He opened the office door and closed it behind him. Liesl sat again. It was hard to believe that she could be made to feel so small by a grown man in a bicycle helmet.
“That went well then?” Francis strode in without knocking, as Liesl’s hands were busy dabbing the corners of her eyes dry.
“Francis. Were you waiting outside my door?”
“News on Chris?”
Liesl spun back and forth in Christopher’s chair.
“The news is that there’s no news,” she said. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”
Francis nodded, distracted. Sat down in the chair across from her without being asked. Even in his distraction his dark hair stayed slicked, perfect, while Liesl was sure her grays were standing on end.
“He’ll not leave us without finishing his work. Not the Chris I know.”
“Was he working on something?” asked Liesl. “I don’t think I knew that.”
“We were working on a book together.” Francis was looking down at his feet, frowning at the left knee that wouldn’t stop bouncing.
“Not like Christopher to share credit,” Liesl said. “How’d you talk him into that?”
The statement made Francis tense, made him look up from his feet.
“Don’t be unkind. Not about a man who can’t speak in his own defense.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Liesl’s mouth got smaller, her head looser. She shrunk with the apology. And the shrinking seemed to satisfy Francis that Liesl hadn’t meant any real disrespect.
“El presidente didn’t seem happy as he was leaving,” Francis clucked as he pulled the Christie’s catalog off the desk and flipped to the first marked page. If he saw anything special in Lot 37, he didn’t show it. Flipped right past it. “Did you bring up the idea of the police with him again?”
“Yes, of course I did.”
“Of course you did,” said Francis, sounding scolding in his artificial disinterest. “And he told you that it was a brilliant idea and to go ahead.”
“And he forbade me from involving them,” Liesl said.
“As I told you he would.”
“As you told me he would.”
“Chin up,” said Francis. He paused to dog-ear a page in the catalog, then he looked up at her. “I was proven right, so we can all feel good about that.”
“What am I supposed to do here?” she asked, overwhelmed with fatigue.
“What you’ve been doing. And I’ll help you.”
“It’s not your responsibility.”
“I’ll meet you back here at five, and we’ll get back to searching.” He tossed the catalog back onto the desk and heaved himself out of the chair, his face fixed with a hero’s resolve. “It’ll mean giving up my evening with the grandchild again, but I reckon my heart will recover.”
***
Liesl stood in the cigar-scented office, hands full of unanswered telephone messages, considering a request from Percy Pickens to come and cast an eye on the Plantin he had purchased but had yet to see, when the clock struck five. She shoved the stack of papers, Percy’s message among them, into her appointment book to be dealt with at some better time.
“Shall we head down?” she said when Francis arrived at her door. They were the only people left in the library. The others had sensed something in the air and gone home promptly at five.
“Not so fast,” Francis said. “Our souls are in need of spirit and strength.”
He pulled open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in the corner of the office.
“Spirit and strength. Dewar’s Scotch whiskey,” he said. He pulled the bottle out of the cabinet and a couple of glasses from the same hiding spot. “Chris and I did plenty of working late in this office.”
The smooth hair, the dark shirt, the Scotch bottle held by the neck. Liesl reckoned he did look a little bit like a spy.
“I’d have thought his tastes would be more refined than Dewar’s,” she said.
“You mean the bottle in his desk? That was for his private consumption,” Francis said. “The filing cabinet whiskey was for when he entertained. When Chris was paying, it was Dewar’s.”
“To Christopher’s health,” she said, glass in the air.
“To his health.”
“Let’s bring it downstairs and get to this.”
“Bringing liquids down to the stacks,” said Francis. “Maybe I’m the one who should call the police.”
“I recently lived with a teenager,” she said. “So I know if you’re going to break the rules, best to do it all the way.” Liesl had eyes on the bottle now and a hand came to her mouth, an immediate self-rebuke at having brought up Hannah.
“I won’t tell John you said that,” said Francis, brushing past the mention for both their sakes.
“We should get started.” She was blushing.
“Yes, Boss.”
“You start at 541, and I’ll go over to 560?”
“Meet in the middle again?”
“Meet in the middle.”
“Good. I’ll see you there. Somewhere in the middle.”
“Call them out when you’re done. I’ll hold the list and write them down.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Please stop calling me that.”
He went over to his stack and she to hers. Though they weren’t standing close to one another, they could each hear the other breathe. Liesl was aware of it. She inhaled and exhaled with intention so that nothing could be read into the quickness of her pulse. When he came over to fill her glass, she didn’t say no.
“Makes the work go quicker,” he said.
“Someone once told me it gives you spirit and strength.”
“That’s right.”
He liked that. She could tell by the length of the look he gave her when she said it. He liked that she remembered.
“Back to work then,” Liesl said. “Or we’ll be here all night.”
They were very nearly there all night. There was work to do and whiskey to drink. And eventually they gave up on the work but not the whiskey. If they had been younger, they would have sat cross-legged on the cement floor, but old bones being what they are, they perched on rolling library stools until the bottle was empty.
“Let me walk you home,” Francis said.
He watched Liesl as she punched in the alarm. There was nary a squirrel nor a security guard that could see them at this hour.
“I can take care of myself, Francis. You should get home too.”
“I can’t very well send a woman off alone into the dark. My mother would kill me.”
“Your mother’s dead.”
“So let her rest in peace,” he said. “And let me walk you home.”
“I’m an old woman,” Liesl said. “I’m pretty well invisible when I walk down the street. It’s excellent armor.”
“You’re not old.”
“You keep saying that. Of course I am, Francis. You are too.”
“It’s hard for me to fathom.”
“Really? I find it impossible to forget how old I am. My body is always reminding me.”
“This stuff with Chris. That’s when I remember.”
“He’s scarcely older than us. It’s a selfish point of view, but I’ve thought about that a lot. That it could have been me.”
“I haven’t thought that at all,” Francis said.
“How can you avoid it? Christopher’s only five or so years older than us.”
A sushi shop they were passing had its neon sign turned on. It cast a red glow on Francis’s face, drawing shadows in every line and crevice that defined the topology of its surface. But then the shop was behind them, and his face went dark again.
“I’ve always looked up to Chris,” he said. “So he’s always seemed somehow older.”
Her steps swayed down Harbord Street, loose and unselfconscious in her whiskey-aided gait. Every few feet she half turned her head at her companion, trying to catch sight of his intentions out of the corner of her eye.
“Luckily that’s not an issue with your new boss,” she said.
“I’ve told you already.”
“You’ve told me what?” she said.
“I can’t look at you and see anything but the thirty-year-old Liesl I first met. So you’ll never be old to me.”
She tried to imagine being back in her thirty-year-old skin, sliding a slender arm against an almost unfamiliar body just to feel the electricity of it, but she couldn’t get the picture of their current anatomy, of the lines and crevices, to go dark for long enough. The red light kept bringing them forward.
“Perhaps,” she said, “that’s a way of making sure that you never seem old to yourself.”