At this point, Kate came to herself, finding that she was standing outside the elevator in the parking garage, feeling as bedeviled and set upon by her fanciful thoughts and images as the wolverine was by the coyotes (a lioness, perhaps it had been, and jackals). She was seized by the desire to lower her head and shake it in massive rage and befuddlement, but a family of honking New Yorkers came out of the garage and she controlled the urge. Don’t frighten the children, Kate, she told herself, and grinned at them instead. The mother instantly herded her charges to one side and the father bristled in suspicion. Kate stood aside and allowed them to sidle past her, then went on into the garage. New Yorkers, she thought with a mental shake of the head. They probably would have been less frightened if I had bellowed at them.
Out on the street again, she pulled her car over into a loading zone and reached for her notebook and the car phone. The phone was answered after four rings by an English voice that by way of greeting merely stated the number she’d just punched out.
“Professor Whitlaw? This is Inspector Kate Martinelli.”
“Yes, Inspector, what can I do for you?”
“I wondered if you might be free for an hour or so this afternoon?”
“Inspector, I’m terribly sorry, I have an informal tutorial that seems to be turning into a seminar, and I can’t see that I’ll be free much before tea.”
“Er, right.”
“I have six people here,” the professor clarified, “and they look to be ensconced until hunger drives them out. Did you wish to review the material I set for you? Would tomorrow do as well?”
“No, it’s not that exactly. I mean, yes, I’d like to go over it with you, but I found Brother Erasmus, and I wondered—”
“You found your Fool! Oh, grand. Where are you?”
“In my car, up near the Fishermen’s Wharf area.”
“Where can I meet you? I’ll have one of the young people drive me. Surely; one of them must have come in an automobile.”
“Well, if you can get free, I’ll come and pick you up.”
“Even better. I’ll dig out my Sherlock Holmes glass and my entomologist’s bottle and meet you on the doorstep. Although come to think of it, etymology might be a more useful discipline for this exercise.”
“Oh, certainly.” Whatever.
“Inspector, I cannot tell you how grateful I am.”
“For what? Messing up your day and dragging you across town to push your way through San Francisco’s answer to the Tower of London?”
“I am ecstatic at the prospect, I assure you, Inspector.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’ll be about ten minutes.”
“I shall be ready.”
When Kate turned the corner on the street where Professor Whitlaw was staying, she saw a group of young people on the steps of the house, forming a circle around an invisible center, which they all seemed to be addressing at once. When the car pulled up in front of them, Kate could see an extra pair of legs in the knot, and after a moment Professor Whitlaw peered out, her gray hair at shoulder level to the shortest of them. They gave way but followed her across the sidewalk to the street, still talking.
“Yes, dear,” the professor soothed. “It’ll keep until tomorrow. Just continue with your word studies.” She climbed in beside Kate, pulled the door shut, and, as Kate pulled away from the protesting students, patted her hair. “My goodness,” she said weakly, “Americans seem so very large, especially the young ones. What do their parents feed them?” She didn’t seem to expect an answer, but sorted out the seat belt, lowered her black leather handbag onto the floor, put the black nylon tube of a fold-up umbrella on her lap and draped a tan raincoat over it, and folded her hands together. Sixty-eight degrees and not a cloud, not even a haze in the sky, but the well-dressed Englishwoman was ready for sleet.
“Where did you find him, this Erasmus?” she asked. “What is he doing?”
“He’s in the very center of the tourist area, juggling, conjuring quarters out of the ears of children, and goading bulls.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Kate laughed. “Sorry, not literally. It’s an image that came to mind.” She explained about the confrontation she had witnessed. Professor Whitlaw reached down for her handbag, snapped open the clasp and took out a small notebook, and wrote for a moment.
“How very interesting,” she murmured.
“Why would he be doing this?” Kate asked. “I mean, I can see how a fool would want to help the homeless and I could sort of see the appeal that the seminary might have for him, but what is he doing here, dressed like a suburban refugee, risking arrest or worse—surely he must occasionally misjudge just how far he can push people before they explode? Dean Gardner said Erasmus had been hurt last November, and I assumed that he’d been beaten up in the street, but now I wouldn’t be surprised if it had happened here.”
“You are quite right. Fools have never been content unless they were putting themselves at risk—from violence, from cold and starvation, whatever edge they were near, they would go closer. A medieval court fool would insult the king; the early Christians embraced martyrdom-. It’s all a means of courting madness.”
“It is a kind of mental illness, then?”
“Oh no. Well, I couldn’t say in this case, not having studied your friend Erasmus, but for a true Fool, a Holy Fool, the madness is always simulated. It is a tool, not a permanent state. I should perhaps qualify that by saying that there were some Holy Fools who had, in an earlier period of their lives, undergone a period of true insanity, but they came out of it, through conversion or enlightenment, and then later, if they returned to it, would only do so deliberately. You might say that they would choose to lose rational control.”
“I don’t understand why. A tool for what?” Other than a means of establishing an insanity plea for murder, she did not say aloud.
“For teaching. A fool who has relinquished control, who has submitted to chaos, is in a sense no longer a person, not an individual with a will and a mind of his own. You saw how Erasmus deferred to the staff he carries. Typically, even an inanimate object has more will than a fool. And because he is not his own person, he can be all people,- he can be a reflection of whatever individual he is facing. That is why a fool is so troubling,- he’s a mirror, and mirrors can be frightening.”
Kate waited until she had negotiated Geary Street before she spoke. “I’m sorry, it’s a pretty theory, but I can’t see what it has to do with the man Erasmus.”
“I am putting it in theoretical terms, perhaps. I should apologize for my airy-fairy academic language, which makes the process sound theoretical, but I assure you it’s quite real. Why do you think your fool so angered that young man? Not just because he was irritating him. Erasmus was reflecting the boy’s own ugly face back to him, showing him that he, a strong, a powerful young man, what you would call ‘macho,” would stoop so low as to hit, not only a frail young woman but even an old, feeble man. Judging by the behavior I have witnessed in the past by experienced fools, I would speculate that Erasmus, left alone, would probably have defused the lad’s anger by carrying it to exaggeration, by actually lying on the ground and inviting the young man to savage him. And then, having shocked the fellow into immobility, he would have brought the lesson to a close by identifying himself, Erasmus, the near victim, with the girl, the man’s perpetual victim. Now,
“If you’re right, it’d be a clever thing to teach in our domestic violence program—lie down and let the husband boot you before arresting him.”
“Of course, it isn’t quite that simple, is it? It’s not a technique at all; it’s a response from the fool’s inner being. And, seeing the effect this fool has had on one far-from-gullible police officer, I must say I am quite looking forward to meeting him.”
¦
At first it looked as if the professor would not get her wish, because when Kate drove past the place where Erasmus had been performing, he had obeyed the patrolman’s order and was no longer there. Nor did they spot him anywhere along the strip of shops and shows, all the way up to the Maritime Museum. Along the drive, however, there had been various tantalizing smells, french fries and onions and grilling hamburgers, topped off by a waft of
