To Play the Fool

“I can imagine.”

“Does he talk like that to everyone? Using quotes and sayings for everything he says?”

“Is that what he does? Good heavens. I knew he was using the Bible a great deal, but that would explain the sometimes… inappropriate things he says. Surely not everything he says comes from somewhere else?”

That’s what I was told.“

“How extraordinary. How utterly sad.”

“Why sad?”

“What I was talking about, the power of names, of words.

He must be very frightened of his own words if he never creates any. Terrified of his own thoughts, to push them aside for the thoughts of others.“

Kate stared at Beatrice, who took a mournful bite of her scone. “You’re an amazing person,” she said without thinking.

“Oh no, not really. I just keep my eyes open and think about things. One thing about being on the street, there’s lots of time for thinking.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? I’m sorry if that’s rude, but most of the street people I see are pretty hopeless. You’re articulate, skilled—you could have a job.”

“Oh indeed, I taught art history at UCLA,” she said, and seeing Kate’s astonishment, she added, “There’s really quite an interesting intellectual community among the street people here. I’ve met an astrophysicist, a couple of other university and college teachers, three computer programmers, and a handful of published poets. To say nothing of the young men, and a few women, who make a deliberate choice to remove themselves from the race of the middle-class rat and as a form of practical philosophy choose this admittedly extreme form of freedom. Wasn’t it Solzhenitsyn who said that a person is free only when there’s nothing more you can take away from him? Dreary man, but unfortunately often right.”

“And you?”

“Oh no, dear. You don’t want to hear about me, it’s not a very pretty story.” Her voice remained light, but her eyes began to shoot around the room, looking for an escape from this topic. Kate relented and gave her one.

“Tell me about Erasmus, then. He won’t, or can’t, tell us anything except that he’s a fool.”

“I told you all I know about him. He comes to us on Sunday morning and leaves us on Tuesday. While he is here, he tells us stories from the Bible, sings hymns, leads us in prayer.

He listens, with all his being he listens, and does not judge. The disturbed are quieted,- the drunks are calmed,- the angry begin to see that there may be ways they can help themselves. He looks, and he sees,- he listens, and he hears. This alone is an unusual experience for most homeless people: We are used to being either invisible or an annoyance. He brings dignity into the lives of those who have lost it. He is like… he is like a small fire that we warm our hands over. What else can I say?“

“But you don’t have any idea who he is or where he came from?”

“He came here in the summer. It would have been two summers ago, I suppose. How time does fly. He gives us Sunday and Monday, he gives the people at this place with the holy hill Wednesday and Thursday.”

“And the other days?”

“Travel, I suppose,” Beatrice said dismissively, but her eyes began to roam and her fingers gave a twitch on the knife.

“Does it take two days to get back from Berkeley?” Kate asked mildly.

“I was never much for distance walking myself.” Beatrice was retreating fast, but this time Kate would not let her go.

“Where does Erasmus go on Saturdays?”

“I have to get back to my drawing.”

“Just tell me where he goes.”

“The world is a big place.”

“Where does he go?”

“It has many needs,” Beatrice said wildly. “Even the world needs comfort.”

“He is off comforting the world?”

“They don’t deserve him. They don’t understand him. All they see is the surface, shallow, silly, violent—no, not that, I didn’t mean that!” she said quickly, looking frightened. “I meant crazy-looking, all they see is the act.”

“Beatrice,” Kate said evenly, “I know Erasmus performs for the tourists at Fishermen’s Wharf. You haven’t told me anything I don’t know. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, but I could see that you were trying to hide something about Erasmus and I wanted to know what it was.” Kate did not make it a habit to apologize to witnesses she’d been pressing, but this woman, strong to look at, struck her as being too fragile to leave in an upset condition. Besides, she wanted her friendly and helpful in the future. “Trust me. I won’t be misled by his act for the tourists. Okay? Good. There was just one other thing: Was there ever any direct animosity that you saw between Erasmus and John?”

This last question blew Kate’s soothing words out of the water. Beatrice slapped the top down on her tin box, picked up box and pad, and rose to her feet.

“Don’t I get my drawing?” Kate asked mildly. Beatrice tucked the box under her arm, flipped open the pad and tore off the page, and dropped it on the cluttered table. It was a caricature, a clever one, that emphasized the look of dry cynicism Kate sometimes felt looking out from her eye. She started to thank Beatrice, but the woman had already moved off to another table and was fumbling with unsteady hands at the clasp of her box. Kate put on her jacket, fished two five-dollar bills out of her purse to shove into the for the artist cup, and rolled the caricature gently into a tube.

It was raining lightly when she stepped out onto the street, raining heavily when she got home, and for the first time in her life she lay awake and wondered where the homeless were resting their heads this night.

♦

TWELVE

♦

The jester could be free when the knight was rigid.

Saturday morning was clear and clean and cold, and Kate stood drinking her coffee in a patch of sunlight that poured through a high side window onto the living room floor, wearing her flannel robe, talking to Al Hawkin on the telephone, and speculating with one part of her mind on how Beatrice and Erasmus fared this day.

“Fine. Good,” she was saying. “No, I don’t think there’s any need for you to cancel. I’m only going because I’m curious, after Beatrice’s reaction. He probably just talks dirty or something that embarrassed her,- I don’t think she was actually trying to hide anything from me. Right. Fine, yes I have Jani’s number.

I’ll call you if anything comes up_; otherwise I’ll talk to you tonight. Have a good time, Al. Say hi to Jani and Jules for me. Bye.“

She pushed the off button and dropped the handset into her pocket, then closed her eyes and absorbed the pleasure of the winter sunlight in the silent house. Saturday mornings, Jon and Lee went to a pottery class, where they produced lopsided bowls and strange shapes from the unconscious. Three whole hours with a house that held only her was a treat she looked forward to every week,- illicit, never mentioned, and resented when her job or an illness—Lee’s, Jon’s, or the pottery teachers—took it from her. This morning she could have half of it before she went hunting Brother Erasmus in his Fishermen’s Wharf manifestation.

Normally she kept this time for something unrelated to daily life: loud music, frozen waffles with maple syrup, a book in a two-hour bath. Not today, though. She pulled a pillow from the sofa and dropped it onto the patch of sunlight. A million dust motes flew up, and she settled herself with a fresh cup of coffee and the folders from Professor Whitlaw. Very soon this case would be pushed to a back burner, superseded by another, probably one considered more pressing than the odd death of a homeless man in a park. But Erasmus interested her—no, he bugged her. He was an unscratched itch, and she wanted him dealt with. So she read the impenetrable files for a second time, this time with a lined pad to write questions on, things she needed to know.

Did Erasmus have the scar of a removed tattoo on his left cheekbone? Might John have had one?

There must have been some organization behind the Fools movement. Where were the original Fools? Someone must have known Erasmus.

Who was the David Sawyer whose notes were marked as a personal communication from 1983? A Fool?

Kate wanted more details on the crimes committed by Fools, both misdemeanors and felonies, primarily the names of those arrested for attempted kidnapping (later dropped) and the murder of the bystander in Los Angeles.

The sun had moved, and Kate scooted the pillow across the wooden floor so as to be fully in it again, then opened Professor Whitlaw’s folder, the one with the loose scraps and notes. She picked up one page at random, and read:

It used to be thought that only through the prayers of aescetic monks did the world maintain itself against the forces of evil, that monks were on the front lines of the battle against evil. Now, we are willing to grant monastic orders their place, for those of excessive sensitivity as well as a place of retreat and spiritual renewal for normal people. However, when a monk comes out of his monastery, we are baffled, and when confronted with a Saint Francis making mischief and behaving without a shred of decorum, we call him mad, not holy, and threaten him with iron bars and tranquillisers.

Christianity is, by its core nature, more akin to folly than it is to the Pope’s massive corporation. The central dictate of Christian doctrine is humility, in imitation of Christ’s ultimate self-humbling. Christians are mocked, persecuted, small: The powerful so-called Christian empires are the real perversion of the Gospel, not the Holy Fool.

One cannot be a Fool for Christ’s sake and be truly insane. Holy Foolishness is a cultivated state, a deliberate choice.However,themovement’sgreatest strength, its simplicity, is also its greatest weakness, for it cannot protect itself against the mad or the vicious. The innocent Fool is as helpless as a child before the folly of willful evil. Hence the absolute catastrophe of the Los Angeles shooting.

The Fool is the mirror image of the shaman. The shaman’s mythic voyage takes him from insanity into control of the basic stuff of the universe,- the Fool goes in the other direction, from normality into apparent lunacy, where he then lives, forever at the mercy of universal chaos. Both remain burdened by their identities: the shaman paying for his control by personal sacrifice, and the Fool being in the grip of what Saward calls “the rare and terrible charism of holy folly.”

Kate came to the end of the file without feeling much further along in her understanding. She set the folders on the table by the door, ate a breakfast of pear and a toasted bagel, and went to dress for her encounter with tourism.

♦

Given a sunny Saturday, even in February there will be a decent crowd in the Fishermen’s Wharf area, meandering with children and cameras along the three-quarters of a mile between the glitzy Pier 39 and Ghirardelli Square, that grandfather of all factory-into-shopping-mall conversions. Kate parked in the garage beneath the former chocolate factory and made her way to the street that fronted Aquatic Park, but there was no sign of a six-foot-two elderly bearded clown. She went up the stairs back into Ghirardelli Square proper and found a puppet show in progress, but no Erasmus.

Back on the street, she crossed over to run the gauntlet of sidewalk vendors selling sweatshirts, tie-dyed infant’s overalls, images of the Golden Gate Bridge painted onto rocks and bits of redwood, bead necklaces, toilet-roll holders in the shape of frogs and palm trees, crystal light-catchers, crystal earrings, crystal necklaces, and crystals to sew into the back seam of your trousers to center your energy. She was tempted to get one of those for Al, just to see his face, but moved on instead to the next stall, where a graying gypsy sold polished stones on thongs. Kate fingered a teardrop-shaped stone, dark blue with an interesting silvery line running through it.

“That’s lapis lazuli, good for physical healing, psychic protection, and stimulating mental powers,” the woman rattled off, adding, “The color would look good on you.”

God knows, I could use some mental stimulation, thought Kate, although she told her, “I’m looking for a gift, for a blond woman.”

The woman gave her a brief lecture on stone auras and personality enhancements, and Kate ended up buying a small necklace of intense lapis lazuli that was set in a delicate silver band. As the woman looked for a suitable box, Kate ran her eyes over the park again.

“Do you come here often?” she asked the woman.

“Seven years,” was the laconic answer.

“There’s a performer here I was hoping to see, an old guy, tall, does a clown act.”

“You a cop?” Kate was surprised, as she had made an effort and dressed like half the women on the street.

“Yes. Why?”

“Just like to know who I’m talking to. That’s eighteen bucks.” Kate handed her a twenty,- she gave her back two ones and the small white box. “I’ve got nothing against cops. My sister used to be married to one,- he was okay. You’re talkin‘ about Erasmus?”

“That’s right. Have you seen him?”

“Not today. He usually comes down in the afternoon,-mornings, he starts in front of the Cannery.”

“I’ll try down there, then. Thanks.”

“Sure. It’s the eyes,” she said unexpectedly.

“What eyes?”

“Cops. Your eyes are never still, not if you’ve been on the streets. Flip-flip-flip, always looking into peoples’ pockets, watchin‘ how they stand. Wear your sunglasses. And relax, sister. It’s a beautiful day.”

Kate laughed aloud, then sauntered off, feeling good. This was not a bad city, sometimes. She tended to forget that, what with one thing and another.

She made her way past the crowded cable-car turntable and turned downhill at the cart selling hot pretzels, strolling along the waterfront with her hands in her pockets and her eyes scanning the streets from behind the black lenses, humming a tune she did not recognize as coming from the silly musical video she had watched two nights ago. (“When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done, a policeman’s lot is not an ‘appy one, ”appy one.“) She saw two drug scores and a cruising hooker, then a familiar face. She walked over and leaned against the wall next to the pickpocket and sometime informant.

“Hey, Battles,” she murmured. “How’s doing?”

“Inspector Martinelli. Looking good. I’m clean.”

“I’m sure you are, Bartles, and how about we stay that way? Such a pretty day, let’s not spoil it for the folks from Nebraska, huh?”

“I’m not working, I told you. I’m just waiting for the wife.”

“ ‘His capacity for innocent enjoyment is just as great as any honest man’s,”“ she sang, out of tune, startling a passing young couple from Visalia.

“What’re you going on about?”

“Just something I heard on the tube the other night. Bar-ties, I think when your wife’s finished her shopping you should take her home. I’m in a good mood and if you spoil it, I might break one of your fingers getting the cuffs on you.”

“I’m not working today,” he insisted.

“Good. Neither am I. Have you seen a tall old man with a beard doing some kind of a clown act?”

“First she threatens me, then she asks me a favor.”

“No threat, and it’s not a favor. Just asking a civil question.

“You wouldn’t know a—oh Christ, it’s my wife. Get lost, will you?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Two blocks down, across the street. Now go!” he hissed.

Kate moved off, but not before she had seen the light of suspicion come on in the face of a thin woman in shorts and spike heels. She whistled softly to herself and turned into one of the nearby clothing shops, where she chose a hot pink nylon baseball cap that was embroidered with a truncated Golden Gate Bridge and the words SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, buying it and a package of chewing gum. She paused at the tiny mirror beside a display of abalone earrings to put her hair up under the hat, then unpeeled the gum and took out a piece, which she never chewed by choice, but it rendered her infinitely more harmless than all the makeup in a theater. Chewing and humming and slouching behind her shades, she went to see the act of Brother Erasmus.

♦

THIRTEEN

♦

A certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul.

It really was a stunningly beautiful morning, Kate thought with pleasure, the kind of day that tempts people from New York and Boise to move to California. It is easy to brave the earthquakes and the unemployment and the killing mortgages when a person can eat lunch outside wearing only a cotton shirt, knowing that much of the country is up to its backside in snow. Strolling along in the carnival atmosphere, kites dipping out over the water, the air smelling of fish and aftershave, the waters of the Golden Gate sparkling, with the bridge, Mount Tamalpais, and the island fortress of Alcatraz looking on benevolently, Kate could forget for a few minutes that she was here on business. She paused to examine the odd wares of the shop that sold live oysters complete with pearls, stopped again to watch a young black kid standing on a box playing robot while his buddy made sure everyone had the hat held under their noses, and then she bought an ice cream cone—for camouflage, of course. By then she had spotted Erasmus. She went up casually, hiding behind hat and cone and the large crowd he had attracted.

He was dressed as Rosalyn Hall had described him, in khaki trousers, a too-small blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, and running shoes that were just a bit too long. He also had a Raiders cap perched on the back of his head and an exaggeratedly garish gold watch on his wrist. His face, as Rosalyn had said, was very lightly shaded. From the side where Kate stood, his face above the beard seemed slightly more dusky than usual, but when he turned around, she saw that the left side of his face was pale, almost chalky. Subtle, and disconcerting.

The most striking thing, however, was not Erasmus himself but his wooden staff: Propped upright against a newspaper vending machine, it wore on its carved head a miniature Raiders cap and a pair of child’s sunglasses, and beneath its chin a scrap of the blue-and-white T-shirt fabric covered the worn piece of ribbon. Kate had not really noticed how like Erasmus the carving was, probably because the wood was so dark that the details faded, but it was all there: the beard, an identical beak of a nose, the high brow beneath the cap. The staff was Erasmus reduced to fist-sized essentials. Only its eyes were invisible behind the miniature black lenses.

Erasmus was talking to the staff. He seemed to be reciting a speech in a Shakespearean cadence (speaking with a clipped midwestern sort of accent), striding up and down in the small area of sidewalk that was his stage, seemingly unaware of any audience but the staff, which stood erect, gazing back enigmatically at him from the orange metal newspaper box.

And then the staff spoke. For a moment, Kate felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise at the hoarse whisper, until she realized it was merely a very skillful ventriloquism she was hearing. Around her, the people in the crowd, particularly the newcomers on the outer fringes, stirred and glanced at one another with quick, embarrassed smiles. It was eerie, that voice, hypnotic and amazingly real. Across the shoulders, she caught a glimpse of two children on the other side of the circle, their mouths agape as they listened to the mannikin speak.

“A pestilent gall to me!” it said.

“Sir, I’ll teach you a speech,” offered Erasmus eagerly. He stood slightly bent, so as to look up at the face on the end of the wooden pole, and his stance, combined with the expression he wore of sly stupidity, changed him, made him both bereft of dignity yet somehow more powerful, as if he was under the control of some primal buffoon.

“Do,” said the staff in its husky voice.

“Mark it, uncle: Have more than you show,- speak less than you know—”

As the speech went on, Kate licked her ice cream absently, the wad of gum tucked up into her cheek, and tried to remember where she had heard this before. It must be Shakespeare, she thought. One of those things Lee had taken her to. What was it, though? One of the dramas. Not Macbeth. The Tempest? No, it was King Lear, talking to his fool. But here, the part of the king was being played by the inanimate staff, while the king’s fool was the flesh-and-blood man.

“This is nothing, fool,” hissed the staff.

“Then it’s like the breath of an unpaid lawyer,” said Erasmus gleefully. “You gave me nothing for it!”

This brought a laugh, from the adults at any rate. The children did not giggle until the fool offered to give the staff two crowns in exchange for an egg.

“What two crowns will they be?” said the staff scornfully.

“Why, after I’ve cut the egg in the middle and eaten the meat, the two crowns of the egg.” And so saying, Erasmus pulled two neat half eggshells out of thin air and placed them on the heads of two children. He turned back to the enigmatic wooden figure.

“I pray you, uncle, keep a schoolmaster, that can teach your fool to lie. I would like to learn to lie.” He wagged his eyebrows up and down and the children laughed again.

“If you lie, sir, we’ll have you whipped,” growled the staff.

“I marvel what kin you and your daughters are!” Erasmus exclaimed. “They’ll have me whipped for speaking the truth, you will have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I would rather be any kind of thing than a fool, and yet—I would not be you,” he said, marching up to the staff and shaking his head at the wooden face. “You have pared your wit on both sides, and left nothing in the middle—and here comes one of the parings.”

He raised his voice at this last sentence and looked pointedly over the heads of the people at a spot behind them. As one, they turned to see. Kate, with the whole mass in front of her, stepped away from the street to look down the sidewalk and saw—Oh no. Oh shit, Erasmus, you stupid old man, don’t do this. Can’t you see what you’re messing with?

But of course he could. That was why he was standing there with his head down, grinning in wicked anticipation as he met the eyes of his target.

The young man was startled at the sudden spectacle of thirty or more people turning to stare at him. Wary, but constitutionally unable to back away from any confrontation, the young man stopped dead, his eyes shooting from side to side as he tried to analyze the situation.

He was a small but powerfully built boy of perhaps nineteen or twenty wearing a tight tank top that showed off the muscles of a weight lifter. His chin and cheeks were dusted with a slight blond bristle and he swaggered in snug blue jeans and black Doc Marten boots that boosted his height almost to average. In his left hand he had a small brown paper bag with the glass neck of a green bottle protruding from it. His right arm was draped over the shoulder of an emaciated girl of seventeen or eighteen who had acne on her chin and chest, black roots in her blond hair, a fading bruise on her upper arm, a lip whose puffiness was not hidden by the lipstick she wore, and a pair of enormous black sunglasses that obscured a large part of her face. Kate had been on enough domestic calls to read the signs without thinking about it: Her careful walk and the arms crossed in front of her told Kate the girl’s ribs hurt,- her body language (leaning both into and away from the possessive arm) told Kate who had been responsible.

Erasmus, too, knew that something was wrong here. He held out a hand to the pair and called jovially, “Come my lad and drink some beer!”

“Uh, thanks, I got some,” said the boy.

“Hasten to be drunk,” Erasmus said smilingly. “The business of the day.”

“I ain’t drunk.”

The staff now spoke up. “First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.”

The young man stood with his mouth open, his eyes going from the man to his curiously dressed stick and back again. He suspected mockery, but the number of spectators made it impossible either to shove the old man around or to back off.

“Wha‘ the fuck?” he asked.

“Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out,” commented the staff.

The boy squinted at the wooden object, then took his arm from the girl’s shoulders to walk around and see it face-on.

“How’s he do that?” The audience had begun to respond to this new act (all except for those with children, who had already faded away) and a murmur of chuckles greeted the drunk boy’s confusion. He spun around belligerently to face them, and the onlookers glanced around for Erasmus to intervene, but he had moved, and they saw him now standing before the girl, her sunglasses in his hand.

Her left eye looked like something from a special-effects laboratory, swollen and black, the eyeball itself so bloodshot, it resembled an open wound. Silence fell immediately. With the others, Kate watched Erasmus bend slightly to look into the girl’s good eye.

“A wounded spirit who can bear?” he said quietly, and reaching up with his right hand, he cupped it gently over her eye. The girl gazed up at him, as hypnotized as a rabbit, and did not even wince. After a moment, he stepped away and held out her sunglasses. She took them and her face once more disappeared behind them. No one watched her, though. Their eyes were on Erasmus, who turned back to the youth.

“A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be.”

The boy was confused by the old man’s friendly smile and voice, and he nodded stupidly.

“Speak roughly to your little girl,” Erasmus continued, “and beat her when she sneezes. She only does it to annoy because she knows it teases.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” objected the boy. “I never—”

“Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.” Erasmus was still smiling, but he did not look friendly now. He looked large, his eyes easily half a foot above those of the boy.

“I didn’t hit her—”

“Jealousy is as cruel as the grave.”

“What are you—”

“Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face,-terror, the human form divine, and secrecy, the human dress.”

“Jesus Christ. C’mon, Angela, this guy’s nuts.” The boy tried to move around Erasmus, but the older man moved to block his way to the girl.

The staff spoke up again. “It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured,” it whined.

“Old man, you’re asking for it.”

Kate began to move through the back of the thinning crowd, cursing under her breath and looking for someplace to deposit the remnants of her cone. She knew what those young muscles would do to the old man, to say nothing of the boots. Erasmus bent to look into the young man’s eyes, and for the first time he seemed to be trying to communicate, not just mock.

“I must be cruel,” he said with a small shrug of apology, “only to be kind.”

The boy hesitated, held not so much by the words as by the man’s unexpected attitude, though even as Kate watched, it began to harden.

“What mean you,” he said coldly, “that you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?”

Silence held,- then, said as a sneer: “The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and… short.”

It was the deliberate stress given the last word that broke the boy, and his powerful right arm, with the paper-wrapped bottle now at the end of it, shot automatically out toward the old man’s head. Kate threw herself against the arm before it made contact, but the impact swept all three of them into the girl Angela, against the wall behind her, and then tumbled them to the pavement in a heap. The raging boy flung his girlfriend off and was first to his feet, and if three men from the audience had not managed to drag him off, Kate would have had considerably more damage than three oval bruises on her shoulders and shins where his boots had hit home. She scrambled upright and shoved her police ID into his face, holding it there until it and her repeated shouts of “Police officer! I’m a police officer!” finally got through and she saw his muscles relax. The boy shook off the restraining hands but made no move to continue the assault.

The raucous gathering had finally attracted official attention, and several short coughs of a siren signaled the arrival of the local uniforms. The two men climbed out of the patrol car and moved their authoritative bulk into the center of activity, but Kate did not take her eyes from the young man until the uniformed officers had acknowledged her identity and were actually standing next to her. Only then did she turn and help Erasmus to his feet. He brushed himself off as if checking that he was in one piece, then, while Kate was making explanations that downplayed the entire episode, he went over to his staff, freed it from the newspaper box, and tucked it into his right shoulder. The effect was bizarre, like looking at a two-headed being, and Kate had to tear her eyes away.

The two uniformed officers were telling the crowd, what remained of it, to move on, and while the younger one dealt with the young man, the older one took Kate to one side.

“Inspector Martinelli, can you tell me what your interest is in the Brother there?”

“At this point, I don’t know what my interest is,” she admitted. “He’s somehow involved in the cremation homicide in Golden Gate Park, but whether as a witness or something more, I just don’t know.”

“The reason I ask, he’s a nice old guy, but he’s like a magnet for trouble. Not always, or we’d move him on, but this is the third time, and once last fall we didn’t get here fast enough. He got beat up pretty bad. I just thought if he was a friend or a relative, well… You know?”

“Would that have been in November?”

“Around then, yeah.”

“I heard about that. I’ll talk with him, see what I can do, but he has his own agenda, if you know what I mean, and self-preservation doesn’t seem to be very high on it.”

The crowd having dispersed, the two patrol officers turned their attentions to the young man and delivered a warning that even he seemed to find impressive (though, truth to tell, even before they began, he looked ill and without interest in beating up old men). When they had finished, he gathered Angela up and would have walked away, but Erasmus put out a gentle hand to stop him.

“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,” he said quietly. The boy nodded and would not look at him, but Angela did, and to her, Erasmus said in a heartfelt exclamation, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and then, with the emphasis of a judgment, told her, “None but the brave” (and here he pointedly ran his eyes over the boy) “deserve the fair.”

The boy tugged at her and they moved off, but after half a dozen steps, Angela shrugged off the confining arm and the two of them continued side by side.

The two patrolmen suggested firmly that it was time Erasmus moved on. Kate reassured them that she would deal with it, and when another call came for them, they climbed back into the car and drove off. Kate waved her thanks. As soon as they had left, she turned on Erasmus.

“You could have been hurt, you stupid old man,” she declared furiously. He did not seem to be listening as he watched the two young people go off down the street. He shook his head in sorrow.

“Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”

“Talk about the shadow of death!” Kate stepped in front of him, though she practically had to jump up and down to interrupt his gaze. “That kid could have put you in the hospital. And you would have deserved it, for being such a damned… idiot.”

He finally looked down at her, and his eyes crinkled up in a smile. “How forcible are right words.”

“Damned straight they’re right. Don’t do that again, you hear me? I don’t care what you think—it doesn’t do anyone any good.”

He looked again at the retreating backs and sighed. “We have scotched the snake, not killed it,” he said, which Kate took as agreement.

“Just stick to juggling,” she suggested. “I can’t guarantee to stumble on you every time you get into trouble.”

She knew in an instant that he did not believe she had just happened to show up here. He leaned on his staff, two identical heads sharing a good joke, and laughed at her. Even the wooden head seemed to be laughing at her, and she felt her face go red. There was absolutely nothing she could do, so she turned her back on him and walked away.

♦

FOURTEEN

♦

With all his gentleness, there was originally something of impatience in his impetuosity.

Kate stalked off down the busy sidewalk, her face flushed, her mind troubled, her shin and left shoulder sore, and her jaw aching. She stopped at the first trash bin she came to and spat out the gum. How could people chew the stuff all day? They must have jaws of iron. She pulled off the stupid pink hat, rolled it up and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans, and ruffled her short hair back into place with her fingers.

Could the man be schizophrenic? There was certainly some kind of a split personality going on here, but whether it was uncontrollable or an act, cynic that she was, she honestly could not say. The performance had not been put on merely for her benefit, of that she was reasonably sure. He could not have seen her until she had stepped back from the crowd, and the direction of the act had been already fully established.

What was that snippet in Professor Whitlaw’s file? Something about Foolishness being a dangerous business. Kate could well believe that, if this was the pattern: One might as well tease a bull as the particular target he had chosen. Come to think of it, the bull would probably be safer.

And what was the point? Did Erasmus actually expect to change the way the boy treated his girlfriend? Or had he just been hoping to distract the young man, to take his attention away from the girl and—what? Allow her a chance to escape?

Oh, this was ridiculous. Erasmus wasn’t all there, and looking for rational reasons for his behavior was pointless.

Still, he was clever, give him that. The more she thought about the scene she had just witnessed, the more impressed she was. Teasing a bull, indeed—and walking away intact, while the bull… what was the image she had in mind? Not a bull, some other powerful and savage animal. A wolverine or a cougar or something, seen long ago on a television nature program, being tormented and ultimately brought down by a pack of small, scruffy, cowardly coyotes or jackals.

At this point, Kate came to herself, finding that she was standing outside the elevator in the parking garage, feeling as bedeviled and set upon by her fanciful thoughts and images as the wolverine was by the coyotes (a lioness, perhaps it had been, and jackals). She was seized by the desire to lower her head and shake it in massive rage and befuddlement, but a family of honking New Yorkers came out of the garage and she controlled the urge. Don’t frighten the children, Kate, she told herself, and grinned at them instead. The mother instantly herded her charges to one side and the father bristled in suspicion. Kate stood aside and allowed them to sidle past her, then went on into the garage. New Yorkers, she thought with a mental shake of the head. They probably would have been less frightened if I had bellowed at them.

Out on the street again, she pulled her car over into a loading zone and reached for her notebook and the car phone. The phone was answered after four rings by an English voice that by way of greeting merely stated the number she’d just punched out.

“Professor Whitlaw? This is Inspector Kate Martinelli.”

“Yes, Inspector, what can I do for you?”

“I wondered if you might be free for an hour or so this afternoon?”

“Inspector, I’m terribly sorry, I have an informal tutorial that seems to be turning into a seminar, and I can’t see that I’ll be free much before tea.”

“Er, right.”

“I have six people here,” the professor clarified, “and they look to be ensconced until hunger drives them out. Did you wish to review the material I set for you? Would tomorrow do as well?”

“No, it’s not that exactly. I mean, yes, I’d like to go over it with you, but I found Brother Erasmus, and I wondered—”

“You found your Fool! Oh, grand. Where are you?”

“In my car, up near the Fishermen’s Wharf area.”

“Where can I meet you? I’ll have one of the young people drive me. Surely; one of them must have come in an automobile.”

“Well, if you can get free, I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Even better. I’ll dig out my Sherlock Holmes glass and my entomologist’s bottle and meet you on the doorstep. Although come to think of it, etymology might be a more useful discipline for this exercise.”

“Oh, certainly.” Whatever.

“Inspector, I cannot tell you how grateful I am.”

“For what? Messing up your day and dragging you across town to push your way through San Francisco’s answer to the Tower of London?”

“I am ecstatic at the prospect, I assure you, Inspector.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’ll be about ten minutes.”

“I shall be ready.”

When Kate turned the corner on the street where Professor Whitlaw was staying, she saw a group of young people on the steps of the house, forming a circle around an invisible center, which they all seemed to be addressing at once. When the car pulled up in front of them, Kate could see an extra pair of legs in the knot, and after a moment Professor Whitlaw peered out, her gray hair at shoulder level to the shortest of them. They gave way but followed her across the sidewalk to the street, still talking.

“Yes, dear,” the professor soothed. “It’ll keep until tomorrow. Just continue with your word studies.” She climbed in beside Kate, pulled the door shut, and, as Kate pulled away from the protesting students, patted her hair. “My goodness,” she said weakly, “Americans seem so very large, especially the young ones. What do their parents feed them?” She didn’t seem to expect an answer, but sorted out the seat belt, lowered her black leather handbag onto the floor, put the black nylon tube of a fold-up umbrella on her lap and draped a tan raincoat over it, and folded her hands together. Sixty-eight degrees and not a cloud, not even a haze in the sky, but the well-dressed Englishwoman was ready for sleet.

“Where did you find him, this Erasmus?” she asked. “What is he doing?”

“He’s in the very center of the tourist area, juggling, conjuring quarters out of the ears of children, and goading bulls.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Kate laughed. “Sorry, not literally. It’s an image that came to mind.” She explained about the confrontation she had witnessed. Professor Whitlaw reached down for her handbag, snapped open the clasp and took out a small notebook, and wrote for a moment.

“How very interesting,” she murmured.

“Why would he be doing this?” Kate asked. “I mean, I can see how a fool would want to help the homeless and I could sort of see the appeal that the seminary might have for him, but what is he doing here, dressed like a suburban refugee, risking arrest or worse—surely he must occasionally misjudge just how far he can push people before they explode? Dean Gardner said Erasmus had been hurt last November, and I assumed that he’d been beaten up in the street, but now I wouldn’t be surprised if it had happened here.”

“You are quite right. Fools have never been content unless they were putting themselves at risk—from violence, from cold and starvation, whatever edge they were near, they would go closer. A medieval court fool would insult the king; the early Christians embraced martyrdom-. It’s all a means of courting madness.”

“It is a kind of mental illness, then?”

“Oh no. Well, I couldn’t say in this case, not having studied your friend Erasmus, but for a true Fool, a Holy Fool, the madness is always simulated. It is a tool, not a permanent state. I should perhaps qualify that by saying that there were some Holy Fools who had, in an earlier period of their lives, undergone a period of true insanity, but they came out of it, through conversion or enlightenment, and then later, if they returned to it, would only do so deliberately. You might say that they would choose to lose rational control.”

“I don’t understand why. A tool for what?” Other than a means of establishing an insanity plea for murder, she did not say aloud.

“For teaching. A fool who has relinquished control, who has submitted to chaos, is in a sense no longer a person, not an individual with a will and a mind of his own. You saw how Erasmus deferred to the staff he carries. Typically, even an inanimate object has more will than a fool. And because he is not his own person, he can be all people,- he can be a reflection of whatever individual he is facing. That is why a fool is so troubling,- he’s a mirror, and mirrors can be frightening.”

Kate waited until she had negotiated Geary Street before she spoke. “I’m sorry, it’s a pretty theory, but I can’t see what it has to do with the man Erasmus.”

“I am putting it in theoretical terms, perhaps. I should apologize for my airy-fairy academic language, which makes the process sound theoretical, but I assure you it’s quite real. Why do you think your fool so angered that young man? Not just because he was irritating him. Erasmus was reflecting the boy’s own ugly face back to him, showing him that he, a strong, a powerful young man, what you would call ‘macho,” would stoop so low as to hit, not only a frail young woman but even an old, feeble man. Judging by the behavior I have witnessed in the past by experienced fools, I would speculate that Erasmus, left alone, would probably have defused the lad’s anger by carrying it to exaggeration, by actually lying on the ground and inviting the young man to savage him. And then, having shocked the fellow into immobility, he would have brought the lesson to a close by identifying himself, Erasmus, the near victim, with the girl, the man’s perpetual victim. Now, that is teaching, and I suspect that even in its interrupted form the lesson will not cease to niggle at the man for some time. Every time he looks at the young woman, for a while.“

“If you’re right, it’d be a clever thing to teach in our domestic violence program—lie down and let the husband boot you before arresting him.”

“Of course, it isn’t quite that simple, is it? It’s not a technique at all; it’s a response from the fool’s inner being. And, seeing the effect this fool has had on one far-from-gullible police officer, I must say I am quite looking forward to meeting him.”

♦

At first it looked as if the professor would not get her wish, because when Kate drove past the place where Erasmus had been performing, he had obeyed the patrolman’s order and was no longer there. Nor did they spot him anywhere along the strip of shops and shows, all the way up to the Maritime Museum. Along the drive, however, there had been various tantalizing smells, french fries and onions and grilling hamburgers, topped off by a waft of chilis and onions that lay over Ghirardelli Square.

“I haven’t had any lunch,” Kate declared. “Do you mind if I stop off and get something, then we can do another drive-by?”

“That’s quite all right with me.”

Kate drove around into Fort Mason and stopped as close to Greens Restaurant as she could get, ran in and bought a juicy sandwich of eggplant and red peppers and cheese, a bag of fruity cookies for the professor, who had said that she’d already eaten lunch, and ran back out. She pulled the car back out into the Marina and parked, and they ate while watching the joggers and Frisbee players and people lying with their faces turned to the winter sun. Professor Whitlaw ate one cookie and then opened the door and got out to stand and gaze over the grass to the waters of the Bay and the tracery of the Golden Gate Bridge. Kate gathered up sandwich and car keys and went to stand with her.

“You have a very lovely city here,” said the professor. “A jewel in a golden setting. Do you know, London is built on one of the most active rivers in the world, and yet in most of the city you’d never know the river was there. I’ve often thought that would be the definition of a modern city: One has absolutely no idea of the natural setting.”

“It would be hard to ignore the Bay and the hills here.”

“Yes, I fear San Francisco is doomed never to achieve modernity. What a blessing. Do you suppose that is a kite that young man is wrestling with, or a tent?”

“God only knows. We’ll have to wait and see if he gets it in the air.”

The results were inconclusive. The winged dome with the dragon stitched on one side was briefly airborne but hardly aerodynamic. Kate crumpled her sandwich wrapper and tossed it into a nearby can.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yes,” Professor Whitlaw said, and turned back to the car. “I really must do this more often. It’s ridiculous, to come to a magnificent place like this and see only the insides of walls. I believe I’ve seen more of the city in the last hour than I have the entire three weeks I’ve been here.” She turned to Kate and humorously half-inclined her head. “Thank you for the tour.”

“Any time.”

In the car, they rolled down the windows. Kate turned back toward Fishermen’s Wharf.

“Are you from London, then?” she asked.

“Oh no, dear. Rural Yorkshire originally, then Cambridge, followed by several years teaching in London. I hated it there. So insular and gray. Chicago seemed wide open, bracing after London. That is where I first came in this country, to a teaching job. Although I admit California seems like a different country entirely. I first got to really know the Fools movement in Chicago and on the East Coast, Boston and New York.”

“Even though they started in England.”

“Yes, ironic, wasn’t it? I knew of them in England, of course, but they were of peripheral interest to me then—a friend who later became a colleague had a passion for them. Eventually the passion proved contagious. My actual field is the history of cults, but there’s so much that is depressing in cult behavior, I found Fools a refreshing change. They are one of the few groups who understand that religion can be not only joyous but fun. He doesn’t seem to be here, does he?” She sounded disappointed as Kate drove slowly past the place where Erasmus had been two hours earlier.

“No, but we’ll try farther up. One of the vendors said he’s usually there in the afternoons.”

There was one crowd, at the beginning of Aquatic Park, but that was only the line waiting for the cable car to be rotated. They rounded the park, dodging a flock of Japanese tourists and a laden station wagon from Michigan, and then, on the path sloping down from the road to the waterfront, there was another crowd: From its center rose the back of a familiar graying head.

Kate pulled into a no-parking area, propped her police identification on the dashboard, and trotted around the car to help Professor Whitlaw out.

“He’s down there. See where that child with the ball just ran?”

The professor set off determinedly in her sensible shoes, with Kate at her side. Halfway down the slope, the din from the street musicians across the road faded, and the wind stilled. Kate could hear him now, not what he was saying but the rhythm of his voice as he chanted some other man’s words. A few more steps, and Professor Whitlaw faltered. Kate’s hand shot out to grasp the woman’s elbow, but she had not stumbled, and now she picked up her pace as if anxious to reach her goal.

The voice of Brother Erasmus rose and faded as his head turned toward them and then away. They were still in back of him.

“… a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than…” he said before his words faded again. The brief phrase had an extraordinary effect on the professor, however. She gave a brief sound, like a cough, and raised her hand as if to pull away the shoulders that were blocking her view of the speaker, but then, realizing the futility of it, she began to work her way around to the right, craning her neck and going up on her toes, to no avail. This close, even Kate couldn’t see him.

They were directly in front of him now, separated by four or five layers of people, and although his words were clear, Kate did not hear them. All her attention was on Eve Whitlaw, that dignified English professor who was now practically whimpering—she was whimpering, with the frustration of being unable to move the bodies ahead of her, those shoulders clad in knit cotton, shining heads of hair a foot above her own. Finally she just put her head down and began to push her way in, Kate close on her heels.

He saw Kate first. His eyes rested on her calmly, sardonically, as if to say, Are you here again, my child? And then they dropped to look at the tiny woman emerging from the circle of onlookers before him. Kate saw the shock run through him, saw him rear up, his two-toned face draining of color, his head turning away even though his eyes were riveted on Eve Whitlaw. His mouth, his entire body were twisting away from her, and the expression on his face could only be one of sudden and complete terror.

“David?” the professor cried. “David, my God, I thought you were dead!”

And with her words, he turned and bolted through the crowd.

♦

FIFTEEN

♦

The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again.

Kate would never have thought that a seventy-year-old man burdened by a wooden staff and overly large shoes could have evaded her, but this one did. His early advantage through the thinnest edge of the crowd while Kate was wading out from the very center got him to the road first. He shot across, to a screeching of tires and the blare of angry horns, and by the time Kate had threaded her way between the camper van and a taxi, he had vanished. He had to have entered Ghirardelli Square somehow, but the shopkeepers all looked at her dumbly and none of the other closed doors would open. Red-faced and cursing her lack of condition, she went to her car to radio for help but then stopped to think.

What difference did his running make? That had not been the flight of a guilty man upon seeing a police officer,- indeed, he hadn’t been the least bit disturbed at seeing her. She could hardly have him arrested for fleeing an old acquaintance—because that’s what he had been doing. He knew Eve Whitlaw, and she knew—David? Kate put down the handset and got out of the car. She could always put out a call for him later, if she needed to.

Professor Whitlaw was sitting on a bench, looking pale, hugging her large black handbag to her chest. Kate sat down beside her.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh yes, dear. Upset. It was a shock. For him, too, obviously. Oh my, how very stupid I was, bursting in on him like that.”

“You know him,” Kate said, not as a question. “I mean personally.”

“Oh my yes, I know him. Knew him. We worked together for ten years, what seems like a long, long time ago.”

“David… Sawyer?”

“You know of him, then?”

“There was a note in your file, a personal communication from David Sawyer, dated October 1983.”

“Lord, yes. I had forgotten that. Just three months before he disappeared. We all thought he was dead.”

“Why? What happened?”

She closed her eyes and put a shaky hand across her mouth. Kate looked up and noticed the last of the crowd, lingering to have the excitement explained. She shook her head at them and they began to drift away.

“I don’t think I can go into it just here and now,” said the professor. “I feel very unsettled. I should like to pull my thoughts together first, if you don’t mind.”

Truth to tell, she was looking old and badly shaken.

“That’s fine. Let me take you back to your house,- we can have a cup of tea. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to offer you?” The professor smiled at her gratefully.

“The English panacea, yes. Tea for upsets, tea when you’ve been working, tea for hot and cold, thirst and hunger, tea to ease an awkward conversation. Yes, we shall drink tea.”

♦

While the kettle was heating in the cheerful pine kitchen, Kate borrowed the telephone in the study, closing the door behind her. She reached Al Hawkin on the third try, neither in his car nor in his office, but at home. She could hear the television in the background.

“Al, this is Kate. I’m glad I reached you, I thought you might be in Palo Alto.”

“Jani’s got a conference this weekend, so I’m catching up on paperwork and watching the moss grow on my carpet. What’s up?”

“Professor Whitlaw knows who Erasmus is. I took her to see him, down on the lawn of Aquatic Park, and when he spotted her, he ran—literally. He was frightened of her, Al.”

“You were there? And he got away from you?”

“I know,” she said, embarrassed. “Only as far as the shops, but one of them was either hiding him or had let him out through a back door. I didn’t think I should make a big thing of it, though. I mean, he’s hardly your average Joe, if we want to pick him up again.”

“Where are you now?”

“At Professor Whitlaw’s house down in Noe Valley. She’s going to tell me what she knows about Erasmus, or I should say David Sawyer. Do you want to hear it?”

“Give me the address,” he said, and when she had described how to find the place, he growled, “Fifteen minutes. I need to shave first.”

“Oh, give her a thrill, Al. She’ll think you’re doing undercover work.”

He grunted and dropped the phone, and Kate replaced her own receiver, then stood looking at the walls of books that rose up on all sides. Two sides, she saw, were filled with an unlikely combination of medical texts (with an emphasis on childhood diseases and allergies) and best-seller hardbacks with brightly colored dust jackets (novels and the sort of non-fiction books everyone talks about but no one reads). One wall and the narrow shelves beside the door had been cleared for use by the temporary resident,- these books were mostly old and lacking dust jackets, with library stickers on their spines. Ignoring the whistle of the teakettle and the sounds of cups and spoons, Kate ran her eye slowly over the assembled volumes until she found what she had thought would be there: The Fool. Order Through Chaos, Clarity from Confusion by David M. Sawyer, M. Div., Ph.D. She pulled it out, then saw another with the name Sawyer on the spine, a slim volume called The Reformation of the Catholic Church. She carried them both with her out to the kitchen and laid them on the oak table, which was looking slightly less polished than it had two days before.

“You’ve found David’s books,” noted Professor Whitlaw. She put down the plate she was carrying and reached out for the book on top, the Church title. She held it in her right hand and, pinching the hollow of the binding between her left thumb and forefinger, she ran her fingers up and down the spine a couple of times before putting the book down again with an affectionate pat.

“These are the only ones he wrote?”

“There are two more, which I’ve loaned out, and he was halfway through a fifth one when he disappeared.”

“If you don’t mind I’d like my partner to hear about Sawyer’s disappearance, too. His name is Al Hawkin,- he’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

“Of course not, I don’t mind waiting.”

Kate looked again at the two books, which gave her a topic of peripheral conversation. “Isn’t that a broad sort of reach, from Catholicism to Fools? I thought scholarly types tended to specialize more than that.”

“The Reformation book was his Ph.D. thesis, an investigation into how early Protestantism changed the Roman Catholic Church. And yes, you’d think the two topics unrelated, but David was interested in the ways an existing organization, when confronted by rebellion, moves not away from but toward its opposition. After Luther, the Roman Catholic authorities—” She was off, in full-fledged scholarly flight, and Kate did not even try to follow her. She just nodded at the pauses and waited for the doorbell to ring.

When Hawkin arrived (shaven and dressed in tan shirt, tie, and tweedy sport jacket), the pot of tea had to be emptied and made anew, the plate of what the professor called “digestive biscuits” refilled, and tea begun again. Eventually they were settled, refreshed, and ready. Kate took out her notebook.

“You want to know about David Sawyer,” Professor Eve Whitlaw began. “I first met David in London in 1971. It was July, the beginning of the long vac, and I was in the reading room of the British Library when he came up to my table and demanded to know why for the third time he had requested a book, only to be told that I had it. He was over from America, looking into the Fools movement, which was barely two years old and had caught his fancy. Our interests overlapped, so for the rest of his stay, which was, I think, a couple of weeks, we joined forces. Academically,” she added sternly, although the vision of even the most platonic relationship was inevitably amusing, given nearly two feet in height difference. Seeing neither suspicion nor humor in either bland detective face, she went on. “He was married and had a son. The family stayed in Chicago that summer, although the next year they came over with him. His wife was younger than he was, and the child was eight or nine.”

“Where are they now?” Kate asked.

“I think you’d best let me tell the story as it comes, if you don’t mind. As I said, we joined forces. I drove him around southern England to the various Fool centers, and he helped me with my work. He had a remarkable understanding of cult psychology, and he knew everyone in the field, it seemed. After he’d left, we corresponded. That first spring we wrote a joint article for a journal. The next summer when he came over with his family, they hired a house near Oxford, and for two months I practically lived with them. His wife was the loveliest person, had just finished her Ph.D. in early-childhood education, and their son was sweet, too. He had a mild speech defect and was at that sort of unformed age, but he had occasional sparkles of joy and intelligence. Ay, what a grand summer that was.

“At the end of it, I went back to gray old London and they flew back to Chicago, and two months later I had a telephone call from David asking if I’d be interested in applying for a job. Teaching undergraduates, to start with, with some research time. I jumped at it, and I got it, and we worked together for the next ten years. They were the best ten years of my life,” she said, pursing her lips as if to keep from having to speak further.

“Now comes the hard part. Perhaps I should point out that David was considerably higher up the ladder than I was. He worked almost exclusively with graduate students and on his own research. In a way, that was a pity, because he was one of the most stimulating lecturers I’ve ever heard. I used to pull him into my classes regularly, just for the pleasure of seeing their faces light up, and to see him respond to them. When he talked about church history, his voice would make poetry out of the councils and the heresies. Brilliant.

“But for the most part, he had graduate students. Some of them were very good,- a few were mediocre—he found it difficult to refuse anyone outright,- he thought it better to let them discover their own limitations. There were a few disappointments, a couple of kids who were angry when they finally realized they weren’t world-movers, but mostly it went smoothly. Until Kyle.

“I never liked Kyle Roberts, and I don’t think it’s only hindsight talking. I didn’t trust him, and I told David so, but he said it would be fine, that it was only Kyle’s rough edges. Kyle came from a very poor family, made it through on some minority scholarship, although he looked straight Caucasian to me, and basically he assumed the world owed him a living. What he wanted was to be a full professor at Yale, no less. David thought… Oh God. David thought it was funny. He thought that when Kyle really knew what he was getting into, he would settle for teaching in some lesser university, or a college. He should have taken his master’s degree and gone away, because he had a wife and two children to support, but his work was just good enough to keep him in the program. David and a couple of the others used to give him part-time jobs, research assistant and teaching aide, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I thought, frankly, that it was cruel to encourage a man who had working-class manners, a family to feed, and no brilliance to think of himself as top academic material.

“Well. By the autumn of 1983, he had been in the program for five years. The first of the men and women he had entered with began to finish their programs, but he hadn’t even had the topic for his dissertation approved, much less written it. Now, that’s not all that unusual—a Ph.D. varies tremendously in how long it takes—but for him it was becoming a real problem, because in his own eyes he was brilliant.

“Then in early December, one of the assistant professors announced that he was leaving, and Kyle went to David and said that he wanted the job. It was utterly impossible, of course. He might just have qualified as a candidate if he’d had the thesis in its final stages, but when he had not even begun to write it? There were at least forty others who would be completely qualified, so why lower the standards in order to get Kyle Roberts?

“It all happened so quickly. Looking back, that’s the most baffling thing, that there was no time for clouds to form on the horizon, no warning. Kyle confronted David, and David finally told him the truth about his academic future. Politely at first and then, when Kyle just refused to understand, David became harder, until he finally lost his temper and said that Kyle was deluding himself if he thought he’d ever reach higher than assistant professor, and that he, David, would be hard put to write a letter of recommendation even for that.

“Kyle had never had anyone he respected tell him that, and it simply shattered him. I saw him when he left David’s office—the whole building heard the argument—and he was just white. Stunned. I will never forget how he looked. And I know, I knew then, that any one of us could have rescued him, just by putting a hand out… But we didn’t. He’d become too much of a leech to risk making contact. I let him walk past me.

“He went home. But on his way, he stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a shotgun, and when he walked through his back door, he loaded it and shot his wife, his eight-year-old son, and his three-year-old daughter. The police later decided that he must have sat there for nearly an hour, and during that time he must have found his anger again, because instead of killing himself, he went to find David. It was dark. He went to David’s home. David was not back yet, but his wife and son were there, and so Kyle shot them both and then finally turned the gun on himself. Jonny died. He was nineteen. Charlotte, David’s wife, had a collapsed lung, but they saved her. She got out of the hospital just in time for Christmas.

“David was utterly devastated, empty—an automaton. He wouldn’t go out, except to buy food for Charlotte and pick up her prescriptions. He wouldn’t talk to me,- when I went to his house, he would not even look at me. The administration arranged for a leave of absence, of course, but he didn’t even sign the papers they sent him until the chair of the department went and stood over him.

“Finally at the end of January, Charlotte was well enough to travel, and she went home to her parents’ house on Long Island. He drove her to New York and then went back to their house, just long enough to type out his letter of resignation, arrange a power of attorney for his lawyer so that all his personal assets could be transferred immediately to Charlotte, and make three phone calls to friends. I was one of them. All he said…” She swallowed, blinking furiously. “This is very difficult. All he said was that his vanity had… had killed five people and that he— Oh God,” she whispered as the tears broke free. “He said he loved me and wished me all good things, and would very probably not see me again. And he asked me to take care of Charlotte… Thank you.” She seized the box of tissues Hawkin had put in front of her and buried her face in a handful of pink paper. “Ten years ago last month,” she said, and blew her nose a final time, “and it seems like yesterday.”

She got up and walked into the kitchen, where she stood on the stool to splash water onto her face, then dried it with a kitchen towel and came back to the table.

“We all assumed that he had gone somewhere and killed himself. He was very nearly dead already. And then today I see David Sawyer looking like an old derelict and acting the Fool for tourists, and he runs at the sight of my face. And,” she added a minute later, “he is somehow involved in a murder. Yet another murder. Oh, poor, poor David.”

Holding her threadbare dignity around her, she stumbled down from the tall chair and walked away down the hallway. A door opened and closed. Kate blew a stream of air through her pursed lips and looked at Hawkin.

“I could understand if someone had bashed him—Erasmus, or Sawyer. I’ve seen two good solid motives for killing him in the last few hours. But as for him killing someone else, I haven’t seen anything.”

“John was a blackmailer,” said Hawkin quietly.

“And he found out about Kyle and threatened to tell the other street people, so Erasmus bashed him to keep him quiet? I can’t see it, Al. Sorry.”

“He ran.”

“From her, not from me.”

“She knows who he is. She’d give you the motive and ID him. Maybe if you hadn’t been there he would have lured her off to a quiet corner and whacked her one, too.”

She leaned over the table to study his face, but it told her nothing.

“Are you serious, Al? Or are you just playing with this?”

I’m mostly trying it out for size, but I will say that I’m not too happy he made a run for it. I don’t like the idea of him skipping town.“

“Okay, you’re the boss. Do you want to put a call out for him tonight or wait and see if he shows up in the park tomorrow?”

“We can wait. Meanwhile, see what you can find out about this Kyle Roberts thing. Where’s Sawyer’s wife now,- was it really an open-and-shut murder/suicide,- did Roberts have family that might want to even things up a bit?”

“Such as a five-foot-eleven white male with a Texas accent who called himself John?”

“Such as. You know anyone in Chicago?”

“ ‘Anyone’ meaning anyone on the police department? No.”

“I don’t, either. Well, I met someone at a conference once, but he and I had differing views on such things as search-and-seizure and putting down riots. He wouldn’t give you the time of day. What about Kenning down in Vice? He had a brother, didn’t he?”

How, wondered Kate, could I have forgotten either Haw-kin’s phenomenal memory or his personal-touch method of getting information? When they had worked together before, she had tended to turn to the computer,- Al depended on someone’s cousin Marty who had been mentioned at the last departmental ball game.

“I’ll ask,” she said. Computers didn’t have it all.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know that we can do anything else here. You want to start the background search on him? I’d do it, but I’m testifying in that Brancusi case Monday and I need to go over it carefully. It’s going to be a bitch.”

“No problem, I’ll get it going. Except—how about you call Kenning and ask for his brother’s name? He’s probably home watching the game, and you’re more likely to know when it’s over than I am.” She grinned at him and he, unembarrassed, grinned back.

“Paperwork, you know?” he said. “I only turn on the tube for the noise.”

“Sure, Al. Have a beer for me, okay?”

“Talk to you later. Thank the professor for the tea.” He let himself out, and a minute later Kate heard a car door slam and an engine start up. She picked up Sawyer’s book on fools and began to leaf through it, waiting for Professor Whitlaw to emerge, but she had barely started the introduction before the door opened and the professor came down the hall.

“I apologize,” she said. “As I said, it was a shock. Now, please tell me what I may do to help my old friend.”

“Er, I don’t really know.”

“I must see him again.”

“I’ll let you know when we find him.” They owed her at least that much, Kate figured, but something in her voice alerted the professor.

“You sound as if you have some doubts about it.”

“He may go to ground for a few days,” she said evasively.

“You don’t think it’ll be more than that, do you? He won’t run away completely, surely.”

Kate always hated this sort of thing. With a suspect, you knew where you stood: Never answer questions,- don’t even act as if you heard them. With a witness, just evade politely. But with an important, intelligent, and potentially very helpful witness, evasion created a barrier, and she couldn’t afford that.

“Professor Whitlaw, we don’t know what to expect, and I doubt you could help us any in figuring it out. I’d say offhand that the David Sawyer you knew is gone. He’s Brother Erasmus now, and Brother Erasmus could do anything.”

“Not murder, in case you are thinking of him as a suspect. Not as David Sawyer, and not as a fool.”

“I hope you’re right. He’s an appealing character.”

“That hasn’t changed, at any rate. Perhaps there’s more of David there than you think.”

“We shall see. Thank you very much for your help with his identity. And I take it that you would be available for assisting in an interview with him?”

“That’s right,- you said he was difficult to communicate with. I had forgotten, in all the uproar. Yes, certainly, I shall be glad to help. Perhaps I’d best brush up on my Shakespeare.”

“That reminds me—the name of his son. You said it was Jonny, I think?”

“Short for Jonathan, yes. Why?”

“The first time I met him, he seemed to be trying to explain himself to me and Dean Gardner, and he said something about vanity, and Absalom, and he also said that David loved Jonathan.”

“Odd. Isn’t it Jonathan who loved David?”

That’s what the dean said. He seemed to think it was very unusual for Erasmus to change a text.“ Although, come to think of it, he had done so again that day. Surely the Lewis Carroll poem told us, Speak roughly to your little boy?

“I’m sorry, but I find it difficult to imagine a fool who is so structured in his utterances.”

“Imagine it. But if as you say his son was named Jonathan, then perhaps he was trying to tell us that he believes his ‘vanity’ led to the death of his son. That’s very close to what you’ve just told me, which proves that he can communicate,- he can even change his quotations if he wants to badly enough.”

“Oh dear. I’m afraid I’m getting too old for this kind of mental gymnastics. I shall have to think about what you’ve told me.

“That’s fine,- there’s nothing more you can do now, anyway. You have my number, if you think of anything. Thanks again for your help. I’ll let myself out.”

♦

SIXTEEN

♦

He suffered fools gladly.

It was dark outside but still clear. Kate got into her car and drove to the Hall of Justice. By the time she arrived, her bladder was nearly bursting from the cups of tea she’d drunk, and she sprinted for the nearest toilet before making her way more slowly to her office, the coffeepot, and the telephone. It was Saturday night, although early yet; business would pick up soon. Her first phone call was to her own number.

“Jon? Kate. I’m going to be stuck at the office for a while. I hope not too long, but don’t hold dinner. Oh, you didn’t, good. Are you going out? Well, if you decide to, give me a ring and let me know who’s there instead, okay? Thanks. Oh, I hope not more than a couple of hours, maybe less. Fine. Right. Bye.”

Then the computer terminal and the other telephone calls, and when Al called with Kenning’s brother-in-law’s (not brother,- Al, unusually, had gotten it wrong) name and home number, she called through to the Chicago police, found that the man was on duty the next morning, and decided that little would be gained by bothering him at home on a Saturday night. There was no trace of David Sawyer on the records— hardly surprising, since David Sawyer had virtually ceased to exist a decade before.

There was not much more she could do tonight, so she gathered her coat and made her way to the elevators, deaf to the ringing telephones and shouts and the scurry of activity. She stepped aside when the doors of the elevator opened and two detectives came out, each holding one elbow of a small Oriental man in handcuffs, with dried blood on his shirt and a monotonous string of tired curses coming from his bruised mouth.

“Another Saturday night,” she said as she slipped through the closing doors.

“And I ain’t got nobody,” sang the detective on the man’s left arm. The doors closed on the rest of the song.

Outside, in the parking lot, Kate was seized by a feeling of restlessness. She should go directly home, five minutes away, let Jon have his evening out, but she’d told him two hours, and it had been barely forty minutes. Time for a brief drive, out to the park.

Erasmus—Sawyer—no, Erasmus—habitually spent Saturday with tourists and then Sunday in the park, roughly four miles away. Did he walk? Was he already in the park now, bedded down beneath some tree? Where did he keep his stash, his bedroll and clothing, the small gym bag Dean Gardner had fetched from the CDSP rooms and which had been returned (with its contents of blue jeans, flannel shirt, bar of soap, threadbare towel, and three books) when Erasmus had been turned loose after making what could only loosely be called his statement?

Kate got into her car and turned, not north to home but west into the city. She drove past the high-rise hotels and department stores and the pulsing neon bars and busy theaters into the more residential areas with their Chinese and Italian restaurants and movie theaters, the pet stores and furniture showrooms closed or closing, until she came to the dark oasis that was Golden Gate Park.

The park held over a thousand acres of trees, flowers, lawn, and lakes, coaxed out of bare sand in painful stages over patient decades, wrenched from the gold-rush squatters in the 1850s and now returning to their spiritual descendants a century and a half later, for despite the combined efforts of police and social services and parks department bulldozers, a large number of men and women regarded the park as home.

Kate drove slowly down Stanyan Street and along Lincoln Way, cruising for street people who were not yet in their beds. At Ninth Avenue, a trio of lumpy men carrying bedrolls leaned into one another and drifted toward the park. She turned in, got out of her car, and waited for them under a streetlight.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. Astonished, and suspicious, they stumbled to a halt, eyeing her. “I’m looking for Brother Erasmus. Have you see him?”

“She’s a cop,” one of them said. “I seen her before.”

Kate reached into her pocket and drew out a five-dollar bill that she’d put there a minute before. She folded it in half lengthwise and ran it crisply through her fingers. “I just hoped to talk with him tonight. I know he’s usually here in the morning, but it would save me some time, you understand.”

“ ‘S tomorrow Sunday?” asked the second man, with the slurred precision of the very drunk. The others ignored him.

“He don’t come on Sa’day,” stated the third man. “You have to wait.”

“Do you know where he is tonight?”

“He’s not here.”

“How do you know?”

“Never is.”

Kate had to be content with that. They hadn’t told her anything, but she gave them the five dollars anyway and left them arguing over what to do with it, spend it now or save it until tomorrow. All three had looked to be in their sixties but were probably barely fifty. She turned to look at them over the top of her car, three drunk men haggling in slow motion over a scrap of paper that represented an evening’s supply of cheap wine.

“Where did you serve?” she called on impulse. They looked up at her, blinking. The third man drew himself up and made an attempt at squaring his shoulders.

“Quang Tri Province mostly. Tony was in Saigon for a while.”

“Well, good luck to you, boys. Keep warm.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” The other two men automatically echoed his thanks, and she got into her car and turned around and reentered the traffic on Lincoln Way.

In the next twenty minutes, she gave away another fifteen dollars and got more or less the same answer from a woman with darting eyes who pulled continuously at her raw lips with the fingers of her left hand,- from a sardonic, sober elderly gentleman who would not approach close enough to take the contribution from her hand but who picked it up from the park bench with a small bow once she had retreated,- and from the monosyllabic Doc, whom she recognized from the initial interviews.

Satisfied, she left the park, intending to go home but then finding herself detouring, taking a route slightly north of the direct one, and finally finding herself in front of the brick bulk of Ghirardelli Square, still lighted up and busy with Saturday night shoppers. Oh well, she was nearly home,- she would only be a little late.

There were four shops that Erasmus might have slipped into that afternoon, plus two blank and locked doors and a stairway up to the main level of shops. Two of the shopkeepers had at the time seemed merely harassed and innocent on a busy afternoon, one of them had been with a woman who was contemplating an expensive purchase and had not seemed the sort to shelter an escaped fool, but the fourth— Kate thought that she would have another word with the fourth shopkeeper, smiling behind his display of magic tricks and stuffed animals.

She parked beneath the NO PARKING sign in front of the shop and strolled in, her hands in her pockets. The man recognized her instantly,- this time his amusement seemed a bit forced, and he was flustered as he made change for the woman who was buying a stuffed pig complete with six snap-on piglets. Kate stood perusing the display of magic tricks until the customer left and he was finally forced to come over to her.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked.

“I’m interested in disappearing tricks,” she said. She picked up a trick plastic ice cube that had a fly embedded in it, studying it carefully. “I had something large disappear, right in front of me. I’d like to know how it was done. I know that magicians don’t like to tell their secrets, but”—she put down the joke ice cube, and leaned forward—“I would really like to know.”

As she’d thought, he folded immediately. “I—I’m really sorry about that,- I didn’t know—I mean, I could tell you were a cop, but I thought you were just hassling him. They do it, to the street artists and stuff, and he’s such a harmless old guy, I just thought it was a joke when he came shooting in here and held his finger in front of his mouth and then ducked behind the curtain.”

So he’d been standing there less than ten feet away. Hell. She went and looked at the small, crowded storage space. He sure wasn’t there now.

“How did he know this was here?”

“He comes here every week. Oh yeah, I sell him things sometimes, magic stuff—you know, scarves and folding bouquets, that sort of thing. He changes clothes here and leaves his stuff in the back while he’s working. I don’t mind. I mean, he’s not that great a customer, never spends much money, but he’s such a sweet old guy, I never minded. What did you want him for?”

“Did he go out through the back?”

“Yes, that door connects with a service entrance. I let him out after you’d gone.”

“Did he leave anything here?”

“He usually does,- he changes out of his costume and leaves it here, but this time he was in a hurry. He just wiped the makeup off his face, took his coat out of the bag and changed his shoes, and took the bag with him.”

“Well, all I can say is, don’t complain about crime in the streets if a cop asks for your help and you just laugh in her face.”

“What did he do?” the man wailed, but Kate walked out of the shop and drove off.

When she got home to Russian Hill, Lee had gone to bed, Jon was sulking over a movie, and her dinner was crisp where it should have been soft, and limp where it had started crisp. However, she consoled herself with the idea that at least she knew how Brother Erasmus avoided carrying his gear all over the city with him.

♦

SEVENTEEN

♦

There was never a man who looked into those

brown burning eyes without being certain that

Francis Bernardone was really interested in him.

For the first time since he had come to San Francisco, Brother Erasmus did not appear on Sunday morning to preach to his flock of society’s offscourings, to lead them in prayer and song and listen to their problems and bring them a degree of cheer and faith in themselves. The men and women waited for some time for him in the meeting place near the Nineteenth Avenue park entrance, but he did not show up, and they drifted off, singly and in pairs, giving wide berth to two newcomers, healthy-looking young men wearing suitably bedraggled clothes but smelling of soap and shaving cream.

At two in the afternoon, Kate called Al Hawkin. “I think he’s gone, Al,” she told him. “Raul just called,- he and Rodriguez hung around until noon and there was no sign of him. All the park people expected him to show,- nobody knows where he might be. Do you want to put out an APB on him?”

“And if they bring him in, what do we do with him? We couldn’t even charge him with littering at this point. Unless you want to put him on a fifty-one-fifty.”

“No,” she said without hesitation. Putting Sawyer on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold would keep him in hand, but it would also open the door wide for an insanity plea, if they did decide to charge him. Beyond that, though, was a personal revulsion: Kate did not wish to see Brother Erasmus slapped into a psychiatric ward without a very good reason. Damn it, why did he have to disappear?

“It may come to that, but let’s give it another twenty-four hours.”

“Okay. And, Al? I talked to the guy in Chicago, he’s going to fax us some records when he can dig them out. And before that, on my way in, I stopped by and talked with that antique-store owner Beatrice told me about.” She reviewed that conversation for him, the trim woman in her fifties who had seemed mildly disturbed by her occasional lover’s death, but mostly embarrassed, both by the affair’s becoming public knowledge and by how little she actually knew about the man: He was not one for pillow talk, it seemed. She did say that he had a fondness for boastful stories about an unlikely and affluent past, which she dismissed, and a habit of denigrating the persons and personalities of others, often to their faces.

“Which is pretty much what we’ve heard already.”

“I know. Well, I’ll let you know if the Chicago information comes in. Talk to you later.”

“Look, Martinelli? Don’t get too hooked on this. You don’t have anything to prove.” There was silence on the line for a long time. “It’s Sunday,” he said. “Go home. Work in the garden. Take Lee for a drive. Don’t let it get to you, or you’ll never make it. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ bullshit,” he snapped. “I don’t want to work with someone who obsesses about their cases.”

“All” Kate started laughing,- she couldn’t help it. “You’re a fine one to talk about being obsessive. What are you doing right now? What did I interrupt?”

His silence was not as long as hers had been, but it was eloquent.

“Look, Martinelli,” he said firmly, “that Brancusi case doesn’t look good, and there’s a lot hanging on my testimony tomorrow. I don’t think you can call that obsessive. I’m just doing my job. I only meant—”

“Go work in your garden, Al. Go for a walk on the beach, why don’t you? Go to a movie, Al, there’s a—”

He hung up on her. She put the receiver down, still grinning, and went home to pry some weeds out of the patio bricks.

♦

Monday morning, Al was in court and Kate was in Golden Gate Park. While Al was being dragged back and forth over the rougher parts of his testimony, Kate walked up and down and talked with people. She ignored the women with shiny strollers and designer toddlers, the couples soaking up winter sun on spread blankets, the skaters and bikers, and anyone with a picnic. The homeless are identified by the mistrust in their eyes, and Kate rarely chose wrong.

She talked with Molly, a seventy-one-year-old ex-secretary who lived off a minute pension and spent her nights behind an apartment house in the shelter that covered the residents’ garbage cans. Some of them left her packets of food, she’d received a blue wool coat and a nice blanket for Christmas, and yes, she knew Brother Erasmus quite well, such a nice man, and what a disappointment he wasn’t at the service yesterday. A couple of the others had tried to lead hymns, but it just wasn’t the same, so in the end she’d just marched down the road and gone to a Catholic church, although she hadn’t been to a church in twenty years, and it was quite a pleasant experience. Everyone had been so nice to her, welcomed her to have coffee and cookies afterward, and what do you know, as she got to talking to one of the girls who was serving the coffee, it turned out that they needed some help in the office, just three or four hours a week, but wasn’t that a happy coincidence. It’d mean she could buy a real dinner sometimes, such a blessing, dear.

Then Kate talked with Star, a frail young woman with the freckles of childhood across her nose and a curly-haired four-year-old son who leaned on his mother’s knee as she sat on the bench, his thumb in his mouth and his eyes darting between Kate and the hillside behind them, where three small children in Osh-Kosh overalls and European shoes giggled madly as they lowered themselves to the ground and rolled, over and over, down the lawn. Star’s hair was lank and greasy and she had a cold sore on her mouth, but her son’s hair shone in the wintery sun and he wore a bright jacket. Star had lived on the streets since her parents in Wichita had thrown her out when she was four months pregnant. Her son Jesse had been born in California. Her AFDC was screwed up,- the checks didn’t come. So they’d been in shelters the last few weeks. Yeah, she knew Erasmus. Funny old guy. At first she stayed away from him, thought he was weird. After all, an old guy who wants to give a kid a toy, a person has to be careful. But after a while he seemed okay. And he was really good with Jesse. He gave him a party for his birthday back in November, a cake for God’s sake, with his name on it, big enough for everyone in the shelter. And last month when Jesse had a really bad cough, it was just after the AFDC screwup, Brother Erasmus had just handed her some money and told her to take Jesse to the doctor’s. Well no, he hadn’t said it like that,- he talks funny, kind of old-fashioned like. But he had said something about doctors, and it was a good thing they went, because it was pneumonia. Jesse could have died. And she was sorry Erasmus wasn’t here yesterday, because she had wanted to talk to him. It was sort of an anniversary—a whole year she’d been clean now. Yeah, she didn’t want Jesse growing up with a junkie for a mom. And what if she went to jail—what’d happen to him? And there was a training program she thought she might start, wanted to talk to Erasmus about it. Well no, he didn’t really give advice, just sometimes in a roundabout way, but talking to him made things clearer. Yeah, maybe she’d sign up anyway, tell him about it next week.

Star was seventeen years old.

Kate saw her three army buddies from the other night, two of them lying back on their elbows in the grass with their shirts off, the third one curled up nearby, asleep. Yes, they had missed Erasmus yesterday, especially Tony. He got really wild when the Brother didn’t show, started shouting that the old guy’d been taken prisoner, that they had to send a patrol out to get him back. “Stupid bastard,” commented the veteran with the collar-to-wrist tattoos, not without affection. The other one shrugged. Nightmares last night, too, and now there he was, sleeping like a baby. Maybe it was time to head south. Not so cold in the south, get some work in the orange groves. If she saw the old Brother, tell him the infantry said hi.

She looked down at the sleeping Tony as she turned to go. His coat collar had slipped down. Behind his right ear, a patch of scalp the size of Kate’s palm gleamed, scar tissue beneath the sparse black hair.

Mark was next, a beautiful surfer boy, lean tan body with long blond curls. Kate wondered what the hell he was doing still loose, but there he was, looking lost beneath the bare pollarded trees in front of the music concourse. Sure, he knew Brother Erasmus. Brother Erasmus was one of the twelve holy men whose presence on earth kept the waves of destruction from sweeping over the land. Every so often one of them would die, and then a war would break out until he was reborn. Or a plague. Maybe an earthquake.

Then there were Tomas and Esmerelda, standing and watching the lawn bowling. They were holding hands surreptitiously. Esmerelda’s belly rose up firm and round beneath her coat, and she did not look well. St, they knew who Padre Erasmus was. No, they hadn’t seen him. St, they had an enormous respect for the padre. He wasn’t like other padres. He had married them. Si, verdad, an actual ceremony. Yes with papers. Did she want to see them? Here they were. No, of course they had not filed them. They could not do that. Tomas had been married before, and there was no divorce in the Catholic Church. St, the padre knew this. But this was the real marriage. This one was true. And to prove it, Tomas had a job—working nights. And they had a house to move into on Wednesday. Small, an apartment, but with a roof to keep out the rain and a door to lock out the crazy people and the addicts and thieves, and there was a stove to cook on and a bed for Esmerelda. Tomas would work hard. If it was a boy, they would name it Erasmo.

Three of the men she talked with would not give her their names, but they all knew Erasmus. The first one, shirtless on a bench, his huge muscles identifying him as recently released from prison even if his demeanor hadn’t, knew her instantly as a cop and wouldn’t look at her. However, his hard face softened for an instant when she mentioned the name Erasmus. The second man, hearing the name, immediately launched into a description of how he’d seen Erasmus one night standing on Strawberry Hill, glowing with a light that grew stronger and stronger until it hurt the eyes, and then he’d disappeared, a little at a time. Kate excused herself and walked briskly away, muttering, “Beam me up, Scotty” under her breath. The third man knew Erasmus, didn’t like her asking questions about him, and was working himself up into belligerence. Kate, unhampered by bedrolls and bulging bags, slipped away, deciding to stick to women for a while.

♦

“They love him.” Kate threw her notebook down on the desk and dropped into the nearest chair. Her feet hurt,- her throat ached: Maybe she was coming down with the flu.

Al Hawkin pulled off his glasses and looked at her. “Who loves whom?”

“The people in the park. I feel like I’m about to book Mother Teresa. He listens to them. He changes their lives. They’re going to name their kids after him. Saint Erasmus. God!” She ran her fingers through her hair, kicked off her shoes, walked over to the coffee machine, came back with a cup, and sat down again. “Hi, Al. How’d it go in court?”

“The jury wasn’t happy with it. I think they’ll acquit. The bastard’s going to walk.” Domenico Brancusi ran a string of very young prostitutes, a specialty service that circled the Bay Area and had made him very rich. He was also very careful, and when one of his girls died—an eleven-year-old whose ribs were more prominent than her breasts—he had proven to be about as vulnerable as an armadillo.

“I’m sorry, Al.”

“American justice, don’t you just love it. I was looking at the stuff your friend in Chicago sent.”

“Did it come? Was there anything?”

“Two blots on Saint Erasmus’s past. A DUI when he was twenty-five—forty seven years ago—and then ten years later he plead guilty to assault, got a year of parole and a hundred hours of community service.”

“Any details?”

“Not many. It looks like what he did was pick up a chair in a classroom and try to brain somebody with it. They were having an argument—a debate in front of a class—and it got out of hand. The gentle life of the mind,” he commented sardonically.

“Damn the man, anyway,” she growled. “Why the hell did he have to run off like that?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“Why did he run?”

“Oh Christ, Al, you’re not going to go all Sherlock Holmes on me, are you? The dog did nothing in the night,” she protests. “Precisely,” says he mysteriously.“

“You are in a good mood, aren’t you?” observed Hawkin. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“Now you sound like my mother. Yes, I had a couple of hot dogs from the stand in the park.”

“There’s the problem. You’ve got nitrates eating your brain cells.”

“Since when do you care about nitrates? You live off the things.”

“No more.” He placed one hand on his chest. “I am pure.”

“First cigarettes and now junk food? That Jani’s a powerful woman.”

Al Hawkin stood up and lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. “Come on, Martinelli,” he said. “I’ll buy you a sandwich and you can tell me about the Brother Erasmus fan club.”

♦

EIGHTEEN

♦

Some might call him a madman, hut he was the very reverse of a dreamer.

It was now two weeks since John had been killed, thirteen days since his funeral pyre had been lighted, and Kate woke that Tuesday morning knowing that her case consisted of a number of details concerning a fine lot of characters, but the only link any of it had was a person she would much prefer to see out of it entirely.

Kate had been a cop long enough to know that likable people can be villains, that personality and charisma are, if anything, more likely to be found attached to the perpetrator than the victim. She liked people,- she sent them to jail: no problem.

But damn it, Erasmus was different. She could not shake the image of him as a priest, but it wasn’t even as simple as that. She had, in fact, once arrested a Roman Catholic priest, with only the mildest hesitation and no regrets afterward. No, there was something about Erasmus—what it was, she could not grasp, could not even begin to articulate, but it was there, a deep distaste of the idea of putting him behind bars. She would do her job, and if necessary she would pursue his arrest to the full extent of her abilities, but lying in bed that Tuesday morning she was aware of the conviction that she would never fully believe the man’s guilt.

Well, Kate, she said to herself, you’ll just have to dig deeper until you find somebody else to hang it on. And with that decision, she threw back the covers and went to face the day.

Her hopeful determination, however, did not last the morning. When she arrived at the Hall of Justice she found two notes under the message clip on her desk. The first was in Al Hawkin’s scrawl, and read:

Martinelli, you’re on your own again today, I’m taking Tom’s appointment with the DA. Back at noon, with any luck.

—Al

The other had been left by the night Field Ops officer:

Insp. Martinelli—3:09 AM., Tuesday. See the woman 982 29th Ave., after 11:00 A.M. today. Info, re the cremation.

At five minutes after eleven, Kate was on Twenty-ninth Avenue, looking at a row of pale two-story stucco houses with never-used balconies and perfunctory lawns. Number 982, unlike most of its neighbors, did not have a metal security gate in front of the entrance. It did have a healthy-looking tree in a Chinese glazed pot sitting on the edge of the tiled portico. When she pressed the doorbell, a small dog barked inside, twice. She heard movement—a door opening and a vague scuffle of footsteps above the noise of traffic. The sound stopped, and Kate felt a gaze from the peephole in the door. Bolts worked and the door opened, to reveal a slim woman slightly taller than Kate, her graying blond hair standing on end, her athletic-looking body wrapped in a maroon terrycloth bathrobe many sizes too large for her. Kate held out her identification in front of the woman’s bleary eyes, which were set in rounds of startlingly pale skin surrounded by a ruddy wind-roughened forehead and cheeks. Ski goggles, Kate diagnosed.

“Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. I received a message that you have information pertaining to the cremation that occurred in Golden Gate Park two weeks ago. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

“Oh no, no. I was up. The friend who was watching my dog just brought her back. Come on in. Would you like some coffee? It’s fresh.” She turned and scuffled away down the hallway, leaving Kate to shut the door.

“No thank you, Ms… ?”

“Didn’t I leave my name? No, maybe I didn’t. I’m Sam Rutlidge. This is Dobie,” she added as they entered the kitchen. “Short for Doberman.”

Doberman was a dachshund. She sniffed Kate’s shoes and ankles enthusiastically and wagged her whip of a tail into a blur, but she neither jumped up and down nor yapped. When Kate reached a hand down, Dobie pushed against it like a cat with her firm, supple body, gave Kate a brief lick with her tongue, and then went to lie in a basket on the lowest shelf of a built-in bookshelf, surrounded by cookbooks. Her dark eyes glittered as she watched them.

“That’s the calmest dachshund I’ve ever seen,” said Kate.

“Just well trained. Sure you won’t have some?” She held out the pot from the coffeemaker. It smelled very good.

“I will change my mind, thanks.”

“Black okay? There isn’t any milk in the house, none that you’d want to drink, anyway.”

“Black is fine. Do I understand that you’ve been away, Ms. Rutlidge?”

“skiing. I’ve been in Tahoe for the last couple of weeks, I got back after midnight last night. It was stupid to call at that hour, I guess, but somehow you don’t think of the police department as working nine to five.”

“The department works twenty-four hours. Some of us are allowed to sleep occasionally. How did you hear about the cremation?”

“I was reading the papers. I’m always so wired when I get in after a long drive, especially at night, there’s no point in going to bed, since I just stare at the ceiling. I make myself some hot milk, soak in the bath, read for a while, just give myself a chance to stop vibrating, you know? So anyway, I went through my mail and then started leafing through the newspapers—the neighbor brings them in for me—and I saw that article about the body being burned, the day I left.”

“You left for Lake Tahoe on the Wednesday?”

“Early Wednesday. I like to get out of the Bay Area before the traffic gets too thick.”

“You didn’t see any news while you were at Tahoe?”

“I was too busy.”

“So you read about it at—what, one or two this morning?”

“About then. Maybe closer to three.”

“What made you think to call us?”

“Well, the first papers were really general, and aside from the fact that it was so close to here, I didn’t really think about it. I mean, I don’t know any homeless people.”

Kate made some encouraging noise.

“Then for a couple of days, there wasn’t anything, or if there was, I didn’t see it—I wasn’t reading very carefully. Then on Monday, there was another article, with a picture, and as soon as I saw the man, it all came back to me.”

“Which man was this?”

In answer, the woman stood up and went out of the room. The dog raised her sleek head from her paws and stared at the door, attentive but not concerned, until Sam Rutlidge came back with a section of the paper, folded back to a photograph. She laid it on the table in front of Kate and tapped her finger on the bearded man who was standing on a lawn in front of about twenty other men and women, reading from a book.

“Him. I saw him coming out of the park, not far from the place where they… burned the body the following morning. I saw him Tuesday morning. And he seemed really upset.”

“What time was this?”

“About quarter to ten. I had an ten o’clock appointment and I was running late because of a phone call, so I was in a hurry. I usually go up a block to the signal or down to Twenty-fifth to get onto Fulton, but I was in such a rush and it would’ve meant turning the car around and there was a truck down the block, so I just went straight down to Fulton and turned left as soon as I could.” She glanced uncomfortably at Kate the defender of law and order. “I’m a careful driver,- I’ve never had a ticket. Looking back, I know how stupid it was, to shove my way in when the traffic was thick and the pavement was wet from the fog, but as I said, I was in a hurry and not thinking straight. I cut it kind of close, and one of the cars slammed on its brakes and honked at me as I moved through his lane to the outside lane.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “I’m not with the traffic division.”

“Yes, well. It was stupid. I wouldn’t have hit the car, but I did scare him, and he went past, shaking his fist out the window at me. And then I saw that man.” She pointed toward the newspaper. “I noticed him because he seemed to be shaking his fist at me, too, but as I went by, I could tell he wasn’t even looking at me. He’d have had to turn his head to see my car, and he hadn’t; he was looking straight ahead.”

“What was he looking at?”

“Nothing, as far as I could tell. He was coming out of the park on one of the paths, not quite to the pavement, and he was holding that big stick of his, shaking it, sort of punching it into the air as he walked along.”

“You’d seen him before?”

“Oh yes, he’s a regular in the park. We call him ‘the Preacher.”“

“ ‘We’ being…”

“There’s a group of us who run three times a week and then go for coffee. We tend to see the same people.”

“Did you ever talk with him?”

“The Preacher? Not really. He’d nod and wave and one of us would call hi, but nothing more. He struck me as kind of shy. Always neat and clean, and polite. Which is why it was so odd to see him behaving that way. I mean, some of the street people are really out of it,- they really should be on medication, if not hospitalized. Of course, thanks to Reagan, we don’t have any hospitals for the marginally insane, only for the totally berserk. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

“Would you mind showing me just where you saw him?”

“Sure, I need to take Dobie for a walk, anyway. Just let me get some clothes on. Help yourself to more coffee. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

It was with some irritation that Kate heard a shower start, but Sam Rutlidge was as good as her word, and in barely seven minutes she came back into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a UCSF sweatshirt, her wet hair slicked back and a pair of worn running shoes in her hand.

“Sorry to be so long,” she said, dropping onto a chair to put on her shoes. “I hate getting dressed without having a shower first. Makes me feel too grungy for words.”

“No problem. Dobie’s a good conversationalist.”

Dobie had, in fact, only eyed her closely. Now, however, she emerged from her basket and went to stand at her owner’s feet, tail whipping with enthusiasm. When the woman rose, the dog turned and galloped like a clumsy weasel down the hallway to the front door. Rutlidge put on a jacket and took down a thin lead to clip to Dobie’s collar, and down the steps they went.

They walked down to Fulton, where Rutlidge paused and pointed.

“I turned onto the road here,” she said. “Moved over into the right lane, the other driver accelerated to pass me, and then I saw the Preacher. Just about where that crooked ‘No Parking’ sign is. See it? He was walking toward the road at an angle, as if he was headed to Park Presidio.”

“Was he carrying anything other than his staff?”

“Not that I saw, but then I couldn’t see his right hand, just his left, and that was holding his stick.”

“What was he wearing?”

Sam Rutlidge wrinkled up her forehead in thought while Dobie whined restlessly. “A coat, brownish, I think. It came almost to his knees. Some dark pants, not jeans, I don’t think. Dark brown or black, maybe. And he had a knit hat, one of those ones that fit close against the skull. That was dark, too. I only saw him for about two or three seconds. I don’t think I’d have given him a second glance if it hadn’t been that his anger was so obvious—and uncharacteristic.”

“Okay. Thank you, Ms. Rutlidge, you’ve been very helpful,” said Kate, polite but careful not to appear overly enthusiastic or grateful. “I’ll need you to sign your statement when I get it drawn up. Could you come by and sign it?”

“Tomorrow’s not very good. I’ll have a long day at work.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a technical writer. Boring, but the pay is good. Do you want my number there? You can call me and arrange a time to meet?” They exchanged telephone numbers and then Rutlidge and her small sleek dog turned right toward the signal where Thirtieth crossed into the park, while Kate walked to the left until she was across the street from the point where the dirt path met the paved sidewalk, marked by a post with a crooked NO PARKING sign. There was no need to cross the road and follow the path through the trees, no need to look for scraps of yellow on the trees. She knew where she was. She stood looking at the park, at the path along which an angry Brother Erasmus had stormed on a Tuesday morning two weeks ago, leaving behind him the area that, twenty hours later, would be surrounded by great lengths of police tapes. Behind those bushes, sometime that morning, John the nameless had lain, bleeding into the soil until the life was gone from him.

She walked back to her car and set into motion the process of obtaining a warrant for the arrest of one David Matthew Sawyer, aka Brother Erasmus, for the murder of John Doe.

♦

NINETEEN

♦

… The valley of humiliation, which seemed to him

very rocky and desolate, hut in which he was

afterwards to find many flowers.

They picked him up near Barstow.

Two sheriff’s deputies spotted him less than a hundred miles from the Arizona border, walking due east along the snow-sprinkled side of Highway 58, barely twenty-four hours after the APB went out on him. They recognized him by the walking stick he used, as tall as himself and with a head carved on the top. He did not seem surprised when they got out of their car and demanded that he spread-eagle on the ground. He did not resist arrest. Besides his staff, he was carrying only a threadbare knapsack that held some warm clothes, a blanket, bread and cheese and a plastic bottle of water, and two books.

He seemed to the sheriff deputies, and to everyone who came in contact with him, a polite, untroubled, intelligent, and silent old man. In fact, so smiling and silent was he that the sheriff himself, on the phone to arrange transportation for the prisoner, asked Kate if the description had neglected to say that Erasmus was a mute.

The Sheriff’s Department already had a scheduled pickup to make in San Francisco, and in light of the state budget and in the spirit of fiscal responsibility, they agreed to take Erasmus north with them. Kate was there to receive him when he was brought in Thursday night, even through it was nearly midnight. He spotted her across the room, nodded and smiled as at an old friend one hasn’t seen in a day or two, and then turned back to the actions of his attendants, watching curiously as they processed his paperwork and transferred the custody of his person and his possessions to the hands of the San Francisco Police Department. Brother Erasmus was now in the maw of Justice, and there was not much any of them could do about it.

When the preliminaries were over and he was parked on a bench awaiting the next stage, Kate went over and pulled a chair up in front of him. He was wearing the clothes he had been picked up in, minus the walking stick, and she studied him for a minute.

She had seen this man in various guises. When she first met him, he had appeared as a priest, wearing an impressive black cassock and a light English accent. Among the tourists, he had dressed almost like one of them, a troubling jester who did not quite fit into his middle-class clothing or his mid-western voice. When ministering (there was no other word for it) to the homeless, he had looked destitute, his knee-length duffel coat lumpy with the possessions stashed in its pockets, watch cap pulled down over his grizzled head, sentences short, voice gruff.

Tonight she was seeing a fourth David Sawyer. This one was an ordinary-looking older man in jeans and worn hiking boots, fraying blue shirt collar visible at the neck of his new-looking thick hand-knit sweater of heathery red wool, lines of exhaustion pulling at his face and turning his thin cheeks gaunt. (He did not, she noted absently, have a scar below his left eye from the removal of a tattoo.) He sat on the hard bench, his head back against the wall, and looked back at her out of the bottom half of his eyes, waiting. After a moment, he shifted his arms to ease the drag of the metal cuffs biting into his bony wrists, and she was suddenly taken by a memory of their first confrontation. He had held out his wrists to be cuffed, and now she had cuffed him, just sixteen days after the murder had been committed.

There was no pleasure in the sight.

“Your name is David Sawyer,” she said to him. There was no reaction in his face or in his body, just a resigned endurance—and, perhaps, just the faintest spark of humor behind it. “Eve Whitlaw told us who you are, and we’ve been in touch with the police in Chicago. They told us what happened back there, Professor Sawyer. We know all about what Kyle Roberts did.”

This last brought a response, but not an expected one. The flicker of humor in the back of his eyes blossomed into a play of amusement over his worn features and one eyebrow raised slightly. Had he said it in words, he could not have expressed any more clearly the dry admiration that she could fully comprehend all the complexities of that long-ago incident. Within two seconds, the eloquent expression had gone, and all traces of humor with it. He looked tired and rather ill.

“Look not mournfully into the past,” he said softly. Hell, she thought, disappointed. She’d been hoping, since seeing him, that this current, rather ordinary manifestation of Sawyer/Erasmus might have regained the power of ordinary speech, but it didn’t seem to work that way.

“I have to look into the past, David,” she said, using his first name in a deliberate bid for familiarity. “I can’t do that without asking questions about the past.”

“Not every question deserves an answer.”

“I think tomorrow, when Inspector Hawkin and I talk with you, we will ask some questions that not only deserve an answer but demand it. We are talking about a human life, David. Even if he wasn’t a very pleasant person, which I have heard he wasn’t, the questions deserve an answer.”

“Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

“You knew it was murder from the first time I laid eyes on you, didn’t you, David? How was that? No, no, don’t answer that, not tonight,” she said quickly, although there was no sign that he was about to respond, not even a flash of fear at being trapped into an admission. She wasn’t about to lay the groundwork for his defense lawyer to claim she had badgered him into giving inadmissible evidence.

That reminded her: “Are you going to want a lawyer present while you are being questioned, David? We will provide you with one if you want.”

He had to search his memory for a moment, but eventually he came up with an answer, spoken with a small conspiratorial smile that was nearly a wink of the eye. “There are no lawyers among them, for they consider them a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.”

“I guess that’s a no. Okay. Let us know if you change your mind.” She stood up, and his eyes followed her, though his head had not moved from the wall during their conversation. “I will see you tomorrow, then. I hope you get some sleep tonight.” This last was intended merely as a wry comment and unspoken apology for the racket of the place, but it served only to draw the man’s attention to his surroundings, and for the first time he looked about him. His gaze traveled over the tired walls, the loud, bored policeman, the drunk and belligerent and bloody prisoners, and he shuddered,- the whole length of him gave way to a deep shiver of revulsion, and then he shut his eyes and seemed to withdraw. Kate stood up and caught the eye of the guard to nod her thanks and signal that she had finished with this prisoner, but before she could move away, she heard Sawyer’s voice, speaking quietly, as if to himself, but very firmly.

“Go and sit in thy cell,” he said, “and thy cell shall teach thee all things.”

Kate gaped at him, but his eyes remained shut, so in the end she threw up her hands and took herself home to her own unquiet bed.

♦

TWENTY

♦

Men like Francis are not common in any age, nor

are they to be fully understood merely by the

exercise of common sense.

The interrogation, if it could be called that, began the next morning, the last Friday in February. Of the three of them gathered in the stuffy room, Al Hawkin was the only one who looked as if he had slept, and even he came shambling down the corridor like an irritable bear. He did not like having his hand forced, he did not like arresting someone with less than an airtight case, and most of all he did not like jousting on the way in with reporters who treated the whole thing as something of a joke.

“Christ, Martinelli, were you in such a hurry to see him that you couldn’t have arranged for the sheriffs to have car trouble or something? We’ve only found two of his hidey-holes, don’t even have the warrants for them yet, and I’m supposed to conduct an interrogation on the strength of his being in the neighborhood at the time the victim was bashed? And to put the frosting on the whole absurd thing, the victim’s still a John Doe! Give me strength,” he prayed to the room in general, and walked over to fight with the coffee machine.

“What was I to do?” she demanded. “He would have been in Florida by next week, or Mexico City.”

“Of course we had to have him brought in. Just maybe not quite so fast.”

Stung by the unreasonableness of Hawkin’s demands, Kate stalked off to call for the transport of Erasmus from cell to interrogation room.

So the three of them came together for the second time, Kate sulky and sleepless, Sawyer looking every one of his seventy-two years, and Hawkin so perversely cheerful, he seemed to be baring his teeth.

This was to be an interrogation, unlike the earlier noncommittal interview. An interview might be considered the polite turning of memory’s pages. Today the purpose was to rifle the pages down to the spine, to shake the book sharply and see what might drift to the floor. Politely, of course, and well within the legal limits—the tape recorder on the table ensured that—but their sleeves were metaphorically rolled back for the job. The only problem was, the process assumes that the suspect being interrogated is to some degree willing to cooperate.

Kate, as had been agreed, opened the session with the standard words into the tape recorder, giving the time and the people present. Then, because Hawkin wanted it on record, she readvised Sawyer of his rights. The first snag came, as Hawkin had anticipated, when Sawyer sat in silence when asked if he understood his rights. Hawkin was prepared for this, and he sat forward to speak clearly into the microphone.

“It should be noted that Mr. Sawyer has thus far refused to communicate in a direct form of speech. He has the apparently unbreakable habit of speaking in quotations, which often have an unfortunately limited application to the topic being discussed. During the course of this interview, it may occasionally be necessary for the police officers conducting the interview to suggest interpretations for Mr. Sawyer’s words and to note aloud any nonverbal communications he might express.”

Hawkin sat back in his chair and looked at the older man, who nodded his head in appreciation and sat back in his own chair, his long fingers finding one another and intertwining across the front of his ill-fitting jail clothes. Somehow, for some reason, life was slowly leaking back into his mobile face, and as animation returned, the years faded.

“Tell me about Berkeley,” Hawkin began. There was no apparent surprise on the fool’s part at this unexpected question, just the customary moment for thought.

“We shall establish a school of the Lord’s service,” he said, “in which we hope to bring no harsh or burdensome thing.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Hawkin flatly. Sawyer merely twitched a skeptical eyebrow and said nothing. Hawkin’s practiced glare was no match for the older man’s implacable serenity, either, and it was Hawkin who broke the long silence.

“Are you saying you find it restful there?”

“Oh Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

This heartfelt prayer, simply recited by a man who so obviously knew what it was to be tired, gathered up the ugly little room and gave pause to the proceedings. Kate thought, This is why he is so curiously impressive, this man: When he says a thing, he means it down to his bones. Hawkin thought, This man is going to be hell before a jury: They’ll be eating out of his hand. He cleared his throat and pushed down the craving for a cigarette.

“So, you go to Berkeley for a rest. Do you go there regularly?”

There was no answer to this, only patient silence, as if Sawyer had heard nothing and was waiting for Hawkin to ask him the next question.

“Do you have a regular schedule?”

Silence.

“You spend time in San Francisco, too, don’t you? In Golden Gate Park? With the homeless? Why won’t you answer me?”

“Not every question deserves an answer,” he replied repressively. It was one of the few times Kate had heard him repeat himself.

“So you think you can choose what questions you answer and which you won’t. Mr. Sawyer, you have been arrested for the murder of a man in Golden Gate Park. At the moment, the charge is murder in the first degree. That means we believe it was premeditated, that you planned to kill him and did so. If you are convicted of that crime, you will go to prison for a long time. You will grow old in prison, and you will very probably die there, in a room considerably smaller and less comfortable than this one. Do you understand that?” He did not wait for an answer other than the one in Sawyer’s eyes.

“One of the purposes of this interview is to determine whether a lesser charge may be justified. Second-degree murder, even manslaughter, and you might sleep under the trees again before you die. Do you understand what I am saying, Mr. Sawyer? I think you do.

“Now, I don’t know if you planned on killing the man known as John or not. I can’t know that until you tell me what happened. And you can’t tell me until you drop this little game of yours, because the answers aren’t in William Shakespeare or the Bible,- they’re in your head. Let’s get rid of these word games—now, before they get you in real trouble. Just talk in simple English, and tell me what happened.”

There was no doubt that Hawkin’s speech had made an impression on the man, though whether it was the threat or the appeal was not clear. He had sat up straight, his hands grasping his knees, now his eyes closed, he raised his face to the overhead light, and his right hand came up to curl into the hollow of his neck, as if grasping his nonexistent staff. For three or four long, silent minutes he stayed like that, struggling with some unknowable dilemma. When he moved, his hand came up to rub across his eyes and down to pinch his lower lip, then dropped back onto his lap. He opened his eyes first on Kate, then on Hawkin. His expression was apologetic, but without the faintest degree of fear or uncertainty.

“Truth,” he began, “is the cry of all, but the game of the few. There is nothing to prevent you from telling the truth, if you do it with a smile.” He gave them the smile and sat forward on the edge of his chair to gather their attention to him, as if his next words would not have done solely themselves. “Dread death. Dry death. Immortal death. Death on his pale horse.” He paused and held out the long, thin fingers of his right hand. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No. Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. A fugitive and a vagabond shall you be on the earth.” He paused to let them think about this, his eyes going from one face to the other. He drew back his hand and commented in a quiet voice that made the thought parenthetical but intensely personal: “Death is not the worst. Rather, to wish for death in vain, and not to gain it.” After a moment, he sat forward again and held out his left hand, cupped slightly as if to guide in another strand of thought. Putting a definite stress on the misplaced names, he said, “Then David made a covenant with Jonathan, because he loved him as he loved his own soul. And David stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to Jonathan. And then he shall go out to the altar which is before the Lord and make atonement for it. He shall go no more to his house. He shall bear all their iniquities with him into a solitary land. I have been a stranger in a strange land. And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank of the brook. I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool. A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.” He stopped, saw that he had lost them, and pursed his lips in thought. Then, with an air of returning to kindergarten basics, he began again. “The wisdom of this world is folly with God. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise now, let him become a fool so he may become wise. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly clothed and buffeted and homeless. We have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. We are fools for Christ’s sake.”

“So you’re saying you do this as some kind of religious exercise?” Hawkin asked bluntly. Kate couldn’t decide if he was acting stupid to draw Sawyer out or because he was irritated.

“I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”

“Then I guess I must be burning in sin,” snapped Hawkin, “because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Sawyer sat back again with his fingers across his stomach and eyed Hawkin for some time, his head to one side, before making the stern pronouncement, “A living dog is better than a dead lion.” Kate glanced at him sharply and saw a sparkle of mischief in the back of his eyes. He looked sideways at her and lowered one eyelid a fraction. Hawkin did not see the gesture, but he was staring at the man with suspicion.

“What does that mean?” he demanded.

“He who blesses his neighbor in a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing.”

“Look, Mr. Sawyer—”

“Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words.”

“Mr. Sawyer—”

“He who walks with wise men becomes wise, but the companion of fools will come to harm.”

Hawkin stood up abruptly, his face dark. “All right, take him back to the cells—” he began, but he was drowned out by Sawyer’s sudden loud stream of words.

“A whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey, and a rod for the back of fools,” he asserted. “Like a thorn that goes into the hand of a drunkard, is a proverb in the mouth of fools. Like snow in summer or rain at the harvest, honor is not fit for a fool. A man without—”

The door closed behind Al Hawkin, and Sawyer, on his feet now, stood tensely for a moment, then relaxed and smiled at Kate as if the two of them had just shared a clever joke. “A man without self-control,” he said slyly, “is like a city broken into and left with no walls.” He sat down again.

Kate did not smile back at him. “Why do you antagonize people? Al Hawkins a good man. Why make an enemy of him?”

Sawyer shrugged. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes. A fool speaks his whole mind.”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to get you to do, David. Your whole mind, not just the games.”

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.”

She leaned forward, her arms flat on the table. “Do you really take death so lightly?”

“Remember, we all must die.”

“And you honestly think that justifies murder? You?” she said pointedly. “Think that?”

The ghostly presence of Kyle Roberts visited the room, and on the other side stood his innocent victims: Kate saw in the worn face across the table that Sawyer felt them there. He finally broke her gaze, and his throat worked before he answered.

“What greater pain could mortals have than this: to see their children dead before their eyes?”

“You know, I’d have thought that would make you more willing to help us, not less.” He did not answer. “All we want is for you to talk to us. No games, just talk.” Still nothing; but she had not expected a response. Time to end it. “You’re tired, David. Think about it for a while, see if you don’t change your mind. We’ll continue this discussion later.”

Kate stood up, went to the door, and looked on as the guard prepared to take Sawyer back to his cell. The prisoner paused in the doorway, with the guard’s hand on his elbow, and looked down at Kate.

“I well believe thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.” He turned and allowed himself to be led away. She went back into the interrogation room and turned off the tape recorder, then took out the tape and carried it downstairs, where she slid it into the other machine that stood on Hawkins desk and waited while he ran the tape back a short way and listened. Erasmus ranted, the door slammed, Kate’s voice reproved their suspect, he answered her. When the tape clicked, Hawkin switched the machine off.

“Well done. That’s just what I had in mind. We’ll let him stew today. I’ll lead another session tomorrow morning, and then you can take over. Stop by and hold his hand for a few minutes before you go home today, okay?” If you say so.

“I want him softened up. The DA’ll have him sent off for psychiatric evaluation the first part of the week. If we keep him longer than that and then they decide he really is nuts, we’re risking a harassment charge.”

“Is it really necessary, the evaluation?”

“For Christ sake, Martinelli, the DA couldn’t possibly take it to trial without. You heard him in there. He was raving. It may be an act, but after forty-eight hours in custody, it isn’t likely to be drugs or booze.”

“I don’t know, Al. He makes a weird kind of sense.”

“Weird’s the word for it.”

“I mean it. I think I’ll make a copy of that tape, if you don’t mind.”

“Studying it for secret meanings?”

“I thought I might have it translated.”

♦

TWENTY-ONE

♦

But after all, this man was a man.

On Sunday afternoon, Kate assembled her team of translators. They met at the house on Russian Hill to avoid the problem of transporting Lee’s wheelchair up and down stairs. At two o’clock, Kate left the house and drove across a rain-lashed San Francisco to fetch Professor Whitlaw, and when they returned, they found Dean Gardner already ensconced in front of the fire in the living room.

On her trip out, Kate had stopped to photocopy the transcripts of the first two interviews, both the abortive one from Friday morning and the longer but even less productive Saturday session. The one from Sunday morning had not yet been transcribed, but she had the tapes from all three.

Coffee and tea and the preliminary rituals were dispensed and then Kate handed out Friday’s interview. The rain on the windows sounded loud as Lee, the dean, and the professor all dove into the pages with the quick concentration of people who live by the written word, all three with pencil in hand. Kate followed more slowly behind them. She had two pages yet to go when the two academics and then Lee began to discuss what they had read, but since she knew how the story ended, she allowed her stapled sheaf to fall shut.

“I should make a couple of comments about what you’ve read. First, Inspector Hawkin’s abrasiveness was more or less deliberate, and certainly he played it up when Sawyer responded to it. In the first two sessions, the idea was to make me look like a paragon of understanding,- for some reason Erasmus—Sawyer—had already responded to me, and there was a degree of rapport before his arrest.”

“Good heavens,” said the professor. “Do you mean to tell me that isn’t just an invention of the television police dramas? There is even a name for the technique, isn’t there?”

“Good cop, bad cop,” suggested the dean.

“That’s right.”

“We use it a lot,” answered Kate, “though it’s not as simple as it sounds. Perpetrators—the accused—are human beings, and most of them want to be told that they’re not really all that bad. Sympathy is a much more effective tool, whether you’re in an interrogation or in a street confrontation, than swagger and threat. All we did was exaggerate an existing situation to emphasize the contrast and make me appear, frankly, on his side.”

“And was David taken in by this little play, Inspector?”

“Professor Whitlaw, your friend David is a tired, confused seventy-two-year-old man who has been living in a carefully constructed dream for the last ten years. I think he is partially aware that he is being gently manipulated, and I think he is allowing it.

“I want to be up front about this. What I’m looking for is a way of making David Sawyer talk. I could tell you it’s for his own good, I could even tell you I want to help acquit him of the charges because I don’t think he’s guilty, but I’m not going to bullshit you. I don’t know if he did it or not. I think he would be capable of hitting out in a moment of great anger,- I think most people are. I do not believe it was premeditated, and, in fact, I think the charge will be reduced next week.

“So. What I’m saying is this: Yes, I’m a cop, and yes, it is my job to compile evidence against your friend. There may be things you don’t want to tell me, and there are sure to be things I’m not going to tell you. Are those ground rules acceptable?”

Professor Whitlaw looked determined and nodded, Dean Gardner looked devious and reached for the Saturday transcript, and Lee—Lee was looking at Kate as if she’d never seen her before.

“Hey,” said Kate with a shrug. “It’s what I do.”

Lee let out a surprised cough of laughter and shook her head. Kate handed her the transcript.

Kate did not bother to read along, as the session was clear enough in her memory. Instead, she went into the kitchen to make another pot of coffee and put on the kettle for Professor Whitlaw’s tea, and as she stood and waited, her eyes went out of focus and she thought about what she had just told them.

A great deal of any police officer’s time is spent on the thin line that divides right from wrong. Representatives of Good, cops spend most of their life in the company of Bad, if not Evil, and often find more to talk about with the people they arrest than with their own neighbors. In a fair world, ends do not justify means,- to a cop, they have to.

She had gone to see Erasmus on Friday before she left, as Hawkin had asked. She found him sitting on the bunk in his cell, his eyes closed and his lips moving in a murmur of prayer or recitation. His head came around at the sound of her approach and he watched her come in, his eyes neither welcoming nor antagonistic, simply waiting. She sat down on the bunk next to him.

“Hello, Erasmus. David. Are you comfortable?” She laughed at the sweep of his eyes. “Yeah, I know, stupid question. What I meant was, can I bring you anything?”

“O, thou fairest among women!” he said in wan humor.

“I don’t know about that. Something to eat tomorrow? Jail food isn’t the greatest.”

“The bread of adversity and the water of affliction.”

“I hope it’s not quite that bad.”

“The abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep,” he said in a gentle refusal of her offer.

“I wasn’t offering rich abundance, but I might stretch to a cheese sandwich and some fruit.”

His eyes lighted up at the last word, though he did not say anything.

“Nothing else?”

He hesitated, then said, “I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.”

“Your books? From your backpack. Yes, I’ll have them brought to you. Writing materials? Another blanket?”

He smiled a refusal, then his right hand came up and nestled into his neck, his index finger stroking his beard. He cocked his eyebrow at her. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” he suggested.

“Urn, your staff? I’m sorry, I don’t think I could get that approved.” Even if I could get the laboratory to hurry up with it, she thought.

He shrugged a bit wistfully. “Naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

She hesitated and then risked a joke. “I don’t think even Inspector Hawkin himself thinks he’s God.”

His smile was warmly appreciative, but somehow she got the uncomfortable feeling that she’d given something away. She stood up, and he rose with her.

“I’ll see if I can get your books released tonight, and I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

He surprised her by putting up a finger to stop her, then bent down to look into her face. “Be strong, and of good courage,” he told her. “Be not afraid.” And when she could find no answer to that, he merely touched her shoulder and, sitting back down on the too-short bunk, said, “I will lay me down to sleep, and take my rest.”

That last little episode was what she had had in mind when she said that David Sawyer was cooperating with his seduction. He knew what she was doing, and moreover he knew what it was doing to her.

No, she did not like cozying up to that old man in order to pry him loose from his secure rest,- she was honest enough with herself to admit that she felt dirty using his affection against him. Feeling dirty was, of course, an occupational hazard, and so far it had never kept her from doing her job.

But all in all, she would much rather play bad cop.

♦

The readers in the living room were coming back to life and the coffee had finished dripping, so she moved back out to be hostess for a few minutes. When the cups were full and hot, she paused, the tape of the Sunday session in her hand.

“Al Hawkin was not there this morning. This was partly technique but mostly because he had other commitments.” (As if Al would allow previous commitments to stand in the way of an important interrogation session unless it was toward a greater goal, Kate thought to herself.) “I conducted the interview” (stick with that less-loaded term) “and another sat in— and only sat in. I don’t think she said a word the whole time, except for saying Hello when I introduced her to Erasmus. Sorry—Sawyer.”

“His nom de folie does seem to fit him better than the workaday David Sawyer,” agreed Dean Gardner.

Kate slipped the cassette into the player and sat down with a cup of coffee. Her own voice came on, sounding stifled and foreign as it always did, with the formalities, then explaining to the prisoner Hawkin’s absence and Officer Macauley’s presence. After that the interview began.

The recording, on more than one cassette, ran for nearly three hours, and there was even more silence on it than Kate remembered. Long stretches of silence. Many questions were unanswered, or perhaps unanswerable,- at other times, remarks were offered that seemed to have nothing to do with Kate’s questions—even at the time, Kate had thought that the pronouncements seemed plucked out of thin air. Hawkin, on the telephone afterward, had been greatly encouraged: There had been no antagonism, and he had interpreted Sawyer’s mute periods as the first signs of stress, the lapse of confidence that would open him up. Kate was not sure of that. She had been in the room with Sawyer and she had witnessed no lack of confidence. If anything, he seemed to be reconciling himself to his surroundings. When he came into the room, he stood easily in himself, he submitted to the handcuff rituals without noticing them, and he was beginning to look with interest at his jailers and fellow prisoners. Last night, the guards had told Kate, he had sung to the other inmates and read from his book of poetry. It had been, she was informed, the calmest Saturday night in a long time.

No, Kate did not think Erasmus was building up to a revelation,- she was afraid he might be settling down to a new home.

Had the tape recorder been voice-activated, the tape they were listening to might have run under two hours. As it was, by the time it ended, Kate was laying out plates and forks and the cold salads Jon had left for them. They helped themselves and carried their plates and glasses back to the sofas and the fireplace. Kate shoveled a few bites down and then opened her notebook.

“Now,” she began, “there are two reasons I’ve asked you to help me with this. The first, as I mentioned, is that one of you might have an idea about how we can get David Sawyer to talk to me about the murdered man. The other is to help me decipher what he’s already told us. It would take me years to track down the references and meanings you probably know instantly.”

“I don’t know about Professor Whitlaw,” began the dean.

“Eve, please,” murmured the professor.

“Eve, then. But it would take me hours to figure out sources for most of the quotes Erasmus uses.”

“I don’t think we need all of them. How about if we concentrate on the ones that don’t seem to have much bearing on the question that we’re asking at the time.”

“What do you hope to gain?” the professor asked doubtfully.

“I won’t know unless I find it. You see, in an investigation like this we may ask a hundred useless questions for every one that turns out to be of importance. The hope is that a thread end may appear in the process.”

“The method is not precisely scientific,” said Professor Whitlaw, sounding disapproving.

“That side of it is not. It’s an art rather than a science,” Kate stated, hoping she sounded confident rather than apologetic. The dean and the professor seemed satisfied, though the therapist lowered her gaze to her plate and did not respond.

“For example. Dean Gardner, when—”

“Philip.”

“Philip. When I first met you, Erasmus said something about—where is it? Here… Jerusalem killing the prophets, and you interpreted that as a reference to hens, and therefore eggs, and so decided he wanted omelets for breakfast.” Lee was frowning and Eve Whitlaw smiling at the convoluted reasoning. “Now, I’m assuming there are other places in the Bible or Shakespeare or wherever where hens are mentioned. Why did he choose this one?”

Philip Gardner scowled at the first page of the thick sheaf of papers. “Yes, I see what you mean. The Beatitude he quoted before that was definitely from Luke, not Matthew, so it wasn’t a tie-in from that. And before, let’s see. It was Corinthians.”

The professor had put her plate aside and picked up her own papers. “Perhaps the link in his mind was thematic rather than—what, bibliographic? I see he was citing Paul’s criticisms of the Corinth church for not accepting the negative side of being prophets—that is, being perceived as silly or mad. It is a reasonably close parallel to ‘Jerusalem killing the prophets,” don’t you think?“

“Was Sawyer saying that he is a prophet, would you say?” Kate asked.

“I don’t think we should read too much into his choice of passages,” the professor objected. “It strikes me that he uses whatever is to hand, then cobbles the phrases together as best he can. A bit like a collage, where the overall effect is more the point than the parts that go to make it up.”

“Would you agree with that, Lee?”

“A Freudian would say that each phrase has to be analyzed in regards to its setting, but I am no Freudian. However, I think you do have to be aware of the sources—where they come from and what’s going on in the place he lifts them from—and to be sensitive to any themes and patterns that may appear. It’s like a collage I saw once, Eva, to use your analogy. It was a giant picture of an empty chair with a book on the floor next to it, but when you got up close you saw that the whole thing was made up of snippets of naked female bodies, cutouts of portions of breast and navels and throats. Knowing that changed the meaning of the final collage considerably. Which was the whole point.”

“Philip?”

“I agree, the overall picture is more important than the component parts. For one thing, I don’t think Erasmus regards himself as a prophet. A prophet is chosen, often despite his wishes, and spends his time exhorting, preaching, driving people toward right behavior. In my experience, Erasmus seems to spend a great deal of his time listening, and when he does preach, it’s often far from clear what he thinks you should do. No, he’s no prophet. Although he may well be a saint.”

Kate looked at him, startled, but he did not appear to be joking.

“Are you serious?”

“About his potential sainthood? Oh yes. You have to remember that even Francis of Assisi was a man before he was a saint. Why not Erasmus?”

She could think of no way to answer that, so Kate turned back to her notes. “Why not indeed? Tell me about his choice of passages that first day, out on the lawn at CDSP. What is Corinthians? Why would he use it so much?”

♦

It was very late when the meeting broke up, and Kate felt more battered than enlightened. It had been a slow and laborious process, and humiliating, an ongoing admission of her own profound ignorance. She had persisted, however, and in the car, driving back from delivering Professor Whitlaw to the Noe Valley house, she came to certain conclusions.

First of all, she abandoned any hope of finding a hidden meaning in Sawyer’s utterances by looking at their original context. Occasionally he used a phrase to refer to a story or episode, but those were generally characterized by the marked inappropriateness of the phrase, such as when he referred to the dead man as “He was not the Light” to give the man a name. For the most part, Sawyer used a quotation as raw material, hacked from its setting regardless.

Beyond that, Kate was not sure what she had expected. However, she did not feel it had been a wasted day. Without knowing why, she felt she had been told the layout of a dark room: She still couldn’t see where she was going, but she could begin to sense the shapes and obstacles it contained.

And as she turned up Russian Hill, she began to play with the idea of meeting Erasmus on his own ground. Could her team of translators assemble enough quotes of their own to enable her, as their mouthpiece, to put David Sawyer on the spot?

Could it be that he was waiting for someone to do just that?

♦

TWENTY-TWO

♦

Never was any man so little afraid of his own

promises. His life was one riot of rash vows, of

rash vows that turned out right.

When the phone rang at 2:20 on Wednesday morning, Kate’s first thought was how she’d forgotten this jolly side of working homicide. Her second thought was that David Sawyer had attempted suicide.

“Martinelli.”

“Inspector, this is Eve Whitlaw.”

“Professor Whitlaw?” Kate dashed her free hand across her eyes and squinted at the bedside clock. Yes, it was indeed the middle of the night. “What is it?”

“It’s about David. I know why he does it.”

Does it, not did it, Kate noted dimly. “And that couldn’t wait?”

“I thought, before you sent him to that mental institution—”

“He’s already gone.” Actually, it was just to the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General.

“Is he? Oh dear. Well, perhaps it’s for the best.”

“It’s also required. I doubt he’ll be gone long. Was there anything else, professor?”

“Did you not want to hear my thoughts? There is a distinct internal logic to his actions, once one understands the starting point.”

“Professor, could it wait until morning?”

“Is it that late? Why, what time—oh good Lord, I had no idea. I was sitting here thinking and—oh how appalling of me, you poor thing. Yes, by all means, ring me in the morning. Go back to sleep, dear.”

Kate hung up with a chuckle and, savoring the delicious feeling of reprieve, curled up against Lee and did indeed go back to sleep.

In the morning, Professor Whitlaw was bristling with apologies. Kate drank half her coffee just waiting for a chance to get a word into the telephone receiver, and she then arranged to meet the professor at a cafe downtown at eleven o’clock. The professor was quite willing to break her other appointments for the morning, but Kate decided that she did not need to break her own.

She did have to cut it short, though, and even then she came into the cafe late, shaking the rain from her coat. She spotted the professor’s gray head at a corner table, bent toward a book, a cup frozen halfway between saucer and lip, forgotten. Kate sat down. Eve Whitlaw looked up, startled, sipped from the cup, made a face, and let it clatter onto the saucer.

“Inspector, how lovely to see you. You’re looking remarkably fresh, considering your disturbed night.”

Before she could launch into more apologies, Kate greeted her, offered her more tea, or a meal, and when both were refused went over to the counter and ordered herself a double cappuccino and a cheese sandwich. Thus fortified, she went back to the table, where she found the professor hunched forward, ready to pounce.

“I will not bore you with further apologies for my deplorable manners, Inspector, but I must apologize for the slowness of my intellect. It has taken me since Sunday evening to see the obvious. The problem is,” she said, as if laying out the basic premise for a lecture—which indeed she was—“I am an historian, and as such I am accustomed to approach theological questions as historical questions. That is, they are tidy, complete, finished. It is very difficult to visualize a modern phenomenon in the same way: it keeps moving about, and one can not foresee its consequences. Rather the same, I suppose, as an early-fourth-century theologian would be unable to visualize the real importance of the Council of Nicaea, or a bishop of the time to imagine the immensity of what Luther was doing. I’m sorry, I’m dithering.

“What I am trying to explain is why I couldn’t see what is happening to David when we first looked at it on Sunday afternoon. You, of course, were approaching it from a legal point of view, your friend saw it from a psychological one, Philip Gardner can see David only as the colorful Erasmus, and I was stuck at seeing Erasmus as a perversion of David Sawyer. This morning at that ungodly hour, I finally turned it around, placed him in an historical setting, and looked at his actions as if they indeed held an internal logic, rather than simply reflecting the irrational reactions of a severely traumatized man.” She leaned forward to drive her point home. “The key idea here is, ”covenant.“”

Kate swallowed her bite and tried to look intelligent. “A covenant is some kind of agreement, isn’t it?”

“A biblical covenant could be anything from an international treaty to a business arrangement. It was regarded as a sacred commitment, legally and morally binding, absolutely unbreakable. The relationship between the Divinity and the people of Israel was covenantal, for example. I should have known immediately that was what David was doing—he used the idea twice in explaining himself, the first time when he was talking to you and Philip Gardner in Berkeley, the second in the interview on Friday. The passages were on both lists, but I was seeing it as one of his loosely metaphorical quotations, or expressing a psychological truth, not a literal one.”

“What difference would that make, precisely?”

“A great deal. You see—well, let me take a step back here.” Take several, thought Kate. “What you see in David is a conjunction of two very different religious traditions that have been brought together by his personal disaster and welded together by his need. The idea of covenant is one of them—we’ll come back to that. The other is the tradition of the Holy Fool, a figure David spent much of his adult life studying. Ten years ago, David took a long-delayed but decisive action and told Kyle Roberts that there was no future, no real future, in the academic world for him. David now attributes his harsh words to his own vanity, which I assume means that he was too proud of his own status to recommend an inferior scholar for a post that he, Kyle, was not suited for. I agreed with him at the time, and still do: One cannot allow oneself to be known as a person who recommends duds,- the academic world is too small and too unforgiving for that. At any rate, David’s criticism was the spark that set off a badly unbalanced and volatile personality, and David’s family, his beloved son, as well as three other innocents, were destroyed in the explosion.

“Now, one of the most basic characteristics of the fool, either a secular or a religious one, is that he is without a will. Even inanimate objects are more self-willed than a fool. Think of some of Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant bits where he wrestles with chairs and clothing and lengths of wallpaper and such and then is beaten by them. Look at the way your Erasmus depends on his scepter—a classic piece of foolishness, by the way. He has no will,- he makes no choices,- he is wafted to and fro by powers he cannot control: Even when he appears forceful and aggressive, he is acting only as a mirror. David, in fact, took this to an extreme, though I admit a logical one: He does not even have words of his own.”

She waited until she saw that Kate had followed her this far, saw Kate begin to nod, and continued.

“Only a brilliant man like David could have managed it. And, more than brilliance. I am not so ready as Dean Gardner to attribute sainthood to David, but he did have a point, and David’s charisma was always considerable.

“What I think happened, then, is that at the point in David’s life where he had to choose between death—remember what he said, that the only thing worse than death was wanting death and being denied it?—and some tolerable form of life, he chose a life of absolute surrender, of complete will-lessness. Complete and daily sacrifice, without any risk of doing harm to another by taking positive action, a form of service to humanity that was properly demanding and might go some way to make up for what he was responsible for—and here’s where the idea of covenant comes in. Guilt is a feeling with a limited life span, and David could not take the chance that someday—in a year, or three years, or five—the initial impulse that drove him to live the life of a Fool would fade and he would find some excuse to resume his normal life. So he ensured that it would be permanent by declaring a covenant, an unbreakable oath said, I venture to say, over the dead body of his son.

“A covenant is either whole or it is broken—nothing in between, no amendments or retractions. In the most archaic forms, the symbolic recognition of a covenant is a split carcass, down the halves of which a flame is passed or the people walk. In fact, in the Hebrew language a covenant is ‘cut,” not just made, which serves as a reminder that if one party goes back on his part of the agreement, he may be split down the middle as the carcass was.

“I can see I’m losing you, and I freely admit that it’s a very cerebral explanation. In fact, I doubt very much that David thought of it in anything like this manner. His was, I imagine, a ‘gut’ response to the option of suicide. The fool’s way of thinking came naturally to hand—it fit—and he clamped on the oath, sworn on his son’s body, like a suit of armor. No—more than armor,- like an exoskeleton, a rigid carapace that held him together and allowed him to justify living. The inflexibility of the vow, the safety of speaking in other men’s words, the freedom that comes with letting go—that has become his life. A life of service to the homeless, of ministering in different ways to the spiritually impoverished middle classes and to the dangerously isolated seminarians.”

“And now, jail,” said Kate slowly. “And probably prison.”

“What do you mean?” Professor Whitlaw said sharply.

“I have had the strong feeling the last few days that Sawyer is reconciling himself to being incarcerated, that he doesn’t really care whether he’s in or out. At any rate, he certainly isn’t afraid of it anymore, like he was at first.”

“God. Oh God. Yes, I can see that. His ministry in prison. Oh Lord, what can we do?”

“We must make him talk. We have to find out what he knows about John’s death. Professor Whitlaw, I am being horribly unprofessional by saying this, but frankly I have serious doubts that David Sawyer killed the man. However, I think he knows who did. He must tell us.”

The cafe lunch tide that had risen around the two women was now starting to ebb, and Kate only now became briefly aware of her surroundings. After a long time, Professor Whitlaw looked up at her, and to Kate’s astonishment the woman did not seem far from tears.

“I want David back, you do understand that. He was my best friend in all the world, and I have missed him terribly, every day, for all these years. However, much as I would rejoice in having him return to himself, I have to admit that what you want could finally destroy what remains of his life. If you make David break this strange vow of personal speechlessness, you will force him to break faith with his murdered son, and I suspect that for David that would be intolerable. It would negate the whole last ten years of his life. I do not wish to be overly dramatic, but I very much fear that if you break his oath, you will break him. You could kill him.”

“What would you recommend we do?”

“You might find the real murderer.”

Kate suppressed a surge of irritation. “Yes,” she said dryly.

“Other than that, frankly, I do not know what you can do. Self-preservation is too low a priority for him to respond to that particular appeal, and you have already tried to convince him that he has the responsibility to help bring the man’s killer to justice, with no result whatsoever. Unless you can convince him that his silence positively harms others, I can’t see that you’ll budge him.”

Kate began to pile her dishes together. She did not say anything, could not say anything without it being inexcusably rude. Even a “Thank you very much” would inevitably sound like sarcasm, and this woman was only doing her best. Still, even with all the pretty words she’d dressed it in, she had told Kate no more than she knew already: Erasmus would not talk, Sawyer would not save himself. So she said nothing. Professor Whitlaw, however, had one more observation to throw in.

“Martyrdom has always been the act of fools. It’s the ultimate absurdity, giving up one’s life for an idea.”

“Martyrs stand for something,” Kate said, suddenly fed up with words. “There’s nothing to stand for here. He’s just being stupid, and a real pain in the neck.”

With that judgment, she tipped her plate into the tub marked DISHES and walked out into the rain.

♦

TWENTY-THREE

♦

… The abrupt simplicity with which Francis won the attention and favour of Rome.

A few days later, David Sawyer was returned to the jail, along with a lengthy psychiatric evaluation that said, in effect, that the man was eccentric but quite sane enough to stand trial. That evening, on her way home, Kate stopped by his cell to see him. She stopped in the next night as well, to take him a book of poetry that Lee had sent, and the next. It soon became a part of her day, and twice when she was out in the city and might normally have gone directly home, she found herself making excuses to drop by her office first and then go up to the sixth floor for a few brief words.

Kate was not the only one to fall beneath the spell of Brother Erasmus. One evening he held out a flowered paper plate and offered her a home-baked chocolate chip cookie. A child’s drawing mysteriously appeared, Scotch-taped to the wall of his cell. Once, late, following a long and depressing day, Kate entered the jail area and heard the sound of Sawyer’s voice ringing out clear and loud among the astonishingly silent cells. When she came nearer, she saw him stretched out on his narrow bed, reading aloud from a book called The Martian Chronicles. The other inmates were sitting, lying down, or hanging on their bars, listening to him. Kate turned and left. Another night, even later, Kate passed by on business and heard a voice singing: a repetitive tune, almost a chant, with every second line exhorting the listener: Praise Him and glorify Him forever.

He had visitors, too, over the next couple of weeks. Those of the homeless who could work up the courage to enter the daunting Hall of Justice came for brief visits: Salvatore once, the three Vietnam vets once each, Doc and Mouse and Wilhemena twice each. Beatrice came four times in the first six days after he had returned to the jail. From Sawyer’s other worlds came Dean Gardner, who visited regularly, and Joel, the grad student who had given Erasmus rides to Berkeley. There was a steady stream of others from the seminary, professors, staff, and students, and from Fishermen’s Wharf, the owner of the store that sold magic supplies and the crystal woman.

Brother Erasmus even had his own newspaper reporter, who had adopted him and argued with his editor about the newsworthiness of a jailed homeless man. Ten days after Sawyer had been brought back to San Francisco, the reporter’s efforts paid off with a full-page human-interest story in the Sunday edition on homeless individuals, one of whom was Erasmus. Photographs and interviews of the homeless men and women connected to him, and of their more settled neighbors, succeeded in drawing a picture of the homeless population as a community of wise eccentrics. The feature spread resulted in a great deal of cynical laughter among those responsible for enforcing the law, a flurry of letters to the editor in praise and condemnation, a brief increase in the takings of the panhandlers across town, and even more visitors for David Sawyer.

It was a popular article, and two days later the reporter submitted another, smaller story, this one looking at the murder case itself in greater detail. His editor cut out half the words and changed it from an investigative piece to one with a greater emphasis on the people involved, but still, there it was in Wednesday’s paper, with interviews of five of the homeless, a review of the facts, and photographs of Erasmus, Beatrice, and the colorful Mouse.

The guards grumbled at the number of visitors they had to handle for this one prisoner. However, they did not stop bringing him plates of food their wives had made and snapshots of their dogs.

The only person Erasmus flatly refused to see was Professor Eve Whitlaw. Everyone else he listened to, smiled at, prayed with, and presented with a pithy saying to take away with them, but the English professor from his past, he would have nothing to do with. She tried twice but not again.

During the weeks after David Sawyer’s arrest, Kate had been immensely busy, not only with the case against Sawyer but with another investigation that she and Hawkin had drawn, the lye poisoning of an alcoholic woman (who had looked to be in her sixties but was in fact thirty-two), which could have been either accident or suicide but was looking more and more like murder. It involved long hours of interviewing the woman’s large and predominantly drunken extended family, and it left Kate with little time to spare for Erasmus, safe in his cell.

It was over a month since the murder, and Kate felt the Sawyer case slipping from her. She had neither the time nor the concentration to pursue it further, and she was uncomfortably aware that she might let it go entirely but for the continued entreaties of Dean Gardner and Professor Whitlaw. She came home late on a Monday night, aching with exhaustion, cold through, and hungry, and found a series of five pink “While You Were Out” slips lined up for her on the kitchen table: Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw, Rosalyn Hall, Philip Gardner, Eve Whitlaw.

Fortunately, it was too late to return the calls. However, she no longer had much of an appetite. She poured herself a tumbler glass of raw red wine, drank it up as she stood in the kitchen, filled up the glass again, and took it to bed.

♦

Things looked rosier in the morning, as she lay with Lee’s arm around her shoulder while they drank their morning coffee.

“You see,” Kate was saying, “what I had hoped to do was assemble enough quotes of my own to meet him on his own ground. I even got a book of quotations and started it off—The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself and ‘I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,” that kind of thing. But I can’t do it. I just don’t have time to memorize the whole damn book.“

“You saw the notes, that Eve and Philip Gardner called?”

“I did. I’ll call them later.”

“She’s only here for another month, did you know that?”

“So she told me. About six times. I don’t know what I can do, Sawyer won’t see her.”

The phone rang.

“Oh hell, it’s not even eight o’clock.”

“Let the machine get it,” Lee said, but Kate was already stretched across to the telephone.

“Yes?” she demanded. “Oh, Al. Hi. Yeah, I was expecting someone else. What’s—Who?” Kate became quiet and listened for a long time, unconsciously disentangling herself from Lee’s embrace until she was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “What do they think about her chances?” she said finally, listening again. “Okay. Sure. Do you have someone at the hospital? Good. See you there, twenty minutes.” She hung up and went to the closet.

“That wasn’t about David Sawyer, was it?” Lee asked.

“David… Oh. No, it’s another case—fifty suspects and now one of the family decided he knows which of his cousins did it and so he took a shot at her early this morning. Several shots, through the wall of her bedroom, and one of them hit her. They’re all nuts, the whole family. No, I won’t bother with breakfast.”

The shower went on and, after two minutes, off again. Kate emerged, her hair wet but her clothes on, kissed Lee absently, and left. Lee listened to her lover’s feet on the stairs, the familiar pause in front of the closet while the wicked gun was strapped on, then the front door opened and closed. A car started up on the street outside, where Kate had left it instead of rattling the garage door late last night, and she was gone. Lee sighed and set about the laborious business of the day.

♦

Not that night, nor the next morning, but the following day over dinner the conversation was resumed.

“You know what you were saying the other day about trying to put together a bunch of quotations to throw back at David Sawyer?” Lee began.

“Fat chance of that now. There’re two more members of that woman’s family in jail now,- they were going at each other with chains in the dead woman’s front yard. There used to be a rose bed. Do they give prizes for the most dysfunctional families? This crew would take the gold.”

“I was wondering if there would be any reason you couldn’t have Philip Gardner and Eve do it for you? Come up with zinging quotes, that is.”

“He’s still in jail.”

“I know he’s still in jail,- is there any reason why you can’t have a conference of half a dozen people? Using the two of them as translators, like you thought of before, only in two-way translation, into and out of Erasmusese?”

“There are problems in allowing civilians—friends—in on an interview,” Kate said slowly.

“Insurmountable problems?”

“I’d have to talk to Al,” Kate finally said.

“Do. Because if you have to argue with him using his own language, you’d better have someone who speaks it as well as Philip and Eve do.”

“You’re right. In fact—no, maybe not.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking that he and Beatrice seem very close. If she’d be willing to help us, it might make it less adversarial. I don’t know if that would help or not.”

“I think it would be a good idea.”

“I’ll have to talk to Al about it. I could probably find Beatrice before Friday night, although I suppose we’d have to do the interview on Saturday anyway to work around Dean Gardner’s schedule. I’ll talk to Al,” she said again finally.

Al agreed, with strong reservations but a willingness to try anything that might loosen David Sawyer’s guard. Philip Gardner agreed,- Eve Whitlaw agreed. The conference was set for ten o’clock on Saturday morning, regardless of whether Beatrice had prior commitments.

But when Kate went to Sentient Beans on Friday evening to talk to the homeless woman, Beatrice was not there. Beatrice had not been there the week before, either.

Kate stood listening to the angry young owner, feeling the cold begin to gather along her spine.

♦

TWENTY-FOUR

♦

Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body.

“You scared her off.” The young man behind the wooden bar was gripping the latte glass as if he were about to throw it at her. His name was Krishna, but he had obviously been named after one of the god’s more violent manifestations.

“Could you explain that please, sir?” Kate asked politely, keeping an eye on the glass.

“You probably did it on purpose. That’s harassment. You could tell her nerves were bad.”

“Are you telling me you haven’t seen Beatrice Jankowski since the night I was here? That was nearly a month ago. I’ve seen her since then.”

“She was in once,” the man said grudgingly.

“Twice,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. The woman herself appeared, carrying a tray of clean cups, which she slid into place beneath the bar. She was very small, with hard, slicked-back unnaturally black hair, at least a dozen loops and studs in her ears and one through her nose, and kind, intelligent brown eyes. Kate recognized the guitarist from the night she had come here. “We didn’t see her last week, and we haven’t seen her since then, but she was in a couple of times after you were here.”

“How do you remember when I was in? One face on a busy night.”

“I noticed you. Beatrice talked about you. But we were a little concerned last week when she didn’t show, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for her in the neighborhood. She’s not around.”

“You haven’t filed a missing-persons report?”

“For a homeless woman? Who’d listen to us?” snorted the man.

The woman answered Kate as if he—her husband?— hadn’t spoken. “I decided that if she didn’t come in tonight, I would report her missing. I called the hospitals, but she’s not there. My name is Leila, by the way.”

The man turned to her, his grip on the glass so tight now that white spots showed on his knuckles. “You called the—I thought we agreed—”

“Oh, Krish, of course I called. What if she was sick or something?”

“But she was here two weeks ago?” Kate asked loudly, to interrupt the burgeoning argument.

“Just like always,” Leila said.

“And she said nothing to indicate that she would not be here?”

“No. In fact, she said, ”See you next week, dear,“ just like she always does. Did.” Leila was worried now, taking police interest as evidence that something was very wrong.

“I wouldn’t be too concerned, not yet. I just wanted to pass on a message from a friend of hers who’s in custody.”

“Brother Erasmus?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“Not personally. Though I feel like I do, since she talked about him all the time. She went to see him in the jail.”

“I know. But not for a while, apparently, because he was asking about her,” she embroidered.

“How long? Since he’s seen her?”

It was in the small beat before Kate answered that she acknowledged her own apprehension.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’ll have to check.”

The stark possibilities lay there, and nothing Krishna or Leila could add changed them any. Finally, she asked for the use of their telephone and began to cast out her lines of inquiry.

The logs at the jail revealed that Beatrice Jankowski had last visited David Sawyer on Wednesday the ninth of March, two days before she had not appeared at Sentient Beans to wash her clothes and sketch the customers.

A call to the morgue confirmed that there were no unclaimed bodies in San Francisco that remotely matched Beatrice’s description.

Al Hawkin was not at home and had not yet arrived at Jani’s apartment in Palo Alto. Rather than beep him, she left brief messages at both numbers, on his machine and with Jani’s daughter Jules, and then went back out into the coffeehouse, where she found Leila cleaning the tables.

“Did Beatrice leave anything here?” she asked.

“Probably. There’s a little cabinet in the back we let her use.

“Does it lock?”

“There’s a padlock. We kept one key, gave her the other.”

“Just the two keys?”

That’s all.“

“May I have the key, please?”

Leila let a cup and saucer crash down onto the tray. “Oh God. What did you find out?”

“Not a thing. I’m not going to open the cabinet, and I’ll give the key back to you if Beatrice turns up. I’d just be more comfortable keeping it in the meantime.”

Leila dug into the deep pocket of her baggy black silk pants and drew out a fist-sized bundle of keys. She flipped through it, unhooked a cheap-looking key, and handed it to Kate. “There’s nothing much in there. Her sketch pad and box, a few clothes, odds and ends.”

“It’s good of you to let her use it.”

Leila actually blushed. “Yes, well, I’ve been there myself, and she’s getting too old to live out of plastic bags.”

Kate opened her mouth to ask if Beatrice slept here occasionally, then closed it again. Time enough for questions that might compromise the insurance and zoning. She merely wrote out a receipt, pocketed the key, thanked Leila, and went back out to her car.

In the Homicide room, at her desk, on that Friday night, Kate sat for a long time and stared at the telephone. She did not want to pick it up. She wanted to go home and rub Lee’s back or watch some inane musical video or listen to Lee’s voice reading from a novel. She did not want to make these telephone calls because she was afraid of what she was going to learn, and when she learned it, she knew whom she would blame.

Kitagawa and O’Hara came in then, speaking in loud voices, and in order to avoid having to talk to them she picked up the receiver and tucked it under her ear. She began to look up the telephone numbers and then made her calls.

After the fifth call, a faint hope began to stir: Maybe she had been wrong. Alarmist. But the optimism was premature: At the seventh morgue, this one in Santa Cruz, they had a Jane Doe, Beatrice’s size, Beatrice’s age, with Beatrice’s hair and eye color. She’d been found four days ago up in the hills, by hikers. Dead at least three days before that. Not pretty. Sure, there’d be someone there all night.

Kate sat and rubbed her eyes, hot and gritty and wanting nothing but to close for a long time. Too late to phone Lee, let her know she wouldn’t be in? Yes, it really was. Lee used to sleep very little—four, five hours a night. Now she needed eight hours, or she ached. Sometimes took a nap. Why are you thinking about that? Kate asked herself. Christ, this is a shitty job.

Phones had been ringing on and off. Now Kate heard her name called, and she automatically picked up the receiver.

“Martinelli. Oh, Al, thanks for calling. Sorry to wreck your weekend. Yeah, she disappeared, but I think I found her. The Santa Cruz morgue. Yeah, I know. I’m going down to see her. Want me to call you from there? You don’t have to come. You’re sure? You promise Jani won’t hate me? Well, leave her a note, maybe you’ll be back before she wakes up. I’ll leave now. Right. Bye.”

It was like old times, driving a sleeping Al through the rain into the Santa Cruz Mountains. This time, however, their goal was not the forest site of three murdered children, their first case together a year earlier, but the sterile, temporary repository of one elderly woman.

When Kate rolled to a stop and pulled on the parking brake, Al woke up, ran his hands over his face, and bent forward to look at the windshield. “It’s deja vu all over again,” he commented.

“How about next year, come March, we arrange a case that takes us to Palm Springs or something?”

“I’ll put in a voucher for it tomorrow. Do you know where—”

“Through there.”

Into the cold, inhuman space that smelled of death, up to the body, leaning over the gray face: Yes. Oh yes: Beatrice Jankowski.

“I hadn’t realized how old she was,” Kate said bleakly.

“She had false teeth,” commented the morgue attendant. “Taking them out makes anyone look shriveled up. Is her family going to want her shipped, do you know?”

“I don’t know if she had a family.”

“We’ll hang on to her for a while, then.”

“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report?” Al asked.

“I don’t think so. You’d have to check with the investigating officer. I think that was Kent Makepeace. I can tell you it was homicide.” He reached down and turned Beatrice’s head to one side, revealing the damage beneath the clotted gray hair on the right side of her skull, between the ear and the spine. “Somebody hit her, hard.”

♦

TWENTY-FIVE

♦

Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.

The mere fact that an identity had been given to a body in the morgue hardly justified rousting the investigating detective out of his bed at four o’clock on a Saturday morning. Even Al Hawkin had to admit that. So he and Kate found an all-night restaurant and ate bacon and eggs in an attempt to fool their bodies into thinking it was a new morning rather than a too-long night, and at six they made their way to the county offices. At 6:30, Hawkin succeeded in bullying an underling into phoning Makepeace. At seven o’clock, they were in his office being shown the case file.

“That’s right,” he was saying, fighting yawns. “Completely nude, no false teeth, not even a hairpin.”

“She wore several rings,” Kate commented.

“That’s in the path report. Couple of nicks on her fingers, scratches that showed where the rings’d been cut off her postmortem. Her hands were so arthritic, I’d guess he tried to pull them off and couldn’t get them over her knuckles, so he had to cut them. She was also moved around after death, a couple of rug fibers and marks on her legs, probably transported in a car’s trunk. Nothing under her fingernails but normal dirt—she didn’t scratch her attacker, no defense marks on her hands, nothing. About the rings, though.” He sounded as if he was beginning to wake up, and he took a large swallow of coffee from his paper cup to increase the rate of coherency. “We did a ground search, especially up and down the road. Among the crap they picked up was a ring. There should be a photograph here somewhere.” He dug back into the file, flipped through the glossy photographs of the nude woman sprawled in the leaves, gray hair snarled across her face, and pulled out the picture of a large fancy ring with a cracked stone. He laid it on the desk between them.

Kate peered at it. “It looks like one of hers. I’d have to ask her friends to be sure. Where was it?”

“Whoever dumped her pulled off the main road down this dirt road.” His finger tapped a long-range photo that showed Beatrice as a mere shape in the corner. “He couldn’t go any farther because of the gate, but you can’t see the place from the road. The ring was on the left side of the road going in, where it might have fallen when he opened the driver-side door. If it was in his pocket, say, and fell out. Of course, it could’ve been there for a week or two.” He sipped at his coffee, then added, as if in afterthought, “There was a partial on the ring, halfway decent. So let us know when you have prints on a suspect. Other than that, we didn’t find a thing. Wasn’t raped or assaulted, no signs that she was tied up, just a sixty-odd-year-old woman in fairly good condition until she ran into a blunt instrument.”

“The pathologist doesn’t seem to have much to say about the weapon,” Hawkin commented. He had put his glasses on to look through the file.

“There wasn’t much to say. No splinters, no rust or grease stains, no glass splinters. A smooth, hard object about two inches in diameter. Three blows, though the first one probably killed her. Could’ve been almost anything. What’s your interest in her, anyway, to drag you down here in the middle of the night?”

“It’s related somehow to the body that was cremated in Golden Gate Park,” Hawkin replied.

“No kidding? I read about that. And I used to think we had all the loose ones rolling around here.”

“We have our share. Can I have a copy of all this?”

“Sure. Here, you take any duplicates of the pictures. If you want copies of the others, let me know and I’ll have them printed. Let me go turn the Xerox machine on.”

Kate turned the car toward the mountainous Highway 17 and began climbing away from the sea. The morning traffic was light, the rain had stopped at some time during the night, and Kate drove with both eyes but only half a mind on the road.

“It was the newspaper story,” she said abruptly.

“What was?”

“Her picture was in the Wednesday paper. The article quoted her as saying she’d seen John talking with a stranger from Texas, she seemed to think we should let Sawyer go because of that. Two days later, she was missing.”

For a long time, Al did not answer. Kate took her eyes off the road for a moment to see if he had fallen asleep, but he was staring ahead through the windshield.

“You don’t agree?”

“We don’t know anything about the woman. It’s a little early for jumping to conclusions.”

Silence descended on the car. Kate had been tired earlier but now, boosted by two cups of stale coffee from the doughnut shop Hawkin had spotted just before the freeway entrance, she felt merely stupid. She followed the road up and out of the hills and into San Jose, where the freeways were always busy.

Nearing Palo Alto, she spoke again. “I’ll drop you at Jani’s, then?”

“No, go on to the City. I changed my mind; I want to be in on your group meeting this morning with Sawyer.”

“I was thinking we’d probably cancel it,” said Kate, surprised.

“This is all the more reason not to.”

♦

TWENTY-SIX

♦

… Something happened to him that must remain

greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and

selfish men whom God has not broken to

make anew.

The interrogation had been scheduled to begin at ten o’clock. Kate and Hawkin were back in the city by then, but they did not join David Sawyer in the interview room at ten. At eleven o’clock, he was still by himself in the room, his hands in his lap, his lips moving continuously in a low recitation. Twice he had glanced at the door, and on the third time he caught himself and made a visible effort to relax. Since then he had appeared to be in meditation, his long body at ease and his eyes open but not focused on any object.

At 11:20, the door opened. Hawkin came in first, followed by Kate. Both of them looked clean and damp, though their bodies and eyes betrayed a sleepless night.

There were three vacant chairs in the room, but neither detective sat. The man in the jail garb blinked gently at them and waited, and then the third figure came through the door and he instantly got to his feet, his face shut-down and hard, and made as if to sidle past his old friend to the door, looking accusingly not at her but at Kate.

Hawkin put out a hand to stop him. “Please, Dr. Sawyer,” he said quietly. “Sit down.”

Sawyer’s head came around and the two men gazed at each other while the old man, alerted by some nuance of tone, tried to gauge what lay behind the words. He studied Hawkins’ stance and eyes and looked down warily at the manila envelope Hawkin held in his hand before he accepted the detective’s unspoken message: Before, we were acting out a game. Before, we had time to play with animosity. The game is over now.

The message that said: Bad news coming, David.

“Please,” Hawkin repeated quietly.

After a long minute, without breaking their locked gaze, Sawyer moved back to the table and lowered himself into his chair. Only then did he look at Kate, sitting poised to take notes, and then at Eve Whitlaw, and when he took his eyes from her and turned back to Al Hawkin, on the other side of the table from him now, he drew breath and opened his mouth.

“No,” interrupted Hawkin, one hand raised to stop Sawyer from speaking. “Don’t say anything yet. Listen to me before you commit yourself to speech. I’ve been told you’re very good at listening.” Hawkin waited until the older man had slowly subsided into the plastic chair. He then leaned forward and, choosing his words carefully, began to speak.

“Five and a half weeks ago, a man was killed in Golden Gate Park. A number of your friends decided to cremate the body, in imitation of a similar cremation you had supervised three weeks earlier, that of a small dog. The attempted cremation confused matters a great deal, but eventually it proved to have no direct connection with the man’s death.

“You, however, attracted our suspicions from the very beginning. You would not answer our questions, you had no alibi for the time of death, and you seemed to have something you were hiding. On the nineteenth of February, you fled from Inspector Martinelli and a woman who could identify you. And then when a person who lives near the park told us that you were in the vicinity at the general time the man was killed, and in a state of agitation, the case against you seemed fairly tight. It appeared that you had been blackmailed by the man John and finally hit him in the head in anger. No, much as I would like to hear what you could come up with by way of a response, I’d really prefer if you would just listen.”

Hawkin slouched down in the chair, playing with the clasp on the envelope that lay on the table between them.

“However, I don’t think you killed him. I know you could have. I know you have a short temper, for all your years of saintly behavior, and you could easily have lost it and swung at him with that stick of yours. But I don’t think you would have been capable of standing by and waiting for him to die. And I don’t believe you could have broken the skull of his dog three weeks before that. And I know damn well that you were in custody eight days ago and that therefore you could not have committed the murder of your friend Beatrice Jankowski.”

It took a moment for the information to lodge in his mind, but when it did, the effect was all Hawkin had aimed for: Shock, profound and complete, froze David Sawyer’s hands on the edge of the table, kept him from moving, stopped the breath in his body.

“Yes. I’m very sorry,” said Hawkin, sounding it. “Beatrice died last week. Inspector Martinelli and I just identified her body a few hours ago.” He pushed back the flap on the envelope and slid the photograph out onto the table, pushed it across in front of Sawyer, and withdrew his hand. The old man stared uncomprehending at the black-and-white photograph of Beatrice Jankowski’s face that had been taken on the autopsy table just before she was cut open. She lay there calmly, her eyes closed, but was very obviously dead.

Sawyer closed his own eyes and his hands came up to his face, pressing hard against his mouth and cheeks as if to hold in his reaction—vomit, perhaps, or words—but he could not hold back the tears that squeezed from beneath his closed eyelids, tears utterly unlike the simple, generous, childlike stream he had cried so freely on the first occasion Kate had seen him. These were a man’s tears, begrudged and painful, and he clawed at them with his long fingers as if they scalded his skin.

They all waited a long time for him to take possession of himself again. Even Professor Whitlaw waited, as she had been instructed, though she palpably yearned to go and comfort him. They waited, and eventually he raised a bleary red-eyed face from his hands and accepted the tissue that Al Hawkin held out to him.

Hawkin then sat forward until his arms were on the table and his face was only inches from the stricken features of the prisoner.

“Dr. Sawyer, you had nothing to do with the deaths of your son and the wife and children of that madman Kyle Roberts. You believe you did, because grief has to go somewhere, but the truth of the matter is, you were in no way responsible.

“Beatrice Jankowski’s death is a different matter. You know who the dead man was, and you know who killed him. You may even know why. You wouldn’t tell us because of this vow of yours. You figured the man was such a miserable shit-filled excuse for a human being, his death was hardly a reason to break your vow. You played God, David, and because you wouldn’t answer our questions a month ago, because you distracted us and slowed down the investigation, he came back. He heard a rumor that Beatrice had seen him, he probably read the interview in the newspaper where she hinted that she could identify him, so he came back for her. He killed her, David. He broke her skull and he cut those distinctive rings from her fingers and then he stripped her naked and dumped her body down in the mountains, because you had made up your mind to be noble in prison rather than answer our questions.”

Although she had been briefed on what to expect, Professor Whitlaw started to protest. Kate stopped her with a hand on her arm, but it was doubtful that either Sawyer or Hawkin noticed.

“Tell me, David,” Hawkin pleaded, nearly whispering. “You know who did it, you know why,- you even know where he is—you were headed for Texas when they picked you up in Barstow, weren’t you? You know everything and I don’t even know what the dead man’s name is. David, you have to suspend this vow of yours. Just long enough to give me the information I need. Please, David, for God’s sake. For Beatrice’s sake, if nothing else.”