Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Kenny Bone had been one of the results of Antioch. As with her public high school sweethearts, it had been obvious to her in-group friends at once that the relationship could only end badly. “From the time she was twelve,” Sheila said, with strict satisfaction in her voice, “she’s been going away and going away, and she always comes back. Usually with her tail between her legs.”

  I doubted that last part; it seemed to me Eileen’s pride would keep her from showing any emotional reaction to failure. But I had to consider Sheila’s own emotional reactions in judging her choice of words. Her own well-guarded pain at these perpetual snubs from Eileen was combined with and shielded by her no doubt sincere belief that the in-group was the best place to be, with the best possible friends, the best possible values, enjoying the best possible times together. Eileen was both an affront and an enigma to Sheila, and no doubt to all the others as well.

  Sheila didn’t say so, but the impression I had of her opinion of me—and by extension the group’s opinion, presumably—was that I was not to be taken seriously, since no one outside the group was ever taken seriously, but that I was certainly a step up from Kenny Bone and undoubtedly a therapeutic interval for Eileen until she was ready to settle down at long last with one of the currently available group males. (These people were far enough from their heritage for divorce to be as common among them as in the external society.)

  I also learned from this talk that Eileen had not been exclusively alone during her stay down here. In fact, she’d been accompanied by a man until just the day before I’d arrived—not the infamous Alfred Broyle, but somebody named Malcolm Callaban, “a swell guy in television news in the city.” Some sort of raging argument had taken place, lasting the final three days of Callaban’s stay on the island, until he had at last departed in a fury, flying back to New York the afternoon before I showed up. Eileen’s temper was apparently as famous with the group as her failed attempts to live away from them, though I had to say I hadn’t as yet seen it. I would have asked for more detail—was she a screamer, a thrower, a silent seether, an insidious revenger—but Eileen herself joined us at that point, followed by lunch, and the subject was dropped.

  * * *

  “Hey, Charlie, you want a drink?”

  “Soon as I finish this one.”

  * * *

  We were alone in El Yunque, Eileen and I, looking at the greenery from the tower there, when next I brought up the subject of the monastery and the sale to Dimp. I hadn’t really thought much about that since coming to this island, though it was certainly urgent enough, with barely a week to go before the sale would be final and all hope gone. But my own chaotic emotional life had driven the question from my mind, and when it had strayed across my consciousness from time to time I’d determinedly avoided it, feeling helpless. The El Yunque tower, though, brought it all back, in a manner too insistent to ignore.

  El Yunque is a rain forest in the mountains of Puerto Rico, part of which has been semicivilized by the National Park Service into the Caribbean National Forest (Luquillo Division). One drives south from the main road, and after a mile of ordinary flat scenery the road begins to climb and curve and zigzag and corkscrew up the steep mountain sides into the rain forest. Much of the road is kept in permanent damp twilight by huge overhanging ferns, and eerie trees crowd the blacktop from both sides, their roots coiled above the ground like gray snakes. Everywhere the trees and vines and shrubs are all snarled together like one of Brother Urban’s illuminated manuscripts—twice on the drive up I thought I read “LINDY LANDS” in the vegetation—and from time to time we’d passed narrow, tiny, furious waterfalls rushing down over slick dark boulders.

  And five miles in, rounding yet another climbing V-turn, one comes abruptly on the tower. Playful, silent, silly, unnamed, virtually useless, it stands on a rare flat spot in the forest, a round blue-gray tower about forty feet high, topped by a crenellated Camelot fortress wall. There’s nothing around it but the jungle and a smallish parking area, and nothing inside it but a circular staircase to the top, from which it is possible on a clear day to see as far as the Virgin Islands.

  Though not today. A notice near the tower entrance had told us that when the tree leaves on the mountainside rising up across the road were all turned over, revealing their pale gray-green undersides, there would soon be rain, and when we reached the top of the tower the leaves were indeed all doing their mysterious flip-flop, looking as though that one mountain out of all the mountains here had been faded by the sun. Southward, thick black clouds like great pillows were humped around the mountaintops, and a damp mildew smell was in the air. To the north and east, the tangled valleys tumbled away, stopping at a narrow tan border of beach before the flat blue ocean.

  But it was the tower that held my attention; reminiscent of so many other towers and turrets and castles and yet uniquely and ridiculously itself, in the wrong place and inexplicable and yet calm about its role in the scheme of things. Insistent and rather friendly and faintly comical, how could it not have reminded me of my monastery?

  “This reminds me of the monastery,” I said.

  “Then let’s leave,” Eileen said. She took my hand and started for the steps.

  “No, wait.” I tugged back, keeping her from descending, and the look she gave me was worried and impatient and annoyed. I said, “I want to talk about it.”

  Annoyance became dominant. “That’s the past, Charlie. Do I talk about Kenny Bone?”

  “But they’re still in trouble, and there isn’t much—”

  “All right,” she interrupted. Withdrawing her hand from mine, she leaned her back against a merlon—a crenellated parapet consists of alternating crenels and merlons—and said, “You want to talk about that place, we’ll talk.”

  Her face was closing against me; was this the beginning of the famous temper? Nevertheless, I had no choice but to push ahead, and so I did. “They’re in trouble,” I said.

  “Uh huh.” The very neutrality of it was hostile.

  “If something doesn’t happen by the first of the year,” I said, “there won’t be any hope left at all. The sale will go through, the building will be torn down, and we’ll—they’ll have to move.”

  “Where to?”

  It seemed a strange question, under the circumstances, and even stranger in its delivery, flung out at me like a challenge. I said, “I don’t know. The Dimp people are trying to find a place, but all they’re thinking of is storage, not living. Some defunct college upstate, places like that.”

  “Did you go look at it?”

  “At what? The college? No, we just heard about it, that’s all. That was enough.”

  “It doesn’t matter, though, does it,” she said. “Dimp could find the greatest place in the world, but that isn’t the point.”

  “That’s right,” I said, eager to find her so unexpectedly on my side.

  “They could offer you the Waldorf-Astoria, you still wouldn’t want it.”

  I didn’t correct her use of pronouns. “They’re happy where they are,” I said. “And the building itself—”

  “Fuck the building, Charlie,” she said.

  “Ah,” I said. “People sure do talk different to you when you wear shirt and trousers, don’t they?”

  “The point is,” she said, sounding like a hanging judge instructing the jury, “and the only point is, those precious monks of yours don’t want to move.”

  “Well, there’s this philosophical viewpoint they have about Travel, the whole question of—”

  “They don’t want to move.”

  I hesitated. Explain at length? No, the moment seemed wrong for that. “Yes,” I said.

  “Big deal,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Why not move?” she said. “A change of pace every once in a while is good for everybody. Get up and get out, blow the cobwebs out of your brain, get a new perspective on life. What’s such a big deal about this bunch of monks, that they can’t be moved? What are
they, breakable?”

  “They’re a community,” I said, “with their own view of life, and they ought to be permitted their own destiny. Surely the world can make a place for alternate points of view.”

  “Upstate,” she said. “In that defunct college.”

  “Where they are,” I insisted. “It’s their setting, it’s been their setting for two hundred years, they belong—”

  “It’s time they moved,” she announced. “It’s the wrong place for them, midtown Manhattan. It’s a ridiculous idea to begin with.”

  “It’s their right to be there.”

  “But it isn’t. My father has property rights, they’re perfectly legal and honorable—”

  “They are not.”

  She lowered her brows at me. “Don’t you play holier-than-thou with me, Brother Benedict.”

  “I’m not. I’m just telling you your father does not have legal and honorable property rights. There’s nothing legal or honorable about it at all.”

  “Of course there is. The lease is up and—”

  “The lease was stolen from us,” I said. I hadn’t intended to get into this—one doesn’t like to accuse one’s girl’s relatives of being thieves and arsonists—but this callous point of view she was putting forth was becoming annoying. “And when we found a copy of it,” I went on, “your brother Frank set fire to it.”

  She looked at me as though I’d just announced I could leap from this tower and fly. “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “I certainly do,” I said. “There’s a clause in the lease that gives the monastery the exclusive right to renew, and we’ve been cheated of that right because our copy of the lease disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and there’s no copy of it on file with the County Clerk, and when we found an unofficial copy that one of the other Abbots had made your brother came in dressed up like a monk and burned it. I saw him.”

  “My brother?” She was still staring at me as though I’d just grown a second nose.

  “Your brother Frank,” I said.

  “That’s such a silly thing to say, I can’t even think about it.” She shook her head to show me how bewildered she was, and spread her hands out. “Why would you even say such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “My brother Frank would never do—How would he even know you had a copy?”

  “They bugged the monastery.”

  She gave me a flat look. “You are crazy,” she said.

  I said, “They put a microphone in Brother Oliver’s office, and they had their equipment in a florist’s truck parked out front. When I found the microphone I went out there and opened the back of the truck and your friend Alfred Broyle was in there. He punched me in the nose.”

  She had been shaking her head all the way through that recital, and now she said, “I don’t see what you expect to gain. Do you think the story’s so wild I won’t believe you could make it up? My brother Frank, now Alfred, there’s—” Then she stopped, and frowned, and looked away toward the upside-down leaves.

  “Everything I’ve told you—”

  “Shut up a minute.” She was thinking hard. “Florist truck,” she said, and looked at me again. “What was the name of the florist?”

  “How would I know? It was just a florist truck, it was parked outside all the time, it finally occurred to me—”

  “You must have looked at it,” she said. “You saw the word florist. What else did it say?”

  “What else?” I did some looking away myself, and some frowning, trying to picture that truck in my memory. Light blue, a badly done painting of flowers in a white vase, and a name followed by the word florist. “I think it started with a C,” I said. “What difference does it make?”

  “A C? You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not, I—Wait a minute. Grynn! That was it, Grynn’s Florists!”

  She was giving me calculated looks. “If only I could be sure of you,” she said.

  “Sure of me about what?”

  “About whether or not you knew that Alfred worked for Grynn’s. Come on,” she said, and turned away.

  The first raindrops, huge and cool, splashed about us. “Come where,” I said.

  “Back to the house. I’m going to call my dear father.”

  * * *

  When I’d changed from my wet clothing into a dry bathing suit and returned to the living room Eileen was already on the phone. Back at the tower the promised rain had suddenly descended as though someone had slit open the black bellies of the clouds with a sword, so that by the time we’d hurried down the circular staircase to ground level the world was made entirely of water. It was like being in a play tower in a fish tank. Running from there to the car, whose windows we’d left open, drenched us to the skin and possibly to the bone, and how Eileen managed to see well enough to drive us away from there I still don’t know. Though the rain stopped two miles later—or perhaps we’d merely traveled beyond its edge—the air remained humid and we remained sodden, and I changed at once upon reaching the house.

  But not Eileen. Urgency had driven her to the telephone, and she was sitting there now with her wet hair lank around her head and her wet clothing plastered to her slender body as she repeated my story to somebody at the other end of the line, presumably her father.

  Most of it had already been told, and she was down to the part about the florist’s truck and the Alfred Broyle nose-punch. She seemed to be giving a mostly fair and neutral account, but I didn’t like the way she kept inserting remarks such as “He says,” and “According to him.” I wished I’d been here to listen to it all from the beginning.

  At the end of her recital she said one word—“Well?”—and then sat back to listen, flashing me a sharp but enigmatic look and gesturing at me crossly to seat myself. I did, and watched her listening. With her wet hair molding her skull she looked younger, quicker, harder, more intelligent, less receptive. “No, it doesn’t,” she said, and went on listening. (Her father had most likely pointed out that the activities described didn’t “sound like” normal doings of the Flattery family.)

  I could faintly hear the crackle of the voice speaking into Eileen’s ear. What was he saying? Would he deny everything? Would she believe him?

  “That isn’t the point,” she said. I frowned, watching her, unable to guess what had been said to cause that response. Then she said, “I know I am. Nobody ever said I shouldn’t be.” The crackle went on, impassioned and impatient, and she interrupted it, saying, “You want me to come home right now? I’ll get a job.” Crackle, crackle crackle. She glanced at me, shook her head, looked away, and when next she spoke I felt she was as much describing the situation for my benefit as to continue the dialogue with her father. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe we are broke, I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Crackle. “No, let me talk for a minute.” Crackle. “I don’t care, I want to say this. If we’re broke somebody should have told me. And maybe it is a legitimate excuse, and I don’t know what right those damn monks have to be smack in the middle of mid-town either, and if we have to set fire to their papers and punch them in the nose then maybe we have to do it. What I want to know is, did we do it?”

  There was silence now for quite a long time, and when the crackle started again it was lower and slower. And Eileen interrupted it: “You already said that, and I already agreed with you.” More crackling. “That’s a good point, I’ll ask him.” Crackle? “Of course he’s here,” she said calmly. “Hold on.” And without covering the mouthpiece she said, “My father says, if there was arson and assault and illegal bugging and all that, why didn’t anybody call the police?”

  “Because we couldn’t prove it,” I said.

  “Why not? You could identify Alfred, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m the only one who could. Nobody else saw him.”

  “What about my brother? Didn’t somebody else see him?”

  “Not his face,�
� I said.

  She gave me a long calculating state. “Next,” she said, “you’ll tell me you were the one who found the microphone.”

  Was I blushing guiltily? Why did I feel guilty, when I knew I was innocent? “Yes,” I said, and had trouble meeting her eye.

  Into the phone she said, “Just a minute, Daddy,” and this time she did put her palm over the mouthpiece, to make our conversation private. She studied me, and she’d never looked more beautiful, but it was a very unhuman beauty. Her skin was thin and taut and almost blue over her cheekbones, and her eyes were so deep-set they seemed to be studying me separately from somewhere deep in the center of her head. I met her gaze—with difficulty—trying to look innocent and finally she said, “Is this whole thing a con job, Charlie?”

  “No! Of course not, why would I—what would I gain, what’s in it—what—?”

  “I can’t figure that out either,” she said. “What do you hope to get out of it?”

  “Look,” I said. “I can’t prove anything, I wasn’t even going to talk about that part with you, I just wanted to know what you meant when you said you could help us and I got caught up in, in, in everything, and I don’t know where I am anymore.”

  “My father says we need the money,” she told me. “When I said I could help, I meant I knew he was embarrassed about selling the monastery, he blustered with us and tried to justify himself, and I know how to handle him when he gets that way. But not if the family’s broke. I wouldn’t be able to talk him into changing his mind even if I wanted to, and why should I want to? If the family’s broke I’m broke. I don’t get any alimony from Kenny Bone, believe me.”

  “But what if it’s dishonest?” I said. “What if the, the monks have the right to stay there, it’s in the lease, and they’re being cheated just so you can afford to go on hanging around with these, these, these people you’re hanging around with?”