To Play the Fool (22 page)

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.

...
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.

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."