There was one crowd, at the beginning of Aquatic Park, but that was only the line waiting for the cable car to be rotated. They rounded the park, dodging a flock of Japanese tourists and a laden station wagon from Michigan, and then, on the path sloping down from the road to the waterfront, there was another crowd: From its center rose the back of a familiar graying head.
Kate pulled into a no-parking area, propped her police identification on the dashboard, and trotted around the car to help Professor Whitlaw out.
“He’s down there. See where that child with the ball just ran?”
The professor set off determinedly in her sensible shoes, with Kate at her side. Halfway down the slope, the din from the street musicians across the road faded, and the wind stilled. Kate could hear him now, not what he was saying but the rhythm of his voice as he chanted some other man’s words. A few more steps, and Professor Whitlaw faltered. Kate’s hand shot out to grasp the woman’s elbow, but she had not stumbled, and now she picked up her pace as if anxious to reach her goal.
The voice of Brother Erasmus rose and faded as his head turned toward them and then away. They were still in back of him.
“… a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than…” he said before his words faded again. The brief phrase had an extraordinary effect on the professor, however. She gave a brief sound, like a cough, and raised her hand as if to pull away the shoulders that were blocking her view of the speaker, but then, realizing the futility of it, she began to work her way around to the right, craning her neck and going up on her toes, to no avail. This close, even Kate couldn’t see him.
They were directly in front of him now, separated by four or five layers of people, and although his words were clear, Kate did not hear them. All her attention was on Eve Whitlaw, that dignified English professor who was now practically whimpering—she was whimpering, with the frustration of being unable to move the bodies ahead of her, those shoulders clad in knit cotton, shining heads of hair a foot above her own. Finally she just put her head down and began to push her way in, Kate close on her heels.
He saw Kate first. His eyes rested on her calmly, sardonically, as if to say, Are you here again, my child? And then they dropped to look at the tiny woman emerging from the circle of onlookers before him. Kate saw the shock run through him, saw him rear up, his two-toned face draining of color, his head turning away even though his eyes were riveted on Eve Whitlaw. His mouth, his entire body were twisting away from her, and the expression on his face could only be one of sudden and complete terror.
“David?” the professor cried. “David, my God, I thought you were dead!”
And with her words, he turned and bolted through the crowd.
♦
FIFTEEN
♦
The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again.
Kate would never have thought that a seventy-year-old man burdened by a wooden staff and overly large shoes could have evaded her, but this one did. His early advantage through the thinnest edge of the crowd while Kate was wading out from the very center got him to the road first. He shot across, to a screeching of tires and the blare of angry horns, and by the time Kate had threaded her way between the camper van and a taxi, he had vanished. He had to have entered Ghirardelli Square somehow, but the shopkeepers all looked at her dumbly and none of the other closed doors would open. Red-faced and cursing her lack of condition, she went to her car to radio for help but then stopped to think.
What difference did his running make? That had not been the flight of a guilty man upon seeing a police officer,- indeed, he hadn’t been the least bit disturbed at seeing her. She could hardly have him arrested for fleeing an old acquaintance—because that’s what he had been doing. He knew Eve Whitlaw, and she knew—David? Kate put down the handset and got out of the car. She could always put out a call for him later, if she needed to.
Professor Whitlaw was sitting on a bench, looking pale, hugging her large black handbag to her chest. Kate sat down beside her.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh yes, dear. Upset. It was a shock. For him, too, obviously. Oh my, how very stupid I was, bursting in on him like that.”
“You know him,” Kate said, not as a question. “I mean personally.”
“Oh my yes, I know him. Knew him. We worked together for ten years, what seems like a long, long time ago.”
“David… Sawyer?”
“You know of him, then?”
“There was a note in your file, a personal communication from David Sawyer, dated October 1983.”
“Lord, yes. I had forgotten that. Just three months before he disappeared. We all thought he was dead.”
“Why? What happened?”
She closed her eyes and put a shaky hand across her mouth. Kate looked up and noticed the last of the crowd, lingering to have the excitement explained. She shook her head at them and they began to drift away.
“I don’t think I can go into it just here and now,” said the professor. “I feel very unsettled. I should like to pull my thoughts together first, if you don’t mind.”
Truth to tell, she was looking old and badly shaken.
“That’s fine. Let me take you back to your house,- we can have a cup of tea. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to offer you?” The professor smiled at her gratefully.
“The English panacea, yes. Tea for upsets, tea when you’ve been working, tea for hot and cold, thirst and hunger, tea to ease an awkward conversation. Yes, we shall drink tea.”
♦
While the kettle was heating in the cheerful pine kitchen, Kate borrowed the telephone in the study, closing the door behind her. She reached Al Hawkin on the third try, neither in his car nor in his office, but at home. She could hear the television in the background.
“Al, this is Kate. I’m glad I reached you, I thought you might be in Palo Alto.”
“Jani’s got a conference this weekend, so I’m catching up on paperwork and watching the moss grow on my carpet. What’s up?”
“Professor Whitlaw knows who Erasmus is. I took her to see him, down on the lawn of Aquatic Park, and when he spotted her, he ran—literally. He was frightened of her, Al.”
“You were there? And he got away from you?”
“I know,” she said, embarrassed. “Only as far as the shops, but one of them was either hiding him or had let him out through a back door. I didn’t think I should make a big thing of it, though. I mean, he’s hardly your average Joe, if we want to pick him up again.”
“Where are you now?”
“At Professor Whitlaw’s house down in Noe Valley. She’s going to tell me what she knows about Erasmus, or I should say David Sawyer. Do you want to hear it?”
“Give me the address,” he said, and when she had described how to find the place, he growled, “Fifteen minutes. I need to shave first.”
“Oh, give her a thrill, Al. She’ll think you’re doing undercover work.”
He grunted and dropped the phone, and Kate replaced her own receiver, then stood looking at the walls of books that rose up on all sides. Two sides, she saw, were filled with an unlikely combination of medical texts (with an emphasis on childhood diseases and allergies) and best-seller hardbacks with brightly colored dust jackets (novels and the sort of non-fiction books everyone talks about but no one reads). One wall and the narrow shelves beside the door had been cleared for use by the temporary resident,- these books were mostly old and lacking dust jackets, with library stickers on their spines. Ignoring the whistle of the teakettle and the sounds of cups and spoons, Kate ran her eye slowly over the assembled volumes until she found what she had thought would be there: The Fool. Order Through Chaos, Clarity from Confusion by David M. Sawyer, M. Div., Ph.D. She pulled it out, then saw another with the name Sawyer on the spine, a slim volume called The Reformation of the Catholic Church. She carried them both with her out to the kitchen and laid them on the oak table, which was looking slightly less polished than it had two days before.