Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

“No, I don’t, I—”

“You think we’re silly useless people who don’t have any reason to be alive, and you’re some sort of saint . A whole bunch of saints there on Park Avenue.”

Knowing that she was accusing me of attitudes toward her friends that she herself held — or why else was she constantly trying to get away from them? — didn’t help me a bit. “I never said I was a saint, or any of us was—”

She slammed the phone into its cradle, ending the call, and jumped to her feet. “You think you can shame me into helping you?”

“The clause!” I wailed, pointing at the phone. “You didn’t ask him about the clause!”

“Just look at yourself!” she challenged me. “Just how holy are you? You come down here like any con man, you jump into the sack with me, you try to turn me against my own family, turn me against my friends, and you’re the biggest fake of all!”

“I never tried to—”

But I was wasting my breath. Turning on her heel, she marched away into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her, shaking the house. And the click I heard an instant later was the lock.

I was still standing there, trying to figure out what words exactly I wanted to try speaking through that locked door, when the phone rang. I looked at it, looked at the door, and it rang again.

No, she wasn’t coming out. Not for me, not for a ringing phone, not for anything.

On the third ring I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Is my daughter there? Eileen, let me speak to Eileen.” It was a heavy and angry and yet hesitant voice.

I said, “I’m not sure, uh... Hold on. I’ll just—”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the monk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just what the hell are you up to? You’re pretty goddam cute, aren’t you, attacking a man through his family.”

“I what ?” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t think of any answer at all.

“Do you call that Christian behavior?”

“Me!”

“Listen,” he said, “I never said I was a saint. I’m just a fella trying to make it in one world at a time. This Dwarfmann deal here, this could pull me out of a real hole.”

“The lease says—”

“Yeah, the lease,” he said. “Does the lease tell you where I get my interest payments? I got loans outstanding, I got earth-moving equipment, I got heavy construction equipment, all of that stuff has to get paid for. You think I go to Mack Truck, I go to Caterpillar, I pull seventy-two grand out of my pocket and I say, ‘Give me one of the big yellow things with the tires?’ You think that’s the way it works?”

“I have no idea how it—”

“No, you don’t, I know damn well you don’t. You hang around, you burn candles, you pray a lot, you got it made. Me, I’m financed up to my earlobes. I got major equipment, the interest alone costs me forty-one hundred dollars a month, I got no job to put them on. I default on the payments, they come take the stuff back, I lose the entire investment. And when another major job comes along, can I bid? Without equipment? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’m not trying to make you—”

“Inflation’s wiping me out,” he said. “It isn’t enough I backed the wrong candidates all over Nassau County, there’s no mortgage money anywhere. Nobody’s building. You want me to tell you about trade unions?”

“No, I don’t think I—”

“No, that’s right. You don’t want to hear any of that shit. My red corpuscles are blowing up like firecrackers, I got a life expectancy of fifteen minutes, all you want is you should go sing Gregorian chants on Park Avenue. Why on Park Avenue ?”

“We don’t sing Gregor—”

“WHY ON PARK AVENUE? WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST ARE YOU DOING ON PARK AVENUE?”

“We were there first,” I said.

“Oh, my bleeding ass,” he said.

“I’m sorry about your financial problems,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t go to these extreme measures if it wasn’t—”

“Shut up,” he said, but he said it quietly, almost calmly.

“What?”

“You talk about extreme measures,” he said. “You’re turning my daughter against me.”

“No, I’m not. I—”

“Don’t tell me what you’re doing, you pasty-faced twit, you’re turning my goddam daughter against me!”

“You mean by telling her the truth?”

“Self-righteous son of a bitch.”

“I’ll tell Eileen you’re on the phone.”

“No,” he said, even more quietly and calmly than before. “Wait a minute. I want to make you a deal.”

“A deal?”

“What’s a construction business, right? It’s only been in the family three generations, so it goes under, so what? I got a piece of a wholesale liquor business, I’m not gonna starve, right?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “If you say so,” I said.

“So here’s the deal,” he said. “You tell my daughter you were lying.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“Hear me out,” he said. “My little girl is very important to me, and what I would most like to do is come break your arms and your legs. But that wouldn’t do me any good.”

“Me either.”

“I don’t care about you. Now, listen. You tell her you were lying, and you make damn sure she believes it. And then you go back to your goddam monastery, and you stay away from my daughter the rest of your life.”

“Mr. Flattery, I can’t—”

“You can listen. What you get in return is a copy of the lease.”

I was silent. There wasn’t a thing I could think of to say.

“ With the option clause,” he said. “Before the first of the year.”

I went on being silent. There went on being nothing for me to say.

“Well? Is it a deal?”

The lady or the monastery. “Um,” I said.

“What?”

“I... I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know? You think you’re in love with her? You’re a monk !”

“I know what I am,” I said, although it wasn’t the strict truth.

“How long you think you’d stay with her? Or her with you?”

I looked at the closed bedroom door. “I don’t know,” I said. Particularly if the price for keeping her was the loss of the monastery.

(And the monastery? If the price of keeping that was the loss of Eileen?)

“It’s a good deal,” Flattery was saying, “better than you deserve. You gonna take it?”

“I’ll, uh, I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up on his squawking voice. “Rum,” I said, in distraction, and went away to the kitchen.

“And a very merry Christmas to you ,” said a female voice, and I opened rum-bleary eyes to see Sheila Foney sitting on the coffee table next to me, holding a glass of creamy foam out in my direction.

I gestured several of my pudgy right hands toward the glass. “What’s that?”

“The cure,” she said. “Can you sit up and take nourishment?”

“I don’t know.”

Yesterday, after the fight with Eileen and the phone conversation with her father, I had done a certain amount of rum drinking. After Eileen suddenly burst out of the bedroom and out of the house and into the Pinto and away from here I did some more rum drinking. Then Sheila and Neal had come back from wherever they’d been, received a blurry headline from me about the fight — I’d offered no details, though they’d both encouraged me — and they’d taken me more or less under their combined wing. A Christmas Eve party was scheduled for the evening over at the Latterals’ place, and they’d urged me to attend it with them, but I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without Eileen. Besides, what if I went out to a party and she came back here to make up? So I’d stayed home, with the rum bottle, and I’d done a lot of indiscriminate meditation, some of which had left tracks in my brain.