The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(85)

He stopped at the top of the stairs.

“I don’t need her to be valorized. What we owe her is peace.”

“Justice for who did this, for the real thief, wouldn’t that give her peace?” Liesl asked. “Wouldn’t that give you peace?”

“It might. If I believed justice was at all possible.”

He continued down the stairs. And she let him. Because she didn’t have an argument that might convince him to stay.





18


After work she met Francis at a playground. It was packed despite the cold. Small children in bright parkas, shoving each other into snowbanks as they clamored to be next in line for the slide. There was a cluster of mothers in designer coats talking in a huddle. Liesl sat on a cold wooden bench next to Francis. The grandson he was babysitting was among the children. She didn’t see him.

A small band of slightly older boys—Liesl was never very good at guessing the ages of children, but these were larger than the preschoolers who occupied most of the playground—had climbed to the top of a play structure and were pelting with snowballs anyone who tried to approach. One of the boys had his navy parka unzipped, and his brown hair had sprung loose from its ponytail so that it haloed his frost-pink face. He let out a guttural scream that drew Francis’s attention enough for him to whistle and wave the boy over.

“Robespierre! Here!” Francis yelled.

He marched in their direction, the child who had screamed, with his brows knit and his chest pushed forward. He was ready for a confrontation.

“Do you really call him that?” she asked. “Or is it just Robbie?”

“Never Robbie,” Francis said as the boy approached. “He goes into a frenzy if you try Robbie.”

“Robespierre it is.”

“What is it, Grandpa?” the boy asked.

“The snowballs,” Francis said. “And the screaming.”

Freed by the absence of their tormentor, the small children had reoccupied the play structure. He looked back at it with regret.

“Is that all?” the boy asked.

“That’s all,” Francis said. The boy ran back in the direction of his kingdom, emitting another scream to let everyone know who was in charge.

“Sorry I didn’t introduce you,” Francis said.

“No. I’m quite glad you didn’t.”

“When they gave him a name like Robespierre,” Francis said, “did they think for a moment he would be a normal kid?”

“I’m glad you invited me.”

“Even though you’re terrified of my grandson?”

“I wanted a chance to apologize.” The playground was penance. Because Liesl had the soot of accusation on her and mere water couldn’t get her hands clean. Instead, she had insisted on accompanying Francis somewhere on his turf, even if it really meant Robespierre’s turf, to ask his forgiveness.

“There’s nothing to it, Liesl. Whatever it is you want to say isn’t worth dwelling on.”

“I treated you badly.”

“You believed something unbelievable about me.”

“I think I did.” Liesl said. It was hard to come to terms with the depth of her suspicion. Liesl had drawn a thorough picture to settle the case—Francis’s skulking around with his manuscript-as-shopping-list, using old intelligence connections to sell the books on the black market—but once all the detail of the picture was filled in, it revealed itself as ridiculous. So there she was. A cold bench in a cold playground.

The detail that made Francis’s innocence true to Liesl was the first bit of the picture Liesl had drawn: Francis rolling his manuscript into the office on a book truck. A stack of papers with the clue that the Vesalius was about to be found missing (if she had known then the depth of what would follow!) and asked her, begged her, to read his words, the words that his mentor had, until that point, asked him to keep a secret. This had been in September, but it took everything that came after for Liesl to understand it.

“What I need to know,” Francis said, “is if you kept me close to, I don’t know, crack the case?”

Liesl shook her head. “No, Francis. I just liked having you close.”

“But you don’t anymore?”

“I wasn’t being fair,” Liesl said. “To you or to John.”

Robespierre came barreling back over to their bench. “Grandpa,” he said. “Give me a stick.”

“What’s that?” Francis said.

“Give me a stick.”

“Why on earth would I give you a stick?”

“F-I-T-E. Do you know what that spells?”

“What?”

“F-I-T-E. Do you know what word that spells?”

“That doesn’t spell anything. F-I-G-H-T spells ‘fight.’ You want me to give you a stick so you can go fight?”

“Yes.”

“Go away.”

He hurtled himself back into the pack of children at the other end of the playground. Francis crossed his legs and, in doing so, turned his body away from Liesl.

“Did you really believe I could have done it?” Francis said. “That I would have done that to Chris, to the library, to you?”

She got up from the bench and stood over him, stomping her feet to keep them warm. On the street beyond the playground fence, a streetcar rumbled past. The sun was nearing the horizon, and one by one, the mothers and fathers who had been standing at the park’s periphery were taking small mittened hands and walking them home for warm dinners.