To Play the Fool Page 12

  Back on the street, she crossed over to run the gauntlet of sidewalk vendors selling sweatshirts, tie-dyed infant’s overalls, images of the Golden Gate Bridge painted onto rocks and bits of redwood, bead necklaces, toilet-roll holders in the shape of frogs and palm trees, crystal light-catchers, crystal earrings, crystal necklaces, and crystals to sew into the back seam of your trousers to center your energy. She was tempted to get one of those for Al, just to see his face, but moved on instead to the next stall, where a graying gypsy sold polished stones on thongs. Kate fingered a teardrop-shaped stone, dark blue with an interesting silvery line running through it.

  “That’s lapis lazuli, good for physical healing, psychic protection, and stimulating mental powers,” the woman rattled off, adding, “The color would look good on you.”

  God knows, I could use some mental stimulation, thought Kate, although she told her, “I’m looking for a gift, for a blond woman.”

  The woman gave her a brief lecture on stone auras and personality enhancements, and Kate ended up buying a small necklace of intense lapis lazuli that was set in a delicate silver band. As the woman looked for a suitable box, Kate ran her eyes over the park again.

  “Do you come here often?” she asked the woman.

  “Seven years,” was the laconic answer.

  “There’s a performer here I was hoping to see, an old guy, tall, does a clown act.”

  “You a cop?” Kate was surprised, as she had made an effort and dressed like half the women on the street.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Just like to know who I’m talking to. That’s eighteen bucks.” Kate handed her a twenty; she gave her back two ones and the small white box. “I’ve got nothing against cops. My sister used to be married to one; he was okay. You’re talkin’ about Erasmus?”

  “That’s right. Have you seen him?”

  “Not today. He usually comes down in the afternoon; mornings, he starts in front of the Cannery.”

  “I’ll try down there, then. Thanks.”

  “Sure. It’s the eyes,” she said unexpectedly.

  “What eyes?”

  “Cops. Your eyes are never still, not if you’ve been on the streets. Flip-flip-flip, always looking into peoples’ pockets, watchin’ how they stand. Wear your sunglasses. And relax, sister. It’s a beautiful day.”

  Kate laughed aloud, then sauntered off, feeling good. This was not a bad city, sometimes. She tended to forget that, what with one thing and another.

  She made her way past the crowded cable-car turntable and turned downhill at the cart selling hot pretzels, strolling along the waterfront with her hands in her pockets and her eyes scanning the streets from behind the black lenses, humming a tune she did not recognize as coming from the silly musical video she had watched two nights ago. (“When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done, a policeman’s lot is not an ’appy one, ’appy one.”) She saw two drug scores and a cruising hooker, then a familiar face. She walked over and leaned against the wall next to the pickpocket and sometime informant.

  “Hey, Bartles,” she murmured. “How’s doing?”

  “Inspector Martinelli. Looking good. I’m clean.”

  “I’m sure you are, Bartles, and how about we stay that way? Such a pretty day, let’s not spoil it for the folks from Nebraska, huh?”

  “I’m not working, I told you. I’m just waiting for the wife.”

  “ ‘His capacity for innocent enjoyment is just as great as any honest man’s;’ ” she sang, out of tune, startling a passing young couple from Visalia.

  “What’re you going on about?”

  “Just something I heard on the tube the other night. Bartles, I think when your wife’s finished her shopping you should take her home. I’m in a good mood and if you spoil it, I might break one of your fingers getting the cuffs on you.”

  “I’m not working today,” he insisted.

  “Good. Neither am I. Have you seen a tall old man with a beard doing some kind of a clown act?”

  “First she threatens me, then she asks me a favor.”

  “No threat, and it’s not a favor. Just asking a civil question.”

  “You wouldn’t know a—oh Christ, it’s my wife. Get lost, will you?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Two blocks down, across the street. Now go!” he hissed.

  Kate moved off, but not before she had seen the light of suspicion come on in the face of a thin woman in shorts and spike heels. She whistled softly to herself and turned into one of the nearby clothing shops, where she chose a hot pink nylon baseball cap that was embroidered with a truncated Golden Gate Bridge and the words SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, buying it and a package of chewing gum. She paused at the tiny mirror beside a display of abalone earrings to put her hair up under the hat, then unpeeled the gum and took out a piece, which she never chewed by choice, but it rendered her infinitely more harmless than all the makeup in a theater. Chewing and humming and slouching behind her shades, she went to see the act of Brother Erasmus.

  Thirteen

  A certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul.

  It really was a stunningly beautiful morning, Kate thought with pleasure, the kind of day that tempts people from New York and Boise to move to California. It is easy to brave the earthquakes and the unemployment and the killing mortgages when a person can eat lunch outside wearing only a cotton shirt, knowing that much of the country is up to its backside in snow.

  Strolling along in the carnival atmosphere, kites dipping out over the water, the air smelling of fish and aftershave, the waters of the Golden Gate sparkling, with the bridge, Mount Tamalpais, and the island fortress of Alcatraz looking on benevolently, Kate could forget for a few minutes that she was here on business. She paused to examine the odd wares of the shop that sold live oysters complete with pearls, stopped again to watch a young black kid standing on a box playing robot while his buddy made sure everyone had the hat held under their noses, and then she bought an ice cream cone—for camouflage, of course. By then she had spotted Erasmus. She went up casually, hiding behind hat and cone and the large crowd he had attracted.

  He was dressed as Rosalyn Hall had described him, in khaki trousers, a too-small blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, and running shoes that were just a bit too long. He also had a Raiders cap perched on the back of his head and an exaggeratedly garish gold watch on his wrist. His face, as Rosalyn had said, was very lightly shaded. From the side where Kate stood, his face above the beard seemed slightly more dusky than usual, but when he turned around, she saw that the left side of his face was pale, almost chalky. Subtle, and disconcerting.

  The most striking thing, however, was not Erasmus himself but his wooden staff: Propped upright against a newspaper vending machine, it wore on its carved head a miniature Raiders cap and a pair of child’s sunglasses, and beneath its chin a scrap of the blue-and-white T-shirt fabric covered the worn piece of ribbon. Kate had not really noticed how like Erasmus the carving was, probably because the wood was so dark that the details faded, but it was all there: the beard, an identical beak of a nose, the high brow beneath the cap. The staff was Erasmus reduced to fist-sized essentials. Only its eyes were invisible behind the miniature black lenses.

  Erasmus was talking to the staff. He seemed to be reciting a speech in a Shakespearean cadence (speaking with a clipped midwestern sort of accent), striding up and down in the small area of sidewalk that was his stage, seemingly unaware of any audience but the staff, which stood erect, gazing back enigmatically at him from the orange metal newspaper box.

  And then the staff spoke. For a moment, Kate felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise at the hoarse whisper, until she realized it was merely a very skillful ventriloquism she was hearing. Around her, the people in the crowd, particularly the newcomers on the outer fringes, stirred and glanced at one another with quick, embarrassed smiles. It was eerie, that voice, hypnotic and amazingly real. Across the shoulders, she caught a glimpse of two childre
n on the other side of the circle, their mouths agape as they listened to the mannikin speak.

  “A pestilent gall to me!” it said.

  “Sir, I’ll teach you a speech,” offered Erasmus eagerly. He stood slightly bent, so as to look up at the face on the end of the wooden pole, and his stance, combined with the expression he wore of sly stupidity, changed him, made him both bereft of dignity yet somehow more powerful, as if he was under the control of some primal buffoon.

  “Do,” said the staff in its husky voice.

  “Mark it, uncle: Have more than you show; speak less than you know—”

  As the speech went on, Kate licked her ice cream absently, the wad of gum tucked up into her cheek, and tried to remember where she had heard this before. It must be Shakespeare, she thought. One of those things Lee had taken her to. What was it, though? One of the dramas. Not Macbeth. The Tempest? No, it was King Lear, talking to his fool. But here, the part of the king was being played by the inanimate staff, while the king’s fool was the flesh-and-blood man.

  “This is nothing, fool,” hissed the staff.

  “Then it’s like the breath of an unpaid lawyer,” said Erasmus gleefully. “You gave me nothing for it!”

  This brought a laugh, from the adults at any rate. The children did not giggle until the fool offered to give the staff two crowns in exchange for an egg.

  “What two crowns will they be?” said the staff scornfully.

  “Why, after I’ve cut the egg in the middle and eaten the meat, the two crowns of the egg.” And so saying, Erasmus pulled two neat half eggshells out of thin air and placed them on the heads of two children. He turned back to the enigmatic wooden figure.

  “I pray you, uncle, keep a schoolmaster, that can teach your fool to lie. I would like to learn to lie.” He wagged his eyebrows up and down and the children laughed again.

  “If you lie, sir, we’ll have you whipped,” growled the staff.

  “I marvel what kin you and your daughters are!” Erasmus exclaimed. “They’ll have me whipped for speaking the truth, you will have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I would rather be any kind of thing than a fool, and yet—I would not be you,” he said, marching up to the staff and shaking his head at the wooden face. “You have pared your wit on both sides, and left nothing in the middle—and here comes one of the parings.”

  He raised his voice at this last sentence and looked pointedly over the heads of the people at a spot behind them. As one, they turned to see. Kate, with the whole mass in front of her, stepped away from the street to look down the sidewalk and saw—Oh no. Oh shit, Erasmus, you stupid old man, don’t do this. Can’t you see what you’re messing with?

  But of course he could. That was why he was standing there with his head down, grinning in wicked anticipation as he met the eyes of his target.

  The young man was startled at the sudden spectacle of thirty or more people turning to stare at him. Wary, but constitutionally unable to back away from any confrontation, the young man stopped dead, his eyes shooting from side to side as he tried to analyze the situation.

  He was a small but powerfully built boy of perhaps nineteen or twenty wearing a tight tank top that showed off the muscles of a weight lifter. His chin and cheeks were dusted with a slight blond bristle and he swaggered in snug blue jeans and black Doc Marten boots that boosted his height almost to average. In his left hand he had a small brown paper bag with the glass neck of a green bottle protruding from it. His right arm was draped over the shoulder of an emaciated girl of seventeen or eighteen who had acne on her chin and chest, black roots in her blond hair, a fading bruise on her upper arm, a lip whose puffiness was not hidden by the lipstick she wore, and a pair of enormous black sunglasses that obscured a large part of her face. Kate had been on enough domestic calls to read the signs without thinking about it: Her careful walk and the arms crossed in front of her told Kate the girl’s ribs hurt; her body language (leaning both into and away from the possessive arm) told Kate who had been responsible.

  Erasmus, too, knew that something was wrong here. He held out a hand to the pair and called jovially, “Come my lad and drink some beer!”

  “Uh, thanks, I got some,” said the boy.

  “Hasten to be drunk,” Erasmus said smilingly. “The business of the day.”

  “I ain’t drunk.”

  The staff now spoke up. “First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.”

  The young man stood with his mouth open, his eyes going from the man to his curiously dressed stick and back again. He suspected mockery, but the number of spectators made it impossible either to shove the old man around or to back off.

  “Wha’ the fuck?” he asked.

  “Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out,” commented the staff.

  The boy squinted at the wooden object, then took his arm from the girl’s shoulders to walk around and see it face-on.

  “How’s he do that?” The audience had begun to respond to this new act (all except for those with children, who had already faded away) and a murmur of chuckles greeted the drunk boy’s confusion. He spun around belligerently to face them, and the onlookers glanced around for Erasmus to intervene, but he had moved, and they saw him now standing before the girl, her sunglasses in his hand.

  Her left eye looked like something from a special-effects laboratory, swollen and black, the eyeball itself so bloodshot, it resembled an open wound. Silence fell immediately. With the others, Kate watched Erasmus bend slightly to look into the girl’s good eye.

  “A wounded spirit who can bear?” he said quietly, and reaching up with his right hand, he cupped it gently over her eye. The girl gazed up at him, as hypnotized as a rabbit, and did not even wince. After a moment, he stepped away and held out her sunglasses. She took them and her face once more disappeared behind them. No one watched her, though. Their eyes were on Erasmus, who turned back to the youth.

  “A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be.”

  The boy was confused by the old man’s friendly smile and voice, and he nodded stupidly.

  “Speak roughly to your little girl,” Erasmus continued, “and beat her when she sneezes. She only does it to annoy because she knows it teases.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” objected the boy. “I never—”

  “Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.” Erasmus was still smiling, but he did not look friendly now. He looked large, his eyes easily half a foot above those of the boy.

  “I didn’t hit her—”

  “Jealousy is as cruel as the grave.”

  “What are you—”

  “Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face; terror, the human form divine, and secrecy, the human dress.”

  “Jesus Christ. C’mon, Angela, this guy’s nuts.” The boy tried to move around Erasmus, but the older man moved to block his way to the girl.

  The staff spoke up again. “It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured,” it whined.

  “Old man, you’re asking for it.”

  Kate began to move through the back of the thinning crowd, cursing under her breath and looking for someplace to deposit the remnants of her cone. She knew what those young muscles would do to the old man, to say nothing of the boots. Erasmus bent to look into the young man’s eyes, and for the first time he seemed to be trying to communicate, not just mock.

  “I must be cruel,” he said with a small shrug of apology, “only to be kind.”

  The boy hesitated, held not so much by the words as by the man’s unexpected attitude, though even as Kate watched, it began to harden.

  “What mean you,” he said coldly, “that you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?”

  Silence held; then, said as a sneer: “The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and…short.”

  It was the deliberate stress given the last word that broke the boy, and his po
werful right arm, with the paper-wrapped bottle now at the end of it, shot automatically out toward the old man’s head. Kate threw herself against the arm before it made contact, but the impact swept all three of them into the girl Angela, against the wall behind her, and then tumbled them to the pavement in a heap. The raging boy flung his girlfriend off and was first to his feet, and if three men from the audience had not managed to drag him off, Kate would have had considerably more damage than three oval bruises on her shoulders and shins where his boots had hit home. She scrambled upright and shoved her police ID into his face, holding it there until it and her repeated shouts of “Police officer! I’m a police officer!” finally got through and she saw his muscles relax. The boy shook off the restraining hands but made no move to continue the assault.

  The raucous gathering had finally attracted official attention, and several short coughs of a siren signaled the arrival of the local uniforms. The two men climbed out of the patrol car and moved their authoritative bulk into the center of activity, but Kate did not take her eyes from the young man until the uniformed officers had acknowledged her identity and were actually standing next to her. Only then did she turn and help Erasmus to his feet. He brushed himself off as if checking that he was in one piece, then, while Kate was making explanations that downplayed the entire episode, he went over to his staff, freed it from the newspaper box, and tucked it into his right shoulder. The effect was bizarre, like looking at a two-headed being, and Kate had to tear her eyes away.

  The two uniformed officers were telling the crowd, what remained of it, to move on, and while the younger one dealt with the young man, the older one took Kate to one side.

  “Inspector Martinelli, can you tell me what your interest is in the Brother there?”

  “At this point, I don’t know what my interest is,” she admitted. “He’s somehow involved in the cremation homicide in Golden Gate Park, but whether as a witness or something more, I just don’t know.”

  “The reason I ask, he’s a nice old guy, but he’s like a magnet for trouble. Not always, or we’d move him on, but this is the third time, and once last fall we didn’t get here fast enough. He got beat up pretty bad. I just thought if he was a friend or a relative, well…You know?”