Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

“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 happy 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.”