The Stallion (1996) (15 page)

Oddly, it was not satisfying for Cindy. She found the pleasure thin, and for the first time in her life she was ashamed of something she had done. She decided to focus
all of her sexual energy on Angelo. She did, and three months later she was pregnant with her fourth child.

When Keijo Shigeto nodded, he sometimes nodded from the waist, and Angelo was not sure if he meant it as a bow. Try though he might, he had not yet mastered the subtleties of Japanese etiquette.

“I have not yet told you,” Keijo said to Angelo, “that my grandfather was a brigadier in the Japanese army. He served in the campaign to take Singapore, later in Burma. He survived the war and was accused of no crimes. He said little to me, a lowly grandson. But he did say something I remember. ‘Be discreet always,’ he told me. ‘To be discreet is of the utmost importance.’”

“I understand you fully,” said Angelo dryly.

He understood that Keijo was telling him, in his oblique way, not to worry about the momentary encounter between them last night in a fine restaurant, where Keijo had walked past his table and seen him sitting with Betsy. Keijo had shown not even a flicker of recognition. Even so, Angelo had no doubt that Keijo had recognized him and had in all likelihood guessed the identity of the young woman with him.

Betsy had an uncanny knack for knowing where he was going and when. He wondered if she hadn’t paid off a clerk in his travel agency, or several clerks at several airlines. He could never be sure when she would appear, when she would knock on the door of a hotel suite—especially in Tokyo.

“I wish to show you a questionnaire—I believe you would call it—from a firm of accountants representing XB Motors, Incorporated.” Keijo pushed across his desk a forty-page set of questions, inquiring into every aspect of the financial status of Shizoka Motors. “It would require a great deal of time to assemble all of that information, some of which is confidential.”

Angelo quickly glanced through the questionnaire. He smiled, shook his head, and pushed it back to Keijo. “Tell
them that all the information you are willing to provide is available in public documents, to which they have ready access.”

“I could assemble some reports and—”

“Let them find it themselves,” said Angelo. “Why do their work for them? Bean counters. They make me sick.”

“I have received a call from a Mr. Beacon. He wants a detailed report on the engineering aspects of our power-train modifications.”

Angelo stabbed the desktop with a finger.
“No,”
he said. “When I see Peter Beacon I’ll tell him that any information he wants about the Stallion will have to come from me. I’ll tell him not to make demands on our Japanese partner. Ignore him. If he calls again, just tell him to talk to me. Better yet, don’t take his call. I’ll see him next week and tell him to mind his own business.”

“He said he spoke for Mr. Hardeman.”

“I don’t care if he speaks for Jesus H. Christ. Tell him to go fuck himself. You know what that American expression means?”

For the first time the smooth and mentally agile Japanese was flustered. He giggled. “I do,” he said.

“Okay. You won’t use that expression. I imagine you have one equally good and equally applicable. Use that.”

Keijo’s office was much like Angelo’s in New York, though not as large. It was in an office building that adjoined a large manufacturing plant of Shizoka Motors. Keijo’s office was sparely furnished and obsessively neat. Any paper not immediately needed was filed somewhere. Obsequious young women ran in and out fetching files as needed. The only personal items in the office were a photograph of Keijo’s family and a vase of flowers—at this time of year, chrysanthemums.

“If I had reported anything to Mr. Beacon,” said Keijo, “it would have been that the necessary adaptations are being made as planned and on schedule except for one thing. The unit is going to cost approximately one hundred and twenty-five dollars more than projected.”

Angelo shook his head. “That could destroy us in the market,” he said. “It’s going to be highly competitive.
You’ve got to cut that. An extra fifty dollars I can accept. An extra hundred and twenty-five dollars can make the difference between success and failure.”

Again Keijo made that deep nod that may have been a bow. “May I ask this question? Will your company be able to meet its own projected costs?”

“A good question,” said Angelo. “I’m beating heads against the walls. One thing I have to fight is this incessant demand for personnel time for reports and projections. It’s a curse of the American way of doing business. The bean counters insist they need to know how much this, that, and the other thing is going to cost in nineteen eighty-two, when I can’t even figure out what it’s going to cost in nineteen eighty.”

“This is the result of insecurity,” said Keijo. “Timid men want to know how things will be next year and the year after, when instead they should be focusing on this year.”

“My battle,” said Angelo. “I’ll fight it. Meanwhile, do try to cut back that hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“We will do our best.”

“A prototype body and chassis will be shipped to Japan next month. Handmade. I’m having it loaded on a 747 freighter and flown to Tokyo from Detroit. I’ll be here to see you install the power unit. You’ll have one ready?”

“One will be ready.”

“We’ll drive it on a test track, you and I—if it fits.”

“It will fit,” said Keijo with a broad smile.

“I know it will. Now … You saw me last night. And you saw the young woman. You know who she is, don’t you?”

“I have no need to know.”

“I suppose you don’t, but you do know. If I saw you in a hotel with a woman in the States, I’d know who she was—or I’d find out. It’s business. You could trust me not to talk about it, and I trust you. We are friends.”

Keijo nodded. “We are friends,” he said firmly.

“He mentioned it?” Betsy asked.

“Yes, he mentioned it. Only to assure me that I need not worry about his discretion.”

“For as smart a fucker as you are, you can sometimes be damned naive,” she said.

“I trust the man,” said Angelo simply.

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the fact that you seem to think my father has rolled over and is playing dead. He’s watching everything you do and still hopes you step on your cock.”

“He’s got a record for doing that; I don’t.”

“No? Seven years ago you did it. Number One lied to you and made you believe him. You sacrificed everything you could to achieve something he told you he wanted, and he cut your arm off at the elbow. My father’s not nearly as good at it as his grandfather, but he’s a Hardeman.”

“I’m going to take the fuckin’ company away from him, Betsy,” said Angelo simply.

“I’ll help you,” she said. “But you must never trust my father. More importantly, you mustn’t trust Roberta. My father would rather destroy the company than let you take it from him. What he really wants is to destroy
you.”

They’d had dinner brought up by room service, the most expensive kind of food the Japanese served: steaks. It was no wonder beef was so expensive in Japan, Angelo reflected; the cattle must have been raised on milk because the beef was especially tender and juicy. The butter on the mashed potatoes tasted like English butter because it had a far higher fat content than American butter and was far more flavorful. The wine had been Australian, but it was good. They also had brandy, and coffee stayed hot in a huge electric pot.

Betsy was as she liked to be when she was with him: naked except for a pair of tiny sheer white crotchless panties. He wore a blue slingshot, nothing more.

Tomorrow night they were going out to the country to stay at an inn Keijo had recommended, where they would live Japanese style, bathing in a communal bath, eating such delicacies as snakes, and sleeping in a room separated from their fellow guests only by bamboo screens.

But tonight—

“Will you give me an honest answer to an honest question?” Betsy asked.

“Sure.”

“Have you ever fucked Roberta?”

He frowned and shook his head. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

She reached for his hand. “Number One kept concealed video cameras in some of the bedrooms in his house in Palm Beach. He had tapes made of the shenanigans that took place in those rooms. The night he died I gathered up all those tapes, took them out on the beach, and put the cartridges on the glowing remains of a picnic fire, after which I threw the melted remains in the ocean. One of those tapes was of you and me.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you think? Didn’t you ever get it through your head how
evil
that old man was? He showed me the tape of you and me.”

“And?”

“Maybe looking at it again, with the live me sitting there, is what caused his coronary—that is if God didn’t cause it, to do justice at long last.”

“Are you sure you got all the tapes?”

“All that were in his room. I doubt there were any others.”

“What’s all this got to do with Roberta? That’s the subject you—”

“Angelo, I didn’t have time to look at his collection, but if there was a tape of you and Roberta it’s very likely he showed it to my father. That would have been like him, to sow a deeper hatred. Angelo, the old man was
wicked.”

“There was no tape of me and Roberta,” said Angelo.

“All right. She’s got the same mentality as my great-grandfather. If you ever did it with her anywhere, you better wonder if she taped you. The woman is capable of—”

“I don’t know much about Roberta,” said Angelo. “I don’t want to know anything more than I know already.”

“Another question,” said Betsy. “Number One couldn’t have made those tapes. So who did? And when will we hear from them? We’ve got blackmail in our future, my love.”

“There are only two ways to deal with blackmailers. One, you pay them. Two, you kill them.”

“Angelo—”

“If anyone contacts you with blackmail in mind, let me know.”

“I bought you something,” said Betsy a little while later. “While you were doing business, I went out exploring.”

He had noticed a small wrapped package lying on the coffee table and expected that sooner or later she would open it. She handed it to him to open. He took off the paper and found a small wooden box with a lid that slid back. Inside the box, on a pink silk lining, lay three leather straps with buckles and a dozen rubber rings, plus printed instructions in Japanese, English, French, and German.

THE WORLD’S FAMOUS “ARABIAN STRAP”

FOR THE MORE HANDSOME MANLY PARTS

FOR THE MORE PLEASING FUCK

Betsy helped him follow the instructions. The straps were made of soft black leather, about half an inch wide, and were fitted with steel buckles. Betsy read the instructions and laughed, but she watched intently as he did what the instructions said. He slipped out of his slingshot. First he passed the longest strap through loops on the ends of the two shorter ones. Then he looped the long strap under his scrotum and over the root of his hard-on, pulled it tight, and buckled it.

“I like the way it squeezes up your balls,” said Betsy. “This is good already.”

The rubber rings came in three sizes. Angelo rolled one of the middle-sized ones down his shaft. He stretched the ring to roll it over the two short straps, one on each side. Finally, as the instructions said, he tightened and buckled the two short straps. His cock, already erect, stiffened even more and grew even larger. It stood high and turned a little red.

“Does it hurt?” asked Betsy.

Angelo laughed. “Hell, no…”

“The instructions say that if you don’t pull it too tight
you can walk around all day with it on, giving you a very showy bulge.”

“Like a woman in a pointy bra,” he said.

“Pull your underpants on. I want to see what you’ll look like.”

“I’m not sure I can
get
’em on.”

He tried and succeeded, stretching the slingshot out in a great pointed bulge. He walked to a mirror and looked at himself. He pulled the underpants off and stared at the mirror.

Betsy pointed at his freakish engorgement. “I
want
that,” she said, pulling off her panties.

She shrieked as he entered her. But two minutes later she moaned and grimaced. The strap caused premature ejaculation. But it kept him hugely erect, and he did not even pull out. He continued until he had come three times and she had come two or three times.

Betsy hurried to the bathroom to wash herself. When she came back out she poured two Scotches. “You like your present?” she purred.

Angelo grinned. “That was the best I ever had.”

“Let me help you take it off. I don’t want it to damage you.” She worked the buckles and loosened the straps. “It’s
your
present,” she said. “But it stays with me. I don’t want you using it with any other woman.”

He kissed her. “I don’t want you letting any other man put it on.”

“I don’t know another man who’d be willing to try it,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know another woman who’d be willing to have you with it on. We’re a pair, Angelo, like I’ve always told you.”

Having answered the telephone in the kitchen, Cindy returned to the dining room, where she and Angelo were eating a Chinese dinner brought by a caterer on the Post Road. The meal was tasty, even if the service was inelegant—they were serving themselves from the paper cartons in which the meal had been delivered.

“It’s Roberta,” she said. “She apologized for calling so late.”

Angelo shook his head. “God, has she become a Hardeman! She’s learned Number One’s bad habit of calling any time of day or night.”

“I told her we are having dinner. She said she wouldn’t take a minute.”

He left the table and went to the kitchen. He stood looking out at the snow that had begun to fall an hour ago and was now accumulating.

“What’s up?” he asked Roberta.

“Loren has called a board meeting for Thursday,” she said. “You’ll be summoned.”