The Thanatos Syndrome

strangely silent, with only a black vagrant and a white couple in the squad room who are being released even as we are booked. Unlikely inmates they are, the couple, a solemn, respectable-looking man and wife who could be a Baptist deacon and deaconess, almost formally dressed, he in a somber but stylish charcoal-colored suit and tie, she too in suit and tie, she with handsome unplucked black eyebrows and black hair whirled up like an old-fashioned Gibson girl. He wears oversize horn-rimmed specs, which give him an incongruous impish Harold Lloyd look.
    The uncle of course knows everyone. We are received and booked amiably. Some mistake must have been made, we are assured. It will soon be straightened out. The deputy and jailer stand about swinging their arms. They kid the uncle: “Looks like they finally caught up with you, Hugh Bob,” etc. Vergil is acutely embarrassed. He sees nothing amusing about jail.
    There prevails the tolerable boredom and gossip of all police stations, tolerable because of the gossip. Something always turns up, the latest outrage and the headshaking, not without pleasure, of the cops who thought they’d seen it all and now here’s the latest. The uncle, who has just got it from the deputy, passes it along to Vergil and me in the same low voice quickened by interest: a crime against nature, many crimes against nature, against children, by none other than this same couple, it is alleged, who run some sort of day camp, the very sort of childcare business these people get into to get at children, you know—alleged because this couple is being sprung for lack of evidence, but the deputy says we’ll get them sooner or later, they always repeat. But children! The couple’s name I remember as the very byword of somber, sober caring: Mr. and Mrs. Brunette.
    â€œThat’s one thing I wouldn’t put up with, messing with children,” says the uncle cheerfully. “I’d cut their nuts out.”
    Bob Comeaux is all rueful smiles, chaffing and headshaking. “You old booger, you jumped the gun on us,” he says in a low voice, pressing me toward the door. “Another twenty-four hours and you’d have been aboard and on the team.”
    His hand is touching my back as he escorts us out to his car, a mud-spattered, high-mounted, big-wheeled Mercedes Duck, a forty-thousand-dollar amphibian good for bird hunting in the pines or duck hunting in the swamp. Bob is dressed, if not for hunting, at least for a weekend at his lodge, safari tans and low-quarter boots, cashmere turtleneck. The uncle is impressed. Vergil is impassive. Our truck, I tell Bob, is parked on the Angola road. No problem, he says, and he’s genial as can be, but I notice that he drops off Vergil and the uncle at Pantherburn first, even though it’s out of the way.
    We’re sailing through the pines, the morning sun warm on our backs. There is a pleasant sense of openness and of riding high and seeing all around, so unlike being sunk in my old spavined Caprice. The Mercedes smells like leather and oiled wood.
    â€œNow, do you think you can get home without getting in any more trouble,” says Bob, smiling at the road, “and make it to our meeting tomorrow when we’re going to wind up this parole foolishness, spring you for good, and then make you an offer you can’t refuse?”
    â€œI haven’t forgotten. I thank you for getting us out of jail, but frankly I’m a little confused.”
    â€œWhat’s the problem, Doctor?” he asks, cocking an attentive ear, but I notice he’s frowning at the wood dashboard, wipes the grain with his handkerchief.
    â€œI don’t understand what’s going on at Grand Mer and the Ratliff intake and what your part in it is.”
    Bob Comeaux shakes his head fondly, socks the wheel. “Same old Tom! You always did lay it right out, didn’t you?” All smiles, he goes suddenly serious. “Good question, Tom!” he says crisply.
    To emphasize the seriousness—this is too important to talk about while sailing along in his Duck—we pull off at an overlook, the loess hills dropping away to a panorama of Grand Mer, the cooling tower with its single pennant of cloud, the river beyond, and upriver the monolith of Fedville.
    Bob swings around to face me, so solemnly his smiling crowfeet are ironed out white. Again he socks the steering wheel softly. The windows of the Duck go down, the