To Play the Fool (17 page)

"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.

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.