To Play the Fool (18 page)

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."