The Stallion (1996) (2 page)

But Angelo Perino could fight, too, and the beating did not frighten him; it only angered him. In a confrontational stockholders meeting, he defeated Loren the Third and saved the old man’s control of his company.

Number One savored the victory Angelo had won for him, but even so, he didn’t like it. He had not meant for his grandson to be defeated and humiliated. He was
family,
after all, and blood was thicker than water. The old man abruptly fired Angelo and ordered him off the company’s premises.

But the story of the fateful link between Angelo Perino and the Hardeman family was hardly over.

Angelo’s father, Dr. John Perino, raised a glass of dark red wine—dago red the Hardemans would have called it. He stared around the table, over a serving platter heaped with pasta. The others took the cue and raised their own glasses: Angelo’s mother, Jenny Perino, Angelo, and Cindy Morris.

“To a brighter future for you and Cindy, Angelo,” said the doctor. “I thank God the old man fired you. You’ve lost enough time with the Hardemans. Nothing can ever redeem that family. The grandson, Loren the Third, is just as bad as the grandfather, the one they call Number One.”

“Worse,” said Angelo as he joined the others in a swallow of wine. He had to sip it through the right corner of his mouth, because the left side of his jaw was still wired, and his lips on that side of his mouth were still hugely swollen.

“Another toast, please,” said Cindy quietly. “To you, Mother and Father. I call you that because Angelo and I agreed this afternoon to be married.”

Jenny Perino drank the toast with tears in her eyes, and they flowed down her cheeks as she filled the plates. All of them understood she could only have been happier if her future daughter-in-law were Catholic. They also knew she
had learned to love and respect Cindy and was pleased that her son was marrying so fine a girl.

According to family tradition, she served each person more than any of them could possibly eat. In addition to the homemade pasta covered with a thick meat sauce, she served a tossed salad from a huge wooden bowl. A platter of garlic bread was passed around the table.

“We’ll have a big wedding,” said Jenny.

“We want to do it quickly,” Angelo said gently. “We’re leaving for Europe soon. I’m going to see Dr. Hans again so he can fix whatever is broken, and then try to put me back the way I was. I mean the way I was before the other plastic surgery.”

Three years ago, Number One had insisted Angelo go to Switzerland and have the famous plastic surgeon remove the burn scars he had suffered in his final Grand Prix crash. The surgeon had done more than that. While he was at it, he had given Angelo a new, more youthful face. Angelo had joked that very few men got a second face; but it really was a second face because it made him look like a twenty-five-year-old when he was in his forties. Now, with the injuries he’d sustained in the assault, he looked grotesque again. He had to see Dr. Hans again, but this time he was going to ask the doctor to put him back together more like the mature man he was.

“A lot of big changes in one year,” said Dr. Perino. “I am sure they will all be for the better.”

“Some of the changes may not suit you very well,” said Angelo. “We are not going to live in Detroit. Cindy and I talked a long time this afternoon, in the hotel room. We are going to live somewhere else.”

“We can visit you often?” his mother asked.

“And we’ll be here often,” said Cindy. “Often enough to make you tired of us.”

“You’ll have children?” Jenny asked with a smile that widened as she asked.

“Six or seven,” said Cindy.

“You don’t like Detroit?” asked Dr. Perino.

“It’s grubby and dangerous,” said Angelo.

“That will change,” said the doctor. “As the blacks take
over and make it
their
city, they will want to save and improve it. Since it never belonged to them, they never cared what happened to it. Now—”

“There are two other reasons,” said Cindy. “First … Well, I’m sorry; it’s your hometown. But frankly, when you’ve seen one boonie, you’ve seen them all. I want to live in New York.”

“The other reason?” asked Jenny. “You said there were two.”

Cindy smiled wryly. “If we stayed here, we’d be forced to associate with horrid parvenus like the Hardemans and the Fords. I really couldn’t tolerate it. God forbid I had to go to a country club dance and dance again with that clumsy, pawing, two-bit drunk Henry Ford the Second. I think I’d vomit.”

Angelo grinned. “We’re going to get out of here. You think I could talk her out of it?”

“You don’t want to,” said his mother. “And you shouldn’t. Do you remember your grandfather, Angelo?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It is too bad you couldn’t have gone to Sicily to see him. Now you will not see him until you join him in heaven. But maybe you should go to Sicily and see—”

“No, Mama,” interrupted Dr. Perino. “Maybe someday Cindy should meet Uncle Jake. But go to Sicily? No. Our family does not keep up that connection.”

“My grandfather was deported to Sicily,” Angelo explained to Cindy. “He was reputedly a Mafia don.”

“My great-grandfather Morris was a robber baron,” said Cindy, grinning. “How else did I get so much money? It’s only rarely obtained by earning it.”

“She has a cynical philosophy.” Angelo shrugged.

“Never mind philosophy,” said Jenny Perino. “It is time you fixed your mind on what’s important, Angelo. You got a good education. But you race cars—and get yourself hurt and almost killed. You try to manufacture cars—with other people’s names on them. You get all mixed up in a fight to help an old man control his company—not
your
company,
his
company—and you get yourself hurt and almost killed. Now you are out of it. Stay out of it! Marry this lovely girl.
Have a family, Angelo … and Cindy. That’s what’s important.”

“Jesus Christ!”
cried Betsy van Ludwige as she gazed at Angelo in her Amsterdam apartment. “They really worked you over, Angelo.”

“There were some very strong emotions involved, Miss Elizabeth.” He leaned further back in the sofa and put his arm around Cindy, who was sitting next to him.

“If you call me Miss Elizabeth one more time, I’m going to throw something at you. You built a car for me: the Betsy. Why can’t you call me Betsy?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I think of Betsy as the name of a car.”

“It’s
my
name, Angelo. Please…” She shrugged. “Anyway … Switzerland?”

Cindy spoke up. “Dr. Perino says everything has to heal before the plastic surgeon can start again. We stayed in London a month. We’ll be in Amsterdam two weeks, then we’ll go to the Riviera for a while. After that … the surgery.”

“I hope it works out very well for you,” said Max van Ludwige.

Betsy had not wanted to marry Max, and he had not wanted to marry her. But the Hardemans—Number One especially—had insisted that her baby have a name. Everyone but Betsy—whose wishes didn’t count for much—had agreed that Max’s wife would divorce him quickly. He would marry Betsy in order to make the child legitimate, then Betsy would divorce him, and he would remarry his wife. Money lubricated the arrangement.

Knowing all about it, Angelo was surprised to find that Max van Ludwige seemed to be a very decent fellow. The baby was his, after all, and he had wanted to do the right thing. His wife remained in the family home, and he and Betsy shared a handsome apartment on the fourth floor of a house that dated from the seventeenth century and overlooked a canal.

Seeing Max established here with the extraordinarily
beautiful twenty-year-old Betsy, Cindy wondered if the last element of the arrangement would ever really be carried out.

She had seen enough of Betsy to know that Betsy lived in style, wherever she was, no matter the circumstances. The apartment’s white plaster walls were decorated with Dutch paintings—no Rembrandts or Vermeers, nothing that grand, but bright, airy paintings of city and country scenes, painted three hundred years ago. School of Rembrandt, school of Vermeer—that sort of thing. Her home was fragrant with cut flowers, which filled myriad vases and bowls.

They paid the obligatory visit to the nursery to see the two-month-old Loren van Ludwige, the child Betsy already called Loren the Fourth. An English nanny had already been employed and was with him. Having admired the baby, they returned to the living room for drinks and a sampling of Dutch cheeses.

“I hope you will enjoy the restaurant where we have booked a table tonight,” said Max. “Dutch food is very good, but if you haven’t visited a rijsttafel, you should.”

The rijsttafel was a Balinese restaurant where close to one hundred dishes were served. An immense bowl of rice was set on the table. After they had loaded their plates with rice, they added as much variety as they wished from almost a hundred tiny bowls of spiced meats, vegetables, and fruits, hot and cold, that were brought to the table on serving carts.

Angelo had never experienced this kind of meal before but was immediately glad he had come. On Max’s recommendation, they ordered glasses of the mild Dutch gin, genever; and they ordered a bottle of Burgundy and one of Chablis.

“What are you going to do, now that you are no longer in the thrall of the Hardemans?” Betsy asked Angelo.

“Well, I have several options,” he told her. “In the first place, my stock in Bethlehem Motors is worth six million dollars. I may sell.”

“Please don’t,” Betsy said simply. “Or if you must, sell it to me. I’ll come up with the money somehow. You paid
one
million for it.”

“You know that,” said Angelo dryly.

“My father nearly split a gut when he found out. Number One never transferred his stock outside the family.”

“He needed seed money for the Betsy project. Your father tried to squeeze him out of the idea by holding back company money. That was before Number One set his foot down again and recaptured absolute control.”

“What are your other options, Angelo?” Max asked, obviously anxious to turn the conversation in some other direction.

“I can also go with the competition,” said Angelo. “I’ve had offers.”

“I can’t imagine you doing that,” said Betsy. “In spite of everything.”

“We’d have to live in Detroit,” said Cindy. “And that’s out of the question.”

“We don’t have to decide for a while,” said Angelo. “We’re not going back to the States until after the surgery and the recovery and—”

“If you’re going to be in Europe so long, please plan on stopping by and visiting us again,” said Max.

“Max and I may no longer be together,” Betsy announced flatly. “We are going to carry out the agreement, of course.”

“But not in the next two or three months, surely,” said Max.

“I suppose not,” Betsy conceded. “Not in the next two or three months anyway, but before you get me in Dutch again.”

Angelo grinned. “You…? Forgive me. I shouldn’t ask.”

“Better with Max than with somebody else,” said Betsy. “I’m not going to go without.”

When they left the restaurant, Cindy said she wanted to see the famous Amsterdam red-light district. It was within easy walking distance, and Max led them there. The district ran on two parallel streets, the Oudezjids Voorburgwal and the Oudezjids Achterburgwal. Many of the girls strolled along the streets or lounged in doorways, typically in
raincoats; but many sat in lighted show windows in various stages of undress.

The business was conducted with surprising decorum. “Every fourth or fifth man you see is a plainclothes police officer,” Max explained. “They enforce the rules strictly. The girls are not allowed to approach men, either by word or gesture. The man must initiate the conversation. But if you ask one of them what time it is, she is likely to respond, ‘Fifty guilders.’”

Because they were two couples, no one so much as looked at them. It was understood that they were tourists, as were many of the people on these streets.

While Angelo and Cindy, Max and Betsy walked through the district, a light rain began to fall. The girls on the streets opened folding umbrellas or pulled rain hats out of their pockets. None of them left their stations.

Max walked beside Cindy. Betsy walked with Angelo, and she slowed down so they could drop back from the others.

“I thought maybe you’d wait for me,” she said quietly.

“Wait…?”

“Little Loren should be
your
son.”

“Betsy…” Angelo hesitated, then said, “The whole Hardeman family would have gone into orbit.”

“Don’t you care as little about that as I do?”

“You’d better care about your great-grandfather. Number One is capable of…”

As he hesitated again, she finished the sentence. “Murder. But it’s my father who’d go into orbit. I heard him call you the grandson of the bootlegger who supplied Number One’s liquor during Prohibition. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that we Hardemans are new money. Number One was a bicycle repairman. He built a car, just the way the first Henry Ford did. The two of them were inspired tinkerers, nothing more. Where does my father get off thinking he’s better than the grandson of the man who supplied liquor to his father? By the way, is it true?”

“It’s true. My grandfather supplied him. Good stuff, too. Number One never missed a sip in all those years.”

“That’s what he hates most about what happened to him,” said Betsy. “It’s not the wheelchair. It’s being unable to drink his Canadian whisky.”

“I can sympathize,” said Angelo.

She took his hand for a moment. “You
are
married, aren’t you? I mean, really. Is she pregnant?”

“No. Not yet. We don’t think so, anyway.”

Betsy shook his hand and then let go. “Angelo Perino, I’m going to have a baby by you. I’ve decided. You just wait and see if I don’t.”

“Whatever Betsy wants, Betsy gets,” he half sang, essaying the tune from
Damn Yankees.

“And, little man, Betsy wants you,” she finished the line.

“Well, to paraphrase FDR, you’ll have to clear it with Cindy.” He laughed.