Philip Gardner scowled at the first page of the thick sheaf of papers. “Yes, I see what you mean. The Beatitude he quoted before that was definitely from Luke, not Matthew, so it wasn’t a tie-in from that. And before, let’s see. It was Corinthians.”
The professor had put her plate aside and picked up her own papers. “Perhaps the link in his mind was thematic rather than—what, bibliographic? I see he was citing Paul’s criticisms of the Corinth church for not accepting the negative side of being prophets—that is, being perceived as silly or mad. It is a reasonably close parallel to ‘Jerusalem killing the prophets,” don’t you think?“
“Was Sawyer saying that he is a prophet, would you say?” Kate asked.
“I don’t think we should read too much into his choice of passages,” the professor objected. “It strikes me that he uses whatever is to hand, then cobbles the phrases together as best he can. A bit like a collage, where the overall effect is more the point than the parts that go to make it up.”
“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.