Keijo nodded. “We are friends,” he said firmly.

  4

  “He mentioned it?” Betsy asked.

  “Yes, he mentioned it. Only to assure me that I need not worry about his discretion.”

  “For as smart a fucker as you are, you can sometimes be damned naive,” she said.

  “I trust the man,” said Angelo simply.

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the fact that you seem to think my father has rolled over and is playing dead. He’s watching everything you do and still hopes you step on your cock.”

  “He’s got a record for doing that; I don’t.”

  “No? Seven years ago you did it. Number One lied to you and made you believe him. You sacrificed everything you could to achieve something he told you he wanted, and he cut your arm off at the elbow. My father’s not nearly as good at it as his grandfather, but he’s a Hardeman.”

  “I’m going to take the fuckin’ company away from him, Betsy,” said Angelo simply.

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “But you must never trust my father. More importantly, you mustn’t trust Roberta. My father would rather destroy the company than let you take it from him. What he really wants is to destroy you.”

  They’d had dinner brought up by room service, the most expensive kind of food the Japanese served: steaks. It was no wonder beef was so expensive in Japan, Angelo reflected; the cattle must have been raised on milk because the beef was especially tender and juicy. The butter on the mashed potatoes tasted like English butter because it had a far higher fat content than American butter and was far more flavorful. The wine had been Australian, but it was good. They also had brandy, and coffee stayed hot in a huge electric pot.

  Betsy was as she liked to be when she was with him: naked except for a pair of tiny sheer white crotchless panties. He wore a blue slingshot, nothing more.

  Tomorrow night they were going out to the country to stay at an inn Keijo had recommended, where they would live Japanese style, bathing in a communal bath, eating such delicacies as snakes, and sleeping in a room separated from their fellow guests only by bamboo screens.

  But tonight—

  “Will you give me an honest answer to an honest question?” Betsy asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Have you ever fucked Roberta?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

  She reached for his hand. “Number One kept concealed video cameras in some of the bedrooms in his house in Palm Beach. He had tapes made of the shenanigans that took place in those rooms. The night he died I gathered up all those tapes, took them out on the beach, and put the cartridges on the glowing remains of a picnic fire, after which I threw the melted remains in the ocean. One of those tapes was of you and me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you think? Didn’t you ever get it through your head how evil that old man was? He showed me the tape of you and me.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe looking at it again, with the live me sitting there, is what caused his coronary—that is if God didn’t cause it, to do justice at long last.”

  “Are you sure you got all the tapes?”

  “All that were in his room. I doubt there were any others.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Roberta? That’s the subject you—”

  “Angelo, I didn’t have time to look at his collection, but if there was a tape of you and Roberta it’s very likely he showed it to my father. That would have been like him, to sow a deeper hatred. Angelo, the old man was wicked.”

  “There was no tape of me and Roberta,” said Angelo.

  “All right. She’s got the same mentality as my great-grandfather. If you ever did it with her anywhere, you better wonder if she taped you. The woman is capable of—”

  “I don’t know much about Roberta,” said Angelo. “I don’t want to know anything more than I know already.”

  “Another question,” said Betsy. “Number One couldn’t have made those tapes. So who did? And when will we hear from them? We’ve got blackmail in our future, my love.”

  “There are only two ways to deal with blackmailers. One, you pay them. Two, you kill them.”

  “Angelo—”

  “If anyone contacts you with blackmail in mind, let me know.”

  5

  “I bought you something,” said Betsy a little while later. “While you were doing business, I went out exploring.”

  He had noticed a small wrapped package lying on the coffee table and expected that sooner or later she would open it. She handed it to him to open. He took off the paper and found a small wooden box with a lid that slid back. Inside the box, on a pink silk lining, lay three leather straps with buckles and a dozen rubber rings, plus printed instructions in Japanese, English, French, and German.

  THE WORLD’S FAMOUS “ARABIAN STRAP”

  FOR THE MORE HANDSOME MANLY PARTS

  FOR THE MORE PLEASING FUCK

  Betsy helped him follow the instructions. The straps were made of soft black leather, about half an inch wide, and were fitted with steel buckles. Betsy read the instructions and laughed, but she watched intently as he did what the instructions said. He slipped out of his slingshot. First he passed the longest strap through loops on the ends of the two shorter ones. Then he looped the long strap under his scrotum and over the root of his hard-on, pulled it tight, and buckled it.

  “I like the way it squeezes up your balls,” said Betsy. “This is good already.”

  The rubber rings came in three sizes. Angelo rolled one of the middle-sized ones down his shaft. He stretched the ring to roll it over the two short straps, one on each side. Finally, as the instructions said, he tightened and buckled the two short straps. His cock, already erect, stiffened even more and grew even larger. It stood high and turned a little red.

  “Does it hurt?” asked Betsy.

  Angelo laughed. “Hell, no…”

  “The instructions say that if you don’t pull it too tight you can walk around all day with it on, giving you a very showy bulge.”

  “Like a woman in a pointy bra,” he said.

  “Pull your underpants on. I want to see what you’ll look like.”

  “I’m not sure I can get ’em on.”

  He tried and succeeded, stretching the slingshot out in a great pointed bulge. He walked to a mirror and looked at himself. He pulled the underpants off and stared at the mirror.

  Betsy pointed at his freakish engorgement. “I want that,” she said, pulling off her panties.

  She shrieked as he entered her. But two minutes later she moaned and grimaced. The strap caused premature ejaculation. But it kept him hugely erect, and he did not even pull out. He continued until he had come three times and she had come two or three times.

  Betsy hurried to the bathroom to wash herself. When she came back out she poured two Scotches. “You like your present?” she purred.

  Angelo grinned. “That was the best I ever had.”

  “Let me help you take it off. I don’t want it to damage you.” She worked the buckles and loosened the straps. “It’s your present,” she said. “But it stays with me. I don’t want you using it with any other woman.”

  He kissed her. “I don’t want you letting any other man put it on.”

  “I don’t know another man who’d be willing to try it,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know another woman who’d be willing to have you with it on. We’re a pair, Angelo, like I’ve always told you.”

  XIV

  1979

  1

  Having answered the telephone in the kitchen, Cindy returned to the dining room, where she and Angelo were eating a Chinese dinner brought by a caterer on the Post Road. The meal was tasty, even if the service was inelegant—they were serving themselves from the paper cartons in which the meal had been delivered.

  “It’s Roberta,” she said. “She apologized for calling so late.”

  Angelo shook his head. “God, has she become a Hardeman! She’s learned Number One’s bad habit of calling any time of day or night.”

  “I told her we are having dinner. She said she wouldn’t take a minute.”

  He left the table and went to the kitchen. He stood looking out at the snow that had begun to fall an hour ago and was now accumulating.

  “What’s up?” he asked Roberta.

  “Loren has called a board meeting for Thursday,” she said. “You’ll be summoned.”

  “What? Two days after Christmas? What the hell’s the matter with him?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with him. He’s just being Loren. He figures calling you back to Detroit from Connecticut two days after Christmas will piss you off and make you an angry man at the board meeting. Angry means less effective.”

  “What’s he trying to do?”

  “Knock you off balance. He’s mad as hell, Angelo. When you told Beacon he couldn’t talk to the Japanese and had to ask all questions through you, Loren was furious. Also, he figures you’re the reason why Shizoka is stonewalling his accountants. His ego is injured. He says he’s still CEO, and you’re his subordinate—which he intends to make clear.”

  “You called to warn me?”

  “I called to warn you. You’ll get official notification of the meeting by certified mail tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Roberta. I’ll sharpen my knives and wear my bulletproof vest.”

  Cindy was picking unenthusiastically at her food when Angelo returned. She was pregnant, and it had been her idea to order Chinese. Now her fancy for it seemed to have subsided.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “Loren has called a board meeting for next Thursday.”

  “In the week between Christmas and New Year’s? Angelo, your folks will be here!”

  “My parents will be here for ten days, if we don’t get so much snow the airports are closed tomorrow.”

  “How can you leave when they’re here?”

  Angelo smiled. “Since they called me to Detroit this particular week, I’m going to let the company pay for a chartered jet. I can leave here at eight, fly from Westchester Airport to Detroit City Airport in time for their ten o’clock meeting, and leave right after it and be back here by the middle of the afternoon. That’ll be a finger in Loren’s face.”

  2

  Angelo’s parents had visited the house in Greenwich once before, shortly after Angelo and Cindy had bought it; but they hadn’t seen it since Cindy had finished her redecorating.

  The house sat on six acres of partly wooded land, off North Street in the posh backcountry area of Greenwich. It was a fieldstone house with a slate roof and copper spouting, built in the early 1920s and substantially remodeled at least twice. It was not as grand as some of the neighboring houses, but it was a solid, handsome home and roomy enough for a family that would soon have four children.

  As she had done in the apartment, Cindy had had all the walls painted white, the better to display art. She had installed some track lighting, but not in the main rooms, since it would have been incongruous with the carved woodwork and leaded windows. Almost all of the furniture from the apartment had been banished to the bedrooms and sitting rooms upstairs. English-country-house style was more suitable to the downstairs rooms, and that was what Cindy had bought—overstuffed, comfortable couches and chairs, upholstered in flower prints, and Oriental rugs for the oak floors.

  Similarly, most of the art she had displayed in the apartment did not suit the downstairs decor. The long hall upstairs was her gallery, seen only by her family and closest friends, and there hung the Amanda Finch nude of the heavily pregnant Cindy. The elder Perinos had stopped and stared at it for a long time when they first saw it, but neither of them said a word. They said nothing either about the nude of the teenaged boy. The only works of Amanda’s that hung downstairs were some of her flowers, which the Perinos did not recognize as the work of the same artist until Cindy pointed out to them the identical style used on a different subject.

  Saturday’s mail did in fact bring notice of the meeting of the board of directors and a summons to Angelo to be present. He had to explain to his parents why he would be absent part of a day during their visit, so he showed the letter to his father.

  They were sitting in the living room. His father was glancing through a catalog of offerings from VKP Galleries, and he laid it aside to read the letter.

  “I have never been able to understand your fatal fascination with the Hardemans,” he said. “I would have thought you would have put aside all thoughts of having anything to do with them, after what they did to you in nineteen seventy-two.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Angelo. “I’m going to take their goddamned company away from them. That son of a bitch thinks he’s gonna kill me. I’m gonna kill him.”

  3

  Sunday morning, the day before Christmas, the children’s nanny answered the phone and informed Cindy that Mrs. Hardeman would like to speak with her.

  Roberta. What could Roberta want now? And why did she want to speak to her, instead of Angelo? Cindy went into the library, sat down at the small leather-topped desk there, and took the call.

  “Hello. This is Cindy.”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t met,” said the voice on the line. “If we have, I apologize for not remembering. I’m Alicia Hardeman. Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “I, uh … well, yes. You’re—”

  “Loren’s first wife. Betsy’s mother. Alicia Grinwold Hardeman.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m having a few friends in for oyster stew on New Year’s Day. Not New Year’s Eve. All of the television sets will be tuned to various bowl games, so people will have their choice of football. Anyway, I don’t send written invitations. I call people. I’d be very pleased if you and Angelo could come. I live in Greenwich, you know, and I’m sorry we haven’t gotten together before.”

  “Well, I appreciate the invitation,” said Cindy. “I do have a little problem. Angelo’s parents are visiting—Dr. and Mrs. Perino, from Detroit. They’ll only be here a short time, and Angelo has been called to Detroit for a corporate board meeting on Thursday. We—”

  “Dr. and Mrs. Perino are invited too, of course. It will be very informal. No neckties. No particular hour to arrive or leave—just sometime between one in the afternoon and, say, seven. My daughter will be here. Betsy. No party can be rigid or formal with Betsy present. Please do try to come.”

  “It’s very kind of you. I accept the invitation. If it turns out we can’t come, I’ll call and let you know.”

  “If you can’t, we’ll get together some other time soon. But do try to make this party. It will also be a good chance for you to meet a few people. We associate only with the laid-back kind, so I know you’ll find my little circle of friends easy to like.”

  Back in the living room, where Angelo sat chatting with his mother and father, Cindy grinned and said, “Honey, we’ve all been invited to a party. All of us. And you’ll never guess by who.”

  4

  “You’re late,” said Loren curtly as Angelo entered the board room.

  “Bad flying weather,” Angelo replied.

  His chartered Learjet had in fact landed half an hour ago, but he had taken time to have a leisurely drink in the airport bar before he went out to the limousine he had rented. If Loren wanted to play games, he could play them too. He had chosen to wear a navy blue blazer with gold buttons over a pink cashmere sweater and a white shirt open at the collar. It was, after all, a holiday week.

  “You might have taken an earlier flight,” said Loren.

  “This one was early enough,” said Angelo.

  Not all the directors had accommodated Loren’s wish to have a meeting on December 27. Princess Anne was not there. Neither was the banker, Myron Goldman. Peter Beacon, XB vice president for engineering, sat in one of the chairs behind the directors’ chairs.

  Roberta, wearing a heavy cable-knit white sweater and smoking a Chesterfield, sat with her chair pushed back from the table. She kept her eyes away from Angelo.

  Loren stared for a moment at Angelo, as if tempted to comment on his informal attire, then apparently decided not to. “When are we going to see this car of yours on the test track?” he asked bluntly.

  “It’s been on the test track, in Japan.”

  “Are you suggesting we fly over there to see it?”

  “If you want to see it before, say, March. We’ll have half a dozen of them running on the test track here, in March.”

  “Flown over from Japan,” said Beacon. “Not cars assembled here.”

  Angelo shrugged. “When you get your new quality control in place, we can start assembling them here. Not until then. At the present rate of progress, I’d estimate Shizoka will have a thousand cars in showrooms and on the road in Japan before one goes to dealers here.”

  “You’re a loose cannon, Angelo,” Loren complained. “You seem to trust the Japanese more than you trust our people. You’ve got a car running on a test track over there that none of us have even seen. Hell, we haven’t even seen film of it.”

  “Let’s get New Year’s out of the way, Loren, then you and I can fly over and you can see the car and drive it yourself. It’s available to you. No one’s hiding it from you. You just can’t sit on your butt in Detroit and see it.”

  “You can’t even assemble a prototype in our plant?”

  “It costs money to assemble a prototype. We’re trying to keep costs down,” Angelo explained. “Besides, if we assemble one here and it goes out on the test track and a door falls off, every television station in town will be running pictures of that on the evening news. Not only is XB quality control substandard, so is XB security. I’m going to fly six or seven cars over here from Japan, and we can put on a show with them. Their doors won’t fall off.”