The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(14)

Liesl’s head hurt again. The old headaches. She thought she should try to drink more water. She thought she should try to drink less lager. She walked through the fire door from one section of the basement to another, flipping the light switches as she went. There were four such fireproof chambers on this floor and two other levels of basement below her. There were books in the collection that she had never seen before, and she had always loved that, loved that she might discover something entirely new that no one had touched in one hundred years in these stacks. Now she was terrified by it. There were books in these stacks that hadn’t been touched in one hundred years. How could they ever expect to find the Plantin volumes among all this? She pulled the book closest to her hand out of the stacks. A 1683 treatise by a religious dissenter from the library of an Italian priest. Not the Plantin. She pulled out its nearest neighbor. A 2018 book by a Polish comic artist working out of Montreal. Not the Plantin. Next to it, an 1832 Hebrew dictionary. Not the Plantin.

Liesl looked at her watch. Checking those three books had taken forty-five seconds. She tried to do the math, but there were so many variables. Some books, the modern ones especially, would be easy to rule out on sight. Others were shelved in boxes and would need to be totally unboxed before they could be ruled out. That could add almost a full minute per book. They might find one volume or two or three but not the others. That had to be considered when thinking about time, but this way, she thought, it wasn’t impossible. What was impossible was the idea that they would find the book before the donors found out they’d lost it.

She kept pulling and reshelving books. It became meditative. She could have been there five minutes, she could have been there an hour; she became lost in it. All she knew was that the library wasn’t yet open. The basement lights always gave a small flicker when the sign by the front door was turned on. She had been down here enough times to know that. And the lights hadn’t yet flickered. Which is why she was surprised, knowing that the library was not yet open, to realize that she wasn’t alone in the basement. She stopped pulling books. She stopped breathing.

It was the chain that gave it away. The sound came from behind the fire door, and if the culprit had only been pulling books, Liesl never would have heard it. But the chain. The monks who made illuminated manuscripts used to attach chains to the spines to keep them from getting stolen, and there were two in the library’s collection that still had their chains attached. She heard the heavy chain against the metal shelf. There was no event planned that required one of those manuscripts, and a researcher request to view one would have had to be cleared by the library director. By Liesl. There was no reason for anyone to be touching that chain on that morning.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” she called as she burst through the fire door.

“Liesl? Is that you?”

“What’s going on, Max? It’s barely seven thirty. Why do you have that manuscript out?”

Liesl waited for him to answer, wondering if the hair curling near her ears from the humidity of the morning or the skin creasing in the corner of her eyes from the severity of her headache was undermining her authority. He’d had the manuscript laid open on a book truck, but he closed it, spine creaking, chain rattling, before he replied.

“I am responsible for religious collections here, am I not?” He stood impossibly straight. His attire impossibly smooth. His neck, what she could see of it, was impossibly free from sweat.

Liesl badly wanted some coffee and water. She should have stopped at that Starbucks. “It’s a tense time,” she said. “I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t have questions.”

“Yes. That’s what would make you irresponsible.”

“You haven’t answered my question. What are you doing with that book?”

She glanced at her watch. The coffee shop in the adjoining building would be open in fifteen minutes. “What, do you think I was going to steal it?” he said. “I don’t like being accused of things. I won’t let myself be accused of things.”

“That is not what I asked. I wasn’t making accusations.” She would splurge for an Americano, not just a regular coffee.

“The alarm was off,” Max said. “The lights were on. Do you think I didn’t know someone else was down here? Do you think everyone pays so little attention?”

“So little attention?”

“The rest of us are paying attention, Liesl. I’m paying attention. You’re here to what, protect our reputation while we wait for Christopher to return? It took you a single day to fail at that.”

If his shirt collar hadn’t been the perfect size, his Adam’s apple would have strained against the top button. But Max would never have allowed for such a thing.

Liesl turned to leave.

“Christopher would have wanted me. If he had to be away, if he was going to be ill, I’m the one who is best able to stand in for him. He knew that. I know he did. And you know it.”

She kept her back turned, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her face. She could not be certain about the validity of Max’s claim that he was best-equipped to stand in as interim director. But as for Christopher’s preference for Max as his proxy over Liesl? They both knew that was true.

“Don’t think I don’t know about the Peshawar either. Dan told me you were about to let just anyone work with it.”