It was closer to forty-five minutes before Hawkin arrived—his hair stilldamp—smelling faintly of lemons and strongly of onions from the pair of white bags he dropped on her desk.
“I didn’t know if your religious fanatic was a vegetarian, so I got him cheese.” Kate waited while Al dug the sandwiches out and handed her one, then she picked up a packet of french fries and a can of Coke and took them to Erasmus.
“Just another ten minutes,” she told him. “There’s cheese and avocado in that,- hope that’s all right.”
“My mouth shall show forth thy praise,” he replied gravely.
“Er… you’re welcome.”
She went back and found Hawkin halfway through his sandwich.
“What are you grinning at?” he said somewhat indistinctly.
“I’ve dealt with nuts before,” she told him, “but nobody quite like Erasmus. Is this that chicken salad with the almonds and orange things? Great.” The french fries were thick and crisp, and for several minutes the only noises to come from Hawkin’s desk were the sounds of food being inhaled.
“So,” said Hawkin eventually, “tell me about our friend down the hall.”
“Well, he’s going to be an interesting interview. He speaks only in quotations—the Bible, Shakespeare, that kind of thing—so of course there’re a lot a direct questions he can’t answer.”
“Is he coherent?”
“Yes, in a roundabout sort of way. There’s usually a kind of key idea in his quote that answers whatever question you’ve asked, but sometimes you have to dig for it. He usually hesitates before he speaks, to think about what he’s going to say, I guess. Some questions he just doesn’t answer at all; others, he answers with body language or facial expressions. When he really wants you to understand, though, he just keeps at it until he’s sure you’ve got whatever it is he’s driving at.”
“Interview by inference,” Hawkin grumbled. “How the hell can we transcribe a whole session filled with shrugs and eloquent silences?”
“It might not be so bad. The problem is interpreting the meaning of his words. For example, it looks like he’s confessed to John’s murder, but I may have misunderstood him.”
“Explain.”
Kate told him what had happened in the restaurant. “And Dean Gardner agreed that to have Erasmus using the words of a biblical murderer could be taken as an admission of guilt. So I read him his rights and brought him here.” Kate decided it wasn’t necessary to mention the little scene outside.
Hawkin shook his head and then began to laugh. “As you say, it’s nice to have a variety of nuts to choose from.” He drained his Coke and swept the rubbish into the wastepaper basket. “Let’s go see what sense we can shake loose from the holy man.”
♦
EIGHT
♦
A camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.
At home, sitting at the dinner table, Kate asked a question.
“Do you know anything about fools?”
Lee finished chewing her mouthful of lasagna and swallowed.
“It’s not a clinically recognized category of mental illness, if that’s what you’re asking. Far too widespread.”
“Not this kind of fool. This one thinks of himself as some kind of prophet, spouting the Bible.”
“You mean a Fool?” Lee said in surprise, her emphasis placing a capital letter on it. “As in Holy Fool?”
“As in,” Kate agreed.
“How on earth did you find one of those?”
“He’s connected with that cremation in the park. Seems to be a sort of friend or maybe spiritual leader, if that isn’t too farfetched, to the street people in the area.”
“That would make sense, I suppose.”
“So what do you know about fools?”
Kate watched Lee take another forkful while she thought.
“Not an awful lot, off the top of my head. It’s a Jungian archetype, of course, a way of counteracting the tendency of social and religious groups to become concretized. The Trickster is a combination of subtle wisdom and profound stupidity, a person both divine and animalistic.” She pinched off another square of lasagna with the edge of her fork, ate it. “Many of the most influential reforms, certainly in religious history, have been made by people who fit the description of fools. St. Francis, for example, was a classic fooclass="underline" He was the son of a wealthy family, who suddenly decided it wasn’t enough, so he gave it all away and went to live on the streets, preaching simplicity. Let’s see. In the Middle Ages, the court fool was the only one who could speak the truth to the king. Clowns are a degenerated form of fool. Charlie Chaplin used traces of Trickster behavior. I don’t know, Kate, I’d have to do some research on it.” She chewed for a while longer, on the food and on the idea. “You know, I vaguely remember this guy at a conference, years and years ago, in the Berkeley days maybe, who presented himself as a fool. A very deliberate and self-conscious evocation of the archetypal figure—it must have been a Jungian conference, come to think of it, one of those weekend things sponsored by UC Extension or the Jung Institute.”
“Do you remember anything about him?”
“Not really. Tall fellow, had a beard, I think. White. Him, I mean, not the beard—he was young, not more than about thirty.”
“You’re sure about the age?”
“Kate, love, this was—what, fifteen years ago? All I remember is that he was taller than I was, hairy but neat, wearing motley and carrying this skinny little cane with an ugly carving on it, and trying hard to project an aura of wisdom and self-confidence, although I think at the time I was not impressed. I picture him as uncomfortable, and I think I wondered if he felt silly. Memory is too unreliable to be sure, but I’m fairly sure if he’d been much older I would have been even more struck by his lack of self-assurance. I take it your fool is too old.”
“He is. I’d say he’s a very healthy seventy, seventy-five.”
“No, I don’t think the man I remember could have been anywhere near fifty. Is there no way of finding out who he is?”
“We’re making inquiries, but so far everything’s negative. Nobody knows where he came from,- he was not carrying any ID. He won’t tell us anything.”
“He doesn’t talk?”
“Oh, he talks. Just doesn’t always make sense. He speaks in phrases taken from someplace—the Bible, Shakespeare, things like that.”
“Everything he says?”
“So far as I can see. I don’t know, of course,- I’m just a Catholic, and everyone knows Catholics don’t read their Bible. But I’ve been told that.” She explained about Dean Philip Gardner and the Graduate Theological Union. “He says they’re quotes, and I’ll take his word for it. They’re definitely not straight speech.”
“How strange.”
“You’d say that isn’t standard behavior for a fool?”
“I don’t know that there is such a thing as standard behavior among fools,” replied Lee, “rules of behavior being almost a contradiction in terms. Still, I wouldn’t have thought that speaking only in quotations was completely consistent with being a fool. In fact, I’d have said fools would be the last people to constrict themselves in that way. Spontaneity would be their hallmark, clever wordplay, and a definite, urn, suppleness in mind and body. Two things that I possess not, at the moment. I’d have to make a deliberate effort and research the topic before I could give you more than a superficial idea, I’m afraid.”