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The strident midafternoon sun cut sharply against the angles of the city’s buildings as Haydon stood on the east side of Louisiana Street with the Pennzoil towers at his back and looked across at the mammoth arch that was the entrance to the lobby of Republic Bank. The most recent of the city’s downtown architectural wonders, and Haydon’s favorite, the Republic Bank Center was one of two dissimilar skyscrapers designed by the Johnson/Burgee team that had just been completed in Houston. They had already garnered enough attention in the press to qualify them as national spectacles.
Beyond the fact that it occupied a solid block of prime downtown real estate, the Republic Bank Center was totally unlike anything built in the city before, and it stood out in the Houston skyline like a Gothic cathedral in a city of glass cylinders. Faced with Napoleon red granite, the Center actually consisted of two interconnecting buildings that evoked the architectural designs of the late Renaissance. The taller wing of the two buildings rose fifty-six stories and was comprised on its northern side of three graduated sections stair stepping down to forty-seven stories and then thirty-two stories, creating a three tiered roof line. Each section was crowned with steep Dutch gables, giving the building the illusion of being three towers in one. The bank lobby itself, at which Haydon was now looking, was actually a smaller, separate building nestled into the eastern flank of the larger structure and connected to it by a dramatically vaulted arcade reaching high above the floor.
Carefully weaving his way through the sluggish traffic, Haydon crossed the street in the middle of the block and walked straight into the bank’s main entrance, which loomed above him in an immense arch of fanning stonework as if it were hewn out of a mountain of granite. Once he was inside, however, the weight of the mountain lifted magically as the bright Texas sun flooded the bank’s lobby with oblique illumination from a profusion of skylights set in the gabled roof eleven stories up and running the width of the entire building.
Haydon walked toward the elevators just beyond the enormous four-faced street clock that sat in the intersection of the two arcades and gave the immense lobby the feeling of a European village square. Three and four stories above the floor, open walkways with wrought iron railings crossed the vast spaces of sunlight beneath the arched ceiling. The echoing of hundreds of footsteps on the inlaid design of white and red granite made him smile. He remembered the sound from walking through the vast cathedrals of Europe. The echo had been imported along with the stone and, like the stone, had been adapted to the American way. From the cathedrals of the past to the banks of the future. The only way to go.
Frank Siddons’ law firm occupied a floor three quarters of the way to the top of the building. His office faced Rusk Street with a full view of downtown and a clear shot of what appeared to be a second downtown six miles away to the southwest. The Post Oak area, which archly considered itself the nave of the city’s elitist spirit and had a skyline rivaling the one where Haydon now stood, was further distinguished by yet another newly completed Johnson/Burgee landmark creation. The elegant art deco inspired shaft of the Transco Tower stood above all the others in the hazy summer heat like a taunt to the future that the present was close on its heels. So imaginative was its design that it gave one the uneasy, though alluring, feeling that in this city fantasy was inexplicably evolving into reality.
Siddons stood at the window with Haydon and made a sweeping gesture with an unsteady arm.
“By God, Stuart, a man my age doesn’t expect to see this kind of madness.”
It was the first time Haydon had been to Siddons’ new offices, and the old man was still clearly enjoying the spectacles visible from his windows.
“We old men sometimes contemplate what the world will be like when we’re gone,” he mused. “It’s kind of like whistling in the dark as you walk through a graveyard. We need to prove to ourselves that we’re not afraid to entertain such a fabulous concept. After a little practice, we’re able to do this with at least the appearance of equilibrious pragmatism.” There was a tone of amusement in his voice, followed by a more sober inflection as he said, “But it’s pretty damn disconcerting, I’ll tell you, to wake up in the morning and discover that the future does not consider your demise a matter worth waiting for.”
He pointed a finger crooked with age into the city to their left. “In there, just down the street there, this hotshot German architect’s going to build ‘the second tallest building in the world.’ Wonderful. I’ve seen the design. Spectacular. It tapers upward with lighted tiers that’ll make it visible all the way to Moscow. Glass and marble, black and white steel.” He shook his head, his hooded old eyes fixed on the street below. “I tell you, son, this is Oz, and everybody thinks it’s for real. Your daddy would have had something to say about all this. I’d like to have the benefit of his observations right now.”
The old man snorted, took one last look at all that lay before him, and turned back to his desk.
“Sit down, Stuart. Let’s talk.”
Frank Siddons was the last remaining founding partner in Houston’s second largest law firm, Siddons, Wayberry and Wright. All three men had been close friends of Haydon’s father, to whom the firm had made a standing offer to include him as a Fourth partner. Webster Haydon had never taken the option. Like his son, he had always preferred the flexibility of independence. Nevertheless, the four men had constituted an unorganized firm of sorts, meeting regularly for lunch or dinner at the various private clubs to which each of them belonged. Among them they had commanded a vast resource of knowledge, both legal and otherwise, with more inside information about Houston’s past and future than any other four men in the city.
Now only the frail but tough Siddons remained. The old man leaned back in his leather armchair, gnawing on a corona maduro his doctor would not let him light, and listened to Haydon relate the circumstances that led him to seek advice and information. Siddons lent his attention with a poker face and unblinking gray eyes sunken into a face that in the last few years had begun to betray the skull beneath it. His fair skin was speckled, and his thinning gray hair was sharply barbered and combed straight back from his pale forehead.
When Haydon finished speaking, Siddons reached a thin hand to his mouth and removed the cigar. His wrist showed small and blue veined from beneath the starched French cuff. Before he spoke his eyes glittered.
“William Hemsley Langer the Fourth. He’s a very important man, as he will readily tell you. I know you remember he’s about your age. He and Sean were at Rice together.”
“Yes. In fact, I met him a couple of times at your place, when I would come home for holidays and go to see Sean. If I remember correctly he was a tall, kind of husky blond.”
“That’s right. Bill was the athletic sort. Stout. Just like numbers One, Two, and Three. That family’s old blood. They had already accumulated enormous wealth from land speculations when your daddy moved here in the 1940s. They had tied themselves to the fortunes of real estate when land could still be traded in lots of thousands of acres within a fifty mile radius of downtown. Shrewd people. Over the years they always managed to hang on to the choicest properties for themselves. The years went by, the city limits went out, and the population went up. They acquired tremendous leverage. They still have it.”
He worked his mouth into a pucker, relaxing, puckering, relaxing, savoring the aftertaste of the tobacco in an old man’s way.
“Bill’s grandaddy and daddy were only children too, you know. The family’s loins were as stingy as their pocketbooks. All of them stayed right in there with the family business. Then Bill came along and kicked over the traces. After college he refused the empire. He used his rightful dollars to wedge his way into an advertising and public relations firm, believing-correctly so, as it turned out-that it would be a potential growth industry for Houston during the seventies. After a decent apprenticeship he formed his own company, Langer Media. He showed a lot of pluck. He fought and clawed and played the games and eventually became a howling success. He also became pretty damned obnoxious.”
The telephone on Siddons’ desk rang, and he leaned forward and picked it up. He listened, holding his corona in his right hand, and then said “No” and hung up. He sat back again and pulled thoughtfully at a long, pendulous earlobe.
“The wheel turned. Langer Media got in trouble. Overextended or whatever it is you do in the advertising and PR business. Bill lost beau coup money and was on the brink of losing the business. Now, because he had crowed so much during the fat years about how he’d made it on his own and was a self-made man in his own right and all that kind of thing, when the crunch came he just couldn’t bring himself to go to the family to bail him out.”
Siddons put the cigar back into his mouth and clamped down on it. He sat in his high backed chair of old leather and stared at something that neither Haydon nor anyone else could see. He was like a little bird in a man’s clothes. His collar was stiff and correct, but too big for his scrawny neck. Haydon waited. Frank Siddons had not forgotten where he was, and he was too old to care if he looked as if he had. He was simply thinking, and his thoughts ran in the delicate streams and strata of his own fading world.
“He did the worst possible thing,” he said abruptly, speaking around the cigar. Then he took it out of his mouth. “It was the classic move of a vain and desperate man. He sold his soul in exchange for something infinitely less valuable, the hollow admiration of his own times. Josef Roeg secretly bought a controlling interest in Langer Media and put the company back in the chips. I suspect the night before he signed that contract was the last good night’s sleep Bill Langer has had.”
Haydon didn’t need any background from Siddons about Josef Roeg. Roeg International was a multinational corporation that spoke for itself. Its headquarters were in Houston, and its flagship building was visible behind the old lawyer’s back.
“When did this happen?”
“Four years ago, I guess. Maybe a little more.”
“But the business is flourishing, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, Stuart,” Siddons said, nodding pensively. “The business is flourishing. But there’s just one further point. When Josef Roeg acquires a company, its corporate executives are eaten alive on the spot. They achieve tremendous status in the business world, but in reality they’re a hell of a lot less than they were before they signed on. They’re dead men, actually. Roeg uses their bodies however it suits him. He just throws away their souls. He’s got little use for something as amorphous as that. If they ever want to live again, they have to give it all up. Forever. Roeg will see that they never achieve that status again, with his operations or anyone else’s. It’s amazing how many men are willing to negotiate under those conditions. Greed and vanity are wonderful things.”
“Did Langer’s advertising agency mean that much to him?”
Frank Siddons sat up in his chair a little and put his forearms on the leather top of the massive old desk he had bought in middle age and carted around with him as the firm grew into ever larger quarters. He too had made a fortune while he was still young, and he had been given a long life in which to enjoy it. It had made him a thoughtful old man.
He smiled, lending a kinder expression to his nose, which had begun to hook with age.
“You know, Stuart, you and your daddy never did quite see the world like most people; neither did Cordelia, for that matter. You’re a true eccentric, son. You’re bred to it.”
The old man took his soggy cigar and threw it in the trash. He reached for his aged Amboina pine humidor, which had sat on his desk as long as Haydon could remember and opened the lid. He took out one of his rich maduros, offered one to Haydon, who refused, and softly closed the lid. Since he wasn’t going to smoke it, he didn’t bother to bite off the tip. He put it in his mouth, rotated it with his fingers to moisten it, and finally chewed on it lightly. Haydon watched the motions of habit. The old man paid no more attention to what he was doing than he did to breathing.
“I’m going to wax philosophical a moment,” he announced. “Bill Langer is a very fine product of the twentieth century. By that I do not mean that what he is is necessarily laudable, but simply that he is a distillation of the elements of his own time and place. He is the issue of commerce, both of commodities and ideas. He may look ahead a little way, but only because commerce by nature has an anticipatory function; and he may look back, but only as far back as his great-grandaddy. He’s got no sense of history. Bill lives for what he is right now, and what he is right now is a ‘businessman.’ Well, I happen to believe that the ‘businessman’ and the ‘politician’ are the giants of the past and present century. Once again, that’s not necessarily laudable, it’s just fact. They are the ones who affect the direction of world history. That may sound a bit overblown, but I’m an old man and it doesn’t bother me like it used to say what I think.
“Anyway, overweening pride and greed are two things that have not been in short supply in this city for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of both sitting right across from this desk, and I’ve felt them myself from this chair.
“Well, Bill Langer played by the rules of the game and the rules of the game are rough. He’s no longer his own man, but he’s tremendously successful.” Siddons smiled at that, as though he had seen something obvious that everyone else was overlooking.
“What does all this mean, exactly?” Haydon asked. “He’s a toady.”
“Is he involved in questionable enterprises with Roeg?”
“Roeg does not have a good reputation.”
“Do you know anything for a fact?”
“No.”
“But you can speculate.”
“Endlessly, but I won’t. It would serve no purpose. I don’t want to leave the impression that I think Bill’s operation is a sink of corruption. I have no reason to believe that. I do know that Josef Roeg is not a good man to do business with. He does not negotiate unless the other party is at a desperate disadvantage. In such a situation the opposite party relinquishes more than would be reasonably expected in any other circumstance. A good, successful businessman is shrewd, tough, and opportunistic; he is not necessarily execrable. Roeg is.”
Behind Siddons’ back the afternoon sun had fallen to an angle that brought its white fire full against Roeg’s building, rendering its enormous sheets of blue glass impenetrable. It became a colossal mirror, revealing nothing of itself while reflecting the images of the surrounding powers. An appropriate metaphor for the man who built it.
“How do I learn more about him?” Haydon asked.
Siddons leaned forward in his chair again, took an ink pen from the holder on his desk, and wrote something on a clean square of vellum notepaper. Haydon could see the embossed names of the firm from where he sat.
“We represented this man about two years ago. I’ll sign my name, and he’ll know it’s all right with me if he talks. Whether it’s all right with him is something else.”
The old man stayed in his chair as Haydon stood and took the piece of paper from his unsteady, puckered hand. They exchanged a few words and Haydon started to leave, then paused a little way from the desk.
“How’s Sean?” he asked softly.
Siddons met Haydon’s eyes full on. “He talks about the whores in Saigon and tells the punch lines to dirty jokes. Not the whole joke, just the punch lines. He’s emaciated. Last year his muscles started contracting for some reason. He’s twisted now, and small. Most of his hair has fallen out. He looks like a monkey. Just a monkey.”
The old man stopped just before his voice cracked and continued to look at Haydon. Haydon stood there, feeling an empty, hopeless expression come over his face, and then Siddons swiveled his chair around toward the windows. Haydon stared at the back of the chair for a few moments before he walked out and softly closed the door.