To Play the Fool (8 page)

He saw the polite disbelief on her face, so he strung the
explanation out a bit further. "Yes, it was more complicated than
that, insurance and security and all that. But what won them over was
Erasmus himself. He has... it's difficult to explain, but I
suppose there's such an air of sweetness around him, even
administrators feel it."

Kate decided to let it go for the time being. "You said he comes on Tuesdays."

"Yes. The young man he rides with is an M.Div. student."
(Whatever that is, thought Kate.) "He has an afternoon class at
three, I think, or three-thirty--a seminar on pastoral theology,
but he may come over earlier and work in the library, I see him there
quite a bit. He has a couple of kids, so it's hard for him to
work at home."

"Did you see him this Tuesday? Or Erasmus?"

"I had meetings pretty much all day. I didn't see anyone but university bureaucrats."

"And when does he usually leave Berkeley?"

"Berkeley as a whole, I can't vouch for, but we rarely see him after Friday morning."

"You don't know how he leaves?"

"No."

"What about friends here? Does he have any particularly close
relationships with students or professors, or with any of the street
people?"

"Joel, the young man who brings him over on Tuesdays, is
probably the student closest to Erasmus. I suppose I'm his best
friend among the faculty. I wouldn't know about the homeless, or
anyone out of the GTU area, for that matter. Look, Inspector
Martinelli, I have to go."

"Just one thing. I'd appreciate it if you could write down for me where those quotes he used today come from."

"All
of them?"

"Whatever you can remember."

"Why? Surely you can't consider them evidence?"

"I don't know what they are, and I don't know that
I will want them. But I do know that if it turns out I need them in two
or three weeks, you won't remember more than a handful.
Right?"

"Probably not. Okay, I'll do my best. And I'll be talking to you. Um... can I say good-bye to him?"

Kate opened the back door of the cruiser and Dean Gardner bent down, holding his hand out to Erasmus.

"So long, old friend," he said. "Sorry
you'll miss dinner tonight, I hope we'll see you next week.
You remember my phone number?" Erasmus just smiled and let go of
the hand. "Well, call me if you need anything." He stepped
back and allowed Kate to slam the door, her mind busy with the image of
Erasmus in a telephone booth. Why was that so completely incongruous?

She told the dean she would talk with him soon, got in behind the wheel, and drove away from Berkeley's holy hill.

Kate kept her eyes firmly on the road, for Berkeley had long been a
haven for the mad cyclist and the blithe wheelchair-bound, although on
this occasion it was a turbaned Sikh climbing out of a BMW convertible
who nearly came to grief under her wheels. She did not glance at the
passenger behind the wire grid until they were on the freeway, passing
the mud-flat sculptures, but when she did, she found him sitting
peacefully, displaying none of the signs of the guilty killer
apprehended: He was not asleep, he was not aggressive, he was not
talking nonstop. He met her eye calmly.

"The driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously," he commented.

"Yeah, well, if you don't dodge around a bit, you get
mowed down." Glancing over her left shoulder, she slipped over
two lanes and then slid back between two trucks and into the turnoff
for the Bay Bridge. Once through the toll booths, she looked again at
Erasmus, who again met her eyes in the mirror. She had been dreading
the drive, fearing the mindless recitations and the inevitable stink of
the wine-sozzled unwashed, but he smelled only of warm earth, and his
silence was somehow restful. He shifted slightly to ease his cramped
position beside the long staff that had barely fit in, and the toy star
she had pinned to his chest caught the light.

"How did you know I was a cop?" she asked.

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee."

"That doesn't explain how you recognized me."

He answered only with a small and apologetic shrug. Perhaps, she
realized some time later, it was one of those places where exact quotes
were unavailable.

"Do you mean you saw my picture somewhere?" she tried.

"The morning stars sang together," he said gently.
Right: the Morningstar case. Really great when even the homeless had
your face memorized from papers salvaged out of the trash cans, she
reflected bitterly, and wrenched the car's wheel across to the
exit for the Hall of Justice. She drove around to the prisoners'
entrance and let him out, wrestled with his long staff and the small
gym bag the dean had fetched from the room Erasmus stayed in, and began
to lead him to the doors. Erasmus stopped, a large and immovable
object, and looked down at her from his great height. His eyes were
worried, but not, Kate thought, because of what might happen in this
building. Rather, he searched her face as if for an answer.

"Weeping may endure for a night," he said finally, "but joy comes in the morning."

"Thanks for sharing that,- now, in you go." He pulled
his elbow away from her hand and turned as if to seize her shoulders.
She took a quick step back, and he did not pursue, but bent his entire
upper body toward her.

"It is a good thing to escape death, but it is no great pleasure to bring death to a friend."

"What are you--"

"Faithful are the wounds of a friend. What is a friend? One
soul in two bodies." The intensity with which he was trying to
get his message across was almost painful.

"Are you talking about John?" she asked.

To her dismay, he straightened and with both fists pounded on his
head, once, twice in frustration. Two uniformed patrolmen walking
toward the building stopped.

"Need some help, Inspector Martinelli?" the older one
said, warily eyeing the tall, graying priest in the distinguished black
robe with the child's badge pinned to one shoulder. Erasmus paid
him no attention but flung out a hand to her in appeal.

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear," he
repeated, nearly shouting. Then immediately, as if the one arose from
the other, exclaimed, "These vile guns. The wounds of a
friend."

Kate felt her face stiffen as the sense of his peculiar method of
communication hit home: He was not talking about the man John, he meant
Lee. He saw her comprehension, and his face relaxed into the loving
concern of a kindly uncle, but there was no way Kate was going to
accept his sympathy. She cursed bitterly under her breath and seized
his elbow again, propelling him past the patrol officers and through
the doors. There was no escape, no relaxing, she was not even allowed
to perform the simplest tasks of her job without the constant reminder
that everyone and his dog knew who and what and where she was. She
would have preferred to have her nude photograph on the front
pages--at least that would have required a degree of imagination
on the part of the voyeurs. Instead of that, even the looniest of the
park-bench homeless knew everything about her, had followed her
exploits like some goddamned soap opera.

She stabbed her finger on the elevator button and stood staring
straight ahead, not looking at the man beside her whose whole being
radiated a patient understanding that was in itself infuriating. They
stepped inside the elevator along with four or five others and the door
closed. They went up, the others got off at the second floor, and when
the elevator had resumed, Erasmus spoke to her.

"A fool's mouth is his destruction," he said,
sounding apologetic. "Let there be no strife, I pray thee,
between me and thee."

Kate tried hard to hang on to her anger, but she could feel it begin
to dissipate, shredding itself against the monumental calm of the old
man in the priest's robe. She sighed.

"No, Erasmus, I'm not angry. Hell, I'm a public
servant,- I have no right to a private life, anyway." The
elevator stopped and the door opened. Kate gestured with the carved end
of the staff. "Down there. I'll see if my partner is
here."

She parked Erasmus at a desk and went in search of Al Hawkin. There
were no signs of recent habitation in his office, and the secretary
said no, she hadn't seen him yet, so Kate phoned down to the
morgue to find out when he would be through. She waited while the woman
went to find out, but instead of a female voice, Al himself came on the
line.

"What's up, Martinelli?"

"I didn't mean you should come to the phone, I just wanted to know how much longer you'd be."

"Just finished."

"What did he find?"

"Fractured skull--compression, not from the heat.
Somebody whacked him. It's ours." Not just an illegal body
disposal case, then, but murder. Kate eyed the hefty staff that she had
left leaning on the wall behind Hawkin's desk, wondering if she
was going to have to bag it as evidence.

"There's a fair amount of stuff for the lab, of
course," he said, "but there were no other overt
signs."

"Any chance of lifting fingerprints?"

"Two of the fingers have a bit of skin left, might give
partials if we're lucky. And there were no teeth to x-ray, and no
dentures, though the doc said he's been wearing them until
recently. Is that what you're phoning about?"

"No. I have Brother Erasmus here,- you said you'd like to be in on the interview."

"I would, yes. Have you had lunch?"

How the man could think of food with the stench of the autopsy still in his nose...

"No. You're going for a sandwich? Bring one for the good
brother, too. He didn't eat much of his breakfast."

"I'll be there as soon as I've changed." He
hung up. In the months since she'd been on active homicide duty,
Kate had forgotten Al's almost ritual cleansing after witnessing
an autopsy. The smell was pervasive and tenacious, clinging to hair and
clothes, and after the first couple of times she, too, had made a point
of taking along a change of clothes and some lemon-scented shampoo.

Kate went back to Erasmus. He was sitting where she'd left
him, the small green book open in his left hand, his right arm tucked
up against his chest, with the fist curled into the line of his jaw. It
was a peculiar position, and Kate stood studying him for a moment until
it came to her: That was how he had stood on the seminary lawn, with
the right side of his body wrapped around the tall staff. Except now
there was no staff inside the fist.

"What's that you're reading?" she asked. He closed it and held it out to her.

Translated by Kirsopp Lake

She opened it curiously. The first thing she noticed was that it was
a library book, property of the Graduate Theological Union Library. It
was divided up into chapters titled "Clement,"
"Ignatius to Polycarp," "The Didache." In the
text of the book, the left-hand page was in Greek, which Kate
recognized but could not read, with the right-hand page its English
translation. Erasmus, she thought, had been reading the left side of
the book. Kate read a few lines, which had to do with repenting,
salvation, seeking God, and fleeing evil, then closed the book and let
it fall open again, something she'd once seen Hawkin do, although
she supposed it wouldn't mean much in a library book. She read
aloud: " 'Wherefore, brethren, let us forsake our
sojourning in this world, and do the will of him who called
us."" She let the pages flip and sort themselves out,
finding: " 'Let us also be imitators of those who went
about "in the skins of goats and sheep."' Yes,
I've seen a few of those downtown lately." She let the book
fall shut and handed it back to him. "It's going to be
about half an hour before we can get started. Sorry about that. Do you
want something to drink? Coffee? A toilet?" At her last word, he
stood up with an air of expectation. She escorted him down the hall,
brought him back, and left him at the desk with his
Apostolic Fathers
while she retreated to Hawkin's office, keeping one eye on Erasmus.

It was closer to forty-five minutes before Hawkin arrived--his
hair stilldamp--smelling faintly of lemons and strongly of onions
from the pair of white bags he dropped on her desk.

"I didn't know if your religious fanatic was a
vegetarian, so I got him cheese." Kate waited while Al dug the
sandwiches out and handed her one, then she picked up a packet of
french fries and a can of Coke and took them to Erasmus.

"Just another ten minutes," she told him.
"There's cheese and avocado in that,- hope that's all
right."

"My mouth shall show forth thy praise," he replied gravely.

"Er... you're welcome."

She went back and found Hawkin halfway through his sandwich.

"What are you grinning at?" he said somewhat indistinctly.

"I've dealt with nuts before," she told him,
"but nobody quite like Erasmus. Is this that chicken salad with
the almonds and orange things? Great." The french fries were
thick and crisp, and for several minutes the only noises to come from
Hawkin's desk were the sounds of food being inhaled.

"So," said Hawkin eventually, "tell me about our friend down the hall."

"Well, he's going to be an interesting interview. He
speaks only in quotations--the Bible, Shakespeare, that kind of
thing--so of course there're a lot a direct questions he
can't answer."

"Is he coherent?"

"Yes, in a roundabout sort of way. There's usually a
kind of key idea in his quote that answers whatever question
you've asked, but sometimes you have to dig for it. He usually
hesitates before he speaks, to think about what he's going to
say, I guess. Some questions he just doesn't answer at all;
others, he answers with body language or facial expressions. When he
really wants you to understand, though, he just keeps at it until
he's sure you've got whatever it is he's driving
at."