The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(88)

“Who’d like to start?” Lieutenant Levi said.

President Garber and both detectives turned to look at Liesl. She in turn looked at the floor. She was prepared, of course she was prepared, but she had expected some lubrication to get things started.

“If you’re not going to say anything,” Garber said, “then I won’t sit here and have my time be wasted.”

Liesl pulled Christopher’s manuscript out of her bag.

President Garber didn’t know what he was looking at. He waited for the detectives to tell him what to do. Liesl pushed the stack of papers over to Garber so he could read the title page. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections by Christopher Wolfe and Francis Churchill. His eyes went wider, ever so slightly wider as he read the names. Detective Yuan got up from the table and poured two glasses of water. He handed one to Garber and one to Liesl. Garber licked his lips and began to smile. He tasted blood.

“I didn’t think he had it in him,” Garber said.

“Then you thought less of him than I believed.”

“I’ve scarcely thought of him at all,” Garber said.

“You’re misreading,” Liesl said. “I’m not presenting this as evidence of a crime by Francis.”

The first blow landed. Liesl felt the crunch. The case against Christopher could have been made without the final chapter of the manuscript, but its delivery from Marie earlier that week could leave no doubt for anyone.

After Christopher’s death, Liesl had lost all hope of ever securing the last piece of evidence. Marie couldn’t be blamed for a desire to protect her late husband’s legacy. It had come as a parcel, not delivered by Marie herself. Typed pages in a yellow envelope, with Christopher’s familiar script up and down the margins of the pages that were meant to be the final chapter of the book that he and Francis were writing together. Liesl would have recognized that handwriting anywhere. She had seen it thousands of times. Notes left on her desk, scribbled onto cocktail napkins, telling her of five-figure deals he had made over Laphroaig that she was to find the money for. Red ink over her own manuscripts that she gave him to edit and he returned, purportedly strengthened but really just transliterated into his own voice. She would have recognized the handwriting anywhere, so she recognized it immediately when she saw the notes he had left all over the chapter he had written about the Plantin Polyglot Bible.

Christopher was a talented writer and had done the book justice. He had written in depth about the feat of typesetting that was required to print the parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic alongside the translations and commentary in Latin. In the earlier part of the chapter, he had devoted some time to the scholarly significance of the work, for its contributions to philological and biblical scholarship and printing arts and the way that the Plantin would complement the library’s existing collections. The chapter would have been incomplete if Christopher had not written about the enormous undertaking the book represented for the printer, the level of scholarship that was involved, the money that would have been required to make the project possible, not to mention the work the publisher did to negotiate the religious and political issues of Reformation Europe. It was a feat, and Christopher wrote about it beautifully. Beautifully and briefly. The chapter was not ultimately interested in the history of the book, or the scholarly significance of the book. It was interested in the beauty of the book. He called it sumptuous. He wrote about the flirty serifs on the Greek characters. The woodcut signature of the scholar who oversaw the translations that ended every section. The shine of the gilt backstrip. Christopher had written about the beauty of the book in a way that only someone who had held it in his arms could have.

The Vesalius chapter had the same magic. From the moment the library had received the book on deposit, decades ago, the librarians had seen that there was something exceptional about the edition. There was scarcely a page that did not have handwritten annotations. The chapter about the Vesalius in Christopher’s book detailed the notes which in many cases did not amount to changes to the meaning of the text but to changes in the style of writing. The annotations, it turned out, were Vesalius’s own and influenced the changes he made to De humani corporis fabrica in subsequent editions. The loving way that Christopher wrote about the Vesalius, the attention he bestowed to each annotation, the way he identified that the annotator wrote in three slightly different styles, and the way he was able to argue that the different styles of annotation matched the letters and other manuscript material that Vesalius was creating at the time: It was masterful. And Christopher’s chapter should have been masterful, because he had spent years with the Vesalius.

The discovery that the annotations were in Vesalius’s own hand was one of Christopher’s most notable contributions to the scholarship of medical history, of book history. The nature of the discovery was itself an argument for the vitality of rare book libraries, because it would have been impossible for him to discover such a thing had he not had access to the physical object of the Vesalius. Vesalius had lived five hundred years before Christopher studied his work, and yet the two men had known each other intimately. Had Christopher been working from facsimiles or from digital images, such a level of fraternity between the two men would have been impossible. Christopher wove fact and story and history in the way he wrote about the Vesalius; it was a beautiful thing to read. The problem that Liesl pointed out to the assembled group was that Christopher wrote with the same familiarity about the Plantin, a book that he should have no personal history with.