The Stallion (1996) (30 page)

“Didn’t it hurt?”

“Yes, it hurt, but it hurt
good?.
I tell you, Lin, if my father and mother had walked in right then, we’d have gone on till we were finished and talked about it afterward.”

“Jesus! Didn’t you guys use a
rubber?”

“We’ll have to think about that next time.”

“Buffy! You lucky bitch!
John Perino!”

“I love him, Lin. And he loves me, too. We talked about how we’d get married after we get out of school.”

Loren van Ludwige was fourteen years old. His father was proud of him. So was his mother. As had been agreed, he had finished his elementary schooling in an English public school and was now a student at l’École St. François Xavier in Paris.

If the choice had been his, Loren would not have been there. Nor would he have attended St. George’s, where his bare buns had been flogged, first by masters, then by upperclassmen performing their duty of hazing. He had not wanted to play rugby, or to run cross country, or to row a
scull. But he’d done it—and showered afterward under cold water. Knowing he would be sent to school in Paris later, he had studied French diligently and had won honors in the subject. He had won honors in math as well. His masters marked him deficient, though, in moral philosophy and economics.

At l’École St. François Xavier he was no longer beaten. His worst punishment there was boredom. He knew all the French he’d ever need to know, and the subtleties of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century grammar, as found in the plays of Racine and the essays of Montesquieu, did not interest him. Educated at St. George’s to regard Napoleon as a monster, he was intrigued to discover that the emperor was a great national hero to the French. His instructors admired Loren’s mastery of numbers, but engineering courses were not offered at l’École. The curriculum emphasized the arts. He was expected to draw and paint, to compose a work of music, and to write a play—all in the manner of some French artist of another century, precisely identifying the influence and elucidating it in notes accompanying his work.

None of the students were allowed outside the walls of the school’s grounds, except when they went together in the company of an instructor to visit the Louvre, Les Invalides, or some other museum or monument.

Loren was intelligent enough to know he was receiving a superb education. But he looked forward to the day when he would move to an American university and taste the freedom he had heard American students enjoyed.

The boarding schools his parents had chosen for him had given him one more thing he appreciated. At St. George’s his schoolmates had not liked the name Loren any better than he liked it himself. They had called him Ren. The French pronounced Loren
Loh-rawn
and would have called him Ron if he had not objected. He asked his classmates to call him Van, for van Ludwige. They liked that. To the French, “Van” was
vin
—wine. So he became Van. Some of his instructors innocently called him Van van Ludwige. To his father’s annoyance, he began to write his name Van
Ludwige. Betsy was amused that he had dropped his first name, but she still thought of him as Loren the Fourth and didn’t tell her father he had renounced the name.

Van had inherited the best of the Hardeman genes, plus some very good ones from Max van Ludwige. He was an exceptionally handsome, tall, well-built young man.

At fourteen he had the same problem many fourteen-year-old boys confronted—he was sexually mature and sexually deprived. So was his roommate, Charles Bizien. They looked to each other to solve the problem—promising, however, that they were not “that kind of fellow” and would turn to females as soon as an opportunity arose.

Their sexual encounters were dangerous. Monitors patrolled the halls of the dormitories and could walk in on them at any moment. The first one who woke, probably to go to the bathroom, at, say, three or four in the morning, woke the other.

They did something that was a tradition at l’École St. François Xavier: rather than go down the hall to the toilet at three or four in the morning, they pissed out the window. It was so common that windows in the dormitory were called
pissoirs.
Whoever woke first would stir his roommate before he went to the window. The one who had not wakened first paid a penalty: to have to take into his mouth the final drops of urine that could never be gotten rid of and remained for the roommate to taste. They sucked each other off in the hour before dawn. They rarely missed a night. Nearly every pair of roommates did it.

As Van and Charles were both Europeans, neither boy was circumcised. Neither one could imagine how a man could enjoy sex if his most sensitive nerves had been cut off and thrown away. They pinched each other’s foreskins between their fingers and used their tongues and lips on them to further animate their pulsing penises.

They did not attempt anal penetration. It didn’t appeal to them, though it did to some of the boys at l’École St. François Xavier. For variation, they masturbated, sometimes rubbing their cocks together, sometimes each boy manipulating his own, sometimes each doing the other.

They proclaimed themselves undying friends who would love each other all their lives. Each one, though, declared he wanted a girl and would love her even more.

On the night when John Perino took Buffy Mead’s virginity—and gave her his—Van Ludwige and Charles Bizien sucked each other for the hundredth or hundred-fiftieth time. Because of the time difference, it may have occurred at the same hour.

At that hour, too, Cindy was in bed with Marcus in Amanda’s studio apartment. Betsy, who had by now given birth to a daughter by Viscount Neville and had just learned she was pregnant again, awoke and roused Angelo. Her husband was trying a case at the Winchester assizes, and she had been unable to resist the opportunity to be with Angelo at least one more time.

Loren and Roberta sat over lunch with Betsy in the Neville town house facing Grosvenor Square. It was a Regency house, not entirely as elegant as the flat Betsy had given up on Regent’s Park, but roomier, with lots of space for the three children living at home: John Hardeman and Charlotte and George Neville. The viscount’s mother had moved out reluctantly, consenting to do so only when she learned that three young children were about to move in. She had taken most of her furniture, which had suited Betsy perfectly. At Angelo’s suggestion—though the origin of the suggestion was known to almost no one—she had engaged Marcus Lincicombe as a consultant to help her explore the shops of London for the furniture and art that turned the house into a showplace.

Most of the money spent on the refurnishing of Neville House had been Betsy’s.

Betsy was thirty-five years old. Another secret, known to Angelo and her husband and to no one else, was that Betsy, now the mother of five, had submitted to surgery that made it impossible for her to become pregnant again. She was no longer the playgirl she had been for many years, nor was she yet the incipient matron; she was an impressively handsome
woman, ageless in the beauty that promised to remain with her all her life.

Her elegance did not approach that of Princess Anne Alekhine—she remained too earthy for that—but the Viscountess Neville had been presented to the queen, in spite of the fact that she had an illegitimate son and daughter, and had carried herself off so well that the London tabloids pounced on her and declared her a new celebrity.

The first course of their lunch was cold borscht. Loren’s third Scotch sat beside his soup plate. He was in a Hardeman mood.

“Can you really promise your husband that his children are his and not Angelo Perino’s?” he asked.

“Fuck off, old boy,” Betsy replied. “Can you really promise anyone I’m your daughter? Anne wasn’t your father’s daughter. Am I yours? Or did Number One do it again?”

Loren flushed deep red. “Damn it, you go too far.”

Roberta fluttered her hands. “Stop it, you two! Loren … Betsy. Please.”

Betsy sighed. “In the Hardeman family, nobody knows who is what. How can any of us be sure of anything? I’m sure of one goddamned thing. You’ve got two children, Father, who are really Angelo’s.”

“Betsy! What the hell?”

“Two XB Stallions. What’s kept the company alive. Without them—”

“No one’s going to argue about that,” Roberta interjected. “The man’s an automobile genius.”

“The man’s a genius
thief,
” said Loren. “He means to steal everything that’s ours. Everything! Will you ever be able to get it through your heads that Perino’s a mafioso?”

“Without him, there wouldn’t be anything to steal,” said Betsy calmly. “He bailed out Number One’s ass, and he’s bailed out yours.”

“You give him too much credit,” said Roberta. “And your father deserves more credit than you give him.”

“For what?” Betsy sneered.

“You say there’d be no company without the Stallions. Well, there’d be no Stallions if it hadn’t been for your
father. Angelo Perino is an engineer. Without very capable management, there would have been no money to build the cars.”

“It was Angelo’s name that moved the New York banks to let loose the four hundred and seventy-five million dollars,” said Betsy.

“Because he meddled,” said Loren. “I could have gotten the money.”

“Where?”

“My friend Herbert Froelich could have come up with it.”

Betsy smiled and nodded. “You’d have had to pledge every share you own and every share the Hardeman Foundation owns. Froelich would have pressed for payment before the Stallion began to make money, and he’d have taken over the company.”

“What do you suppose Perino plans to do?”

“He’ll be the next CEO of XB Motors,” said Betsy bluntly.

“Over my dead body.”

“That way or any other way.”

“I’ve got a big surprise for you, slut. When I cash out—”

Betsy nodded. “I know. There won’t be any XB Motors for Angelo to take away from you. But don’t count on cashing out. It may not work.”

“I can do it,” said Loren stubbornly. “You just watch me.”

Angelo and Betsy lay in each other’s arms on a king-size bed in his hotel suite in Tokyo. Angelo was there to talk to Tadashi Komatsu. With her usual perspicacity, Betsy had learned he was going to Japan and where he would be staying. She had somehow managed to convince her husband that she needed to fly to Detroit, which is where he thought she was. In fact, that is where she had changed planes.

“I had to see you as soon as possible,” she said. “He’s gonna do it. He’s going to sell out.”

“Well … he has control,” said Angelo quietly.

“Right. Look, it’s like this … Number One gave my father and Anne each ten percent of the stock in Bethlehem Motors many years ago. My father lost half of his when my mother divorced him, so she owns five percent. Then, under Number One’s will, my father got another twenty-five percent, which made him thirty percent, but he gave five percent to Roberta. I got fifteen percent. Number One handed out three percent to employees he thought were loyal to him. He funded the Hardeman Foundation with thirty-five percent. The foundation will vote its stock whatever way my father says, so that gives him control.”

“You and Anne are trustees,” said Angelo, “but you are outnumbered.”

“Randolph and Mueller are my father’s creatures—not to mention that he’s made Roberta a trustee. Number One was stupid when he let my father appoint Randolph and Mueller trustees. In those years he wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“So you have fifteen percent, Anne has ten percent, Alicia has five, and I have two.”

“A few short of a majority,” she said wryly.

“That thirty-some percent may be more significant than you think. I’ve been talking to Paul Burger. Minority shareholders have rights. I’d talk to Paul if I were you. We might be able to elect a director. Maybe even two.”

“What difference would it make?”

“Well, I’m going to confront Loren with a big new proposition. That’s why I’m here in Japan. A new car. A totally new car. For the twenty-first century.”

Betsy nuzzled his neck. “How often do I get to be with you, my one love?” she whispered. “Fuck cars. We can talk about cars and directors in a London restaurant, with George listening. Goddamnit! I want to make love with you! Why else did I fly all the way to Japan? Two nights … three nights at best. Then I have to go home. Tell me you love me, Angelo Perino! Tell me that, and I’ll reward you. Tell me that and the Viscountess Neville, a chum of the queen, is gonna suck your cock till you can’t come anymore!”

“When we repay all the loans, Froelich will move again,” said Angelo to Bill Adams. They sat together in the Four Seasons, over a lunch of crab cakes.

“He wants that state-of-the-art plant you built to manufacture the new Stallion,” said Bill. “He could sell that to—he could sell it to any number of companies. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering. Any one of the Big Three car companies would like to have it. The Japanese would buy it. The Germans. The Russians would buy it if they could find the money. Anyway, he—”

“All Froelich has to do is quit manufacturing automobiles,” said Angelo. “Kill the Stallion.”

Bill Adams nodded. “He can sell the plant for what he proposes to pay for the stock. Then he unloads everything else the company owns, as profit.”

“Betsy says Loren will sell his stock. On top of that, he’ll tell the trustees of the Hardeman Foundation to sell its stock—and since they were Number One’s creatures and are now his, they’ll do what he says. A foundation is better off with a hundred million in cash than—”

“There’s the key,” said Bill.

“Key?”

“‘In cash.’ Suppose Froelich & Green can’t come up with enough cash to buy the Hardeman Foundation’s stock plus Loren’s? Then they’ll offer something besides cash: stock in their own company, warrants, notes, whatever. Loren Hardeman might be fool enough to accept what they offer. But the foundation is subject to Michigan laws that limit the kinds of securities a charitable trust can buy and hold. Blue-sky securities offered by Froelich & Green won’t qualify.”