“Do you think he believed you?”
“No. That’s why I expect some flap. He’s going to do a little checking around in Detroit for himself. He can’t stand not being on the inside.”
“How are you handling the finances?” Number One asked.
“Out of my own trust account,” I said. “You weren’t the only rich grandfather in Grosse Pointe.”
He laughed. “That’s not very good business on your part. What if I don’t come up with the money?”
“I’ll take my chances. My grandfather said you were the best credit risk in Detroit. You were the only man who paid his bootlegger as if he were legitimate.”
“You shamed me into it,” he laughed. “How much are you in for?”
“About two million so far,” I answered. “A million for the acquisition and about a million for operating expenses over the next few months.”
“Will you take a million in cash and a million in BMC stock warrants?”
“Done,” I said.
“It will be in your bank in the morning,” he said. “Where do you go next?”
“Riverside, California,” I answered, “to line up some drivers, then to New York. I have a date there with Len Forman about underwriting.”
He was silent for a moment. “Forget Riverside. I think we’ve gone too far now to worry about a cover. Better get on to New York directly. I want to have as much preparation as possible before they catch up to us.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I think I ought to call Loren then and let him know that I’m quitting. I don’t mind playing games, but I don’t like outright cheating. I did say I would field a racing team.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” His voice was sharp. “Leave Loren to me. Besides, you don’t think he believed your story even for a minute, do you?”
I didn’t answer.
“You keep your mouth shut and go to New York,” he said.
“Okay. He may be your grandson, but I still don’t like it.”
“I’m not looking for your approval,” he snapped. “Just do your job!”
The telephone went dead in my hand and I put it down. I made myself a drink and went into the bedroom.
She was lying on the bed, leafing through a magazine. She looked up. “Meeting over?”
I nodded.
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah.” I took a sip. The whiskey tasted good. “There’s been a change of plans.”
“Oh?”
“We’re not going to Riverside.”
“I’m not sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t care less if I never saw another raceway.”
“We’re going to New York.”
“When?”
“If we pack now, we can make the red-eye leaving at ten forty-five and we’ll be in New York in the morning.”
“And if we don’t make the red-eye?”
“We leave in the morning. But then I lose a whole day.”
“Is that important?”
“Could be.”
“Then we’ll make it,” she said, getting out of bed.
I watched her slip out of her robe and walk nude to the closet and reach for a dress. “Aah, the hell with it,” I said. “Get back into bed.”
I couldn’t think of anything more stupid than spending the night on a plane.
Chapter Twelve
I had to say one thing for her. Lady or no, she ate like a stevedore. I watched her demolish her breakfast: juice, dollar-size pancakes with eggs and sausages, toast, marmalade and tea. And all the time I kept pouring coffee into myself to bring myself up to the day.
“You Americans eat such enormous breakfasts,” she said between mouthfuls. “Lovely.”
I nodded. We certainly did, I thought as I poured myself a fourth cup of coffee. The phone rang and I picked it up.
“Mr. Carroll at the front desk,” the voice identified itself. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Perino.”
“Quite all right, Mr. Carroll.”
His voice lowered. “I have a long-distance call for Lady Ayres. It’s from Detroit and I thought perhaps it might be wise if I got your permission before we put it through.”
I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Who in Detroit knows you’re staying here?”
“The only one I told was Loren,” she answered.
Since her name hadn’t appeared on the hotel register, it meant that security was on the ball. I spoke into the phone. “Mr. Carroll, you’re a gentleman of intelligence and discretion. Put the call through.”
“Thank you, Mr. Perino.” I could tell he was pleased because his voice held that man-to-man feeling. “If you’ll hang up, I’ll instruct the operator.”
I put down the telephone and pushed it toward her. A moment later it rang.
“Hello,” she said. There was a faint crackle in the receiver. “Why, Loren, how nice of you to call. … No, it’s not too early, I was just having breakfast.”
His voice echoed faintly on the phone. She listened for a moment, then covering the mouthpiece, whispered to me. “He said he was coming out to Palm Springs for a long weekend of sun and golf and wants me to join him.”
I smiled. Loren had balls after all. I wondered if he just discovered them. “Tell him you were leaving for Hawaii today.”
She nodded. “What rotten luck, Loren. I would have loved to see you but I’ve made plans to leave for Hawaii. I’ve never been there, you know, and I’ve always been so curious about the place.”
His voice echoed again in the phone. Again she covered the mouthpiece. “He said that’s even better. He knows some marvelous places on the outer islands. What do I do now?”
I thought for a moment. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. At least it would keep him out of Detroit, and the longer he stayed away, the better our chances were to get set. I grinned at her. “I guess you’re going to Hawaii.”
She spoke a few moments more into the phone, then put it down. She reached for a cigarette silently. I held the light for her. She dragged the smoke deeply into her, her eyes never leaving mine. Finally she let the smoke out. “I don’t know whether I like it.”
“Why not?” I asked. “It’s not every day a girl gets a chance to go to Hawaii.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it,” she snapped. “It’s your attitude. You dispose of me as if I were some whore you picked up.”
I smiled at her. “It seems to me that I read somewhere of an Englishman who once said that’s the only way to treat a lady.”
She didn’t smile. “You really don’t care anything at all about me.”
“Don’t say that. I would not love thee half as much, my darling, if I did not love honor more.”
“Stop quoting at me,” she said, annoyed. “What has honor got to do with it?”
“It seems a very honorable thing for me to do,” I said. “To sacrifice myself for a friend. Noblesse oblige. After all, I do owe him something. If it weren’t for him we would never have met.”
She met my eyes levelly. “You want him out of the way, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said simply.
“What if he falls in love with me?”
“That’s his problem.”
“What if I fall in love with him?”
“Then it’s your problem.”
“You’re a real shit,” she said. I started to get up. “Wait a minute. Where are you going?” she asked.
“Get dressed,” I answered. “I have a plane to catch at ten o’clock.”
“You’re not going anywhere, just yet,” she said firmly. “I’m not meeting him at the airport until seven this evening. Now that you know he’ll be out of the way, you can afford another day.”
“What for?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “Because I’m going to fuck you into the ground. Fuck you until there’s no juice left in your balls, no marrow in your bones. So much that you’ll be lucky if you can raise a hard for a month.”
I laughed a
nd sank back into the chair. I reached for the phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked suspiciously.
“Room service,” I said. I had the sudden feeling I would need a large breakfast.
I went out to the airport with her even though my plane did not leave until two hours later. I checked my bags onto my flight, then went with her to the waiting area for the United flight from Detroit. We got there about fifteen minutes before the flight was due.
“We’ve got time for a quick drink,” I said, and led her to the nearest bar.
The waitress put our drinks in front of us and walked away. I raised my glass. “Cheers.”
She barely tasted her martini.
I looked at her. She had been silent all the way out. “Chin up,” I said. “It’s not so bad.”
In the dim lights I could barely see her eyes under the wide brim of her soft felt hat. “I’m worried about you,” she said.
“I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
She raised the glass to her lips, then put it down without tasting it. “Will I see you again?”
I nodded.
“When?”
“When you get back.”
“Where will I find you?”
“I’ll be around. I’ll find you.”
The mechanical voice came from the speakers built into the ceiling. “United Airlines, Flight 271 from Detroit, now arriving at Gate 72.”
“That’s you,” I said. I finished my drink and we got to our feet. She hadn’t touched hers.
We left the dark and walked into the million-watt fluorescents of the terminal. I stood there. “Have a fun vacation,” I said.
She looked up into my face. Her voice was soft. “Don’t get caught up in the dicing, there are other ways to get yourself killed besides climbing the wall.”
“I won’t,” I said. I bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Good-bye.”
I barely felt her lips move beneath mine. “Good-bye.”
She made it as far as three steps away, then abruptly flung herself back into my arms. Her mouth crushed hungrily against mine. “Don’t let me go, Angelo!” she cried. “I love you.”
For a moment I almost heard the music, but the roll of drums was louder. “I’m not letting go,” I said and gently took her arms from around my neck and placed them at her side.
She didn’t say another word. This time she made it all the way. I stood looking there after her until she reached the gate.
The passengers were already coming through. He was among the first off the plane. He was a big man and he towered above the others with his gray Detroit felt snap brim.
A smile split his face when he saw her. He hurried toward her, removing his hat with one hand and holding out the other. Almost formally they shook hands, then awkwardly he bent and kissed her cheek.
I turned and got onto the electric walkway leading to the main terminal section and my flight. I looked back only once.
They were on the way into the bar we had just left. He had one hand on her arm as if he were supporting a basket of eggs, looking down into her face and talking.
The million fluorescent watts began to burn my eyes and I stopped looking. I couldn’t wait until I reached the end of the walkway, then I headed for the nearest bar.
I had two hours before my flight and by the time I boarded, I was smashed. Not smashed outside, rolling and drunk, but smashed inside, bleak and empty.
I sank into my seat and fastened the belt. I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“Are you comfortable, sir?” the stewardess asked. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
I opened my eyes and looked into her professionally smiling face. “Yes,” I said. “Give me a double Canadian on the rocks as soon as we take off and a pair of eye shades. Then don’t disturb me for anything. No hors d’oeuvres, no dinner, no movie, no nothing. I want to sleep all the way to New York.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
But it didn’t work. Neither the whiskey nor the eye shades. Though I kept them on and my eyes closed for the whole of the flight, I didn’t sleep.
All I could hear was the sound of her voice in my ear, all I could see was the expression on her face when she left me.
I was glad when the plane finally touched down in New York and I could open my eyes. The whole damn thing was too heavy.
Chapter Thirteen
It was three days later; we sat on the lawn overlooking the swimming pool and the private beach with its white sand going down to the water. A faint early September wind rustled in the palm fronds over our heads. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun.
“Winter is coming,” Number One said.
“It’s still warm,” I said.
“Not to me. Each year I’ve been thinking of going farther and farther south. Maybe to Nassau or the Virgins. As I grow older my bones seem to signal the oncoming cold.”
I turned my head to look at him. He was sitting in his chair, his legs wrapped in the perennial blanket, his eyes looking out toward the sea. “What is it like to grow old, Number One?” I asked.
He didn’t take his eyes from the white-capped water. “I hate it,” he said, without giving his words any special emphasis. “Mostly because it’s such a bore. Everything seems to be passing you by, you find out that you’re not as important as you thought you were. The world moves on and after a while you become absorbed in the only game left to play. One stupid ambition: 12:01 a.m.”
“12:01 a.m.?” I asked. “What’s that?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, turning to look at me. “The survival game. Only you don’t know why you’re playing it. Tomorrow is nothing but today all over again. Only more so.”
“If that’s it, why are you starting all this?”
“Because just once again before I die, I want something to matter more to me than 12:01 a.m.” He turned to look again at the ocean. “I suppose I didn’t think much about what was happening to me until last year when Elizabeth came down and spent a few days. Do you know her?”
Elizabeth was Loren’s daughter. “We’ve never met.”
“She was sixteen then,” he said. “And, suddenly, she turned back the clock for me. Betsy, last summer, was the exact age that her great-grandmother was when we met. Time plays funny tricks on people, it jumps generations to recreate itself. For those few days I was young.”
I didn’t speak.
“I would get up early in the morning and look out from my window at her swimming in the pool. One morning, it was so beautiful that she dropped her swimsuit at the side of the pool and dove into the water. I watched her until the sheer youth and exuberance of her brought tears to my eyes. And then I realized what had happened to me. Too many years had gone by and I had not cared enough about anything to cry for it.
“My world had become my body. My body, my shell, my prison in which I served out my time. And that was very wrong. Because a prison is something you should try to get out of. I was doing exactly the opposite. My only concern was to find ways and means to spend more and more time in it. At exactly that moment I knew what I had to do.
“Take off my clothes and jump once more into the pool. For over thirty years I sat in this chair thinking I was alive when I was really dead. But I wasn’t about to stay dead. There was still something for me to do, something I could do. Build a car for Betsy as I had built a car for her great-grandmother.
“When she came up from the pool and we sat at the breakfast table, I told her what I would do. She jumped up and threw her arms around me. And do you know what she said?”
I shook my head.
“‘Great-Grandfather, that would be the grooviest thing that anyone could ever do for me!’”
He was silent. “After she had gone, I called Loren. He thought it was a beautiful sentiment. But not very practical. Economically, our profit structure had stabilized; building a new car could possibly disturb that. Physically, we didn’t h
ave the space; over seventy percent was committed to other forms of manufacture. But I did get him to promise to look into it.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know. If he did, I never heard from him. After a while I realized that if I wanted it done I would have to find someone else to do it for me. That’s how I came to you.”
“Why me?”
“Because automobiles are your life as much as they are mine. I knew that ever since that day in the park and I knew it would be just a matter of time before you stopped playing with toys and got to the core of what you’re about. I knew I was right the moment I heard your voice on the phone after the Indy.”
“Okay, you got me,” I smiled. “But there’s still Loren.”
A puzzled look came over his face. “I don’t understand that at all. I know Loren’s not stupid. He should have found out what we’re up to, long before now. But not a word from him.”
“Loren has other things on his mind,” I said.
“Like what? One thing Loren never does is take his eyes off the business.”
“This time he did.”
“Don’t be so damned mysterious,” he snapped. “If you know something I don’t, tell me.”
“Loren has romance on his mind,” I said. “Right now he’s in Hawaii.”
“How do you know that?” he asked sharply. “I’ve called his home and the office. Nobody knows where he is.”
I laughed. “I practically did everything but put the girl on the plane with him.” Briefly I told him the story and at its finish he began to smile.
“Good,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if he was human. Maybe there’s some hope for him yet.”
I got to my feet. “I think I’ll take a look inside and see how the boys are coming along with their figures.”
I left him sitting there, looking out at the ocean, and walked back up to the house and into the library. Despite the opened windows there were always layers of blue cigarette smoke hanging in the air over the table around which the accountants were gathered. At one end of the table sat Len Forman, a senior partner of Danville, Reynolds, and Firestone, representing the combined underwriters, and at the other end of the table, Arthur Roberts, a prominent New York corporate attorney, who had been retained as our counsel. The thing I liked about Artie is that he wasn’t afraid of a fight and we all knew, going in, that this was not going to be a waltz.
The Betsy (1971) Page 7