To Play the Fool (24 page)

"Urn, your staff? I'm sorry, I don't think I could
get that approved." Even if I could get the laboratory to hurry
up with it, she thought.

He shrugged a bit wistfully. "Naked came I into the world, and
naked shall I return. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed
be the name of the Lord."

She hesitated and then risked a joke. "I don't think even Inspector Hawkin himself thinks he's God."

His smile was warmly appreciative, but somehow she got the
uncomfortable feeling that she'd given something away. She stood
up, and he rose with her.

"I'll see if I can get your books released tonight, and I'll see you in the morning. Good night."

He surprised her by putting up a finger to stop her, then bent down
to look into her face. "Be strong, and of good courage," he
told her. "Be not afraid." And when she could find no
answer to that, he merely touched her shoulder and, sitting back down
on the too-short bunk, said, "I will lay me down to sleep, and
take my rest."

That last little episode was what she had had in mind when she said
that David Sawyer was cooperating with his seduction. He knew what she
was doing, and moreover he knew what it was doing to her.

No, she did not like cozying up to that old man in order to pry him
loose from his secure rest,- she was honest enough with herself to
admit that she felt dirty using his affection against him. Feeling
dirty was, of course, an occupational hazard, and so far it had never
kept her from doing her job.

But all in all, she would much rather play bad cop.

The readers in the living room were coming back to life and the
coffee had finished dripping, so she moved back out to be hostess for a
few minutes. When the cups were full and hot, she paused, the tape of
the Sunday session in her hand.

"Al Hawkin was not there this morning. This was partly
technique but mostly because he had other commitments." (As if Al
would allow previous commitments to stand in the way of an important
interrogation session unless it was toward a greater goal, Kate thought
to herself.) "I conducted the interview" (stick with that
less-loaded term) "and another sat in-- and only sat in. I
don't think she said a word the whole time, except for saying
Hello when I introduced her to Erasmus. Sorry--Sawyer."

"His
nom de folie
does seem to fit him better than the workaday David Sawyer," agreed Dean Gardner.

Kate slipped the cassette into the player and sat down with a cup of
coffee. Her own voice came on, sounding stifled and foreign as it
always did, with the formalities, then explaining to the prisoner
Hawkin's absence and Officer Macauley's presence. After
that the interview began.

The recording, on more than one cassette, ran for nearly three
hours, and there was even more silence on it than Kate remembered. Long
stretches of silence. Many questions were unanswered, or perhaps
unanswerable,- at other times, remarks were offered that seemed to have
nothing to do with Kate's questions--even at the time, Kate
had thought that the pronouncements seemed plucked out of thin air.
Hawkin, on the telephone afterward, had been greatly encouraged: There
had been no antagonism, and he had interpreted Sawyer's mute
periods as the first signs of stress, the lapse of confidence that
would open him up. Kate was not sure of that. She had been in the room
with Sawyer and she had witnessed no lack of confidence. If anything,
he seemed to be reconciling himself to his surroundings. When he came
into the room, he stood easily in himself, he submitted to the handcuff
rituals without noticing them, and he was beginning to look with
interest at his jailers and fellow prisoners. Last night, the guards
had told Kate, he had sung to the other inmates and read from his book
of poetry. It had been, she was informed, the calmest Saturday night in
a long time.

No, Kate did not think Erasmus was building up to a revelation,- she was afraid he might be settling down to a new home.

Had the tape recorder been voice-activated, the tape they were
listening to might have run under two hours. As it was, by the time it
ended, Kate was laying out plates and forks and the cold salads Jon had
left for them. They helped themselves and carried their plates and
glasses back to the sofas and the fireplace. Kate shoveled a few bites
down and then opened her notebook.

"Now," she began, "there are two reasons
I've asked you to help me with this. The first, as I mentioned,
is that one of you might have an idea about how we can get David Sawyer
to talk to me about the murdered man. The other is to help me decipher
what he's already told us. It would take me years to track down
the references and meanings you probably know instantly."

"I don't know about Professor Whitlaw," began the dean.

"Eve, please," murmured the professor.

"Eve, then. But it would take me hours to figure out sources for most of the quotes Erasmus uses."

"I don't think we need all of them. How about if we
concentrate on the ones that don't seem to have much bearing on
the question that we're asking at the time."

"What do you hope to gain?" the professor asked doubtfully.

"I won't know unless I find it. You see, in an
investigation like this we may ask a hundred useless questions for
every one that turns out to be of importance. The hope is that a thread
end may appear in the process."

"The method is not precisely scientific," said Professor Whitlaw, sounding disapproving.

"That side of it is not. It's an art rather than a
science," Kate stated, hoping she sounded confident rather than
apologetic. The dean and the professor seemed satisfied, though the
therapist lowered her gaze to her plate and did not respond.

"For example. Dean Gardner, when--"

"Philip."

"Philip. When I first met you, Erasmus said something
about--where is it? Here... Jerusalem killing the prophets,
and you interpreted that as a reference to hens, and therefore eggs,
and so decided he wanted omelets for breakfast." Lee was frowning
and Eve Whitlaw smiling at the convoluted reasoning. "Now,
I'm assuming there are other places in the Bible or Shakespeare
or wherever where hens are mentioned. Why did he choose this one?"

Philip Gardner scowled at the first page of the thick sheaf of
papers. "Yes, I see what you mean. The Beatitude he quoted before
that was definitely from Luke, not Matthew, so it wasn't a tie-in
from that. And before, let's see. It was Corinthians."

The professor had put her plate aside and picked up her own papers.
"Perhaps the link in his mind was thematic rather
than--what, bibliographic? I see he was citing Paul's
criticisms of the Corinth church for not accepting the negative side of
being prophets--that is, being perceived as silly or mad. It is a
reasonably close parallel to 'Jerusalem killing the
prophets," don't you think?"

"Was Sawyer saying that he is a prophet, would you say?" Kate asked.

"I don't think we should read too much into his choice
of passages," the professor objected. "It strikes me that
he uses whatever is to hand, then cobbles the phrases together as best
he can. A bit like a collage, where the overall effect is more the
point than the parts that go to make it up."

"Would you agree with that, Lee?"

"A Freudian would say that each phrase has to be analyzed in
regards to its setting, but I am no Freudian. However, I think you do
have to be aware of the sources--where they come from and
what's going on in the place he lifts them from--and to be
sensitive to any themes and patterns that may appear. It's like a
collage I saw once, Eva, to use your analogy. It was a giant picture of
an empty chair with a book on the floor next to it, but when you got up
close you saw that the whole thing was made up of snippets of naked
female bodies, cutouts of portions of breast and navels and throats.
Knowing that changed the meaning of the final collage considerably.
Which was the whole point."

"Philip?"

"I agree, the overall picture is more important than the
component parts. For one thing, I don't think Erasmus regards
himself as a prophet. A prophet is chosen, often despite his wishes,
and spends his time exhorting, preaching, driving people toward right
behavior. In my experience, Erasmus seems to spend a great deal of his
time listening, and when he does preach, it's often far from
clear what he thinks you should do. No, he's no prophet. Although
he may well be a saint."

Kate looked at him, startled, but he did not appear to be joking.

"Are you serious?"

"About his potential sainthood? Oh yes. You have to remember
that even Francis of Assisi was a man before he was a saint. Why not
Erasmus?"

She could think of no way to answer that, so Kate turned back to her
notes. "Why not indeed? Tell me about his choice of passages that
first day, out on the lawn at CDSP. What is Corinthians? Why would he
use it so much?"

It was very late when the meeting broke up, and Kate felt more
battered than enlightened. It had been a slow and laborious process,
and humiliating, an ongoing admission of her own profound ignorance.
She had persisted, however, and in the car, driving back from
delivering Professor Whitlaw to the Noe Valley house, she came to
certain conclusions.

First of all, she abandoned any hope of finding a hidden meaning in
Sawyer's utterances by looking at their original context.
Occasionally he used a phrase to refer to a story or episode, but those
were generally characterized by the marked inappropriateness of the
phrase, such as when he referred to the dead man as "He was not
the Light" to give the man a name. For the most part, Sawyer used
a quotation as raw material, hacked from its setting regardless.

Beyond that, Kate was not sure what she had expected. However, she
did not feel it had been a wasted day. Without knowing why, she felt
she had been told the layout of a dark room: She still couldn't
see where she was going, but she could begin to sense the shapes and
obstacles it contained.

And as she turned up Russian Hill, she began to play with the idea
of meeting Erasmus on his own ground. Could her team of translators
assemble enough quotes of their own to enable her, as their mouthpiece,
to put David Sawyer on the spot?

Could it be that he was waiting for someone to do just that?

Never was any man so little afraid of his own

promises. His life was one riot of rash vows, of

rash vows that turned out right.

When the phone rang at 2:20 on Wednesday morning, Kate's first
thought was how she'd forgotten this jolly side of working
homicide. Her second thought was that David Sawyer had attempted
suicide.

"Martinelli."

"Inspector, this is Eve Whitlaw."

"Professor Whitlaw?" Kate dashed her free hand across
her eyes and squinted at the bedside clock. Yes, it was indeed the
middle of the night. "What is it?"

"It's about David. I know why he does it."

Does
it, not
did
it, Kate noted dimly. "And that couldn't wait?"

"I thought, before you sent him to that mental institution--"

"He's already gone." Actually, it was just to the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General.

"Is he? Oh dear. Well, perhaps it's for the best."

"It's also required. I doubt he'll be gone long. Was there anything else, professor?"

"Did you not want to hear my thoughts? There is a distinct
internal logic to his actions, once one understands the starting
point."

"Professor, could it wait until morning?"

"Is it that late? Why, what time--oh good Lord, I had no
idea. I was sitting here thinking and--oh how appalling of me, you
poor thing. Yes, by all means, ring me in the morning. Go back to
sleep, dear."

Kate hung up with a chuckle and, savoring the delicious feeling of
reprieve, curled up against Lee and did indeed go back to sleep.

In the morning, Professor Whitlaw was bristling with apologies. Kate
drank half her coffee just waiting for a chance to get a word into the
telephone receiver, and she then arranged to meet the professor at a
cafe downtown at eleven o'clock. The professor was quite willing
to break her other appointments for the morning, but Kate decided that
she did not need to break her own.

She did have to cut it short, though, and even then she came into
the cafe late, shaking the rain from her coat. She spotted the
professor's gray head at a corner table, bent toward a book, a
cup frozen halfway between saucer and lip, forgotten. Kate sat down.
Eve Whitlaw looked up, startled, sipped from the cup, made a face, and
let it clatter onto the saucer.

"Inspector, how lovely to see you. You're looking remarkably fresh, considering your disturbed night."

Before she could launch into more apologies, Kate greeted her,
offered her more tea, or a meal, and when both were refused went over
to the counter and ordered herself a double cappuccino and a cheese
sandwich. Thus fortified, she went back to the table, where she found
the professor hunched forward, ready to pounce.

"I will not bore you with further apologies for my deplorable
manners, Inspector, but I must apologize for the slowness of my
intellect. It has taken me since Sunday evening to see the obvious. The
problem is," she said, as if laying out the basic premise for a
lecture--which indeed she was--"I am an historian, and
as such I am accustomed to approach theological questions as historical
questions. That is, they are tidy, complete, finished. It is very
difficult to visualize a modern phenomenon in the same way: it keeps
moving about, and one can not foresee its consequences. Rather the
same, I suppose, as an early-fourth-century theologian would be unable
to visualize the real importance of the Council of Nicaea, or a bishop
of the time to imagine the immensity of what Luther was doing.
I'm sorry, I'm dithering.