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plastic. She went
to the shop and bought the hair combs, a pair of extravagant
multicolored swirling shapes, the blue of which matched the color of
Lee's eyes. The woman wrapped the box in a glossy midnight paper
and Kate dropped it into her coat pocket.
    She turned briskly uphill, crossed the street that brought an end to
commerce, and walked up another block to the sign for a Catholic school
she had noticed while cruising for a parking space: Surely the
Catholics would know.
    As she reached for the door, it opened and a brown-robed monk came out.
    "Excuse me," she said, stepping back, "I wonder if
you can tell me where I might find the Graduate Theological
Union?" Sketchy research the night before had brought her as far
as the name, and indeed, the monk nodded, gestured that she should
follow him back to the street, and once there pointed to a brick
building a couple of doors up, smiling all the while. She thanked him,
he nodded and crossed the street, still smiling. A vow of silence,
perhaps? Kate speculated.
    The ground floor of the building proved to be an airy oak-floored
bookstore. The customer ahead of her was just finishing her purchase of
three heavy black tomes with squiggly gilt writing on the back covers.
When she turned away with her bag, Kate saw that she was wearing a
clerical collar on her blue shirt, an odd sight to someone raised a
Roman Catholic.
    At the register, Kate showed her police identification and explained her presence.
    "I'm looking for a man in connection with an
investigation. He's a homeless man in San Francisco who
apparently comes over to this part of Berkeley regularly. How do I find
the head of your security personnel?"
    The man and woman looked at each other doubtfully.
    "Is he a student here?" the woman asked.
    "I doubt it."
    "Or a professor--no, he wouldn't be, would he? Gee, I don't know how you'd find him."
    "Don't you have some kind of campus police?"
    "We don't actually have a campus, per se," the
young man explained. "In fact, you could say that there's
actually no such thing as the GTU. It's an administrative entity
more than anything else. Each of the schools is self-contained, you
see. We're just this building. Or actually, they're
upstairs. We're just the bookstore. If you want to talk with
someone in administration, you could take the elevator upstairs."
    "And how many schools are there?"
    "Nine. And of course the affiliated groups, Buddhist Studies,
the Orthodox Institute,- most of them have separate buildings."
    "What about a student center?"
    "All the seminaries have their own."
    Kate thought for a minute. "If someone came over here regularly, where would he go?"
    "That depends on what he's coming for," the young
man said helpfully. Another customer arrived with a stack of books,
mostly paperbacks. These titles were in English, but as foreign as the
gilt squiggles had been. What was--or were--hermeneutics? Or
semeiology?
    "I don't know what he's coming for. All I know is
that he comes over on Tuesday and returns to San Francisco before
Sunday. Look, this is not a part of Berkeley that gets a lot of
homeless men. Surely he'd be conspicuous."
    "What does he look like?"
    "Six foot two, approximately seventy years old, short
salt-and-pepper hair, clipped beard, Caucasian but tan, a deep
voice."
    "Brother Erasmus!" said a voice from the back of the
store. Kate turned and saw another woman wearing a clerical collar,
this shirt a natural oatmeal color.
    "You know him?" Kate asked.
    "Everyone knows him."
    "I don't," said the young man.
    "Sure you do," said the woman (priest?). "She
means the monk who preaches and sings in the courtyard over at CDSP.
I've seen you there."
    "Oh,
him.
But he's not homeless."
    "Do you know where he lives?" Kate asked.
    "Of course not, but he can't be homeless. I mean,
he's clean, and he doesn't carry things or have a shopping
cart or anything."
    "Right," said Kate. "Where is CDSP?"
    "Just across the street," the man said.
    "I'll take you if you want to