Дональд Уэстлейк: Brothers Keepers

But Brother Oliver, at the head of the table, was sadly nodding. “I’m afraid it’s true,” he said.

Brother Clemence said, “ Who is going to tear it down?”

“Certainly not the Flatterys,” said Brother Hilarius.

Brother Oliver told them, “Someone named Dwarfmann.”

“That’s absurd,” said Brother Dexter, and Brother Hilarius said, “No one named Dwarfmann owns this monastery. It’s the property of the Flatterys.”

“No longer,” said Brother Oliver.

Brother Clemence, who used to be a Wall Street lawyer before his conversion from the things of Caesar, said, “Flattery? Dwarfmann? Who are these people?”

Brother Oliver said, “Perhaps Brother Hilarius should give us the historical background.”

“Excellent idea,” said Brother Clemence, and now we all turned our curious and expectant faces toward Brother Hilarius.

Who was not at all daunted by public speaking. “Of course,” he said. A humorless stolid phlegmatic man with a heavy flat-footed way of standing and walking, he was utterly unlike his name, but then so was the saint he’d been called after, who had been Pope from 461 to 468. Brother Hilarius, a onetime department store clerk, was our monastery historian.

Speaking now in a methodical monotone, Brother Hilarius told us, “Our Founder, the Blessed Zapatero, established this monastery in 1777, taking a ninety-nine-year lease on the land, which was then owned by one Colton Van deWitt. The Van deWitts daughtered out during the Civil War, and the—”

Brother Oliver said, “Daughtered out?” He looked helpless, the way he had the time Brother Mallory had suggested he do a painting which was not of a Madonna and Child.

“The line eventually produced no sons,” Brother Hilarius explained, “and therefore the name ceased to exist. During the Civil War, ownership of our land passed to a good Irish Catholic family named Flattery, who have retained title to this day.”

Brother Clemence asked, “Do we pay any rent?” A heavyset roguish man with a great unmowed field of white hair all over his head, Brother Clemence still looked like the expensive attorney he used to be, and he still took huge delight in argument for its own sake, the more nitpicking and the less substantive the better. He had been on my side in the great censorship controversy, more than once in the course of it reducing firebrand Brother Flavian to sputtering speechlessness. From the glint in his eye when he asked now about rent, I suspected he had some sort of legal trickery up his sleeve.

Brother Hilarius answered, “I wouldn’t know. Does it matter?”

“In law,” Brother Clemence told him, “unchallenged occupancy for a period of fifteen years endows the tenant with title.”

Brother Oliver, echoing again the word he didn’t understand, said, “Title?”

“Ownership,” Brother Clemence explained.

“Ownership?” Brother Oliver’s face lit with startled hope. “You mean we own our monastery?”

“If we’ve paid no rent for fifteen years,” Brother Clemence said, “and if there has been no challenge in that time from whoever holds title, then it’s ours. The question is, do we pay rent?”

“Not exactly,” said Brother Dexter, entering the conversation for the first time. A narrow-bodied narrow-headed man with a permanent air about him of scrubbed cleanliness, Brother Dexter was generally believed to be next in line for the abbotcy, once Brother Oliver had been taken to his reward. In the meantime he was Brother Oliver’s assistant, where his background — he came from a Maryland banking family — was a continual blessing in the balancing of our meager but messy books.

Brother Clemence frowned at him. “What does ‘not exactly’ mean, Brother?”

“We are required,” Brother Dexter told him, “to pay an annual rental, every February first, of an amount equal to one percent of the entire monastery income for the preceding year. The Blessed Zapatero invested his remaining capital when the monastery was founded, and other residents have also turned over income which has been invested in the general behalf. Also, for the first hundred years or so a certain amount of begging was undertaken, but the investment program was a sound one from the beginning and mendicancy has been unnecessary since well before the turn of the century.”

Brother Clemence, disguising his impatience very well I thought, gently said, “Brother, have we been fulfilling our obligations vis-à-vis the rent?”

“Yes, we have. We’ve been relieved of the necessity of actually paying over the rent, but in effect the rental situation remains intact.”

Brother Oliver said, “I’m not understanding one word in ten. We don’t pay the rent but the rental situation remains intact? Is that even possible ?”

I was glad he’d asked that question, since I wasn’t understanding one word in twenty-five, but I hadn’t felt I should interrupt the flow of expertise. Now I squinted my eyes at Brother Dexter, the better to hear his answer.

He began with a sentence I had no trouble comprehending. “The Flatterys are rich.” Then he went on, “They’ve never needed our rent money, so they used to return it as a contribution. But for the last sixty-odd years they haven’t taken it at all.”

“That’s the part I don’t follow,” Brother Clemence said, and the rest of us all nodded; even Brother Hilarius.

“I was trying to explain,” Brother Dexter said. Experts always get snappish when laymen are slow to understand. “Sometime before the First World War,” he said, “the Flatterys sent us a letter saying we should not send the rent money anymore, but should consider it a charitable contribution.”

“Ah,” Brother Clemence said. “I see. They don’t forgive us the rent. We still have to determine the amount and collect it, but then instead of paying it to them we give it to ourselves.”

Brother Dexter nodded. “That’s right. And we send them a memo telling them how much they gave. Last year, for instance, their contribution turned out to be four hundred eighty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

Even in grade school I had trouble with decimal points. But I’d lived in this monastery for ten years and this was the first hint I’d ever been given as to how we managed to make ends meet, so I was determined to work it out no matter what. Our communal property was in “investments,” and last year’s income from those investments had been four hundred eighty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents times one hundred. Add two zeros — move the decimal point to the left — no, the right — forty-eight million dollars?

Thousand! Forty-eight thousand, two hundred twenty-seven dollars. Split among sixteen men, that gave us an average annual income of three thousand dollars. Not very much. Of course we did live here rent-free — sort of — and we were exempt from property taxes, and our mode of life didn’t encourage us toward very expensive tastes.

Brother Dexter, ever the banker, now added, “Our income, by the way, represented nearly nine point four percent return on capital investment.”

No. That one was beyond me. Some people — Albert Einstein, say — might be able to figure out from that clue how much money we had in these mysterious investments, but not me. Casting all numbers from my brain, I returned my attention to the conversation.

Which Brother Hilarius had reentered, saying, “I’m no attorney, but if we aren’t in arrears in our rent they can’t throw us out, can they?”

“Not until the lease is up,” Brother Clemence said, and looked around the table hopefully, saying, “Does anybody know when that is?”

“I can’t find it,” Brother Oliver said. He gestured helplessly toward our filing cabinet in the darkest corner, a cabinet I myself knew to be every bit as neat and organized as our attic and those grapevines out there. “I spent hours last night looking for it.”