Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Brother Oliver was not in his office, though Brothers Clemence and Dexter were, both of them elbow deep in paper and looking mildly hysterical. I asked them if they knew where Brother Oliver was, and Brother Clemence said, “Try the library.”

  “Fine.”

  “Or the calefactory,” said Brother Dexter.

  Brother Clemence looked at him. “The calefactory? What would he be doing in there?”

  “I saw him in there just the other day,” Brother Dexter said.

  Brother Clemence said, “But what would he be doing in there now?”

  “Thank you,” I told them both.

  They ignored me. Brother Dexter said to Brother Clemence. “I just said he could be in there.”

  I hurried on, hearing their voices rising somewhat behind me.

  Brother Oliver was not in the library. Brother Silas was sitting there, reading his book—when joining this Order, he had donated to our library fifteen remaindered copies of I’m No Saint, the memoir of his life as a professional criminal, and he frequently came here to glance through one or another copy—and when I asked him about Brother Oliver he said, “He was here. I think he went upstairs.”

  “Upstairs. Right.” I turned back down the hall, and then I realized I’d have to go back through the office—the one containing Roger Dwarfmann—to get to the stairs. Well, there was nothing for it.

  The sounds of Brothers Clemence and Dexter in contention rippled from their doorway as I retraced my steps. I trotted back to the front office and found Roger Dwarfmann not sitting. He was standing, and he was pacing, and he was looking at his watch with the trembly red numbers. He paused to lower his eyebrows at me, but I didn’t pause at all. “Upstairs,” I said, en passant. “I’ll just be—” And up the stairs I went.

  Brother Oliver’s room was second on the left. I could see it was empty through the open doorway, but I knocked anyway, and Brother Quillon came out of his own room diagonally across the hall to say, “Did you want somebody?”

  “Brother Oliver.”

  “I think he’s in the calefactory.”

  Two votes for that suggestion. “Ah,” I said.

  Brother Quillon went back into his room, leaving the door open. Starting for the stairs, I paused to look in at him and say, “What’s he doing in there?”

  Brother Quillon was puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Brother Oliver. In the calefactory.”

  “Oh. Calisthenics,” he said.

  “Calisthenics? In the calefactory?”

  “Brother Mallory thought it was getting too cold in the courtyard.”

  “Ah. Thank you.” And I hurried back down the stairs, wondering fretfully what little red numbers were showing by now on Roger Dwarfmann’s watch. But I really didn’t want to know.

  He was pacing again. He stopped to glare at me, frowning like a rock fault, and I said, “Calefactory. I’ll go, um—” And down the hall I went again.

  Brothers Clemence and Dexter were very angry at one another. I paused on the way by to close that door, not wanting Roger Dwarfmann to hear monks shouting at one another that way, and then hurried on down the hall to the calefactory.

  The original idea of a calefactory was that it was a room that was kept warm in winter. Until this century, most rooms of most buildings were left unheated, and the calefactory in a monastery was where one could find heat if it was needed. The great fireplace in one wall demonstrates that this room was originally employed as its name suggests, but in more recent years it has become a general sitting room, our communal parlor. We most particularly like it in summer, perhaps, when it is one of the coolest spots in the building.

  And Brother Mallory seemed to be taking it over for himself, gradually turning it into a gymnasium. Last Saturday he’d held his boxing matches here, and now his calisthenics class was spread out on the floor, raising one leg after the other with a great whiffling of robes. Brothers Valerian, Peregrine and Hilarius, looking like tipped-over wind-up dolls, with Brother Mallory marching around them and counting out the cadence.

  But no Brother Oliver. I shouted out my question, breaking into Brother Mallory’s count, and while the three on the floor permitted their legs to flop and did a lot of gasping for breath. Brother Mallory mused a moment and said, “I think I saw him going into the chapel.”

  Would this never end? “Thank you, Brother,” I said, and trotted out the calefactory’s side door, through the cloakroom past the sacristy, and into the chapel by the door behind the altar, where the reports of exploding knees told me Brother Zebulon was present long before I actually saw him.

  Yes, there he was, sweeping the floor, and genuflecting every time he passed the center aisle. Crack! Bang! Kapow! He sounded like a Civil War battle.

  Brother Oliver wasn’t here, of course. I hurried over to Brother Zebulon—adding my own rattle of gunfire when genuflecting along the way—and whispered, “Where’s Brother Oliver?”

  He ignored me. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

  Well. One should whisper in church, but whispering to a deaf old man is self-defeating, so I raised my voice: “Brother Zebulon!”

  He dropped his broom and jumped a foot. Turning, he said, “What? What?”

  “Brother Oliver,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

  He was annoyed with me, and so didn’t answer till he’d picked up his broom. Then he said, “Try the kitchen,” and turned his back on me.

  I went out the far door of the chapel, intending to go through the cemetery to the cloister and thus into the kitchen, but turning out the cemetery arch I stopped and frowned and decided no. The way things were going Brother Oliver would not be in the kitchen but Brother Leo would, and he’d tell me to try the refectory, where some other Brother would tell me to try the second floor on this side—there are two separate second floors, which don’t connect—where yet another Brother would tell me to try the tower, where a passing pigeon would suggest I try the undercroft, which is the basement, back over on the other side. Directly beneath, in fact, the pacing feet of Roger Dwarfmann.

  No. Enough. Leaving the cemetery, I went instead directly out to the courtyard, a big grassy area crisscrossed by stone walks and dotted with plane trees, a few struggling evergreens, a couple of birdbaths, a flower garden which was not at its best this time of year, and along the chapel wall our grape arbor. I strode now out to the middle of this space, lifted my head, and said, “BROTHER OLIVER!”

  “Yes, Brother Benedict?”

  He was right next to me. He came mildly around the nearest evergreen, his paintbrush and palette in his hands, and blinked gently at me, wondering what it was I wanted.

  “At last,” I said. “It must be 2:43 by now, maybe even 2:44.”

  “Brother Benedict? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Roger Dwarfmann is in there.”

  Brother Oliver looked pleasantly surprised, but no more. “He called?”

  “He came! He’s here, right now, he’s walking up and down in the office!”

  “He’s here now?” Brother Oliver fussed with his paintbrush and palette, not knowing where to put them. “In my office?”

  “No, the other one. The scriptorium. Brothers Clemence and Dexter are in your office, I didn’t think I should—”

  I stopped talking, because Brother Oliver had disappeared around the tree again. Following him, I saw him place his brush and palette at the feet of his latest murky Madonna, who oddly enough seemed to have been influenced by Picasso—I assume that treatment of the eyes was deliberate—and then he gathered up his skirts and trotted toward the side door, which led via a short hall to the scriptorium. I jogged after.

  Dwarfmann had continued to pace. He stopped at our arrival and I tried to read those transient red numbers on his wrist, but his hands and arms were constantly involved in expansive gestures. “Well?” he said, glaring past Brother Oliver’s shoulder at me. “Well?”

  Apparently I was to make introductio
ns. “Brother Oliver,” I said. “This is Roger Dwarfmann.”

  “So here you are,” Dwarfmann said. He bobbed on the balls of his feet, as though to make himself taller, and frowned severely upward at Brother Oliver’s bulk.

  “Have I kept you waiting? I’m so sorry,” Brother Oliver said. “I was painting, in the courtyard. This winter light is so perfect for—”

  Dwarfmann gestured that away with an impatient flick of his numerical wrist; I couldn’t see the numbers. “My days,” he said, “are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Let’s get down to business.”

  I’m sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann’s rattly style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, “Was that from Job?”

  “Chapter seven, verse six,” Dwarfmann snapped. “Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.”

  “I don’t know the Apocrypha,” Brother Oliver said.

  Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. “You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five.”

  “Then I can only cite One Thessalonians,” Brother Oliver said. “Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men.”

  “Let us run with patience,” Dwarfmann or somebody said, “the race that is set before us.”

  “I don’t believe,” Brother Oliver told him, “that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context.”

  “Hebrews, twelve, one.” Dwarfmann shrugged. “Then how about Paul to Timothy, with its meaning intact? Be instant in season, out of season.” Again he tapped those little red numbers, and now I saw them: 2:51. I don’t know why I felt so relieved to know the exact time—something about Dwarfmann’s presence, I suppose. And he was saying, “I’m a busy man.” That couldn’t be Biblical. “My man Snopes told you all you needed to know, we’ll give you every assistance in relocation, given the circumstances we’ll go farther than the law requires. Much farther. But that wasn’t enough for you, you have to hear it from me direct. All right, you’re hearing it from me direct. We’re building on this site.”

  “There is a building on this site,” Brother Oliver said.

  “Not for long.”

  “Why not look at it?” Brother Oliver made hospitable gestures, urging our guest to come look the place over. “Now that you’re here, why not see the place you intend to destroy?”

  “Beauty is vain,” Dwarfmann said. “Proverbs, thirty-one, thirty.”

  Brother Oliver began to look somewhat put out. He said, “Wot ye not what the Scripture saith? Romans, eleven.”

  With that sudden thin smile again, Dwarfmann answered, “What saith the Scripture? Galatians, four.”

  “Pride goeth before destruction,” Brother Oliver told him, “and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs, sixteen.”

  Dwarfmann shrugged, saying, “Let us do evil, that good may come. Romans, three.”

  “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. Isaiah, five.”

  “Sin is not imputed when there is no law,” Dwarfmann insisted. “Romans, five.”

  Brother Oliver shook his head. “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”

  “Money answereth all things,” Dwarfmann said, with a great deal of assurance.

  “He heapeth up riches,” Brother Oliver said scornfully, “and knoweth not who shall gather them.”

  “Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” Dwarfmann permitted his own scornful expression to roam around our room, then finished, “But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Another quick look at his watch. “I think we’ve played enough,” he said, and turned toward the door.

  Brother Oliver had two pink circles on his cheeks, and his pudgy hands were more or less closed into ineffective fists. “The devil is come down unto you,” he announced, “having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

  Dwarfmann’s hand was on our doorknob. He looked back at Brother Oliver, flashed that thin smile again as though to say he was glad we all understood one another now, and with another quick glance around the room said, “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. Job, chapter seven, verse ten.” And he left.

  Brother Oliver expelled held-in breath with a sudden long whoosh. Shaking my head, I said, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

  Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. “Is that New Testament? I don’t recognize that.”

  “Uhh, no,” I said. “It’s Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry,” I said.

  Nine

  Father Banzolini’s tear sheets were perhaps the most difficult penance he’d yet given me. What an earnest writer he was! His articles were clearly the work of a slow but serious man who very sincerely wanted to explain every last detail of whatever subject he had chosen to gnaw. Unfortunately, he knew only one kind of sentence—the kind that has a subject and a verb and a comma and another subject and another verb and a period—and he used that sentence to tell us everything. A straightforward compound sentence is perfectly all right, of course, but seven thousand of them in a row can get wearing. After a while, the only question left was whether the word after the comma would be “and” or “but” or “or.”

  But I did have to read them. Father Banzolini had given me these tear sheets at confession with a kind of shy pride, and I knew I was not only going to have to read them, I was going to have to like them. Or at least find something in each of them that I could think of as likable for the next time I met with their author.

  Because I was on the horns of a dilemma, a true dilemma. If I lied to Father Banzolini, I would then have to admit to him in confession that I had told the lie. In the abstract that might make for what mathematicians call a pretty problem, but in real life it made for a very ugly problem indeed.

  And so I read. I learned more than I cared to know about missionary obstacles in newly independent African states, the attitude of the Church toward the “Protestant Ethic,” Women’s Lib for Catholics, feudalism versus mass transit, translation difficulties with the Bible, and several other topics both sacred and profane. By the time I finished I was feeling both sacred and profane myself.

  Well, at least I was distracted for a while from my own more personal dilemma, which could very neatly be defined in the Father Banzolini Format: “I will stay in the monastery, or I will leave the monastery.” Meditation was getting me nowhere on that topic, so perhaps distraction would help. As Father Banzolini himself had pointed out in The Subconscious and the Holy Ghost, “We think we are thinking about something else, but we are still thinking about Topic A.”

  So I read all the articles, starting them Tuesday night and finishing early Wednesday afternoon. Then I took a walk in the cloisters, trying to think of something both truthful and flattering to say about them. I could call them “interesting,” which was true of at least a few—The Great Catholic Boxers, for instance, and Why Animals Don’t Have Souls. I could say of all of them that they were “fact-filled,” and I could hear myself saying enthusiastically to Father Banzolini, “I hadn’t known about ———.” (I’d fill in the blank as seemed appropriate at the time.)

  But it was going to take more; I could feel it in my bones. I doubted that Father Banzolini, in the ordinary course of his days, had been so inundated with praise for his writing efforts as to become jaded or blasé on the subject. It was my very strong suspicion, in fact, that he was hungry for shoptalk and “positive feedback,” as he’d phrased it in the The Confessional: A Two-Way Street. It was going to take more than a couple of carefully phrased ambivalent sentences to satisfy that hunger.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was going to need professional—or at least semiprofessional—help. Brother Silas did a lot of reading in the Sunday Times Book Review, and I suspected t
here was still something criminous buried deep within him. Could he be of assistance? Not so much with specific phrases as with a general wishy-washy attitude. I firmly intended to waffle, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing it.

  Come to think of it, though, Brother Silas just didn’t strike me as the waffling type. Criminal and literary though he might be, there was still something very direct about his approach to life. I would certainly talk to him, but I doubted he was the expert I needed.

  Who else, then? Pacing back and forth in the cloister, trying to think of someone who could help, I looked out over the courtyard where several of my fellow residents happened at the moment to be in view. Brother Oliver, for instance, seated on a three-legged stool, was hard at work on his latest Madonna and Child; but no, he didn’t have the devious cast of mind I was seeking. Brothers Mallory and Jerome were packing mulch around some shrubbery near the front wall, but they were even more remote from the necessary subtlety of approach. And who else was there?

  Someone came out of Brother Oliver’s office across the way, turning to walk along the cloister on that side. His cowl was up, making identification difficult, but in his build and movements he reminded me of Brother Peregrine.

  Of course! Brother Peregrine had operated summer theaters! Would anyone be more experienced at the ambivalent compliment, the tender treatment of tremulous talents? “Brother Peregrine!” I cried, waving one hand over my head, and dashed out across the courtyard in his direction.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He was striding quite purposefully toward the front wall, more or less in the direction of Brothers Mallory and Jerome, angling out now away from the cloister and across the courtyard toward the front doors.

  “Brother Peregrine! Brother Peregrine!” I altered my own course to intersect his, trotting around birdbaths and plane trees, and he just kept moving. Such concentration I would normally respect, but this time I could think of nothing but my own problems, so when I reached him I put out my hand to grab his forearm, his head turned in my direction, and inside the cowl he was not Brother Peregrine.