Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

“You are?”

“I do over a quarter million miles a year,” he informed me.

“Good God! I mean, uh, good gracious. Why?”

“Have to,” he said. He took one of his remorseless sips of Jack Daniel’s.

“But if you hate Travel so much, why—”

“Have to!”

Violence seemed very possible from this gentleman, but my curiosity overcame my caution. “But why?” I persisted.

Sip. Brood. Sip. “I’m a Travel agent.” He spoke more quietly, but also more desperately. “The airlines ship me, the hotels put me up, the restaurants feed me. And I have to do it, I have to know what’s out there.” He turned his head to glare out the window, hurling his hatred at everything “out there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I know very little about Travel, and—”

“You’re a lucky man,” he told me. “In my business, it’s Travel or perish. The customer comes in, the customer says, ‘What’s the best hotel in Quito?’ Well, say no one in my office has been to Quito in ten years, and we tell him the Asuncion. So he books it, because we don’t know the family that ran the Asuncion sold it three years ago to a Brazilian hotel chain and they’re running it into the ground. Is that a customer I’ll ever see again?”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“I suppose not,” he echoed, but his sarcasm — if that’s what it was — seemed more directed at life in general than at me. “I’m selling the world,” he said. “You know what that means?” He held out one of his bony hands between us, cupped the fingers around an imaginary globe, hefting that imaginary globe in the palm of his hand. “The world is my stock-in-trade, and I have to know my inventory.”

“I see,” I said. I looked on him now with combined pity and awe. “And do all Travel agents have to go through this?”

“Pah!” he answered, and rattled the ice cubes in his empty glass at the passing stewardess.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and glanced at me. “And you, sir?”

“Of course for him,” growled my neighbor.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I really don’t — I don’t have any money.”

“You’re my guest,” he told me, and glowered at the stewardess. “He’s my guest.”

“Yes, Mr. Schumacher,” she said, casting her smile uselessly against the rock cliff of his face, and moved briskly away, her thighs stroking one another within her tiny uniform skirt. I watched her stride along the aisle, realizing fatalistically that I would be fantasizing myself in bed with the next three hundred women I saw, and I was grateful when my seatmate, Mr. Schumacher, distracted me by saying, bitterly, “They all know me.”

Could it be so terrible to be known by such an attractive girl? Wishing my thoughts elsewhere, I turned to him and said, “You were saying, about other Travel agents...”

“I was saying, ‘Pah!’ ” he told me. “Glorified clerks, most of them. Writing an airline ticket to Disneyworld about strains the limits of their capacity. I am a Travel agent . My card.”

He conjured the card from an inner pocket with a practiced stroke, extending it to me between the second and third fingers of his hand, and I took it to find a stylized globe centered in the rectangle, surrounded by the firm’s name: Schumacher & Sons . Across the bottom were two small lines of print reading, “Offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Caracas, Tokyo, Munich, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Mexico City and Sydney.” On the upper right, in simple small block lettering, was the name, “Irwin Schumacher.”

I was still studying this card, which managed to be so fact-filled and yet so uncluttered — unlike, for instance, Father Banzolini’s tear sheets — when the stewardess returned with our drinks. She assisted me in lowering my little table from the seat back in front of me, which gave us a proximity I regretfully found delightful, and then gave me my glass of ice cubes and two little Jack Daniel’s bottles. Well, it was one way to get my empties; souvenirs of my Travels, to put next to Brother Oliver’s railroad timetable.

The stewardess returned at last to her other duties, and I returned to my examination of the card, saying, “Are you the father or one of the sons?”

“A grandson,” he said gloomily. All facts seemed to embitter him. “My grandfather started the company with a small store-front in the Yorkville section of New York, booking Germans onto Lloyd Line steamships.”

“I know Yorkville,” I said. “I live not far from there.”

“You live in one place,” he said. He sounded envious, saddened, wistful.

“In a glorious place,” I told him, forgetting for a moment that I might never live in that place again.

He looked at me as a starving man might look at someone freshly returned from a banquet. “Tell me about it,” he said.

“Well, it’s a monastery. It’s two hundred years old.”

“Do you leave it often?”

“Almost never. We don’t believe in Travel.”

He clutched my forearm just as I was about to sip my drink. “You don’t believe in Travel! Can that be true?”

“We’re a contemplative Order,” I explained, “and one of the wishes of our founder was that we meditate on Earthly Travel. We have found most of it unnecessary and wrongheaded.”

“By God , sir!” Animation lit his eyes for the first time. I wouldn’t say he exactly smiled, but his intensity seemed all at once much more positive, much less despairing. “Tell me more about this place!” he cried. “Tell me everything!”

So I did. Between sips of Jack Daniel’s — and a constant renewal of full little bottles from the full little stewardess — I told him everything. I told him of our founder, Israel Zapatero, and of his midocean visitation from Saints Crispin and Crispinian. I told him the history of those saints, and the history of Zapatero, and the history of our Order. I described our thinking on the subject of Travel, our conclusions, our postulates, our hypotheses. I described my fellow brothers, one by one, in the greatest detail.

All of this took quite a long time, and much Jack Daniel’s. “It sounds like Heaven!” he cried at one point, and I answered, “It is Heaven!” and looking at him I saw he was in tears. Well, and so was I.

He questioned me as I went along. More detail, and more, and more. And more Jack Daniel’s, and more, and more. I had souvenir empties for our entire Brotherhood, and then some. I described our traditional Christmas dinner, I described our attic, I described our courtyard and our grapes and our cemetery and our chapel and our undercroft.

And finally, I described our present predicament. The bulldozers, the real estate developers, the coming Wanderings in the desert. “Oh, no!” he cried. “It must not happen!”

“All hope is gone,” I told him. And then, being full of Jack Daniel’s, I frowned at him, wondering if perhaps God had not sent this man at the last moment — machina ex Deus? — with that one unsuspected salvation that would make the difference.

No. I saw him shake his head, and knew that he too was mortal. “It’s a crime,” he said.

“Absolutely,” I agreed, and took some time to struggle with the cap of the next Jack Daniel’s bottle. They were getting trickier for some reason.

“But you’ll move somewhere else, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course. We won’t disband.”

“And you’re not priests, you say. A man could walk in off the streets and be accepted among you. Like that Brother Eli you told me about, the whittler.”

“Absolutely,” I said again. I suddenly had discovered it to be a word I was fond of saying aloud. I did it again: “Absolutely.”