The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(11)

Liesl gathered them in the large reading room for a cross-examination—everyone who had seen or touched the Plantin Bible since it had been in the library’s possession. The room was soundproof when the doors were closed, well suited for events when the donors overdid it with the Chablis. And perfect for an interrogation.

The campus buildings were scattered across a parcel of land in Toronto, just north of downtown on the dividing line between a neighborhood where the Korean noodle shops were celebrating their fiftieth year in business and where the owners of Victorian mansions wrote strongly worded letters to the city council to ensure that nothing so tacky as a condominium could be built in their neighborhood. The coffee shops had literary names where baristas with unironic mustaches shared their artistic ambitions as they made perfect pour-over coffee. Until about ten years ago, the students had their pick of spacious flats above the noodle shops, but all at once the streets had come to be lined with shiny Subarus instead of rusted Hondas. Days, young mothers pushed their strollers down well-swept sidewalks. Nights, the students vomited four-dollar dim sum into alleyways. And it was the university, the bricks and the books and the brilliance, that tied those two Torontos together.

Francis sat by the door across the room from Maximilian Hubbard, the head of religious acquisitions, and Miriam Peters, the head of the modern manuscripts division. Light streamed across their faces through the window, the city peeking in. The library stacks rose up above the room in an octagon over six stories, a cathedral of dark volumes barely illuminated by yellow lights lining the walls. It gave the space the feeling of a panopticon, but it was the people in the room who were being watched by the silent books.

Dan might emerge on one of the catwalks along the walls to retrieve a volume, but it was unlikely. These books had been chosen for their aesthetic beauty, to lend the space a sense of grandeur. They were rarely read. The real collections were on book trucks in the small reading room or in the layers of basements beneath the building. Liesl pressed her lips together as she prepared to address the group.

“The Plantin Polyglot Bible,” she said. “The volumes are not in the safe as they should be. The book is missing.”

“Where is it?” Francis asked.

“Can I look myself?” Max said.

“Oh dear,” Miriam said.

“My understanding is that each of you saw the Plantin after it arrived here.”

“What are you accusing us of?” Max asked.

“Of seeing the Plantin after it arrived here. Of being able to help find where it was mislaid.”

Max was a small man who got his thinning hair cut every Friday afternoon, and he had never come to work without his pressed white shirt buttoned to the chin. At a library where not much interesting ever happened, there was gossip any time Max opted for a sweater vest instead of a sport coat. Liesl tried to sound open-minded when leveling the question at Max, but there was no softening him; he was all angles.

“She’s right that we all saw it, and she’s right that we might be able to help,” Miriam said.

Miriam had her arms crossed and her legs crossed and her voice was just above a whisper. She looked in Liesl’s eyes while the men, who had both risen from their chairs, were pacing around the room. As the only two women at the library, Liesl and Miriam had often found themselves bound together, and Liesl appreciated her support now. She just wished that support wasn’t quite so hushed.

“You managed shipping and receiving, didn’t you, Miriam?” Liesl asked.

“Well, yes,” she said. “But only because Christopher asked me to.”

“Why would he have asked you?” Francis asked. Against the September heat he’d left the top three buttons of his shirt open, which was really too many buttons. With his hands on his hips, the dark fabric stretched and showed quite a lot of chest.

“Liesl was away, I guess?” Miriam said. “I handle all the shipping for my own division, so I know the paperwork.”

“So you just did the paperwork?” Francis said.

“That’s enough, Francis. No one has asked you to conduct an interrogation,” Liesl said.

Francis was still standing and Miriam was still sitting, and Liesl felt like she was losing control of the situation. She turned the attention off Miriam.

“When did you see it, Francis? Had it been placed in the safe yet?”

“The Plantin isn’t a set of house keys,” Max muttered. “You don’t just mislay a priceless religious artifact.”

“I’m trying to think of the simplest solutions first, Max.”

“No, I mean you shouldn’t have mislaid it.”

“It was meant to be in the safe before I ever arrived.” He wasn’t looking at her; he was running a thumb over the razor’s-edge crease ironed into his trousers. “I would like to take a systematic approach and understand where the book went in the building after it arrived. I’d like your help doing so.”

“Well,” Max said. “I’d like a leader who shows some regard for the sanctity of that book and the reputation of this library.”

Liesl looked to Francis. Over the years they had joked about Max’s self-importance, his irrationality. She waited for Francis to jump to her defense, to acknowledge that Max was being irrational now. He didn’t.

“You always handle shipping,” Max said. “For an acquisition this significant, our most significant in maybe a decade? You couldn’t have come back for one day to handle shipping?”