The Stallion (1996) (9 page)

Angelo shrugged.

“Did you ever
fail,
Perino? Really fail? Do you know what it’s like? I doubt you do. It never happened to you.”

“So what do you want me to do? Why’d you come here, Roberta?”

She stood, walked to the window, parted the drapes, and looked out on the busy highway that passed by the motel. Abruptly she pulled the raspberry shirt over her head and turned to face him, showing the imposing bra it took to imprison and mold her.

“Uh-uh, Roberta,” said Angelo. “We—”

“Okay,” she said. “Not us. Not written in the stars. But let me be comfortable, for Christ’s sake.” She released the bra behind and let her boobs fall loose: the biggest he had ever seen that were not freakish. Hers were flesh, not just fat. They hung. They did not droop. “You have any idea
what it feels like when you’ve worn a harness like this for twelve hours?” She picked up the shirt and pulled it on again. “You have to wear a jockstrap, Angelo?”

He went to the kitchen, picked up the bottle of Scotch, and put it on the table between them. He had not been attracted to Roberta while she was firmly shaped by nylon and rubber, but those tremendous tits moving freely inside the raspberry-colored shirt caused an erection.

“Your question was, why did I come here?” she said. She reached for the bottle and poured herself another drink. “I came here hoping we might be able to save Loren.”

“I can’t save him, even if I wanted to. And why should I want to?”

“You can save the company, Angelo. The old man knows you can. He knows you’re right about the transverse engine and the deal with the Japanese company. Loren knows you’re right. And they’re going to ask you to save Bethlehem Motors. And when you do, you’ll have emasculated Loren as effectively as the old man has done. You will do what
he
couldn’t. His father killed himself. Loren is capable of it.”

“I should care?” Angelo asked.

“You’re not that hard a man, Angelo Perino. You’ll help me save my husband’s life … if I beg you.”

“I don’t want you to beg me, Roberta.”

“Good,” she said. “I’d rather make a reasoned business proposition. Mutually beneficial. To you and me.”

“And Loren?”

“Depends on how much of a man Loren can prove himself to be.”

“I fail to see anything beneficial to me in getting myself mixed up with the Hardemans again.”

“You want to build a car, don’t you, Angelo?” she asked. “You’re like the old man that way. You can be a consultant, you can be this, be that, but nothing lights a fire in your gut more than building a car—the way the old man built the Sundancer, the way Lee lacocca built the Mustang. That’s why Number One won’t let Loren quit building cars. A dozen virgins under his blankets wouldn’t warm him the way building one more car would do.”

“He’s got a funny way of saying so.”

“You and I don’t give a damn what lights a fire in the old man’s gut,” said Roberta. “You’re interested, I’m interested, in what lights one in
Angelo’s
gut. Automobiles are your
life,
Perino. Bethlehem Motors is the only company you can get your hands on. You can—”

“The old man—”

“Will be dead in eighteen months, if not before,” she said.

“And Loren…”

“Will do what I tell him to do,” she said.

“So how do we avoid emasculating him?” asked Angelo. “If I care.”

“We work it,” she said. “You give me ideas. I’ll feed them to him, on the pillow. He’ll show up at the office filled with enthusiasm for
your
idea.”

“He’s that big a fool?”

She smiled. “You’ve known him longer than I have,” she said.

“I feel like I’m … being sucked into a whirlpool.”

“There’s a good word,” said Roberta with a wicked smile. “‘Sucked.’ Sucked you’re gonna get. And more.” She pulled off the shirt again and this time tossed it across the room. “We’ll seal the bargain between us—the one nobody but us knows about.”

“Roberta, I—”

“Don’t make an enemy of me, Angelo. I want you to build your car. I can help you or I can block you. The Mustang was not called the Lee, and your new car won’t be called the Angelo. But everybody’ll know who did it.”

She continued to undress and was naked in a matter of seconds.

“This isn’t a necessary part—,” he started to say.

“This is an important goddamned bargain,” she said. “And it can’t be written down. What would you have it on, a handshake? No. Hey—you remember how they used to mark survey lines in medieval England? They’d take a boy out to an essential point on the line, and there they’d take his pants down and beat his ass bloody. That way they could be sure he would never forget the place. It wasn’t just something shown to him; it was the place where he’d got his
ass whipped, and he’d never forget. Well, you’re not going to forget tonight, and neither am I. We’re not going to forget what we agreed to on the night when—”

Angelo nodded. “It’ll be memorable,” he conceded.

“Just to be sure it is, come here to the couch. I’m going to lie across your legs, and I want you to spank me until my butt gleams pink.”

“Roberta…”

“I mean it, Angelo. Until I cry and beg you to stop. Then we’ll remember our deal. Then we’ll do two or three other things that will reinforce our memory.
Fancy
fuckin’, Perino. Not the usual stuff.”

She turned her head around and laughed at him after his first slap on her behind. She winced after the second and clenched her teeth and grimaced after that. In time she began to cry, but he did not stop because she had not begged. Then she did. She was still sobbing as she knelt and sucked his penis between her lips. She worked on him so hard he was not sure he would be able to do what she promised was next.

In bed she grunted under him and emitted little squeals. “Ohh!” she cried gutturally. “Angelo’s a
steel-drivin’
man!”

He awoke the next morning to the ringing of the telephone. It was a secretary at the Hardeman house, saying Mr. Hardeman would like to see him before he caught his plane for New York. Would that be possible?

The plane left at 10:10, so he had time to drive to the beach and meet the old man once more.

It was not the old man who met him. It was Loren. He waited on the lanai, with a breakfast of coffee, Danish, and fruit laid out.

The weather had cleared, and the early-morning sun was red over a gentle surf slip-slapping on the beach. Stranded Portuguese men-of-war died slowly as the water at low tide failed again and again to reach them.

“Number One is asleep,” said Loren.

“At his age, he’s entitled.”

“I’ll be brief, Angelo,” Loren continued. “Number One and I would like to call you wrong about the new car, but we know you’re right. We also have to acknowledge that you’re right about making the deal with Shizoka. Obviously, Number One isn’t designing any more cars or negotiating any more deals. My own skills don’t lie in automotive engineering or in negotiating with Japanese businessmen. We need you. So there. Did you ever think you’d hear me say that?”

“I don’t need you, Loren.”

“Hell, you never did. You’re the kind of guy who’d be a success in whatever you chose to do. But I’m gonna make a guess. What really lights a fire in your gut is the idea of building a new car, something very different. Lee Iacocca was responsible for the Mustang. His name’s not on it; it’s a Ford, not an Iacocca; but everybody knows he built it.”

Roberta’s words almost exactly, Angelo thought. She’d come home from last night’s performance, wakened Loren, and fed him everything she’d said—unless she’d primed him with it before. Whichever, Loren was speaking
her
words like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“What lights a fire in
my
gut is seeing this company survive and prosper,” Loren went on. “Angelo, you have good reason to hate me. Hell, man, I have some reason to hate you. But let’s put all that behind us, can’t we? You want to build the car you believe in. GM, Ford, and Chrysler aren’t going to give you the chance. We will. Number One and I need a guy who can build the car that will save the company. Hey, this isn’t easy for me, but I’m asking you. Come back, man. Build the car.”

“Vice president for research and development,” said Angelo. “Not as an employee, as a consultant. A five-year contract. If it doesn’t work out, you have to pay out my five years. A stock option. In writing. A further understanding not in writing—that
you
keep hands off, Loren. You’ll get credit for having been smart enough to hire Angelo Perino. I’ll get credit for having built you a car.”

“You put things bluntly,” said Loren.

“You have any amendments to the proposal?”

“I buy it. How much money?”

“Say half a million a year. How’s Number One going to take it?”

“Angelo, how Number One takes anything isn’t going to count for much. How much longer can he live? Short of that, how much longer before he lapses into a coma? Angelo, it’s you and I. That’s how it can be. We don’t need Number One anymore.”

During the course of his five visits to Japan in 1976, Angelo came to like the country better than he had on his first visit. Twice he took Cindy with him. She entered into a deal with a Japanese art dealer to open a one-man show in her New York gallery for Cho Sei-ichi, a sculptor who made exquisite small bronzes of birds, animals, and flowers. She was unable to accompany her husband on his first trip there in 1977 because she was expecting their third child within the next few weeks.

Their son, John, had been born in 1973 and their daughter, Anna, in 1975. Staying home during the last few months of her third pregnancy, Cindy had begun a search for a home in Westchester County or across the line in Connecticut. Angelo expected she would take him to look at houses as soon as he returned from Japan.

Although he had an office at the plant in Detroit, he spent no more than two days a week there. The other days he worked out of his New York office. It was part of his understanding with Loren that he would not be expected to spend all his time in Detroit and that he would not move his family there.

Every time he arrived in Tokyo alone, he had to wonder if Betsy would come knocking on his door. She kept track of him. One night she’d come to his room in Chicago and another night to his room in Dallas.

The negotiations with Shizoka had gone more slowly than he had expected. They were finished now, and the deal was set. The problems that had to be solved now involved the modification of the Shizoka power train to fit into the new car (problems to be solved in Japan) and building a chassis and body that would suit the modified power train (problems to be solved in the United States).

He had made an effort to learn Japanese but had quickly given up on the idea of speaking the language with his new associates. He discovered that the Japanese would rather hear him speak English than anything but perfect, idiomatic Japanese. More and more he understood what they were saying to each other, but he was careful not to let them know it.

Keijo Shigeto was a thirty-nine-year-old mechanical engineer, a major contributor to the design of the Shizoka engines. He had been seven years old on August 6, 1945, and lived in the town of Matsuyama, about fifteen miles across the Inland Sea from Hiroshima. He remembered an intense, enduring flash of pink light, then a strange cloud boiling up in the north, looking to him like a palm tree, not a mushroom. To his child’s eyes it was filled with lightning and must have been the center of a huge storm. His mother rushed him inside their house, and when he saw the cloud again it was breaking up and drifting west.

He was a handsome man, with traces of gray already appearing at his temples. He was proud of his English, but he welcomed correction. When Angelo essayed a few sentences of Japanese, Keijo could not suppress his laughter.

During one visit Keijo invited Angelo to dinner at his home. Angelo could not be sure if the dinner was formal or informal, but he accepted the invitation to undress as much as Keijo did—that is, to his underwear—and to wear a silk kimono. He removed his socks as Keijo did and put on white ones instead.

Angelo, Keijo, his wife, Toshiko, and their son and daughter sat cross-legged at a low table. The two children, age eleven and thirteen, spoke perfect American English. Toshiko, a diminutive and beautiful woman, wore traditional Japanese dress. She spoke no English but had many questions about American habits and customs.

Keijo translated, and each question began, “Mrs. Keijo would like to know…” Each answer was received with a nervous little giggle. Angelo understood that the giggle was a polite way of acknowledging his answer and thanking him for it.

The meal, served for the most part by a bowing servant girl, was delicious.

Several months later Keijo took Angelo to a geisha house. The dinner there was much more formal. The geishas played little stringed instruments, sang in artificial, doll-like voices, and made light conversation. The one assigned to Angelo spoke English of a sort. She was beautiful, of course—in the formal style of the geishas, which was a little off-putting to Angelo.

“You like Jack Kerouac?” she asked brightly.

“I haven’t read any of his books.”

She frowned as if shocked, then recovered, smiled, and said, “Yes. Is not so good. Which is favorite?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m old-fashioned enough to like Mark Twain better than any other American author.”

“Ah! Yes. Yes. Is much favorite in Japan. You like
beisuboru?”

Baseball. Yes. He said he liked that.

“Ah! Like Sanders Kewfack?”

“Sandy Koufax. Yes.”

Her restrained smile brightened. “Have you see kabuki theater?”

“No. I want to.”

“This you must do,” she said. “Is beautiful.”

When the time came, he and Keijo left. Geishas—
these
geishas, anyway—did not continue their entertainment past dinner and sake, songs and conversation. Keijo asked
him in the taxi if he needed a woman for the night, and Angelo said he didn’t.