“Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face,-terror, the human form divine, and secrecy, the human dress.”
“Jesus Christ. C’mon, Angela, this guy’s nuts.” The boy tried to move around Erasmus, but the older man moved to block his way to the girl.
The staff spoke up again. “It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured,” it whined.
“Old man, you’re asking for it.”
Kate began to move through the back of the thinning crowd, cursing under her breath and looking for someplace to deposit the remnants of her cone. She knew what those young muscles would do to the old man, to say nothing of the boots. Erasmus bent to look into the young man’s eyes, and for the first time he seemed to be trying to communicate, not just mock.
“I must be cruel,” he said with a small shrug of apology, “only to be kind.”
The boy hesitated, held not so much by the words as by the man’s unexpected attitude, though even as Kate watched, it began to harden.
“What mean you,” he said coldly, “that you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?”
Silence held,- then, said as a sneer: “The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and… short.”
It was the deliberate stress given the last word that broke the boy, and his powerful right arm, with the paper-wrapped bottle now at the end of it, shot automatically out toward the old man’s head. Kate threw herself against the arm before it made contact, but the impact swept all three of them into the girl Angela, against the wall behind her, and then tumbled them to the pavement in a heap. The raging boy flung his girlfriend off and was first to his feet, and if three men from the audience had not managed to drag him off, Kate would have had considerably more damage than three oval bruises on her shoulders and shins where his boots had hit home. She scrambled upright and shoved her police ID into his face, holding it there until it and her repeated shouts of “Police officer! I’m a police officer!” finally got through and she saw his muscles relax. The boy shook off the restraining hands but made no move to continue the assault.
The raucous gathering had finally attracted official attention, and several short coughs of a siren signaled the arrival of the local uniforms. The two men climbed out of the patrol car and moved their authoritative bulk into the center of activity, but Kate did not take her eyes from the young man until the uniformed officers had acknowledged her identity and were actually standing next to her. Only then did she turn and help Erasmus to his feet. He brushed himself off as if checking that he was in one piece, then, while Kate was making explanations that downplayed the entire episode, he went over to his staff, freed it from the newspaper box, and tucked it into his right shoulder. The effect was bizarre, like looking at a two-headed being, and Kate had to tear her eyes away.
The two uniformed officers were telling the crowd, what remained of it, to move on, and while the younger one dealt with the young man, the older one took Kate to one side.
“Inspector Martinelli, can you tell me what your interest is in the Brother there?”
“At this point, I don’t know what my interest is,” she admitted. “He’s somehow involved in the cremation homicide in Golden Gate Park, but whether as a witness or something more, I just don’t know.”
“The reason I ask, he’s a nice old guy, but he’s like a magnet for trouble. Not always, or we’d move him on, but this is the third time, and once last fall we didn’t get here fast enough. He got beat up pretty bad. I just thought if he was a friend or a relative, well… You know?”
“Would that have been in November?”
“Around then, yeah.”
“I heard about that. I’ll talk with him, see what I can do, but he has his own agenda, if you know what I mean, and self-preservation doesn’t seem to be very high on it.”
The crowd having dispersed, the two patrol officers turned their attentions to the young man and delivered a warning that even he seemed to find impressive (though, truth to tell, even before they began, he looked ill and without interest in beating up old men). When they had finished, he gathered Angela up and would have walked away, but Erasmus put out a gentle hand to stop him.
“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,” he said quietly. The boy nodded and would not look at him, but Angela did, and to her, Erasmus said in a heartfelt exclamation, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and then, with the emphasis of a judgment, told her, “None but the brave” (and here he pointedly ran his eyes over the boy) “deserve the fair.”
The boy tugged at her and they moved off, but after half a dozen steps, Angela shrugged off the confining arm and the two of them continued side by side.
The two patrolmen suggested firmly that it was time Erasmus moved on. Kate reassured them that she would deal with it, and when another call came for them, they climbed back into the car and drove off. Kate waved her thanks. As soon as they had left, she turned on Erasmus.
“You could have been hurt, you stupid old man,” she declared furiously. He did not seem to be listening as he watched the two young people go off down the street. He shook his head in sorrow.
“Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”
“Talk about the shadow of death!” Kate stepped in front of him, though she practically had to jump up and down to interrupt his gaze. “That kid could have put you in the hospital. And you would have deserved it, for being such a damned… idiot.”
He finally looked down at her, and his eyes crinkled up in a smile. “How forcible are right words.”
“Damned straight they’re right. Don’t do that again, you hear me? I don’t care what you think—it doesn’t do anyone any good.”
He looked again at the retreating backs and sighed. “We have scotched the snake, not killed it,” he said, which Kate took as agreement.
“Just stick to juggling,” she suggested. “I can’t guarantee to stumble on you every time you get into trouble.”
She knew in an instant that he did not believe she had just happened to show up here. He leaned on his staff, two identical heads sharing a good joke, and laughed at her. Even the wooden head seemed to be laughing at her, and she felt her face go red. There was absolutely nothing she could do, so she turned her back on him and walked away.
¦
FOURTEEN
¦
Kate stalked off down the busy sidewalk, her face flushed, her mind troubled, her shin and left shoulder sore, and her jaw aching. She stopped at the first trash bin she came to and spat out the gum. How could people chew the stuff all day? They must have jaws of iron. She pulled off the stupid pink hat, rolled it up and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans, and ruffled her short hair back into place with her fingers.
Could the man be schizophrenic? There was certainly some kind of a split personality going on here, but whether it was uncontrollable or an act, cynic that she was, she honestly could not say. The performance had not been put on merely for her benefit, of that she was reasonably sure. He could not have seen her until she had stepped back from the crowd, and the direction of the act had been already fully established.
What was that snippet in Professor Whitlaw’s file? Something about Foolishness being a dangerous business. Kate could well believe that, if this was the pattern: One might as well tease a bull as the particular target he had chosen. Come to think of it, the bull would probably be safer.
And what was the point? Did Erasmus actually expect to change the way the boy treated his girlfriend? Or had he just been hoping to distract the young man, to take his attention away from the girl and—what? Allow her a chance to escape?
Oh, this was ridiculous. Erasmus wasn’t all there, and looking for rational reasons for his behavior was pointless.
Still, he was clever, give him that. The more she thought about the scene she had just witnessed, the more impressed she was. Teasing a bull, indeed—and walking away intact, while the bull… what was the image she had in mind? Not a bull, some other powerful and savage animal. A wolverine or a cougar or something, seen long ago on a television nature program, being tormented and ultimately brought down by a pack of small, scruffy, cowardly coyotes or jackals.
