“Would you agree with that, Lee?”
“A Freudian would say that each phrase has to be analyzed in regards to its setting, but I am no Freudian. However, I think you do have to be aware of the sources—where they come from and what’s going on in the place he lifts them from—and to be sensitive to any themes and patterns that may appear. It’s like a collage I saw once, Eva, to use your analogy. It was a giant picture of an empty chair with a book on the floor next to it, but when you got up close you saw that the whole thing was made up of snippets of naked female bodies, cutouts of portions of breast and navels and throats. Knowing that changed the meaning of the final collage considerably. Which was the whole point.”
“Philip?”
“I agree, the overall picture is more important than the component parts. For one thing, I don’t think Erasmus regards himself as a prophet. A prophet is chosen, often despite his wishes, and spends his time exhorting, preaching, driving people toward right behavior. In my experience, Erasmus seems to spend a great deal of his time listening, and when he does preach, it’s often far from clear what he thinks you should do. No, he’s no prophet. Although he may well be a saint.”
Kate looked at him, startled, but he did not appear to be joking.
“Are you serious?”
“About his potential sainthood? Oh yes. You have to remember that even Francis of Assisi was a man before he was a saint. Why not Erasmus?”
She could think of no way to answer that, so Kate turned back to her notes. “Why not indeed? Tell me about his choice of passages that first day, out on the lawn at CDSP. What is Corinthians? Why would he use it so much?”
♦
It was very late when the meeting broke up, and Kate felt more battered than enlightened. It had been a slow and laborious process, and humiliating, an ongoing admission of her own profound ignorance. She had persisted, however, and in the car, driving back from delivering Professor Whitlaw to the Noe Valley house, she came to certain conclusions.
First of all, she abandoned any hope of finding a hidden meaning in Sawyer’s utterances by looking at their original context. Occasionally he used a phrase to refer to a story or episode, but those were generally characterized by the marked inappropriateness of the phrase, such as when he referred to the dead man as “He was not the Light” to give the man a name. For the most part, Sawyer used a quotation as raw material, hacked from its setting regardless.
Beyond that, Kate was not sure what she had expected. However, she did not feel it had been a wasted day. Without knowing why, she felt she had been told the layout of a dark room: She still couldn’t see where she was going, but she could begin to sense the shapes and obstacles it contained.
And as she turned up Russian Hill, she began to play with the idea of meeting Erasmus on his own ground. Could her team of translators assemble enough quotes of their own to enable her, as their mouthpiece, to put David Sawyer on the spot?
Could it be that he was waiting for someone to do just that?
♦
TWENTY-TWO
♦
Never was any man so little afraid of his own
promises. His life was one riot of rash vows, of
rash vows that turned out right.
When the phone rang at 2:20 on Wednesday morning, Kate’s first thought was how she’d forgotten this jolly side of working homicide. Her second thought was that David Sawyer had attempted suicide.
“Martinelli.”
“Inspector, this is Eve Whitlaw.”
“Professor Whitlaw?” Kate dashed her free hand across her eyes and squinted at the bedside clock. Yes, it was indeed the middle of the night. “What is it?”
“It’s about David. I know why he does it.”
Does it, not did it, Kate noted dimly. “And that couldn’t wait?”
“I thought, before you sent him to that mental institution—”
“He’s already gone.” Actually, it was just to the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General.
“Is he? Oh dear. Well, perhaps it’s for the best.”
“It’s also required. I doubt he’ll be gone long. Was there anything else, professor?”
“Did you not want to hear my thoughts? There is a distinct internal logic to his actions, once one understands the starting point.”
“Professor, could it wait until morning?”
“Is it that late? Why, what time—oh good Lord, I had no idea. I was sitting here thinking and—oh how appalling of me, you poor thing. Yes, by all means, ring me in the morning. Go back to sleep, dear.”
Kate hung up with a chuckle and, savoring the delicious feeling of reprieve, curled up against Lee and did indeed go back to sleep.
In the morning, Professor Whitlaw was bristling with apologies. Kate drank half her coffee just waiting for a chance to get a word into the telephone receiver, and she then arranged to meet the professor at a cafe downtown at eleven o’clock. The professor was quite willing to break her other appointments for the morning, but Kate decided that she did not need to break her own.
She did have to cut it short, though, and even then she came into the cafe late, shaking the rain from her coat. She spotted the professor’s gray head at a corner table, bent toward a book, a cup frozen halfway between saucer and lip, forgotten. Kate sat down. Eve Whitlaw looked up, startled, sipped from the cup, made a face, and let it clatter onto the saucer.
“Inspector, how lovely to see you. You’re looking remarkably fresh, considering your disturbed night.”
Before she could launch into more apologies, Kate greeted her, offered her more tea, or a meal, and when both were refused went over to the counter and ordered herself a double cappuccino and a cheese sandwich. Thus fortified, she went back to the table, where she found the professor hunched forward, ready to pounce.
“I will not bore you with further apologies for my deplorable manners, Inspector, but I must apologize for the slowness of my intellect. It has taken me since Sunday evening to see the obvious. The problem is,” she said, as if laying out the basic premise for a lecture—which indeed she was—“I am an historian, and as such I am accustomed to approach theological questions as historical questions. That is, they are tidy, complete, finished. It is very difficult to visualize a modern phenomenon in the same way: it keeps moving about, and one can not foresee its consequences. Rather the same, I suppose, as an early-fourth-century theologian would be unable to visualize the real importance of the Council of Nicaea, or a bishop of the time to imagine the immensity of what Luther was doing. I’m sorry, I’m dithering.
“What I am trying to explain is why I couldn’t see what is happening to David when we first looked at it on Sunday afternoon. You, of course, were approaching it from a legal point of view, your friend saw it from a psychological one, Philip Gardner can see David only as the colorful Erasmus, and I was stuck at seeing Erasmus as a perversion of David Sawyer. This morning at that ungodly hour, I finally turned it around, placed him in an historical setting, and looked at his actions as if they indeed held an internal logic, rather than simply reflecting the irrational reactions of a severely traumatized man.” She leaned forward to drive her point home. “The key idea here is, ”covenant.“”
Kate swallowed her bite and tried to look intelligent. “A covenant is some kind of agreement, isn’t it?”
“A biblical covenant could be anything from an international treaty to a business arrangement. It was regarded as a sacred commitment, legally and morally binding, absolutely unbreakable. The relationship between the Divinity and the people of Israel was covenantal, for example. I should have known immediately that was what David was doing—he used the idea twice in explaining himself, the first time when he was talking to you and Philip Gardner in Berkeley, the second in the interview on Friday. The passages were on both lists, but I was seeing it as one of his loosely metaphorical quotations, or expressing a psychological truth, not a literal one.”
“What difference would that make, pre
cisely?”
“A great deal. You see—well, let me take a step back here.” Take several, thought Kate. “What you see in David is a conjunction of two very different religious traditions that have been brought together by his personal disaster and welded together by his need. The idea of covenant is one of them—we’ll come back to that. The other is the tradition of the Holy Fool, a figure David spent much of his adult life studying. Ten years ago, David took a long-delayed but decisive action and told Kyle Roberts that there was no future, no real future, in the academic world for him. David now attributes his harsh words to his own vanity, which I assume means that he was too proud of his own status to recommend an inferior scholar for a post that he, Kyle, was not suited for. I agreed with him at the time, and still do: One cannot allow oneself to be known as a person who recommends duds,- the academic world is too small and too unforgiving for that. At any rate, David’s criticism was the spark that set off a badly unbalanced and volatile personality, and David’s family, his beloved son, as well as three other innocents, were destroyed in the explosion.
“Now, one of the most basic characteristics of the fool, either a secular or a religious one, is that he is without a will. Even inanimate objects are more self-willed than a fool. Think of some of Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant bits where he wrestles with chairs and clothing and lengths of wallpaper and such and then is beaten by them. Look at the way your Erasmus depends on his scepter—a classic piece of foolishness, by the way. He has no will,- he makes no choices,- he is wafted to and fro by powers he cannot control: Even when he appears forceful and aggressive, he is acting only as a mirror. David, in fact, took this to an extreme, though I admit a logical one: He does not even have words of his own.”
She waited until she saw that Kate had followed her this far, saw Kate begin to nod, and continued.
“Only a brilliant man like David could have managed it. And, more than brilliance. I am not so ready as Dean Gardner to attribute sainthood to David, but he did have a point, and David’s charisma was always considerable.
“What I think happened, then, is that at the point in David’s life where he had to choose between death—remember what he said, that the only thing worse than death was wanting death and being denied it?—and some tolerable form of life, he chose a life of absolute surrender, of complete will-lessness. Complete and daily sacrifice, without any risk of doing harm to another by taking positive action, a form of service to humanity that was properly demanding and might go some way to make up for what he was responsible for—and here’s where the idea of covenant comes in. Guilt is a feeling with a limited life span, and David could not take the chance that someday—in a year, or three years, or five—the initial impulse that drove him to live the life of a Fool would fade and he would find some excuse to resume his normal life. So he ensured that it would be permanent by declaring a covenant, an unbreakable oath said, I venture to say, over the dead body of his son.
“A covenant is either whole or it is broken—nothing in between, no amendments or retractions. In the most archaic forms, the symbolic recognition of a covenant is a split carcass, down the halves of which a flame is passed or the people walk. In fact, in the Hebrew language a covenant is ‘cut,” not just made, which serves as a reminder that if one party goes back on his part of the agreement, he may be split down the middle as the carcass was.
“I can see I’m losing you, and I freely admit that it’s a very cerebral explanation. In fact, I doubt very much that David thought of it in anything like this manner. His was, I imagine, a ‘gut’ response to the option of suicide. The fool’s way of thinking came naturally to hand—it fit—and he clamped on the oath, sworn on his son’s body, like a suit of armor. No—more than armor,- like an exoskeleton, a rigid carapace that held him together and allowed him to justify living. The inflexibility of the vow, the safety of speaking in other men’s words, the freedom that comes with letting go—that has become his life. A life of service to the homeless, of ministering in different ways to the spiritually impoverished middle classes and to the dangerously isolated seminarians.”
“And now, jail,” said Kate slowly. “And probably prison.”
“What do you mean?” Professor Whitlaw said sharply.
“I have had the strong feeling the last few days that Sawyer is reconciling himself to being incarcerated, that he doesn’t really care whether he’s in or out. At any rate, he certainly isn’t afraid of it anymore, like he was at first.”
“God. Oh God. Yes, I can see that. His ministry in prison. Oh Lord, what can we do?”
“We must make him talk. We have to find out what he knows about John’s death. Professor Whitlaw, I am being horribly unprofessional by saying this, but frankly I have serious doubts that David Sawyer killed the man. However, I think he knows who did. He must tell us.”
The cafe lunch tide that had risen around the two women was now starting to ebb, and Kate only now became briefly aware of her surroundings. After a long time, Professor Whitlaw looked up at her, and to Kate’s astonishment the woman did not seem far from tears.
“I want David back, you do understand that. He was my best friend in all the world, and I have missed him terribly, every day, for all these years. However, much as I would rejoice in having him return to himself, I have to admit that what you want could finally destroy what remains of his life. If you make David break this strange vow of personal speechlessness, you will force him to break faith with his murdered son, and I suspect that for David that would be intolerable. It would negate the whole last ten years of his life. I do not wish to be overly dramatic, but I very much fear that if you break his oath, you will break him. You could kill him.”
“What would you recommend we do?”
“You might find the real murderer.”
Kate suppressed a surge of irritation. “Yes,” she said dryly.
“Other than that, frankly, I do not know what you can do. Self-preservation is too low a priority for him to respond to that particular appeal, and you have already tried to convince him that he has the responsibility to help bring the man’s killer to justice, with no result whatsoever. Unless you can convince him that his silence positively harms others, I can’t see that you’ll budge him.”
Kate began to pile her dishes together. She did not say anything, could not say anything without it being inexcusably rude. Even a “Thank you very much” would inevitably sound like sarcasm, and this woman was only doing her best. Still, even with all the pretty words she’d dressed it in, she had told Kate no more than she knew already: Erasmus would not talk, Sawyer would not save himself. So she said nothing. Professor Whitlaw, however, had one more observation to throw in.
“Martyrdom has always been the act of fools. It’s the ultimate absurdity, giving up one’s life for an idea.”
“Martyrs stand for something,” Kate said, suddenly fed up with words. “There’s nothing to stand for here. He’s just being stupid, and a real pain in the neck.”
With that judgment, she tipped her plate into the tub marked DISHES and walked out into the rain.
♦
TWENTY-THREE
♦
… The abrupt simplicity with which Francis won the attention and favour of Rome.
A few days later, David Sawyer was returned to the jail, along with a lengthy psychiatric evaluation that said, in effect, that the man was eccentric but quite sane enough to stand trial. That evening, on her way home, Kate stopped by his cell to see him. She stopped in the next night as well, to take him a book of poetry that Lee had sent, and the next. It soon became a part of her day, and twice when she was out in the city and might normally have gone directly home, she found herself making excuses to drop by her office first and then go up to the sixth floor for a few brief words.
Kate was not the only one to fall beneath the spell of Brother Erasmus. One evening he held out a flowered paper plate and offered her a home-baked chocolate chip cookie. A child’s drawing mysteriously appear
ed, Scotch-taped to the wall of his cell. Once, late, following a long and depressing day, Kate entered the jail area and heard the sound of Sawyer’s voice ringing out clear and loud among the astonishingly silent cells. When she came nearer, she saw him stretched out on his narrow bed, reading aloud from a book called The Martian Chronicles. The other inmates were sitting, lying down, or hanging on their bars, listening to him. Kate turned and left. Another night, even later, Kate passed by on business and heard a voice singing: a repetitive tune, almost a chant, with every second line exhorting the listener: Praise Him and glorify Him forever.
He had visitors, too, over the next couple of weeks. Those of the homeless who could work up the courage to enter the daunting Hall of Justice came for brief visits: Salvatore once, the three Vietnam vets once each, Doc and Mouse and Wilhemena twice each. Beatrice came four times in the first six days after he had returned to the jail. From Sawyer’s other worlds came Dean Gardner, who visited regularly, and Joel, the grad student who had given Erasmus rides to Berkeley. There was a steady stream of others from the seminary, professors, staff, and students, and from Fishermen’s Wharf, the owner of the store that sold magic supplies and the crystal woman.
Brother Erasmus even had his own newspaper reporter, who had adopted him and argued with his editor about the newsworthiness of a jailed homeless man. Ten days after Sawyer had been brought back to San Francisco, the reporter’s efforts paid off with a full-page human-interest story in the Sunday edition on homeless individuals, one of whom was Erasmus. Photographs and interviews of the homeless men and women connected to him, and of their more settled neighbors, succeeded in drawing a picture of the homeless population as a community of wise eccentrics. The feature spread resulted in a great deal of cynical laughter among those responsible for enforcing the law, a flurry of letters to the editor in praise and condemnation, a brief increase in the takings of the panhandlers across town, and even more visitors for David Sawyer.
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