To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  “Would that have been in November?”

  “Around then, yeah.”

  “I heard about that. I’ll talk with him, see what I can do, but he has his own agenda, if you know what I mean, and self-preservation doesn’t seem to be very high on it.”

  The crowd having dispersed, the two patrol officers turned their attentions to the young man and delivered a warning that even he seemed to find impressive (though, truth to tell, even before they began, he looked ill and without interest in beating up old men). When they had finished, he gathered Angela up and would have walked away, but Erasmus put out a gentle hand to stop him.

  “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,” he said quietly. The boy nodded and would not look at him, but Angela did, and to her, Erasmus said in a heartfelt exclamation, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and then, with the emphasis of a judgment, told her, “None but the brave” (and here he pointedly ran his eyes over the boy) “deserve the fair.”

  The boy tugged at her and they moved off, but after half a dozen steps, Angela shrugged off the confining arm and the two of them continued side by side.

  The two patrolmen suggested firmly that it was time Erasmus moved on. Kate reassured them that she would deal with it, and when another call came for them, they climbed back into the car and drove off. Kate waved her thanks. As soon as they had left, she turned on Erasmus.

  “You could have been hurt, you stupid old man,” she declared furiously. He did not seem to be listening as he watched the two young people go off down the street. He shook his head in sorrow.

  “Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”

  “Talk about the shadow of death!” Kate stepped in front of him, though she practically had to jump up and down to interrupt his gaze. “That kid could have put you in the hospital. And you would have deserved it, for being such a damned…idiot.”

  He finally looked down at her, and his eyes crinkled up in a smile. “How forcible are right words.”

  “Damned straight they’re right. Don’t do that again, you hear me? I don’t care what you think—it doesn’t do anyone any good.”

  He looked again at the retreating backs and sighed. “We have scotched the snake, not killed it,” he said, which Kate took as agreement.

  “Just stick to juggling,” she suggested. “I can’t guarantee to stumble on you every time you get into trouble.”

  She knew in an instant that he did not believe she had just happened to show up here. He leaned on his staff, two identical heads sharing a good joke, and laughed at her. Even the wooden head seemed to be laughing at her, and she felt her face go red. There was absolutely nothing she could do, so she turned her back on him and walked away.

  Fourteen

  With all his gentleness, there was originally something of impatience in his impetuosity.

  Kate stalked off down the busy sidewalk, her face flushed, her mind troubled, her shin and left shoulder sore, and her jaw aching. She stopped at the first trash bin she came to and spat out the gum. How could people chew the stuff all day? They must have jaws of iron. She pulled off the stupid pink hat, rolled it up and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans, and ruffled her short hair back into place with her fingers.

  Could the man be schizophrenic? There was certainly some kind of a split personality going on here, but whether it was uncontrollable or an act, cynic that she was, she honestly could not say. The performance had not been put on merely for her benefit, of that she was reasonably sure. He could not have seen her until she had stepped back from the crowd, and the direction of the act had been already fully established.

  What was that snippet in Professor Whitlaw’s file? Something about Foolishness being a dangerous business. Kate could well believe that, if this was the pattern: One might as well tease a bull as the particular target he had chosen. Come to think of it, the bull would probably be safer.

  And what was the point? Did Erasmus actually expect to change the way the boy treated his girlfriend? Or had he just been hoping to distract the young man, to take his attention away from the girl and—what? Allow her a chance to escape?

  Oh, this was ridiculous. Erasmus wasn’t all there, and looking for rational reasons for his behavior was pointless.

  Still, he was clever, give him that. The more she thought about the scene she had just witnessed, the more impressed she was. Teasing a bull, indeed—and walking away intact, while the bull…what was the image she had in mind? Not a bull, some other powerful and savage animal. A wolverine or a cougar or something, seen long ago on a television nature program, being tormented and ultimately brought down by a pack of small, scruffy, cowardly coyotes or jackals.

  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, pul
led 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, that is teaching, and I suspect that even in its interrupted form the lesson will not cease to niggle at the man for some time. Every time he looks at the young woman, for a while.”

  “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 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. Ev
entually 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.