She went to the shop and bought the hair combs, a pair of extravagant multicolored swirling shapes, the blue of which matched the color of Lee’s eyes. The woman wrapped the box in a glossy midnight paper and Kate dropped it into her coat pocket.
She turned briskly uphill, crossed the street that brought an end to commerce, and walked up another block to the sign for a Catholic school she had noticed while cruising for a parking space: Surely the Catholics would know.
As she reached for the door, it opened and a brown-robed monk came out.
“Excuse me,” she said, stepping back, “I wonder if you can tell me where I might find the Graduate Theological Union?” Sketchy research the night before had brought her as far as the name, and indeed, the monk nodded, gestured that she should follow him back to the street, and once there pointed to a brick building a couple of doors up, smiling all the while. She thanked him, he nodded and crossed the street, still smiling. A vow of silence, perhaps? Kate speculated.
The ground floor of the building proved to be an airy oak-floored bookstore. The customer ahead of her was just finishing her purchase of three heavy black tomes with squiggly gilt writing on the back covers. When she turned away with her bag, Kate saw that she was wearing a clerical collar on her blue shirt, an odd sight to someone raised a Roman Catholic.
At the register, Kate showed her police identification and explained her presence.
“I’m looking for a man in connection with an investigation. He’s a homeless man in San Francisco who apparently comes over to this part of Berkeley regularly. How do I find the head of your security personnel?”
The man and woman looked at each other doubtfully.
“Is he a student here?” the woman asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Or a professor—no, he wouldn’t be, would he? Gee, I don’t know how you’d find him.”
“Don’t you have some kind of campus police?”
“We don’t actually have a campus, per se,” the young man explained. “In fact, you could say that there’s actually no such thing as the GTU. It’s an administrative entity more than anything else. Each of the schools is self-contained, you see. We’re just this building. Or actually, they’re upstairs. We’re just the bookstore. If you want to talk with someone in administration, you could take the elevator upstairs.”
“And how many schools are there?”
“Nine. And of course the affiliated groups, Buddhist Studies, the Orthodox Institute,- most of them have separate buildings.”
“What about a student center?”
“All the seminaries have their own.”
Kate thought for a minute. “If someone came over here regularly, where would he go?”
“That depends on what he’s coming for,” the young man said helpfully. Another customer arrived with a stack of books, mostly paperbacks. These titles were in English, but as foreign as the gilt squiggles had been. What was —or were—hermeneutics? Or semeiology?
“I don’t know what he’s coming for. All I know is that he comes over on Tuesday and returns to San Francisco before Sunday. Look, this is not a part of Berkeley that gets a lot of homeless men. Surely he’d be conspicuous.”
“What does he look like?”
“Six foot two, approximately seventy years old, short salt-and-pepper hair, clipped beard, Caucasian but tan, a deep voice.”
“Brother Erasmus!” said a voice from the back of the store. Kate turned and saw another woman wearing a clerical collar, this shirt a natural oatmeal color.
“You know him?” Kate asked.
“Everyone knows him.”
“I don’t,” said the young man.
“Sure you do,” said the woman (priest?). “She means the monk who preaches and sings in the courtyard over at CDSP. I’ve seen you there.”
“Oh,
“Do you know where he lives?” Kate asked.
“Of course not, but he can’t be homeless. I mean, he’s clean, and he doesn’t carry things or have a shopping cart or anything.”
“Right,” said Kate. “Where is CDSP?”
“Just across the street,” the man said.
“I’ll take you if you want to wait a minute,” said the woman. (Priestess? Reverend Mother? What the hell did you call her, anyway? wondered Kate.) She waited while the woman rang up her purchases, and Kate glanced at these titles, then looked again with interest:
“Thanks, Tina,” she said to the cashier.
“Have a good one, Rosalyn.”
Kate followed her out the door and down the wide steps. On the sidewalk the woman stopped and turned to study Kate.
“I know you, don’t I?” she asked, uncertain. Kate became suddenly wary.
“Oh, I don’t live around here.”
“I know that. What is your name?”
There was no avoiding it. “Kate Martinelli.”
“I do know you. Oh, of course, you’re Lee Cooper’s partner. Casey, isn’t it? We met briefly at a forum at Glide Memorial a couple of years ago. Rosalyn Hall.” She held out her hand and Kate shook it. “You won’t remember me, especially in this”—she stuck a finger into her collar and wiggled it—“and with my hair longer. I was into spikes then.”
“Sorry,” Kate said, though she did remember the forum on community violence and vaguely recalled a woman minister. She relaxed slightly. “I go by Kate now,” she added. “I grew out of Casey.”
“Amazing how nicknames haunt you, isn’t it? My mother still calls me Rosie. Tell me, how is Lee? I heard about it, of course. It’s one of those situations where you feel you should do something, but to intrude seems ghoulish.”
“She’s doing okay. And I don’t think it would be intrusive. Actually, she’s lost a lot of friends in the last months. People feel uncomfortable around wheelchairs and catheters and the threat of paralysis.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try to find some excuse to go see her. Something professional, maybe. Her profession, I mean. Is she working?”
“She just started up again, and that would be ideal, if you need an excuse.”
“Fine. I’m glad I stumbled into you, Kate. I’ve got to get myself together for a lecture, but we’ll meet again. Oh—stupid of me. Brother Erasmus. I’ll show you where he holds forth.”
They crossed the tree-lined curve of street with its sodden drifts of rotting leaves and winter-bare branches and went through an opening in the brick wall into a broad courtyard, at the far side of which were doors into two buildings and, between them, steps climbing up to more buildings. Rosalyn went to the doors on the right, and Kate found herself in a long, dimly lighted and sunken room with a bunch of tables, some of them occupied by men and women with paper cups of coffee.
“This is the refectory,” said Rosalyn. “The coffee isn’t too bad, if you want a cup. And that’s where Brother Erasmus usually is.” She nodded toward the opposite windows, which looked out on another, smaller courtyard, this one grassy and with bare trees, green shrubs, and a forlorn-looking fountain playing by itself in a rectangular pond. Rosalyn glanced at her watch. “He may be in the chapel. I’ll take you there, and then I have to run.”
Across the refectory, out the doors at the corner of the grassy space, and up another flight of stairs, more brick and glass buildings in front of them—the place was a warren, Kate thought, built on a hillside. Up more stairs, more buildings rising up, and then suddenly confronted with what could indeed only be a chapel. Rosalyn opened the door silently and they slipped in.
“That’s Erasmus,” she murmured, nodding her head toward the front. “In the second pew from the front on the right-hand side. He’s sitting next to Dean Gardner,” she added with a smile, then left.
