen today. Anne would vote against him, if she felt like it; and what the banker would do was anybody’s guess. For sure, Loren had five votes. If he had decided to kill the new car, he would be able to do so.

He had obviously given some thought to the arrangement of the room. The directors sat around a table. Angelo sat in a chair behind them, against the wall, where corporate counsel also sat. The stenographer who would transcribe the meeting on her Stenotype sat beside Angelo.

“You have been given copies of the minutes of the last meeting of the board,” said Loren. “Without objection they will be received as written. You have copies of the treasurer’s report. Without objection it will be received as submitted. This is the first meeting of the directors since the death of my grandfather, and we have major decisions to make. Unless someone wishes to bring up something else, I would like first to take up the report of our consultant and vice president, Mr. Angelo Perino, who proposes that this company build a new automobile. No objection? Mr. Perino.”