“You say we are losing money on the Sundancer. Why do you think so?”

  Angelo turned to Number Three. “What about it, Loren? Are you losing money?”

  “That’s inside information,” Loren replied testily.

  “You say we’re losing market share,” said Number One.

  “I don’t have to have inside information to know that,” said Angelo. “Do you deny it?”

  “We don’t have to affirm or deny anything, Angelo,” said Loren.

  Angelo shrugged and spoke to Betsy. “Common knowledge.”

  “I don’t know what makes you an ‘industry analyst,’” said Loren, “but your damned report caused the price of our stock to go down. Worse than that, we lost eight dealers.”

  “Do you pay any attention to what I write, or just bitch?” Angelo asked.

  “We shouldn’t be manufacturing automobiles at all anymore,” said Loren the Third.

  Number One slammed his hand on the table. “I don’t want to hear it! As long as I am alive, Bethlehem Motors will make cars. Period.”

  “Then you had better make ones you can sell,” said Angelo.

  “The Sundancer—”

  “Was a fine car, in its time and context. Bethlehem Motors didn’t capture any of the market Ford captured when Lee Iacocca shoved the Mustang up Henry the Second’s ass. You missed that market. Now you’re going to miss another one if you don’t get out in front.”

  “I read your goddamned analysis,” said Number One. “It’s easy to be a genius when you don’t have to do what you write about.”

  “I read it, too,” said Betsy. “It says the Sundancer—which I agree was a fine car in its day—is now thought of as a dinosaur, a gas-guzzler—”

  “Oh, come on!” Loren the Third interrupted. “George Romney thought he could sell fuel-efficient cars. You can’t even find a Rambler in a junkyard today.”

  Betsy picked up from where she had been interrupted. “When George Romney called ‘Detroit iron’ dinosaurs, gasoline sold for thirty-five cents a gallon. Now it sells for a dollar, and we’ll see it selling for a dollar and a half. Why do you think Volkswagen sells ten times the number of cars it sold ten years ago? Because it gets thirty miles to the gallon, compared to twelve for a Sundancer. The VW is ugly and uncomfortable, but—”

  “It also runs,” said Angelo, “and doesn’t require days of warranty work.”

  “So what’s your solution, Angelo?” asked Number One. “Transverse engines driving the front wheels—”

  “No long drive shaft,” said Angelo.

  “Four cylinders,” Number One went on. “Who’s going to buy a car with a four-cylinder engine?”

  “The people who buy Volkswagens, Hondas, Toyotas—”

  “Oh, sure,” laughed Loren the Third. “Chuggety-chug. Noise. No pep. No acceleration.”

  Angelo shrugged. “The MG has a four-cylinder engine,” he said. “So does the Porsche 911. Chuggety-chug, Loren?”

  Betsy pointed at her father and laughed. “Gotcha there!”

  Loren the Third shot an angry glance at his daughter.

  Number One reached inside his suit and drew out a clipping. It was Angelo’s report to New York securities dealers on the condition of Bethlehem Motors. He read, “‘Bethlehem lacks the facilities to build four-cylinder transverse engines and their associated drive system, and it cannot within any reasonable time retool and begin to manufacture them.’ So, young man, we can’t, hey? What’s your solution? You say, ‘A number of Japanese manufacturers have that manufacturing capacity in place, have extended experience in engineering and producing such power trains, and have in fact surplus capacity. They are ready, willing, and able to supply American manufacturers with these fuel-efficient, powerful little engines. Companies like Bethlehem Motors could do worse than enter into negotiations to import them.’ So … a bastardized car, half American, half Jap. That’s what you want us to build, Angelo?”

  “It could save the company,” said Angelo.

  “All my life,” said Number One, “the phrase ‘Made in Japan’ has stood for cheap and shoddy.”

  “Like Sony television sets and Nikon cameras?” asked Betsy.

  Number One slammed his hand down on the table. “While I live,” he said, “no automobile made in my plant will have a goddamned Japanese engine!”

  Angelo smiled. “That’s what Hank Ford told Lee Iacocca. And, frankly, I don’t give a damn what you do. There’s the truth, whether you like it or not. I’m not asking you to take my recommendations. I didn’t make them to you. I made them to the securities boys in New York. Try raising money, my friends. Try floating a bond issue or a new issue of stock.”

  “Ever consider that you might get sued for libeling a company?” Loren the Third asked.

  Angelo ignored his question. “Your ratings are down. Your stock has ‘sell’ recommendations from the major analysts. Bethlehem Motors has a limited life expectancy.”

  “So do I,” muttered Number One. “Eat your goddamned soup before it gets cold.”

  3

  Angelo knew Betsy would come to his room. He knew it would be more dangerous to lock her out than to let her in. Besides, he didn’t want to lock her out.

  “You and I are perfect together,” she whispered to him after they had made love. She reached for the snifter of brandy she had brought to the room and took a small sip before she held it to his lips and let him sip. “There’s got to be more to it than this—more, I mean, than sneaking a night in this house. Oh, God! Leave her, Angelo! Give her a nice settlement and come to me.”

  “She’s the mother of my son,” he said simply.

  Betsy took the snifter back, took a bigger swallow, and put it aside on the night table. “Anyway, I suppose you love her. You love her, don’t you?”

  Angelo nodded.

  “I’m sure she’s a good wife for you,” said Betsy. “I’d have been better.’

  “You were married when I married Cindy, if you remember.”

  “You knew the arrangement,” she said. “You could have waited.”

  He shook his head.

  “They’re feeling murderous,” she said. “I mean the old bastard and my father. I’m not exaggerating. They’d gladly kill you if they thought they could get away with it.”

  Angelo shrugged. “I haven’t hurt them. Not really.”

  “It’s not what you’ve published. They figure you’re the source of what Thurman wrote in his big expose. You know what I mean.”

  Angelo surely did. Guy Thurman had published a twenty-page article on the Hardeman family in one of the major newsmagazines—

  The qualities that make fathers great men are rarely inherited by their sons. In fact, those very qualities tend to suppress similar qualities in the sons. So it has been with Loren Hardeman, founder of Bethlehem Motors. His son and grandson were also named Loren Hardeman, and the custom grew of calling the eldest man Number One, the son Number Two, and the grandson Number Three.

  Number One would come to wonder what Number Two might have been had he not been so completely overshadowed by his domineering father. As it was, he became a weak and vacillating man and a closet homosexual who was blackmailed. In 1952 he committed suicide. Number Three turned out to be a jealous, manipulative man who has tried more than once to take control of Bethlehem Motors away from Number One.

  Looking around for a man who could build a Bethlehem Motors sports car, to be called the Betsy for his great-granddaughter, Number One settled on a young man he had known since that young man was a child—Angelo Perino.

  Angelo Perino had the engineering degree and he had the same commitment to building automobiles that Number One had. What was more, he had guts. He had spent five years as a racing driver, had once ranked number two in the world, and had nearly died in a crash. He also had money of his own and was willing to take risks.

  To build the Betsy, it would be necessary to overwhelm the angry opposition of Loren Hardeman III, who would do anything to frustrate the project—out of jealousy, yes, but also out of a conviction that Bethlehem Motors must sooner or later get out of the automobile business and concentrate on the business that made far more money for the company: the manufacture of appliances.

  The battle raged for three years. When Number Three saw he was losing, he went so far as to attempt to sabotage the experimental car. When that tactic failed, he actually hired thugs to beat up on Angelo Perino….

  Number Three had sued Thurman, but the case had been quickly dismissed, which left him to pay the legal fees.

  “Thurman tells too much not to have had an inside source of information,” said Betsy.

  “That doesn’t make it me. I swear before God I never met Thurman, never talked to him, never corresponded with him.”

  “You’ll never make them believe it. Watch out for them, lover. Never turn your back. They…” She shrugged. “To hell with it. We’ve got better things to think about.”

  Betsy got up on her hands and knees and straddled him. She dangled her breasts over his crotch, swinging them back and forth against his cock. “Turn over on your face,” she urged in a throaty whisper.

  He did. She spread his hinder cheeks with her hands, shoved her face into his anus, and began to probe with her tongue. He drew all the breath he could contain. The sensation was not orgasmic, but what her tongue reached tingled with a pleasure that became more and more intense and yet was not orgasmic. She worked at it for five minutes or so, then reached between his legs, found his rigid shaft, and began to stroke it. He came within half a minute: a deep, riotous, sustained orgasm.

  “So…,” Betsy whispered. “I bet she never does that for you.”

  Angelo smiled fondly at her and shook his head. He lied. Betsy didn’t need to know that Cindy did it, too.

  VI

  1975

  1

  VKP Galleries was located on Park Avenue a few blocks north of the Waldorf and on the west side of the street. On a Monday night in April, Cindy and Dietz presided over the opening of a one-woman show for Amanda Finch, a young artist Cindy had discovered through her sorority contacts.

  Amanda Finch had never been a sorority girl, but Mary Wilkerson had. Mary, who lived in Greenwich, was enrolled in art classes at the Silvermine Guild, where Amanda was a figure model for classes in sketching, painting, and sculpture. The two women became acquainted when Amanda walked back among the easels to see how the students were portraying her. When Amanda offered a suggestion about Mary’s painting, Mary learned that Amanda was herself an artist and was posing as a figure model to earn a living in a nondemanding way that allowed her to devote most of her time to her own painting. Mary saw some of Amanda’s work and immediately invited Cindy to come to Connecticut and look at it.

  Amanda Finch’s work fit into the realist category that VKP Galleries was still promoting. She painted with meticulous attention to detail, so that her paintings could, from a distance, be mistaken for finely focused photographs. The stamens and pistils in her flowers were scrupulously reproduced, as were the veins in the petals. Her portraits were reminiscent of Rembrandt’s in that they resembled greatly enlarged color photographs of faces and hands, that precisely depicted a subject’s varying skin colors, including blotches and scars. Eyelashes and eyebrows seemed to have been painted with single-hair brushes.

  The most impressive of her works were her nudes. Having been unable to pay models for the long hours it took to paint so realistically, she had modeled for herself, standing before a tall mirror. In two of the paintings she was standing. In the third she was sitting on a wooden stool with her feet hooked behind the legs. This pose spread her legs, and her rendition of her intimate parts was as finely detailed as her paintings of stamens and pistils.

  It was obvious to everyone in the gallery that the diffident young woman in gray tailored skirt and white silk blouse—clothes to which she was clearly unaccustomed—was not just the artist but the model. The painting of her spread open sold the first night of the show for $7,500.

  Angelo met her on the second night of the show. He had flown in from Chicago too late to attend the opening. She was an attractive but certainly not ideally beautiful young woman. She made it apparent that she had better things to think about than how she looked. Her dark brown hair hung as it would. Her eyebrows were heavy. Her brown eyes were myopic behind a pair of little round gold-rimmed glasses—they, too, were meticulously reproduced in the paintings. Her mouth was wide and thin. Her figure was as her paintings showed her: ordinary. Apart from her eyes swimming behind thick lenses, the only really distinctive things about her were her hands, which were extraordinarily large, too large for the rest of her, like the hands of Michelangelo’s David.

  “I owe Mrs. Perino a debt I’ll never be able to repay,” she said to Angelo. “This show is everything I ever wanted in my life. If I die tonight, my life has been fulfilled.”

  Cindy had overheard and came up to embrace the girl. “Would you accept fifteen hundred for the violets?” she asked. “And we’ve got a possible three thousand for the glads.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “We’ve got a bid of four for one of the other nudes. I’m not accepting it yet.”

  “My God…”

  “Plan on spending the next six months starkers in front of that mirror of yours,” said Cindy, grinning.

  Cindy was pregnant again, not yet heavily, but it was visible when she was unclothed. “Except for your condition, I’d commission her to paint you,” said Angelo.

  “It’s a beautiful condition,” said Amanda with quiet simplicity.

  Angelo stared at Cindy for a moment. “To be hung in a private room in our place,” he said. “Not here.”

  So it was agreed. Beginning in July, Amanda moved into the Perino apartment. Cindy posed four hours a day, and Amanda painted six.

  The result was a painting that Angelo thought was the most beautiful work of art he had ever seen in his life. Standing in profile so that her distended belly would be dramatized, Cindy was quietly proud. Her eyes were on it, staring as though she could see the life within her. One hand rested on her belly near her navel. The other rested on her hip. Posing on summer days, she gleamed faintly with sweat, and Amanda captured that, too, as she did every other detail of Cindy’s body, with the consummate skill of an artist, not an illustrator.

  The portrait was in fact hung in Angelo and Cindy’s bedroom, but a few trusted friends were invited to see it. Dietz, of course, saw it. So did Mary Wilkerson.

  Angelo paid Amanda $15,000 for the painting and commissioned her to do a portrait of him as soon as he could find the time to pose.

  2

  Number One took a swallow of the Canadian Club that was forbidden to him. He sat in his wheelchair on the lanai, looking vaguely out at the Atlantic. Loren the Third sat on a chaise longue. Roberta, now Mrs. Hardeman, sat in a wooden chair upholstered with vinyl flower-pattern cushions, drank Scotch, and smoked a Chesterfield.

  “The stock closed yesterday at eighteen and three quarters,” said Number One. “Two years ago it sold at sixty. We’re all poorer than we used to be.”

  “It’s the economy,” said Loren. “They drove Nixon out of office—”

  “We’re holding on to barely two percent of the automotive market,” said Number One. “And the refrigerators aren’t selling well either, in spite of hiring that expensive broad to open and shut the doors on television.”

  “The price of plastics went up,” said Loren.

  “Went up for everybody,” said Number One.

  “They squeeze out the smaller companies,” said Roberta. “It’s always that way. Basic economics. General Motors and General Electric can achieve economies of scale that we can’t. It’s a fact of life.”

  Number One noticed the “we.” He raised one eyebrow slightly. “I competed effectively for many years,” he said. “How do you explain that?”

  “You built an automobile people wanted to buy,” said Roberta. “So did Studebaker. So did Packard. So did Hudson and Nash. People could always buy a Ford or a Chevy, but some people wanted a Sundancer. The fore-and-aft Studebaker was a funny-looking damned car, but it appealed to a lot of buyers. It was distinctive. So was the Sundancer.”

  “Yes, and by God we survived them,” said Number One. “You can’t buy a Studebaker today, but you can buy a Sundancer.”

  “We lose money on every unit we produce,” said Loren.

  “We lose money on your goddamned refrigerators! Don’t tell me again to get out of the automobile business. I’m not getting out.”

  “The company will go under,” said Loren sadly.

  Number One looked at Roberta.

  “No, it won’t,” she said. “Between the two of you there’s enough smarts to air-condition hell.” She reached across to Loren and patted his shoulder. “I’ve got confidence in this man, Mr. Hardeman.”

  Number One lifted off his hat for a moment and used it to fan his bald head. “Son,” he said to his grandson. “Get this idea of surrendering the automobile business out of your head. Concentrate on making our cars sell. I know you can do it.”

  Loren stared at Roberta, and she nodded. “Grandfather, I hate to say this … but I’m afraid we have to face the fact that Angelo Perino is right. The Sundancer is too big. It burns too much gas. We’ve got to build cars—”

  “With fuckin’ transverse engines!” Number One yelled. “And what they call ‘power trains’ instead of transmissions. And … and you’re going to tell me next that we can’t build them.”

  Loren shook his head. “No. We can’t build them. Oh, sure, we can build anything, given enough time and investment. But the competition is already ahead of us. If we buy the power units in Japan—”

  “And build half-breed cars—”

  “It’s our last chance,” said Loren bluntly.

  “All right, son,” said Number One quietly. “Tell me. Make a flat statement. Tell me we have to build these half-Jap cars to stay in the car business.”