“She painted Alicia, nude,” said Anne. “I understand she’s a fine artist.”

  “She did a painting of Cindy when she was pregnant with our second child,” said Angelo. “Yes, nude. She was twenty-six and heavy with our little Anna. Last year, Amanda painted her again. Amanda is unrelenting in her realism. Cindy looks a year or two older than she was before. Not more. Having children hasn’t hurt her.”

  “You love her.”

  “Of course.”

  “You come from a loving family, which was a model for you. I often wonder what Betsy and I would be if we hadn’t been Hardemans. Number One was a monster. Number Two was a weakling. Number Three is a wretch. Except for me, there was only one child born to each generation. Until now. Betsy has three—only one legitimate, of course. Loren hates her for it.”

  “The problem with Loren is, he hates himself.”

  Anne raised her snifter and swirled her brandy. She smiled playfully. “Tell me something, Angelo. How many of the Hardeman women have you had?”

  “I really can’t talk about that.”

  She tipped her head. “Well, obviously you had Betsy. And you had Bobbie, Lady Ayres.”

  “Not when she was a Hardeman.”

  “Alicia speaks of you with a fondness that is highly suggestive. Also, is it just a coincidence that when you come to London, Roberta comes, too? I’m surprised she’s not here now.”

  Angelo tipped his snifter and finished his brandy. “The conversation is getting a little—”

  “Too personal? Well, Angelo, I am curious to know what the special attraction is. For Betsy, not being married to you is the tragedy of her life. She tricked you into getting her pregnant because she thought you couldn’t abandon her if she were the mother of your child.” Anne paused and raised her eyebrows. “A lot of wives have thought that way, too.”

  “‘Abandon her’ is hardly the right expression,” said Angelo.

  “Separate yourself from her. Refuse to see her. Withhold your love. There’s more between the two of you than just sex, isn’t there?”

  He nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re—what?—twenty years older than she is?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Anne gestured to the waiter for two more brandies. “Loren is convinced you’re this baby’s father.”

  “I gave my word to Roberta that I’m not.”

  “Good for you! The meddling bitch. I bet she asked you.”

  “She asked me.”

  Anne reached across the little round table and put her index finger lightly on Angelo’s hand. “I know you didn’t have sex with my mother,” she said. “You did with one of Loren’s wives, and my money says you have with all three. And you have with his daughter. Would you like to complete the set, Angelo?”

  “Why?”

  “I confronted Number One and had it out with him. Maybe someday I’ll confront Number Three. It would be fun to be able to say, ‘Angelo Perino has slept with every living woman in the Hardeman family.’”

  “Not a very worthy motive, Princess. I don’t want to play games.”

  “All right. A better motive. Besides the Hardeman women, you’ve had quite a track record. There must be some-thing awfully good about you. Why can’t I experience it, if all the others have?”

  “It would be a betrayal of Betsy, wouldn’t it?”

  Anne smiled with real amusement. “Do you think you’re the only man she sleeps with—apart from the psychiatrist? You’re with her a few times a year. Do you suppose she’s chaste between those times? Angelo … following out your logic, either you betray your wife every time you make love to Betsy, or you betray Betsy every time you make love to your wife.”

  “Supposing we do this, do you plan to tell her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Won’t both of us be thinking about her all the time?”

  “Will that make you incapable of doing it?”

  3

  In the foyer of her suite, they kissed. She parted her lips, and he pushed his tongue into her mouth. They stood there for half a minute, their tongues working together, before she turned and led him into the living room.

  She unclasped her pearls and put them aside on an escritoire, then unzipped her dress and pulled it over her head.

  Under her cashmere dress, she wore just one item: a sheer black bodysuit that combined stockings and a basque. Undressing did not diminish the elegant dignity of Princess Anne Alekhine. She picked up a bottle and two snifters from a table by the window and poured two tiny splashes of brandy. When she handed him a snifter, he drew her into his arms and kissed her again.

  Though it covered her from her armpits to the tips of her toes, the bodysuit was so sheer he could see all of her. Her legs were long. Her breasts were small. The lines of the bikini she wore when she sunbathed were clearly shown by the boundary between tanned skin and white.

  She opened the bedroom door and used a graceful gesture to invite him in.

  He undressed, as she watched. She helped him push down his underpants, then took his penis in her hand and gently squeezed it. She knelt and kissed it, just brushing her lips on it and quickly rising to her feet again.

  She slipped out of the bodysuit and then, surprisingly, pushed her feet back into her shoes. Through the sheer fabric he’d thought he’d seen that her crotch was shaved, or had perhaps been waxed, and now he saw he had been right. He ran his fingers over her outer lips. The skin was so smooth that he guessed she had had herself waxed.

  “Angelo, I don’t much care for the missionary position. Do you? And I don’t want to hurry, either. You probably know the way I want to do it. Can we?”

  He let her lead him. He had never made love exactly this way before. They sat facing each other on the bed, each with legs spread wide apart. She scooted up until their crotches were together, then inserted him. She leaned back and asked him to do the same. When her knees were in his armpits and his were in hers, she reached for his hands. They pulled on each other’s arms, which pressed him more deeply into her. For half an hour they remained that way, slowly moving, twisting their hips. Sometimes they let go of each other’s hands and leaned back, afterwards grabbing hands and pulling again.

  The sensations were enduring and exquisite. Their movements were slow and careful and varied. They did not exhaust themselves or sweat. They experimented with movements, slowly and carefully, savoring the strong and varied feelings they could generate. Neither came to an orgasm. Each time he was near, Angelo paused so as not to end the experience.

  Her scent was part of the experience. He had smelled her perfume. To that was now added a subtle, musky odor from her body, faint but provocative.

  Eventually, Anne slowly raised her legs over his shoulders and brought her feet together behind his head. “Now…,” she whispered calmly. He rammed himself deeper into her and began the thrusts that quickly brought both of them to explosive climaxes.

  In the shower a little later, she kissed him and remarked in a throaty voice, “Okay, I understand the fatal attraction. Now, admit it. Every living Hardeman woman…”

  Angelo sensed that he could trust her. He nodded.

  4

  In March Cindy gave birth to a baby girl they named Mary.

  Keijo Shigeto and his wife, Toshiko, arrived in Greenwich the following week. Their children would come later, when their school year was completed. In the meantime they would live with their grandparents in Tokyo.

  Angelo had decided to establish Keijo in Greenwich, where he could help him and where he would be handy for consultation as often as possible. He provided him an office in the Angelo Perino, Incorporated, suite of offices on Third Avenue and accompanied him on the train on his first few commutes.

  Cindy had hoped to be able to help Toshiko establish herself in Greenwich, but the move had been planned during the final stages of her pregnancy and had been accomplished within a week of the birth of Mary. Fortunately, she was not needed to help the family find a house. Shizoka took care of that. There was a Japanese real estate agency in Greenwich. Japanese companies bought houses and leased them to their own employees or the employees of other companies during their time in the States. Keijo leased a house on a hillside street in the Cos Cob area of Greenwich, furnished and entirely ready for the family to move in.

  It was not where Cindy would have suggested they live. Keijo had a three-mile drive to the railroad station. Toshiko would have to drive two miles or so to the grocery store and the post office. Within two weeks of arriving, the family had acquired two cars: a Buick and a Chrysler. Keijo drove the Buick to the station. Toshiko drove the Chrysler everywhere. They were fascinated with the big American cars. Neither of them drove well, but they drove.

  Angelo had identified a vacant industrial plant in Danbury as a possible site for installing the machinery and personnel to manufacture the epoxy resin material that would become the bodies for the XB 2000. The manufacturing process was not heavy industry. The liquid material was rolled out into large, thin sheets, which could be stretched over fiberglass forms to shape it into fenders, doors, hoods, and so on. As many as twenty layers would be laid on, fastened together with epoxy cement, forming laminated body parts that would be extraordinarily strong and resilient, as well as light in weight.

  Single sheets of the material could easily be trimmed with scissors, though they would in fact be trimmed with specialized electric shears that cut by vibration rather than mechanical movement. The plant would use no dangerous machine tools, and there would be no heavy lifting. Care had to be taken with the chemicals, but workers could be trained to protect themselves. Once a sheet hardened, as someone put it, it could safely be used in place of a rubber sheet in a baby crib.

  Manufacture of epoxy resin sheets would employ a hundred workers or so at first, and most of them could be women. The little city of Danbury enthusiastically welcomed Angelo Perino and Keijo Shigeto. They were invited to speak at a dinner held by the Chamber of Commerce and at luncheons of the local Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs.

  Angelo planned to make prototype bodies in Danbury. After the prototype XB 2000s were tested, he would ship epoxy resin sheets to Detroit to be formed into bodies in an XB Motors plant.

  He formed a corporation to license the process and manufacture the material. He called it CINDY Corporation.

  5

  Toshiko made herself into an American woman as quickly and thoroughly as she could. For dinner at the Perinos’, she appeared wearing a pleated tartan skirt and a dark blue cardigan sweater over a white blouse.

  “Greenwich Academy,” Cindy murmured to Angelo when they were in the kitchen pouring drinks.

  Speaking English remained a challenge for her, but the little Japanese woman had plunged into it and somehow managed to make her wishes known in the local stores.

  “Are gin,” she said, tasting her martini. “Rike this. Not so much rike Shots.”

  “Scotch,” Keijo corrected her curtly.

  “Shotch…”

  “Scotch.”

  “Scotch. Yes. Is good. Gin more good.”

  At midnight, Angelo and Cindy lay in bed together. They had been benignly amused with Toshiko’s attempts to speak English and at the same time sincerely respectful of the way she was facing the challenge of life in a country that was vastly different from her homeland. They chuckled as they repeated some of the things she had said.

  Times like this, nights together in bed, when they were not exhausted from the demands of the day, had become too infrequent for Cindy and Angelo; and they had learned to cherish them. They lay in each other’s arms, comfortable with flesh against flesh, since neither of them ever wore anything to bed.

  “Darling…,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you comfortable?”

  Angelo nodded.

  “So am I. And maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe we’re too damned comfortable. Did you ever think of that? We’re not the kind to be comfortable. Still here we are, domesticated and cozy. I never thought we would get to be that way. In 1963 you were the second-ranked racing driver in the world—and would have been ranked first if that crash hadn’t sidelined you so long. When I met you, you were still great. I loved racing. They wouldn’t let a woman compete, but you let me be a test driver. We used to live on the edge, man!”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m not sure either, but I have a sense that we’ve lapsed into middle-age boredom—in our personal lives, I mean; your professional life is adventurous enough. We go sailing, but Bill doesn’t race the yawl. There’s no challenge in sailing with him. I’d like to take flying lessons, but I suppose as a mother of five—”

  Angelo grinned. “If you flew, you’d want to go into aerobatics. And so would I—if I flew. Are you telling me you’re bored, Cindy?”

  She shrugged. “It’s such a damned cliche,” she said.

  “The gallery—”

  “I ought to spend more time in there. I’ve let Dietz run things too much. And Marcus Lincicombe. Marcus is a fine dealer—too good to be a junior partner.”

  “No reason why you shouldn’t spend more time in the gallery. You do trust the au pair, don’t you?”

  “Yes. She’s all right.”

  “Well, then…”

  Cindy ran her hands down her cheeks, then down over her breasts and lifted them. “Do you remember the line in The Godfather when Mike tells Kay he’ll let her ask him one question about his business but never another?”

  Angelo nodded. “She asked him if he’d killed his brother-in-law, and he lied and said no.”

  “Right. Will you let me ask you one question about your personal life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you the father of Betsy’s latest child?”

  Angelo did not hesitate for more than a moment. He drew a deep breath and said, “Yes.”

  “I thought so,” she said calmly. “I’m not going to forgive you, because I don’t think it’s something you need be forgiven for. I can understand. She’s drop-dead beautiful. She’s smart. She’s vital. She was there a lot of times when I couldn’t be. Besides, she’s a Hardeman. Fucking her, you fucked the whole clan.”

  “I’m sorry, Cindy.”

  “I’m going to show you how much I love you, Angelo. I could hold this over you, but instead I’m going to tell you that I’ve strayed on you a time or two. If you were a commuter who came home on the train every night, I don’t think either one of us would have found an occasion to do anything outside our marriage. But that’s not the way it is. Do you love her?”

  “Well—”

  “You damned well better. You’d better love the mother of your son. It’s okay, too—as long as you love me more.”

  “I love you more, Cindy. A whole lot more.”

  She smiled and reached out with both hands. “Show me,” she said.

  XXII

  1984

  1

  Two prototypes of the XB 2000 were cobbled together—Angelo’s term—by the end of February 1984. He had leased the space in Danbury, had installed the necessary equipment to mix the epoxy resin material and roll it out into sheets, had ordered forms built according to the Varallo design, and had produced two bodies. They were flown to Detroit and installed on Stallion frames and chassis with modified engines. They carried Stallion gear boxes, instrument panels, and other interior components, and so were not really 2000s. Even so, they looked like the new car; and on the test track the modified engine drove the light vehicle with a performance that felt like the new car.

  Betsy came to Detroit and demanded one of the prototypes. She drove it on a test track, then on the streets, then on the Michigan highways, picking up one speeding ticket and outdistancing the second police car that chased her.

  Princess Anne was interested, and she and Igor came to Detroit and drove one of the prototypes. Pulled over by a Grosse Pointe patrol car, she indignantly showed the visa stamp in her passport that proved she had not been the woman driving the yellow sports car on the night when it had outraced the same police car.

  It was not possible to have two XB 2000s available to every dealer by the time of the April dealers meeting. Two cars were ready for display in Cobol Hall—this pair complete with 2000 gear boxes, instrumentation, and all interior appointments.

  Betsy was to unveil the car at the annual dinner for dealers. She was popular with the dealers, especially those who remembered her hospitality suite from the meeting two years before. When she was introduced by her father, the dealers rose and gave her a standing ovation—as they had done for Angelo Perino a few minutes before.

  2

  Loren and Roberta sat side by side at the head table, she all but obscured from the dealers by a large basket of white carnations.

  “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this,” muttered Loren as Betsy, looking splendid in a white silk dress, took the microphone and beamed at the clapping, shouting dealers.

  “Keep cool, lover,” Roberta whispered to him. “The 2000 is gonna fail. And when it does, whose car was it? Let Betsy and Perino have their hour of glory. Their honey will turn to vinegar very shortly. And it damned well better, too. Perino knows too fuckin’ much.”

  Betsy gave a short speech. She spread credit around. It was Angelo Perino’s project, she said. Applause. Based on something she had been urging him to do. Applause. Because her great-grandfather had promised her the company would do it. Applause. Possible because of the support of her father. Applause. Assisted by his vice president for engineering, Peter Beacon. Applause.

  “XB Motors, formerly Bethlehem Motors, has maintained a secure niche in an industry increasingly dominated by the Big Three, because our company has always given the American consumer what he and she wanted. The Sundancer was a great car. The XB Stallion is a great car—as the sales figures you are returning every month clearly show. And now, for those Americans who want something different…