“Patch me through to them, will you?”
It only took him two tries. When she had Alex Torres on the line, she asked if the two patrolmen could swing by the front of the Felicia library in fifteen minutes, to provide a little probably unnecessary backup.
“Funny, that’s where we are now.”
“What, at the library? Why?”
“Someone called in a report of a suspected terrorist in Arab robes hanging around out front.”
“A Muslim terrorist? In Felicia?” Every cop’s nightmare: an incomprehensible threat dropping out of the blue to splash some backwater town across the nation’s headlines, just because some maniac—wait. “I don’t suppose the guy has an English accent?”
“Don’t know about the accent, we just pulled up, but there’s a white-haired male sitting on the bench near the phones. He’s got a knapsack on the ground next to him, but I got to say he looks more like a monk than an Arab. Doesn’t have a turban or anything.”
“Look, would you mind not approaching him until I get there? Unless he’s actively causing problems, that is. I’m leaving the station now.”
“Sure, he’s just sitting there. Looks pretty harmless. You want us to watch him from the car, or from the café across the street? It has a clear line of surveillance.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and take your break? But sit where you can keep an eye on him. I’ll be there in twelve minutes if I make both signals.”
“Take your time, Sergeant. Wong’s got the prostrate trouble, he’s happy to piss for a while.”
The line cut off, but not before she heard the beginnings of an outraged partner’s voice. She smiled, figuring that Wong, not yet thirty, had no “prostrate” trouble at all. Torres had no doubt heard that Olivia Mendez was unattached again, and was pulling his unmarried partner’s leg.
The Felicia library was a tiny building with a few hundred books, two computer terminals, one part-time librarian, and a regiment of volunteers, mostly Latinas with young kids. The Felicia district of San Felipe, surrounded by fields of strawberries and lettuce, was the kind of neighborhood where few homes had computers (or books, for that matter), and the only other forms of entertainment in walking distance were the roadside bar a mile south and the dusty general-store-and-café across from the library. That made the Felicia Public Library the de facto community center, the place to go for homework, after-school gatherings, job searches, ESL classes, casting a ballot, and visiting-nurse clinics. It also made for some great numbers to show the state auditors, and its high percentage of non-English-speaking, low-income patrons generated a regular trickle of state and federal grants. Without a doubt, the people here adored the place, and kept it both busy and spotless.
Which might explain why some concerned patron had called in a stranger hanging around the public phone out front. As Olivia pulled into the pitted but freshly swept surface of the small parking area, a mother and her two young kids were coming out of the library door. All three patrons gave the odd figure a wary look. The white-haired man lifted his hand, two fingers raised like a benediction, and the uncertain looks turned to smiles.
When Olivia got closer, she could understand why. The man in the brown robe—which was no more Arabic than the checked shirt and khaki trousers she was wearing—resembled a tall, thin, brown-clad Father Christmas, down to the twinkle in his eye. There was, as Torres had told her, a blue nylon backpack tucked under the front edge of the bench, and a tall walking stick leaning against its back. A pair of nearly white running shoes peeked out from the hem of his robe.
The old man watched her climb out of the Department’s car (unmarked, but so anonymous it could only belong to the police), showing no sign of the defiant manner that raised a cop’s hackles.
Seconds later, Torres and Wong emerged from the Felicia Mercado, a onetime garage now plastered with neatly painted signs advertising “Strong Hot Coffee,” “Breakfast Burritoes All Day,” and “Menudo Ever Tursday.” The two uniforms hitched up their duty belts as they crossed the deserted side-street. They joined her at the car, only taking their eyes off the man for the brief moment necessary to greet her.
Torres she had known forever. Wong had been with the Department just under a year. Torres spoke first.
“He’s just been sitting there. Says hi to the people going in and out, but otherwise just cooling it.”
“Okay, I don’t think there’ll be a problem here, you might as well go back to work.”
“In a minute.” The men followed her up the library’s walk.
The bearded monk stood as she approached, a motion less like a flight response and more like the compulsive manners of her mother’s father, who’d been unable to sit when a lady came in the room. Any resemblance ended there: her grandfather, shaped by childhood malnutrition and a lifetime of work in the fields, hadn’t been much over five and a half feet. This man towered well over six, though so gaunt, there were hollows in the cheeks above his beard. He was probably homeless, what with being a stranger in the area and carrying that worn knapsack, but if so, it was a very clean and tidy homelessness. He reminded her of a saintly portrait in church school.
“Sir, I believe you called the police department?”
“When there are constabulary duties to be done.” One eyelid drooped infinitesimally, a near-wink.
“Could we have your name, sir?”
Instead of answering, his right hand went toward the side of the brown robe, where a pocket might be; instantly, both young officers leapt forward to seize his arms hard, making the old man gasp.
“Stop!” She stepped between the monk and Torres. “He’s probably got arthritis. Sir, do you have any weapons in your pocket? Anything sharp?”
He shook his head.
“Do we have your permission to check for ourselves?”
He nodded.
“Would you please lean with both arms against the back of that bench?” The two uniforms let him go, and the old man turned to place both hands on the bench, automatically spreading his feet apart as he did so: he’d been patted down before. Then again, anyone who looked like this would have been picked up regularly, no matter his appearance of a thin Kris Kringle.
His pockets, accessible through slits in the seams of the brown robe, held no weapon, only coins, a pencil stub, some folded sheets of paper, and a nearly flat wallet. She signaled for the officers to let him go, and held out his wallet to him. “Is this what you were after?”
In answer, he took it from her and opened the billfold portion. No money that she could see, but he selected a piece of folded newspaper and held it out.
Torres, meanwhile, had his hand on the backpack. “You want us to look through this?”
She met the brown eyes above her. “Sir, do you mind if we take a look at your belongings?”
“What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.” The monk watched as Torres unbuckled the top. Gingerly, Olivia began to peel apart the ancient piece of newspaper.
It was the upper half of a front page from the San Francisco Chronicle. In the center was a photograph showing four people, standing in conversation.
Although the page was all but worn through on its fold lines, Olivia recognized the figure with the white hair. He was wearing the same robe, or an earlier version of this one, and had a tall walking stick with a knob on top—currently leaning against the end of the bench. In the grainy newsprint, the stick was tucked into his shoulder as he stood listening to a dark-haired woman who barely came to his chin. To her left stood a distinctive black man in a dashing hat who could only be the former mayor of San Francisco. The picture’s fourth figure was a middle-aged man whose face was vaguely familiar.
When she read the caption, she realized why:
Mayor Willie Brown, Inspectors Martinelli and Hawkin of the SFPD talk with the self-styled “Brother Erasmus” at the funeral of homeless woman Beatrice Jankowski, Saturday, St. Mary’s Church.
Hawkin: she knew that name. And Martinelli—they
’d been involved with a couple of cases that got a lot of press.
The faint bell of memory rang slightly louder. Hadn’t one of those cases been something extremely quirky to do with the homeless population of San Francisco? Ages ago—a murder case in which a sort of patron saint of the homeless population had played a part? One Brother Erasmus?
She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but suddenly Torres cursed and thrust an object under her nose—a small, thick, leather-bound book with onionskin pages, closely printed in some heavy writing.
“Arabic! And it’s got notes to himself in the same language!”
For a moment, just an instant, it crossed Olivia’s mind that there might actually be a point to all those idiotic federal terrorist warnings the Department kept getting—but one glance at the old man’s face, one white eyebrow raised in a look that was more quizzical than guilty, and the panic faded.
“Let me see.” She held out her hand for the book. Torres gave it to her, his own hand on the butt of his gun, the snap flipped away: he’d be ready if the old man reached for the trigger of a vest-bomb. She opened the book, and immediately shook her head—not that she had any idea what it said, but she’d watched enough television news to know what she was looking at.
“This isn’t Arabic, Torres, it’s Hebrew. And for heaven’s sake take your hand off your weapon.”
“Hebrew?”
“Sure, it’s all square and boxy—Arabic is all curves and curlicues. Haven’t you ever noticed the banners and signs on the news?”
“So, what? A Jewish terrorist?”
“This is a Bible. Look, don’t bother going through the rest of his pack. I know who this is. They call him Brother Erasmus.”
“A muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.” His smile was like a beatitude as he held out his hand to her.
“Er, right.” She allowed his fingers to wrap around hers, a smooth, strong, warm grip that again evoked her grandfather, who had grasped the wooden handle of a hoe until the last day of a long life. Not that they shared much in the way of appearance—this man’s were long and thin and considerably less bashed about. They reminded her of that Dürer engraving of praying hands that used to be so popular when she was growing up. “Sergeant Olivia Mendez.”
Erasmus held on for a moment, then let her go.
“Thanks, Torres, you and Wong can get back on patrol. We’ll be fine here.”
Reluctantly, the two patrol officers retreated to their car. Olivia turned to the man at her side. “Sir, I’m going to need to make some phone calls. Do you mind coming with me to the station house? You could have a cup of coffee or something.” She didn’t want him to think of it as an arrest.
He stretched out a long arm for the rucksack Torres had left on the bench, retrieved the carved staff, and walked beside her to the unmarked she’d driven here.
She put him in the front, with the staff threaded over the seat back. Neither of them spoke on the drive into town, although it was not an uncomfortable silence. At the station, she helped him get his stick out and led him inside.
“Sir, I’m going to put you in an interview room for a few minutes, and I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve made my calls. Is there anything you need? Coffee? Soft drink? Something to eat?”
“I am glad I was not born before tea.” The fellow had a knack for making a statement sound like a suggestion.
“Tea? I’ll see what we can do. Officer Marcoletti, would you please make a cup of tea for the gentleman in interview room one?”
“Tea?”
“Yes, there are some bags in the cabinet. And take him the milk and sugar, in case he wants them.”
“Milk and sugar?”
“And the package of cookies.” She shut the door before he could repeat that, too.
It took four calls to track down Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department, finally reaching her at home. A woman answered; a child was talking in the background; Martinelli came on the line, and the noises cut off.
Olivia began to explain: her odd phone call; tracked to a local library; seemed to match the identity of the man known as Brother Erasmus, and she wondered—
“Our Holy Fool is there? In San Felipe?”
“Apparently.”
“Good Lord, I’ve often wondered what happened to him. How is the old fellow?”
“He looks fine. Thin, but healthy.”
“I am so tempted to drive down and see him. Tell him hi from me, would you?”
The affection in Martinelli’s voice was not the usual reaction of a homicide detective to a witness and onetime suspect, Olivia reflected.
“I wanted to ask you about him, whether you’d say he was reliable, but it sounds like you’ve already answered my question.”
“I don’t know about reliable, since he’s a man with his own agendas, but I’d say Brother Erasmus is the most honest man you’ll ever meet.”
“If you can figure out what he’s saying.”
“Does he still talk that way? Everything in quotes?”
“Are those all quotes?”
“That’s how he talked then. It took us forever to catch on.”
“Why does he do that?”
The phone went silent for a minute, before Martinelli answered. “He would probably call it penance for his sins. He lost his family, years ago back in England, in a way he felt responsible for. Personally, I thought he was trying to keep his mind so busy, he didn’t have energy left over for his own thoughts. He is actually able to speak directly, in his own words—he finally did when he was helping us with our case—but it seemed to be very hard on him. I think you’ll find that, if you listen carefully, his meaning becomes clear. Have you figured out what he’s after?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said he called you and said something about ‘a child crying in the night.’ Has he suggested yet how he can help you?”
“You think he knows something about one of my cases?”
“People open up to him—even the most unlikely people.” The detective made it sound like an admission. “And if he didn’t know anything, why would he have called? Do you have a case involving a child?”
Gloria Rivas was nearly seventeen, the edge of womanhood, but Olivia pictured the bedroom of eleven-year-old Danny Escobedo, his LEGO spaceship and Spider-Man sheets. “Yes.”
“Well, he had some reason to come to you. You might start there.”
Olivia thanked her, repeated the promise to pass her greeting on to the old man, and hung up. She then phoned her priest, at the Catholic church downtown. He knew immediately who she was talking about.
“The children call him Saint Francis, because he has a way of coaxing birds into eating from his hand—literally, although I suppose figurative birds as well. He’s been at mass several times over the past few weeks. I’m not sure where he lives, or how he supports himself, although I’ve seen people slip him money and they often bring him something to eat. He’s oddly…authoritative. There was a scuffle in the food line one day and he stepped forward to put his hands on the two men’s shoulders. They calmed right down. What’s more, he had them eating together afterward, talking up a storm while he sat and nodded.”
“Have you talked with him?”
“Don’t know if I’d call it talking with him, but I’ve talked to him three or four times myself. Very restful kind of guy. Knows his Bible better than I do.”
“But you’d say he’s a trustworthy sort?”
The priest did not hesitate. “I’d say he’s a saint of God.”
When she hung up, she tapped her fingernail on the desk a few times, then returned to the interrogation room. Glancing through the door’s small window, she could see the old man, long fingers threaded together, gazing in silent contemplation at the staff propped in the corner. She opened the door and stuck her head inside.
“I need some lunch. Want to join me?”
He rose and picked up his knapsack and staff, following her
out of the station.
The take-out burrito stand down the street was doing brisk business with an assortment of children in soccer uniforms. They waited their turn, the old man beaming down at all around him. She was curious to see how he would order, but rather than speak, he laid a finger on the Spanish-language menu taped to the pass-through window, choosing the vegetarian option, and water. Two minutes later they had their fragrant meals before them on one of the stand’s scarred wooden picnic tables. She peeled back the paper from one end and bit in; Erasmus was of the fork-and-knife school, taking a fastidious surgical approach to the object with his plastic utensils. His staff lay stretched out on the top of a low concrete-block wall, and she noticed that the fist-sized swelling at the top was not an amorphous knot of the wood as she’d thought, but a heavily worn carving. Studying it, she realized that when it was new, it must have resembled its owner—beard, flowing hair, hawk-like nose. She smiled.
“I spoke with Inspector Martinelli in San Francisco.”
His response came as an affectionate murmur. “Subtle and profound female.”
“Yeah, she seemed to admire you, too. Asked me to say hi. She also said you might have some information regarding an active case. That it could be the reason you called.”
He put his fork down and reached through the pocket-slit of his robe, pulling out a folded scrap of newsprint considerably fresher than the earlier one. He laid it in front of her, reclaiming his fork as she picked up the clipping.
The Escobedo boy’s school picture looked out at her.
She knew what the article said without having to look—the words might have been carved on her heart. It had been published on Thursday, six days after Gloria Rivas was gunned down and Danny vanished.
“You have information about this?”
He gazed thoughtfully at the rice and beans. “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
“Look, sir, can’t we just drop this whole quotation business? This isn’t a game.”
“The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.” He chewed, watching as she thought it over.
Lockdown Page 14