The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(50)

The hackles in the room went up. Max looked up from his bible, and Francis laid down his pencil, and Dan pressed Pause on his Discman. They watched the detective.

Liesl was standing in silence, also watching. She was telling two lies. She didn’t give the detective the full context surrounding Miriam’s disappearance. And she didn’t pick up the phone to tell Garber that another book was missing.

“Will you excuse me?” Liesl said.

The detective nodded. Having answered some rudimentary questions, she was already invisible to him. Dan and Max and Francis watched Liesl leave the workroom. She heard the scraping of a chair; someone was walking behind her. She quickened her pace, walked into the office, and closed the heavy door before her pursuer could confront her.

Garber had not explicitly told her to avoid sending emails about the theft. Yet, without explicitly telling her, it had been made clear that there should be no paper trail, no evidence that the administration had known about a theft and failed to act. Liesl looked at the phone but didn’t pick it up. She began to type an email.

“Did Garber tell you to invite the police in?” Francis blew through her office door without knocking. “Are they investigating Miriam for the Plantin?”

“I need a moment to do something.”

“Are you not going to tell me what’s going on? Don’t I deserve to know?”

“Deserve to know. Do you deserve to know? I’m emailing President Garber to report the theft of the Vesalius as a courtesy before I report it to the police.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, dropped his eyes to the floor, shrinking himself. Every feature that made him look like a spy could also make him look like a villain. It didn’t mean he was guilty. The news of a second theft was shocking. The news of Liesl’s disloyalty to Garber was shocking. It didn’t mean he was guilty.

They were interrupted by the detective at the office door. He looked between them, the air full of accusation.

Francis backed out of the room, having said nothing, and Detective Yuan reentered it, closing the door softly behind him.

“I haven’t told you the whole story,” Liesl said.

“I see that now.” The air of accusation lingered. The detective could smell in the air that there was information that had been withheld from him.

“This isn’t my office. I’m not the library director.”

“Yes, that’s obvious.”

“That I’m not the director?”

“That this isn’t your office. The upholstery smells like testosterone.”

“The director had a stroke,” she said. “And a situation has arisen while I’ve been filling in.”

“A situation. Does it have to do with Miriam’s disappearance?”

The phone on Christopher’s desk rang.

“That’s one theory.”

“Okay. I’d prefer not to entertain theories. I like my information served straight.”

It was a ridiculous line that only a movie detective would say. But it made her like him.

“Miriam,” she said over the sound of the ringing phone. “Miriam disappeared at around the same time as two priceless manuscripts from our collection.”

“All right,” he said. Detective Yuan looked down at the phone and waited for her to answer it. The call display indicated that it was President Garber’s office. It seemed that the busy university president did indeed check his emails right away.

***

Liesl followed the blue arrows on the floor toward the intensive care unit. There were purple arrows for obstetrics, red for emergency, yellow for palliative care. Door after door clicked open as she approached, and she got a tour of most of the white-walled sterile space before she came to the ICU and encountered the first door that did not open on command. She almost turned around to leave. No one had known she had come in the first place. But then a sturdy nurse opened the door to get through and Liesl stepped through behind her.

She did not find Christopher’s room right away. In the first ICU suite she tried, a very handsome, very young man lay surrounded by tubes and computers while an equally young, equally attractive woman in her third trimester of pregnancy sat on the edge of his bed and wept.

While Liesl stared through the doorway at the dying man, Detective Yuan was moving, inhabiting her space and filling it with questions behind closed doors. She had left him to the library so she didn’t have to watch it, didn’t have to watch him draw conclusions and make assumptions about the people and the place. He knocked off interviews one by one, scrawling notes in his book while the assembly line deposited librarians and administrators and spouses and friends at the door of his makeshift interrogation room. They all looked so nice in their pressed shirts before they went behind the closed door to accuse their colleagues of major crimes and minor indiscretions.

From the ICU hallway Liesl could not hear nurses or doctors speaking or machines beeping. If she had encountered a person, she would have been too embarrassed to break the silence to ask for Christopher’s room.

The others had been taking turns going to visit, armed with books he couldn’t read and flowers he couldn’t smell. In the weeks it had taken her to make her first trip to the hospital to see him, she hadn’t been able to conjure any guilt. She was filling his chair; that would be more important to him than a visit. In those weeks, she hadn’t felt the need to see him. But now there was a detective in the library, and dominoes were falling, and she would have been too embarrassed to admit it to anyone, but she wanted to go and stand beside the book man to see if there were any answers in his aura.