The Stallion (1996) (27 page)

“No.”

“Really?”

“It’s Betsy’s car,” said Angelo. “It’s an ego trip for her. She and Princess Anne Alekhine are going to make personal appearances all over the country. But they’ll never make that car sell. People who buy it are going to love it. I love it. But the country’s not ready for it. There’s no market niche for it. The original Thunderbird was a beautiful little two-seater, and everybody loved it, but it didn’t sell. They turned it into a bathtub on wheels, and
then
it sold.”

“Then why’d you do it, Angelo?”

Angelo glanced at Cindy. “Betsy can be persuasive,” he said. “Anyway, we’ve learned some important lessons from it. The epoxy resin material is a complete success.”

“And you’ve got that to yourself,” said Bill, grinning.

“We’ve
got that to ourselves,” said Angelo. “CINDY, Incorporated, has many parents.”

Alicia spoke. “Who was it that said success always has many parents but failure is an orphan?”

Cindy drove her S Stallion, for the time being leaving her Porsche in the garage. She quickly discovered its shortcomings. Vision to the rear was limited by the narrow, sloping window. The driver had to rely on the outside mirrors. It was so low slung that it was invisible to drivers in other lanes, particularly to truck drivers. She learned to accelerate rapidly when parallel to a truck on its right side—after two truck drivers innocently tried to change lanes to the right and nearly ran over her.

In fact, that’s what happened to an S Stallion driver in Boston. The fatal accident was featured by all the news media.

Even so, Marcus Lincicombe was determined to have a Super Stallion, and after she had driven hers for three months, Cindy got Angelo’s permission to sell hers to Marcus. When he was sideswiped by a taxi on Lexington Avenue and the epoxy resin body yielded and then sprung out again, leaving the cab with a collapsed fender and the Super Stallion with no visible damage, that story also received nationwide attention.

Marcus Lincicombe was a small, precise, intense man of thirty-three. He was bald, having only a fringe of black hair around the sides of his head. He wore gold-rimmed round spectacles and smoked a pipe, which, when it was not lighted, he carried in a pocket of his tweed jacket. He was fussy about the pipe, constantly cleaning it. He was fussy in the way he loaded it with an aromatic tobacco. In fact, some people thought he was fussy about everything.

He had been an asset to the gallery. As Dietz had suggested, he had a fine eye for art; and because of him they displayed and sold a wider variety of pieces than they had sold before. He had bought into VKP Galleries, but even so, he didn’t demand that the name be changed to reflect his interest. Dietz was now an employee. Marcus was a minority owner.

He was one of the world’s foremost collectors of and authorities on netsuke, the tiny ivory carvings once used in the manner of buttons on the sashes of Japanese gentlemen.
Small personal possessions were once hung from sashes by using netsuke as fasteners. Genuine antique netsuke were valuable collector’s items. They were also the basis of a cottage industry in twentieth-century Japan, and some of the modern ones were worth collecting, too. Netsuke were carved in the images of men and women, animals and birds. Some of the most prized ones were images of men and women having sex.

Marcus displayed parts of his own collection in the gallery, and the gallery offered netsuke for sale—its provenance precisely labeled. Cindy had wondered if selling netsuke would not turn VKP Galleries into a Fifth Avenue-style purveyor of pseudo-Oriental, pseudoantique junk, but she quickly learned to appreciate the artistic value of what Marcus collected and sold.

He was what she was: the heir to some family money, which made it possible for him to be an art collector and dealer. He lived beyond the earnings he achieved in the gallery.

His favorite place for lunch was the Bull & Bear, in the Waldorf. He invited Cindy to join him there.

He introduced her to the maître d’. “Remember her. This is Mrs. Angelo Perino—Cindy Perino. If she comes without me, give her a table you’d give me.”

Oversized martinis were a specialty of the house; and free at last of pregnancy and nursing, Cindy called for a Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist.

With their drinks before them, they talked for a few minutes about a show they were assembling. Marcus used his apartment the way Cindy had used hers: as an intimate gallery for showing small collections to little groups of likely buyers. He was not an admirer of Amanda Finch, certainly not in the way that Cindy and Dietz were, and he mentioned that he did not want to offer any of her work at a dinner they were planning.

“We don’t have to show her every time we invite people in for something special,” said Cindy. “But you have to admit, she makes money for us.”

“A not inconsiderable consideration,” said Marcus gravely.

It was difficult for Cindy to know whether he was being
sincere or facetious when he made a pronouncement like that. She smiled and did not respond.

He was not an easy man to know. He was mysterious, probably intentionally so. His precise little smiles were meaningful, but what meaning was behind them was all but impossible to guess.

He smiled now. “I should like to make you a small present,” he said. “Would you accept it?”

“Marcus, I don’t know. What is it?”

He took from his jacket pocket—the one opposite the pocket that bulged with his pipe—a little red velvet bag, closed with a drawstring. He handed it to her.

She opened the bag and pulled out an exquisite netsuke. Not more than an inch and a half in any dimension, it was so finely carved that it portrayed what it portrayed not only accurately but in detail. Two tiny ivory figures were having sex. The woman’s tongue was out, and she was licking the man’s lingam. The middle finger of his right hand was in her furrow. So carefully were they portrayed that the tension in their bodies was apparent.

Cindy understood that the carving was worth thousands of dollars. To accept it from him—and to accept so erotic a piece—would alter the nature of their relationship.

“I don’t know what to say, Marcus.”

“Say you think it’s beautiful.”

She nodded. “I think it’s beautiful.”

“It’s about a hundred years old. It was done by one of the finer carvers. He seems to have specialized in this sort of thing.”

“I’m hesitant to accept a gift like this from you,” she said.

“The subject?”

“The value.”

“I’d like for you to have it.”

“What does it suggest, Marcus? That this couple could be you and me?”

He blushed. “Oh, no! Though … though nothing would be more wonderful. But no. I just thought of it as one of the better of the pieces in my collection, and I wanted you to have it—as a mark of my respect.”

She smiled at him. “You are being disingenuous,” she said.

He picked up the netsuke and turned it over and over in his hand. “I don’t deny I would like for us to become closer friends,” he said. He placed the netsuke again in her hand, letting his fingers linger on hers.

Cindy put the netsuke in its velvet bag and the bag in her purse. “This is more than just kind of you, Marcus,” she said.

She had let him become a closer friend.

“He can’t decide whether he’s happy or sad,” Roberta told Angelo.

They sat over a room-service dinner. Since the waiter would not return until he was called for, Roberta had stripped to her garter belt and stockings. She exulted in displaying herself to him and had complained that he did not provide her with enough opportunities to do it. She had no sense at all that he no longer wanted to do it. She had no idea that he regarded her as gross—and suspected she may have acted with Loren to kill Burt Craddock. For his part, he was not really certain anymore what motivated her to come to him.

Loren was in Florida, meeting with the Southern dealers, which left her free to spend the evening, though not the night, with Angelo in his suite in the hotel in the Renaissance Center. In a very small sense, she reminded him of the way Betsy had once been if he refused to see her anymore, he could not be sure how she would react and what she would do.

He could not tell Roberta to put her clothes back on, but he took no pleasure in looking at her. He knew she meant to
use him anyway she could. Okay. He could play that game at least as well as she could. What could he get from her?

“I know what he’s happy about,” said Angelo. “The S Stallion.”

She shrugged. “I had to talk him out of having a champagne party to celebrate the termination of production.”

“A lovely fellow, Loren. He made his own little contribution to the death of the S.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he planted stories in every newspaper and magazine he could, reporting what a failure the car was, how dangerous it was. All behind the scenes, trying to keep his name out of it, he did a job on the Super Stallion like Nader did on the Corvair.”

“You’ve got that one wrong, Angelo.”

“The hell I do. Did he really think I wouldn’t find out?”

“He
does
have reason to hate you.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“I don’t give a damn about him,” said Roberta. “But I give a damn about
me.
The survival of XB Motors is more important to me than it is to him.”

“I don’t give a damn about that either,” said Angelo. “I’ve
ceased
to give a damn about it.”

“Kid me not,” said Roberta. “You’ve admitted to me more than once that the only real thing in your life is building cars. Hell, man, you like building cars more than you like having your cock sucked. I hate that old cliché ‘fire in the gut,’ but, man, building cars is what lights the fire in your gut.”

Angelo drew a deep breath and sighed. “And XB is the only company I can get control of to build cars the way I want to.”

“The Big Three would take you on and be overjoyed to have you. But you’d have to work—”

“Within committees,” he finished the sentence. “Inside management.”

“And Angelo Perino won’t work that way,” she said. “Angelo Perino doesn’t like organizations, will not abide hierarchy, won’t call anyone his boss. I like that about you. I don’t call anyone boss either. Never did and never will.”

“I put my cock on the anvil for the S Stallion. I can see why Loren is happy it failed.”

“It didn’t fail, lover,” Roberta corrected. “America failed. The country failed the car.”

“Same thing,” said Angelo. “Rationalizations don’t help.”

She stood up and walked to the window, carrying with her a glass of red wine. She stood there for a moment. She had to be visible to hundreds of people looking out of hundreds of windows in the great Ren Center complex. Angelo rushed over and pulled the cord to close the drapes.

Roberta smiled lazily at him, letting him see she had liked the idea that people might have seen her. She returned to the table and sat down over their dinner.

“The Stallion is in trouble,” she said quietly.

“It’s four years old,” said Angelo. “It was
my
idea to continue a model several years, so buyers wouldn’t have it shoved in their faces that come October they were driving what was conspicuously last year’s car. We’ve made a few cosmetic changes, but essentially we’re still offering the eighty-one car. The time has come for a completely new model. Loren and his board don’t want to do it.”

“Money,” she said.

“No business makes money without spending money,” said Angelo.

“They’re determined they won’t make a car with an epoxy resin body. They say that’s what you want because you own the American rights to the Shizoka epoxy resin process.”

Angelo shrugged. “Loren and his board of directors think in terms of their own morality. Because they cheat, they assume everyone else does.”

“Apart from that,” she asked, “what would you do with the Stallion?”

“Restyle it,” said Angelo. “Downsize it a little. There’s very little market anymore for what used to be called an American family car, a car big enough to haul six people. Families who want to cram six in a vehicle buy vans. Look at the cars on the roads. Ninety percent of them are carrying just one person.”

“A whole new model,” she said.

“Which we can’t make and sell for an acceptable price, using the obsolete old Sundancer plant. I’ve talked about robotic welders and all kinds of other technology.
Essential,
Roberta. You say you want the company to survive? The twenty-first century is coming. XB has got to be a twenty-first-century company.”

“Would you come back as a vice president if you could make the changes you want?”

“No. Keijo and I are doing all right with the epoxy resin. A new airplane is going up with it next month. I’m still a well paid consultant to XB. I make my recommendations, even if they don’t follow them. Roberta, at XB I’m up to my ass in midgets. It’s nothing but frustration. And that’s apart from the fact that Loren, and others, would like to … well, maybe not kill me literally, but destroy me. I’d have to protect my back every minute. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”

“And you’re not building cars,” she said. “Where’s the fire in the gut?”

“I may go to Japan. Maybe I can do better with Shizoka.”

“Don’t kid yourself. No Japanese company is going to give you autonomy.”

“And Loren would?”

“Loren faces two possibilities,” she said. “The company’s in trouble again. He changes things or he sells out.”

“The raiders are still out there?”

“They figure they can get it cheap and make something out of it.” She grinned. “Hey, the first thing they’ll do if they get the company is offer you the presidency.”

Angelo shook his head. “And let me build cars? I doubt it.”

“Tuck your goddamned pride in a little bit, Angelo,” said Roberta. “Using a little bit of smarts, you can be a vice president again, with more power than you ever had.”

He shook his head again. “Fuck it, Roberta. Why would I want to buy grief? Besides, what makes you think Loren and his lackeys would—”