“Why? What happened?”
She closed her eyes and put a shaky hand across her mouth. Kate looked up and noticed the last of the crowd, lingering to have the excitement explained. She shook her head at them and they began to drift away.
“I don’t think I can go into it just here and now,” said the professor. “I feel very unsettled. I should like to pull my thoughts together first, if you don’t mind.”
Truth to tell, she was looking old and badly shaken.
“That’s fine. Let me take you back to your house,- we can have a cup of tea. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to offer you?” The professor smiled at her gratefully.
“The English panacea, yes. Tea for upsets, tea when you’ve been working, tea for hot and cold, thirst and hunger, tea to ease an awkward conversation. Yes, we shall drink tea.”
¦
While the kettle was heating in the cheerful pine kitchen, Kate borrowed the telephone in the study, closing the door behind her. She reached Al Hawkin on the third try, neither in his car nor in his office, but at home. She could hear the television in the background.
“Al, this is Kate. I’m glad I reached you, I thought you might be in Palo Alto.”
“Jani’s got a conference this weekend, so I’m catching up on paperwork and watching the moss grow on my carpet. What’s up?”
“Professor Whitlaw knows who Erasmus is. I took her to see him, down on the lawn of Aquatic Park, and when he spotted her, he ran—literally. He was frightened of her, Al.”
“You were there? And he got away from you?”
“I know,” she said, embarrassed. “Only as far as the shops, but one of them was either hiding him or had let him out through a back door. I didn’t think I should make a big thing of it, though. I mean, he’s hardly your average Joe, if we want to pick him up again.”
“Where are you now?”
“At Professor Whitlaw’s house down in Noe Valley. She’s going to tell me what she knows about Erasmus, or I should say David Sawyer. Do you want to hear it?”
“Give me the address,” he said, and when she had described how to find the place, he growled, “Fifteen minutes. I need to shave first.”
“Oh, give her a thrill, Al. She’ll think you’re doing undercover work.”
He grunted and dropped the phone, and Kate replaced her own receiver, then stood looking at the walls of books that rose up on all sides. Two sides, she saw, were filled with an unlikely combination of medical texts (with an emphasis on childhood diseases and allergies) and best-seller hardbacks with brightly colored dust jackets (novels and the sort of non-fiction books everyone talks about but no one reads). One wall and the narrow shelves beside the door had been cleared for use by the temporary resident,- these books were mostly old and lacking dust jackets, with library stickers on their spines. Ignoring the whistle of the teakettle and the sounds of cups and spoons, Kate ran her eye slowly over the assembled volumes until she found what she had thought would be there:
“You’ve found David’s books,” noted Professor Whitlaw. She put down the plate she was carrying and reached out for the book on top, the
“These are the only ones he wrote?”
“There are two more, which I’ve loaned out, and he was halfway through a fifth one when he disappeared.”
“If you don’t mind I’d like my partner to hear about Sawyer’s disappearance, too. His name is Al Hawkin,- he’ll be here in about ten minutes.”
“Of course not, I don’t mind waiting.”
Kate looked again at the two books, which gave her a topic of peripheral conversation. “Isn’t that a broad sort of reach, from Catholicism to Fools? I thought scholarly types tended to specialize more than that.”
“The Reformation book was his Ph.D. thesis, an investigation into how early Protestantism changed the Roman Catholic Church. And yes, you’d think the two topics unrelated, but David was interested in the ways an existing organization, when confronted by rebellion, moves not away from but toward its opposition. After Luther, the Roman Catholic authorities—” She was off, in full-fledged scholarly flight, and Kate did not even try to follow her. She just nodded at the pauses and waited for the doorbell to ring.
When Hawkin arrived (shaven and dressed in tan shirt, tie, and tweedy sport jacket), the pot of tea had to be emptied and made anew, the plate of what the professor called “digestive biscuits” refilled, and tea begun again. Eventually they were settled, refreshed, and ready. Kate took out her notebook.
“You want to know about David Sawyer,” Professor Eve Whitlaw began. “I first met David in London in 1971. It was July, the beginning of the long vac, and I was in the reading room of the British Library when he came up to my table and demanded to know why for the third time he had requested a book, only to be told that I had it. He was over from America, looking into the Fools movement, which was barely two years old and had caught his fancy. Our interests overlapped, so for the rest of his stay, which was, I think, a couple of weeks, we joined forces. Academically,” she added sternly, although the vision of even the most platonic relationship was inevitably amusing, given nearly two feet in height difference. Seeing neither suspicion nor humor in either bland detective face, she went on. “He was married and had a son. The family stayed in Chicago that summer, although the next year they came over with him. His wife was younger than he was, and the child was eight or nine.”
“Where are they now?” Kate asked.
“I think you’d best let me tell the story as it comes, if you don’t mind. As I said, we joined forces. I drove him around southern England to the various Fool centers, and he helped me with my work. He had a remarkable understanding of cult psychology, and he knew everyone in the field, it seemed. After he’d left, we corresponded. That first spring we wrote a joint article for a journal. The next summer when he came over with his family, they hired a house near Oxford, and for two months I practically lived with them. His wife was the loveliest person, had just finished her Ph.D. in early-childhood education, and their son was sweet, too. He had a mild speech defect and was at that sort of unformed age, but he had occasional sparkles of joy and intelligence. Ay, what a grand summer that was.
“At the end of it, I went back to gray old London and they flew back to Chicago, and two months later I had a telephone call from David asking if I’d be interested in applying for a job. Teaching undergraduates, to start with, with some research time. I jumped at it, and I got it, and we worked together for the next ten years. They were the best ten years of my life,” she said, pursing her lips as if to keep from having to speak further.
“Now comes the hard part. Perhaps I should point out that David was considerably higher up the ladder than I was. He worked almost exclusively with graduate students and on his own research. In a way, that was a pity, because he was one of the most stimulating lecturers I’ve ever heard. I used to pull him into my classes regularly, just for the pleasure of seeing their faces light up, and to see him respond to them. When he talked about church history, his voice would make poetry out of the councils and the heresies. Brilliant.
“But for the most part, he had graduate students. Some of them were very good,- a few were mediocre—he found it difficult to refuse anyone outright,- he thought it better to let them discover their own limitations. There were a few disappointments, a couple of kids who were angry when they finally realized they weren’t world-movers, but mostly it went smoothly. Until Kyle.
“I never liked Kyle Roberts, and I don’t think it’s only hindsight talking. I didn’t trust him, and I told David so, but he said it would be fine, that it was only Kyle’s rough edges. Kyle came from a very poor family, made it through on some minority scholarship, although he looked straight Caucasian to me, and basically he assumed the world owed him a living. What he wanted was to be a full professor at Yale, no less. David thought… Oh God. David thought it was funny. He thought that when Kyle really knew what he was getting into, he would settle for teaching in some lesser university, or a college. He should have taken his master’s degree and gone away, because he had a wife and two children to support, but his work was just good enough to keep him in the program. David and a couple of the others used to give him part-time jobs, research assistant and teaching aide, but I wouldn’t have
