The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(3)

She flipped through an old exhibition catalog that featured the Peshawar. Finance money, pharma money, family money—she was looking for the angle they’d feel at the front of their trousers. She wasn’t an expert in Sanskrit, mathematics, or early writing, and while that hardly mattered when she was talking to undergraduates, she worried that this group might see through her. This group that flexed their fortunes to acquire pages like these. That, coupled with Garber’s lecture that morning about the need to convince the donors that the library was in stable hands, had her feeling like a schoolgirl about to sit for an exam. Had Christopher been there, he would have done the talking. It all made her rather doubtful of her own level of knowledge and nervous to even touch the book when Dan finally rolled it into the office on a book truck.

Then there was another thing. The pages of the Peshawar looked like garbage. The library had been playing a shell game for years, using photos of the leaves in lieu of the real thing. The photographs were just easier to read; they hadn’t been darkening over the decades like the birch leaves had. But Garber had been clear; photographs were going to do little to make this group feel important, so even if the real thing was barely legible and even if the lack of legibility might raise some questions, she was going to have to bring up the real thing. Dan left her alone in the office with it, and she opened the album. The Plantin volumes that were, at that moment, trapped in the safe in Christopher’s office, while finely bound and historically important, were not totally unique—there was a handful of sets in library and private collections. The Peshawar, on the other hand… Nothing like it existed in the whole world. She decided she would let them touch it if they wanted, stroke the leaves. That would have to be enough to get them off.

“Francis,” Liesl said when she walked into the workroom. “Can you be a bit late picking up your grandson today and give a bit of a talk on the Peshawar this afternoon?”

Francis strove for a personal presentation that resembled an MI6 spy and almost succeeded except, pity for him, for being older than and not as handsome as the well-known filmic representation of a British spook. He exaggerated his dark features: dark-brown eyes, yes, but a dark-blue button-down and his still-dark hair, which was worn slicked back when he was feeling rakish and to the side when he wasn’t. At this moment it was back. When he replied to Liesl, his Eton accent was much stronger than you’d expect from a man who’d left the isles behind nearly forty years earlier.

“You know I’m happy to leave that terror waiting in the playground until morning,” he said. “But seems an odd day to be pulling out the Peshawar.”

“Indeed. But all the same we’ve pulled it out. You’ll do it then?”

“You know I hate to miss my weekly appointment with that vile child, but I suppose I’ll have to. Can you tell me why? You all right?”

“The Plantin’s in the safe. The safe is locked. Christopher is the only one with the current combination. So we’re substituting the Peshawar.”

“The donors aren’t going to like that.”

“They might if you make it sound appealing.”

Francis leaned his chair all the way back. He was considering, or negotiating.

“Quite a mess they’ve dragged you into,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“Is it? I suppose it’s better than being the one with the stroke.”

“That’s a bit cold, Francis. I’m here to help in any way I can. I’m surprised you’re not happy to do the same.”

“Don’t chastise me, Liesl. You’re meant to be asking me a favor.”

She wasn’t, though. Only asking him to do his job. But she kept her tone gentle.

“You know the Peshawar better than anyone. We’re trying to present a picture of a fully functioning library to the donors. It seems simple to me.”

“It’s not to me,” he said. “Chris is my best mate. I don’t like being asked to stand in for him like he’s already dead.”

“That isn’t the intention. You know it isn’t,” Liesl said. She pulled a chair up to Francis’s desk and sat next to him. “I don’t want Christopher’s job. But I want his job to be recognizable to him when he comes back. That means we have to keep things moving in the meantime.”

“Why don’t you ask Max?” Francis said. “He’s always been better than I have at glad-handing the donors.”

“A Catholic priest is not the right tool to get their minds off a missing bible.”

“Former priest,” Francis said. “It’s not as though he’d be wearing his collar.”

Liesl didn’t think that Max had Francis’s compunctions about not stealing Christopher’s job out from under him. But she didn’t say so.

“I want them to feel special, like they’re getting to see something unique. I think you’re the one to do it.”

“And you think the Peshawar is the right book?”

“It’s one of a kind. Fragile. We rarely pull it out. We never let it travel. How many people in the last hundred years have stood in a room with it? I think it’s perfect.”

“Not much to appeal to the eye, though.”

“You’ll sell them on its scarcity.”

“The invention of mathematics,” he said in a booming ringmaster voice.