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Haydon pulled the Vanden Plas to the curb across the street from the bike shop and parked in the shade of the buildings blocking the afternoon sun. He was far out on Bissonnet near Fondren, and the blistered asphalt was giving off shimmering, vaporous waves that seemed thick enough to ignite. The traffic leaving the city was already heavy at four o’clock, its lavalike flow of chrome and glass splintering the sunlight through the smothering heat.
He left the motor running for a moment with the air conditioning going and looked at the customers behind the plate glass window. There were a couple of young boys milling around the rows of bicycles and a woman in dark skirt and light blouse standing at the counter, talking with a man on the other side. The shop wasn’t fancy. Haydon guessed it was more of a neighborhood operation than a hangout for serious racers in tight black shorts and sporty gear.
Turning off the motor and locking the car, Haydon walked to the end of the block, crossed the street at the traffic light, and doubled back to the bike shop. A sign hung over the sidewalk said FELTNER BICYCLES and had a drawing of a sleek racer with the rider bent forward, grasping the campy downward bent handlebars.
As Haydon opened the door to go inside the woman was coming out, stuffing something into her already bloated purse. She wore her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon, and her sunglasses were pushed up over the smooth hair. He held the door for her as she stepped past him, continuing to dig for something in her purse. She never looked up.
Haydon removed his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes as he made his way to the sales counter.
“You guys have to squeeze the brakes on every bike?”
The man was leaning with his forearms across the top of the cash register, addressing the two kids. They quit but kept going over the bikes.
Haydon walked up to the man, who shook his head and grinned sideways. “Little farts,” he said.
Haydon looked at the boys, who had now migrated to the far corner of the shop, where they no doubt hoped to avoid such close observation. “Future customers?” he asked.
“Nah. Summertime hangouts. The air conditioning’s a good place to beat the heat. When they get ready to buy new bikes their parents will take them to one of the discount houses. No guarantees, no service. I’ll make up for the lost sale in repair charges.” He sighed. “What can I do for you?”
“Are you Jack Feltner?”
“Sure am.”
Haydon reached into his pocket and handed Siddons’ note to Feltner. When the man finished reading the note Haydon showed him his identification.
“Can you spare a few minutes for me?” he asked.
Feltner looked at Haydon. His eyes reflected nothing. They belonged to a man who wasn’t easily caught off guard; he had already heard and seen everything.
“What are we going to talk about?”
“Josef Roeg.”
“Regarding what?”
“Bill Langer.”
Feltner looked at the note and tapped it contemplatively against the thumb of his other hand. He was a couple of inches shorter than Haydon and was wearing a tattersall shirt that looked as if it would begin to fray at the collar the next time it was washed. His hair, the color of a paper grocery bag, no longer bore the measured shaping of the regulation executive haircut but was tapered at the neck, enabling him to stretch out the time between trips to the barber. Like many men in their late thirties, his face was at that stage in life where, if you looked carefully, you could still see the once hopeful boy behind the emerging sober face of middle age.
He closed his eyes and rolled his head around his shoulders, loosening the tendons in his neck. He stopped.
“Let’s try a Vietnamese doughnut and see where that gets us,” he
said. He turned and walked around a corner into the back of the shop. Haydon watched the two boys, who were opening all the flaps on the bike bags and looking inside. They didn’t buckle the flaps when they closed them.
Feltner was gone long enough to make a telephone call, and when he came back around the corner he was talking to a boy who followed him with an expression of extreme disconsolation.
“ . . . and kind of keep an eye on these two little farts up here,” Feltner said. The boy, wiping his greasy hands on a red rag, was easily a head taller than his boss. He was skinny, with stooped shoulders, an Adam’s apple of truly heroic proportions, and a pimple that had gotten out of control right between his eyes and made him look like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. He wore a T-shirt, and when he turned sideways you could see the inward curve of his stomach and chest.
Haydon and Feltner walked out into the heat and followed the sidewalk half a block to a Dunkin’ Donuts shop. It was too hot, and the wrong time of day. The place was empty. From the back they heard the tinny blare of the music as Feltner slapped the bell on the counter. A middle aged Vietnamese man came to the front, wiping his hands on an apron. His harried face broke into a tired smile when he saw Feltner, who spoke to him by name. They exchanged a few words about nothing in particular while the man got what they ordered, bobbing his head rhythmically in sweaty accommodation and grinning bravely as if they might go away without paying if he relaxed a muscle.
A plate glass window looked into the kitchen and Haydon saw two Vietnamese teenagers pushing doughnuts around in a vat of hot grease while they gyrated to the music. The boy, whose straight hair was heavily oiled and roached back in the front, wore lime green parachute pants and a pink T-shirt. His pink heart shaped sunglasses had a missing arm and kept tilting to the side of his small oily nose. The girl wore a Day-Clo red miniskirt and a powder blue T-shirt with a picture of Princess Di in a compromising posture. The girl’s hair was put up in two clumps that spurted out of the sides of her head like Pekingese ears, and she viewed the world through the thin slits of wraparound sunglasses. They poked occasionally at the doughnuts and periodically choreographed a smooth movement that put them in tandem, their torsos leaned back, pelvises forward, legs gliding in a pattern that produced a flawless vignette before they broke up again and, still moving to the music, gouged at the doughnuts some more.
Haydon sat at one of the yellow plastic bench tables near the front door where he could still see the two kids. Feltner came over with two coffees and two apple fritters and saw Haydon looking into the kitchen.
“His niece and nephew,” Feltner said. “Good kids, but America has them by the ass. It’s hard to believe that eighteen month ago they staggered out of Cambodia. Mama dead. Papa dead. Old Vu got them over here real quick. I helped him get the franchise to this place.”
When the record stopped so did the girl, who went over to a little portable turntable and started it again: The Kinks singing “Come Dancin’.”
They took a few bites of the fritters, which were a little hard, and Haydon explained what had happened at Langer Media and part of what Siddons had told him. Feltner listened and eventually pushed away his fritter, half eaten.
“Siddons told me you might be able to add something to what he told me about the Roeg/Langer relationship,” Haydon said. “He said he’d represented you before, but that was all. I assumed it was something regarding Roeg or Langer.”
Feltner nodded. “I used to work for Roeg.” It was a tired admission. “I ran around in the same privileged crowd with Bill. That was a long time ago.” He pulled his mouth down in an ironic smile. “Only yesterday.”
He seemed suddenly to slump, and the soft flesh under his eyes took on additional weight.
“Roeg is rough, but . . . I mean, I know he bent the law sometimes, but mostly he was just morally reprehensible. He didn’t go around taking out contracts on people, but he never let the illegality of kickbacks stand in his way for arranging a good deal. I’ve heard rumors that Roeg’s lawyers were involved in money laundering operations for the drug trade. Cayman Island deals. It doesn’t bother him to ruin lives, but I’ve never heard that he was ever responsible for taking one. But then, really, what the hell do I know?”
Haydon studied his face. “Frank Siddons indicated Langer may have paid a high price for his association with Roeg.”
“I’m sure he did. We all did.”
“What kind of price?”
“It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. Josef Roeg doesn’t manage people, he manipulates them. If you want the money, which is extraordinary, you submit to the damnedest things. He pits his executives against one another so that they’re all kept off balance, suspicious, fearful, aggressive, jealous, and greedy. You become aware of a hierarchy after a while. There’s an inner circle, close to Roeg, that changes from time to time. In favor, out of favor. Once you fall out of favor you never get back in. You can imagine the kind of pressure some men put on themselves to stay at that level once they get there. Money is the only reward. That, and the prestige of having access to Roeg.”
“How does Langer stand?”
“At the top. He has access, which means they handle things no one else knows anything about. Langer actually sees the man.”
“Most executives don’t?”
“Oh, hell no. He’s a recluse. Yeah, like Howard Hughes,” he said wearily.
“Then all the influence Roeg has on most of his people is executed by proxies?”
“Absolutely.”
“How many men would you say have access to him?”
“Seven.”
“Worldwide?”
Feltner nodded. “Bill Langer’s got a lot at stake.”
The Kinks’ song ended again, and Haydon looked up. The girl grooved past the window, one hand white to the wrist with flour. The old man came out of the kitchen, carrying a tray twice his size filled with particolored doughnuts, and began stacking them in the display racks. The music started again, and the girl cruised back past the window.
Haydon looked at Feltner. ‘‘If you had to guess, where would you say Langer was feeling the most pressure in his association with Roeg?”
Feltner started shaking his head slowly. He looked out the window at the traffic. His forearms were on the plastic table and his coffee rested between his hands. He didn’t speak for a long time, and the expression on his face was the weary mask of a man who has swallowed gallons of bitterness and survived, but not without life shortening scars.
“The most pressure?” Feltner said. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not familiar with the inner workings at that level. But I know Bill pretty well, and I can guess at some of his tensions. Those few men close to Roeg are like clones. It takes a certain personality to suck ass the way they do and still think you’re somebody important and not feel debased by continually exchanging your personal honor for . . . money. Those men are extremely intelligent, selfish, aloof, and amazingly petty. They come as close as any I’ve ever known to fulfilling the popular image of the hard-as-nails corporate executive.
“Bill can be like that, is like that, but it doesn’t come natural to him. In addition to his fourth generation obligations to be successful, he married a woman who probably expects more of him than Roeg. She was a Merriam. Her family has been around town as long as his. Their marriage was the sort of union the parents dreamed about, Louise herself coveted, and Bill—well, he knew it was the right way to go. If Roeg had never come along to put the big pressure on Bill, the cumulative effect of years with Louise would have done the same thing. Now he’s got both of them. The point is, he’s not ever going to be able to back down. He may wig out, have a nervous breakdown, but he won’t back down with that kind of stuff behind him.”
Outside, the traffic had come to a standstill. They sat behind the glass and looked at the frustrated drivers twenty-five feet away in the street. In front of them a pickup jacked high on its axles was beginning to throw steam. Behind the wheel a beaver faced man with sideburns glared straight ahead, his gimme cap pushed back on his sweaty fore head. On the other side of the seat a girl with stringy brown hair leaned her head against the window frame and cried.
Feltner pushed aside his coffee and looked away from the pickup. “Langer’s situation would make most of those execs just that much harder, that much more unreachable, as they dug in for the long haul, elbowing people out of their way. Bill has one basic flaw that prevents him from surviving like that: He wants to be liked. None of the others give a shit as long as they get what they want. Bill wants to stand on his own two feet, but he sometimes looks down to see whose juice he’s got on the soles of his shoes. According to the game rules, that’s a mistake.”
“How long has he been this close to Roeg?” Haydon asked.
“It’s probably been about four years since he sold out to Roeg, but he didn’t really get into the inner circle until a couple of years ago. I guess Roeg saw something he liked. Probably all of Bill’s weaknesses.”
“Is their only connection through Langer Media?”
“It was initially. I’d guess it’s gone way beyond that now. Usually when Roeg makes a new acquisition, he already has in mind how he’ll put it to work for him, though it may take him a while to act on it. Each company is rejuvenated-they’re always in dire straits when he gets them-and allowed to function awhile and regain their balance. Then Roeg utilizes their leverage.”
“What do you mean?”
“Roeg’s operations are multinational: petroleum, mining, shipping, agriculture, computer technology. When he acquires, it’s in related fields: he buys steel mills that forge the ore from his mines. These are in third world countries where labor is cheaper. His oil holdings are here, but the oil is shipped to third world countries on his tankers. He uses his petroleum to make fertilizer in his chemical plants, which then nourishes his crops, both here and in third world countries. He owns farms and ranches in Latin America. He is a major force in several computer technology research consortiums. These products are used in all his other interests. He’s so diversified that whatever happens in the stock market, or on the world money markets, he’s going to gain somewhere.”
“So Langer probably has some healthy contracts with other Roeg companies for advertising and promotion,” Haydon said.
“No doubt.”
That didn’t lead anywhere as far as Haydon was concerned. The incessant repetition of “Come Dancin’“ bled into an endless loop of sound. The traffic moved a little. When Haydon turned his face toward the street he could actually feel the combined heat of the sun, the straining automobile engines, hot metal, and asphalt.
“Not much help, is it,” Feltner said.
“You never can tell.” Haydon looked around at the wobbling shoulders of the Vietnamese girl as she passed by the window. The air conditioning in the little shop couldn’t offset the sun, magnified through the plate glass, and the heat seeping in from the kitchen. The sweet, heavy smell of yeast and hot sugar became oppressive. Haydon noticed beads of sweat beginning to show on Feltner’s upper lip.
“What you need is the other ninety percent,” Feltner said. “The rest of the iceberg. Men like Langer live another life, the one that revolves around the presence of Roeg. Like I said, they have deals going nobody else knows about.”
“You said once someone in the inner circle falls from grace they never regain it. What happens to them?”
Feltner grinned. Haydon could see he’d been waiting for that. “It’s the most soothing fall from grace anyone could imagine. It’s the only time Roeg uses kid gloves. He doesn’t want any kiss-and-tell from that group. Suddenly you’re denied the presence of Josef Roeg, but by the time you realize what’s happened to you, you’ve been offered the damnedest deal any executive might hope to experience. If you’re old enough, it’s early retirement with lots of stocks and benefits. If you’re middle aged it’s a plush position that will help you save face, lend prestige, plus lots of stocks and benefits. When the time comes, he knows you well enough to know what he needs to do to buy your silence. He lets you down easy and treats you nice. You know you’re out of the picture and it’s irrevocable. You might as well settle back and enjoy what you get for it. No one has ever talked about ‘what it’s really like to work close to Josef Roeg.”‘
“No one?”
“Not a single soul.”
Haydon talked with Feltner a few more minutes, thanked him for his help, and put a couple of dollars on the table as he stood.
“I may want to ask you a few more questions later on,” Haydon said.
“You know where to find me. I’m mortgaged to the hilt, so I’m not going anywhere.”
Haydon walked into the afternoon furnace and headed for the end of the block. The light changed and the traffic stopped grudgingly. He crossed to the shady side of the street and got into the Vanden Plas. The air conditioner blew hot air for a minute or so, and then it was a long time before anyone let Haydon pull into the traffic. He made a quick right turn, deciding to double back through the neighborhoods rather than having to endure the traffic on the main arteries. It would take him about forty-five minutes to get home. He thought about the doughnut shop.