To Play the Fool (16 page)

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.

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?"