The Stallion (1996) Read online

  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.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  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. Numb
er 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.

  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.

  I

  1972

  1

  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.”

  2

  “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 ha
ndsome 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.”

  3

  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.”