The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(38)

“Are there more pages?” she asked.

Francis didn’t immediately reply. Couldn’t reply. He was weeping.

Liesl reached across the desk, hesitated a moment, and then covered his hand with hers, a comfort, a promise, a reminder. Francis turned his palm up. They sat and relived a shared and complicated history, theirs and Christopher’s, as he stroked his thumb back and forth across her wrist.

“What a picture I am,” he finally said. “But the man has meant so much in my life. And I’m scared he’ll die. Almost as scared as I am he’ll wake up to this.”

“There’s a third option,” Liesl said. She pulled her hand back and passed him a tissue. She saw that the full weight of his emotion was wrapped in the possibility of his mentor’s death. “He could come out of it and tell us all about the safe place where the Plantin has been all along, and we can all feel very silly and very relieved.”

“Liesl,” said Francis. “Do you believe that there’s any chance at all of that happening?”

“I think there is very little chance. But not none.”

“I’m scared he’ll die.”

“That might happen too. He’s not a young man.” She shot him a look of apology, but at her age she had learned it was easier to be honest about the proximity of death.

Francis rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Is it daft if I say it feels like my father is dying?”

Liesl went over to the office door and closed it. She hated how it would look, sitting in here with Francis behind closed doors like coconspirators, but a man was owed a closed door for his tears. When the door clicked into place, Francis allowed himself permission to issue a great sob and then began to take deep breaths to try to stem the tears.

“There’s nothing daft about it,” Liesl said.

He nodded. “He’s not that much older than I am.”

“That’s not what makes a father.”

“He’s taught me so bloody much.”

It was too early for the bottle, but without the bottle she had no idea what to do about the tears.

“After my divorce,” he said, “he taught me how to be excited about life again. The way he was excited by his books.”

Liesl sat and listened as Francis wept over the man she would never measure up to. On the desk was a stack of preview catalogs from booksellers who would be at the fair. Her eyes wandered over, and she calculated how late she would be at work that evening, marking them up, but then she chastened herself. Here was a man putting the contents of his heart on display.

“He loves these books like a man loves his bloody children,” he said. His tone had changed.

“And he’ll be back with them,” Liesl said. “And you. When it’s time for goodbye it will be on his terms.”

“Except with the Plantin,” he said. “He’ll never get to count the Plantin as part of his collection.”

“You don’t know that,” Liesl said.

“Bollocks we don’t. The book is gone. And you know what else? What I can’t stop my mind from thinking? The book disappears and then who goes right after it? Seems too tidy to be a coincidence.”

“Don’t say something you’ll later regret,” Liesl said. “You’re the one who said that you thought she had taken a lover.”

“I did,” he said. “And you said that was impossible.”

Mousy Miriam. Maudlin Miriam. Mawkish Miriam. Thoroughly Medium Miriam. Malevolent Miriam? It was the only solution that was more ridiculous than Mistress Miriam.

“Isn’t that all the more reason to report Miriam missing to the police?” Liesl asked. “If she’s some brilliant bandit?”

“They’d learn of the theft, and then the donors would. Can’t do it.”

“You’re going to get yourself committed with this line of thinking,” Liesl said. Francis looked hurt.

She in her light-blue coat and he in his tears, she took him by the arm and swept him out of her office and out of the library. Past the yellow falafel truck and the stoic anti-abortion protesters they found an empty bench in the shade of the library building. Inside the library his tears were conspicuous, but out here, amid all this youth, they could be invisible.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought it,” he said.

“Not for a moment. Not Miriam.”

“I want to fix this for Chris.”

“I know you do.”

They sat on the bench under the tree close enough for their thighs to touch. There was no time for this sitting. Later that night, Liesl would think about the hour they spent, mostly in silence, and she would think of the pressure of his left thigh against her right. She thought about it as the sun set and as the streetlamps came on and as John called the office to see when she was coming home and she told him not for a while because she was poring over catalogs and planning for the book fair. She didn’t regret the hour. Students followed by students followed by students walked by them, mothers pushing strollers on walks through the leafy campus, administrators in suits, and faculty members in brown blazers, but no one noticed them, and no one asked why they were sitting so close that their thighs touched. So they kept sitting.

“I’m moved that you shared the manuscript with me,” she said.