The Stallion (1996) (34 page)

In the morning they returned to Westchester Airport to see if the jet had come in during the night and was sitting on the ramp. It had not.

They did not drive past the house during the day on Friday. The road on which the Perino house sat was a residential street, and a strange car with New York plates might be noticed if it drove by too often.

They sat in their motel room, nervously watching television. Every five minutes Len went to the window to look out at the car—obsessed with the idea that someone might somehow discover the rifle hidden in the trunk. They ate nervously, too, and drank very little.

At six they went back to the airport.

As the light faded, it was more and more difficult to identify the landing bizjets. But then it came: the XB corporate Lear. It was easy enough to identify, by the prominent logo on the fin—

Shortly Perino came out of the general-aviation building. They recognized him—they had watched him for hours that night in the Renaissance Center. He was a bigger man than they had remembered. Knowing his age, which was almost sixty, they had visualized him as smaller. He carried a small suitcase and had a raincoat folded over his arm.

Trish started the rented Chevy, drove to the gate and paid for her parking, then drove up the road toward Greenwich. They were well ahead of Perino, but they could be certain he was back there, no more than two or three minutes behind.

Neither of them spoke a word. In the course of their careers as private investigators, both of them had done despicable things. They had committed burglaries. They had committed assaults. They had tapped telephones illegally. Either one of them could have been in prison. Trish had, in fact, spent thirty days in jail for criminal trespass. But neither of them had ever killed anyone. They had never even contemplated such a thing.

But this … They hated Perino. He’d had them slugged. Trish carried on her face the marks left by the heavy blow of a blackjack. She remembered the terror and the pain. Besides, Hardeman was paying them half a million dollars for this hit. They had half of it in hand already. They had laughed over what was so far their worst problem: what to do with money they obviously could not report on their income tax returns.

They had planned their hit carefully, almost lightheartedly. Now, suddenly, the enormity of it was bearing down on them. They were going to
kill a man\
They were silent and thoughtful.

They reached the street. Trish pulled the car over at the
spot she had identified weeks ago as the best place. She turned out the lights.

Len reached to the floor of the backseat and lifted the rifle. It was rolled in a blanket, and he unrolled it. The Remington was a hunting rifle, and the clip was loaded with long, slender cartridges. The bullets had flat tips, so they would expand as they tore through flesh, giving a deer a fatal wound. They would do the same to a man. Len had fired at trees and had marveled at the damage the slugs did, even to wood.

He rolled down the window. He worked the bolt to bring up a cartridge from the clip to the chamber. For the moment he set the safety.

Perino passed them and turned into his driveway.

Len flipped off the safety and put his eye to the telescopic sight. Perino would be getting out of the car under the glare of bright lights mounted on the overhang of the garage roof. That was one place where he could be shot: right there in front of the garage as he got out of the car. The other place was on his doorstep, when he stood with his back to the road and put his key in the lock. The latter would be the better chance, when he was standing still; and that was where Len had decided he would make the shot.

He saw that his judgment had been right. Perino was a man of abrupt movements. He ducked out of the car, grabbed his suitcase and raincoat, and strode toward the house: a bad target. But at the door—

Suddenly that door flew open. Two little girls ran toward Perino. They threw their arms around him, jumping up and down, and pulled him toward the house. Then another one came out, this one a pretty teenage girl who grabbed Perino by the hand. He was surrounded by his children.

“Jesus Christ…,” Len muttered.

“You can’t,”
Trish whispered shrilly.

“No.”

“There’ll be another time.”

“There
has
to be another time. We’ve got a quarter of a million dollars of Hardeman’s money.”

“Let it go for now,” said Loren. “Things are developing. It may be to my advantage to keep him alive for a while. But don’t bank my money and forget about it. I’ll call on you again, sooner or later.”

Another opportunity would not come quickly. Angelo stayed home for a week, to be with the son he rarely saw and to spend time with the rest of the family. They went into New York City to see sights his Connecticut children had never seen: the Statue of Liberty, the view from the top of the Empire State Building, and Manhattan as viewed from a Circle Line cruise ship.

Cindy gave Angelo and Betsy an opportunity to be alone. They did not take advantage of it.

In bed the third night of Betsy’s visit to Greenwich, Angelo murmured to Cindy, “I don’t deserve a wife as perfect as you. To accept my son by Betsy—”

“Angelo. I’m no saint either.”

“I know. I guessed, anyway. Dietz? Marcus?”

“Please. I haven’t asked
you
many questions.”

“God … I’m not going to say I don’t care. But I love you more, not less.”

Cindy reached for his jock, held it, and squeezed it gently. “I guess … probably every woman in the Hardeman family. Including Alicia. Christ! Mother and daughter. And … Oh, my God! Even Roberta, huh? Is that why she’s so helpful sometimes?”

Angelo smiled and kissed her. “Business is business,” he said.

“But you still love me more than all the rest of them put together, don’t you? I love you more than anyone else I’ve ever been with, put together.”

“I love you more than all the other women in the world put together,” said Angelo.

In this moment of mutual frankness, so beautifully free of recrimination, she was tempted to tell him about the
abortion. She had told him about the ligation, saying she’d had it done because her doctor told her she could not take the pill anymore. But the abortion—no. She
couldn’t
tell him.

For Van, adjustment to American ways was fascinating, welcome—and difficult. He couldn’t believe he was supposed to call Mr. Perino and Mrs. Perino Angelo and Cindy. John and Anna Perino introduced him to young Americans. He was astonished to hear them say words like “cock” and “cunt” and, most unbelievable of all, “fuck.” They seemed to have no sense of propriety or modesty.

When John took him to his parents’ bedroom and showed him the paintings of Mrs. Perino nude and of himself nude, Van blushed.

As he said good-bye to his mother and his little half brother John Hardeman, who were returning to London, Van wondered if he were not being left in a barbaric land with a barbaric family.

But there was one member of the Perino family whom he found truly congenial—fourteen-year-old Anna Perino. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Not only beautiful, she was gentle and tender; she seemed to understand his confusion and sympathized with him. He hadn’t known Anna a week before he decided he loved her. But he hadn’t the remotest notion what to do about it.

Van was perplexed by the freedom Americans enjoyed. He and Charles had lived in terror that someone might find out what they were doing at night. He wasn’t sure Americans would care.

John took him to parties where young Americans drank, took drugs, fondled one another, and exposed themselves to one another. God knew what else they did. Oh, it was the freedom he had always dreamed of—he and Charles, who would never know it because he would remain all his life in France. The difference between himself and Charles and his new American friends was that he and Charles had done what they did and were ashamed of it—but the Americans felt no shame. Like young animals, they followed their
desires wherever they led them and seemed not to think twice about it.

John Perino was intimate with a girl named Buffy. Their best friends were a couple named Jeff and Kara. Buffy was eighteen and would attend Wellesley in the fall. She was two years older than John, who would not graduate from high school for another year. Jeff and Kara were seventeen and also had to complete their senior years of high school.

Kara’s father, who was a surgeon at Greenwich Hospital, owned a thirty-foot sports cruiser, which he berthed in Cos Cob Harbor. Jeff had demonstrated enough skill and responsibility with the boat that he allowed Jeff to take it out on weekday afternoons. On a Thursday afternoon in August, the three couples—John and Buffy, Jeff and Kara, Van and Anna—carried picnic baskets aboard and set out eastward on Long Island Sound, going nowhere in particular and planning to anchor in some cove where they would eat their lunch and maybe slip over the side to swim.

The girls wore colorful bikinis. Kara in particular filled hers to overflowing. The boys wore White Stag Speedos, tight, showing proud bulges.

The boat, named
Finisterre,
could be controlled from a flying bridge atop the main cabin or from a control center inside the cabin. As he eased the boat away from the dock and out into the harbor, Jeff worked from the flying bridge, where he had the best visibility. He used minimal engine power, causing no wake. Only when he was well beyond the harbor did he shove in the throttles and send the boat charging forward into a light swell.

The other five sat in the cockpit, feeling in their feet the vibrations from the engines. John opened an ice chest and passed around bottles of beer.

When they were two miles offshore and abreast of Shippan Point, in Stamford, Buffy pulled off her bikini top and cast it aside. Kara immediately followed suit. Anna was conspicuously reluctant to do the same but was also unwilling to be different. She took off her top, showing a fourteen-year-old girl’s small, pointed breasts.

Kara climbed to the flying bridge, taking Jeff a beer.

Van noted that no one seemed embarrassed. Apparently, his new friends were doing what they always did. He
wondered if next the boys would pull off their Speedos and expose themselves naked. He wasn’t sure if he could do that.

As they cruised east on the Sound, the sky behind them darkened, the wind freshened and turned cooler, and the water became choppy. Jeff switched on the radio on the bridge and listened to the Coast Guard frequency.

“No problem,” he told the others. “A squall passing through. I’m going to run inside the islands just ahead and find a cove where we can anchor.”

The three girls retreated into the cabin. The boys stayed on deck, and John and Van went out on the bow to be ready to drop the anchor when Jeff called for it. By the time they reached sheltered water in a cove, hissing rain had reduced visibility to almost nothing. When the boys came into the cabin, they were wet. Kara had taken towels from the locker, and the three boys rubbed themselves dry. Their Speedos were wet. Jeff and John pulled theirs off. Van hesitated but decided he would look silly to the others if he didn’t do the same. Jeff knelt at the rear of the cabin, opened a hatch in the bulkhead, and hung the trunks on hooks in the engine compartment, where the heat would dry them.

The girls broke out their sandwiches and chips, and the boys opened more beer. The boat rocked on growing swells but was in no way threatened.

“Cozy,” said Kara, snuggling against Jeff. He put his left arm around her and cupped her breast in his hand. “Mmm-hmm,” she murmured. “Very cozy.”

John bent over and kissed each of Buffy’s nipples, leaving them glistening with the saliva from his tongue.

Van looked at Anna and saw apprehension in her eyes. He put his arm around her shoulders, and she smiled shyly and kissed him quickly on the cheek.

As they ate, the Greenwichers talked about their schools and the upcoming football season, and they laughed as they tried to explain to Van the fundamentals of American football.

As soon as Jeff and Kara had finished eating their sandwiches and drinking their beer, they went down a short
ladder and opened a door that admitted them to a narrow cabin.

John and Buffy stretched out on the settee on the right side of the main cabin and began to kiss and fondle each other.

Van kissed Anna. It was the first time he had kissed her on the mouth. He was thrilled. Her dark, solemn eyes fastened on his, and she lifted her soft, moist lips to invite him to kiss her again. He wanted to touch her small bare breasts.

But—her brother was just across the cabin!

John had pushed Buffy’s bikini bottom down. He kneaded her taut little rear.

Van put his right hand gently on Anna’s left breast. She gasped but did not move away from him or try to move his hand away. She only stared into his eyes with increasing solemnity. He kissed her again. They relaxed, settled back on the settee, and continued kissing.

The rain slackened, and visibility around the boat improved. Van and Anna could see the islands around them and the mainland shore. Other boats were at anchor not far from them, and Van wondered if people on those boats were doing what they were doing on this one.