To Play the Fool

kind of shy. Always neat and clean, and polite. Which is why it was so odd to see him behaving that way. I mean, some of the street people are really out of it,- they really should be on medication, if not hospitalized. Of course, thanks to Reagan, we don’t have any hospitals for the marginally insane, only for the totally berserk. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

“Would you mind showing me just where you saw him?”

“Sure, I need to take Dobie for a walk, anyway. Just let me get some clothes on. Help yourself to more coffee. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

It was with some irritation that Kate heard a shower start, but Sam Rutlidge was as good as her word, and in barely seven minutes she came back into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a UCSF sweatshirt, her wet hair slicked back and a pair of worn running shoes in her hand.

“Sorry to be so long,” she said, dropping onto a chair to put on her shoes. “I hate getting dressed without having a shower first. Makes me feel too grungy for words.”

“No problem. Dobie’s a good conversationalist.”

Dobie had, in fact, only eyed her closely. Now, however, she emerged from her basket and went to stand at her owner’s feet, tail whipping with enthusiasm. When the woman rose, the dog turned and galloped like a clumsy weasel down the hallway to the front door. Rutlidge put on a jacket and took down a thin lead to clip to Dobie’s collar, and down the steps they went.

They walked down to Fulton, where Rutlidge paused and pointed.

“I turned onto the road here,” she said. “Moved over into the right lane, the other driver accelerated to pass me, and then I saw the Preacher. Just about where that crooked ‘No Parking’ sign is. See it? He was walking toward the road at an angle, as if he was headed to Park Presidio.”

“Was he carrying anything other than his staff?”

“Not that I saw, but then I couldn’t see his right hand, just his left, and that was holding his stick.”

“What was he wearing?”

Sam Rutlidge wrinkled up her forehead in thought while Dobie whined restlessly. “A coat, brownish, I think. It came almost to his knees. Some dark pants, not jeans, I don’t think. Dark brown or black, maybe. And he had a knit hat, one of those ones that fit close against the skull. That was dark, too. I only saw him for about two or three seconds. I don’t think I’d have given him a second glance if it hadn’t been that his anger was so obvious—and uncharacteristic.”

“Okay. Thank you, Ms. Rutlidge, you’ve been very helpful,” said Kate, polite but careful not to appear overly enthusiastic or grateful. “I’ll need you to sign your statement when I get it drawn up. Could you come by and sign it?”

“Tomorrow’s not very good. I’ll have a long day at work.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a technical writer. Boring, but the pay is good. Do you want my number there? You can call me and arrange a time to meet?” They exchanged telephone numbers and then Rutlidge and her small sleek dog turned right toward the signal where Thirtieth crossed into the park, while Kate walked to the left until she was across the street from the point where the dirt path met the paved sidewalk, marked by a post with a crooked NO PARKING sign. There was no need to cross the road and follow the path through the trees, no need to look for scraps of yellow on the trees. She knew where she was. She stood looking at the park, at the path along which an angry Brother Erasmus had stormed on a Tuesday morning two weeks ago, leaving behind him the area that, twenty hours later, would be surrounded by great lengths of police tapes. Behind those bushes, sometime that morning, John the nameless had lain, bleeding into the soil until the life was gone from him.

She walked back to her car and set into motion the process of obtaining a warrant for the arrest of one David Matthew Sawyer, aka Brother Erasmus, for the murder of John Doe.

¦

NINETEEN

¦

… The valley of humiliation, which seemed to him

very rocky and desolate, hut in which he was

afterwards to find many flowers.

They picked him up near Barstow.

Two sheriff’s deputies spotted him less than a hundred miles from the Arizona border, walking due east along the snow-sprinkled side of Highway 58, barely twenty-four hours after the APB went out on him. They recognized him by the walking stick he used, as tall as himself and with a head carved on the top. He did not seem surprised when they got out of their car and demanded that he spread-eagle on the ground. He did not resist arrest. Besides his staff, he was carrying only a threadbare knapsack that held some warm clothes, a blanket, bread and cheese and a plastic bottle of water, and two books.

He seemed to the sheriff deputies, and to everyone who came in contact with him, a polite, untroubled, intelligent, and silent old man. In fact, so smiling and silent was he that the sheriff himself, on the phone to arrange transportation for the prisoner, asked Kate if the description had neglected to say that Erasmus was a mute.

The Sheriff’s Department already had a scheduled pickup to make in San Francisco, and in light of the state budget and in the spirit of fiscal responsibility, they agreed to take Erasmus north with them. Kate was there to receive him when he was brought in Thursday night, even through it was nearly midnight. He spotted her across the room, nodded and smiled as at an old friend one hasn’t seen in a day or two, and then turned back to the actions of his attendants, watching curiously as they processed his paperwork and transferred the custody of his person and his possessions to the hands of the San Francisco Police Department. Brother Erasmus was now in the maw of Justice, and there was not much any of them could do about it.

When the preliminaries were over and he was parked on a bench awaiting the next stage, Kate went over and pulled a chair up in front of him. He was wearing the clothes he had been picked up in, minus the walking stick, and she studied him for a minute.

She had seen this man in various guises. When she first met him, he had appeared as a priest, wearing an impressive black cassock and a light English accent. Among the tourists, he had dressed almost like one of them, a troubling jester who did not quite fit into his middle-class clothing or his mid-western voice. When ministering (there was no other word for it) to the homeless, he had looked destitute, his knee-length duffel coat lumpy with the possessions stashed in its pockets, watch cap pulled down over his grizzled head, sentences short, voice gruff.

Tonight she was seeing a fourth David Sawyer. This one was an ordinary-looking older man in jeans and worn hiking boots, fraying blue shirt collar visible at the neck of his new-looking thick hand-knit sweater of heathery red wool, lines of exhaustion pulling at his face and turning his thin cheeks gaunt. (He did not, she noted absently, have a scar below his left eye from the removal of a tattoo.) He sat on the hard bench, his head back against the wall, and looked back at her out of the bottom half of his eyes, waiting. After a moment, he shifted his arms to ease the drag of the metal cuffs biting into his bony wrists, and she was suddenly taken by a memory of their first confrontation. He had held out his wrists to be cuffed, and now she had cuffed him, just sixteen days after the murder had been committed.

There was no pleasure in the sight.

“Your name is David Sawyer,” she said to him. There was no reaction in his face or in his body, just a resigned endurance—and, perhaps, just the faintest spark of humor behind it. “Eve Whitlaw told us who you are, and we’ve been in touch with the police in Chicago. They told us what happened back there, Professor Sawyer. We know all about what Kyle Roberts did.”

This last brought a response, but not an expected one. The flicker of humor in the back of his eyes blossomed into a play of amusement over his worn features and one eyebrow raised slightly. Had he said it in words, he could not have expressed any more clearly the dry admiration that she could fully comprehend all the complexities of that long-ago incident. Within two seconds, the eloquent expression had gone, and all traces of humor with it. He looked tired and rather ill.

“Look not mournfully into the past,” he said softly. Hell, she thought, disappointed. She’d been hoping, since seeing him, that this current, rather ordinary manifestation of Sawyer/Erasmus might have regained the power of ordinary speech, but it didn’t seem to work that way.

“I have to look into the past, David,” she said, using his first name in a deliberate bid for familiarity. “I can’t