The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(77)

“It never is,” Liesl said with a laugh. “But tell me all the same.” She leaned forward and whispered, “It’s not the oldest zero, is it?”

“It’s not,” Rhonda said. “But I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this.”

“Tell me. Will we have to remove this particular claim from the library’s Wikipedia page?”

“I’m going to try my best to explain.”

“Please do,” Liesl said. “I imagine I’ll have to explain to the marketing department why they need to update the library’s brochures.”

Liesl leaned back in her chair. Crossed her legs at the ankles. Rhonda remained upright, hands folded on the report.

“Liesl. My high-school calculus textbook used the zero before the manuscript we tested did.”

The stone that Liesl had been carrying around in her stomach since September was back. She let her head roll backward so she was looking at the ceiling. There was a light bulb out.

“It’s a fake?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rhonda said. “Now I know mathematics, and I know libraries, but I’m not a physicist. But I’ll try to explain what the physicists found.” She slid the report across the table.

“There’s always been some variation in the estimates,” Liesl said. “It could be eleventh century.” Her response was perfectly rational. Her behavior, perfectly rational, but she could feel her pulse beating in her throat, and her muscles and bones and tendons were begging her to get out of that chair, out of the library, and run as fast as she could from this stack of problems.

“Yes,” Rhonda said. “That’s what we thought at first. So the lab redid the testing when the first result was so confusing.”

“And?” said Liesl.

“Again, I’m not a physicist. But there’s something called the bomb peak.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the frequent testing of nuclear weapons caused large variations in radiocarbon concentration.”

“So the ‘bomb’ is a nuclear bomb?”

Liesl was looking through the pages of the report. There were charts and graphs and lists of numbers she didn’t know the significance of.

“It roughly doubled the radiocarbon concentration in the atmosphere.” Rhonda reached over and closed the report. “It allows physicists to tell with a great deal of accuracy when something was created in the second half of the twentieth century or later.”

“It’s been in the university’s collection for over a hundred years,” Liesl said.

“No.”

“No?”

“Not the manuscript we sampled.”

Liesl covered her mouth with her hands.

“So you’re not saying we acquired a forgery a hundred years ago,” Liesl said.

“Liesl. You know I can’t speculate.”

“Right. But you can confirm that even if we acquired a forgery a hundred years ago, this isn’t it?”

“Yes. I suppose I can confirm that.”

Liesl stood up and then Rhonda did.

“How long?” Liesl said. “How long do I have until the lab submits the results for publication and this goes public?”

Rhonda picked up the loose pages of the report. She knew exactly what Liesl was asking of her. Her answer confirmed that yes, she knew.

“They’ll wait,” Rhonda said. “No one at the lab will report anything until you have told us we can do so.”

Liesl led Rhonda back to the elevator. They said a quiet goodbye. Liesl walked back through to the larger reading room. It had been cleaned from the night before; there was no trace of the drinking or the mourning that had taken place under the eyes of the books. Liesl stretched out, resting her feet on a table and looking up to the shining books and the one burned-out light bulb, hoping the answer of what to do would suddenly come to her.





Nine Years Earlier


The sixty-one-year-old chief librarian of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections was forty-five minutes late for his meeting with the brand-new university president, Lawrence Garber. By the time the librarian arrived, the university’s youngest-ever president was scheduled to leave for his next meeting with the dean of the medical school. Garber wanted to leave on general principle, but as an economist, he subscribed to the idea of sunk cost and knew that the time already spent waiting could not be recovered. The board of regents at the university had advised of the importance of the rare books library as a major source of donors, and Garber knew that leaving now would only mean another wasted forty-five minutes as a result of another power play by a man who didn’t like answering to someone ten years his junior.

“Mr. Garber,” Christopher said with a warm handshake when he finally appeared. He made no apologies for his tardiness.

“You have a beautiful library here,” Garber said, not too proud to flatter. “Opened in ’69, I understand?”

“We got our own building then, yes.”

“And you’ve been the chief since then? Since 1969?”

“Why?”

Garber took a seat without being asked. The room had swung back in his favor. “Thirty-one years is an awfully long time. I’m interested in planning for the future.”