The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(58)

On the way back to the library, she walked on the shady side of the street, under the ginkgo trees that shielded the campus from the sun in the summer but shed their fruit and stunk like vomit through the autumn. The sidewalks were littered with the rotting yellow berries, and she smashed them with her shoes as she walked. It was midterm season, so the students didn’t gather in clusters by the food trucks anymore. They walked from class to class with their heads down, their backpacks full.

“What are we supposed to do?” Max said when she walked in, looking at the ringing phone on the reference desk like it was a bomb.

Liesl shook her head. “Proactively contact the Plantin donors, hold their hands, stroke their heads, feed them warm milk, all while not giving them too much information about what’s actually going on.”

As she approached him, he stuck out his hand, holding a stack of messages. It was too late to contact the Plantin donors proactively. She wanted to stick the stack in the trash and run away. The authority she had entered with evaporated in an audible puff.

She didn’t have a full list of the Plantin donors. She didn’t tell Max that part. Christopher hadn’t saved anything on his computer, so it could be anywhere on one of the thousands of sheets of loose paper in his office. Max was already panicking, so she didn’t tell him that part. He was the type who still received the morning paper. Liesl imagined him wearing a dressing gown. Not a robe, but a dressing gown. His husband becoming increasingly concerned as he watched the horror spread over Max’s face as he read the article, letting his coffee get cold. Or maybe there had been no horror at all. Maybe he was the one who leaked to the press.

She clutched the stack of messages with her sweaty hands. She was panicking too.

“We can split them up,” he said.

“They’re going to want to hear from me,” Liesl said.

“All they want is to have their call returned.”

She didn’t argue because she didn’t want to. She wanted someone to offer to help her, and he had. If he had an agenda, she didn’t care. Max had a talent for soothing donors.

“Should I handle Percy?” Max asked.

The right answer was no. Percy was their most important donor, Percy had fronted most of the money for the Plantin, Percy would be among the angriest of the donors because Percy was often angry anyway. Liesl nodded. Percy would prefer to hear from the one of them who came to work in a tie. He pulled Percy’s message slip from the pile.

“Don’t be more honest than you have to,” Liesl said.

The phone was ringing again, the bomb ticking again. He reached for it, but she shook her head. If the reference desk phone went unanswered, the call would be rerouted to an open line in the workroom. Right now they were doing triage. Someone inside could deal with new messages.

She handed Max his pile of messages. His skin drooped against his eye sockets and his tie had skewed to the left, but he didn’t look like he was panicking anymore. He was a man who knew about secrets. He had done this before.

“We tell the truth,” Liesl said. She placed a message from a retired faculty member and good friend on top of her pile.

“But not too much of it?”

“The Plantin disappeared. With Christopher’s illness, there was a delay in reporting.” She paused. “We believe it will be recovered.”

“What about Miriam?”

“I went and saw Vivek this morning.”

A flinch. A blow making it past his armor. He had imagination enough to think of what the conversation must have been like. The elevator door opened, and Liesl crushed the pile of messages in her fists. A young man, a graduate student, walked out into the artificial light. The university marched forward. He had requested the use of the papers of a prominent songwriter and poet. There were dozens of gray archive boxes in the main reading room waiting for him.

“Can I have your student card?” Max asked. His hands weren’t shaking; his fists weren’t clenched. He had done this before. He noted the young man’s details, directed him to his papers. They stayed quiet until he was through the door.

“Where does Vivek think she is?” Max said.

“Nowhere good,” she said. “He asked her for a divorce.”

“Goodness. When?”

The graduate student—buzz-cut brown hair, Labrador grin—came back out front. He had only brought a pen to take notes. He didn’t know the rules. He’d been sent out to the reference area in search of a pencil. Liesl opened the top drawer of the desk and rooted around for a sharpened pencil. She handed it to him, and instead of looking grateful, he looked amused. He likely hadn’t used a pencil since grade school. No matter. He trotted back into the reading room, tail wagging as he went.

She unclenched her fists and smoothed the messages. Impossible to know how much she should tell Max, how much she should trust him. In the end, trust didn’t matter. It was a grim morning. She needed to talk to someone, and Max was there.

The reading room door swung open again. The graduate student came back out into the reference area, holding up the pencil, its tip snapped. She motioned to the pencil sharpener.

Liesl and Max watched him make his way over, insert the pencil into the old steel sharpener bolted to the long desk, and begin to turn the hand crank. It roared. He smiled to himself, the graduate student, at the noise he was making.