The Stallion (1996) (37 page)

“I’m old enough to remember that the original Henry Ford was a great admirer of Hitler,” said Tom.

Betsy nodded. “On the other hand,” she said, “a camel is a horse put together by committee.”

“If I know Angelo, he’ll run the corporation with an iron hand.”

“While he lasts.”

Tom finished his martini, as had she, and he reached for the pitcher and poured for both of them. “Tell me about the electric car,” he said.

“Angelo will have to tell you. It won’t be a runabout for old ladies, I’ll tell you that. Everything depends on it. Initially, it may depend on you, on how you vote as a director.”

“I’ve got a lot of respect for Angelo.”

“Tom, so do I. I wanted to marry him, and I fuck with him every chance I can get. But I’d like to have
your
judgment as to whether or not this electric car is—is life or death for XB Motors.”

Tom nodded and swallowed half of his second martini. “Where are we having dinner?” he asked.

“Room service,” she said. “It wouldn’t be wise for us to be seen together in a Detroit restaurant.”

“Oh…”

“Tom”—she grinned again—“on the few occasions we’ve been together, you seem to spend half your time staring at my tits.”

“Oh … I’m
sorry,
Miss Betsy!”

“Really want to see them?” she asked—and she shrugged, letting the sweater fall down off both her shoulders.

At home, Loren lay with his head in Roberta’s lap and wept. “The bastards took it away from me!” he complained over and over again.

“Only temporarily,” she said calmly. “Here, have a drink. It’ll make you feel better.”

At three in the morning, when she was asleep and snoring, he went downstairs and telephoned Len Bragg.

Bragg was sleepy and impatient. “Thought maybe you’d given up on the idea.”

“I have
not
given up. I told you to stay ready. Have you got another plan?”

“Trish went back to Greenwich and watched him again.
We can get him when he comes out on a Monday morning. The kids don’t follow him to the car. While he’s stuffing his bag and briefcase into the car.”

“Do it!”

Alexandria McCullough was the redheaded computer guru Roberta had seen with Angelo in the lobby bar of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston. She had worked for Texas Instruments but was now an independent consultant. Forty-four years old, she was a committed jogger who got in her five miles every morning, no matter what the weather. Her body was hard. She drank and ate whatever she wanted, but she remained hard and slender, because in addition to jogging, she worked out in a gym three nights a week. Her hair was flaming red. Her eyes were pale blue. Her face was round, and she had pursed lips, and freckles dotted her cheeks and forehead.

She and Angelo had worked all afternoon in her office and now were having dinner in the restaurant overlooking the Hyatt Regency lobby. They’d eaten oysters and were now cracking crab legs.

“I’m a committed environmentalist,” she told Angelo. “That’s why your electric car interests me so much. It won’t be filling the air with the products of the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels.”

“Well, where will the power come from that we use to charge the batteries?” he asked. “Power plants still burn fossil fuels.”

“In a far better controlled way,” she said. “Anyway, once the antinuclear nuts fade away, we’ll generate our electricity from fission and fusion—that, plus solar and water and wind power.”

“Batteries are my bugaboo, of course,” said Angelo. “I’ve looked at fuel cells, flywheel battery systems, and lithium-polymer cells.”

“I can’t help you with battery technology,” said Alexandria. “What I can do is show you how to use computer technology to extract the utmost performance from your power source.”

“An electric motor on each of the four wheels,” he said, summarizing what they had discussed that afternoon.

“Each motor pulling only as much power as it absolutely needs,” she said. “Anybody who drives with a straight stick knows that you roll forward a great deal of the time without using engine power—not just rolling downhill but rolling up to a traffic light with your transmission in neutral. You expend energy to get a ton or more of steel moving, then waste it braking. Your idea is to use that kinetic energy to run a generator and recharge. My contribution is to develop a computer system that analyzes energy requirement and use instantly, using every erg of energy to move the car.”

“Four motors…,” Angelo mused.

“A car turning right,” she said, “is pulled around by its left front wheel, with some assistance from the right rear. Why power the right front and left rear wheels when they are not doing any of the work? You power the wheels that are contributing something besides holding up the weight of the car—and let the others rest, so far as power is concerned. But it takes a computer to analyze what is going on fast enough and allocate power accordingly.”

“We can gain—”

“Hell, Angelo. A conventional automobile uses not more than twenty percent of its energy effectively. Why not use ninety percent effectively?”

“Alex, you scare me.”

“You scare me, you Italian stud. You know what reputation runs ahead of you. But I’ve got a surprise for you. I’m in love and one hundred percent committed—to Lucy.”

He reached for her hand. “Maybe that makes it easier for us to work together,” he said.

She nodded. “Maybe. I won’t deny that I’m damned curious. But…” She shrugged. “If it was okay with Lucy…”

“Go ahead and discuss it with Lucy,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s focus on automobiles.”

The following Monday morning, when Angelo left his house, Len Bragg and Trish Warner were waiting on the
road. This time she was driving a long black Cadillac they had rented at Newark Airport. They had stayed in the Holiday Inn in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and had driven to Greenwich at four in the morning. This time they were not able to be so precise in their timing and had to drive back and forth on the road, watching for the lights to come on in the Perino house.

Finally lights did come on, and through his telescopic sight Len could see Perino and his wife moving inside the house.

“Jesus Christ!”

Len saw the reflection just in time and jammed the rifle under the seat as far as he could. The reflection was of the flashing lights of a police car that had pulled up behind them.

The officer walked up to the car. Trish put down her window.

“Are you folks lost or something?” asked the policeman.

“Exactly,” said Trish. She’d had the presence of mind to unfold the Greenwich town map that lay on the seat. “Round Hill Road?”

The officer shook his head. “You’re a long way from there. Let me show you on the map.”

While the officer showed Trish the way to Round Hill Road, Len feigned interest but kept his heels pushing as hard as he could on the rifle.

“Well, thank you. I can find it now.”

As they pulled away, Angelo Perino came out of his house and got into his car. The police car followed them for a few minutes—whether because the policeman was suspicious or so he could be sure they went the right way, they could not guess.

“Screwed,” Len muttered. “What rotten luck!”

“Rotten, my achin’ ass. What kind of luck was it that he didn’t see the rifle? He would’ve if he’d looked down.”

“Perino’s the one with luck. That son of a bitch leads a charmed life.”

“Expenses. We’ve had expenses. That was the deal, you know: half a million, but we pay expenses.”

“So how much of my money have you spent?” Loren demanded.

He met with Len and Trish in his car, in the parking lot of a shopping mall. He didn’t dare take them to his office or home. Roberta didn’t know about them.

“Also, we have to be compensated for the time we’ve put in.”

“So how much?”

“About fifteen thousand dollars, roughly.”

“So you’ve still got two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars?”

Len nodded. “Something like that.”

“I don’t suppose you plan on giving it back.”

“Is the deal off?”

Loren drew a deep breath, frowned, and pondered. He shook his head. “You can’t do it in that driveway. That cop may very well have been suspicious. Who knows? He may actually have told Perino about you, warned him.”

“Where else then? We can’t do it in Detroit, and we can’t do it in Greenwich…”

“Cool it awhile. When I’ve got an idea I’ll let you know.”

“Good afternoon. My name is Robert Carpenter. Have I the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Perino?”

Cindy looked up from a stack of eighteenth-century prints she was examining in the gallery. The man who had addressed her was tall and blond, with blue eyes fixed intently on her, and a voluptuous smile. He had a close-trimmed graying beard and was dressed nattily in a dark gray pinstripe suit with a cream-colored tattersall vest.

She nodded and let him see a cautious smile.

“One of your competitors told me you may have some DeCombe figures. I rather favor them. I have one and am thinking of acquiring another.”

“As a matter of fact, we have three DeCombes,” she said. “They’re in the next gallery.” She closed the portfolio of prints. “I’ll show you.”

François DeCombe was a sculptor who produced exquisite small bronzes in the realistic style favored by VKP Galleries. The three DeCombes in the gallery were a ten-inch figure of a boy reclining on his stomach and reading, a ballerina the same size standing on one point, and a larger nude of a paunchy man in late middle age lying on his side with one leg drawn up and also reading.

“Very nice,” said Robert Carpenter as he walked around the sculptures, studying them with a squint.

“We have a catalog as well,” she said. “We can order anything he hasn’t already sold. Also, he will do work on order. You can tell him what you want, and he will do the piece. I would suggest, though, that if you do that you go to Quebec and visit him. You have to be quite specific about what you want. It would be a good idea, too, to go up and look at the clay model before he casts it.”

“What are the prices of these three pieces, Mrs. Perino?”

“The reclining boy and the ballerina are fifteen thousand dollars each. The man is twenty-five thousand.”

Carpenter smiled. “I bought mine four years ago. I see I made a good investment.”

“Yes, he brings much higher prices now than he used to. He won a couple of prizes and was given a one-man show at the Pompidou Center. That sort of thing always raises prices.”

“Better than dying,” said Carpenter.

“In one aspect, anyway,” said Cindy.

Carpenter chuckled. “Let me give you my card,” he said. “I may be interested in buying one of these—the ballerina, I think.”

He presented her an engraved card—

Robert J. Carpenter

100 Hollyridge Drive

Los Angeles, California 90068

“If I decide to purchase, I will give you a check and will not of course expect to take possession until it has cleared. The price is firm?”

“On DeCombes the prices are firm,” she said.

He glanced around. “Your gallery is extremely interesting. I’ll browse a bit.”

“Let me show you a few things we think are especially interesting,” she said.

Over a late lunch at Quilted Giraffe he wrote her a check for fifteen thousand dollars.

Roberta unpacked the DeCombe ballerina. Cindy had packed it lovingly in a wooden box stuffed with excelsior. Carpenter had carried it aboard the plane from New York as cabin luggage.

“Fifteen thousand dollars…,” Loren murmured, shaking his head.

“First installment,” said Carpenter. “And a very small first installment. You’re going to have quite an art collection.”

“Yes. You decided to do this,” Roberta reminded Loren, “so you can’t skimp on it and expect it to work.”

“Besides,” said Carpenter, pausing to take a sip of Courvoisier, “what you’ve got there is worth every dime of the fifteen thousand dollars. You could sell it right now for twelve or more, easily—and maybe for the whole fifteen. In a couple of years it will be worth twenty or twenty-five. Think of it as an investment. It’s my fees and expenses that you’ll never see again.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Roberta. “We certainly can’t begrudge the fifteen thou.”

“I suppose you didn’t find out anything,” said Loren.

“Of course not. I didn’t even say I knew her husband is
in
the automobile business. I didn’t ask any personal questions, and neither did she. We talked about art.”

“When are you going to see her again?” Loren asked.

“Certainly not until after you make another deposit to my account in United California Bank. Then … well, it would be a mistake—wouldn’t it?—to appear again too soon. Not for a month at least.”

“What is she supposed to think you are?”

“A man who appreciates art and has the money to buy it. If the question arises, I’ll probably say I’m a yacht broker. That’s a sufficiently obscure business to discourage their checking on me.”

“Do you have any problems yet?”

“One. Marcus Lincicombe. He looked at me sort of strangely. I can’t imagine where he could have seen me before my visit to VKP, but the art world is small and
clannish. It’s not impossible that we passed each other somewhere and he remembers.”

“You told me you never worked in the East or in Europe.”

“I’ve never taught anywhere but in the Southwest and in California. But Lincicombe, I suppose, could have come West for some showing or festival and—”

“All right, Professor. Let’s hope not. Where will you be until your next trip to New York?”

“At home, of course. I’m still a professor of art history. I have classes to teach. I have a show to hang.” He smiled. “I also have a very competent forgery to conceal.”

“Don’t take any chances, Professor,” said Loren. “You’re working for me now, for plenty. Postpone any ventures in selling forgeries until our business is finished.”