The Stallion (1996) (19 page)

Angelo overheard some of this and was amused. He knew Loren was in torment. Loren did not follow sports, did not attend movies, and read but little. His idea of recreation was drinking and watching television, maybe playing a little golf.

“Mr. Hardeman plays golf,” Angelo said to Tadashi.

“Ahh! I too dribble on the links,” said Tadashi; and this launched him, speaking through his interpreter, on a series of questions about golfers, clubs, and American golf courses.

Loren shot Angelo a dark glance and struggled with the questions.

Angelo sat back and enjoyed one of the finest meals he’d ever eaten. The prime ribs of beef were the most tender and flavorful he had ever tasted. The wine was Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

Keijo spoke earnestly to Angelo. “I have persuaded Mr. Tadashi not to come to Nagoya tomorrow. He must not see—”

“Exactly,” Angelo agreed.

“I will go to Nagoya with the Hardemans, by train. A helicopter will pick you up here at nine.”

“Why here? I’m going back to Tokyo—”

Keijo shook his head. “That would offend Mr. Tadashi, who has arranged for you to stay here.”

Angelo frowned. “Uh…?”

Keijo frowned. “Yes.”

No explanation about travel arrangements was given to Loren or Roberta. If they wanted to object, they had no chance. Everything was organized. Before they realized that he was not coming with them, Angelo had been ushered away by Keijo and two smiling Shizoka executives.

Tadashi accompanied Loren and Roberta to their limousine and said, “Before you fly, we must have fun again.”

Keijo accompanied Angelo only to the foyer for the private elevator. There he gave Angelo a key, which was for the elevator and suite 3B. Breakfast, he said, would be brought up at eight. The helicopter pilot would be waiting in the elevator foyer at nine.

Without much enthusiasm for what Tadashi had arranged for him, yet with curiosity, Angelo took the elevator to the third floor and used the key to let himself into suite 3B. Inside the door, he found himself in another foyer, probably where breakfast would be left by a waiter who would not see the occupants of the suite. He unlocked a second door.

“Hello, Angelo…”

“Betsy!
What in the name of—How did you arrange
this?
”

She didn’t tell him until after they had kissed. And not until after she had tossed aside a silk wrapper and stood naked in his arms.

“I decided it was in my best interest, and probably in yours, to get to know Mr. Tadashi. Now I know him better than you do. Angelo, we have things to talk about as well as things to do.”

The Japanese helicopter pilot was waiting in the elevator foyer at nine. He spoke no English, but he recognized Angelo Perino. He led Angelo to an electric golf cart, and they rode to a helicopter pad set to one side of the dew-drenched first fairway. The helicopter was small, a two-place machine, and Angelo sat beside the pilot inside a plastic bubble, not entirely at ease.

The little chopper was noisy, but that made no difference, since they could not converse and the pilot never removed his earphones anyway. He spoke into a throat mike, apparently to air traffic control, then lifted off and flew south over the outskirts of Tokyo and Yokohama.

Mist hung over the landscape, and there were broken clouds at six or eight thousand feet.

Angelo knew there were mountains between Tokyo and Nagoya. Indeed, Fuji itself was not far off the direct course between the two cities. The pilot knew all this too. He did not fly direct. He flew out over the ocean so far that the mist all but obscured the shore, then turned west and flew over the narrow neck of a peninsula. After that he crossed a little more water, then climbed to an altitude well above the mist
yet well below the clouds, and flew west over hilly country, rivers, towns, and cities, until he reached Nagoya.

An hour and a half after takeoff he settled the helicopter onto the pad at the Nagoya test track of Shizoka Motors.

All had been timed precisely. Loren and Roberta and Keijo had just arrived and were drinking tea as they walked around the prototype Stallion and stared at it.

“I trust you had a pleasant night,” said Roberta sarcastically.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” said Angelo.

“I don’t need all this,” Loren protested as a technician buckled the harness that would hold him in his seat. He wore a helmet and a pair of fire-retardant silver coveralls. “Why do we have to overdramatize everything?”

“This is a prototype car,” said Angelo. “I’m going to put it through its paces. This is a test drive, so we are outfitted as test drivers.”

Roberta leaned down and spoke in the window at Loren. “Remember how we said we’d let engineering do engineering’s thing? If Angelo says you need to be dressed and harnessed like a test driver, you need to be dressed and harnessed like a test driver.
He
is.”

“It’s supposed to be
a family
car,” Loren grumbled.

“We’re gonna stretch it,” said Angelo.

Loren frowned. “Nothing fancy,” he said.

“Right. I’ll take you around the track a couple of times, then we’ll switch and you can take me around a couple of times. Or you can have it to yourself.”

The Stallion was smaller than a 1980 Sundancer, smaller than a Chevy or a Ford, yet bigger than a Mustang. Nothing about it suggested that it was far lighter than any of those cars. Its squarish lines gave it a look of solid stability. This one was painted silver gray. The backseat had been removed to make room for boxes of instruments and the radios that transmitted their readings.

“The upholstery will be spiffier than this,” Angelo explained. “And of course the instrument panel will look like
the drawings you’ve seen. It will be fully instrumented, including a tach. This one’s equipped with a four-speed manual transmission. The gear placement is normal.”

Angelo drove out onto the track and accelerated rapidly. The Stallion shifted and accelerated smoothly with a minimum of noise—because the engine was not pulling a lot of weight. Angelo brought it up to eighty miles an hour.

The track was not an oval but a curving track with turns in both directions, some shallow and some deep. The Stallion was surefooted in the turns, never threatening to skid and not leaning.

Loren looked at the speedometer. “Is this its max?” he asked.

“It’s got more in it, and I can handle it. I’m not sure you can, in the turns. We assume our family driver will not go into turns at more than eighty miles an hour.”

“What if he does?”

“He can lose it. It will warn him, though. I can show you.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I’d like to drive it myself.”

“Sure. We don’t stop on the track. We’ll go back in and switch drivers behind the fence.”

Angelo brought the car down to twenty miles an hour before he made the ninety-degree turn through the gate. Even at that speed he felt the oversteer.

They got out.

“You want me to go with you, or you want to take it alone?” Angelo asked.

“I’ll take it alone,” said Loren. He turned to Roberta. “You want to squeeze into one of these silly suits and get strapped in?”

“I’ll wait till we’re ready to go without silly suits and harnesses,” she said.

As Loren was strapped into the driver’s seat, Angelo leaned over and told him, “It’s perfectly sure in regular curves. Be a little careful with sharp turns. There’s a tendency to oversteer.”

“Gotcha,” said Loren.

He drove out onto the track and accelerated in the long straightaway that faced the garage where the instruments
were housed. When the Stallion was out of sight, Angelo and Roberta watched the readings on the speedometer. Loren did not drive as fast as Angelo had. He entered the curves at about sixty and accelerated as he came out. He became a little more daring as he got the feel of the car.

“You’re sure he’s not going to kill himself?” Roberta murmured to Angelo.

“Not unless he tries damned hard.”

They stepped outside to watch him as he came along the straight and passed the garage. They waved but couldn’t see if he waved back.

On his second circuit of the track, Loren increased his speed a little but not much. The instruments indicated that he was entering the curves more sharply. Angelo did not want him to encounter the oversteer out on the track and considered getting on the radio and warning him. But Loren was not approaching a problem.

“How’s he handling it?” Roberta asked as Loren approached the straightaway past the garage.

“So far, so good,” said Angelo. “Let’s go outside. I suppose he’ll come in this lap.”

“When’s he gonna lose it?” she asked quietly.

“Now or never,” said Angelo.

The entry to the garage area—what might have been called a pit at an American raceway—was a simple gate. The driver had to cut ninety degrees and come through. For Loren it would be like making a right turn at a street intersection. The gate was flanked by two white wooden posts about six feet tall. The entire pit area was enclosed inside white picket fence.

Loren braked and brought the Stallion down to maybe forty miles an hour, braked again and brought it down to thirty-five or less, then spun the wheel and turned sharply into the gate.

The Stallion made the turn, but it kept on turning. The rear end skidded to the left, and the nose rammed the fence. Wood flew as the car plowed through the picket fence. Skidding sideways and left, the car shredded its left rear tire and skidded then on its wheel. The wheel broke off the axle, and the car dropped and tore off its left rear fender.

“Jesus Christ!”
shrieked Loren.

“Spectacular,” muttered Angelo.

“Your fuckin’ car’s not only a fuckin’ failure, it’s a fuckiri
MENACE!
”

Loren did not wait until he was where the Japanese could not hear him. He screamed at Angelo as he scrambled out of the harness and out of the wrecked Stallion.

“Easy, Loren, easy. I warned you about the oversteer. It’s a small problem. We knew about it and know how to fix it. I warned you.”

“Fix it”?
Don’t bother to fix it! The project’s
dead!
I don’t want another fuckin’ dollar spent on it!”

Loren threw his helmet down on the ground.

“Loren,” said Roberta. “You’ve got too much riding on this—”

“To put a fuckin’
murder car
on the highway?”

“I believe,” said Angelo, “you’ve seen test cars have problems before.
Induced
test problems, filmed by snakes. Remember?”

Loren blanched. “You have to bring that up, don’t you? I thought we said bygones—”

Angelo pointed at the wreck. “I told you not to put it into too tight a turn. I told you we had an oversteer problem to solve.”

“Oversteer? A. J. Foyt couldn’t drive that car safely!”

“Give us two days,” said Angelo, “and you can run it through that gate at forty miles an hour. You can snap it into the turn and—”

“I’ll never drive that son of a bitch again! And neither will anybody else. Not another dollar, Angelo! Not one more fuckin’ dollar!”

“Fine,” said Angelo coldly. “What will be your price for the machine tools and jigs to build the body and chassis? Or will you sell them?”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

Angelo glanced at Roberta. “Mr. Tadashi and I are going to build the car,” he said. “With XB or without it. With you or without you.”

“With whose money?”

“Does Mr. Tadashi impress you as a man without resources?” Angelo asked. “Do I? I’ll sell my XB shares, for one thing. Shortly after we announce we are going ahead without XB, the shares will be worthless. There’s a difference between you and me, Loren. You want money and power and prestige. I want to build an automobile. Like Number One always did.”

Loren sighed heavily. He stared at Roberta, looking for a suggestion. It was a suggestion she couldn’t give him. “You can fix this thing in two days?” he asked. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Well, let’s not get overexcited. Jesus! You can understand a man getting excited when he—”

“I’m sorry about that, Loren, but we’re going to build the car.”

“I’ll come back and see it come through that gate at forty,” said Loren. “And if you can shoot that son of a bitch through there at forty, so by God can I!”

Loren went inside the garage to change out of his test-driver outfit.

Roberta seized Angelo by the elbow. “This is not exactly the way this was supposed to turn out.”

“Better,” said Angelo. “When he drives through at forty, he’ll—”

“You were bluffing,” she interrupted. “You and Tadashi—”

“Mr. Tadashi and I will build the car,” said Angelo. “One way or the other.”

Betsy sat astride him. He had just come and was still very deep in her, feeling her work him with her inside muscles.

“What would you have done if he’d called your bluff?” she asked.

“I never had to think about it,” Angelo replied.

Cindy gave birth to her fourth child in April. She and Angelo named the little girl Valerie.

John, named for his grandfather, was now seven; Anna was five; and Morris was three.

Previous owners had allowed the swimming pool behind the house to fall into disrepair, then converted it into a fish and lily pond. That spring Angelo hired a local pool company to dig it out and replace it with a landscaped pool. He had a heater installed, so the water was warm enough by May, when the air was still too cold for swimming; and he had a motion detector installed, which set off a loud alarm if child or dog entered the water when no adult was at poolside watching.

The dog was more of a problem than the children. Cindy had bought a black Labrador—Greenwich’s most fashionable dog—and named him Number One. (“Because he’ll piss on anything that stands still.”) The dog loved the pool more than anyone else in the family did, and he set off at least one alarm every day. Most of them were answered by the au pair, who begged Angelo to install a fence around the pool. In July the fence was installed.