Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Option,” said Brother Oliver. “Option means choice. You mean they’re going to choose one bit of land and let the rest go?”

  Brother Clemence said to Brother Dexter, “May I?”

  “By all means,” Brother Dexter said to Brother Clemence.

  Brother Clemence said to Brother Oliver, “In law, an option is a binding agreement to make a purchase. For instance, I might say to you that I want to buy your, um…” Frowning massively, Brother Clemence ground to a halt. “You don’t own anything,” he said. He looked around at the rest of us. “None of us own anything.”

  “Perhaps I ought to try it,” Brother Dexter said.

  “You’re welcome to,” Brother Clemence told him.

  Brother Dexter said to Brother Oliver, “Suppose you owned the chair you’re sitting in.”

  Brother Oliver looked doubtful but willing. “Very well,” he said.

  “Suppose,” Brother Dexter went on, elaborating his fantasy, “suppose we all owned the chairs we were sitting in.”

  Brother Oliver looked at us. I looked steadfastly back, trying to fix about my face the gaze of a man who owns the chair he’s sitting in. Even more doubtfully, but just as willing, Brother Oliver said again, “Very well.”

  “Now suppose further,” Brother Dexter said, risking all at every step, “that I wish to own all the chairs.”

  Brother Oliver gave him an astounded look. “What for?” Brother Dexter was patently stymied for just a second, but then he leaned forward and said, clearly and distinctly, “For purposes of my own.”

  “Yes!” cried Brother Clemence. He had obviously caught Brother Dexter’s drift and was pleased with the structure under formation. Leaning forward to stare intently at Brother Oliver while waggling a finger at Brother Dexter, Brother Clemence cried out, “For reasons of his own! Personal private reasons! He has to own all the chairs!”

  “That’s the point,” Brother Dexter said.

  Brother Oliver, apparently at the point of despair, looked at him and said. “It is?”

  “I have to have all the chairs,” Brother Dexter said. “Just some of them won’t do, not for, uhh, those purposes of mine. I need them all. So I come to you,” he rushed forward, “and I tell you I’ll pay you, oh, fifty dollars for your chair.”

  Brother Oliver twisted about to look at his chair, which was in fact a very handsome carved-oak antique. “You will?”

  Brother Dexter was not about to get sidetracked into a discussion of furniture. Racing along, he said, “However, I explain to you that I can’t use your chair unless I can also buy all the other chairs. So we sign an agreement.”

  “An option agreement,” put in Brother Clemence.

  “Yes,” said Brother Dexter. “An option agreement. The agreement says that I will buy your chair for fifty dollars next Monday, if I have managed to conclude similar agreements with the owners of all the other chairs. And I will pay you five dollars now as an earnest of my intentions. With that agreement, and once you accept the five dollars, you can no longer sell your chair to anyone else, even if someone were to make you a better offer. If Brother Benedict, for instance, were to come along tomorrow and offer you a thousand dollars for that chair, you couldn’t sell it to him.”

  Brother Oliver studied me in bemused astonishment. “A thousand dollars?”

  For some reason I remembered yesterday’s very long penance, which Brother Oliver had noticed, and I became very very guilty. I think, in fact, I blushed, and I know I averted my gaze.

  But Brother Dexter wasn’t going to permit that digression either. “The point is,” he said, “once we sign that option agreement we are committed to the sale of the chair if the other conditions are met by the deadline. Being next Monday.”

  “I think,” said Brother Oliver cautiously, “that some parts of this are beginning to make sense.”

  “Good,” said Brother Dexter.

  “Peripheral parts,” Brother Oliver added. “But now, if you would expand your parable from chairs to monasteries, I just might be able to follow you.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Brother Dexter said. “The Dwarfmann people—by the way, they seem to refer to themselves as Dimp, which would stand for Dwarfmann Investment Management Partners—so the Dimp people—”

  Brother Hilarius, incredulity ringing in his voice, said, “The Dimp people?”

  “That is what they call themselves,” Brother Dexter said.

  “Quickly,” Brother Oliver said. “I feel it all slipping away.”

  “Certainly,” Brother Dexter said. “The Dimp people have acquired options on several pieces of land in this area. The Alpenstock Hotel, for instance, and this monastery, and that building on the corner with the silver-fronted store. You know the one.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Brother Oliver said. The store in question, very Bauhaus in its facade, was called the Buttock Boutique and it featured ladies’ slacks. When a member of our community did find it necessary to Travel, he almost always set off in the opposite direction from that shop, no matter what the destination.

  “Well, these options,” Brother Dexter said, “come due on January first. At that time, if all the necessary parcels of land have been acquired, the sales will go through.”

  “I don’t understand about necessary parcels,” Brother Oliver said. “If they buy one piece of land—or one chair, come to that—why do they have to have another one as well?”

  “Because of the building they intend to put up.” Brother Dexter did some crisp but unintelligible things with his hands on the tabletop, the while saying, “If they were to buy the land on either side of this monastery, for instance, but then didn’t buy the monastery, they wouldn’t be able to put up one large office building spreading over all their land.”

  “I don’t like large office buildings anyway,” Brother Oliver said.

  “Nobody likes them,” Brother Dexter said, “but they do intend to build one, and unfortunately we are on part of the land they intend to use.”

  Usually I preferred to keep my own two cents’ worth out of these discussions, but an issue had been raised a minute ago and I wanted to explore it a little further, so I said, “Brother Dexter, are you saying that if they don’t get options on every piece of land the deal is off? They won’t buy the monastery after all, and they won’t put up their office building?”

  The light of hope shone in several faces around the table, but not for long. Smiling sadly at me and shaking his head, Brother Dexter said, “I’m afraid it’s too late, Brother Benedict. They already have all the options they need. They don’t intend to close before January, but unless something unforeseen happens there’s no chance that the deal won’t go through.” Turning back to Brother Oliver, he said, “Now you see why I said not exactly when you asked me if the Flatterys still owned the land. In a sense, they do, but the Dimp people have taken an option and will complete the purchase in January.”

  “I understand enough of it now,” Brother Oliver said, “to know there’s little comfort in it. The more I understand, in fact, the more depressing it becomes. It might be best not to explain anything to me from now on.”

  “There are a few thin rays of sunshine,” Brother Dexter said. “When I told the Dimp man, Snopes, that Brother Benedict here was in communication with Ada Louise Huxtable, he assured—”

  “Brother Dexter!” I said. I was truly shocked.

  Brother Dexter gave me the crystal-clear glance of the true sophist and said, “You do read her column, don’t you? You’ve written to her, haven’t you? If that isn’t being in communication I’d like to know what is.”

  Patting the table impatiently, Brother Clemence said, “We’ll leave that to you and Father Banzolini to work out, Brother Dexter. What did this Dimp person assure you, after you’d name-dropped at him?”

  “That the Dwarfmann organization,” Brother Dexter said, “would make every effort to help us find satisfactory new quarters, and would also help to allay the expense of our moving.�
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  “Sunshine?” Brother Oliver’s voice was nearly a squeak. “You call that a ray of sunshine? How can there be satisfactory new quarters? If the quarters are new, they won’t be satisfactory! Look around you, look around just simply this one room—where on the face of God’s Earth would we find its counterpart?”

  “Nowhere,” Brother Dexter said promptly.

  Brother Hilarius said, “And you forget the question of Travel. The process of Moving, the permanent relocation of not only one’s self but also all of one’s possessions from point A to point B, is the profoundest form of Travel.”

  “It’s just impossible,” Brother Oliver said. “The more one thinks about it, the more one sees we simply can’t leave this monastery.”

  Brother Hilarius said, “But if they tear it down?”

  “They must not, that’s all there is to it.” Brother Oliver had clearly brought himself back from the edge of despair and helplessness, and had determined to fight back. “Through the forest of your not exactlys,” he said to Brother Dexter, “I seem to discern one tree. The land is promised to Dwarfmann or Dimp or whatever those tools of Satan call themselves, but until January first the owner of the land is Daniel Flattery.”

  “Technically,” Brother Dexter said, “yes.”

  “Technically is good enough for me,” Brother Oliver said. “Tonight I will continue to look for that missing lease, though I can’t think what corners there are left to search in, and tomorrow I shall Travel.”

  We all looked at him. Brother Hilarius said, “Travel? You, Brother?”

  “To Long Island,” Brother Oliver said. “To the Flattery estate. Daniel Flattery was embarrassed to tell me the truth on the telephone. In person, perhaps I can turn that embarrassment to honest shame and put an end to this sale.”

  Brother Clemence said, “If there’s already a signed option agreement, I don’t see what we can do.”

  “I know very little about rich men,” Brother Oliver said, “but one of the few things I believe about them is that they became rich by knowing how to renege on their promises. If Daniel Flattery wants to void that option agreement, he’ll void it.”

  Smiling slightly, Brother Clemence said, “Remembering my days on the Street, Brother Oliver, I must say I think you have something there.”

  Brother Dexter said, “Would you want us to go with you? You wouldn’t want to Travel alone.”

  “I would prefer a companion,” Brother Oliver admitted, but then he looked around doubtfully and said, “But if I were to arrive with an ex-banker or an ex-lawyer we might very well degrade ourselves to a business level, when the effect I intend to strive for is one of good strong Catholic guilt.” He mused aloud, saying, “On the other hand, we five are the only ones in the monastery who know about this, and I still don’t want to alarm the others.” His eye lit on me. “Ah,” he said.

  Three

  Travel. The world is insane, it really is. I’d forgotten, during my ten years inside our monastery walls, just how lunatic they all are out there, and my weekly stroll to the Lexington Avenue newsstand had not been exposure enough to remind me. I had come to think of the world as colorful, exciting, variegated and even dangerous, but I had forgotten about the craziness.

  Brother Oliver and I, our cowls up protectively about our heads, left the monastery at eight-fifteen Thursday morning, after Mass and breakfast and morning prayer, and turned our faces south. And the city struck us head on, with noise and color and motion and confusion beyond description. Large ramshackle delivery trucks rounded corners continuously, always too fast, always jouncing a rear tire against the curb, always changing gears with terrifying clash-grind-snarls in the middle of the operation. Taxis, all of them as yellow and speedy as a school of demented fish, were incessantly either honking their horns or squealing their brakes, the meantime jockeying for position like children hoping for the largest piece of birthday cake. Pedestrians of all sizes and shapes and sexes (including the dubious), but of one uniform facial expression—scowling urgency—elbowed along the sidewalks and raced in front of speeding cabs and shook their fists at any driver who had the temerity to sound his horn.

  Why was everybody Traveling so much? Where was the need? Was it even remotely possible that so very many people had just discovered they were in the wrong place? What if everyone in the world were to call up everyone else in the world some morning and say, “Look, instead of you coming here and me going there why don’t I stay here and you stay there,” wouldn’t that be saner? Not to speak of quieter.

  Like babes in a boiler factory, Brother Oliver and I huddled close to one another as we set off, Traveling south along Park Avenue. Scrupulously we obeyed the intersection signs that alternately said WALK and DON’T WALK, though no one else did. Slowly we made progress.

  Park Avenue stretched half a dozen blocks ahead of us, as far as Grand Central Station, with the hilt of the PanAm Building sticking out of its back. We would be taking a train eventually, but not from that terminal; the Long Island Railroad connects in Manhattan with Pennsylvania Station, quite some distance away. Eighteen blocks south and four blocks west, slightly over a mile from the monastery, the farthest I had been in ten years.

  We crossed 51st Street, jostled by hurrying louts, and I gestured to an impressive church structure on our left, saying, “Well, that’s reassuring, anyway.”

  Brother Oliver gave me the tiniest of headshakes, then leaned his cowl close to mine so I could hear him over the surrounding din. “That’s Saint Bartholomew,” he said. “Not one of ours.”

  “Oh?” It looked like one of ours.

  “Anglican,” he explained.

  “Ah,” I said. The sanctum simulacrum; that explained it.

  In the next block we passed the Waldorf-Astoria, a veritable cathedral of Travel; not one of ours at all. At 49th Street the WALK-DON’T WALK signs were so displaced that we chose to cross to the far side of Park Avenue, a very great distance in itself, the endless lanes of traffic separated in the middle by a grass-covered mall, as scruffy as but narrower than our courtyard. On the far side I looked back and could barely make out our monastery in the distance, huddled there like some ancient wood-and-stone flying saucer among the technological barbarians.

  “Come, come,” Brother Oliver said to me. “It’ll be over soon.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t. The walk to Penn Station was both interminable and terrifying. Madison and Fifth Avenue were even more crowded and bustling than Park Avenue—and narrower as well—and west of Fifth Avenue we were in Babel. The citizens had become shorter and stouter and swarthier, and they spoke such a confusion of tongues we might as well have been in Baghdad or an evangelist’s tent. Spanish, Yiddish, Italian, Chinese, and God alone knows what else. Urdu and Kurd, I don’t doubt. Pashto and Persian.

  Pennsylvania Station was a different sort of nightmare. The Penn Central and Long Island railroads both terminate there, and the resulting furor was too blurred with frenzy for me to see it clearly, much less describe it. One rode an escalator down to the floor of the main terminal building, and as I descended into it the whole panorama looked to me like nothing more nor less than a fistful of ants scrambling in the bottom of an amber bottle.

  Then we couldn’t find the railroad. We found the other one with no difficulty, we found it over and over again: Penn Central to the left of us, Penn Central to the right of us, but where oh where was the blessed Long Island Railroad?

  In the bowels of the earth. We commandeered a bustling maintenance man long enough to be given hurried grudging directions, and learned we had to descend more stairs to a different kind of station. The transition was very like that from the east side of Fifth Avenue to the west; we had descended not only physically but also in caste. It was very obvious.

  “Now I understand,” I told Brother Oliver, “why Hell is always depicted as being beneath the surface of the earth.”

  “Strength, Brother Benedict,” he advised me, and pressed onward to an Informa
tion booth, where we were given rapid-fire instructions in re ticket purchasing and train catching. There would be a train to be caught in the direction of Sayville in twenty-five minutes. “Change at Jamaica,” the Information man rattled off, “no change at Babylon.”

  Brother Oliver leaned toward him, pushing his cowl back the better to hear what was being said. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Change at Jamaica, no change at Babylon.” And the Information man pointedly looked at the inquirer next in line behind us.

  “I’m not at all surprised to hear that,” Brother Oliver said, and I was pleased to see the Information man frown in bewilderment after us as we went away to buy our tickets. So it was possible to attract the attention of one of these dervishes after all.

  * * *

  “In 1971,” Brother Oliver told me as our train rolled through the industrial squalor of Queens, “Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of the State of New York, declared the Long Island Railroad to be the finest railroad anywhere in the world. As of the first of November that year.”

  “Then I am all the more amazed,” I said, “that anyone ever Travels at all.”

  The car in which we found ourselves was a sort of two-tiered slave quarters. One entered upon an incredibly narrow central corridor, lined with metal walls broken by open entrances to the cubicles on both sides. These cubicles were alternately two awkward steps up or two awkward steps down from the corridor, so that someone sitting in a lower cubicle was directly beneath the rump of the passenger in the next upper cubicle. We had chosen a lower, and huddled there like mice in an egg carton while the train rolled first through a tunnel and then through neighborhoods as grim as the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. The knees and ankles occasionally passing in the corridor seemed calm enough, inured to this harsh environment, but I couldn’t have felt more dislocated if I’d awakened on the planet Jupiter.