She wanted to go collect herself, but now Don Lake wanted to talk about the facsimile. The early-twentieth-century printer had thought himself clever and printed onto birch bark, same as the original, and the effect was that the facsimiles had been darkening at more or less the same rate as the original. Liesl flexed her toes in her wet shoes as a way to offload her discomfort. It was like meeting her twin sister for the first time. The card stock that held the birch leaves in place was the same ridged beige, the album cover the same weathered black. Only the frontispiece, which gave the identity of the creator and indicated that 165 of these reproductions had been made, gave away that it was a facsimile.
The library held many of these facsimiles. They could be collector’s items. But it was the first time that Liesl had stood in front of a facsimile of a book when she knew the original so well. It changed the shape of what she understood. It was an impostor, and she didn’t like that it was allowed to exist.
She squeezed Don Lake’s forearm and, legs stiff, limped toward the next booth. He called back to her, tried to draw her attention to a map that he thought would be a nice complement to the library’s collection on the settlement of the American West, but she declined, promising to send her map expert to the bookshop to take a look if the item remained unsold by the close of the show. She crossed into the next aisle to get away from him, the time and the proximity to the center of the show meaning that the crowds were thickening now, and she could get lost in them.
This close to the heart, the treasures were in glass display cases rather than on plastic folding tables, and they had printed labels rather than hand-drawn pricing signs.
It went faster now. The sellers were busy; the materials couldn’t be picked up and inspected. Liesl wanted to ask about a mid-century Anne of Green Gables in a dust jacket she hadn’t ever seen before. But it would have to come later. At the appointed time, she was back at the front of the show, waiting.
It was uncharitable to think that Max had been lurking in a corner so that he and his sweater vest could stride out just as the second hand was striking, but his ability to arrive neither a second early nor late left little alternate explanation. At Max’s suggestion, he and his sweater vest and Liesl and her wet feet started down the middle aisle.
The place was lousy with bibles. Printers loved printing bibles, and Max loved acquiring them, studying them, talking about them. The New Testaments were coming at her from every direction. Max would fall in love with a binding, a frontispiece, a printing error and would sing in her ear about the need to invest, the need to win the rare-books-library bible arms race. To Liesl, Max was the right choice over Francis to accompany her to the fair. There were never, wouldn’t ever be rumors about her and Max. So she had to keep her mouth shut, nod in the right places, and wait for raised eyebrows to make their ways south.
There was a twelfth-century illuminated leaf from the book of Joshua that Max insisted she had to see. Her mind wandered back to the gold calligraphy on blue vellum and to her wish to hold that piece in her hands. She could see that the book of Joshua leaf was special; she was skeptical but not blind to the winged creature inked in blue dividing the columns of text. She let Max haggle, knowing that with a starting cost of $5,900, there was no amount of bargaining that would reduce the fee to something reasonable for a single sheet.
“Well,” she said when they walked off empty-handed. “There will be others.”
“What a thing to think. You don’t believe that?”
“Won’t there?” she said. “Hundreds of exhibitors here would disagree.”
“That piece is singular,” he said.
“Of course I understand that,” Liesl said.
He let it hang there. She knew he didn’t think she understood at all.
“Somewhere in France, eight hundred years ago, a Dominican monk labored over that piece,” Max said. To avoid a lecture about Dominican monks, she was willing to write him a check for the $5,900 from her own bank account.
“We’re responsible for the pieces that are singular,” he said, his hand back at his collar, always at that collar.
“Like the Plantin?” she asked. A lecture about the Plantin would still be a lecture, but it might be of use to her.
“Like the Plantin,” he agreed.
“How are you taking the loss? It must be a blow.”
“All right,” he said. “I feel powerless, but I’m a Catholic, so it’s a familiar feeling.”
“That’s funny,” Liesl said in a tone that made clear that it wasn’t, not really. “What were your plans for the Plantin? Exhibition? Digitization? Research?”
“You have a lot of questions,” he said.
A map seller in a newsboy cap pulled Max into a hug as they walked by. He expressed his sorrow at Christopher’s condition. He didn’t acknowledge Liesl. They walked on.
“I had no plans yet,” Max said when they were out of the map seller’s earshot. “I just wanted a chance to see it.”
“But you had a chance, didn’t you? During the acquisition? I’m certain that you and I talked about it when it first went missing. You inspected it before the purchase?”
Max crossed his arms over his chest.
“I did no such thing.”
“You’re responsible for religion collections.”
“Christopher didn’t ask me to weigh in,” Max said. “He went to the auction alone, and he handled the acquisition alone.”
“Why didn’t you say that? In our meeting, when I first asked?”
“I didn’t realize I was under investigation.”
She wondered about Max, and then she felt guilty for wondering about Max, but there was nothing she could do to keep from wondering. She wished she could remove the thought from her mind, but the truth was that Max was a man who had made certain promises to the church and had failed to keep them. She didn’t know the details, but the broad strokes were enough to make an impression.
“Better to offer all the information you have from the outset, though, isn’t it?”
“I’ve found that isn’t always the case,” he said. She wondered if a man who broke those big promises would not violate other types of trust.
They stopped for a coffee at the stand on the far end of the exhibition hall. It was watery and served in maroon paper cups. The aisles of the fair were properly full now. The professional collectors and cultural institutions already halfway through their days, the moneyed private collectors resting their elbows on glass cases as far as the eye could see, and the spaces in between occupied by the garage-sale set in their cargo shorts, looking for a treasure for less than the cost of a tank of gas and oblivious to how much the book dealers disdained them. They were all so old, Liesl thought. Was she that old?
“There wasn’t any point where you saw or handled or were alone with the Plantin?”
“No. There wasn’t any point. You can ask Dan if you like, since it’s obvious that this is an investigation. Just make it clear that you’re looking to humiliate me, not exonerate me. He can confirm that I never got the chance to help with the Plantin, because he was delighted by the idea of my exclusion.”
Liesl slid in closer, rested her fingers on her pursed lips, thinking that this disclosure that he was embarrassed to have been excluded was as open as Max had ever been with her. Max was ramrod straight, eyes on his empty cup instead of her, but Liesl wanted to believe that she’d be able to tell if he was lying. And she didn’t think he was.
“Would you like another coffee?” she asked.
They were both at the end of their cups of tepid brown water.
“Why not?”
“I’ll get it,” she said. “Maybe a biscuit too. To help it go down easier.” She went to stand in the line.