The Stallion (1996)
| The Stallion (1996) | |
| Robbins, Harold | |
| (2011) | |
| Tags: | Thriller Thrillerttt |
Continuing the phenomenal story in
The Betsy
,
The Stallion
reintroduces the Hardeman family and the cutthroat world of their vast automobile empire, where the stakes are high and every man, and woman, is a gambler.
Loren Hardeman, known as “Number One,” is gradually transferring control of Bethlehem Motors to his grandson, Loren Hardeman III—a man possessed with his father’s cunning, but sadly lacking in his ability to go for the kill. So when Angelo Perino, an outsider previously nurtured by Number One, threatens the position held by Hardeman III, what ensues is a battle of wills in which integrity takes a backseat to animal instinct, and in which there can only be one winner.
Bursting with huge ingredients of lust, greed, sex, and intrigue—and a plot full of twists and double-crosses—this is Harold Robbins at his sizzling best.
Harold Robbins
was born in 1915 in New York's Hell's Kitchen. He wrote twenty-three novels, as well as numerous film and television scripts. A bestselling novelist for over half a century, his novels have sold over 500 million copies.
Harold Robbins captivated millions of readers with his searing bestseller
The Betsy
, a saga of violent ambition and passion in the auto industry. In this breathtaking, long-awaited sequel, the struggle continues in all its naked fury…
Generations apart, automotive titan Loren Hardeman I and ex-race car driver Angelo Perino were equals in their vision, arrogance, and lust for women. But in a sudden show of blood loyalty, the old man fired Perino after using him to defeat his grandson, Loren III, in a desperate corporate battle. Humiliated, Loren III had Perino savagely beaten—but not to death.
Now an uneasy truce with Loren III brings Perino back to Bethlehem Motors—to pit his creative genius against his rival’s dissolute legacy of blackmail, sexual scandal, and murder. In a contest spanning two decades, raging from Detroit to Tokyo, New York, Palm Beach, and London, two bitter enemies will fight for fortune and glory—and for the power to destroy each other. THE STALLION is a wild, sizzling tour de force by the most enduring popular novelist of our time.
“Robbins’ books are packed with action, sustained by a strong narrative drive and are given vitality by his own colorful life.”—
The Wall Street Journal
HAROLD ROBBINS
“HAROLD ROBBINS IS A MASTER!”
—Playboy
“ROBBINS IS AN INCOMPARABLE STORYTELLER.”
—United Press International
HAROLD ROBBINS
IS ONE OF THE
“WORLD’S FIVE BESTSELLING AUTHORS…
EACH WEEK, AN ESTIMATED
280,000 PEOPLE … PURCHASE A
HAROLD ROBBINS BOOK.”
—Saturday Review
“ROBBINS CAN … MAKE READERS TURN
THE PAGES THROUGH CLIFF-HANGING
CHAPTERS AND A GALLERY OF
ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS….
HE GRABS THE READER AND
DOESN’T LET GO….”
—Publishers Weekly
Books by Harold Robbins
The Stallion
The Raiders
The Piranhas
The Storyteller
Descent from Xanadu
Spellbinder
Good-bye, Janette
Memories of Another Day
Dreams Die First
The Lonely Lady
The Pirate
The Betsy
The Inheritors
The Adventurers
Where Love Has Gone
The Carpetbaggers
Stiletto
79 Park Avenue
Never Leave Me
A Stone for Danny Fisher
The Dream Merchants
Never Love a Stranger
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON & SCHUSTER, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1996 by Harold Robbins
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions there of in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York. NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-87294-X
ISBN 978-1-43914-110-6 (eBook)
First Simon & Schuster ebook edition June 2012
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
For my wife, Jann
The last shall be the one and only.
FOREWORD
One summer day in 1939, in a park in Detroit, sixty-one-year-old Loren Hardeman met eight-year-old Angelo Perino. Hardeman was in a wheelchair, being pushed through the park by a nurse. Angelo was pedaling a kiddie-car replica of a Bugatti that his grandfather had had specially made for him in Italy.
Loren Hardeman observed that the car didn’t work very well—that is, it couldn’t achieve any speed on a slight up-slope, no matter how furiously the little boy pedaled. Maybe, Loren said, he could fix it; and he grabbed a sketch pad and drew the design of a variable transmission for the little boy’s toy car.
Angelo had no idea that the man in the wheelchair was in fact the chief executive officer of Bethlehem Motors, the nation’s number four automobile manufacturer. He had created the company, and he governed it like a fief. He was the same kind of man the first Henry Ford was: an inspired tinkerer who had built his first car with his own hands, with no education in engineering, then built his own manufacturing company with his own hands, with no education in management. He resembled Henry Ford in other important respects—he, too, was arrogant, arbitrary, and capricious.
It was Loren Hardeman’s caprice to spend $11,000 of his company’s money to build a concatenation of chains and sprockets and levers that made the best use of little Angelo’s pedaling and gave the car speed and power.
As the years passed, Loren Hardeman grew sicker and more bitter at the hand God had dealt him. He had only one son and was unfortunate in him. He had only one grandson and was unfortunate in him, too. The world came to call the three Hardemans Number One, Number Two, and Number Three. Number One never trusted Number Two or Number Three with the power to run his company.
Angelo Perino grew up to share several of Number One’s characteristics. He was as vigorous and lusty as the old man. Like Number One, he was obsessed with automobiles: designing them, building them, racing them. Like Number One, he almost always got what he wanted. First, he wanted to race. In 1963 he was the world’s number-two-ranked Grand Prix driver and would have been first if he had not climbed the wall at Sebring and nearly died in a flaming crash that broke his body and scarred his face.
Number One had designed a new transmission for Angelo’s kiddie car bacause he was bored. He loved to
do,
to
build,
to
achieve.
The venerable Sundancer, the design that had made Bethlehem Motors a power in the industry, was a bland family car. In 1969 he decided to build a sports car. He told his teenaged great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Hardeman, he would name it after her: the Betsy. The girl pronounced the idea “cool.”
To design and build the Betsy, Number One called in a man he knew he could trust—a race driver but also an automotive engineer, Angelo Perino. He ordered Angelo to have a plastic surgeon repair his face, claiming he couldn’t have a top executive of his company looking like a movie monster. Angelo agreed and had the surgery done in Switzerland. Number One installed him in Detroit, with ample powers to build the Betsy.
But there was a problem. Number Two was dead, and Loren Number Three believed the future of Bethlehem Motors was in making appliances, not cars, and he was determined to have his way. He fought Number One and tried to take the company away from him, using tactics that
were sometimes legal but always dirty. He’d be damned if any wop—let alone the grandson of a mafioso bootlegger—would diminish his authority as heir to the Hardeman business and fortune. He even went so far as to have Angelo beaten by thugs.
