The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(39)

“I knew you would understand. I hoped you would.”

“Maybe you can show me the rest of the chapters later,” she said.

They finally loped inside with the almost-limp of almost-old people who had been sitting on a hard surface for too long. At the revolving door he motioned for her to go ahead, and just for a moment, he placed his hand on the small of her back to guide her through.

But in the library there was a man, a man they had never seen before, and their guards went back up, and their hands stayed close to their own bodies.

“Hello, Liesl. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“For me?” she said. “Is this about Miriam?”

“Who’s Miriam?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m from IT,” the man said. “Here to change the passwords.” He was wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt, fastened to the neck, tucked into oversized Dockers. There was no way he could be anything but a representative from the IT department.

“Come on back to the office. I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

She led him into Christopher’s office. Her purse hung on the coatrack. Her papers and catalogs were stacked neatly on the table. The room was even beginning to smell like her shampoo. He sat down at the computer right away and clacked at the keys for only a moment before inviting her to sit down.

“It’s unlocked for you,” he said. “You’ll be prompted to change the password right away. Once you do, you’ll have access to his email, calendars, documents, to his full identity. I did a quick inventory, and it doesn’t look like he ever accessed additional drives, so it will all be straightforward. Have any questions?”

She indicated that she didn’t, and he left with a polite wave. She sat in front of the computer and, with the stroke of a few keys, slipped into Christopher’s identity. She opened the documents folder. There was nothing in it. She clicked to open his email. There was an error message saying it had never been set up. She clicked through folder after folder after folder. Nothing. Christopher Wolfe was a digital ghost.





10


The book fair was in the big convention center, the one by the airport. It was not a good part of town. Liesl drove past the strip clubs advertising chicken-wing specials and past the Ramada and the Hilton and the Delta and the Best Western and past the motels that didn’t have brand names and didn’t care whether their guest stayed the whole night. The neighborhood couldn’t decide whether it wanted to facilitate business or bad behavior.

She had left home not knowing if she would make it to the fair in time, but she found herself in the parking lot twenty minutes early, so she sat in the driver’s seat and read her catalogs while hunger and anxiety turned her stomach. The engine ran so she could keep the windshield wipers running, and every five seconds they swished away the water and cleared her view.

When the doors to the fair were unlocked, the windshield wipers were off and Liesl was out of the car, waiting. A man named Steve who didn’t know that the book fair was a test of Liesl and her ability to do her job well scanned her badge and remarked about the weather.

The aisles of glass and wood bookshelves forming pretend bookshops had been laid over a deep-red carpet that stretched across the full conference center. Had the red carpet been here in previous years? Liesl couldn’t remember, but she hated it. Her shoes were damp from the rain, and it felt as though blood were squelching up between her toes every time she took a step. The biggest vendors with the biggest shops had set up along the central aisle. They looked more like an outpost of Tiffany’s than a dusty old book room, these big shops with their glass display cases, twinkling lights, and Hugo Boss–suited sales staff. They weren’t for Liesl, these big shops.

They were after the big-fish private collectors who were looking for something to brag about at their next tennis game. Liesl would let those customers overpay, hold on to their treasures for ten years, and then donate their finds to the library when they decided they’d rather have a tax receipt than a signed first edition of Goodbye, Columbus.

She started at the edges of the show. Christopher had taught her that the first year. The stalls were smaller, the shelves were borrowed from someone’s basement, and there were treasures. The inner aisles were where you went to shake hands; the outer aisles were where you went to make deals. She saw it all without making it look like she was too interested. She allowed her eyes to linger on some lovely eighteenth-century horticultural books, and she looked back over her shoulder, trying to mark their location in her memory. Maybe if there was money left at the end of the day, or maybe if she could convincingly call them science books and pay for them with the science fund, or maybe she would just buy them for herself and take them home so they could watch her work from her own bookshelf.

An exhibitor who knew how the game worked displayed some materials of regional interest on a folding card table. Turn-of-the-century ephemera advertising the railway, a Polish translation in a handsome dust jacket from a local author. The collection was a smattering with no melody tying it all together, but Liesl didn’t mind. She liked the hunt. She didn’t want arrows telling her where the pearls would be.

She left the quiet outer edge. The next aisle over had mostly wood shelving, not plastic, but the exhibitors were in rumpled Oxford shirts, not Italian suits. A memorial pamphlet for a Chinese female revolutionary published in Shanghai in 1907. She paused. The bookseller explained that Qiu Jin had been an advocate of female education and women’s rights before she was beheaded in 1907. The bookseller had failed to fasten one of the buttons on the collar of his button-down shirt. Liesl was hungry. She thought an $18,000 acquisition might satisfy her appetite. She asked the exhibitor to hold the pamphlet pending a call back to the university.