But didn’t this thing need wires? Apparently not. It was all alone here, a little Flattery outpost in our midst. And where would the receiver be, the nest of ears, listening to every word spoken in this room?
Well, maybe that florist’s truck had also been parked in my subconscious at the time of the brainstorm. Consciously, though, it was only now that I realized it was far too often parked outside our door. Every time I went out it had been there, sometimes noticed and sometimes not. Frank Flattery had run around it and disappeared; inside it, of course.
Outrage is not an emotion I’m that used to, and in this instance it made me do something foolish. Pausing for nothing, I stormed out of Brother Oliver’s office through the outer door to the cloister, strode across the courtyard, threw open the great doors to the outside world, ignored the midafternoon crush of pedestrians and traffic, bore directly to the rear of the florist’s truck, yanked open its back doors, and Alfred Broyle punched me very hard on the nose.
I sat down on the pavement. Eileen’s “young man” pulled his doors closed again, and the florist’s truck drove immediately away.
“You made a very serious error there,” Brother Clemence told me.
“I know,” I said. I felt miserable. Not only had I made a very serious error, I’d been punched in the nose for my pains and it still hurt. I was puffy around the eyes, I couldn’t breathe through my nose, and I talked like a long-distance telephone operator.
Brother Oliver said, “Oh, Brother Clemence, don’t be hard on him. He did wonderful work this afternoon! That cloud of suspicion, that sense of gloom—”
“I know that,” Brother Clemence said. “You’re absolutely right. We all owe Brother Benedict our deepest thanks for what he did. I only wish he’d taken along a witness when he went out to that florist’s truck.”
This conversation was taking place an hour later, in Brother Oliver’s office, sans microphone. (The bug itself was in the sacristy, under a stack of altar cloths.) Brothers Clemence, Oliver, Dexter and I had been joined by an old friend of Brother Clemence, a distinguished-looking attorney named Remington Gates who sported both a hat and a cane, and who pursed his lips a lot to display a sense of dubiousness.
The sequence of events had now been pretty clearly worked out. The Flatterys had undoubtedly been planning this sale for several years, at least since that Landmarks Commission hearing, and had been waiting only for the lease to be up. Their difficulty had been with that clause giving us the option to renew. Learning that the lease had not been recorded with the County Clerk, that they and we had the only copies, they had broken in here at some point, rifled our files — what an undertaking that must have been — and stolen our copy of the lease. Either then or later they’d planted that bug, so they would know if we planned any moves to save ourselves. They’d hoped we wouldn’t learn about the sale until after next January first, when it would be over and done with, when Dimp might have some small trouble with us but the Flatterys would be in the clear. But we did find out, so at once they’d put us under constant surveillance, just to be on the safe side. Naturally they’d heard us discover the copy of the lease, and they’d heard Brother Clemence discuss his plan involving secondary documents, and they’d waited till Brother Clemence had told Brother Dexter — in their hearing — that we now did have all the documentary evidence we needed. Then they broke in and burned the papers.
And we couldn’t prove it. I was the only one who could identify Alfred Broyle as the man in the florist’s truck, and in fact I was the only one who could identify the florist’s truck. I was also the only one who could identify Frank Flattery as the arsonist. If only I had brought someone else with me today, a second witness to the presence of that truck and the presence in it of Alfred Broyle, we would now have a presentable case. Instead of which, we had Mr. Remington Gates pursing his lips and saying, “I really don’t see that we have enough.”
Brother Oliver said, “But we have so much. We have that, that microphone thing, and several of us saw the man running away after he set fire to our papers.”
Mr. Gates said, “But none of you can identify him, except Brother Benedict here. And Brother Benedict found the microphone. It’s all Brother Benedict. Do you know what I would say if I were the attorney on the other side?”
Brother Clemence rather gloomily said, “I know what you’d say, Rem.”
“Yes, you do, Howard,” Mr. Gates said to him. (So Brother Clemence’s civilian name had been Howard; how strange. I squinted at him, trying to see him as a Howard, but failed.) “But let me,” Mr. Gates went on, “try to make it clear to your friends here.” Turning a stern eye on me, pursing his lips mammothly, he said, “I am now the attorney for the other side, Brother Benedict.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And I put it to you, Brother Benedict, that you are happy in this monastery.”
“Of course.”
“You do not want to leave this monastery.”
Did I? Oh, but that wasn’t what he was talking about; he was talking about all this other business. After only the slightest hesitation, I said, “Of course not.”
“You would do almost anything to save the monastery, wouldn’t you, Brother Benedict?”
“Anything I could,” I said.
“Then let me suggest to you, Brother Benedict,” he said, his stern eye getting sterner by the second, “that what you have done to help save the monastery is plant evidence, present a fraudulent and trumped-up case, and malign and libel my clients, the Flattery family, who are decent well-thought-of members of society.”
I said, “What?” Around me Brother Clemence was nodding moodily, as though he’d always known I was capable of such things, while Brothers Oliver and Dexter were both looking just as shocked as I felt.
“I put it to you, Brother Benedict,” this horrible man went on, “that you planted that microphone in the office, in order to find it again. I further put it to you that there was no florist’s truck parked outside, and that you did not see and were not punched in the nose by Alfred Broyle.”
“I wasn’t? Look at my nose!”
“Three weeks from now in court? Besides, Brother Benedict, the self-inflicted injury is a cliché of the legal profession.”
“But—”
“I further put it to you, Brother Benedict,” he rolled on, “that the man who burned those papers was a confederate of yours, that he did so at your request and because you believed an insufficiently strong case for your side would be built by those papers, and that you willfully and knowingly misidentified this man as my client, Frank Flattery. And I finally put it to you, Brother Benedict, that you have not one shred of proof for any of your assertions and that you lack the slightest capability of confounding my version of the facts.”
“But,” I said, and then, although no one interrupted me, I stopped. I had nothing to say.
Mr. Gates’ stern eye became kindly and sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Brother Benedict,” he said. “But you do see the situation.”
“Yes,” I said.
Mr. Gates turned to Brother Oliver. “I’ve offered to assist in any way I can,” he said, “and now that I see the dastardly level these people will descend to I am more than ever available. And I will go and present our case to the Flatterys’ attorney if you insist, but I must say I dislike being laughed at in another man’s office.”