Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Brother Flavian, angry and suspicious, said, “Where in Pennsylvania?”

  “A small town called Higpen.”

  Brother Silas said, “Higpen? You mean Lancaster Abbey?”

  Brother Oliver said, “You know the place?”

  “I was there for a while. It’s no good, believe me. After this place, it’s trash.”

  Brother Quillon called, “Tell us about it, Brother.”

  “Sure.” Brother Silas got to his feet and half-turned so we could all see him. He was somewhat shorter than average, a fact which had apparently been useful in his burglary-cum-pickpocket career, and his face was composed of small sharp features bunched together. He had the appearance I had always visualized for racetrack touts.

  “This Lancaster Abbey,” Brother Silas told us, “was a part of the Dismal Order. You know, dedicated to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, the one hanging on the right of Christ.”

  We all bowed our heads at the Name.

  “I joined up with them,” Brother Silas went on, “when I first went straight. They sounded like my kind of people, they mostly used to be in the rackets themselves. But it turned out all they did, these guys, was sit around and tell each other what masterminds they used to be, tell each other the capers they pulled and how they got out of this thing and how they knocked off the other thing and all that. I began to think, these guys, they didn’t so much reform as retire, you know? So I split and I came here.”

  Brother Oliver cleared his throat, “I believe our primary interest right now, Brother Silas,” he suggested, “is in the building.”

  “Right, Brother.” He shook his head, telling us, “You don’t want it. See, these guys, they’d spent most of their adult lives doing time, you know what I mean? When they thought of home, they thought of something with cell doors and an exercise yard. So what they built themselves out there in Pennsy was like a baby Sing Sing. Gray walls, metal doors, brown dirt courtyard. You wouldn’t like it at all.”

  “Thank you very much, Brother,” said Brother Oliver. The information seemed to have daunted him, but he turned bravely to the rest of us and said, “Of course, Dimp has promised to keep looking until they find something we can approve.”

  Brother Quillon, his voice rather shrill, cried out, “But how can we approve anything, Brother? After this. Our home.”

  “We all feel that way,” Brother Oliver assured him.

  Brother Clemence said, “Excuse me. Let me just raise this question of the lease one more time. Has no one seen it, or have any idea where it might be?”

  There was silence as we all looked at one another, everybody waiting for somebody else to speak.

  Brother Clemence spread his hands. “Well, that’s it, then,” he said.

  Then little Brother Zebulon piped up, saying, “Whyn’t you look at the copy?”

  That got him more attention than he’d received in forty-five years. Brother Clemence actually stepped out into the aisle and took a pace in Brother Zebulon’s direction, saying, “Copy? What copy?”

  “Brother Urban’s copy, of course,” said Brother Zebulon. “What other copy is there?”

  “Brother Urban’s copy?” Brother Clemence looked around at us, his helpless expression saying as clearly as words that there was no Brother Urban among us.

  Then Brother Hilarius spoke up. “A former Abbot,” he said. “The one before Wesley, I think.”

  “That’s right!” cried Brother Valerian. “Now I remember! He did illuminated manuscripts. There’s a framed one of his hanging in the kitchen, near the sink, an illuminated version of I Corinthians V, 7: Every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.”

  Brother Clemence looked groggy. “Illuminated manuscripts?”

  “He did illuminated manuscripts on everything,” Brother Zebulon crowed, suddenly breaking into laughter. “You should have seen his illuminated version of the front page of the Daily News the day Lucky Lindy landed in Paris!”

  Brother Clemence shook his head. “Do you mean,” he asked, “this Brother Urban did an illuminated manuscript version of our lease?”

  “Of course!” cried Brother Zebulon. He was slapping his knees and cackling as though he were on some front porch somewhere and not in our chapel at all. I suppose in the excitement he must have completely forgotten where he was. “That Brother Urban,” he cried, “was the looniest of them all, and they’ve all been loony! If he saw a piece of paper with writing on it, he’d do a copy, do it all up with pictures and big fancy capital letters and gold color all around the border and I don’t know what all.”

  I noticed that none of us was looking at Brother Oliver. I too did not look at Brother Oliver, so I don’t exactly know how he took what he was hearing. But I know how Brother Clemence took it; with the stunned joy of a miser who’s been hit on the head by a gold bar. “Where is this copy?” he demanded. “The copy of the lease, where is it?”

  Brother Zebulon spread his bony hands, shrugged his bony shoulders. “How should I know? With all his others, I suppose.”

  “All right, where are they?”

  “Don’t know that, either.”

  But Brother Hilarius did. “Brother Clemence,” he said, and when Clemence turned to him he said, “Brother Clemence, you know where they are.”

  Clemence frowned. We all frowned. Then Clemence’s frown cleared away. “Ah,” he said. “The attic.”

  “Where else,” said Brother Hilarius.

  * * *

  The attic. Because the roof slanted down on both sides, the only place where one could stand up straight was in the very middle, directly beneath the ridgepole. And even then one could stand up straight only if one were less than five feet six inches tall. And barefoot.

  That taller central area had been left clear as a passageway, but the triangular spaces on both sides were filled with the most incredible array of artifacts. Abbot Ardward’s matchstick mangers—and his three partly damaged matchstick cathedrals—made a sort of sprawling Lilliputian city all about, intermixed with ancient cracking leather suitcases, copses and groves of tarnished candelabra, tilting light-absorbing examples of Abbot Jacob’s art of the stained-glass window, curling blow-up sheafs of Abbot Delfast’s photographic studies of the changing of the seasons in our courtyard, piles of clothing, cartons of shoes, small hills of broken coffeepots and cracked dinnerware, and who knows what else. Over there leaned Abbot Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, now an apartment house for mice. Old chairs, small tables, a log-slab bench and what I took to be a hitching post. Kerosene lanterns hanging from nails in the old beams, bas-reliefs on religious subjects jammed in every which way, and a rolled-up carpet with no Cleopatra inside. The wanderings of the Jews were recorded in mosaics of tiny tile glued to broad planks; some of the glue had dried out and the tiles had fallen off, to be crunched distressingly underfoot. Old newspapers, old woodcuts of sailing vessels, old fedoras, old stereopticon sets and old school ties.

  You can really fill an attic in a hundred and ninety-eight years.

  We came boiling up to that attic now, all sixteen of us, like escaping prisoners of war. Up we came and out we spread and down we bent and on we searched. Tiles and mothballs and mouse droppings crunched distressingly underfoot. Heads thonked into beams, followed by cries of pain or indistinct mutterings. The forty-watt bulb at the head of the stairs, our only illumination, gave little enough light to begin with, and we made matters worse by constantly casting shadows either in our own way or somebody else’s. Brother Leo inadvertently knelt on a matchstick cathedral, Brother Thaddeus gashed his temple on a nail, Brother Jerome knocked over Abbot Wesley’s novel, and Brother Quillon tripped him while attempting to stand the volumes up again. Brother Valerian found a stub of candle, stuck it into a candelabra, lit it, and the candle fell out and rolled burning into a little suburb of newspapers and shirts. Pandemonium ensued, but the fire was put out before it caused much damage.

  An
d the dust. One man up here, just having a casual look around, could raise enough dust in five minutes to drive himself back downstairs again. Sixteen of us, all more or less frantic, all rooting and scrounging through the deepest and furthest recesses of accumulated junk, created the closest thing to the atmosphere of the planet Mercury ever seen on the planet Earth. We coughed and sneezed, our perspiration turned to mud, our wool robes itched, our eyes burned, and half the things we picked up fell apart in our hands. Creating more dust.

  When in tribulation, when in discomfort, the good Catholic can offer his sufferings to be credited to the account of the souls in Purgatory, to shorten their punishments and gain them earlier release to Heaven. If we sixteen didn’t empty Purgatory that day, I just don’t know.

  “Here!”

  The voice was Brother Mallory’s, and looking through the swirling gloom I saw his fighter’s body in a fighter’s crouch beneath the threatening beams. He was holding out and waving a large piece of stiff paper.

  We all made our way in his direction, crushing anonymous crushables beneath our feet. Brother Clemence coughed and sputtered and called, “The lease? Is it the lease?”

  “Not yet!” Brother Mallory shouted. “But it’s the right stuff. And there’s a lot of it here!” And he held that piece of paper out for our inspection.

  Never had I seen No Smoking so beautifully rendered. The sinuousness of that S, suggesting smoke itself, was played off beautifully against the tendrils of green ivy encircling it, and the massive tree-trunk effect of that determined N was softened by the bank of daylilies in which it was embedded. The smaller letters were of a clear but soft black calligraphy, the whole surrounded by vines and leaves and floral arrangements. Small rectangular drawings of artisans in their rooms plying their crafts—writing, weaving, boot-making—were gracefully placed around the margins, and one noticed at once that not one of those artisans had a cigarette.

  “There’s a whole stack of these,” Brother Mallory told us. “All different.” Turning to show us some more of them, he gave his head a whack on a beam and dropped the No Smoking sign. “Damn that beam,” he said, and looked toward Brother Oliver to say, “in a theological sense only.”

  “The lease,” Brother Clemence said, leaning forward in impatience. “Never mind anything else, get that lease.” Like half a dozen of the others, he had put his cowl up to protect his head slightly from beam-thumps, and I suddenly realized that by now, in this smoky dusty yellow light, in these cramped wooden quarters surrounded by strange bric-a-brac, we sixteen robed figures, half of us with hidden hooded faces, must look like one of the more disturbed paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Monks in Hell, at the very least. I half expected some little imp-figure, half toad and half man, to come scampering out of that nearby matchstick cathedral.

  But he didn’t; he stayed within. Brother Mallory, on the other hand, came up with a whole double armload of papers. “I don’t know what your lease looks like,” he complained. “Can’t see anyway, not in this light, with all this dust in my eyes.”

  “We’ll bring them all downstairs,” Brother Clemence decided, “sort them out down there.”

  “This isn’t all of them,” Brother Mallory said. “There’s hundreds back here.” Thrusting the present handful at Brother Leo, he said, “Here, take this. I’ll get the rest.” Brother Leo grasped the bundle of papers and hit his head on a beam. He grunted, and I waited for him to say something far worse than Brother Mallory’s theological comment. But he didn’t. For a few seconds he stood there biting his lips, and then he turned to say, “Brother Hilarius, was the Blessed Zapatero a tall man?”

  “Short, I believe,” Brother Hilarius said. “Under five feet.”

  “Pity,” said Brother Leo.

  Brother Mallory had come up with another armload, which he passed to Brother Peregrine. Sheets fluttered this way and that. I spotted a beautifully rendered version of a poster for the Louis-Schmeling fight, the letters cleverly entwined with knotted ring ropes. An outsize copy of what appeared to be a doctor’s prescription featured stethoscopes, caducei, brass bedposts and cork-stoppered bottles in freeform style around the carefully reproduced illegible handwriting. Other sheets were too heavily encrusted with drawings, ivy-festooned capital letters, calligraphic curlicues and general grume to be comprehendible without a closer clearer look. But it was all very interesting.

  And there was tons of it. When at last we all blundered back downstairs again armloads of the stuff were being toted by Brothers Mallory, Leo, Jerome, Silas, Eli and Clemence, while I stayed behind to gather up the half dozen sheets that had slipped and slithered out of the Brothers’ embrace. None of them proved to be the wanted lease, but I carried them along anyway, and followed everyone else all the way down to the first floor and Brother Oliver’s office, picking up other stray sheets along the way.

  It’s truly wonderful how intense group activity can take one out of oneself. From the moment this great lease-hunt had gotten underway I had completely forgotten all about my own personal troubles, the doubts and perplexities about my future. It wasn’t until I was alone again, following the trail of paper left by the others, that reflection on my own situation returned to me. I felt the gloom descending, the unease and uncertainty, and I hurried to rejoin the safe anonymity of the crowd.

  Brother Oliver’s office looked like Bureaucrat Heaven: papers everywhere, teetering and tottering on chairs and tables, collapsing on the floor, heaped atop the filing cabinet. Brothers Clemence, Oliver, Flavian, Mallory and Leo were all simultaneously trying to create order, which meant that together they created chaos. Brothers Valerian, Eli, Quillon and Thaddeus were all waving sheets of paper in Brother Clemence’s general direction and crying out, not at all in unison, “Is this it?” Brother Dexter looked across the mob scene at me, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. I could only agree with him.

  It was Brother Peregrine who finally got everything channeled. Leaping up onto the refectory table as though about to break into a fast buck-and-wing—Brother Oliver gave him a startled and not pleased stare—Brother Peregrine clapped his hands together and shouted, exactly like the choreographer in every movie musical, “People! People!”

  I think it was being called “People” rather than “Brothers” that did the trick. Silence fell, two or three syllables later, and everybody looked up at Brother Peregrine, who filled the silence at once by saying, very loudly, “Now, we need some organization here!” Two or three people would have restored chaos by simultaneously agreeing with him, but he out-shouted them and bore inexorably onward: “Now, Brother Clemence is the only one of us who knows exactly what we’re looking for.” Pointing at Brother Clemence, he said, “Brother, if you’ll come around on the other side of this table.…Come along, come along.”

  You don’t argue with the choreographer. I could see Brother Clemence begin dimly to understand that as, after a very brief pause, he pushed through the crush and went obediently around to the far side of the refectory table.

  “That’s fine.” Brother Peregrine was suddenly so totally in command that he didn’t have to ask anybody for anything. Pointing as he called out the names, he said, “Now, Brother Oliver, Brother Hilarius, Brother Benedict and myself, we’ll go through those papers. It won’t take more than four of us. I know the rest of you are interested, but if we all try to help we just won’t get anything done. Now, if you want to watch, please just stand back there by the door. Brother Flavian? Over by the door, please.”

  Magnificent. In no time at all Brother Peregrine had chosen his cast and created his audience. (I noticed he’d cast himself in a leading role, but since he’d done the same for me I wasn’t about to complain.)

  Obedience was prompt and complete. Even Brother Flavian, though he hesitated, finally chose to keep his mouth shut and join the spectators. As those also-rans clustered themselves into the corner by the door, Brother Peregrine finished his staging. “Now,” he said, “we four will each take a stack of manuscript
s and go through them one at a time. If you find something that looks as though it might be right, take it to Brother Clemence for inspection. All clear?”

  I noticed that he didn’t ask us if we agreed; he asked us if we understood. You can’t answer a question you haven’t been asked, so we all nodded and mumbled our yesses. Brother Peregrine hopped gracefully down again from the refectory table, and the search got under way.

  Brother Hilarius and I worked at stacks side by side, and very soon Brother Hilarius totally lost sight of the objective. The historian in him took over, and he thought we were here to admire the manuscripts. “Very nice,” he would say, holding out a representation of the front of a Kellogg’s Pep box. “Unusual commingling of Carolingian and Byzantine elements.” Or, in re a supermarket flyer offering steak at forty-nine cents a pound, “A perfect example of the Ottoman Renaissance.”

  It made it difficult to concentrate on my own stack, but I did my best. And what a busy pen Abbot Urban had possessed! Anything in print, anything in print, that had passed before that man’s eyes had been copied in one or another style of illumination. Sheet after sheet after sheet I went through, finding nothing, pausing at a menu in which the capitals were constructed around the animals whose parts were being offered: fish, cattle, sheep.

  “Look,” said Brother Hilarius. “Look at these drolleries.”

  They didn’t look very droll to me. Hangings, crucifixions, electrocutions and other forms of violent institutional death were represented with small stylized figures in the margins of a wanted poster. I said, “Droll?”

  “Drolleries,” he corrected me. “That’s the term for these, it’s a characteristic of the Gothic style, early sixteenth century.”

  “Oh,” I said, and went back to my own array of drolleries.

  “This Brother Urban,” Brother Hilarius said, “was quite a scholar as well as being quite an artist. He knew the different styles and stages of illumination, and he had the wit to combine them for his own statements.”