Liesl looked at her watch. Checking those three books had taken forty-five seconds. She tried to do the math, but there were so many variables. Some books, the modern ones especially, would be easy to rule out on sight. Others were shelved in boxes and would need to be totally unboxed before they could be ruled out. That could add almost a full minute per book. They might find one volume or two or three but not the others. That had to be considered when thinking about time, but this way, she thought, it wasn’t impossible. What was impossible was the idea that they would find the book before the donors found out they’d lost it.
She kept pulling and reshelving books. It became meditative. She could have been there five minutes, she could have been there an hour; she became lost in it. All she knew was that the library wasn’t yet open. The basement lights always gave a small flicker when the sign by the front door was turned on. She had been down here enough times to know that. And the lights hadn’t yet flickered. Which is why she was surprised, knowing that the library was not yet open, to realize that she wasn’t alone in the basement. She stopped pulling books. She stopped breathing.
It was the chain that gave it away. The sound came from behind the fire door, and if the culprit had only been pulling books, Liesl never would have heard it. But the chain. The monks who made illuminated manuscripts used to attach chains to the spines to keep them from getting stolen, and there were two in the library’s collection that still had their chains attached. She heard the heavy chain against the metal shelf. There was no event planned that required one of those manuscripts, and a researcher request to view one would have had to be cleared by the library director. By Liesl. There was no reason for anyone to be touching that chain on that morning.
“Who is it? Who’s there?” she called as she burst through the fire door.
“Liesl? Is that you?”
“What’s going on, Max? It’s barely seven thirty. Why do you have that manuscript out?”
Liesl waited for him to answer, wondering if the hair curling near her ears from the humidity of the morning or the skin creasing in the corner of her eyes from the severity of her headache was undermining her authority. He’d had the manuscript laid open on a book truck, but he closed it, spine creaking, chain rattling, before he replied.
“I am responsible for religious collections here, am I not?” He stood impossibly straight. His attire impossibly smooth. His neck, what she could see of it, was impossibly free from sweat.
Liesl badly wanted some coffee and water. She should have stopped at that Starbucks. “It’s a tense time,” she said. “I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t have questions.”
“Yes. That’s what would make you irresponsible.”
“You haven’t answered my question. What are you doing with that book?”
She glanced at her watch. The coffee shop in the adjoining building would be open in fifteen minutes. “What, do you think I was going to steal it?” he said. “I don’t like being accused of things. I won’t let myself be accused of things.”
“That is not what I asked. I wasn’t making accusations.” She would splurge for an Americano, not just a regular coffee.
“The alarm was off,” Max said. “The lights were on. Do you think I didn’t know someone else was down here? Do you think everyone pays so little attention?”
“So little attention?”
“The rest of us are paying attention, Liesl. I’m paying attention. You’re here to what, protect our reputation while we wait for Christopher to return? It took you a single day to fail at that.”
If his shirt collar hadn’t been the perfect size, his Adam’s apple would have strained against the top button. But Max would never have allowed for such a thing.
Liesl turned to leave.
“Christopher would have wanted me. If he had to be away, if he was going to be ill, I’m the one who is best able to stand in for him. He knew that. I know he did. And you know it.”
She kept her back turned, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her face. She could not be certain about the validity of Max’s claim that he was best-equipped to stand in as interim director. But as for Christopher’s preference for Max as his proxy over Liesl? They both knew that was true.
“Don’t think I don’t know about the Peshawar either. Dan told me you were about to let just anyone work with it.”
“A respected faculty member.”
“So respected that she’s never been in here. We’ve never heard of her. Don’t you care at all about these collections?”
“I’ve worked here longer than you have, Max.”
“It’s hardly about tenure, is it? I know these books in my bones. The way Christopher does. It’s my calling. The library isn’t just somewhere I’ve worked a long time.”
“I didn’t volunteer for this.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t. But you didn’t say no either. You didn’t think of what Christopher would want. What the library would need.”
Liesl shook her head.
“Christopher will be back and well soon, I’m sure,” she said. “Until then, we have to find a way to work together.”
“Are you asking me to put on appearances?” Max said. “Well, I won’t. You’ve lost a piece of religious history. Of world history. I won’t put on appearances that everything is fine until that is resolved. Nor should anyone else around here.”
She turned back around to face him, finally. “I don’t understand, Max,” she said. “The Plantin never made it into the safe. Christopher didn’t put it into the safe. Why are you so insistent that I’m to blame?”
“Why not?”
“You need a more compelling reason than that.”
“Because you are the only one who doesn’t seem certain that it wasn’t their fault. I can see it in your eyes, the doubt.”
“That’s your imagination, I’m afraid.”
“Are you down here, going through book by book, because you think it was on Christopher’s desk and was mis-shelved? Is that my imagination?”
“Please make sure you sign out that manuscript if you’re to use it,” Liesl said. “Or put it right back.”
She finally walked out the door, finally went to the elevator, finally got into the office, finally closed the door, and finally let herself cry, but only a little. She looked around the office and tried to imagine where the books had been before she’d had them removed. Three on the desk? Four? A stack on the filing cabinet. The Plantin was bound in the eighteenth century, in a red morocco binding. She checked her copy of the invoice. Six volumes. Could she have missed that? Could Dan? She had heard the binding was beautiful. The deep-red goatskin, the gilt edges. Could she have missed that? She walked back to the door of the office and stood facing the room as she had when she first entered on Monday. No, she didn’t think she had missed anything. She was almost certain now. The Plantin hadn’t been taken out of the office and mislaid. It had never been there in the first place.
5
The students interfered greatly with Liesl’s enjoyment of the campus. The breeze rustling the old oaks, the September crispness nudging out the August humidity. It was a perfect time in a perfect place to remove one’s shoes and read Jane Austen, but, Liesl thought, how could one go barefoot and not risk having one’s toes crushed beneath all these undergraduates? There were students coming from every direction, heading toward the large lecture hall that was attached to the administration building. Liesl was a river rock, and they were the water that rushed around her.