Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Puerto Rico, eh?” The vague concept of writing her some sort of letter entered my head, and I said, “Would you know her address? I’d like to, uh, send her a Christmas card.”

  “How very sweet,” she said. “Yes, I’ll give it to you; wait, um—” She rummaged in her shoulder bag, produced a stub of pencil and an envelope with LILCO in big letters for the return address, and carefully printed on the back of the envelope Eileen’s address in the Caribbean, using the top of her little green automobile as a writing surface. “There you are,” she said.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Nice to see you again,” she told me.

  “And you,” I said, giving her a smile and a bow. I was becoming quite the lady’s man.

  Ten

  My useless journey didn’t help improve the atmosphere in the monastery, but I doubt at that point anything could have. I returned without incident, reported to Brother Oliver, and sank back at once into the silent morass that still enveloped everybody else. There seemed nothing to do, no action that anyone could take that would get us out of this pit we were in.

  Brothers Flavian and Silas had talked at first about conducting an investigation, and for a little while they’d even had Brother Clemence involved with their idea, but when all was said and done what was there to investigate? There were no secrets in our lives; we knew one another as well as we knew ourselves. Could we interrogate one another? “Where were you on the night of December first?” Or any other date you chose, the answer would always be the same: “Right here, and you know it, because you saw me. Because you would have noticed my absence.” We couldn’t do timetables of people’s movements, because we had no movements. We couldn’t check the suspects’ associates, because we associated with no one but ourselves. Failing a confession by the guilty party, what was there to do?

  Nothing.

  And without that confession, without knowing certainly and finally who the guilty party was, how could we go on with one another? We couldn’t, that’s all. We could only sit and mope and wait for some outside force to change things.

  Until my brainstorm.

  What is there to call a brainstorm but a brainstorm? There are two kinds of reasoning, and a brainstorm is the other one. The first kind, deductive reasoning, the process of arriving at D on the basis of A and B and C, is easily explained and easily seen, but inductive reasoning, the process of arriving at D when all you’ve had to go on is 7 and B and K, is utterly impossible to describe. When people say to writers or inventors, “Where do you get your ideas?” they are really asking them to explain inductive reasoning.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, more or less had to try a definition of inductive reasoning, and so he wrote, in The Sign of the Four, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Although he didn’t go on to tell us how to draw that thin and snakelike line between the impossible and the improbable, the definition has a certain comfortable solidity to it, and I suppose it could be used to explain my brainstorm. For instance, I suppose some corner of my brain could have been saying to itself like so:

  1) It is impossible that any of the Brothers in this monastery betrayed us to the Flatterys.

  2) It is impossible that Frank Flattery could have known to come in here and burn those papers without having been told of their existence, their importance, and their location.

  3) It is impossible that Frank Flattery could have been told these things by anybody except a member of this community.

  4) However improbable it may sound, Frank Flattery must have been told those things by someone who didn’t know he was telling.

  All of which is hindsight. None of that was in my conscious mind prior to the brainstorm. It simply struck me, that’s all, and I rose up from my bed and went downstairs, where I found Brother Oliver coming long-faced out of his office. “May I go in there?” I asked him.

  He seemed slightly surprised. “Did you want to talk to me, Brother Benedict?”

  “No, I just wanted to be alone in your office for a few minutes,” I said. Alone, because although I was certain in some nonrational way, at the rational level I thought I was probably crazy.

  Suspicion crossed his face—what a strange thing to see there —and then cleared away again. Was it because he realized he could trust me, or because he’d remembered the damage had already been done?

  “Of course, Brother,” he said, trying to smile as though he hadn’t hesitated, and he stepped aside, gesturing me the hospitality of his office. “Are you going to meditate?”

  “Fumigate,” I told him, and went on in.

  * * *

  I found the bug, taped to the back of a Madonna and Child. It looked like a large button, and yet it didn’t. What it was most like was those enlarged photographs of the eyeball of a fly, and it had for me the same eerie inhuman effect. The human race lost something when people stopped bashing one another with sticks and started using technology in their disputes, and what they lost was their humanness. We’ll all wake up some morning and find that we’re the Martians.

  But didn’t this thing need wires? Apparently not. It was all alone here, a little Flattery outpost in our midst. And where would the receiver be, the nest of ears, listening to every word spoken in this room?

  Well, maybe that florist’s truck had also been parked in my subconscious at the time of the brainstorm. Consciously, though, it was only now that I realized it was far too often parked outside our door. Every time I went out it had been there, sometimes noticed and sometimes not. Frank Flattery had run around it and disappeared; inside it, of course.

  Outrage is not an emotion I’m that used to, and in this instance it made me do something foolish. Pausing for nothing, I stormed out of Brother Oliver’s office through the outer door to the cloister, strode across the courtyard, threw open the great doors to the outside world, ignored the midafternoon crush of pedestrians and traffic, bore directly to the rear of the florist’s truck, yanked open its back doors, and Alfred Broyle punched me very hard on the nose.

  I sat down on the pavement. Eileen’s “young man” pulled his doors closed again, and the florist’s truck drove immediately away.

  * * *

  “You made a very serious error there,” Brother Clemence told me.

  “I know,” I said. I felt miserable. Not only had I made a very serious error, I’d been punched in the nose for my pains and it still hurt. I was puffy around the eyes, I couldn’t breathe through my nose, and I talked like a long-distance telephone operator.

  Brother Oliver said, “Oh, Brother Clemence, don’t be hard on him. He did wonderful work this afternoon! That cloud of suspicion, that sense of gloom—”

  “I know that,” Brother Clemence said. “You’re absolutely right. We all owe Brother Benedict our deepest thanks for what he did. I only wish he’d taken along a witness when he went out to that florist’s truck.”

  This conversation was taking place an hour later, in Brother Oliver’s office, sans microphone. (The bug itself was in the sacristy, under a stack of altar cloths.) Brothers Clemence, Oliver, Dexter and I had been joined by an old friend of Brother Clemence, a distinguished-looking attorney named Remington Gates who sported both a hat and a cane, and who pursed his lips a lot to display a sense of dubiousness.

  The sequence of events had now been pretty clearly worked out. The Flatterys had undoubtedly been planning this sale for several years, at least since that Landmarks Commission hearing, and had been waiting only for the lease to be up. Their difficulty had been with that clause giving us the option to renew. Learning that the lease had not been recorded with the County Clerk, that they and we had the only copies, they had broken in here at some point, rifled our files—what an undertaking that must have been—and stolen our copy of the lease. Either then or later they’d planted that bug, so they would know if we planned any moves to save ourselves. They’d hoped we wouldn’t learn about the sale until af
ter next January first, when it would be over and done with, when Dimp might have some small trouble with us but the Flatterys would be in the clear. But we did find out, so at once they’d put us under constant surveillance, just to be on the safe side. Naturally they’d heard us discover the copy of the lease, and they’d heard Brother Clemence discuss his plan involving secondary documents, and they’d waited till Brother Clemence had told Brother Dexter—in their hearing—that we now did have all the documentary evidence we needed. Then they broke in and burned the papers.

  And we couldn’t prove it. I was the only one who could identify Alfred Broyle as the man in the florist’s truck, and in fact I was the only one who could identify the florist’s truck. I was also the only one who could identify Frank Flattery as the arsonist. If only I had brought someone else with me today, a second witness to the presence of that truck and the presence in it of Alfred Broyle, we would now have a presentable case. Instead of which, we had Mr. Remington Gates pursing his lips and saying, “I really don’t see that we have enough.”

  Brother Oliver said, “But we have so much. We have that, that microphone thing, and several of us saw the man running away after he set fire to our papers.”

  Mr. Gates said, “But none of you can identify him, except Brother Benedict here. And Brother Benedict found the microphone. It’s all Brother Benedict. Do you know what I would say if I were the attorney on the other side?”

  Brother Clemence rather gloomily said, “I know what you’d say, Rem.”

  “Yes, you do, Howard,” Mr. Gates said to him. (So Brother Clemence’s civilian name had been Howard; how strange. I squinted at him, trying to see him as a Howard, but failed.) “But let me,” Mr. Gates went on, “try to make it clear to your friends here.” Turning a stern eye on me, pursing his lips mammothly, he said, “I am now the attorney for the other side, Brother Benedict.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And I put it to you, Brother Benedict, that you are happy in this monastery.”

  “Of course.”

  “You do not want to leave this monastery.”

  Did I? Oh, but that wasn’t what he was talking about; he was talking about all this other business. After only the slightest hesitation, I said, “Of course not.”

  “You would do almost anything to save the monastery, wouldn’t you, Brother Benedict?”

  “Anything I could,” I said.

  “Then let me suggest to you, Brother Benedict,” he said, his stern eye getting sterner by the second, “that what you have done to help save the monastery is plant evidence, present a fraudulent and trumped-up case, and malign and libel my clients, the Flattery family, who are decent well-thought-of members of society.”

  I said, “What?” Around me Brother Clemence was nodding moodily, as though he’d always known I was capable of such things, while Brothers Oliver and Dexter were both looking just as shocked as I felt.

  “I put it to you, Brother Benedict,” this horrible man went on, “that you planted that microphone in the office, in order to find it again. I further put it to you that there was no florist’s truck parked outside, and that you did not see and were not punched in the nose by Alfred Broyle.”

  “I wasn’t? Look at my nose!”

  “Three weeks from now in court? Besides, Brother Benedict, the self-inflicted injury is a cliché of the legal profession.”

  “But—”

  “I further put it to you, Brother Benedict,” he rolled on, “that the man who burned those papers was a confederate of yours, that he did so at your request and because you believed an insufficiently strong case for your side would be built by those papers, and that you willfully and knowingly misidentified this man as my client, Frank Flattery. And I finally put it to you, Brother Benedict, that you have not one shred of proof for any of your assertions and that you lack the slightest capability of confounding my version of the facts.”

  “But,” I said, and then, although no one interrupted me, I stopped. I had nothing to say.

  Mr. Gates’ stern eye became kindly and sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Brother Benedict,” he said. “But you do see the situation.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mr. Gates turned to Brother Oliver. “I’ve offered to assist in any way I can,” he said, “and now that I see the dastardly level these people will descend to I am more than ever available. And I will go and present our case to the Flatterys’ attorney if you insist, but I must say I dislike being laughed at in another man’s office.”

  * * *

  I made my decision on Friday, December 19th, at ten-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t 10:30 by Roger Dwarfmann’s red-and-black watch; it was ten-thirty by the grandfather clock in the scriptorium, which is always a little off one way or the other, so it probably wasn’t exactly ten-thirty at all. But it was a decision, and I stood by it.

  The atmosphere in the monastery had altered again. From that stagnant depression of mutual mistrust we had leaped to a sudden joy of reunity, which had lasted only until we’d all had time to think out our current position. Trust and brotherhood might have returned to our lives, but the monastery was still under a death sentence, and our present state was more perilous than it had ever seemed before. An answer had come to us from Ada Louise Huxtable of the Times, responding to my letter by assuring us of her support, urging us to both hire a good attorney and get in touch with the Landmarks Commission, and pointing out quite rightly that there was nothing she personally either could or should do. But we knew now that the Landmarks Commission couldn’t help us, the law couldn’t help us, the lease couldn’t help us, and neither the Flatterys nor Dimp were prepared to help us. Brother Clemence was doggedly at work on tertiary documents, Brother Flavian was writing inflamed letters to his congressman and the United Nations and most of the other politicians of the world, Brother Mallory was shadow-boxing all over the calefactory in hopes of a return bout with Frank Flattery, Brother Oliver was studying the Bible in the event of a return bout with Roger Dwarfmann, Brother Dexter was phoning relatives and friends of relatives to see if anybody had any influence on the two banks involved, and Brother Hilarius was reading Abbot Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure just in case it might include something useful to us; but none of these activities was being done out of a positive spirit. A sense of defeat was pervasive among us now, and those who struggled against it were doing just that, and no more; not really trying to save the monastery but merely fighting against their own sense of defeat.

  Others had given up the struggle. Brother Leo was preparing breakfasts and dinners of such opulence and variety that each of them was obviously intended as a last meal. Brother Silas had retired to the library, surrounding himself with his book. Brother Eli was whittling figures from the Tarot deck; hanged men, doomed towers. And Brother Quillon had taken to his bed with a head cold, possibly terminal.

  We had twelve days. But help was not going to come to us from Brother Dexter’s relatives or Abbot Wesley’s novel or Brother Clemence’s old fuel bills. Help could only come from one place.

  Me.

  * * *

  “Brother Oliver,” I said, “I would like two hundred dollars and permission to Travel.”

  I had found him seated at the refectory table in his office. He looked up at me, appropriately startled, having been deep in Deuteronomy. (“Then shall his brother’s wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother’s house. And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed.”) Brother Oliver gaped at me across the centuries, apparently hearing my question from back to front. He said, “Yes? Travel? What? Two hundred dollars!”

  “Transportation and miscellaneous,” I explained.

  He closed the book on his hand. Then he opened it, withdrew his hand, and closed it again. “You’re leaving us, Brother
Benedict?” He sounded saddened, but not surprised.

  Was I? That wasn’t the question I had asked myself, nor was I prepared with an answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I can help save the monastery.”

  “Eileen Flattery again,” he said.

  “Yes, Brother.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me you want to Travel to Puerto Rico.”

  “Yes, Brother.”

  He reared back, studying me as though I might have something contagious. “Yes, Brother? What do you mean, yes, Brother?”

  “I want to Travel to Puerto Rico, Brother Oliver, and talk to Eileen Flattery face to face, and try to persuade her to help us.”

  He thought about it. He gazed past me, in the general direction of the windows and the courtyard, and when he looked back at me again his expression was deeply troubled. He said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Brother Benedict?”

  “Yes, Brother.”

  “And you feel…emotionally secure enough? You’re sure you can deal with it all?”

  “No, Brother.”

  He cocked his head to one side, studying my face. “No?”

  “Brother Oliver,” I said, “I don’t really want to do this. I don’t want to go anywhere, I don’t want to involve myself further with Eileen Flattery, I don’t want to confuse myself to distraction, I don’t want to break up a comfortable way of living, but I just don’t have any choice. If we can possibly save the monastery that’s what we have to do, and no one can help us, no one at all can help us, except Eileen Flattery.”

  “Who may not choose to, Brother Benedict.”

  “I know that. But she’s still our last hope.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and put my elbows on the refectory table. “I thought of writing her a letter,” I said, “but I know it wouldn’t do any good. Because I know why she went away. She went away because the thing that happened the other night shocked her just as much as it shocked me. She doesn’t want this any more than I do, and if I send her a letter she’ll probably throw it away unopened. She certainly won’t answer, won’t decide to involve herself again.”