The Stallion (1996) (7 page)

Number One would come to wonder what Number Two might have been had he not been so completely overshadowed by his domineering father. As it was, he became a weak and vacillating man and a closet homosexual who was blackmailed. In 1952 he committed suicide. Number Three turned out to be a jealous, manipulative man who has tried more than once to take control of Bethlehem Motors away from Number One.

Looking around for a man who could build a Bethlehem
Motors sports car, to be called the Betsy for his great-granddaughter, Number One settled on a young man he had known since that young man was a child—Angelo Perino.

Angelo Perino had the engineering degree and he had the same commitment to building automobiles that Number One had. What was more, he had guts. He had spent five years as a racing driver, had once ranked number two in the world, and had nearly died in a crash. He also had money of his own and was willing to take risks.

To build the Betsy, it would be necessary to overwhelm the angry opposition of Loren Hardeman III, who would do anything to frustrate the project—out of jealousy, yes, but also out of a conviction that Bethlehem Motors must sooner or later get out of the automobile business and concentrate on the business that made far more money for the company: the manufacture of appliances.

The battle raged for three years. When Number Three saw he was losing, he went so far as to attempt to sabotage the experimental car. When that tactic failed, he actually hired thugs to beat up on Angelo Perino….

Number Three had sued Thurman, but the case had been quickly dismissed, which left him to pay the legal fees.

“Thurman tells too much not to have had an inside source of information,” said Betsy.

“That doesn’t make it me. I swear before God I never met Thurman, never talked to him, never corresponded with him.”

“You’ll never make them believe it. Watch out for them, lover. Never turn your back. They…” She shrugged. “To hell with it. We’ve got better things to think about.”

Betsy got up on her hands and knees and straddled him. She dangled her breasts over his crotch, swinging them back and forth against his cock. “Turn over on your face,” she urged in a throaty whisper.

He did. She spread his hinder cheeks with her hands, shoved her face into his anus, and began to probe with her
tongue. He drew all the breath he could contain. The sensation was not orgasmic, but what her tongue reached tingled with a pleasure that became more and more intense and yet was not orgasmic. She worked at it for five minutes or so, then reached between his legs, found his rigid shaft, and began to stroke it. He came within half a minute: a deep, riotous, sustained orgasm.

“So…,” Betsy whispered. “I bet she never does that for you.”

Angelo smiled fondly at her and shook his head. He lied. Betsy didn’t need to know that Cindy did it, too.

VKP Galleries was located on Park Avenue a few blocks north of the Waldorf and on the west side of the street. On a Monday night in April, Cindy and Dietz presided over the opening of a one-woman show for Amanda Finch, a young artist Cindy had discovered through her sorority contacts.

Amanda Finch had never been a sorority girl, but Mary Wilkerson had. Mary, who lived in Greenwich, was enrolled in art classes at the Silvermine Guild, where Amanda was a figure model for classes in sketching, painting, and sculpture. The two women became acquainted when Amanda walked back among the easels to see how the students were portraying her. When Amanda offered a suggestion about Mary’s painting, Mary learned that Amanda was herself an artist and was posing as a figure model to earn a living in a nondemanding way that allowed her to devote most of her time to her own painting. Mary saw some of Amanda’s work and immediately invited Cindy to come to Connecticut and look at it.

Amanda Finch’s work fit into the realist category that VKP Galleries was still promoting. She painted with meticulous attention to detail, so that her paintings could, from a
distance, be mistaken for finely focused photographs. The stamens and pistils in her flowers were scrupulously reproduced, as were the veins in the petals. Her portraits were reminiscent of Rembrandt’s in that they resembled greatly enlarged color photographs of faces and hands, that precisely depicted a subject’s varying skin colors, including blotches and scars. Eyelashes and eyebrows seemed to have been painted with single-hair brushes.

The most impressive of her works were her nudes. Having been unable to pay models for the long hours it took to paint so realistically, she had modeled for herself, standing before a tall mirror. In two of the paintings she was standing. In the third she was sitting on a wooden stool with her feet hooked behind the legs. This pose spread her legs, and her rendition of her intimate parts was as finely detailed as her paintings of stamens and pistils.

It was obvious to everyone in the gallery that the diffident young woman in gray tailored skirt and white silk blouse—clothes to which she was clearly unaccustomed—was not just the artist but the model. The painting of her spread open sold the first night of the show for $7,500.

Angelo met her on the second night of the show. He had flown in from Chicago too late to attend the opening. She was an attractive but certainly not ideally beautiful young woman. She made it apparent that she had better things to think about than how she looked. Her dark brown hair hung as it would. Her eyebrows were heavy. Her brown eyes were myopic behind a pair of little round gold-rimmed glasses—they, too, were meticulously reproduced in the paintings. Her mouth was wide and thin. Her figure was as her paintings showed her: ordinary. Apart from her eyes swimming behind thick lenses, the only really distinctive things about her were her hands, which were extraordinarily large, too large for the rest of her, like the hands of Michelangelo’s
David.

“I owe Mrs. Perino a debt I’ll never be able to repay,” she said to Angelo. “This show is everything I ever wanted in my life. If I die tonight, my life has been fulfilled.”

Cindy had overheard and came up to embrace the girl. “Would you accept fifteen hundred for the violets?” she
asked. “And we’ve got a possible three thousand for the glads.”

“Oh, my God!”

“We’ve got a bid of four for one of the other nudes. I’m not accepting it yet.”

“My God…”

“Plan on spending the next six months starkers in front of that mirror of yours,” said Cindy, grinning.

Cindy was pregnant again, not yet heavily, but it was visible when she was unclothed. “Except for your condition, I’d commission her to paint
you,”
said Angelo.

“It’s a beautiful condition,” said Amanda with quiet simplicity.

Angelo stared at Cindy for a moment. “To be hung in a private room in our place,” he said. “Not here.”

So it was agreed. Beginning in July, Amanda moved into the Perino apartment. Cindy posed four hours a day, and Amanda painted six.

The result was a painting that Angelo thought was the most beautiful work of art he had ever seen in his life. Standing in profile so that her distended belly would be dramatized, Cindy was quietly proud. Her eyes were on it, staring as though she could see the life within her. One hand rested on her belly near her navel. The other rested on her hip. Posing on summer days, she gleamed faintly with sweat, and Amanda captured that, too, as she did every other detail of Cindy’s body, with the consummate skill of an artist, not an illustrator.

The portrait was in fact hung in Angelo and Cindy’s bedroom, but a few trusted friends were invited to see it. Dietz, of course, saw it. So did Mary Wilkerson.

Angelo paid Amanda $15,000 for the painting and commissioned her to do a portrait of him as soon as he could find the time to pose.

Number One took a swallow of the Canadian Club that was forbidden to him. He sat in his wheelchair on the lanai, looking vaguely out at the Atlantic. Loren the Third sat on a chaise longue. Roberta, now Mrs. Hardeman, sat in
a wooden chair upholstered with vinyl flower-pattern cushions, drank Scotch, and smoked a Chesterfield.

“The stock closed yesterday at eighteen and three quarters,” said Number One. “Two years ago it sold at sixty. We’re all poorer than we used to be.”

“It’s the economy,” said Loren. “They drove Nixon out of office—”

“We’re holding on to barely two percent of the automotive market,” said Number One. “And the refrigerators aren’t selling well either, in spite of hiring that expensive broad to open and shut the doors on television.”

“The price of plastics went up,” said Loren.

“Went up for everybody,” said Number One.

“They squeeze out the smaller companies,” said Roberta. “It’s always that way. Basic economics. General Motors and General Electric can achieve economies of scale that we can’t. It’s a fact of life.”

Number One noticed the “we.” He raised one eyebrow slightly. “I competed effectively for many years,” he said. “How do you explain that?”

“You built an automobile people wanted to buy,” said Roberta. “So did Studebaker. So did Packard. So did Hudson and Nash. People could always buy a Ford or a Chevy, but some people wanted a Sundancer. The fore-and-aft Studebaker was a funny-looking damned car, but it appealed to a lot of buyers. It was distinctive. So was the Sundancer.”

“Yes, and by God we survived them,” said Number One. “You can’t buy a Studebaker today, but you can buy a Sundancer.”

“We lose money on every unit we produce,” said Loren.

“We lose money on your goddamned refrigerators! Don’t tell me again to get out of the automobile business. I’m not getting out.”

“The company will go under,” said Loren sadly.

Number One looked at Roberta.

“No, it won’t,” she said. “Between the two of you there’s enough smarts to air-condition hell.” She reached across to Loren and patted his shoulder. “I’ve got confidence in this man, Mr. Hardeman.”

Number One lifted off his hat for a moment and used it to
fan his bald head. “Son,” he said to his grandson. “Get this idea of surrendering the automobile business out of your head. Concentrate on making our cars sell. I know you can do it.”

Loren stared at Roberta, and she nodded. “Grandfather, I hate to say this … but I’m afraid we have to face the fact that Angelo Perino is right. The Sundancer is too big. It burns too much gas. We’ve got to build cars—”

“With fuckin’ transverse engines!”
Number One yelled. “And what they call ‘power trains’ instead of transmissions. And … and you’re going to tell me next that we can’t build them.”

Loren shook his head. “No. We can’t build them. Oh, sure, we can build anything, given enough time and investment. But the competition is already ahead of us. If we buy the power units in Japan—”

“And build half-breed cars—”

“It’s our last chance,” said Loren bluntly.

“All right, son,” said Number One quietly. “Tell me. Make a flat statement. Tell me we have to build these half-Jap cars to stay in the car business.”

“Grandfather, we have to build these half-Jap cars to stay in the business,” Loren recited grimly.

“We have the
people?”

“We’ll find them.”

“I don’t have to tell you who we need.”

Loren shook his head. “No. No, by God! No! That wop son of a bitch—”

“We
need
him, goddamnit! On an understanding. He works for
you.
Haven’t we taught him that lesson: that when he works for us, he
works for us?’

“He won’t come.”

Number One smiled. “I can get him. I’ll get him down here in twenty-four hours. And between the two of us, we’ll make him fuckin’ dance to our tune.”

Number One went to bed early, immediately after dinner. He had placed a call to Angelo Perino in New York, but the secretary said that Mr. Perino would not be in New
York until sometime tomorrow. Loren and Roberta stayed at the dinner table after Number One was wheeled away. They talked about going out but decided instead to take a walk on the beach and then go to their suite.

It was ten o’clock before either of them mentioned the name Angelo Perino.

Roberta was by then wearing a peach-colored negligee, semisheer for the most part except for a panel of completely sheer material at the level of her armpits that exposed her ample breasts to easy view. She smoked a Chesterfield and had a Scotch within reach.

Loren was naked. He sat on the floor at her feet, bending down from time to time to lick her toes.

“The secret is to use Perino while keeping him under control,” said Roberta.

“Yes, of course. But how do I do that?”

“Your grandfather will help you. And so will I.”

“I don’t know…”

“Have confidence in yourself, Loren,” she said sternly. “The old man swore he’d never allow a Japanese engine to be put in a Bethlehem Motors car. You won that battle today.”

“Angelo Perino hates me. Well, shit … I suppose he has good reason.”

She reached down and stroked his cheek. “You made a mistake,” she said gently. “Everybody’s entitled to a mistake, even a big one. But you won’t do it again. Mama’ll be watching over you and won’t let you.”

He pushed the skirt of her negligee back and licked the insides of her legs.

“Anyway,” she said, “the old man’s on your side now.”

“He oughta be,” said Loren bitterly. “Imagine … my grandfather fucked my mother! What the hell is Anne to me, anyway? My half sister or my aunt?”

“Both,” said Roberta. “But what’s the difference? She stays in Europe with the prince and doesn’t meddle.”

“Also, Perino fucked my second wife.”

“Only before she was your wife. You can’t hate him for that. Do you hate my late husband?”

“It’s different. Perino knew I cared for Bobbie and was planning—”

“Forget it, Loren.
You’ve got other things to think about.”

“I won’t let that wop son of a bitch screw me again. Roberta, I
hate
Angelo Perino. My grandfather is going to
beg
him to come back with the company. I wish his plane would crash on the way down here. I could arrange some-thing like that maybe, sometime.”