I grinned right back at him. “I want my monastery back,” I said.
He nodded, chuckling to himself. Laying a finger beside his nose, he said, “You got it.” And he winked at me.
They told me she wasn’t there. I spoke to her mother first, and she said, “Oh, Eileen went away for the holidays. Aren’t you the monk that came here last week with that other one, the stout one?”
“That was Brother Oliver,” I said.
“Oh, he made Dan very upset,” she said. She hadn’t invited me into the house, and I could see she wasn’t going to. “I think Dan would be very angry if he saw you here,” she said.
“I’m sorry we upset him,” I said. “Could you tell me when Eileen will be back?”
“Oh, not till after the first of the year,” she said. “But I’ll be certain to tell her you called. Brother — what was it?”
“Benedict,” I said. But I was thinking that our deadline was the first of the year. Fifteen days from now. After that it would be too late.
“Brother Benedict,” the mother was saying. “I’ll be sure to tell her.” And she was starting to close the door.
“Uh, Mrs. Flattery. Wait.”
“Yes?” She didn’t want to be impolite — I could see that — but on the other hand she didn’t want this conversation to continue any longer either.
I said, “Where is she? She’s gone away where?” Thinking that it might be somewhere close by, that I could still get in touch with her.
But Mrs. Flattery said, “Oh, the Caribbean. She loves to get down there two or three times every winter. I’ll be sure to tell her you called.” And she firmly closed the door.
The Caribbean. She might as well have gone to the Moon. More wasted Travel. I’d come out here for nothing. Gloomily I turned away from the door.
To see a small, dark green automobile turning in at the driveway, with a female at the wheel. Had Mrs. Flattery lied to me? I waited, hope fluttering in my throat, and when the automobile stopped it was Eileen’s sister-in-law who clambered out. Peggy, her name was, married to Eileen’s brother Hugh. Not the brother who had burned our papers, that was the unmarried one, Frank.
Peggy was a pleasant enough girl, and she recognized me at once. “Well, Brother Benedict,” she said, with a big open smile, “what brings you way out here?”
“I wanted to see Eileen,” I said. “But I understand she’s gone away.”
“Down to Puerto Rico for the holidays,” Peggy agreed. She was so open and friendly with me that I couldn’t believe she was a part of the plot against us, or knew anything about it.
“Puerto Rico, eh?” The vague concept of writing her some sort of letter entered my head, and I said, “Would you know her address? I’d like to, uh, send her a Christmas card.”
“How very sweet,” she said. “Yes, I’ll give it to you; wait, um—” She rummaged in her shoulder bag, produced a stub of pencil and an envelope with LILCO in big letters for the return address, and carefully printed on the back of the envelope Eileen’s address in the Caribbean, using the top of her little green automobile as a writing surface. “There you are,” she said.
“Thank you very much.”
“Nice to see you again,” she told me.
“And you,” I said, giving her a smile and a bow. I was becoming quite the lady’s man.
Ten
My useless journey didn’t help improve the atmosphere in the monastery, but I doubt at that point anything could have. I returned without incident, reported to Brother Oliver, and sank back at once into the silent morass that still enveloped everybody else. There seemed nothing to do, no action that anyone could take that would get us out of this pit we were in.
Brothers Flavian and Silas had talked at first about conducting an investigation, and for a little while they’d even had Brother Clemence involved with their idea, but when all was said and done what was there to investigate? There were no secrets in our lives; we knew one another as well as we knew ourselves. Could we interrogate one another? “Where were you on the night of December first?” Or any other date you chose, the answer would always be the same: “Right here, and you know it, because you saw me. Because you would have noticed my absence.” We couldn’t do timetables of people’s movements, because we had no movements. We couldn’t check the suspects’ associates, because we associated with no one but ourselves. Failing a confession by the guilty party, what was there to do?
Nothing.
And without that confession, without knowing certainly and finally who the guilty party was, how could we go on with one another? We couldn’t, that’s all. We could only sit and mope and wait for some outside force to change things.
Until my brainstorm.
What is there to call a brainstorm but a brainstorm? There are two kinds of reasoning, and a brainstorm is the other one. The first kind, deductive reasoning, the process of arriving at D on the basis of A and B and C, is easily explained and easily seen, but inductive reasoning, the process of arriving at D when all you’ve had to go on is 7 and B and K, is utterly impossible to describe. When people say to writers or inventors, “Where do you get your ideas?” they are really asking them to explain inductive reasoning.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, more or less had to try a definition of inductive reasoning, and so he wrote, in The Sign of the Four, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Although he didn’t go on to tell us how to draw that thin and snakelike line between the impossible and the improbable, the definition has a certain comfortable solidity to it, and I suppose it could be used to explain my brainstorm. For instance, I suppose some corner of my brain could have been saying to itself like so:
1) It is impossible that any of the Brothers in this monastery betrayed us to the Flatterys.
2) It is impossible that Frank Flattery could have known to come in here and burn those papers without having been told of their existence, their importance, and their location.
3) It is impossible that Frank Flattery could have been told these things by anybody except a member of this community.
4) However improbable it may sound, Frank Flattery must have been told those things by someone who didn’t know he was telling.
All of which is hindsight. None of that was in my conscious mind prior to the brainstorm. It simply struck me, that’s all, and I rose up from my bed and went downstairs, where I found Brother Oliver coming long-faced out of his office. “May I go in there?” I asked him.
He seemed slightly surprised. “Did you want to talk to me, Brother Benedict?”
“No, I just wanted to be alone in your office for a few minutes,” I said. Alone, because although I was certain in some nonrational way, at the rational level I thought I was probably crazy.
Suspicion crossed his face — what a strange thing to see there — and then cleared away again. Was it because he realized he could trust me, or because he’d remembered the damage had already been done?
“Of course, Brother,” he said, trying to smile as though he hadn’t hesitated, and he stepped aside, gesturing me the hospitality of his office. “Are you going to meditate?”
“Fumigate,” I told him, and went on in.
I found the bug, taped to the back of a Madonna and Child. It looked like a large button, and yet it didn’t. What it was most like was those enlarged photographs of the eyeball of a fly, and it had for me the same eerie inhuman effect. The human race lost something when people stopped bashing one another with sticks and started using technology in their disputes, and what they lost was their humanness. We’ll all wake up some morning and find that we’re the Martians.