To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  “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, but 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 midwestern 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 do that without asking questions about the past.”


  “Not every question deserves an answer.”

  “I think tomorrow, when Inspector Hawkin and I talk with you, we will ask some questions that not only deserve an answer but demand it. We are talking about a human life, David. Even if he wasn’t a very pleasant person, which I have heard he wasn’t, the questions deserve an answer.”

  “Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

  “You knew it was murder from the first time I laid eyes on you, didn’t you, David? How was that? No, no, don’t answer that, not tonight,” she said quickly, although there was no sign that he was about to respond, not even a flash of fear at being trapped into an admission. She wasn’t about to lay the groundwork for his defense lawyer to claim she had badgered him into giving inadmissible evidence.

  That reminded her: “Are you going to want a lawyer present while you are being questioned, David? We will provide you with one if you want.”

  He had to search his memory for a moment, but eventually he came up with an answer, spoken with a small conspiratorial smile that was nearly a wink of the eye. “There are no lawyers among them, for they consider them a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.”

  “I guess that’s a no. Okay. Let us know if you change your mind.” She stood up, and his eyes followed her, though his head had not moved from the wall during their conversation. “I will see you tomorrow, then. I hope you get some sleep tonight.” This last was intended merely as a wry comment and unspoken apology for the racket of the place, but it served only to draw the man’s attention to his surroundings, and for the first time he looked about him. His gaze traveled over the tired walls, the loud, bored policeman, the drunk and belligerent and bloody prisoners, and he shuddered; the whole length of him gave way to a deep shiver of revulsion, and then he shut his eyes and seemed to withdraw. Kate stood up and caught the eye of the guard to nod her thanks and signal that she had finished with this prisoner, but before she could move away, she heard Sawyer’s voice, speaking quietly, as if to himself, but very firmly.

  “Go and sit in thy cell,” he said, “and thy cell shall teach thee all things.”

  Kate gaped at him, but his eyes remained shut, so in the end she threw up her hands and took herself home to her own unquiet bed.

  Twenty

  Men like Francis are not common in any age, nor are they to be fully understood merely by the exercise of common sense.

  The interrogation, if it could be called that, began the next morning, the last Friday in February. Of the three of them gathered in the stuffy room, Al Hawkin was the only one who looked as if he had slept, and even he came shambling down the corridor like an irritable bear. He did not like having his hand forced, he did not like arresting someone with less than an airtight case, and most of all he did not like jousting on the way in with reporters who treated the whole thing as something of a joke.

  “Christ, Martinelli, were you in such a hurry to see him that you couldn’t have arranged for the sheriffs to have car trouble or something? We’ve only found two of his hidey-holes, don’t even have the warrants for them yet, and I’m supposed to conduct an interrogation on the strength of his being in the neighborhood at the time the victim was bashed? And to put the frosting on the whole absurd thing, the victim’s still a John Doe! Give me strength,” he prayed to the room in general, and walked over to fight with the coffee machine.

  “What was I to do?” she demanded. “He would have been in Florida by next week, or Mexico City.”

  “Of course we had to have him brought in. Just maybe not quite so fast.”

  Stung by the unreasonableness of Hawkin’s demands, Kate stalked off to call for the transport of Erasmus from cell to interrogation room.

  So the three of them came together for the second time, Kate sulky and sleepless, Sawyer looking every one of his seventy-two years, and Hawkin so perversely cheerful, he seemed to be baring his teeth.

  This was to be an interrogation, unlike the earlier noncommittal interview. An interview might be considered the polite turning of memory’s pages. Today the purpose was to rifle the pages down to the spine, to shake the book sharply and see what might drift to the floor. Politely, of course, and well within the legal limits—the tape recorder on the table ensured that—but their sleeves were metaphorically rolled back for the job. The only problem was, the process assumes that the suspect being interrogated is to some degree willing to cooperate.

  Kate, as had been agreed, opened the session with the standard words into the tape recorder, giving the time and the people present. Then, because Hawkin wanted it on record, she readvised Sawyer of his rights. The first snag came, as Hawkin had anticipated, when Sawyer sat in silence when asked if he understood his rights. Hawkin was prepared for this, and he sat forward to speak clearly into the microphone.

  “It should be noted that Mr. Sawyer has thus far refused to communicate in a direct form of speech. He has the apparently unbreakable habit of speaking in quotations, which often have an unfortunately limited application to the topic being discussed. During the course of this interview, it may occasionally be necessary for the police officers conducting the interview to suggest interpretations for Mr. Sawyer’s words and to note aloud any nonverbal communications he might express.”

  Hawkin sat back in his chair and looked at the older man, who nodded his head in appreciation and sat back in his own chair, his long fingers finding one another and intertwining across the front of his ill-fitting jail clothes. Somehow, for some reason, life was slowly leaking back into his mobile face, and as animation returned, the years faded.

  “Tell me about Berkeley,” Hawkin began. There was no apparent surprise on the fool’s part at this unexpected question, just the customary moment for thought.

  “We shall establish a school of the Lord’s service,” he said, “in which we hope to bring no harsh or burdensome thing.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” said Hawkin flatly. Sawyer merely twitched a skeptical eyebrow and said nothing. Hawkin’s practiced glare was no match for the older man’s implacable serenity, either, and it was Hawkin who broke the long silence.

  “Are you saying you find it restful there?”

  “Oh Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

  This heartfelt prayer, simply recited by a man who so obviously knew what it was to be tired, gathered up the ugly little room and gave pause to the proceedings. Kate thought, This is why he is so curiously impressive, this man: When he says a thing, he means it down to his bones. Hawkin thought, This man is going to be hell before a jury: They’ll be eating out of his hand. He cleared his throat and pushed down the craving for a cigarette.

  “So, you go to Berkeley for a rest. Do you go there regularly?”

  There was no answer to this, only patient silence, as if Sawyer had heard nothing and was waiting for Hawkin to ask him the next question.

  “Do you have a regular schedule?”

  Silence.

  “You spend time in San Francisco, too, don’t you? In Golden Gate Park? With the homeless? Why won’t you answer me?”

  “Not every question deserves an answer,” he replied repressively. It was one of the few times Kate had heard him repeat himself.

  “So you think you can choose what questions you answer and which you won’t. Mr. Sawyer, you have been arrested for the murder of a man in Golden Gate Park. At the moment, the charge is murder in the first degree. That means we believe it was premeditated, that you planned to kill him and did so. If you are convicted of that crime, you will go to prison for a long time. You will grow old in prison, and you will very probably die there, in a room considerably smaller and less comfortable than this one. Do you understand that?” He did not wait for an answer other than the one in Sawyer’s eyes
.

  “One of the purposes of this interview is to determine whether a lesser charge may be justified. Second-degree murder, even manslaughter, and you might sleep under the trees again before you die. Do you understand what I am saying, Mr. Sawyer? I think you do.

  “Now, I don’t know if you planned on killing the man known as John or not. I can’t know that until you tell me what happened. And you can’t tell me until you drop this little game of yours, because the answers aren’t in William Shakespeare or the Bible; they’re in your head. Let’s get rid of these word games—now, before they get you in real trouble. Just talk in simple English, and tell me what happened.”

  There was no doubt that Hawkin’s speech had made an impression on the man, though whether it was the threat or the appeal was not clear. He had sat up straight, his hands grasping his knees; now his eyes closed, he raised his face to the overhead light, and his right hand came up to curl into the hollow of his neck, as if grasping his nonexistent staff. For three or four long, silent minutes he stayed like that, struggling with some unknowable dilemma. When he moved, his hand came up to rub across his eyes and down to pinch his lower lip, then dropped back onto his lap. He opened his eyes first on Kate, then on Hawkin. His expression was apologetic, but without the faintest degree of fear or uncertainty.

  “Truth,” he began, “is the cry of all, but the game of the few. There is nothing to prevent you from telling the truth, if you do it with a smile.” He gave them the smile and sat forward on the edge of his chair to gather their attention to him, as if his next words would not have done solely themselves. “Dread death. Dry death. Immortal death. Death on his pale horse.” He paused and held out the long, thin fingers of his right hand. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No. Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. A fugitive and a vagabond shall you be on the earth.” He paused to let them think about this, his eyes going from one face to the other. He drew back his hand and commented in a quiet voice that made the thought parenthetical but intensely personal: “Death is not the worst. Rather, to wish for death in vain, and not to gain it.” After a moment, he sat forward again and held out his left hand, cupped slightly as if to guide in another strand of thought. Putting a definite stress on the misplaced names, he said, “Then David made a covenant with Jonathan, because he loved him as he loved his own soul. And David stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to Jonathan. And then he shall go out to the altar which is before the Lord and make atonement for it. He shall go no more to his house. He shall bear all their iniquities with him into a solitary land. I have been a stranger in a strange land. And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank of the brook. I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool. A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.” He stopped, saw that he had lost them, and pursed his lips in thought. Then, with an air of returning to kindergarten basics, he began again. The wisdom of this world is folly with God. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise now, let him become a fool so he may become wise. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly clothed and buffeted and homeless. We have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. We are fools for Christ’s sake.”