Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Sixteen

  It was a real bus, with a real driver in a real uniform. Mr. Schumacher signed some papers on the driver’s clipboard, Brother Oliver gave the Flatterys’ address, and we all climbed aboard for our Journey.

  It was now nearly seven o’clock. In the interim, I’d washed off the Travel grime, emptied my pockets of all those little empty bottles, eaten several pieces of Brother Quillon’s pie, and drunk enough coffee to make me both reasonably sober and totally jittery.

  Although I suppose I would have been jittery anyway, all things considered. When I’d made my decision, back in the chapel, to try Dan Flattery one last time, I’d visualized the two of us in private confrontation and I’d thought it just possible that somewhere in our reluctant relationship I could find a handle I could grasp to turn the man around. But that intention had become lost almost at once, and now with seventeen of us on our merry way I had no idea what we hoped to do or how we hoped to do it.

  We were not the only Travelers abroad tonight. Our bus flowed like a whale through schools of passenger cars, moving in endless lines along the Long Island Expressway. My fellow passengers, unused to Travel (as I had been until a scant four weeks ago), gaped and gawped out the windows, not even trying to look disinterested or unimpressed. I remembered behaving the same way on that first railroad Journey, and how far had I come since then, both in miles and attitude!

  This bus was very comfortable, with reclining seats and a spacious central aisle and a smooth commanding feel to the ride. The driver had a black cloth draped behind himself to eliminate distracting reflections, so we could have lights on and we could visit back and forth from one seat to another. I myself stayed in one place, next to Brother Oliver—who had beaten me to the window seat—but many of the others were apparently too keyed-up to sit still and there was a lot of milling about in the aisle as a result.

  Several Brothers came by to chat with me, or with Brother Oliver. The first was Brother Mallory, who sat on the armrest of the seat across the aisle and spoke casually of this and that for a minute before coming to the point: “Brother Benedict,” he said, “when we get there, would you point out this fellow Frank Flattery?”

  Brother Oliver leaned past me to say, in a shocked voice, “Brother Mallory! You aren’t thinking of fighting the man?”

  “No no,” Mallory said. “I just want to see him, that’s all, see what he looks like.”

  “We’re peaceful men,” Brother Oliver reminded him.

  “Of course,” said Mallory, but somehow the glint in his eye didn’t look all that peaceful to me, so I said, “Brother Mallory, it won’t help us if we do a lot of brawling there.”

  “The farthest thought from my mind,” Mallory insisted, and went away before we could lecture him further.

  “Hmmmm,” I said, watching his broad back move down the aisle.

  Brother Oliver cleared his throat. “Father Banzolini, were he here,” he suggested, “might agree that a lie under the circumstances would be a very very minor sin.”

  “I’ll fail to find Frank Flattery,” I agreed.

  Brother Silas came by next, perched on the same armrest, and began to talk to us casually about the Flattery household. He seemed fascinated by architectural details, the layout of the rooms and so on, and I didn’t catch his drift until he asked, still casually, “You didn’t see anything that looked like a wall safe, did you?”

  Brother Oliver lunged forward across me again; he seemed to be spending much of this trip in my lap. “Brother Silas,” he said sternly, “we do not intend to steal the lease.”

  Silas gave us that glare of outraged guilt with which he used often to face policemen, judges, wardens and other authority figures. “What do you mean, steal? They stole it from us. Getting it back, getting our own property back, isn’t stealing.”

  “That’s sophistry, Brother Silas,” Brother Oliver told him.

  “It’s common sense, is what it is,” Silas grumbled.

  I said, “We didn’t see a wall safe. Besides, they probably keep leases and things like that in a safe deposit box in some bank anyway. Most people do, don’t they?”

  Silas nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah,” he said. “Mostly what you get in a house is personal jewelry.”

  Brother Oliver said, “I hope you aren’t going to suggest bank robbery next.”

  Silas glanced at the other brothers all around us. “Not with this string,” he said, and went away.

  Brother Oliver frowned after him. “What did that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Brother Flavian was next. “I think we ought to call the media,” he said.

  While Brother Oliver was saying, “What?” I was saying, “I really don’t think so, Brother. Reporters and cameras and things like that just don’t lend themselves to reasonable discussion.”

  “Reasonable discussion? We’re talking about pressure. Maybe Dwarfmann and Snopes don’t mind public pressure, but Flattery has to go on living in his community.”

  Brother Oliver returned to my lap, apparently having caught up with the conversation. “Absolutely not,” he said. “We are not performing penguins, we are a Monastic Order and we have to behave like it.”

  “Even if we lose the monastery?”

  “Capering for television cameras,” Brother Oliver told him, “is not going to solve anything.”

  “It ended the war in Vietnam,” Flavian told us.

  “Oh, hardly,” I said.

  “It sounds unlikely,” Brother Oliver said. “But even if it did, ending a war is not the same as renewing a lease.”

  “Even if the media showed up,” I said, “which is unlikely, and even if they took us seriously, which is unlikely, and even if they took our side—”

  “Which is likely!” Flavian insisted, and shook his ever-present fist.

  “Even so,” I said, “our deadline is midnight tonight, and our message wouldn’t get into the media until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “It’s the threat,” Flavian told us. “What do you think this man Flattery would do if he looked out his front window and saw his lawn full of television cameras?”

  “From what I’ve seen of him so far,” I said, “I think he’d reach for a shotgun.”

  Brother Oliver nodded and said, “I couldn’t agree more. We know this man, Brother Flavian, and I must say he’s very nearly as hot-tempered and stiff-necked as you are yourself.”

  “I believe in justice!”

  “You certainly do,” Brother Oliver said.

  Flavian switched gears all at once, saying to me, “What do you intend to say to this man Flattery?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  “Do you mind if I talk to him?”

  That brought Brother Oliver back into my lap lickety-split. “I do,” he said. “I absolutely forbid it.”

  I said, “Brother Oliver, all I ask is to talk to him first. If I fail, anybody can talk to him who wants to, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Fine,” said Brother Oliver.

  “Fine,” said Brother Flavian, and he went away.

  Mr. Schumacher was next. A kind of dazed but beatific smile seemed to have fixed itself permanently to his face, and I couldn’t help contrasting this euphoric look with that pinched cranky expression he’d worn when I’d first met him. Sitting where all the others had perched, he leaned across the aisle and spoke past me to Brother Oliver. “Abbot,” he said, “when I join up with you people, do I get to pick my own name?”

  “Of course,” Brother Oliver said. “Just as long as it’s the name of a saint. Or if it’s biblical in some other way.”

  “Oh, it’s Biblical all right,” he said.

  “You know the name you want?”

  “That I do.” His smile turning a little sheepish, he shrugged and said, “I suppose it’s the result of all those Bibles I’ve read over the years in all those hotel rooms, but if nobody objects I think I want to be known from now on as Brother Gideon.”

/>   * * *

  There was a party going on at the Flatterys’ house, the only center of commotion in an otherwise darkened neighborhood. The driveway was full of parked cars and the air was full of accordion music. Light gleamed into the night from every window in the house, upstairs and down, and boisterous party noises bubbled and frothed amid the accordion chords.

  “Oh, dear,” said Brother Oliver, looking out the bus window.

  “A party,” I said.

  “Why a party?” he asked plaintively. “Tonight, of all nights.”

  “Uh, Brother,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Brother Peregrine, moving past toward the front of the bus, said, “Accordion music was one of the things that drove me away from the world in the first place.”

  I asked him, “What is that tune, do you know?”

  “I’m afraid it’s ‘Danny Boy,’ ” he said. “In polka time.” He moved on.

  The driver had turned the bus in among the parked cars, had pressed forward as far as he dared to go, and had now come to a stop, with a great sneezing of air brakes. Looking around the edge of his dark cloth drape, he called, “Here we are, Mr. Schumacher.”

  Mr. Schumacher—the potential Brother Gideon—was still seated across the aisle from me, and now he turned in my direction to say, “Well, what next?”

  “We can’t very well come back another time,” I said, “so I guess the only thing to do is join the party.”

  * * *

  So that’s what we did, and for some time nothing at all happened. Flattery must have invited all of his relatives and all of his friends and all of his neighbors and all of his business acquaintances and everybody not covered under a previous heading, and they’d all come, and the result was that sixteen robed and cowled monks (plus one semimonk in mufti) were swallowed up in the incredible crush of people like a water buffalo in quicksand, causing not the slightest ripple of excitement or even attention. And a second result was that I couldn’t seem to find my host.

  One of my troubles, of course, was that Dan Flattery was so thoroughly a type rather than a person, as I’d noticed when he and two of his look-alikes had emerged from that boat of his at our first meeting. Buffeted by the throng, I kept haring off in the wake of one thick neck after another, none of them turning out to belong to the man I was looking for.

  Brother Mallory fought his way to my side at one point, saying, “Did you see him? The son, I mean, Frank.”

  “I haven’t even found the father,” I told him. Then, noticing how fixed his jaw and eyes looked, I said, “Brother Mallory, you promised. No pugilism.”

  “I just want to look at him,” he said, and ducked away from me again. Worried about him, but with more urgent problems to concern me, I went back to my search.

  With all of this scrambling about, I was picking up stray bits of conversation along the way, and gradually I was coming to realize that this was the society whose iceberg tip I’d met down in Puerto Rico. All the people who had been so thoroughly character-assassinated by that group down there were now here, the parents and cousins and schoolmates, the dishonest uncles and frigid aunts and round-heeled older sisters, and of course these people were merrily dishing that absentee bunch down south.

  All of which was well and good, but where was Dan Flattery? Not in the living room, with its buffet-style table of food surrounded by stocky patrons. Nor in any of the rooms behind it as far back as the enclosed porch where we’d all had lunch that first day I’d ever met Eileen Flattery Bone. And not in the kitchen full of liquor and drunks, not in the dining room full of hoppity dancers and the accordionist (a shriveled old man accompanied by a machine that made drum sounds), not in the line for either bathroom, not in any of the second-floor bedrooms with their beds under mounds of coats and their populations of two or three or four people in serious tête-à-tête, and finally not in the library.

  Wait! In the library. I’d just given up on that room and was about to press on to the outside world—there seemed to be more partygoers doing something or other in the icy dark cold of the back yard—when I spied the man himself, leaning against his shelves of self-improvement and talking with fierce red face to two identikit replicas of himself.

  How white that face went when he saw me, without losing any of its fierceness. Shock, in fact, seemed only to emphasize Dan Flattery’s patriarchal air of bulldog determination. Without a word to his companions, he pushed his way through the intervening partygoers, thrust his face toward mine, and yelled, “I thought you were going to stay away from her!”

  “I want to talk to you!” I yelled back. (Whatever other reason he may have had for yelling, it was the only way under the circumstances for either of us to make himself heard.)

  “You’ve done e—” he started, and then blinked, looking past me, and yelled, “Who’s that?”

  I turned. “Brother Quillon,” I said. “And Brother Leo.” The former was deep in conversation with a pair of beaming buxom maidens, and the latter was disapprovingly browsing among the sets of Dickens.

  “You brought them with you?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “We want to talk with you about the lease,” I yelled, and then the first thing he’d said finally triggered itself in my head and I double-yelled, “WHAT?”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “Before that! The first thing you said to me!”

  “I said—” Then he paused, and frowned at me; apparently a similar triggering event had just taken place inside his own head. “You’re here to talk about the lease?”

  “What did you mean, ‘stay away from her?’ I am away from her.”

  “You—” he looked at his watch. (Nothing like Dwarfmann and his skittish red numbers, this was a monstrous old turnip of a pocket watch with roman numerals.) “Come with me,” he announced, put the turnip away, grasped my elbow in a non-gentle grip, and started hacking his way through the wall of human flesh, pulling me along like a canoe behind him.

  We crossed the central hall and waded into the living room, where Flattery suddenly stopped, pointed the hand that wasn’t welded to me, and cried, “More of you?”

  I followed his pointing finger and saw Brother Flavian in haranguing dialogue with half a dozen college-age youths. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves tremendously. Beyond them, Brothers Clemence and Dexter, cocktails in hand, were in civilized discourse with several ur-Flatterys.

  Flattery shook my arm, crying, “How many are you?”

  “We’re all here,” I told him. “Sixteen of us.”

  “Christ on a crutch!”

  And he towed me onward, through the living room and into the dining room—Brother Peregrine was fox-trotting to “How Much Is that Doggy in the Window?” with a suspiciously blonde blonde, while Brother Eli was managing to do the monkey to the same music with a girl who looked like all folksingers—and across the dining room to a door I already knew was locked because I’d tried it earlier in my search. Flattery, however, had a key, and without releasing my arm (my hand was beginning to suffer from lack of blood) he unlocked the door and pushed it open by shoving me into it.

  An office, small and compact and horridly messy. It reminded me of field engineers’ offices in mobile trailers, with its charts and blueprints and scale drawings thumbtacked over one another on the walls, its leaning stacks of flimsy papers on the desk, its looseleaf manuals crammed every which way into the narrow tall bookcase, and even its outsize air-conditioner jutting so far into the room that anybody sitting at the desk would have to lean slightly to the left at all times or else remove his head.

  Flattery closed and relocked the door behind us, and now we were in privacy and comparative quiet. The rattle and roar of the party could still be heard, but at least we wouldn’t have to yell at one another to be heard.

  Flattery yelled anyway: “What the hell do you think you’
re up to now, you son of a bitch?”

  “You don’t have to yell,” I told him. “I can hear you.”

  “It isn’t enough,” he yelled, “you steal my daughter away from me, now you want to blacken my name with my family and friends!”

  “Not at all,” I said. “We had no idea you were having a—”

  “Well, I don’t care, do you understand me? Bad-mouth me all you want, those goddam freeloaders out there bad-mouth me all the time anyway, what do I care about that?”

  “Nobody wants to—”

  “But when it comes to my Eileen,” he said, shaking a fist close enough to my face for me to admire every orange hair and orange freckle and knee-shaped knuckle, “it’s about time you started to watch yourself.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with Eileen,” I said. “We said goodbye to one another.”

  “That’s what she told me,” he said. “She called me and told me.” The fist became a pointing finger. “But you didn’t fulfill the deal,” he said, “so don’t come around as though you did. You left her to believe her own father’s a two-faced liar and a crook.”

  “Her own father is a two-faced liar and a crook.”

  “And what about you? You break my poor girl’s heart, you leave her forever, and the same goddam day you’re back again.”

  “What do you mean, back? She’s in Puerto Rico.”

  He peered at me, as though trying to read small printing in dim light. “Are you on the level?”

  “What is it?” A suspicion had entered my mind, and I very much wanted to be wrong. “She isn’t here, is she? How could she be, she’s still in Puerto Rico.”

  “No, she isn’t here,” he said, and I breathed with relief (and regret). But then he looked at his watch and said, “But she will be, in less than half an hour.”

  I couldn’t even speak. I backed up to a chair littered with papers and books and sat down on them all and just looked up at Dan Flattery’s heavy face.

  The printing had become much larger and the light much better; he could read me now. “Goddam it, look at you,” he said. “You do want to make more trouble.”

  “I’m back in the monastery,” I said.