The Stallion (1996) (35 page)

The door opened. Jeff and Kara came up the ladder, grinning.

“Next!”

John and Buffy descended into the front cabin. Jeff and Kara sat down and opened two more beers. Van and Anna said they wouldn’t have any more for now.

Jeff grinned impishly and said, “They don’t circumcise everybody in Europe, do they?”

“No. Only if parents specifically ask for it to be done.”

“You have to in this country. It’s the law.”

“No it isn’t,” said Kara.

“I always heard it was,” said Jeff.

“Well, my father’s a doctor. He ought to know.”

“Come to think of it, not all the guys at school are. Anyway … they didn’t do it to you, huh, Van?”

“No,” said Van very quietly. The other three were all staring at his penis, and he knew he was blushing. This was really too much, but he had no escape from it. “In Amsterdam,
where I was born, it is regarded as a religious rite only.”

“Did you go out for any sports in your schools?”

“‘Go out’?”

“Did you play any sports?”

“Oh, yes. Rugby especially.”

“That’s a rough game, isn’t it?”

“It can be very rough. Have you ever heard the joke about it? They say rugby is a game for hoodlums, played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen, played by hoodlums. And ice hockey is a game for hoodlums, played by hoodlums.”

The others laughed. Van was glad they had turned their attention away from his crotch.

Jeff resumed his explanation of American football.

John and Buffy came up. John nodded at Van.

“Uh, well, perhaps…,” Van murmured.

“Don’t be bashful,” said John. “Anna’s not.”

One small brass lamp on the bulkhead lighted the cabin. It was tiny and warm and cozy. It was equipped with two narrow bunks, with hardly enough room to stand between them. Van and Anna lay down facing each other. He was embarrassed to find his fully engorged organ pressing between her legs. She showed no sign of dismay but only looked at him with those appealing dark eyes of hers and offered her mouth to be kissed.

He kissed her warmly, more warmly than passionately. “Anna,” he whispered to her, “we will not take off the rest of your swimsuit.”

“No,” she said. “We mustn’t.”

“You can touch me, though, if you want to.”

She closed her hand around his shaft and instinctively knew what to do. Only a minute passed before he ejaculated into her hand and onto her legs.

“Anna,” he said. “I want you to understand that I love you. I will see no other girls until we are old enough to marry.”

Alicia invited the Perino family to Thanksgiving dinner. Her grandson Van Ludwige had come down from Harvard and was staying with her. Everyone gathered in her living room around a crackling fire in the formal marble-bordered fireplace. They nibbled hors d’oeuvres and sipped drinks.

Bill Adams and Angelo stood apart from the group for a few minutes of private talk.

Froelich & Green had at last made their offer. It was $625 per share, on the condition that F & G acquire a minimum of 51 percent of the stock in XB Motors. The price would be paid $150 per share in cash, $400 per share in warrants for stock in Froelich & Green, $75 per share in notes.

“I was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t backed off,” said Angelo, sipping from a martini.

“They had a difficult time raising the money,” said Bill. “I put the word around, which didn’t help them.”

“But they raised it,” said Angelo.

“Some very sharp guys are working with them,” said Bill. “They’ve got the hundred and fifty million dollars they’d need if all the XB stockholders accepted their offer. They can secure the notes. They’ve sold enough junk bonds to
cover those. It’s the warrants that are doubtful. They value their stock at four hundred and fifty dollars and offer warrants for it at four hundred dollars. But the warrants may turn out to be worthless.”

“If their stock isn’t worth four hundred dollars a share.”

“Precisely.”

Angelo shook his head. “I don’t understand how these guys can raise money. Hell, Boesky’s in jail. Milken is going there. The world has to be full of suckers.”

“Including one named Loren Hardeman the Third,” said Bill Adams.

Neither Van nor Anna could conceal what their eyes told anyone acute enough to see. The way she looked at him and the way he hovered over her attentively and lovingly was only a little short of conspicuous.

“What’s going on between those two?” Angelo asked Cindy when they were alone in their bedroom.

“They’re in love.”

“Christ! She’s fourteen!”

“He promised her he will not date any other woman and will wait for her until she’s old enough to marry him,” said Cindy. “She gave him the same promise.”

“Gimme a
break?
Don’t tell me they—”

“No. She swears not, and I believe her. She said they had chances last summer and agreed not to. I wish I could say the same for John and Buffy. He doesn’t confide in me, but I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“I did it when I was sixteen,” said Angelo.

“Well, you never asked me for my intimate autobiography, but I lost my virginity—lost it? Not the way to say it. I gave it away gladly when I was fourteen.”

Cindy stood before a long mirror, critically examining the red marks around her waist that had been left by the panty hose she had worn all afternoon and evening. Those things would take hours to disappear. Garter belts didn’t leave marks like that. She resolved to quit wearing panty hose. She avoided bras as much as she could, too, and when she
did wear one, it was sheer and flimsy and not too tight so that it wouldn’t mark her.

“Maybe we’re lucky in a way,” she said. “Our kids seem to be monogamous. In the age of AIDS, you have to think about that.”

“They don’t do drugs, either—do they?”

“Anna has beer now and then. She told me. I imagine John goes further. But I’ve seen no problem.”

Angelo lay on the bed, waiting for Cindy. He shook his head. “I’ve done a lot of things,” he said, “but I’ve never had a snort of coke. Did a little grass one time, but that’s all.”

“So did I,” said Cindy. “Back when I was hanging around the tracks, I used to share roaches. You could hardly live and not do it. But I’ve never tried anything harder.”

“You know something? We’re a couple of
old
farts. In a couple of years I’m going to be sixty years old!”

Cindy looked at him and grinned. He lay on his back, and his cock, standing just behind his balls, looked vaguely like the stake behind the last two arches on a croquet court. “You’re still young and handsome, my husband,” she said. “Will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Let Amanda paint you. I’ll put John somewhere else and put you beside me.”

Angelo ran his hands down his face. “If I can find time,” he said with a mock groan.

“Thirty-seven fuckin’ million!” Roberta yelled. “What the hell became of
two hundred and twelve million?

“We’ve been through it,” Loren protested impatiently. “Nineteen million more from the notes. That makes fifty-six. And the Froelich & Green stock is worth four hundred
and twenty-five dollars a share. When I exercise my warrants, I’ll get a hundred and six million more.”

“You believe that, you believe in the tooth fairy,” she snorted.

“If all I get out of it is the thirty-seven, that’ll come without capital gains tax, and I’ll wind up a wealthy man who can retire in comfort with a wife he loves, someplace where we can look at the ocean.”

“Ocean, my achin’ ass! What ocean? We were gonna live in
Paris!?

Roberta was drunk. He had found her drunk when he came home. For some odd reason she was dressed in a pair of blue jeans—something she almost never wore—and a plain white bra. She was not just drunk; she was slobbering drunk. He himself had overdone the Scotch on the way home, but she was out of control, weepy and profane and unsteady on her feet.

There was no reasoning with her, not when she was in this condition. He had seen her drunk before but never as drunk as this.

Nothing she said could make any difference. This afternoon he had signed the papers, selling his 250,000 shares of XB Motors to Froelich & Green. Their check for $37,500,000 was in his bank—in escrow only until March 1. Their notes and warrants were held by the bank, also in escrow.

What was more, the trustees of the Hardeman Foundation had been polled by telephone, and he had secured authority to sell the foundation’s stock, too. He had deposited $52,500,000 to an escrow account for the foundation.

The deal was done. The terms of the escrows had already been met. He had sold 60 percent of XB Motors to Froelich & Green: a clear controlling interest. That was why Roberta was so upset. She had become accustomed to dominating him. Well, it was one thing to tie him to the bed and beat his ass with a belt; it was quite another to browbeat him about his business.

“It’s done, Roberta,” he said. “You say I have good business judgment. You’ve said it repeatedly. Well, I’ve exercised my judgment.”

“You did it because you hate Angelo Perino more than you love the business your grandfather built!”

Loren smiled. “That son of a bitch and his electric car are kaput. Now, if I could just kaput him…”

Betsy took a cab from Kennedy Airport to the Perino house in Greenwich. She accepted a martini and sat down in the living room, almost tearful.

“It’s done! He sold out. He had enough flunkies on the board of trustees of the Hardeman Foundation to—”

“It’s not done,” said Angelo. “Here’s yesterday’s
Wall Street Journal.
Front page. Read it.”

The story read—

XB Motors Acquisition Challenged in Suit

by Michigan Attorney General

Special to
The Wall Street Journal

By Jane Loughlin

The sale of XB Motors stock by the Hardeman Foundation was challenged in a suit filed yesterday by Michigan attorney general Frank Fairfield. A temporary injunction, granted immediately by Judge Homer Wilkinson of Detroit Circuit Court, blocks for the moment the attempt by Froelich & Green, Incorporated, to take over the nation’s fourth-largest automobile manufacturer.

The Hardeman Foundation, established by the first Loren Hardeman, the founder of Bethlehem Motors, the corporate predecessor of XB Motors, holds 35 percent of the stock in XB. That stock is the foundation’s sole asset. The closely held stock is almost never traded, and its value has been estimated from as high as $800 to as low as $550 a share. Froelich & Green offered $625, of which only $150 is to be in cash, the rest being in notes and warrants.

The attorney general’s complaint describes the notes and warrants offered by Froelich & Green as “of highly questionable value.” In any event, the complaint goes
on, charitable trusts in Michigan are limited by statute law to investment in specific kinds of securities. The notes and warrants, he alleges, do not meet the requirements of the Michigan statutes.

“The Hardeman Foundation is the chief support of maternity clinics, vocational schools and worker retraining programs in several Michigan cities,” said Attorney General Fairfield. “We cannot stand by and allow its assets to be dissipated.”

Loren Hardeman III, the grandson of the founder, commented that from time to time over the years the big automotive company has failed to pay dividends or has paid only minimal dividends. “This sale gives the foundation more than fifty-two million dollars in cash,” he said. “It can invest that money in the very soundest of blue-chip securities and government bonds and actually have a better basis for its charitable gifts than it has now.”

Attorney Paul Burger, formerly a judge of the Michigan Supreme Court, representing several minority stockholders, including XB’s executive vice president, Angelo Perino, and Loren Hardeman Ill’s daughter, Elizabeth, Viscountess Neville, disagreed and said the sale “put the Hardeman Foundation in grave jeopardy.”

“But are we going to win this suit?” asked Betsy. “Surely Froelich & Green must have looked into the law before they raised the money and made the offer.”

“I’d guess they thought it would be all over before anyone could stop them,” said Angelo. “I’d guess that Loren didn’t believe you and I would go so far as to invoke the power of the Michigan attorney general.”

Betsy smiled slyly. “How’d you work that one, Angelo?” she asked. “Family friends?”

“No. The attorney general was a law clerk for two years to Paul Burger when he was a judge. Something else your father and his friends didn’t know.”

Betsy tapped the newspaper with one finger. “But is this suit based on sound law?”

“If Paul Burger thinks it is, it must be,” Angelo said firmly.

Loren sat behind his desk in the XB office building. He had been drinking and had a glass of Scotch on his desk. With him was Herbert Froelich, James Randolph, director of the Hardeman Foundation, and Ned Hogan, corporate counsel. Each of them had politely declined his offer of a drink.

“Whatever the outcome, this lawsuit will be pending for
years,”
said Loren. “In the meantime, Mr. Froelich will vote my twenty-five percent of the stock, and Jim Randolph will vote the foundation’s thirty-five percent. With that sixty percent and three of the five directors, we can rid this company once and for all of an executive vice president who had the balls to precipitate a lawsuit against us—that and his cockamamie electric car project.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Randolph. “Here is an order that was served on me at the gate just now.” He handed the papers to Hogan. “The Superior Court has appointed a conservator to manage the assets of the foundation until the issues raised in the suit have been resolved. The conservator is Benjamin Marple, assistant vice president of Detroit City Bank. Until the suit is resolved,
he’ll
vote the foundation’s stock.”

Struggling to focus his eyes, Loren turned to the lawyer. “Is that goddamned paper valid?” he demanded.