The Stallion (1996) (22 page)

“I want you to do something for me,” she said.

“Okay. I say okay without even knowing what you want.”

“You haven’t built
my car
yet. The Stallion is successful,
but I wouldn’t be caught dead driving one. Whatever happened to the Betsy?”

“I’ve been busy staving off bankruptcy,” he said. “And protecting my back against your father’s knives.”

“I want my car, Angelo. You can’t call it the Betsy. But I want you to build a car
you
can be proud of and
I
can be proud of. That’s what the Stallion is good for: to generate the revenues that will make it possible for you to build
my
car.”

“I’m proud of the Stallion, Betsy.”

“Sure. And with good reason. But you grit your teeth every time you drive it. There was a story in
Financial Times
to the effect that Cindy drove hers for two weeks and will not drive it anymore. She drives a Porsche. Where’s
our
Porsche, Herr Doktor Engineer Perino?”

“I couldn’t shove a sports car past the XB board of directors with a bulldozer.”

“What Angelo wants, Angelo gets,” she said. “And so does Betsy. I want to be able to drive a car from our company on European roads and be able to say, ‘Here, you fuckers, look what
my
company can do!
My
company and
my
lover, Angelo Perino, built this!’ Like they wrote on late-medieval works of art:
AP fecit.
It means, ‘Angelo Perino made this.’ Huh?”

“Tempting,” he said. “Shizoka is working with a new material: epoxy resin. You can build extremely strong but extremely light bodies with it. A muscle car doesn’t need a muscle engine if it doesn’t have to lug around tons of steel.”

“I want to be able to pass a Porsche or Ferrari on the Corniche. Can you do it?”

Angelo nodded. “I can do it.”

“Then
do
it.”

He sighed. “Jesus Christ, Betsy! Just when I have a success under my belt and—”

“That’s your life, my wonderful, loving man. You don’t sit around congratulating yourself. You
do
! That’s the point. You
do.
And Betsy will be behind you every step of the way. Angelo, if I had to
kill
my father to get him out of your way—”

“Betsy, Jesus Christ!”

“Well … you know what I mean and what I don’t mean.”

“Betsy—”

“My son
will be Number Four,” she declared. “He’ll be good enough. Among the things he’ll be good enough to do is to appreciate you and let you build cars the way you want to build cars, without interference. All we have to do is brush Number Three out of the way. That shouldn’t take much more than a flyswatter for people like you and me. I may never be married to you, my love. But you and I are going to take the company and run it. And whatever scruples discourage you from doing,
I
’ll do. I did something already. I can do it again.”

“What are you talking about, Betsy, for Christ’s sake?”

“Christ has nothing to do with it. Forget I said it.”

“Betsy…”

Her eyes turned glittering hard, like two chips of ice. “Forget it,” she muttered.

Angelo sighed and shook his head. He guessed she had come close to a highly significant confession.

She grinned. “Remember our Arab strap? It’s waiting for us in my bedroom. Let’s eat and get on with things.”

The annual meeting of XB dealers was held in Detroit in April.

Betsy came. She opened a hospitality suite in the Renaissance Center and invited the dealers. There she presided as a princess, a vivacious, stylishly dressed personality who could trade jokes with small-town automobile dealers as easily as she discussed incunabula with London booksellers. Her hospitality suite was far more popular than Loren’s.

Hanging on the wall behind the bar in her suite was a framed designer’s drawing of a sleek, low-slung yellow sports car. The drawing featured a logo—

“Hey, Tom. You think you could sell that?”

She asked every dealer the same question. A few expressed doubts. Most of them said they were sure they could sell the 2000.

“I could sure sell it if I had
you
working my sales floor, Miss Hardeman,” said Tom Mason.

She grinned. “How would the car do without me?”

“There’d be a limited market for it, quite frankly. But I think we could sell a few. The problem of course is—”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted him. “Here’s Angelo. I want him to hear what the problem will be.”

She gestured to Angelo. He walked across the room to join her and the dealer.

“Tom Mason, Angelo Perino. Tom was about to tell me about a problem he might have selling the 2000. I thought you ought to hear what he has to say.”

Angelo had met most of the dealers, including this one. Mason was a heavy-set, flush-faced, jolly man. In his agency in Louisville, Kentucky, he also sold Chiisais and BMWs. He was a straightforward, practical man who had sold Sundancers and had been glad when the Stallions replaced them. Angelo understood that, like most of the dealers, Mason felt no loyalty whatsoever to XB Motors and would dump the line and sell another make if he saw any good reason to. Angelo’s job was to make cars; Mason’s job was to sell them. He was good at it. He had continued to sell Sundancers even when they were losing market share precipitously. He said that people who came to his agency came to buy cars from Mason and didn’t much care what line he sold.

“So what problem do you see, Tom?” Angelo asked.

“All your dealers will have to stock a whole new line of parts,” said Mason. “And we probably won’t sell great numbers of that car.”

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” said Angelo. “Under the 2000 shell there’ll be a Stallion power train and chassis. We’ll bore out the cylinders to get two hundred more c.c.’s. The engine will be fuel injected, so no carbs. You’ll have to stock kits of parts for the fuel system. Also for the instrument panel. Finally, there’s the body. It’s going to be made of epoxy resin. You’ll have no bodywork to do in the old sense. The stuff is extremely resilient. Little dings and creases will simply spring back out. If it’s punctured, you can patch it. If a part is really torn up, you just detach it and replace it. There’s no painting; the color goes all the way through the material.”

“Meaning we have to carry body parts in all the colors?” asked Mason.

“There will only be one color, at least at first. Yellow. If we’re a big success, maybe we’ll add a red one.”

“What price?”

“We’re not sure. Think in terms of a hundred and fifty percent of the price of a Stallion.”

“Look at the picture,” said Betsy. “Isn’t it
beautiful!.”

The car in the drawing had a wedge-shaped front sloping up between the fenders. The headlights were set into the fronts of the fenders. The windshield sloped sharply back to a low roof. The car was so low that the diameter of the wheels was half its height. It looked sleek and fast.

“When will we see these cars?” asked Mason.

Angelo shrugged. “It’s a drawing, Tom. We’ve done a little of the engineering work, but the company has not committed itself to building it.”

“Is Mr. Hardeman committed to it?” Mason asked Betsy.

She smiled. “My father is going to build it whether he likes it or not.”

It was past midnight when Angelo said good night to the last dealer and returned to Betsy’s suite. She had closed her bar and locked the door. When he knocked she was emptying ashtrays and flushing the ashes and butts down a toilet. The hotel staff would clean up the suite in the morning, but she couldn’t suffer another minute of the wretched stench from the ashtrays.

She asked who was there before she opened the door. “Pour us something,” she said to him as she closed and chained the door again. “I’ll be finished with what I’m doing in a minute.”

He decided to take the time to mix martinis. While he was pouring and stirring, Betsy went in her bedroom and stripped naked. He was behind the bar, and she stood and stared at the drawing of the XB 2000. She lifted and massaged her breasts, newly freed from the bra that had confined them all day.

“That’s gonna be a
car,”
she said.

“If we ever get it built,” said Angelo.

“We’ll get it built,” she said confidently. She accepted the martini he handed her, sipped, and said, “You and I are unbeatable.”

“I hope—”

She was interrupted by a firm knock on the door.

“Betsy! I need to talk to you!”

“Just what I need,” she muttered to Angelo. “My father.” Angelo realized there was no way out of the suite except through the door on which Loren was knocking. Betsy pushed him toward the door to her bedroom.

“Daddy, I’m not dressed.”

“Well,
get
dressed and let me in.”

“All right. It’ll take a minute.”

She had a black silk kimono in her bedroom closet. She pulled it on. “It may be good for you to hear this,” she said to Angelo as she left the bedroom and closed the door.

“Daddy, what do you want in the middle of the night?”

Loren lurched into the suite. He was drunk. He pointed at the drawing of the 2000. “Where the hell did you get that? Where the hell do you get off telling our dealers we are going to build a piece of junk like that?”

“We are going to build it, Daddy. That’s the Betsy that Number One promised me.”

“Number One is dead! That’s a car Angelo Perino promised you! You think I’m a fool?”

“Great-grandfather promised me a car I could be proud of.”

“How many millions of dollars do you want us to throw into that …
plaything?”

“Whatever it takes,” she said.

Loren glanced around. “Who’s in your bedroom?” he asked.

“Whoever it is, he’ll punch your lights out if you open that door.”

Loren staggered, then sat down abruptly on a couch. “Your great-grandfather called you a slut. To my face he told me my daughter is a slut.”

“Do you know what he called
you?”

“I don’t want to know. He was a rotten old bastard.” Betsy walked to the bar and picked up the martini Angelo
had mixed her. “You have no idea how rotten. He called you a masochist. He said you let Roberta beat you with a belt Wherever could he have gotten an idea like that?”

Loren blanched. “He was … crazy!”

“Was he? He had videotapes of you. And of me. Casa Hardeman was wired.”

“Where are those tapes now?”

“I took them. He showed them to me in his room that night—I mean, the night he died. I was there when it happened, you know. You remember, he ordered me to come to his room that night. He’d watched the tape of me and decided I could do the same for him. I mean, I
was
doing something unusual. He—”

“Are you telling me that Number One wanted you to—”

“Why do you think he ordered me to his room? He showed me my tape, he showed me your tape, and ordered me to do for him what I was doing on my tape.”

“With who?”

“Never mind with who. Let me show you what killed him, Daddy.” She pulled her kimono open. “When he saw, he began to choke.”

“You didn’t call for help?”

“He didn’t need help. He died quite handily, all by himself. But lucky for us, I’d seen the tapes. I gathered them all up.”

“Where are they now?”

She closed the kimono. “Never mind where they are. They’re where you can’t get your hands on them.”

Loren struggled to his feet. “Why should I believe any of this?”

Betsy shrugged. “You want to tell me Roberta doesn’t put angry red welts across your ass with your belt? Don’t you tell her how great it is and beg to her to do more? Didn’t you let her do it to you in a guest room in the house in Palm Beach? Think, Daddy! How else would I know?”

Loren struggled to reach the door. He stopped and looked at the bedroom door. “I bet anything the wop’s in there,” he mumbled.

“Actually, it’s the boy who’s gonna clean up the room,” she sneered. “As soon as we have a quickie.”

Loren lurched for the bedroom door and threw it open. He lunged through just in time to meet Angelo’s fist, which caught him full on the jaw and knocked him off his feet. He lay on his back, dazed, shaking his head.

“Get up and get your ass out of here, Loren. And quit calling me wop. Some other people can, but you can’t.”

Loren had to struggle to get back on his feet. “I’ll call Cindy,” he muttered. “Just as soon as I get back to my room.”

Betsy stopped him. “How would you like a full public airing of your love life with Roberta,
Daddy?
I mean, I can show your tape to anybody, not just to Angelo.”

Loren snapped his head back and forth, glaring at Betsy, then at Angelo. “This isn’t the end,” he said darkly. “Between us. You’ll both live to regret this night.”

While the hotel staff cleaned up the living room of the suite, Betsy and Angelo showered together and enjoyed each other one more time before she began receiving dealers and he went to Cobol Hall to walk around the display of Stallions and talk with more dealers.