To Play the Fool (11 page)

"Martinelli."

"This is Professor Eve Whitlaw, returning your call." The voice was low, calm, and English.

"Yes, Dr. Whitlaw, thank you for phoning. I am the--"

"Is that pirates?"

"Sorry?"

"The music you're listening to. It is, yes. Not perhaps
their best, but it has a few delicious moments. You were saying."

"Er, yes. I am Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco
Police Department. We are investigating a murder that occurred recently
in Golden Gate Park. The reason I am calling you is that one of the
persons involved refers to himself as a 'fool," and I was
told by the dean of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific over in
Berkeley that you might be able to tell me exactly what this man means
when he uses that description." By the time Kate reached the end
of this convoluted request, she was feeling something of a fool
herself, and the sensation was reinforced by the long and ringing
silence on the other end of the line.

"Dr. Whit--"

"You've arrested a Fool for murder?" the English voice said incredulously.

"He is not under arrest. At most, he's a weak suspect.
However, he's a problem to us because it's very difficult
to understand what he's doing here. The interviews we've
held have been... unsatisfactory."

The deep voice chuckled. "I can imagine. He answers your
questions, but his answers are, shall we say, ambiguous. Even
enigmatic."

"Thank God," Kate burst out. "You do understand."

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I may be able
to throw a bit of light into your darkness. When may I meet this fool
of yours?"

"You want to meet him?"

"My dear young woman, would you ask a paleontologist if she
would care to meet a dinosaur? Of course I must meet him. Is he in
jail?"

"No, at the moment he's in Berkeley. He will be back in
San Francisco by Saturday, I think, and I could put my hands on him by
Sunday. Perhaps we could arrange a meeting on Monday?"

"Not until then? Ah well, it can't be helped, I suppose.
However, my dear, if you lose him, I shall find it very hard."
There was a thread of steel beneath the jovial words, and Kate had a
vivid picture of an elderly teacher she'd once had, a nun who
used to punish tardiness and forgotten homework with an astonishingly
painful rap on the skull with a thimble.

"I'll try not to lose him," she said. "But I wonder if before then you and I could meet."

"A brief tutorial might well be in order. Tomorrow will be
difficult, the entire afternoon is rather solidly booked. Let me look
at my diary. Hmm. I do have a space in the early afternoon. What about
one--no, shall we say twelve-thirty?"

Dr. Whitlaw gave Kate an address in Noe Valley and the house telephone number, wished her enjoyment of the remainder of
Pirates,
and hung up. Kate obediently poured herself a tiny glass of the syrupy
port and went out to sit between Lee and Jon on the sofa, watching the
equally syrupy ending of the operetta.

When Francis came forth from his cave of vision,

he was wearing the same word "fool" as a feather

in his cap, as a crest or even a crown.

At under five and a half feet with shoes on, Kate was not often
given the chance to feel tall, except in a room full of kids. In fact,
when the door opened, she thought for a moment that she was faced with
a child. It was the impression of an instant's glance, though,
because no sooner had the door begun to open than it caught forcibly on
the chain and slammed shut in her face. The chain rattled, the door
opened again, more fully this time, and the person standing there,
colorful and gray-haired and of a height surely not far from dwarfism,
was not a child, but a woman of about sixty.

"Doctor Whitlaw?" Kate asked uncertainly.

"Professor, actually. You're Inspector Martinelli. Come in."

Kate stepped inside while the woman reached up to fasten the chain.

"I was told that I must always bolt and chain the doors in
this city. I live in a village, where a crime wave is the
neighbor's son stealing a handbag from the backseat of a car.
I'm forever forgetting that I've put the chain on,- I
nearly took my nose off the other day. Come in here and sit down, and
tell me what I can do for you. Will you take a cup of tea?"

She had a lovely voice. On the phone it had sounded gruff, but in
person it was only surprisingly deep, and the accent that had sounded
English became something other than the posh tones of most actors and
the occasional foreign correspondent on the news. Her accent had depth
rather than smoothness, flavor rather than sophistication, and made her
sound as if she could tell a sly joke, if the opportunity arose. Kate
couldn't remember the last time she'd drunk tea, but she
accepted.

They sat at a round, claw-foot, polished oak table, between a
cheerful pine kitchen and a living room bursting with gloriously happy
plants, tropical-print fabrics, and African sculpture. Professor
Whitlaw brought another cup from the kitchen (using a step stool to
reach the cupboard) and poured from a dark brown teapot so new that it
still had the price sticker on the handle. She added milk without
asking, put a sugar bowl, spoon, and plate of boring-looking cookies in
front of Kate, and sat back in her chair, her feet dangling.

"This is a very pleasant place," Kate offered.

"Do you think so? It belongs to friends of my niece, two
pediatricians who are away for the month, so I'm house-sitting.
Actually, I am beginning to find its unremitting cheerfulness
oppressive, particularly in the mornings. I come out in my dressing
gown and expect to hear parrots and monkeys. Fortunately, I don't
have to care for the jungle. They have a sort of indoor gardener who
comes twice a week to water and prune--a good thing, because if I
was responsible, they would come back to a desert. You wish to talk
about the Fools movement."

"Er, yes. Or about one particular fool, really." Kate
explained at length what she knew about Erasmus, his relationships with
the homeless and the seminary, and his apparent unwillingness or
inability to speak other than by way of quotations. She then gave a
very general picture of the murder and investigation, ending up with:
"So you see, the man must be treated as a suspect,- he has no
alibi, no identification, no past, no nothing. The only thing he has
said about himself that sounds in the least bit personal is that he
thinks of himself as a fool. Now, he could just be saying that, or he
may be referring to this organization or movement or whatever it is.
Dean Gardner thought there was a chance he might be, so he referred me
to you."

"You are catching at straws."

"I suppose so."

"And even if he is a remnant of the Fools movement, it may have nothing to do with the man's death."

"That's very possible."

"But you are hoping nonetheless to understand the differences
between the cultivated lunacy of Foolishness and the inadvertent
insanity of a murderer."

"Well, I guess. Actually, I was hoping that if he had been a
member of this... movement, there might be records, or someone who
might know who Erasmus is."

"The Fools movement was short-lived, and fairly
comprehensively dispersed. It was also never the sort of thing to have
any formalized membership--that would have been seen as
oxymoronic. If you will pardon the pun." She chuckled, and Kate
smiled politely, not having the faintest idea what the woman was
talking about. "What you require," she continued, sounding
every bit the academic, "is background information. However, as I
told you over the telephone, my day is fairly full. I'm afraid
that I've loaned out my only copies of the book I edited on the
subject, but may I suggest that I give you a couple of papers and you
come back and talk with me when you've had a chance to digest
them? This evening or tomorrow, or whenever."

Without waiting for Kate to agree, she slid down from her chair and
went out of the room and through a doorway on the other side of the
hall. When Kate reached the door, she found Professor Whitlaw with her
head in a filing cabinet. She laid three manila folders on the desk,
opened the first two, and took out some papers, leaving a stapled sheaf
of papers in each one. The third one, she hesitated over, then opened
it and began to sift through the contents thoughtfully.

The doorbell rang. Professor Whitlaw glanced at her wrist in
surprise, thumbed through two or three more sheets of paper in the
file, and then snapped it shut and handed it to Kate along with the
other two folders.

"I don't have photocopies of the loose material,"
she said, "and it would be very inconvenient if you lost it. But
if one cannot trust a policewoman, whom can one trust? Give me a ring
when you've had a chance to formulate some questions. The next
two nights are good for me."

The professor remembered the chain this time. Kate changed places on
the doorstep with an anemic young man wearing a skullcap and went to do
her assignment.

"What are you doing home?" demanded Jon. "Did you get fired?"

"The teacher gave me homework. Ooh,
love
your outfit,
Jonnie." It was quite fetching--a lacy apron over his
Balinese sarong and nothing else--as he leaned on the table,
making a pie crust on the marble pastry board, the rolling pin in his
hand and a smudge of flour on one cheekbone. It always surprised Kate
to see how muscular Jon was, for all his languid act. She wiggled her
fingers at him and went looking for Lee.

Her voice answered Kate from upstairs, and Kate followed it to the
room they used as a study. Lee was in her upstairs wheelchair at the
computer terminal. A scattering of notepads and a long-dry coffee cup
bore witness to a lengthy session.

"Hi there," Lee said. "I didn't expect to see you so soon."

"I'm obviously getting too predictable in my old
age," complained Kate. "You and Jon can plan your orgies
around my absences. I had some reading to do and it's too noisy
at work," she explained, waving the folders. "Look, I
don't know if you want to go on with your search. Dr.
Whitlaw--Professor Whit-law--is a real find, and if
you're getting tired..."

"Oh, I'm not working on your stuff. This is something
else." Feeling both piqued and amused at her sensation of being
abandoned, Kate went to look over Lee's shoulder at the screen,
which was displaying a graph.

"What is it?"

"I had an interesting visit this morning from a woman I worked
with on a project two or three years ago,- she said she'd seen
you in Berkeley recently."

"Rosalyn something?" Kate tossed the folders onto a table and sat down.

"Hall. She's putting together a grant proposal for a
mental-health program targeting homeless women, wondered if I might
help with it. Remember that paper I gave at the Glide conference? She
wants me to update it so she can use it as an appendix. I was just
reviewing it, seeing how much I'd have to rewrite the thing. I
don't know, though,- my brain seems to have forgotten how to
think."

"You and me both, babe. It looks like you've been at it for quite a while."

Lee picked up on the question behind the statement. "I did
most of this earlier. I had a long session with Petra,- she thinks the
tone in my right leg is improving. And then I had a rest, so I thought
I'd work for a while longer."

They talked for a while about gluteus and abdominal and trapezius
muscles, about spasms and recovery and tone, the things that until a
month ago had formed their entire lives, until Lee had seemed to make a
deliberate choice to push back all the necessary fixations and passions
of her recovery in order to allow a small space for the life that had
been hers a year ago. Kate respected Lee's decision and tried
hard not to push for every detail of a muscle gradually regained, a
weight lifted, in the same way that she had respected Lee's
choice of a caregiver, Lee's decision to come directly home from
the hospital with full-time attendants rather than enter a
rehabilitation clinic, and Lee's determination to keep some of
the details of her care from her lover. Privacy is a precious commodity
to anyone, but to a woman emerging from paraplegia, it was a gift of
life.

So all Kate said was, mildly, "Well, don't overdo it."

"Of course not. What have you got?"

"Couple of articles by the expert on Fools. I was looking at
one of them on the way here, and I swear it isn't written in
English."

"Would you rather do my appendix to the grant application?"

"Tempting, but I think there's going to be a quiz on this."

Kate picked up the folder and Lee turned back to the terminal, and
for the next hour the rusty gears of two minds independently ground and
meshed. Kate looked over her two articles, decided to skip for the
moment the one that used
exegetical
and
synthesis
in
the first sentence, and began to read the other, a transcript of a talk
given to some religious organization with an impressive name but an
apparently generic audience.

The modern Fools movement began, as far as can be determined, in
1969 in southern England. Its earliest manifestation was on a clear,
warm morning in early June, when three Fools appeared (with an
appreciation for paradox that was at the movement's core from the
very beginning) at the entrance to the Tower of London, that massive
and anachronistic fortress which forms the symbolic heart of the
British Empire. And, lest anyone miss the point, they arrived there
from the morning service at St. Bartholemew-the-Great, a church founded
by Rahere, Henry I's jester.

Had any of London's natives been watching, the behaviour of
the taxi driver would have alerted him to the extraordinary nature of
what was arriving, for the cabby, unflappable son of a phlegmatic
people, stared at his departing passengers with open-mouthed
befuddlement. Interviews with that driver and with the American tour
which witnessed the appearance of Foolishness were more or less in
agreement: One of the trio, the tallest, turned to pay the driver,
adding as a tip a five-pound note and a red rosebud plucked from thin
air. The three passengers walked a short distance away, dropped the
small canvas bags they each carried, joined hands in a long moment of
(apparently) prayer, and set about their performance. The cab driver
shook himself like a setter emerging from a pond, put the taxi into
gear, and drove off. The red rose he tucked into the side of his
taximeter, where it gradually dried and blackened, remaining tightly
furled but fragrant, until he plucked it off and threw it out the
window over the Westminster Bridge nearly three weeks later.