Torres, she had known for years, and she’d met Wong (who couldn’t have been more than thirty, further marks against the prostate story) a couple of times, although she’d never worked with him.
“He’s just been sitting there,” Torres told her. “Occasionally says hi to someone going in or 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.”
“We’ll hang on for a minute,” Torres said firmly. Jaime Torres was a few years older than she was, and she’d been friends with his sister in high schooclass="underline" this was a brotherly thing. She wouldn’t even try to argue him out of it.
“Okay,” she agreed, and led the way up the library’s walk.
The bearded monk rose as she approached, not like a wary suspect but like her maternal grandfather, who’d been incapable of sitting when a lady entered the room. The resemblance ended there: her grandfather had been shaped by a lifetime of work in the fields, but even if he’d lived a life of leisure, he wouldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet. This man was well over six feet and of a willowy build that wasn’t far from gaunt, creating hollows in the cheeks above his beard. She figured him for a homeless man, what with being a stranger in the area and carrying that worn knapsack, but if so, he was a very clean and tidy homeless man. He reminded her of a portrait of a saint in church school.
“Sir, I believe you called the police department?” she said.
“When constabulary duty’s to be done,” he replied, one eyelid drooping infinitesimally in a near wink.
“Could we have your name, sir?” she asked.
Instead of answering, his right hand went toward the side of the brown robe, where a pocket might be; instantly, both men at her side leaped forward to seize him, yanking his arms around and making him stagger back with a grimace of pain.
“Wait, wait!” she told them. “Don’t hurt him. 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? Let him go,” she told the two uniforms.
The old man turned and leaned his arms onto 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 behavior.
His pockets, accessible through slits in the seams of the brown robe, held no gun or knife. Some coins, a pencil stub and folded sheets of paper, and a nearly flat wallet. She held out his wallet to him. “Is this what you were after?” she asked.
In answer, he took it from her and opened the billfold portion. There was no money that she could see, but he took out a piece of folded newspaper and offered it to her.
“You want us to look at his pack?” Torres asked her.
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 said, extending one hand in a sweeping gesture toward the beat-up rucksack on the ground. Torres picked it up and unbuckled the top, while Mendez picked apart the ancient folded square of newspaper.
It was the upper half of a front page, seven-year-old 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, she recognized the figure with the white hair, the dark robe, and the long walking stick with the knob on top that was currently leaning against the end of the bench – in the grainy newsprint, the stick was tucked against his shoulder as he leaned forward to listen to a dark-haired woman not much taller than Mendez herself. To the woman’s left stood the familiar image of a black man wearing a dashing hat who could be only the then mayor of San Francisco. Next to the man in the robe was the fourth figure, a middle-aged man whose face was vaguely familiar.
When she read the caption, she realized why:
“Mayor Willie Brown and Inspectors Martinelli and Hawkin of the SFPD talk with the self-styled ‘Brother Erasmus’ at the funeral of homeless woman Beatrice Jankowski on Saturday, St. Mary’s Cathedral.”
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? 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 exclaimed and thrust out the object in his hand. It was a small, thick leather-bound book with onionskin pages, closely printed in some heavy writing.
“Arabic!” he exclaimed. “And it’s got notes to himself in the same language!”
For a moment, just an instant, it crossed Mendez’s mind that there might be a terrorist cell here in Rio Linda, the world’s least likely place. She shot a glance at the accused man’s face, but the old bearded man had one white eyebrow raised in a look that was more quizzical than guilty. Of course, it was possible that terrorists had now started enrolling in acting school…
“Let me see that,” she said. Torres gave her the book and transferred his hand to the butt of his gun, flipping off the snap to be ready when the old man reached for the trigger of his vest bomb. She opened the book and immediately shook her head – she had no idea what the words 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,” she said. “No, look, don’t bother going through the rest of his pack. I know who this is. You’re Brother Erasmus, aren’t you?” she asked.
“A muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.” His smile was like a beatitude as he held out his hand to her.
“Er, right,” she said.
She gave him her hand and felt it wrapped in 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. But this man’s fingers were long and thin and considerably less bashed about, and reminded her of that Dürer engraving of praying hands that used to be so popular when she was growing up. “Sergeant Bonita Mendez,” she told him.
He held her hand a moment, then let her go.
“Thanks, Torres, you and Wong can get back on patrol. I’m fine here.”
Reluctantly, and not without protest, the two patrol officers separated themselves from the library forecourt and returned to their car. Watching the two men swagger off, Mendez regretted, not for the first time, that a uniformed officer’s equipment belt encouraged such a gait.
She turned to the man at her side and said, “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 added, lest he think of it as an arrest.
He stretched out a long arm for the rucksack Torres had abandoned, half-searched, on the bench, retrieved the carved staff, and walked beside her to the unmarked she’d driven there.
She put him in the front, threading the staff over the seat back, and pulled out of the library parking lot. Neither of them spoke on the drive into town, although it was not an uncomfortable silence, merely restful. At the station, she helped him get his walking stick out and led him inside.