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He lived in Hunters Creek, one of a cluster of incorporated townships within the city of Houston known as the Memorial Villages. Together they encompassed eleven square miles of the city’s most tranquil and expensive real estate west of the Loop and along Memorial Drive. His house lay in the middle of two acres of lushly wooded land on Pifer Road off Beinhorn. The pines here were close and crowded with a thick, impenetrable undergrowth. When the sun broke through it came in shattered pieces, fighting shadows all the way down from the overstory to the mulchy earth, dancing briefly before disappearing as though absorbed by the gloom.
Haydon turned into a paved drive behind a split rail fence and followed it well off the road until it ended in front of a low built house situated so tightly within the surrounding woods that Haydon found himself wondering how the builders had managed to do it. It was a ranch style home, maybe twenty years old, with walnut colored brick and a cedar shake roof whose shingles had weathered gray like the surrounding underbrush. The house blended subtly with its environment, making it seem even more secluded and remote.
There were no other cars in the drive, no apparent garage, and it was a moment after Haydon turned off the motor of the Vanden Plas that he made out a small strip of pavement leading off into the trees and disappearing around the house. At the edge of the paved drive there was a wooden bridge with simple log railings that spanned a kind of ditch, or dry creek, and led to a limestone walk that went to the front door. The pine needles were so thick on the ground that Haydon felt as if he were walking on a cushioned path as he crossed the bridge and approached the front door. He heard a mockingbird singing crazily somewhere in the dense undergrowth as he inhaled deeply of the scent of the woods.
He pressed the buzzer on the front door and waited.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice came from the grilled speaker. A middle aged voice, he thought.
“Stuart Haydon for Mr. Greiner.” He wondered if his voice sounded middle aged to her.
“Just a moment, please.”
He waited, looking into the woods to his right, then on the other side. When the door was opened a stout, muscular young man dressed in white stood in the doorway. Haydon quickly determined it was a uniform, a tight-fitting athletic T-shirt, white cotton pants, white belt, white crepe soled shoes. A male nurse. The young man said hello and glanced beyond Haydon out to the driveway.
“You came alone.” It was a statement, but Haydon said yes. “Fine, come in.” He stepped back and Haydon walked into a rush of cool air and the faint tangy smell of woodsmoke left over from the winter.
The house was big. The ceilings were not high, but the rooms sprawled and rambled from one to another in all directions. He could see through wide doorways into other areas of the house. Directly in front of them was a glass wall that looked outside, and as Haydon followed the silent steps of the nurse, he realized it was one of three glass walls that seemed to wrap around a vast portion of the woods. The house was totally carpeted, which cushioned the inside from noise as the woods cushioned the outside. The silence was oppressive. Haydon felt vaguely uneasy.
They followed a broad hallway, with the woods beyond the glass on one side and an occasional door on the other. The nurse stopped before double casement doors and pulled them apart. As they disappeared into the walls, the young man stepped into the room and Haydon followed him. It was the last room on this wing of the house, long with a convex outer wall at the far end, also made of glass. In the center of the large bulbous portion of the room sat a man in a wheelchair looking out at the woods.
“Here’s Mr. Haydon, sir,” the young nurse said. The wheelchair whirred and slowly pivoted about.
“Philip Greiner,” the man said as the wheelchair hummed toward Haydon. “Frank called ahead of you.”
He stopped in front of Haydon. It was obvious he was a very sick man. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, but it was difficult to tell, since his flesh sagged exaggeratedly, giving him loose jowls, and revealing too much of the mushy red tissue below his eyeballs.
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” he said. “I got it after I ‘retired.’ When I was supposed to enjoy the fruits of my many years of labor.’’ He laughed. It wasn’t a bitter laugh. He really seemed to find some humor in the irony. His head bobbed a little and then fell down on his chest the way a baby’s does when it is just learning to hold it up but hasn’t yet acquired the strength. The young man came over and helped him raise it again until he was looking once more at Haydon. “That happens,” Greiner said. “Hope it’s not disconcerting to you.’’
“I appreciate your taking the time,” Haydon said.
“You’ll buzz if you need me, Mr. Greiner?” the young man asked.
He stood halfway to the door.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks, Mike. Thanks.”
The young man walked out and pulled the doors closed behind him. Greiner plucked at a toggle switch on the wheelchair arm, and the chair began turning robotically, moving back to the other end of the room.
“Let’s go over here. If I get right out near the glass it makes me feel like I’m outside. It helps.’’
There were armchairs in a casual semicircle facing out to the woods, a coffee table, a liquor cart with a small icebox, lots of magazines, and a few popular novels tossed on the floor. The man pulled up among the group of chairs.
“Sit anywhere you like, Mr. Haydon. Want a drink?”
“No, thank you.’’
Greiner smiled shakily. “Frank and I are good friends,” he said. “Have been for . . . eighteen years. I worked ten years for Josef Roeg. Five years coming up, five years on the inside.” He leaned his head back on a cushioned brace that had been built onto the chair for him. Since his head wasn’t erect, he looked at Haydon through slightly lowered eyelids. “Frank said you needed to know something about the inner workings of Roeg the man, and that you were told nobody talked who knew anything. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
Haydon shook his head. It was difficult to tell how large a man Greiner was. The wheelchair had a lot of batteries and gadgets on it, and he looked relatively small sitting in it. It may have been because his navy blue robe, which swallowed him, had been bought for the man he had been before his illness. His pale blue pajamas with dark piping showed from beneath the robe at the collar, cuffs, and legs.
“Frank didn’t tell you anything about me, did he. Didn’t even tell you I was in a wheelchair.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Greiner said, “Are you an introspective man, Mr. Haydon?”
“I suppose,” Haydon said. “Reasonably.”
Greiner smiled again. “Reasonably. Well, I’ll tell you, I never was. But in the last fourteen months I have become the most introspective of men. Churchill said that being shot at concentrates the mind wonder fully. He was right, but having pieces of you ripped away does the same thing. I mean real pieces of you, not your body.
“I’ll tell you what can happen to a man in fourteen months that will concentrate his mind wonderfully. A little over a year ago I had everything. Lucrative career, status, lovely wife, wonderful daughter. In May, fourteen months ago, my wife, Janet, and I were sitting right here where you and I are sitting now. It was a Saturday morning, and we’d just received a call from Denise, our daughter. She was leaving Chapel Hill that very minute. Coming home for the summer. Janet and I had been talking about how eager we were to see her. Janet picked up a new National Geographic that had just come in the mail and was looking at it when she suddenly sighed and slumped over on the sofa. Right there. Dead. Massive coronary.”
He stopped, as if remembering exactly how it happened.
“You know, it was supposed to have been me. I smoked, drank a little, had a high pressure executive position. It was supposed to have been me from an actuarial perspective. A few days later I was sitting here again. Alone. A widower. But Denise was here, and we had the summer together.
“Three months later, after her summer vacation was over, Denise was driving back to school in an autumn rain. Her car left the road on a curve, and she was killed. When I got the telephone call I almost died too. I really did.”
Greiner rolled his head the other way, looking out to the woods. “Three months later, just before the Christmas holidays, Roeg retired me. Within six weeks of that, doctors discovered this: amyotrophic . . . lateral . . . sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease. No cure.”
He rolled his head back toward Haydon. “In the past five months I’ve become . . . a little more than ‘reasonably’ introspective. I’ll bet you’ve read about things like that happening to people before. In the newspaper. Somebody suffers a string of tragedies, and you shake your head and turn to the sports section. I’ve done it myself. There’s really nothing else you can do.”
There was a brief silence and then Greiner touched the toggle switch on the arm of his wheelchair, which moved him to a slightly better angle to see Haydon.
“What is it you wanted to know about Roeg?” he asked. He seemed to have said all he wanted to say about the sad matters of the last fourteen months of his life.
It seemed to Haydon that he should somehow respond to Greiner’s story, but he could think of nothing that wouldn’t sound trivial in com parison. Instead he followed Greiner’s lead, crossed his long legs, and slowly began a careful overview of the case, giving it enough continuity for Greiner to see how Roeg might fit into it and why Haydon needed more information about him. He did not mention Langer’s name, but it proved to be a naive omission. As he talked the sick man closed his eyes. He smiled once at something but was otherwise motionless.
When Haydon finished, Greiner opened his eyes and touched the toggle switch again just enough to make the motor whirr. It didn’t really move the wheelchair. He seemed to do it like a nervous tic, to affirm his presence in the world of the living.
“You’re talking about Bill Langer too,” Greiner said. “Listen, before I start enlightening you, would you come over here and adjust this headrest?”
Haydon got up and went over to the wheelchair.
“There’s a wing nut at the back on the chrome shaft holding this thing up. Just loosen it and tilt the pad forward a little. Good, great. Right there. Thanks.”
Haydon returned to his chair and sat down again.
Greiner bumped the toggle switch again and waited a moment before he spoke, seeming to settle his mind on the subject.
“Josef Roeg is an odd man in every respect. He looks odd, acts odd, and has one of the most unusual obsessions in the world. He loves violence. That is, he loves to watch it. A wisely passive observer.
“He has a film archive in that big place of his over by the River Oaks Country Club. A big vault with controlled humidity and temperature to preserve old film as well as the new developments in video technology. He has spent hundreds of thousands to stock that archive with the most violent things ever captured on film. Mostly war footage, naturally, since that’s about the only kind of real violence you can get on film legally. He’s got pirated copies of most of what the networks couldn’t show. He’s got Nazi SS interrogation film, gassings, brutality in the camps. Those bastards pioneered that kind of thing. Documentary film. Preserving the history of the Third Reich. They put a lot of horror on film you wouldn’t believe. The documentaries you see on television don’t even scratch the surface of the kind of stuff that’s available.
“As you know, Roeg’s corporate headquarters are downtown. But he, personally, works solely from that big estate of his. From there his directives go out into the real world, where he uses the fulcrum of human frailty to move his corporations. He works in a huge, long hall. At one end is his desk, his computer screens, all the electronic paraphernalia he needs to communicate with the rest of the world. I’ll bet there’re as many cables going into that place as a lot of corporate offices. At the other end of the big room is a retractable movie screen mounted in the ceiling. The film archive is located through a couple of doors off one side of the hall. There’s a permanent movie projector installed in the center of the room. Most of the video tapes have been converted to film so he can see them on the big screen.”
Greiner paused and coughed, trying to maintain his balance against the headrest and the back of the chair. If he slid to one side, someone would have to set him right again.
“What happens is your muscles grow progressively weaker,” Greiner explained. “They atrophy. You become totally helpless. You can’t even speak, because eventually your vocal cords grow flaccid, your jaw muscles will no longer pull up your jaw. You’re in a state of absolute immobility. But of course your mind remains in wonderful shape. It’s just imprisoned. You can think, but that’s all you can do. As time passes your body can’t properly keep up its defenses. You get pneumonia, a kidney infection, or something like that and you can’t fight it off. Something else gets you, but ALS brings it on.”
“I can come back another time,” Haydon said. “We don’t have to talk now.”
“You better get it while you can,” Greiner said, grinning. “This is a progressive disease. In my case, later definitely is not better.”
He bumped the toggle switch.
“All of us had to watch the films,” he continued. “Did you ever read any of those books about Hitler’s entourage at the Chancellery or Obersalzberg: the interminable hours spent sitting around in overstuffed armchairs after meals in which everyone ate too much; long afternoons in which nothing happened and people nodded off to sleep, bored, but staying on because that’s what suited Hitler? That’s what it was like for the privileged executives in Roeg’s big hall. Except, instead of dozing boredom, we watched hours and hours of horror.
“What is the effect of this kind of entertainment? At first, when I was introduced into the sanctum of these afternoons and evenings, I was fascinated. No one had enlightened me or warned me about this side of Roeg’s nature. God, I’d never seen anything like it. I watched every frame that came across the screen. It didn’t seem ghoulish at first, but after a while I began to be uneasy. There was just too much of it. It began to seem sick. I watched the other men. One fellow, if he could get a seat out of Roeg’s line of vision, simply went to sleep. An other man really suffered through those things. He didn’t like any of it. On more than one occasion a couple of us would go into the lavatory between reels, and this guy would be in there throwing up. He never said anything about it, and we didn’t either. He would always be late for the next reel.”
“Did no one take pleasure in these things besides Roeg?”
“Oh, yeah. Two or three guys consistently got a kick out of it. And I’m not going to claim a constant position of pious moral indignation. None of us were always revolted. You’d find yourself being fascinated almost against your will. It was incredible stuff. The intensity of the violence was frequently mesmerizing. After a while you realize there’s simply nothing people won’t do to other people, and there’s nothing new that can be done in the way of violence. It’s all been done before, in endless variation. We just keep on repeating the same atrocities from generation to generation, from one people to another. We never lack for someone to sacrifice to our prejudices.
“Oddly, that constant barrage of violence gave me some distance from the subject, gave me a new perspective on it. There’s no denying it’s stimulating. Violence appeals to something primitive in us. In our society we take it in fairly regular doses, in films, books, television, newspapers. We kind of like the little shocks we get from it. But when you sit for hours, day after day, and watch actual violence, not just Hollywood’s glamorous view of it, you come to see it as a real entity, a specific identifiable force. It’s like you’ve been able to distill it, put it in a test tube, and hold it up and look at it in its pure form. You realize that it is as lethal to society as a deadly bacillus. You don’t come to that kind of realization from periodic exposure. It makes you wonder what will happen if the duration between exposures becomes less and less frequent and society one day wakes up and finds itself terminally infected.”
“How did Roeg justify all this time spent away from your executive responsibilities?”
“When you work for Roeg, you have to get used to the fact that he’s going to waste a certain amount of your time. The man has no family and no social skills. He doesn’t know how to entertain or just sit around and chat, but he wants company. Since he hasn’t a single real friend in the world that anyone knows about, he uses his executives as substitutes. In effect, they are total prostitutes. They’re highly paid, but he has the right to call them anytime he wants. Anytime.
“The time you might waste with him is not work time. You do your job, or you wouldn’t be there. It’s the time you normally would have spent with your own family that you sacrifice. Roeg’s share comes first. He doesn’t hesitate to call you away from home or a family party with friends. Anytime. And when you get over there he might not be able to make it clear what he wants to talk about or do, so you end up watching more film.”
“What do you mean, he can’t make it clear what he wants?” Haydon asked.
“He’s socially inept,” Greiner said, rolling his head more directly at Haydon. “It’s that simple. He can talk business, once you learn his quirky way of communicating, but when the business is done and he still wants someone around, he doesn’t really know how to keep you there. Except the films.” Greiner let his head ease back to a more comfortable position. “It’s pathetic.”
“How many men were involved in these afternoon sessions?” Haydon asked.
“It varied. Several of the men who are a part of the inner circle live outside the country, so they would not be there regularly. I’d say it fluctuated between four and five. Not counting Langer and Roeg. I’ve been there when there were as many as seven.”
“Did he hire photographers when you were still going there?”
“I don’t know. You see, Roeg kept his life compartmentalized. Each executive was in charge of looking after not only his own area of corporate responsibilities but also some area of Roeg’s personal life. One guy was responsible for everything administrative regarding the estate: hired the groundskeepers, the gardeners, the servants, authorized the improvements and repairs. Everything. Another was responsible for all the transportation, kept the limos serviced and fitted with the gadgets Roeg would get a notion to have, took care of hangaring and servicing the Lears at Hobby, hired the pilots. Each of us had something. We had our own families, and then we had a piece of Roeg’s life also.”
“And Langer?”
“You see, remarkably, none of us ever discussed our responsibilities, or the troubles we had with them, with each other. That’s hard to believe, I know, but there’s a very good reason: If you didn’t know anything about it, then you couldn’t be held responsible. Nobody wanted to know anything beyond their own realm of responsibility. And that’s the way Roeg wanted it, too. He had reasons for that. Legal reasons, practical ones.
“But at the same time, we knew.” Greiner smiled wearily. “Roeg would say in front of the others, ‘Phil, did you get the new carpet in at the Rue LaMarque?’ and everyone would know that I was responsible for Roeg’s homes away from home. He had to travel all over the world, and he owned places in about six major cities. I had to look after those, staff them, make sure they were ready when he needed to be there. Or he’d say, ‘Wes, did you take care of that thing for Chuck?’ We all knew Chuck was the Lear pilot, so we knew Wes was in charge of transportation.”
He paused and let his eyes wander to the forest outside. There was no sound in the house. It seemed completely removed in time from the woods beyond the glass. Haydon had the sensation of being in a large museum in which the trees and underbrush were a diorama depicting a wildlife scene. If you looked closely, you would see a stuffed squirrel with slightly dusty fur, birds with faded feathers sitting at stiff angles on dead branches, and a raccoon frozen beside a pool of blue polymer plastic.
Greiner rolled his head toward Haydon again.
“Yeah, Bill was in charge of the archives. He’d be responsible for the photographer.” He said it as though the words soured on his lips as he spoke them, his eyes locked on Haydon. I’m gravely ill, Mr. Haydon. I’m dying. But I’m not nearly as sick as I was while I was working for Josef Roeg.”
There was a long pause. Haydon could almost feel the great expanses of carpet reaching up to absorb any wayward sound, even muffling his own heartbeat.
“It’s amazing,” Greiner said, “how grown, intelligent men can let themselves be manipulated by . . . someone like Josef Roeg. Their strong desires become their frailties, and a small man can gain enormous strength through their weaknesses.”