The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(53)

“Right,” Liesl said. She stayed sitting as a form of protest, not wanting him to leave until she had some small bit of satisfaction, some answer that made sense. “But you won’t investigate her for the commission of said crime.”

“Right.”

“Is all law enforcement this insane?” she asked.

“No. But in my experience, all academia is.”

“What should I be doing now?”

“Eating your delicious sandwich,” he said. He put his hands in the pockets of his trench coat.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve never had more authority and less control in my life.”

“That’s funny.”

“Not to me.”

“Let President Garber deal with the theft, and let me deal with Miriam,” he said. “You keep yourself sane by finding yourself something no one else can say no to.”

***

She asked Dan to clear some boxes out of the receiving room. He cited a clause from the collective bargaining agreement explaining why he wouldn’t. She picked up the Christie’s catalog, looking with longing at Lot 37. She ignored the stack of unpaid invoices on the desk. She took her half-eaten sandwich to the lunchroom and threw the sandwich and the wrapper in the general trash bin instead of the green bin. It didn’t satisfy her. She went back to the office and picked up the phone.

“Rhonda,” she said. “It’s Liesl from the library.”

“Is everything all right?”

“All right? Why wouldn’t it be?”

She was drumming her fingers on the table and clenching her jaw. She might have sounded manic.

“I’m calling about the Peshawar.”

Somewhere in a hospital bed, Christopher’s eyelids fluttered.

“I’d love for you to take it for your research.”

A team from the university’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit came to the library the next day. All three wore eccentric designer glasses.

They came several times over the next few days. There were measurements and preparations and discussions about how to carry out sampling. Liesl did not ask Dan to bring out and put away the Peshawar every time it was needed for these meetings. She did it herself. In the evenings she called Vivek and Detective Yuan to check on progress, and she responded to President Garber’s voicemails with curt emails. It began to get dark very early in the evenings, but Liesl did not let that deter her from walking home through the cold every night.





13


Liesl lay on rumpled linens, drool puddling on her pillow, one eye half-open and watching the clock so she could count every second that she had left to sleep, pretending not to notice the sour smell of night sweat paired with last night’s gewürztraminer on her breath.

“Liesl, wake up.” John came into the room smelling of shampoo. “You have to go to work.”

He was washed and dressed. Gray beard, blue eyes, white teeth. The man she was married to had once spent fifteen consecutive days in bed, and now he looked like an advertisement for a retirement home for active seniors; she was stupefied by how much she resented it. She calculated that she had thirty minutes longer to sleep. She turned her back to him.

“You’re in the newspaper. The library is.” He set a mug of coffee on her night table and then the newspaper on the opposite side of the bed so she could see the frowning photo of Miriam on the front page next to the cathedral of the library’s inner stacks.

She sat up.

The rare books library thought it was just unlucky earlier this year when a rare Plantin Polyglot Bible, printed between 1568 and 1572, went missing.

“The Plantin Polyglot Bible closes the most notable gap in our collection of post-1500 bibles,” said Maximilian Hubbard, a former Catholic priest and the library’s religion collections coordinator, when the book was acquired.

He had no idea that the book would soon go missing, alongside one of the institution’s librarians. Miriam Peters was reported missing two weeks ago. A source familiar with the case, speaking on background to reporters, said Peters is suspected of having made off with the Plantin Bible and at least one other work from the library’s vast and valuable collection.

“Who else has seen this?” Liesl asked John.

“Liesl. It’s the front page of the newspaper. We’re not in the boom days of journalism, but it’s the front page.”

“If we leave now, can we buy them all before anyone else is awake?”

“You didn’t tell me about Miriam.”

“Of course I did. I told you she was missing.”

“That she was missing. You didn’t tell me that you suspected her of the theft.”

“I don’t suspect her. But she is suspected.”

“Nice girl, that Miriam. I always assumed you quite liked her.”

“Do I stink? Can I run in now without a shower?”

“You need a shower. Would you like to do some breathing exercises?”

“I don’t think you understand what this news story means for me.”

“I understand precisely. But this is about more than your work. Miriam is someone you care about.”

Liesl threw the newspaper aside so she didn’t have to look at the familiar wounded expression on Miriam’s face as she contemplated what to do next.