Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, and rejected a laundry list, all in gold and red.

  “Is this it?” Brother Peregrine stood up, spraying sheets of paper off his lap, and rushed to Brother Clemence with his find. We all waited, tense, watching Brother Clemence’s face. He studied the wording which, like many of these things, was hard indeed to read, and abruptly shook his head. “Seven cents off on Crisco,” he announced.

  Crushed, his star role reduced to a comic turn, Brother Peregrine turned away without a word and went back to his place. And my own humiliation followed almost immediately after.

  I was positive I’d found it, positive, but Brother Clemence hardly gave it a look before dismissing it. “Birth certificate,” he announced. “Somebody named Joseph something-or-other.”

  So we continued, more cautiously now, nobody wanting to be third in the chump sweepstakes, and then I got to something I couldn’t read at all. There was lettering there—I could see that much—but I couldn’t make out a word of it. Was that an L? Vines entwined themselves around the latticework of lettering, leaves fluttered, long-necked birds craned Heavenward, suns and moons were scattered with a liberal hand, and all in all I just got a headache trying to look at it.

  Finally I had to ask for help. But not from Brother Clemence, not just yet. “Brother Hilarius,” I said. “What do you suppose this is?”

  He looked at it, and burst out laughing. “Oh, that’s priceless!” he said.

  “It is?”

  “That’s very funny,” he informed me. “What a wonderful joke. Don’t you see what he’s done?”

  “Not in the slightest particular.”

  “He’s combined the Irish style,” Brother Hilarius told me, “right out of the Book of Durrow—look at that S right there—”

  “Is that an S?”

  “Of course it’s an S.” Brother Hilarius leaned over, chuckling, to study the joke in close-up. “He’s mixed the Irish style,” he said, “with Art Nouveau!”

  “Oh really?”

  “Art Nouveau! Don’t you see? Art Nouveau is less than a hundred years old, it comes much later than the age of illumination. Look at the curve of that tendril there.”

  “Anachronism,” I suggested, trying to get a handle on this alleged joke.

  “Wonderful juxtaposition.”

  “Probably so,” I agreed. “The question is, is it the lease?”

  Brother Hilarius frowned at me, distracted from his admiration of Abbot Urban’s humor. “What?”

  “Is it the lease?”

  “The lease?” He sounded astonished, as though he didn’t know there was supposed to be any lease around here at all. “Of course not.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look! Look! Read it for yourself.” His finger rippled across the leafy maze. “Lindy Lands,” he said.

  “Lindy Lands?”

  “Lindbergh. That’s the front page of the Daily News!”

  Brother Zebulon, with that carelessness about rules characteristic of senior citizens, had wandered out of the audience and onto the stage. Now he was standing on Brother Hilarius’ other side, leaning over to look at the manuscript in my lap and to say, “Yes, that’s it. Lindy was all the way back here before Brother Urban ever got that one finished.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  Then Brother Zebulon looked around the room, squinting, obviously looking for something. “Where’s the rolls?” he said.

  Brother Hilarius and I, in close harmony, both said, “Rolls?” Vision of hard rolls danced in my head.

  Brother Zebulon placed all his fingertips together, then pulled his hands far apart, like someone pulling taffy. “Rolls,” he said. “Brother Urban did all the long things on rolls.”

  Brother Hilarius said, “Papyrus rolls?”

  “Paper rolls, that’s right,” said Brother Zebulon. “He taped pieces of paper together, and then rolled them up.”

  Brother Clemence, who had been sitting at the refectory table twiddling his thumbs—literally physically twiddling his thumbs—now frowned in our direction, saying, “What’s that?”

  “There should be rolls,” Brother Hilarius explained.

  Brother Clemence spread out his arms to encompass the entire messy paper-strewn room. “You mean, there’s more?”

  * * *

  It was on one of the rolls. A select search party composed of Brothers Hilarius, Mallory, Jerome and Zebulon had found the rolls amid a lot of window shades and curtain rods, in behind the fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, and it didn’t take long to find the one headed by a magnificent Romanesque capital L in the form of an ivy-covered tower or turret, leading to delicately etched E, A, S and E, superimposed on small detailed two-dimensional representations of outbuildings.

  “All right,” Brother Clemence said. “Let’s unroll it, and see what it has to say.”

  More easily said than done. The roll wished to remain a roll, and not to become a tongue. When the end was released, it would immediately snap back to the main body. If just the end were held, the main body wished to barrel forward and enclose itself again. If both ends were held, the sides became determined to curl toward one another across the text.

  Finally, four of us had to hold it down, like a sailor having his leg amputated in a pirate movie. I held part of the end and part of one side, with Brother Peregrine across from me and Brothers Mallory and Jerome down at the main body.

  With the document thus spreadeagled, Brother Clemence could begin his inspection. Slowly he read, word by painful word, picking his way through two-hundred-year-old spelling, two-hundred-year-old legal phrasing, and nine-hundred-year-old calligraphy.

  I grew tired, but I refused to let go, and in fact I saved the day when Brother Peregrine slipped and for just a second lost his grip on the other side. I held on, and Brother Peregrine quickly grabbed the curling corner again, but not before Brother Clemence gave him an annoyed look, saying, “Hold it steady, man.”

  “Sorry.”

  Brother Clemence read on. The audience crowded around, watching Brother Clemence’s face. There wasn’t a sound in the room.

  Then Brother Clemence said, “Hm.” We all looked at him more closely. The audience stood up on tiptoe. Brother Clemence, one finger marking his route, read slowly again through the same passage, and by the end of it he was nodding. “Yes,” he said, and lifted his head to look around at all of us in grim satisfaction. “I got it,” he said.

  It was Brother Oliver’s role to ask the questions now, and instinctively the rest of us deferred to him. And he asked: “What do you have, Brother?”

  “Let me read this to you,” Brother Clemence said. Returning to the lease, having a little difficulty finding the place and then at last finding it again, he read aloud, “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.”

  Brother Oliver turned his head a bit to one side, as though favoring a good ear. “It does what?”

  “I’ll read it again,” Brother Clemence offered. And he did so: “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.” And now Brother Clemence smiled. Turing that smile on Brother Oliver, he said, “You see what that does?”

  “No,” said Brother Oliver.

  Brother Dexter said, “It says we can renew.”

  “It says,” Brother Clemence said, “the option is ours to renew. Exclusively.”

  Shaking his head, Brother Oliver said, “There’s that word option again.”

  “Choice,” Brother Clemence told him. “In this case, Brother Oliver, it means choice. This lease says that we have the choice as to whether or not we want to renew.” Hope lit Brother Oliver’s eyes. “It does?”

  “I thought there might be something like this,” Brother Clemence said. “When there was no paper filed at the time of the first renewal, back in 1876, I thought there just might be an automatic renewal option, and I wanted to see exactly what that option might say.” Patting the lease, which we four were still holding s
pread out like a patient etherized upon a table, he said, “And this is wording far beyond what I’d hoped for. At the best, I’d hoped it might say renewal was automatic unless one side or the other gave written notice of an intention not to renew at some specified interval before the due date. And that would have been enough, since we never were given any kind of notice. But this is even better. This lease says the lessor, the owner of the land, cannot refuse to renew the lease if we wish to stay on.”

  “Then we’re saved!” Brother Oliver cried, and in the general hosannah that went up after that the lease got loose and snapped shut like a bear trap on Brother Clemence’s hand. Extricating himself, Brother Clemence shouted for our attention, and then said, “No, it doesn’t. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.”

  Brother Hilarius said, “It doesn’t what, Brother?”

  “It doesn’t save us.” Holding up the lease, which was now a tight double roll, he said, “This is not the actual lease. It doesn’t contain the signatures of the participants. Nor is it, in any legal sense, a true copy. It isn’t notarized and there’s no original to compare it to for inaccuracies. It just wouldn’t carry sufficient weight in a court of law to decide the case conclusively for our side.”

  Brother Flavian, ever the firebrand, cried out, “But it shows we’re in the right! Would we lie?”

  “Men have been known to,” Brother Clemence told him drily. “Even clerics have on occasion dealt rashly with the truth.”

  Brother Quillon said, “You mean, we went through all this for nothing? All we’ve done is find out we’re the victim of a miscarriage of justice?”

  “Not exactly,” said Brother Clemence, and Brother Oliver sighed. Pushing ahead, Brother Clemence said, “We don’t have the original lease, but we do have this version, and it may be able to help us. The courts have established a precedent that could be very useful to us here. When a primary document is unavailable, the contents of that document can be reconstructed by assumption from secondary documents and the matter treated as though the primary document had been produced.”

  “Oh, Brother Clemence,” Brother Oliver said wearily, and he sat down at the refectory table, shaking his head.

  “This is a secondary document,” Brother Clemence said, waving the illuminated lease again. “In those messy filing cabinets over there, Brother Oliver, there must be other secondary documents that refer either directly or by inference to matters in the original lease. Letters, tax bills, account books, I don’t know what all. What I will do, now that I have this copy to tell me what to look for, is go through every document we possess and construct the strongest possible profile of the original lease. I will then ask a friend of mine, an attorney who volunteered the other day to help us for no fee, to get in touch with the Flatterys’ attorney, present our case, and suggest we settle out of court.”

  Brother Oliver said, “And you really think there’s a chance?”

  “It depends,” Brother Clemence told him, “on what secondary documents I can find.”

  “And you’ll start searching right away?”

  “As soon as I’ve cleaned up,” Brother Clemence said, “and broken my fast.”

  “Oh,” said Brother Oliver. “Of course.”

  Of course. We’d all been so caught up in this quest that all the more mundane things of life had become mislaid and forgotten. Breakfast; yes, indeed. We never eat until after morning Mass, of course, and today we hadn’t eaten at all. I was suddenly aware that I was starving, and I could see the same awareness in all the filthy faces around me.

  Which was the other item Brother Clemence had mentioned; cleaning up. Scrounging around up there in that musty attic, smearing ourselves with dirt, cutting and bruising ourselves, getting ourselves severally muddied and bloodied, we looked now less like monks and more like the inhabitants of some medieval lunatic asylum.

  As did our surroundings. This room, Brother Oliver’s office, was a knee-deep swirl of incomprehensible papers. Dust that had come downstairs with us hung in the air or had already settled on the room’s various surfaces. Brother Quillon now said, “Well, you won’t be able to find a thing in here the way it is. I’ll clean up.”

  “I’ll help you,” Brother Valerian offered.

  “Wonderful.”

  The group was diffusing itself into separate conversations. Brother Leo, our cook, said, “I’d better get to the kitchen. Who’s on duty with me this morning?”

  It turned out to be Brothers Thaddeus and Peregrine. “Well, come along, then,” Brother Leo said grumpily.

  “Just a second,” Brother Clemence said, and when we all turned to give him our attention he said, “I hope everybody realizes the implication of this discovery.”

  Brother Oliver said, “Implication? Besides the obvious?”

  “This means,” Brother Clemence said, gesturing with the rolled-up lease, “that Brother Silas may have been right after all. The original lease really might have been stolen, to keep us from proving we have the right to stay here. So I think none of us should say anything to anybody about this copy we found.”

  We all agreed, rather somberly, and then the kitchen trio went off to make breakfast while the rest of us headed upstairs to wash and change.

  Brother Oliver stopped me briefly at the head of the stairs. “We’ll talk after breakfast,” he said.

  “Yes, Brother,” I said.

  And as I washed the attic grime from myself I wondered if Brother Clemence—or any of the others—had thought about the other implication of our find. If Brother Silas was right, if the lease had been stolen by somebody working either for the Flatterys or Dimp, who could have stolen it? Who, but one of us?

  Eight

  We had our talk after breakfast, strolling in the cloister, past the refectory and the kitchen, with the courtyard on our other side. The high wall separating us from the street marked one boundary of our walk, and the chapel and cemetery marked the other, a symbolism that struck me as simultaneously pat and obscure.

  We walked together one circuit in silence. I could feel Brother Oliver glancing sidelong at me from time to time, but he remained very patient, not speaking until we had passed our original starting point, and then saying, “Yes, Brother Benedict?”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” I said.

  “Why not at the traditional place?”

  “Yes, of course.” I frowned, scrinching my face up tight. I held my breath for several seconds, and at last I burst out with it: “Brother Oliver, I’m emotionally involved with that woman!”

  “Woman?”

  “Eileen Flattery.”

  “I know which woman, Brother Benedict,” he informed me. “But what do you mean by the phrase ‘emotionally involved’?”

  What did I mean by it? Wasn’t that the question I’d been asking myself? We walked as far as the front wall, then reversed. “I mean,” I said at last, “that my mind is confused. She’s in my thoughts waking and sleeping. I hardly know who I am any more.”

  Brother Oliver listened to this definition in silence, his somber gaze on the alternating toes of his sandaled feet licking out from under his robe as he walked. When I finished, he nodded slowly and said, “In other words, she has attracted your attention.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded again, continuing to watch his feet, and we walked the length of the cloister as far as the archway leading to the chapel and cemetery. Again we reversed, and he said, “Is this a sexual feeling?”

  “I suppose it must be,” I said. “I want to touch her the way an infant wants to touch a gold watch.”

  I must have spoken somewhat forcefully. Brother Oliver flashed me a quick startled look, but said nothing.

  I went on. “Last night,” I said, “I did touch her.”

  He stopped in his tracks, and looked at me.

  “Not very much,” I said.

  “Perhaps you should tell me about it,” he suggested. He didn’t walk on, so neither did I.

  “Last night,”
I said, “she took me for a ride in Central Park. She stopped the car and two young men tried to rob us. After I chased them off she was—”

  “You chased them off?”

  “It worked out that way. And afterwards she was trembling, and I put my arms around her.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “I hadn’t done that with anybody for a long time,” I said.

  “No,” he agreed. “And that was as far as it went?”

  “Yes, Brother.”

  “I see.” He turned and walked again, and I fell in beside him, and we walked in silence together as far as the front wall, and reversed.

  I said, “I think she’s emotionally involved with me, too.” Then I frowned and moved my arms around and stared out at the courtyard on our left, and said, “At least I think so. I’m not sure of it, but that’s what I think.”

  Brother Oliver shook his head, saying, “I wish you knew a shorter phrase than ‘emotionally involved,’ Brother Benedict. It’s like talking with some giddy version of Brother Clemence.”

  “I do know a shorter phrase, Brother Oliver,” I told him, “but I’m afraid to use it.”

  “Oh.” He gave me a quick speculative look, then studied his feet once more. “All right, then,” he said. “Whatever you think best.” His voice sounded muffled all at once, as though he were talking into a turtleneck sweater.

  “Thank you, Brother Oliver,” I said.

  We walked together. We reached the cemetery arch and reversed. Brother Oliver said, “So you think she is also emotionally involved.”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Maybe she’s just confused, the way I am.”

  “And is that what she wanted to talk with you about last night?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. She wanted to talk about the monastery.”

  “And to say what about it, Brother Benedict?”

  I said, “She told me the arguments her father used to justify the sale.”

  “His arguments?” Brother Oliver sounded more intrigued than surprised. He said, “I hadn’t realized he’d done any arguing on the subject.”