“What—” I said, bewildered, and then everything happened at once. Flattery pulled away from me, with an imprecation that didn’t blend well with his costume. Brother Clemence came dashing out of Brother Oliver’s office, crying, “Fire!” And Flattery made a run for the doors.
“Brother Mallory!” I shouted. Flattery’s cowl had fallen back, revealing him as a stranger and thereby greatly simplifying the message I had to transmit. When Brother Mallory looked up from his mulching, I pointed at the running impostor and shouted, “Smite him, Brother Mallory!”
Well, he tried, but years in a monastery do take their toll on the belligerent instincts. Brother Mallory dashed over between Flattery and the doors, feinted with his left and threw an over-hand right. Flattery stepped inside the punch, gave Brother Mallory a short left chop to the breadbasket and a quick right uppercut on the button, and as Brother Mallory went pinwheeling backward Flattery flung himself at the doors, yanked them open, and dashed out.
I went running in his wake. Cabs, trucks, pedestrians, that great churning agitated other world boiled away outside there, and Flattery ran into it like a man in an asbestos suit running through a fire. A florist’s delivery truck was parked at the curb, and Flattery ran around it and disappeared. I gave chase, but by the time I rounded the truck he was gone. Into a passing cab, perhaps, or zigzag across this busy street. Gone, in any event. Gone.
And so was the lease. Abbot Urban’s illuminated lease, its old dry paper burned to ashes, along with a dozen other documents. “Our whole case,” Brother Clemence said bitterly.
The physical events were simply stated. Frank Flattery had disguised himself in a robe like ours and had come on the grounds through either of our front doors — we were very very sloppy about keeping them locked. He had hung around Brother Oliver’s office until Brother Clemence, working alone in there today, had been called away by nature. Then Flattery had entered, made a pile of all the valuable documents on the refectory table, put a match to them, and walked out again. If I hadn’t mistaken him for Brother Peregrine he would have gotten away scot-free.
Well, apparently he’d gotten away scot-free anyway. When we had our hysterical meeting in Brother Oliver’s smoke-reeking office five minutes after the event, with all sixteen of us present, it turned out I was the only one who could identify the arsonist, and Brother Clemence assured me my unsupported testimony would not be sufficient in a criminal action. “Particularly,” he pointed out, “when you’re already a party in a civil dispute against his family.”
Brother Flavian, who was practically eating the woodwork in his frustration and rage, cried at Brother Mallory, “Surely you know what he looks like! The man knocked you down!”
Brother Mallory, who had a swollen jaw and a sheepish expression, flushed a dull red and muttered, “It all happened too fast. We were both bobbing and weaving, I wouldn’t recognize him if he came walking through that door over there. All I know is he was white.”
“Well, that narrows it,” Brother Flavian said.
Brother Mallory looked as though he’d like to rehearse awhile on Brother Flavian in preparation for a return bout with Frank Flattery, but he said nothing.
The main subject, in any event, was the loss, which turned out to be considerable. Brother Oliver asked Brother Clemence, “Had you been getting close to what you wanted?”
“Close?” Brother Clemence’s manner combined outrage and weariness in a very delicate balance. “We had it,” he said. “We had it in the palm of our hand.”
Brother Dexter said, “We were just talking about it this morning, Brother Oliver. Clemence and I, right in this room, with the papers around us.”
“It took nearly a dozen separate secondary documents,” Brother Clemence said, “and some very fancy inductive reasoning may I say, but we had put together a profile of the lease that I am certain would have stood up in any court in the land.”
“All we needed,” Brother Dexter added, “was to assemble the documents in the proper order and write our brief.”
“That’s what I was doing when it happened,” Brother Clemence said. “I was writing it all out, laying every document in place, demonstrating what each one meant, how they reinforced one another, how the implications of this paper supported the implications of that paper, making sure it was absolutely airtight.”
“It was becoming a beautiful piece of work,” Brother Dexter told us.
Brother Clemence shook his head. “The rest of today to finish the draft,” he said. “Tomorrow I’d intended to go over it with you, Brother Oliver, and anyone else who was interested. By Friday my friend could have been meeting with the Flatterys’ attorneys.”
We all looked silently at the ash-and-water mess on the refectory table. Brother Oliver said, “Isn’t there any way to start all over?”
“None,” Brother Clemence said. “The secondary documents are gone. All of our substantiation is up in smoke.”
“Couldn’t they be reconstructed?”
Brother Clemence smudged his forehead with his smudgy hand. “Use tertiary documents to reconstruct the secondary documents, and then by implication reconstruct the primary document? Brother Oliver, I doubt there’s a human brain on this planet that could do a thing like that, and certainly not in two weeks.”
Brother Peregrine joined the conversation, saying, “But they won’t start tearing the building down in two weeks, will they? That’s only when the sale is completed.”
“Once the sale is made,” Brother Clemence told him, “it will be too late. Nothing can save us unless we stop the sale from going through, that’s our only hope.”
Brother Eli, who rarely had anything to say, now said, “They’ll come with the bulldozers. Bright and early on the first of January.”
We all looked at him. Brother Peregrine said, “What makes you think so?”
“We’re troublemakers,” Brother Eli said. “The longer we’re around, the more trouble we can make, but once this building is knocked down the trouble is gone.”
The Vietnam generation has a slightly different view of life from the rest of us; colder, and I suspect more accurate. Brother Oliver said, “You mean, whether they intend to start construction right away or not, they’ll get rid of us for the advantage of getting rid of us.”
Brother Eli nodded.
Brother Oliver shook his head. “It isn’t the world that Christ had in mind,” he said. Turning to Brother Clemence he said, “And was this our last chance? Do we have to give up now?”
The heaviness in Brother Clemence’s stance and voice seemed to indicate that the answer to that question was yes, but he said, “Not necessarily. There may be things we can do, delaying tactics at least, and maybe some—”
“Excuse me,” I said.
Brother Clemence paused, and looked at me. “Brother?”
“I don’t think,” I said carefully, hating to have to talk this way, “you should be specific about your plans, Brother Clemence.”
He didn’t understand me. “You mean it’s bad luck? Superstition, Brother Benedict?”
“No, that isn’t what I mean,” I said. “I mean, how did Frank Flattery know what to burn? How did he know there was something to burn?”
I had everyone’s attention now. Brother Oliver said, “What on earth are you saying to us, Brother Benedict?”
“I’m saying what Brother Silas said the other day,” I said. “And Brother Clemence said it, too. That our copy of the original lease was stolen. And who stole it?”
“Frank Flattery,” Brother Clemence said. “He obviously came in here the same way he did today.”