4. BOB COMEAUX AND MAX AND I reached a gentleman’s agreement. Instead of turning Bob over to the Justice Department for prosecution for defrauding the federal government, specifically in his misuse of both discretionary NIH funds and Ford Foundation grants, we suggested that it might be in his interest to stay long enough to dismantle the sodium shunt and to divert next year’s funds to St. Margaret’s Hospice—and then to leave town. Max, who knows everybody, made friendly telephone calls to the directors of both NIH and ACMUI and let drop not even a hint but only an intimation that even though they were not legally responsible for the Blue Boy pilot, it might be prudent—politics being politics, and we know about politicians, right, Doctors?—not only to dismantle the sodium shunt for environmental reasons but to terminate the local Qualitar?an Center at Fedville—for fiscal reasons.

The center was closed, quietly. Bob Comeaux left town even more quietly. I have not heard from him. There are rumors. Some say that he returned to Long Island City, resumed the family name Como—Huguenots being in short supply in Queens—and is running a Planned Parenthood clinic on Queens Boulevard.

He bears me no malice. In fact, the last time I saw him, in the A&P parking lot, where he’d had to park to get to the post office because his Mercedes was pulling a two-horse trailer, he greeted me in his old style, with knowing looks right and left as if he meant to share a secret. The secret was that he’d been invited to the People’s Republic of China to serve as consultant to the minister for family planning, who wanted to enlist his expertise in the humane disposal of newborn second children—Chinese families being limited, as everyone knows, to one child.

“You want to know something, old buddy,” says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.

“What?”

“You and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing.”

“We were?”

“Sure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals.”

“It was?”

“You always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship—for helping the individual—and you were right—especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers—for which I salute you.”

“Thanks.”

“But I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit.”

“I must?”

“We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”

“We did?”

“Sure.” He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. “We’ve never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can’t argue.” His eyes almost come back to mine.

“About what?”

“Argue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”

“I—”

“You want to know the truth,” he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.

“Yes.”

“You and I are more alike than most folks think.”

“We are?”

“Sure—and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing—such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. You have style and know how to act, and I don’t. But you don’t have one good reason—” He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. “You all right, Doc.”

“I—” I begin, but he’s gone.