chilis and onions that lay over Ghirardelli Square.
“I haven’t had any lunch,” Kate declared. “Do you mind if I stop off and get something, then we can do another drive-by?”
“That’s quite all right with me.”
Kate drove around into Fort Mason and stopped as close to Greens Restaurant as she could get, ran in and bought a juicy sandwich of eggplant and red peppers and cheese, a bag of fruity cookies for the professor, who had said that she’d already eaten lunch, and ran back out. She pulled the car back out into the Marina and parked, and they ate while watching the joggers and Frisbee players and people lying with their faces turned to the winter sun. Professor Whitlaw ate one cookie and then opened the door and got out to stand and gaze over the grass to the waters of the Bay and the tracery of the Golden Gate Bridge. Kate gathered up sandwich and car keys and went to stand with her.
“You have a very lovely city here,” said the professor. “A jewel in a golden setting. Do you know, London is built on one of the most active rivers in the world, and yet in most of the city you’d never know the river was there. I’ve often thought that would be the definition of a modern city: One has absolutely no idea of the natural setting.”
“It would be hard to ignore the Bay and the hills here.”
“Yes, I fear San Francisco is doomed never to achieve modernity. What a blessing. Do you suppose that is a kite that young man is wrestling with, or a tent?”
“God only knows. We’ll have to wait and see if he gets it in the air.”
The results were inconclusive. The winged dome with the dragon stitched on one side was briefly airborne but hardly aerodynamic. Kate crumpled her sandwich wrapper and tossed it into a nearby can.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” Professor Whitlaw said, and turned back to the car. “I really must do this more often. It’s ridiculous, to come to a magnificent place like this and see only the insides of walls. I believe I’ve seen more of the city in the last hour than I have the entire three weeks I’ve been here.” She turned to Kate and humorously half-inclined her head. “Thank you for the tour.”
“Any time.”
In the car, they rolled down the windows. Kate turned back toward Fishermen’s Wharf.
“Are you from London, then?” she asked.
“Oh no, dear. Rural Yorkshire originally, then Cambridge, followed by several years teaching in London. I hated it there. So insular and gray. Chicago seemed wide open, bracing after London. That is where I first came in this country, to a teaching job. Although I admit California seems like a different country entirely. I first got to really know the Fools movement in Chicago and on the East Coast, Boston and New York.”
“Even though they started in England.”
“Yes, ironic, wasn’t it? I knew of them in England, of course, but they were of peripheral interest to me then—a friend who later became a colleague had a passion for them. Eventually the passion proved contagious. My actual field is the history of cults, but there’s so much that is depressing in cult behavior, I found Fools a refreshing change. They are one of the few groups who understand that religion can be not only joyous but fun. He doesn’t seem to be here, does he?” She sounded disappointed as Kate drove slowly past the place where Erasmus had been two hours earlier.
“No, but we’ll try farther up. One of the vendors said he’s usually there in the afternoons.”
There was one crowd, at the beginning of Aquatic Park, but that was only the line waiting for the cable car to be rotated. They rounded the park, dodging a flock of Japanese tourists and a laden station wagon from Michigan, and then, on the path sloping down from the road to the waterfront, there was another crowd: From its center rose the back of a familiar graying head.
Kate pulled into a no-parking area, propped her police identification on the dashboard, and trotted around the car to help Professor Whitlaw out.
“He’s down there. See where that child with the ball just ran?”
The professor set off determinedly in her sensible shoes, with Kate at her side. Halfway down the slope, the din from the street musicians across the road faded, and the wind stilled. Kate could hear him now, not what he was saying but the rhythm of his voice as he chanted some other man’s words. A few more steps, and Professor Whitlaw faltered. Kate’s hand shot out to grasp the woman’s elbow, but she had not stumbled, and now she picked up her pace as if anxious to reach her goal.
The voice of Brother Erasmus rose and faded as his head turned toward them and then away. They were still in back of him.
“… a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than…” he said before his words faded again. The brief phrase had an extraordinary effect on the professor, however. She gave a brief sound, like a cough, and raised her hand as if to pull away the shoulders that were blocking her view of the speaker, but then, realizing the futility of it, she began to work her way around to the right, craning her neck and going up on her toes, to no avail. This close, even Kate couldn’t see him.
They were directly in front of him now, separated by four or five layers of people, and although his words were clear, Kate did not hear them. All her attention was on Eve Whitlaw, that dignified English professor who was now practically whimpering—she
He saw Kate first. His eyes rested on her calmly, sardonically, as if to say, Are you here again, my child? And then they dropped to look at the tiny woman emerging from the circle of onlookers before him. Kate saw the shock run through him, saw him rear up, his two-toned face draining of color, his head turning away even though his eyes were riveted on Eve Whitlaw. His mouth, his entire body were twisting away from her, and the expression on his face could only be one of sudden and complete terror.
“David?” the professor cried. “David, my God, I thought you were dead!”
And with her words, he turned and bolted through the crowd.
¦
FIFTEEN
¦
Kate would never have thought that a seventy-year-old man burdened by a wooden staff and overly large shoes could have evaded her, but this one did. His early advantage through the thinnest edge of the crowd while Kate was wading out from the very center got him to the road first. He shot across, to a screeching of tires and the blare of angry horns, and by the time Kate had threaded her way between the camper van and a taxi, he had vanished. He had to have entered Ghirardelli Square somehow, but the shopkeepers all looked at her dumbly and none of the other closed doors would open. Red-faced and cursing her lack of condition, she went to her car to radio for help but then stopped to think.
What difference did his running make? That had not been the flight of a guilty man upon seeing a police officer,- indeed, he hadn’t been the least bit disturbed at seeing her. She could hardly have him arrested for fleeing an old acquaintance—because that’s what he had been doing. He knew Eve Whitlaw, and she knew—David? Kate put down the handset and got out of the car. She could always put out a call for him later, if she needed to.
Professor Whitlaw was sitting on a bench, looking pale, hugging her large black handbag to her chest. Kate sat down beside her.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh yes, dear. Upset. It was a shock. For him, too, obviously. Oh my, how very stupid I was, bursting in on him like that.”
“You know him,” Kate said, not as a question. “I mean personally.”
“Oh my yes, I know him. Knew him. We worked together for ten years, what seems like a long, long time ago.”
“David… Sawyer?”
“You know of him, then?”
“There was a note in your file, a personal communication from David Sawyer, dated October 1983.”
“Lord, yes. I had forgotten that. Just three months before he disappeared. We all thought he was dead.”
