The Thanatos Syndrome

in religious crusades, and everybody knows that.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œTom.” She has come close. There’s half the seat left beyond her. We’re spinning down River Road in the pickup like Louisiana lovers.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œBob Comeaux laid it out for me one, two, three. He was perfectly open and aboveboard and, Tom—”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œHe’s got a good case.”
    â€œHe has?”
    â€œMay I tell you?”
    â€œTell me later.” I can see the widow’s walk of Belle Ame over a cypress break.
    â€œWe’re here. Let’s get the kids.” We’re through the great iron gates of Belle Ame and into an English park.
    Nothing could look less sinister than the gentle golden light of Louisiana autumn, which is both sociable and sad, casting shadows from humpy oaks across a peopled park, boys and girls in running suits gold and green, a bus loading up with day students, and the playing fields beyond, youth in all the rinsing sadness of its happiness, bare-legged pep-squad girls flourishing in sync banners as big as Camelot, boys in a pickup game of touch coming close to the girls both heedless and mindful.
    Lucy speaks quickly, one hand creasing the flesh of my thigh to fold the words in.
    â€œTake the job with Comeaux. You have no choice.”
    â€œI probably will. Look out for a couple named Brunette, a Mr. and Mrs. Brunette.”
    â€œOkay. You and the kids better spend the night at Pantherburn.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYour phone’s bugged, for one thing. Hal told me.”
    â€œSo is yours, probably.”
    â€œNot now.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI fixed a device on my modem.”
    â€œYou have a lovely one.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI said you have a lovely modem.”
    â€œYou’re crazy.”
    â€œCome back in half an hour. Head for the rec room over there.”
    I’m not looking at her now but at Van Dorn. He’s coming down the outside staircase of Belle Ame, which hangs like a necklace from this lovely old lady of a house. Belle Ame, lovely lady. He’s smiling, his arms outstretched. He’s expecting us.

11. BELLE AME IS nestled under the levee in a magnolia grove, which hides most of the tank farm which surrounds it on three sides and the towers and pipery of the refinery which used to hum night and day like twenty dynamos before the oil wells dried up.
    This is no hard-used, working plantation house like Pantherburn. There are no Sears freezers on the gallery, no bird dogs scrabbling in the hall. Belle Ame has been restored to its 1857 splendor, a slightly vulgar splendor, showy and ritzy even then, with its florid Corinthian columns from late rich Rome and the late rich South. It is even more showy and ritzy now, as much now the creature of Texaco and Hollywood as of King Cotton then. Texaco, which owned it, wanted to do something “cultural” to show they were not despoiling the state. Hollywood wanted its own dream palace of the South. More movies have been made here than on Paramount’s back lot. Susan Hayward and John Carroll are its proper tenants. Clint Eastwood, a Yankee deserter, unshaven but not ungallant, was hidden out here by Southern belles, a bevy of hoopskirted starlets from Sunset Boulevard …
    Outside, between its far-flung wings, its famous twin staircases rise and curve as delicately as filigree between the columns of its slightly vulgar, thrusting Roman portico. The grounds are scattered with no less pretentious structures, garçonnières, pigeonnières, slave quarters, and even a columned Greek-revival privy.
    Texaco, which didn’t need it, gave the place to a private school, which had been founded to revive the traditional Southern academy founded on Greek ideals of virtue and to avoid the integration of the public schools.
    Van Dorn holds out a hand to each of us. “Old Br’er Possum Tom! Cud’n Lucy!” He gives her a kiss, pulls us close, holds us off. “Look at you two. I like. Splendid. Aren’t y’all kissin’ cousins too?” Van Dorn looks good, his gray-green eyes glittering, his heavy handsome pocked face not pale but slightly flushed as if he had just waked. He’s wearing old air force coveralls with knee pockets and loops for tools. He extracts a big Stillson wrench. “Pardon the mess but guess who’s the number-one handyman here. Have you tried to hire a plumber lately,