Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Also available from Titan Books

  Acclaim for the Work of DONALD E. WESTLAKE!

  “Dark and delicious.”

  —New York Times

  “Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

  —Booklist

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  —Washington Post Book World

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  —New York Review of Books

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  —George F. Will

  “The wildest, screwiest, fastest-paced yet…It is also insanely funny.”

  —Des Moines Register

  “Suspenseful…As always, [Westlake] writes like the consummate pro he is.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Westlake remains in perfect command; there’s not a word…out of place.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Donald E. Westlake is probably the funniest crime writer going.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The suspense and the laughs multiply as the mad one-upmanship resembles doings at the Tower of Babel…The dénouement is a stunner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Westlake is one of the best.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Just a second,” Brother Clemence said, and when we all turned to give him our attention he said, “I hope everybody realizes the implication of this discovery.”

  Brother Oliver said, “Implication?”

  “This means,” Brother Clemence said, gesturing with the rolled-up document, “that Brother Silas may have been right after all. The original lease really might have been stolen, to keep us from proving we have the right to stay here. So I think none of us should say anything to anybody about what we’ve found.”

  We all agreed, rather somberly.

  Brother Oliver stopped me briefly at the head of the stairs. “We’ll talk later,” he said.

  “Yes, Brother,” I said.

  And as I washed the attic grime from myself I wondered if Brother Clemence—or any of the others—had thought about the other implication of our find. If Brother Silas was right, if the lease had been stolen by somebody working for our enemies, who could have stolen it?

  Who, but one of us…?

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE:

  361

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED

  THE CUTIE

  FOREVER AND A DEATH

  HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER

  LEMONS NEVER LIE (writing as Richard Stark)

  MEMORY

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  CHARLESGATE CONFIDENTIAL by Scott Von Doviak

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain

  THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES by Lawrence Block

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SOHO SINS by Richard Vine

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

  SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

  THE LAST STAND by Mickey Spillane

  UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH by Charles Willeford

  Brothers

  KEEPERS

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-137)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2019

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 1975 by Donald E. Westlake

  Cover painting copyright © 2019 by Paul Mann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78565-715-3

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-716-0

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  And this one is for

  BYRNE and GEORGE

  fellow firemen

  BROTHERS KEEPERS

  One

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession.”

  “Yes, yes. Go on.”

  Why does he always sound so impatient? Rush rush rush; that’s not the proper attitude. “Well,” I said, “let’s see.” I tried not to be rattled. “I had an impure thought,” I said, “on Thursday evening, during a shaving commercial on television.”

  “A shaving commercial?” Now he sounded exasperated; it was bad enough, apparently, that I bored him, without bewildering him as well.

  “It’s a commercial,” I said, “in which a blonde lady with a Swedish accent applies shaving cream to the face of a young man with a rather prognathous jaw.”

  “Prognathous?” More bewildered than exasperated this time; I’d caught his attention for fair.

  “That means, uh, prominent. A large jaw, that sort of sticks out.”

  “Does that have anything to do with the sin?”

  “No, no. I just thought, uh, I thought you wanted to know, uh…”

  “This impure thought,” he said, chopping off my unfinished sentence. “Did it concern the woman or the man?”

  “The woman, of course! What do you think?” I was shocked; you don’t expect to hear that sort of thing in confession.

  “All right,” he said. “Anything else?” His name is Father Banzolini, and he comes here twice a week to hear our confessions. We give him a nice dinner before and a nightcap after, but he’s surly all the time, a very surly priest. I imagine he finds us dull, and would rather be hearing confessions over in the theater district or down in Greenwich Village. After all, how far can a lamb stray in a monastery?

  “Um,” I said, trying to think. I’d had all my sins organized in my mind befo
re coming in here, but as usual Father Banzolini’s asperity had thrown me off course. I’d once thought I might jot down all my sins in advance and simply read them from the paper in the confessional, but somehow that lacked the proper tone for contrition and so on. Also, what if the paper were to fall into the wrong hands?

  Father Banzolini cleared his throat.

  “Um,” I said hurriedly. “I, uh, I stole an orange Flair pen from Brother Valerian.”

  “You stole it? Or you borrowed it?”

  “I stole it,” I said, somewhat proudly. “On purpose.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he did the puzzle in last Sunday’s Times, and he knows that’s my prerogative. He claims he forgot. I imagine you’ll be hearing the story from his side a little later tonight.”

  “Never mind anyone else’s sins,” Father Banzolini said. “Did you make restitution?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  A long artificial sigh. “Did you give it back?”

  “No, I lost it. You didn’t see it, did you? It’s an ordinary orange—”

  “No, I did not see it!”

  “Oh. Well, I know it’s around here somewhere, and when I find it I’ll give it right back.”

  “Good,” he said. “Of course, if you don’t find it you’ll have to replace it.”

  Forty-nine cents. I sighed, but said, “Yes, I know, I will.”

  “Anything else?”

  I wished I could say no, but it seemed to me there had been something more than the Flair pen and the impure thought. Now, what was it? I cast my mind back.

  “Brother Benedict?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said. “Yes!”

  He gave a sudden little jump, the other side of the small screened window. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But I remember the other one.”

  “There’s more,” he said, without joy.

  “Just one. I took the Lord’s name in vain.”

  He rested his chin on his hand. It was hard to see his face in the semidark, but his eyes appeared hooded, perhaps entirely closed. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “I was in the courtyard,” I told him, “and Brother Jerome was washing windows on the second floor when he dropped the cloth. It landed on my head, wet and cold and utterly without warning, and I instinctively shouted, ‘Jesus Christ!’ ”

  He jumped again.

  “Whoops,” I whispered. “Did I say that too loud?”

  He coughed a bit. “Perhaps more than was absolutely necessary,” he said. “Is that all of it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “And do you have contrition and a firm purpose of amendment?”

  “Oh, positively,” I said.

  “Good.” He roused himself a bit, lifting his chin from his propped hand and shifting around on his chair. “For your penance, say two Our Fathers and, oh, seven Hail Marys.”

  That seemed a bit steep for three little sins, but penances are non-negotiable. “Yes, Father,” I said.

  “And it might be a good idea to close your eyes during television commercials.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Now say a good act of contrition.”

  I closed my eyes and said the prayer, hearing him mumble the absolution in slurred Latin at the same time, and then my turn was finished and I left the confessional, my place being taken at once by old Brother Zebulon, tiny, bent, wrinkled and white-haired. He nodded at me and slipped behind the curtain, out of sight but not out of hearing; the cracking of his joints as he knelt down in there sounded through the chapel like a pair of rifle shots.

  I knelt at the altar rail to zip through my penance, all the time trying to think where that blasted Flair could be. I’d taken it Thursday afternoon, and when I’d changed my mind the next morning—felt remorseful, in fact—the pen was absolutely nowhere to be found. This was Saturday night, and I had now spent the last day and a half looking for it, with so far not the slightest trace. What on earth had I done with it?

  Finishing my penance without having solved the mystery of the missing Flair, I left the chapel and looked at the big clock in the hall. Ten-forty. The Sunday Times would be at the newsstand by now. I hurried along toward the office to get the necessary sixty cents and official permission to leave the premises.

  Brother Leo was on duty at the desk, reading one of his aviation magazines. He was the exception to the rule. Brother Leo, an extremely stout man who wasn’t the slightest bit jolly. He was named for the lion, but he looked and acted more like a bear, or a bull, though fatter than either. All he cared about in this world was private aviation, the Lord knows why. Relatives from outside subscribed him to aviation magazines, which he read at all hours of the day and night. When a plane would pass over the monastery while Brother Leo was in the courtyard, he would shade his eyes with a massive pudgy hand and gaze up at the sky as though Christ Himself were up there on a cloud. And then, like as not, tell you what sort of plane it had been. “Boeing,” he’d say. “Seven-oh-seven.” What sort of response can you make to a thing like that?

  Now Brother Leo put down his magazine on the reception desk and peered at me through the top half of his bifocals. “The Sunday Times,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. My weekly journey on Saturday evening to get the Sunday Times afforded me a pleasure even Brother Leo’s sour disposition couldn’t spoil. It—along with Sunday Mass, of course—was the highlight of my week.

  “Brother Benedict,” he said, “there’s something worldly about you.”

  I looked pointedly at his magazine, but said nothing. Having just come from confession, my soul as clean and well scrubbed as a sheet on a line, I had no desire to get into an altercation in which I might become uncharitable.

  Brother Leo opened the side drawer of the desk, took out the petty cash box, and placed it atop his magazine. Opening it, he scrunched among the crumbled dollar bills toward the change at the bottom, and finally came up with two quarters and a dime. He extended his hand to me, the quarters looking like nickels in his huge palm, the dime a mere dot, and I took them, saying, “Thank you, Brother. See you in a very few minutes.”

  He grunted and returned to his magazine, and I went off for my weekly adventure in the outside world.

  * * *

  I have not always, of course, been Brother Benedict of the Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum. In point of fact, for most of my life I wasn’t even a Roman Catholic.

  I was born, thirty-four years ago, to a family named Rowbottom, and was christened Charles, after a maternal grandfather. My parents having divorced in my youth, my mother next married a gentleman called Finchworthy, whose name I then used for a while. Mr. Finchworthy died in an automobile crash while I was still in high school, and my mother for some reason I never entirely understood reverted to her maiden name, Swellingsburg, taking me with her. She and I had a falling out while I was in college, so I switched back to Rowbottom, under which name I was drafted into the Army. It was simplest to keep that name even after my mother and I settled our differences, so Charles Rowbottom I remained from then until I entered the monastery.

  So much for my name. (They never leave enough room on application blanks.) As to my becoming Brother Benedict, that all began in my twenty-fourth year, when I met a young lady named Anne Wilmer, a devout Roman Catholic. We fell in love, I proposed marriage and was accepted, and at her urging I undertook instruction to enter her faith. I found Roman Catholicism endlessly fascinating, as arcane and tricky and at times unfathomable as the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times; and when my mother passed on shortly before I was to be baptized, my new religion was a great source of solace and comfort to me.

  It was also a great source of solace and comfort a short while later, when Anne Wilmer up and ran off with a Lebanese. A practicing Mohammedan. “As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.” Proverbs, XI, 22. Or, as Freud put it, “What does a woman want?”

&
nbsp; I suppose it would be fair to say I entered the monastery on the rebound from Anne Wilmer, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed. I had always found the world contradictory and annoying, with no coherent place in it for me. Politically I disagreed equally with Left, Right and Center. I had no strong career goals, and my slight build and college education had left me little to look forward to but a lifetime spent somehow in the service of pieces of paper as a clerk or examiner, an administrator or counselor or staff member. Money was unimportant to me, so long as I was adequately fed and clothed and housed, and I saw no way that I was likely to attain fame or honor or any of the other talismans of worldly success. I was merely Charles Rowbottom, adrift in a white-collar sea of mundane purposelessness, and if Anne Wilmer had ditched me at any other time in my life I would surely have reacted like any of my ten million lookalikes; I would have been unhappy for a month or two, and then found an Anne Wilmer lookalike, and gone ahead with the marriage as originally planned.

  But the timing was perfect. I had just completed my instructions in Catholicism, and my mind was full of religious repose. Father Dilray, the priest who had been my instructor, was connected with the Crispinite Order, so I already knew something about it, and when I investigated further it began to seem more and more that the Order of St. Crispin was the perfect solution to the problem of my existence.

  St. Crispin and his brother St. Crispinian are the patron saints of shoemakers. In the third century the two brothers, members of a noble Roman family, traveled to Soissons where they supported themselves as shoemakers while converting many heathens to Mother Church. The emperor Maximianus (also known as Herculius) had their heads cut off around the year 286, and they were buried at Soissons. Six centuries later they were dug up again—or at any rate somebody was dug up—and transferred partly to Osnabrück and partly to Rome. Whether all the parts of each brother are in the same place or not is anybody’s guess.

  The Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum was begun in New York City in 1777 by Israel Zapatero, a half-Moorish Spanish Jew who had converted to Catholicism solely to get himself and his worldly goods safely out of Spain so he could emigrate to America, but who then underwent a miracle in mid-ocean, a vision in which Saints Crispin and Crispinian appeared to him and told him the Church had saved his life and goods so that both could be turned to the greater glory of God. His name meaning “shoemaker” in Spanish, it was the shoemaker brothers who had been dispatched to give him his instructions. He was to found a monastic order on Manhattan Island, devoted to contemplation and good works and meditation on the meaning of Earthly travel. (Crispin and Crispinian had traveled to the scene of their missionary work, and their remains had traveled again several centuries after their deaths; Israel Zapatero was at the moment of his miracle traveling; and the very concept of shoes implies travel.)