“It seems to me,” she said to him as they walked through the house, “that you used to be an aficionado of dry martinis. When did you switch to Scotch?”

  “I didn’t. Decent Scotch is easier to come by than well-mixed martinis.”

  “Try me?” she asked as she turned into the kitchen.

  “Sure.”

  She had Beefeater gin. She cracked ice cubes in the palm of her hand, under the impact of an odd little hammer with a flat spring for a handle. Into a tall thin glass pitcher she put ice, gin, and a touch of vermouth. She stirred with a glass rod. Expertly, she cut a curl of lemon peel, then twisted it into a long-stemmed glass. She poured.

  He sipped.

  “A dry martini well mixed,” said Alicia.

  “Well mixed,” he agreed, saluting her with the glass. She cut and twisted another bit of lemon peel and poured for herself. “When you can’t make automobiles or launch great stock issues or run for Congress, you cultivate the small, civilized skills, like making a good martini.”

  Once again, Angelo lifted his glass in salute. “The roads are crowded with cars,” he said. “Most of them junk. But good martinis are rare.”

  “Altogether too many Americans,” she said, “content themselves with Bud Lite and think it’s beer, with instant decaf and think it’s coffee.”

  “What can you expect of generations brought up on burgers and fries from McDonald’s or Burger King?”

  “Angelo … Have you seen the painting Amanda Finch did of me?”

  “No. I understand it’s—”

  “Yes, of course. I’m starkers. And it’s beautiful. Someday, after I’m gone, it will hang in a gallery. I don’t mean a sales gallery; I mean a museum. Come. I’ll show you. I keep it upstairs. I don’t show it to everyone. But I swear to God, if the Bruce Museum wanted to hang it, I’d let them.”

  He followed her up the stairs and along the hall to her bedroom, where the painting dominated one wall and in fact the whole room. He had guessed what Alicia Grinwold Hardeman looked like nude, but facing the painting he realized the naked woman looking lazily out of the painting was more realistically Alicia than Alicia was herself.

  She was sitting on a graceful Victorian chair upholstered with black horsehair—a chair taken from her living room to Amanda’s studio. Like Manet’s Olympia, she wore a cameo on a black ribbon around her neck. Her dark brown hair was tied back. She wore a faint smile, perhaps defiant.

  She sat with her legs crossed at the ankles and relaxed at an angle to the left. The pose did not display her crotch, only her belly down to the edge of her pubic hair, where Amanda had painted a few curly strands.

  Alicia was forty-eight years old, and Amanda had made no attempt to portray her as younger than that. Her breasts were pendulous and soft. She was slender, but she had a full little belly. Amanda had not failed to depict the stretch marks from the birth of her one child, Betsy.

  “Not bad for an old girl, huh?”

  “You’re beautiful, Alicia,” said Angelo.

  She sighed. “I wanted that picture done before I have to kid myself,” she said. “I’ve had Bill take Polaroids of me. When I’m a really old woman, I want to have evidence that I wasn’t always an old woman. Capisce?

  Angelo nodded. “Capisco.”

  She crossed the room to the window and parted the sheer curtains and looked out. “As the years go by, you know more and more vividly that you haven’t lived all you could have lived. You think about chances you didn’t take.”

  “I know.”

  “Not you,” she said. “Racing driver … all the rest of it. You’re still at it. You don’t miss anything, do you? Do you have any idea how many people envy you?”

  “Alicia…”

  “Bill, for example. Bill Adams. God, man! You go after what you want!”

  “Alicia…”

  “If only—Can you guess what I want right now?” “Alicia…”

  “I want you to put me down on that bed and make love to me, Angelo. It may be the last chance I’ll ever have, to—”

  “It could be a big mistake,” he said.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Don’t spoil the romantic, dashing image of Angelo Perino. Don’t turn into Mr. Caution. Right now it’s perfect. No one can possibly know. Maybe another time will come. Maybe not. I’m not an hysterical woman, Angelo. I know there’s no future for us. But by God there’s nowl This one time, and maybe never again. Angelo…”

  She was wearing a bikini under the beach coat. A skimpy yellow one. She jerked it off and stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, to let him look at her naked body. Then she offered herself in the missionary position and murmured and groaned the whole time he was inside her.

  It was an odd experience for Angelo. Alicia was not a sexpot like her daughter, not a woman of uncommon appetites like Roberta; she was just a woman who enjoyed straightforward copulation, who was happy just feeling a big hard driving deep into her. Only when he came did she throw her legs around him to pin him inside her and prevent him from withdrawing.

  She held him inside her for a long time as she came down slowly.

  “Sometime again, Angelo,” she whispered. “When it’s absolutely safe. Don’t worry. I won’t embarrass you. No risks. Just … when we can.”

  Driving home, he had an unworthy thought—unworthy, that is, of the fine woman he had just been with. He had now fucked all of Loren’s wives and his daughter.

  4

  On Monday evening, October 6, Cindy’s Porsche was put in the garage and the door was closed. Two XB Stallions, one white and one metallic blue, were brought to the house and parked in the driveway. The men who delivered them drove away with Angelo’s Sundancer.

  The family went out to look at them. Of the children, only seven-year-old John understood what they were, and he gravely pronounced them beautiful. Shortly a third Stallion arrived, driven by Alicia, to whom a red one had been delivered a few minutes ago. Bill Adams was with her.

  “Looks to me like you’ve got a winner here,” he said to Angelo.

  “I’ve only got one question,” Cindy muttered under her breath to Angelo. “How long do I have to drive this goddamned thing before I can take out my Porsche again?”

  “A week,” he said. “Me, I’m in heaven. Now I won’t have to drive that clunky Sundancer anymore.”

  Two couples from the neighborhood arrived. They admired the Stallions and pronounced them handsome cars that would surely be a big success.

  Shortly everyone went in the house, where a buffet and bar had been set up. The Stallion would be introduced to America on Monday Night Football.

  The telephone began to ring. Loren called to say the car looked good, and Roberta added a word of congratulations. Dr. John Perino called. Mr. Tadashi called from Japan to say he wished “excellence” to Angelo Perino and Loren Hardeman.

  Dietz von Keyserling arrived, bringing Amanda Finch.

  Alicia followed Angelo into the library, where he switched on another television set and tuned it to WABC. They were alone for the moment.

  “I’d like to talk with you for a moment,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t know what to do about Betsy,” said Alicia somberly.

  “What’s the problem?” Angelo asked.

  “Oh God, she’s pregnant again!”

  “Well, it can happen. Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Her psychiatrist. Or so she says. She’s been seeing this shrink in London, and apparently he administered his favorite therapy.”

  “He’s married, I suppose.”

  “With three children. He wants her to come to the States and have an abortion. She wants to have the child. She says she can take care of another one. She has a home and a nanny. Little Loren is old enough to be placed in an English public school, so the nanny can give all her attention to the new one. The odd thing about her, Angelo, is that in spite of all her wildness and all her traveling around the world, she has been a good mother. She says mothering gives her a purpose.”

  Angelo took Alicia’s hand between his. “You opened this conversation by saying you didn’t know what to do about Betsy. I think you’re going to have to let her do what she wants to do. Aside from giving her advice, I don’t see how you can influence her.”

  “I suppose I can’t. It’s for damned sure her father can’t influence her. I think that shrink took advantage of her.”

  “Oh, there you are,” said Bill Adams. “They’re about to kick off. When’s the commercial, Angelo?”

  “It runs twice in the first half, twice in the second. Four different commercials, not a repeat.”

  At halftime they walked out to the buffet and picked up some food, then went to the bar for drinks.

  “The commercials are greatl” Amanda exclaimed.

  Angelo thought so. He had hired a New York advertising agency to do them, taking the account away from the firm that had handled Sundancer advertising since 1966. The Stallion had to be introduced by a glamorous star, he said—not only that, but by a glamorous star who had done few or no commercials before. The agency had managed to convince Natalie Wood to introduce the new automobile. Her fee was exorbitant, but half of it went to charities of her choosing—a fact that had been publicized by all three major network news broadcasts in the past two weeks.

  At least some viewers would stay in front of their sets to see Natalie Wood.

  She was superb. Angelo had authorized the line, “It’s not a car for me, I suppose. I live in Europe, where the roads are narrower and there are no speed limits, and I drive a Lamborghini. But when I come home and rent a car, I hope it will be an XB Stallion. For the American way of driving, it has to be the best car you can find—safe, reliable, economical.”

  5

  Angelo’s secretary in his New York office knocked on his door and stepped in. “You’ve got an odd telephone call,” she said. “The man insists on talking to you and says you’ll want to talk to him for sure, but he won’t give his name.”

  “I’ll fix his ass,” said Angelo as he grabbed the phone. “Hello!”

  “We’ve met, Mr. Perino.”

  “I wouldn’t know, since you haven’t identified yourself.”

  “Who I am is immaterial. I have something you want. I can arrange to deliver it to you, in return for … a consideration.”

  “Really? And what’s that?”

  “It’s a videotape, Mr. Perino. It was shot in the Hardeman house in Palm Beach in 1974. You may remember my mother. She was Mr. Hardeman’s secretary.”

  “Mrs. Craddock,” said Angelo.

  “You remember. Well, I worked for Mr. Hardeman, too. You may recall I handled the guard dogs. Also, I kept the alarm system working. Anyway, Mr. Hardeman ordered me to install hidden cameras and microphones in the house and record certain events in certain rooms. Which I did. This particular tape was one of his favorites. It stars you and Miss Elizabeth Hardeman. Do I need to describe it to you?”

  For a moment Angelo wondered if the man had copied Number One’s tapes. But only for a moment. Number One had been too smart to let that happen. Anyway, why would this idiot have waited two years before attempting blackmail? No. Betsy had destroyed them, as she had said. The man on the other end of the line had seen them, though.

  “What do you have in mind?” Angelo asked coldly.

  “The years haven’t been kind to my mother and me since Mr. Hardeman died. He wasn’t at all generous to us in his will. I thought maybe a few thousand for people struggling to make a living—”

  “Let me tell you something, Craddock. In the first place, there are no tapes. They were destroyed.”

  “Do you think so? Do you know how easy it is to copy a tape, Mr. Perino?”

  “Well, I know just two ways to deal with a blackmailer: one, you pay him, two, you kill him. Which way do you think I’m going to handle you?”

  6

  The XB Stallion did not take off like a rocket. As a Wall Street analyst reminded his readers, it came after all from a company that had almost failed in the past five years, that had clung too long to its outmoded Sundancer, and that might yet fail. Even so, the dealers sold out their minimum stocks of ten before Christmas and ordered a few more. By February they were selling an average of four Stallions a week, by March an average of six.

  Word of mouth sold the Stallion. People who bought one liked it. In June 1981, XB Motors announced that it would not offer a 1982 model. The original Stallion needed no major modification, and people who bought one would still have the latest model, through 1982. Small changes had been made and would continue to be made. None would be merely cosmetic.

  The car was solid, surefooted, comfortable, and economical to drive.

  At the board meeting when Angelo recommended there be no 1982 model, he also recommended the Sundancer be discontinued. Loren joined him in the recommendation, and the venerable family car initiated by Number One died a quiet death. Dealers had stopped ordering it. They wanted their showroom space for Stallions.

  XVIII

  1981

  1

  In March 1981, Betsy gave birth to a baby girl she named Sally, for her grandmother. She was to be Sally Hardeman because she could not carry the name of her father, the psychiatrist.

  Max von Ludwige had a pronounced sense of honor. He flew to London and broke the psychiatrist’s jaw. The psychiatrist told everyone he had fallen down a flight of stairs.

  Loren van Ludwige left home that spring for St. George’s School. His father had arranged for his enrollment there and agreed to pay his tuition, though Betsy said she could afford to pay it herself. She agreed with Max that the boy should receive part of his education in a French secondary school, then take his university degree in the States. He was to be a cosmopolitan man.

  2

  In June Angelo flew to London to meet with British backers of the idea of importing the XB Stallion. They agreed that the car would be assembled in a plant in Manchester. The power trains would come directly from Japan, and XB would export to Britain the right-hand-drive version of the bodies and chassis.

  He stayed at Dukes Hotel and found in his room, after he’d checked in, a vase of flowers with a note from Betsy. Worse, he had a telephone message from Roberta, who was staying at the Hilton.

  Pleading a heavy schedule of appointments, including dinner with his British associates, he put off Betsy the first night and met with Roberta.

  “We have to think carefully about something,” he said, when they met in Harry’s Bar. “Loren’s daughter lives in London. I’m not exactly an anonymous character. If someone recognizes me, sees me with you, tells her, and … Well, you understand.”

  “I’m anonymous,” said Roberta. “Nobody knows me.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I don’t have to see you in public, lover. Only in private.”

  “Okay. Not tomorrow night. I’m being taken to a show, then to dinner.”

  “You can call on me at three A.M.”

  “And do business the next day? Hey—”

  “We need to talk and fuck, Angelo,” she said grimly. “Both.”

  He nodded. “I’m looking forward to the one but am a little apprehensive about the other.”

  “What do you want to bet nobody of Betsy’s acquaintance knows about our little Lebanese restaurant? I want some more lambs’ balls!”

  They walked the short distance through narrow streets to the restaurant, and over the lambs’ testicles and gorgeous Middle Eastern olives and a Lebanese wine, Roberta talked about Loren.

  “Hank Ford had to get rid of Lee Iacocca,” she said. “He had to. As he often reminds people, the name on the building is Ford. If he had to get work suited to his abilities, he’d be lucky to be a produce manager in a supermarket. Loren knows something like that about himself.”

  “I don’t put him down quite that far,” said Angelo. “I think he could manage a Woolworth store.”

  Roberta smiled bitterly. “Every big news story about the Stallion—in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Business Week, you name it—calls you the man who built the Stallion and saved the company. How could Loren not hate you?”

  “It would never occur to him to be grateful, I imagine.”

  “You’ve made a fool of him. Again. He’s the president of a company, and everybody calls it your company. I can emasculate him, but that’s in private. You do it to him publicly.”

  Angelo shrugged. “So what am I supposed to do, lie down and play dead for the sake of Loren’s balls? To be frank with you, Roberta, I don’t give a damn about Loren’s balls. I tolerate him. And I’m gettting sick of tolerating him.”

  “You don’t have to be so fuckin’ obvious about tolerating him.”

  “I suppose he wants to get rid of me.”

  She nodded. “Any goddamned way he has to.”

  “I don’t know why I don’t take my father’s advice,” said Angelo. “He’s said to me a hundred times, ‘Quit bailing out the Hardemans. They’re not worth it. Do your own thing.’ Why don’t I?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because my ‘thing’ is automobiles. It used to be driving them. Now, it’s building them. The Stallion is my automobile, and it’s only the first. I’ve put up with the Hardemans because they’ve got the only company I can take over and use to build cars.”

  “You can take over!”

  “Haven’t I? Didn’t I once before?”

  “Loren would rather see the company die than have it taken away from him.”

  “I’m willing for him to play the Henry Ford role,” said Angelo. “We can put his name on the building. So long as I have a free hand to build cars. My peers, the people I respect and who respect me, will know who’s building the cars.”

  Roberta stirred the food on her plate. “Ironic, isn’t it?” she murmured. “We’re talking about putting Loren’s balls on a plate in gravy, just like these.”