“She’s done with all that. Who needs a lover when you have a terrible grandchild to dote on? Perhaps if I didn’t find the little bugger so hateful I’d have an easier time of it all.”
Liesl walked around the corner and got started on stack 539, wondering now about what the lack of Christopher might mean to a man like Francis. She had stopped talking and so had he, but they were within each other’s body heat now—him checking the books at one end of the stack and her at the other until eventually they would meet in the middle. He was pulling a book gently by its spine; she was opening an unmarked box.
“I think it’s lonely,” said Liesl. “No matter what. It’s just a thing about getting older.”
“Come on. That’s just the feeling of lovely Hannah growing up. Not the same thing.”
There was a long-unspoken rule that they didn’t talk about Hannah. Certainly not when they were alone. She should have chided him for it, but to do so would mean breaking the rule herself so she let it pass quietly.
“That’s part of it, I’m sure. But not all.”
“John-O still having his troubles?”
“Nothing like that,” she said. “I just think people retreat in on themselves as they age. So even if you’re not alone it can get a bit lonely.”
“I don’t know,” Francis studied the colophon of a book that was clearly not one of the Plantin volumes. “I think it’s the fact that our friends keep dying on us.” He reshelved the book and pulled out its nearest neighbor.
“Well, yes. That certainly doesn’t help.”
“I think I know what you’re saying, though, about the loneliness that arrives in your sixties. I can’t imagine it gets better as time goes on.”
“Married or not, it creeps in.”
“Still. Must be nice to have someone around to shag,” Francis said with a grin.
“It’s nice to have someone to have dinner with every night, absolutely.” She shot him a wink. The giddiness of a good flirt got rarer with age, but it didn’t get less potent.
“Don’t play coy with me,” he said. “You marry a man like that, it’s not for his money. It’s got to be something else.”
“It is wild to me that your mind still goes there.”
“It’s wild to me that yours doesn’t.”
“We’re not young,” she said.
“Some might even call us old. But we weren’t always.”
“Living in the past,” Liesl said. “Now there’s a thing that will make you lonely.”
“It’s not living in the past.”
“No?” she said. “Then what would you call it?”
“We were what, in our thirties when we met? You’ll always be that girl to me.”
They had reached the end of their work on stack 539 and stood arm to arm now. It was easy to imagine them as they had been. Francis with his flop of brown hair and enigmatic European past, her all legs and glasses and wit. If those two people had been standing this close, this alone. Well. The books in front of them might have burst into flames.
“Is that it then? Why you’re so certain I don’t know what I’m doing?”
They had been almost touching, but now Francis stepped back.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m still that girl to you,” she said. “And so you can’t trust my judgment about the Plantin.”
“Not this again.”
“It’s time to bring in the police.”
She resettled her weight against the shelving unit, and it shifted, just a little, on its track.
“We can’t have outsiders sniffing around this,” Francis said.
“Not outsiders. The police.”
Francis shook his head at her.
“You won’t be able to keep it quiet once you involve them. Remember what my mates at Oxford went through back when that fellow was pinching books? They brought in Scotland Yard and wound up in the Spectator. Do you fancy a write-up in the Spectator?”
They had taken their argument out of stack 539, and Liesl would have to remember to note later that it had been checked. She followed Francis toward the elevator. His evocation of Oxford put her on the back foot. She didn’t have mates. At Oxford, at Cambridge, anywhere really, who would know what to do. Christopher would have. Some friend he had roomed with at nineteen who would know just what the next move was to be.
“We have been looking for days,” she said, trying to get Francis to turn to face her.
“And what good will police do?” He jabbed at the elevator button. It was old and unhurried.
“What a bizarre question. They’ll investigate.”
He turned to her. “‘Rogues and Ne’er-Do-Wells.’ That was the Spectator headline. I remember it like yesterday. Will the police come down here and search the stacks with us?”
“Of course not.”
“Access some network of rare-book dealers we don’t know about? That’s what my mate said, by the way. If they’d have just gone to their dealers before the police, they’d have solved the whole thing and prevented the ‘rogues and ne’er-do-wells’ business.”
The elevator door rumbled open, and he took a step forward to enter it, to exit the conversation on a clever line, but politeness got the best of him, and he swept his arm to the side, indicating she should go first.
“They’ll do the things police do,” Liesl said. And even to her, it sounded like a thing a child would say. “See if there was a crime and then solve it.”
She could feel the wave of frustration that washed over him when the elevator door closed before she had immediately agreed that he was in the right.
“You’re being daft,” Francis said, pushing the button for the ground floor. “Our entire job is finding information.”
“Not like this.”
“You think some suburbanite with a community-college education is going to help you find a priceless artifact?”
“Why are you so resistant to the idea that I try this?” She’d turned her back to the elevator door, cornering him in the tiny space.
“Because of rogues and ne’er-do-wells. And because you’ve been told not to. Go ahead if you like. But I care about the library, and I care about you, and I know that the police would be a mistake.”
“Is that all?”
“What else would it be? Am I the thief now? Keeping the police away for self-preservation?”
“I said no such thing.” She turned away, stepping back from him and turning to face the lit buttons at the top of the elevators the way a good citizen should. She didn’t want a quarrel. She wanted him to be on her side.
“Let’s stop this now,” Francis said. “Talking is a waste. You know very well what I think.”
“And I value that opinion.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” He glanced in her direction when he said it but still stood in the very corner of the elevator, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“I’m in an impossible position.”
“You are doing all the right things.”
“Am I?” She slumped against the wall then, too, the tiny bit of reassurance melting like a lump of sugar on her tongue.
“You are.”
“What would Christopher do?” she asked.
“Chris? I have no idea. But it would be a hell of a thing to watch.”
“We never agreed,” Liesl said as the elevator chimed at their destination.
“You and Chris? Everyone knows that.”
“Of course they do,” she said. “And they probably think I want to bring the police in because it’s the opposite of how Christopher would have handled it.”
The elevator door opened into the library’s reference area where all 130 pounds of Max was standing by the desk, arms crossed, red-faced, neck veins throbbing against the tightly buttoned collar of his impeccably pressed shirt.
“Max, what’s going on?” Liesl asked.
“Did you forget to tell me something this morning? Fail to deliver a message?”
“A message?”
“Yes. Is there anything you’ve failed to tell me?”
“I have no idea. Can you tell me why you’re upset?”
“I see. Maybe you don’t know. Perhaps you haven’t even checked your messages today. I’m not sure which is worse.”
Francis had extricated himself from the conversation. The traitor. The only one in the library who absolutely had to listen to Max when he was this obstinate was Liesl.