She was a formidable woman, in every sense.

  She was as tall as Loren, actually half an inch or so taller. If not for the work of her hairdresser, she would have been a dishwater blond. She did not want to be that, yet she did not want her hair stripped. She insisted on, and got, a golden color with a wholly natural look. At a time when piled-up hair was in style, she had hers cut short: clipped on the sides shorter than most men wore theirs, then abundant but not piled up on top. Her eyes were vivid blue. Her nose was too big to be thought ideal, but she had never considered letting a surgeon scrape cartilage out of it. Her mouth was narrow, her lips thin.

  Roberta’s figure was robust. She had broad shoulders and strong arms, and long muscular legs. Her hips were narrow for a woman her size, but her breasts left no doubt of her womanliness. They were large.

  She met Loren at the door and kissed him lustily. “Day?” she asked.

  “Same old shit,” he said. “They’re talking about raising the price of plastics again. You know. Goddamned Arab oil embargo. It’ll cost us eight dollars a unit on refrigerators, a hundred forty-something on a Sundancer. How the hell can we compete when—”

  “Isn’t everybody getting hit with the same increase?”

  “Well…”

  “Then you’ll compete,” she said. “Anyway, you’ll figure out a way to overcome it. I know you, Loren. You’re one shrewd bastard.”

  He tossed his briefcase into the closet and hung up his raincoat. He always swore he would work on the papers in the briefcase during the evening, but he never did. Bethlehem Motors had problems, big problems, but he hired people to work at night; he didn’t have to do it himself.

  Roberta was stunning, as she made it a point to be when he came home evenings. She was wearing tailored gray flannel slacks, cut more tightly than such slacks usually were, to cling to her backside and legs. She also wore an off-white cable-knit turtleneck sweater. For some reason she liked to go barefoot in the house, so she wore no shoes.

  “Had anything to drink?” she asked.

  “A Scotch in the car.”

  “Scotch now?”

  “Sure.”

  They walked through the living and dining rooms to a family room at the back of the house. The room was exquisite, as in fact were all the rooms, though this one appealed to Loren more than any other. It was furnished with a baby grand Steinway, which Roberta played, and with English-country-house furniture: two overstuffed couches and two fat chairs, upholstered with colorful floral prints. When the drapes were open, a picture window in the rear wall opened on a densely planted rock garden. A big Persian rug covered most of the oak floor. Paintings of Thoroughbred horses and frolicking spaniels in country settings dominated the walls. Three brass lamps filled the room with warm light.

  Roberta brought two drinks to the couch where Loren had sat down. She sat down beside him, saluted him, drank, and then kissed him.

  “I just washed, mister,” she said curtly.

  Loren took a second swallow of Scotch. He nodded. “Good,” he said.

  He stood, put his drink aside on the coffee table, and began to take off his clothes.

  As he stripped naked, Roberta slipped down her slacks and her panties, leaving them around her ankles.

  She scooted to the end of the couch, beyond the coffee table. Loren, entirely nude, knelt before her. He lifted her sweater and kissed her on each breast, pausing to suck on each nipple. Then he pushed her knees apart and shoved his face into her crotch. He used his tongue to find what he knew she wanted him to find. He flicked the tip of his tongue over it. Then he licked it. Then he backed away a little and began to lick her entire furrow with his flattened tongue.

  If someone had told him a year ago he would do this—and a great deal more that Roberta had taught him—he would have laughed. He, Loren Hardeman, naked on his knees eating a woman’s cunt? Well, he was doing it. And not only that, he liked it. He didn’t know why he liked it. He couldn’t explain it to himself.

  Roberta arched her back and moaned. Loren returned his tongue to her clit and gave it all his attention. He worked until with a shriek she achieved an orgasm. Then he licked all up and down again. She came again before he even returned to her clit. Working on it once more, he brought her a third time.

  She shoved him back.

  “Was it good?” he whispered.

  “You’ve done better,” she grunted.

  “Do you want to punish me?”

  “A little.”

  Loren picked up his trousers, pulled his belt out of the loops, and presented it to her. He turned over on his hands and knees and presented his backside to her.

  “Do it, darling!” he whispered hoarsely.

  She flogged him with the belt, half a dozen strokes, raising angry red welts. Then abruptly she threw the belt aside, dropped to the floor beside him, roughly turned him over, and gobbled his erect organ into her mouth. He climaxed within half a minute. She swallowed his ejaculate.

  He remained on the floor naked as she pulled up her panties and slacks. She handed him what was left of his drink and picked up hers and gulped it down.

  She went to the bar and poured them two more drinks. Glancing at her watch, she said, “We’ve got exactly eighteen minutes to get to the Farbers’. And Jesus Christ, you’ve sweated again. You’d better trot up to the shower toot dee sweet. I’m going in what I’ve got on. Your camel jacket and dark brown slacks would be right.”

  Loren tossed down half his Scotch. He bent down and kissed her feet before he trotted away toward the stairs and the bathroom.

  He ran his fingertips over his backside and felt the welts. They hurt—really hurt—but goddamn! he was a lucky fellow.

  III

  1973

  1

  Anne, Princess Alekhine, whoever she had once been, however she had been born, was a princess by anyone’s definition. Prince Igor had made her so. Or maybe she had always had a regal nature, and marriage to Prince Igor had only afforded her an opportunity to blossom.

  She looked like a princess: tall, slender, exquisitely graceful. The beautifully tailored pink suit she wore would have made almost any woman look genteel, but Anne would have looked aristocratic naked.

  In any event, she was acutely aware that the Hardemans were nouveaux riches and rude Americans. Money, she observed once again as she sat at Number One’s dinner table in Palm Beach, did not buy breeding.

  The old man was not supposed to drink anymore. But he did. Canadian whisky. Only one or two, but that one or two he heaved back like a peasant, obviously more interested in the effect of the alcohol than in the taste of what he drank.

  She had sent one of Number One’s servants out to buy a bottle of Tio Pepe. Another princess, much older, with the name Esterhazy, had remarked to her one day that one served guests only one sherry, Tio Pepe, and served it only in Murano glass, preferably goblets with crystal stems and milk-glass bowls.

  Number One had been the kind of savage who would have thought it the height of sophistication to throw his glassware into the fireplace. Wheelchair bound, he was much subdued, but still he was a savage. She remembered him as a big man. It was impossible for a man really to shrink, but he was probably forty pounds less heavy than he had been the last time she’d seen him. His trouser legs hung loosely over legs long atrophied. His shoulders appeared narrower. He sat with them hunched, his earlobes all but touching them. His face was deeply wrinkled. Even at table he wore a panama straw hat to conceal his liver-spotted bald pate.

  Princess Anne had become a snob. She had so intended, and she reveled in it.

  Number One was not allowed to eat most of the food that was served to his guest. “What the hell am I supposed to eat? Nothing that tastes good. But you know something, Anne? I’ve been under the so-called care of these medical butchers for more than thirty-five years, and I’ve outlived most of them. Mostly by not doing what they say I have to do. You know what? I’m ninety-five goddamned years old. Anne, honey, don’t live to be this old. It isn’t worth it.”

  “No?”

  “No. Think of what you lose! Jesus, Anne, do you realize Elizabeth has been gone forty-four years! My son has been gone more than twenty years. Now your mother…” He shook his head. “Sally was a wonderful woman. She was a good wife to my son—”

  “A good mother to me,” Anne interrupted.

  “Yes, of course. That’s why you came to see me, isn’t it? To share memories of—”

  “No,” said Anne with brutal severity. “I came to find out if after all these years you would admit the truth.”

  “What truth…?”

  “You’re not my grandfather, you egregious old liar.”

  “Anne!”

  “You’re my father, damn you!”

  “Anne, for God’s sake—”

  “When people are dying, they tell the truth. Even the law of evidence acknowledges that.” She reached for the bottle and renewed her glass of Tio Pepe. “When she was dying, my mother told me about you and her. Loren Two knew he was not my father, and he never told me. You never told me.”

  “Don’t judge us, Anne,” the old man pleaded. “You know what my son was. You found out during the stockholders meeting, thanks to that rotten goddamned—”

  “Thanks to Angelo Perino,” she interrupted, “whose word is better than yours.”

  “You can’t understand,” said Number One tearfully. “Sally was so beautiful, so wonderful, and Loren Two was so incapable of—”

  “So you solved the problem in the most direct way,” said Anne coldly. “And to be altogether frank, it’s a matter of indifference to me. I made a life for myself outside the orbit of this corrupt parvenu family. But it would have been nice to know I was your daughter and not to have believed all these years I was the daughter of a weakling who killed himself. All these years I’ve had to wonder, and Igor has had to wonder, if there wasn’t something evil in my genes, a predilection for self-destruction. It would have been nice to know I was not his daughter. That would have been nice … Dad.”

  “You must not talk about this,” said Number One. “In the first place, no one will believe you.”

  “I suppose Loren Three doesn’t know,” she said. She smiled and shook her head. “That worthless little man turns out to be my nephew, not my brother.”

  “Loren is not a worthless man,” said Number One, his face rigid with anger.

  “Your male descendants do you no honor,” she said coldly. “You should rely more on your female ones. I’m a far better person than Loren. And so is Betsy. Betsy and I would not arrange to have a man beaten half to death. That’s what Loren did. He’s lucky to be alive. Angelo Perino is connected, you know. He could have Loren swatted like a fly.”

  “Don’t overestimate the wop. And don’t underestimate what you call a parvenu family. I built a multibillion-dollar—”

  “And didn’t learn anything in the process, Dad. You’re still a bib-overalls machine-shop tinkerer. And my nephew, as he turns out to be, is a thug.”

  Number One’s face reddened. “Oh? Well, you, my dear Anne, are an ornament. That’s what you are: an ornament purchased by a noble family, in the same way they purchase art and lovely furniture and fast cars. And Betsy is … a nymphomaniac. She’s got a stronger sex drive than any man.”

  “As strong as yours?” asked Anne.

  2

  When Number One first saw Cindy in a dress he didn’t recognize her. He hadn’t seen her often, but when he had seen her she had been a racetrack groupie and a test driver, invariably wearing faded, ragged jeans with a sweatshirt as often as not smeared with grease. She had been so fascinated with racing that she had carried a hi-fi around with her and played tapes of Grand Prix cars roaring on straights then lowering to gurgles as they were shifted down in turns. She had been asked to leave hotels because she played those damned tapes so loud. She played them when she was making love, and the roars of racing engines helped her to achieve fiery orgasms.

  When Angelo walked away from racing, she walked away from him: abruptly and completely.

  Last year, after his beating and his dramatic confrontation with the Hardeman clan, she had walked away from everything he’d thought had mattered to her just as abruptly and completely as she’d walked away from him. Suddenly she wasn’t interested in automobiles anymore, not in the racing kind or any other kind.

  Only then did he discover that she had a fine classical education. Her time in the racing world had been a fling: a four-year fling after a rigidly respectable upbringing and schooling. His gamine racetrack groupie was actually a lady.

  During their prolonged European wedding trip she had led him through famous galleries and introduced him to the glories of art. Angelo had been in St. Peter’s twice before, but he had never been guided through by so knowledgeable a guide as his wife.

  She had her own money, of course, and from time to time she shipped a painting or sculpture home. These were in their Manhattan apartment now, and Angelo had seen the chief art critic for the New York Times study for minutes on end one or another of her pieces and then pronounce it “an exceptionally fine example of whatever.

  Their apartment was an exceptionally fine example of gracious living—Manhattan style. It was on East Seventy-fourth Street and had in fact once been two apartments. Sometime in the forties a wall had been removed and they had been joined together. Angelo and Cindy had leased the place before they’d left for Europe so the work they required could be done while they were away. The oak floors had been stripped and refinished. All the walls had been painted white. Track lighting had been installed on the ceilings of the living room and entrance hall so spots and floods could be hung to light the art Cindy expected to display.

  The big windows to the east overlooked the FDR Drive and the East River. Drapes could be opened and closed electrically. When they came back from Europe they lived in the Waldorf for four weeks while they chose furniture and had it delivered. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he was content with letting Cindy select what she liked: lots of fine wood, stainless steel, and upholstery of tan-and-black leather.

  Shortly after they moved into their apartment, Cindy began to entertain, and Angelo discovered he needn’t be concerned about leaving her alone while he was on business trips; she would not be alone. Many of her friends from college lived in New York. Some of her sorority sisters even lived close by. They were transfixed by Cindy’s stories of her years at the tracks. Her experiences were beyond their imagining.

  They were curious, too, about the man she had married: a big, handsome Italian seventeen years her senior, a onetime championship race driver—number two in the world in 1963—now an automotive engineer. One of them was playfully forward enough to ask Cindy if she’d been pregnant when she married him.

  “No,” said Cindy. “But I am now.”

  “Pretty good is he?” the woman asked.

  “Shirley, with his brains, he’s an engineer. With his cock, he’s an artist. Every fuck’s a masterpiece.”

  The husband of one of her sorority sisters told Angelo he had been at Sebring when Angelo climbed the wall and was burned. The husbands were interested in his new business. Some of them were with brokerage houses and could use competent industry analysis. He made friendships with these men, which would be useful to him as he built his business. One of them proposed him for membership in the University Club, and he joined and took many of his lunches there.

  Cindy bought a Leroy Neiman lithograph. It was called Sautatuck and was an honest nude: a girl comfortably reclining with her legs apart, wearing one red stocking and one green. The owner of the gallery who sold it to her came to the apartment to help her hang and light it. She was heavily pregnant and did not want to climb on a ladder to install a spotlight in the track. When Angelo came in, that is where the man was: on the ladder.

  “Angelo,” said Cindy, “I want you to meet Dietz von Keyserling—more formally, Dietrich von Keyserling. He sold me the Neiman.”

  “I’ll shake hands when you come down,” said Angelo. “It would be something of a challenge to your balance, I’m afraid.”

  He examined the lithograph and decided he liked it very much. Although the subject was decidedly immodest, the artist’s technique made it modest. It was erotic only in a restrained and subtle way.

  Von Keyserling adjusted the light and came down. He was a tall, slender young man, about Cindy’s age, which was twenty-five, and he was handsome, though Angelo found him a little too … pretty. He was blond. His cheekbones were high and pronounced. His lips were full and a little redder than most men’s. He wore a double-breasted blue blazer with gold buttons, a white cotton turtleneck, and crisply pressed gray slacks.

  “It is very good to meet you, Mr. Perino,” said von Keyserling. “Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you drove a Porsche 908 in the Nürburgring in nineteen sixty-eight. I was there. I saw you drive, did I not?”

  “You saw me,” said Angelo “It was in the twilight of my years. I managed not to slam a wall and nearly bum myself alive; but that was about all I accomplished that year.”

  “He’s modest,” said Cindy. “He’s one of the great drivers, and he was still a driver the others feared in nineteen sixty-eight.”

  “They called the 908 the Short-Tail, did they not?”

  “You know something about racing,” said Angelo. “The 917 was faster but not handy, not maneuverable like the 908.1 loved that car.”

  “You drove a number of marques. Was it your favorite?”

  “Well, Porsche … Ferrari.”

  “Brandy?” asked Cindy. “At this stage, I’m not having any, but that’s no reason why you two shouldn’t.”

  The two men nodded their assent, and Cindy brought a bottle of Courvoisier and two snifters.

  Angelo raised his brandy and saluted. “I am happy to have met you, Mr. von Keyserling.”

  “Please. In America everyone calls me Dietz. I am Dietrich Josef Maximilian von Keyserling, but I enjoy American informality and like to be called simply Dietz. It is what my mother called me. I am, incidentally, Austrian, not German. From Vienna.”