The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(47)

“I would have ended the conversation if he hadn’t,” Rhonda said. “I had an agenda in agreeing to do this for you.”

The vegan in the wig interrupted them to say she was leaving. Both Liesl and Rhonda shook her hand and wished her a good night. Her wig had slipped slightly to the left. On account of the wine.

“The Peshawar should be carbon-dated,” Rhonda said. “I can find us the resources to do it.”

A waiter came by with more wine. Liesl covered her glass with her hand to refuse him.

“You’d ruin it,” said Liesl. “We’d lose the book.”

A weak argument. They were already losing the book.

“A lot of the money in this room is supportive of the idea. Don’t say no out of fear of the unknown.”

Liesl made Rhonda no promises. Walking home that night, she called and left a message. For Professor Mahmoud. Asking him about his interest in a leaf from a Quran; gold calligraphy on blue vellum.

Liesl stopped by the noodle shop on the corner on her way home and asked for an order of dumplings. It was only a minute or two between the noodle shop and her front door, but she ate the slippery dumplings with her fingers as she walked, plucking them from the tray and slurping them up in giant bites.





Nineteen Years Earlier


Max sweated under the fluorescent lobby lights, one of the first times he’d been out of the house at all since his secret stopped being a secret.

“You’re not wearing the collar.” Christopher walked a lap around Max when he greeted him in the library’s lobby and found him in a suit that looked very much like his own. “Are we worried that the change will raise questions?”

Christopher was striding back toward his office. Max followed. Every person they passed on the way through the workroom was staring at him; he was sure of it. Max put his fingers up to his neck where the collar had been. Mourning its departure.

“It was in the newspaper. The questions are no longer sleeping.” He pulled his tie tighter, wanting it to act as armor the way his collar always had.

“It’s fine, I guess. They’ll know you’ve left the church…” Christopher’s voice trailed off as he searched through stacks of papers on his desk, shoving piles from one side to the other.

“Wait, do they know I’m coming?” Max put his hands in his pockets, then crossed his arms in front of him, then clasped them behind his back. Without the armor of the collar, he wasn’t even certain how to stand.

“I thought it best not to leave a lot of time in advance for questions. It’ll be a nice surprise.” He held a sheet of paper, finally retrieved from the piles, up in the air like a victor’s flag.

Max thought it would have been better to be honest. To confess about the scandal. To be open about the stolen money. To tell them exactly why he had been asked to leave the church. He had been under the impression that Christopher agreed with him, but now it was clear that wasn’t true, and he let Christopher take the lead. He knew this place and these people better, and besides, he was Max’s boss now, and even outside of the church, it was in Max’s nature to be an obedient servant.

Ever since he had left St. Peter’s parish, he had been in a state of disorder, looking for a job, looking for a home, waiting for the police to come and disrupt it all. He might have checked himself into a hospital if not for Christopher. Christopher knew him well enough to invite him to deliver the Jackman Lecture a year earlier, to speak on the King James Bible. What did Christopher care about scandal when there was a great-books man who could be brought onto staff?





12


It was an aching and unpleasant morning, the kind that let an old woman know exactly how old she was: puffy face, sore knees, the fuzz on the tongue of a crone who had been using wine to help her sleep. John had left the bed without waking her; he was up in his attic studio alone. He raised his eyes when she came up to see him but didn’t say anything. He could see she wasn’t at her best.

They weren’t at their best. But she needed his counsel. She sat on the stool in front of a blank canvas, but he told her she looked too serious for there to not be coffee, and he wouldn’t let her tell him what was on her mind until they were dressed and out of the house at the coffee shop with the blue awning and the ginger cookies. He insisted on taking their coffee outside, walking with it.

Powerless, afraid to go to the library for another day, the library she was meant to be leading, Liesl kicked a stone on the sidewalk, lost in her disquiet and doubt, pulling from her memory stories and images about Miriam and testing theories and fears out on John so that he might tell her what to do. She couldn’t remember Miriam ever arriving anywhere late or breaking any rule at all. Miriam had been comforting in her predictability. Liesl recalled the time she and Miriam were filling out the paperwork for a large donation of materials by a prominent Caribbean poet, maybe two years after Miriam had started at the library. They were sitting at Liesl’s desk in front of a pastel sketch interpretation of one of the poems by the poet himself, trying to describe the depth of the shade of yellow and the feeling it conjured in an application for a tax receipt, and Miriam said, “‘Nature rarer uses yellow.’” Liesl looked at her, surprised, but Miriam found her voice and continued from memory, “‘Than another hue; Saves she all of that for sunsets, Prodigal of blue, Spending scarlet like a woman, Yellow she affords Only scantly and selectively, Like a lover’s words.’”