Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Apparently it looked otherwise to Brother Oliver. “Lot’s wife,” he commented as we went by.

  Inside the building, different banks of elevators went to different groups of floors. “We want the fifty-seventh floor,” Brother Oliver said, and pointed. “One of those elevators over there.”

  “That sounds very high,” I said, following him.

  He frowned at me. “Do you get nosebleeds?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Bland music played in the elevator, which had imitation wood-grained walls and which we shared with several other people. The three chattering gum-chewing girls got off at 51, the bent old man carrying a manila envelope almost as big as himself got off at 54, and the two neat Japanese gentlemen got off at 56. At 57, Brother Oliver and I stepped out onto pale green carpeting defining a large space containing a receptionist’s desk and a waiting area with red leatherette sofas. Great red letters on the wall behind and above the receptionist spelled out DIMP.

  Brother Oliver gave our names to the receptionist, who had a reserved manner and an English accent, and she did some things with a very complicated telephone console before telling us, “Have a seat over there. Mr. Snopes’ secretary will be right out.”

  The red sofas were Danish in style, minimal in construction and uncomfortable to sit upon. White Formica tables amid them contained copies of Forbes magazine and Business Week and several real estate trade journals and something called Travel And Leisure, which turned out to be a magazine for American Express credit card users. The enjoyment and personal satisfaction to be found in such places as Bangkok was described. Brother Oliver chose that to leaf through—I made no comment—and I glanced at Business Week, a magazine I’d never seen before. I soon noticed they had a tendency to use the word “aggressive” to describe activity of which they approved. Another form of behavior they felt positive about was belt-tightening. As I continued to read, it seemed to me that all American business was divided into two camps, those who were aggressive and those who tightened their belts, and that Business Week, unable to choose the better from the worse, had given its unqualified blessing to both.

  “Brother Oliver?” It was the same English accent as that of the receptionist, but here combined with a softer voice and a more friendly-seeming girl. At her call, we set aside our magazines, got to our feet, and followed her through a door, down a long cream corridor decorated with poster-size black-and-white photographs of tall buildings, and into a very large room dominated by two sweeping walls of windows. Outside the windows were the fifty-seventh floors of other buildings. Inside was a wood-veneered desk the size of a backyard swimming pool and the shape of a lima bean, along with a forest of potted plants ranging from one to four feet in height, two large building models on their own tables, and a thin swarthy hawk-faced man who came around the end of the desk and approached us with a facile smile and an outstretched hand. “Brother Oliver! And Brother Benedict!”

  Brother Oliver shook hands for both of us. In the division of American business, this was clearly not a belt-tightener. Aggression poured from him in a gleaming oily river. “I’m Elroy Snopes,” he announced, still pumping Brother Oliver’s hand. “We’ve only met on the phone before this. Sit down, Brothers.” He released Brother Oliver in order to make a sweeping gesture at a pair of wooden-armed chairs with black leather seats and backs. “Coffee? A Coke? Anything at all?”

  We both demurred.

  “I’m having coffee myself,” Snopes insisted. We were all still standing, and he was leaning toward us, smiling, expectant, pushing his personality on us like a magician at a children’s party.

  “Then I’ll have coffee with you,” Brother Oliver said. “Milk, no sugar.”

  I understood his reasoning there. It was important to get into some sort of friendly relationship with this man, and throughout history the easiest way to do that kind of thing has been to break bread together. Or, in this case, to break coffee together. So I said, “Me, too. Regular, please.”

  Snopes aimed his personality like a floodlight at the girl who had brought us in here. “Miss Flinter?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Right away.” And off she went, closing the door behind her.

  Brother Oliver sat down, while Snopes strode away to the far side of his desk. Brother Oliver gave me a fast down-patting gesture, so I quickly sat in the other chair next to him, while Snopes settled himself behind his desk like a concert pianist at his Baldwin. He slapped his elbows onto the desktop, rubbed his hands together beneath his chin, beamed a smile at us, and said, “I’m glad you contacted us, Brother Oliver. We’d scheduled to contact you after the first of the year, but you can never have too much lead time in a situation like this.”

  “I agree,” said Brother Oliver.

  “Now as I understand it,” Snopes said, “you have a monastery population of sixteen.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Including Brother Benedict here.” He flicked the light of his personality at me, and returned to Brother Oliver, saying, “Plus of course you have specialized requirements, chapels and whatever, spatial necessities of a distinctive nature.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “On the other hand, several of the more usual factors don’t get cranked into the mix.”

  Brother Oliver leaned forward. “I beg pardon?”

  “There’s no co-ed problem, for instance,” Snopes said. “And no children.”

  “That’s true,” Brother Oliver said, and he sounded as puzzled as I felt. What was the purpose of this endless recital of the obvious?

  Snopes, offering no clues, rattled onward. “Children create,” he told us, “an entire spectrum of housing needs all their own, believe me. So to that extent, we’re working with a simplified problem. Then there’s garaging. Do you have vehicles?”

  “No,” Brother Oliver said. “We rarely Travel.”

  “Another simplification.” The Snopes beam of friendly approval became broad enough to include Brother Oliver, myself and a good third of the hovering plants. “The job at hand looks complex at first blush,” he told us, “but only because the problem is new, it’s different, it isn’t run of the mill. But once we look more closely, define our areas and our terminology, we can see that it doesn’t complex itself at all.”

  This man’s use of the English language, his apparent belief that any word could be turned into a verb by a simple effort of will, was starting to make me squint. “Contact,”

  “schedule,”

  “garage,” and “complex” all had become verbs at his hands so far, and who knew what else he might say before we got safely out of his office and back to our monastery?

  The other problem, aside from his form, was his content. What in fact was he talking about? What job wasn’t as complex as it at first appeared? Brother Oliver now asked this very question: “Exactly what job are we talking about, Mr. Snopes?”

  “Why, relocation, of course.”

  Brother Oliver stiffened. “Relocation?”

  “Not that there’s any hurry,” Snopes said smoothly. “The way it looks now, we won’t be at the demolish stage with your facility at least until next September and possibly not till the following spring.”

  Demolish stage: so now he had begun to redress the imbalance in the language by taking a verb and turning it into…what? An adjective, modifying “stage”? Or its own noun?

  But it was the gist that Brother Oliver concentrated on. He said, “But we don’t want you to demolish us. We don’t want to be relocated.”

  The Snopes personality wound itself up another forty watts, to include sympathy and human understanding. “Boy, I know just how you feel, Brother Oliver.” Flash: “You, too, Brother Benedict.” End of flash. “You people have been living there for years, haven’t you? You kind of get attached to a place.”

  “Precisely,” said Brother Oliver.

  “But we’ve got ourselves almost a year lead time,” Snopes told us, and his flashing eyes told us how hap
py that made him. “We’ll come up with just the right relocate long before we get deadlined.”

  “Unh,” I said.

  Snopes raised a gleaming eyebrow at me. “Brother Benedict?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I was just gastricked there for a second.”

  “Miss Flinter has Alka Seltzer,” he offered.

  “No. No, thank you.”

  Brother Oliver gave me a quick shut-up glance and returned to Snopes. “Mr. Snopes,” he said, “you don’t understand.”

  “I think I do, Brother Oliver,” Snopes said. He paused to emanate sympathy, then went on. “I do understand your special needs, and believe me we’re not placing you in the position where you either move into some fleabag or wind up out on the street.”

  “Those are not the options—”

  “For instance,” Snopes said, interrupting more with his smiles and gestures than with his words, “we’re already doing a potentiality survey on a little place up in New Paltz.”

  “New Paltz?”

  “Upstate,” Snopes said. “Up the Hudson. A former two-year community college. It got phased out, the facilities are there and in good shape, and it’s a very handsome little campus.”

  “But—”

  “Brick buildings, in what you might call your Ivy League style, only more modern, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid I do, but—”

  “They did a lot of tree planting, too,” Snopes went on, “and in years to come those trees are going to be beautiful. Gorgeous. When they get a little taller, you know.”

  “Mr. Snopes, we—”

  “Listen, on that subject.” Leaning across his desk, turning the wattage way down to indicate confidentiality, Snopes said, “You don’t do any drug work there, do you? In the monastery? Drug rehabilitation, any of that?”

  “No, of course not, we’re a contempla—”

  “Well, that’s fine.” Snopes leaned back, smiling, but with the wattage still down. “That would have been a problem with the community,” he said. “It might have been, I think it might have been. I think they’ll sit still for a religious situation, but drugs or anything like that, it might have been a problem.”

  “Mr. Snopes,” Brother Oliver said firmly, “we have no intention of going to New Paltz.”

  Snopes was amused by that. “I’m going to be honest with you, Brother Oliver,” he said. “We’re not going to get you anything on Park Avenue.”

  “We’re on Park Avenue.”

  “Yes, but you can’t expect—”

  “And,” Brother Oliver said, doing some of his own interrupting, without benefit of personality, “we’re going to stay on Park Avenue.”

  Mr. Snopes frowned, with many many muscles. “Well, I don’t see—”

  “In our present building,” Brother Oliver told him. “In our monastery. We are not going to move.”

  Mr. Snopes came to a stop. He brooded at Brother Oliver, thinking things over. With his personality turned off he looked like a desert bandit or a Mafia lawyer’s clerk. He also looked very difficult, much more difficult than Daniel Flattery. I glanced at Brother Oliver, and I saw that his brave front was held together with chewing gum and matchsticks, but that was holding.

  Mr. Snopes, speaking softly, almost gently, said, “Brother Oliver, I don’t think you understand what’s going on here.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  “Let me recap you anyway, just in case. What’s happened here, Dwarfmann Investment Management Partners, Incorporated, has bought some land. There are structures on that land. The structures will be removed and a new building will be put in their place. You and your other monks are tenants in one of those structures and you will be relocated. That’s what’s going on, Brother Oliver, and it has gone on in this city for the last thirty years, and you just have to look out the window to see it. And when the process starts, it goes through to the finish. Now, most of the time everything is calm, everybody is happy, and there’s no problem, but sometimes you get a situation where a tenant refuses to vacate. Does that desist the process? No, it does not, Brother Oliver. What happens, Federal marshals and New York City policemen enter the premises and remove the tenant and remove the tenant’s possessions and then the structure is knocked down per schedule and the new building is erected per schedule and the tenant makes a fool of himself on the sidewalk with his possessions for maybe three hours. Now, that’s what happens, Brother Oliver.”

  “Not this time,” Brother Oliver said.

  “Every time,” Mr. Snopes said.

  Brother Oliver shook his head. “No. I’m sure you would have called us after the first of the year to talk about relocation, because by then you’d own the land. But we found out ahead of time, before you own the land, and that means we have the chance to stop you.”

  “We have an option, Brother Oliver, and that’s just as good as ownership.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Brother Oliver insisted. “We have time now, and we’ll use that time, and we’ll stop this from happening.”

  Scornfully, Mr. Snopes said, “By doing what? You’ll go talk to Dan Flattery?”

  There was no way Brother Oliver could admit we’d already been turned down by Flattery, but on the other hand how could he tell a direct lie? I admired his way out. He said, “Why not?”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Mr. Snopes said. “He wants this sale just as much as we do. In fact, more.”

  “There are other ways,” Brother Oliver said. “We can get ourselves designated a landmark.”

  Mr. Snopes shook his head. “You’re wasting your time,” he said.

  “We can mobilize public opinion. Don’t you think public opinion will rally behind sixteen monks driven from their two-hundred-year-old monastery?”

  “I’m sure it will,” Mr. Snopes said. “And if Mr. Dwarfmann or I were running for public office we’d probably be pretty scared. But we’re not, Brother Oliver. The public has nothing to do with us. The law is all we’re concerned with.”

  Brother Oliver took a deep breath. I figured he was counting to ten, so I counted also, and when I got to seven he said, “I didn’t come here to argue with you, Mr. Snopes, or to trade challenges with you. I came here to find out what solution we could come to together that would enable us to keep our monastery.”

  Mr. Snopes had never become impassioned below the surface, and so had no need to count rapidly and angrily to ten. He clicked on his personality once more, now that the air raid was over, and flashed us some rueful comradeship. “I’m really sorry, Brother Oliver,” he said. “I wish there was a way, and I know Mr. Dwarfmann wishes the same thing, because your monastery could up the aesthetic values on the whole site. Better than a Picasso. Now, if you were on the corner we could probably work something out, but you’re right in the middle of the parcel, and there’s just no—Comere, take a look at this.”

  He popped up from his chair, bounded around the desk, and gestured us to come to one of the building models at the side of the room. “Here, this’ll explain the whole thing.”

  Brother Oliver got to his feet, so I did too, and we both walked over to look at this thing. On a more or less square surface stood two featureless white slabs. They looked like tombstones on a macrobiotic diet. Tiny trees and people and automobiles disported themselves around the base of the slabs. The slabs were united at the bottom, and then were united again briefly about halfway up, like Siamese twins joined at the hip.

  Pointing, Mr. Snopes said, “Now, that’s where your monastery is right now. You see the situation. Site logistics give us no alternative placement.”

  Brother Oliver waggled a finger at the slabs. “Is that what you intend to put up instead of our monastery?”

  “I suppose you’re more comfortable with an older style of architecture.”

  “I’m comfortable with style,” Brother Oliver told him, “and I’m comfortable with architecture. And now, more than ever, I am determined to save our monastery.”


  “Don’t make grief for yourself, Brother Oliver,” Mr. Snopes said, demonstrating true concern and fellow feeling. “Remember, it’s an old saying but it’s true, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  Brother Oliver glanced again at the slabs. “I see the broken eggs, Mr. Snopes,” he said, “but I see no sign of the omelet.”

  Mr. Snopes shrugged. His manner showed that he was giving up on us at the moment, but that he still was prepared to think of us as nice guys. He said, “I do sympathize, Brother Oliver, I said that before, and I meant it. But there’s nothing to be done.” He shifted to a brisker gear. “Now, what I suggest, you and Brother Benedict here, you go back to the monastery and talk it over, discuss it among yourselves, maybe consult an attorney, that’s always a good idea. Brother Benedict, I understand you’re friends with Miss Huxtable from the Times, you might want to sound her out, let her give you the real estate facts of life, and find out for yourselves what the situation is.”

  I said, “She won’t be in favor of what you’re doing. She already said so in the paper.”

  “Brother Benedict,” Mr. Snopes said, “so far as I know Ada Louise Huxtable has never liked anything that Dimp has done. All I’m saying is, she knows her way around in the real world, she’ll tell you what your chances are.”

  “She’ll be on our side.”

  Mr. Snopes shrugged. “Fine.” Turning back to Brother Oliver, he said, “When you’ve had a chance to think it over, give me a call. This New Paltz site isn’t the only potentiality, and like I said before we’ve got almost a year. Plenty of time.”

  Brother Oliver said, “I want to speak to Mr. Dwarfmann.”

  “He won’t tell you anything different from me, Brother Oliver.”

  “I want to speak to him.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s impossible.”

  “If he’s alive and conscious, it isn’t impossible.”