The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(51)

His room was the last one along the corridor, but then she got there and wasn’t sure if she could go in. She had brought him a book, a collection of William Sydney Porter’s letters, and though she knew he was unconscious and couldn’t read, she thought that having the book in his room might have some sort of impact. That the smell of the paper and cardboard and glue would shake him awake.

“Christopher?” she whispered from the doorway. He looked one hundred years old. The skin on his face hung off his skull like a wet rag on a rock.

The hospital room was cut off from three others in an ICU cluster by a frosted-glass partition and a blue cotton sheet. A dozen floral arrangements in various states of decomposition were clustered on a side table, and Liesl didn’t know where to look in the room that would keep her from having to watch something decay. She’d sat in many rooms with Christopher Wolfe, and no matter the setting, he’d always managed to make himself the center of the space, always managed to suck all the air out.

Here, with his bed in the very middle of the floor, with his breath drawing from a lightly beeping ventilator, he looked as unimportant as she’d ever seen him. She was filled with a sense of foreboding that she hadn’t felt in her stomach since her own mother died. A sense that a source of answers, of steadiness, had been taken from her. It was John who had coached her through the dread, reminding her that her mother had suffered from dementia for at least the last ten years of her life, and that even if death lent the feeling of finality, her mother hadn’t been a source of answers in a long, long time.

“Liesl. I didn’t know you were coming.”

Liesl gasped, audibly gasped, at the sound of Marie’s voice behind her. Shocked that someone would dare interrupt her reverie, embarrassed that she’d been caught tiptoeing around the ICU. She stuck out the book and forced it on Marie like an offering on an altar.

“I’m intruding.”

“You’re not.”

“Is there any news?”

“He’s the same.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“The same isn’t necessarily bad.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Find the Plantin.”

“The police are involved now.”

“Yes.”

“I’m intruding.”

The book was in Marie’s hands, and there was nothing else to say. Liesl was wet from sweat and followed the blue arrows back to the cold October air as fast as she could.

A cryptic call from a blocked number had reached Liesl’s cell phone at some point between obstetrics and Marie, and while a call from a concealed number was not an uncommon occurrence, a call from a concealed number that was accompanied by a voicemail was unusual enough to catch Liesl’s attention. So when Liesl exited the hospital, she didn’t walk right for the Bathurst bus to get back to the library. She clicked the button to play the message because there was a chance the message was the detective or Miriam herself or some other sort of good or at least relieving news. Strange as it sounds, Liesl was convinced that a voicemail from a blocked number had to be a happy announcement, if only to even the odds.

President Garber, ignorant of Liesl’s need for cheer, had used all 120 seconds allowable in a single voice message, intent on expressing his displeasure, intent on putting Liesl in her place after she had dared, dared contact a prominent Quranic scholar to advocate for the purchase of some blue manuscript, a purchase that the scholar was now near-insisting the university make.

Delete. She deleted the 120-second berating about her place and responsibilities and “times like these” and then went to wait for the bus. She couldn’t delete the words from her memory but she deleted them from her phone, and as the bus pulled up, she deleted the record of the call from the blocked number, just for good measure.

The door of the office was open when she returned to the library. Detective Yuan was seated at the desk. He was flipping through a Sotheby’s catalog she had left by the computer. He looked up and waved her in when she came to the door.

“Are these really the prices?” he said. He turned the catalog over so she could see the page. “Someone is going to pay $35,000 for a children’s book?”

“For a first edition of Harry Potter.”

He turned the catalog back over and looked at the page again.

“It’s ten dollars at the store down the street,” he said.

“There were only five hundred printed in that edition,” she said.

He shrugged and tossed the catalog aside.

“It has a couple of typos. It’s very rare.”

“Would you like to get lunch?”

“Is this another interview?”

“I’m not planning an interrogation,” the detective said. “Just an update. I thought you’d be interested.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“Miriam? Why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know. Because it’s the worst possible outcome.”

Yuan pulled on his trench coat.

“It’s unlikely,” he said as he walked toward the elevator. Liesl hadn’t agreed to lunch but didn’t feel like there was a choice. “I also don’t think she’s taken a lover.”

“Are people still proposing that as a theory?”