Max thought it would have been better to be honest. To confess about the scandal. To be open about the stolen money. To tell them exactly why he had been asked to leave the church. He had been under the impression that Christopher agreed with him, but now it was clear that wasn’t true, and he let Christopher take the lead. He knew this place and these people better, and besides, he was Max’s boss now, and even outside of the church, it was in Max’s nature to be an obedient servant.
Ever since he had left St. Peter’s parish, he had been in a state of disorder, looking for a job, looking for a home, waiting for the police to come and disrupt it all. He might have checked himself into a hospital if not for Christopher. Christopher knew him well enough to invite him to deliver the Jackman Lecture a year earlier, to speak on the King James Bible. What did Christopher care about scandal when there was a great-books man who could be brought onto staff?
12
It was an aching and unpleasant morning, the kind that let an old woman know exactly how old she was: puffy face, sore knees, the fuzz on the tongue of a crone who had been using wine to help her sleep. John had left the bed without waking her; he was up in his attic studio alone. He raised his eyes when she came up to see him but didn’t say anything. He could see she wasn’t at her best.
They weren’t at their best. But she needed his counsel. She sat on the stool in front of a blank canvas, but he told her she looked too serious for there to not be coffee, and he wouldn’t let her tell him what was on her mind until they were dressed and out of the house at the coffee shop with the blue awning and the ginger cookies. He insisted on taking their coffee outside, walking with it.
Powerless, afraid to go to the library for another day, the library she was meant to be leading, Liesl kicked a stone on the sidewalk, lost in her disquiet and doubt, pulling from her memory stories and images about Miriam and testing theories and fears out on John so that he might tell her what to do. She couldn’t remember Miriam ever arriving anywhere late or breaking any rule at all. Miriam had been comforting in her predictability. Liesl recalled the time she and Miriam were filling out the paperwork for a large donation of materials by a prominent Caribbean poet, maybe two years after Miriam had started at the library. They were sitting at Liesl’s desk in front of a pastel sketch interpretation of one of the poems by the poet himself, trying to describe the depth of the shade of yellow and the feeling it conjured in an application for a tax receipt, and Miriam said, “‘Nature rarer uses yellow.’” Liesl looked at her, surprised, but Miriam found her voice and continued from memory, “‘Than another hue; Saves she all of that for sunsets, Prodigal of blue, Spending scarlet like a woman, Yellow she affords Only scantly and selectively, Like a lover’s words.’”
Liesl had left her seat, walked across the office, and cleared the tears from her eyes with her fingertips as Miriam sat upright and still, the Dickinson poem having adequately expressed her emotion that the pastel sketch had conjured. Liesl asked her why she didn’t work more closely with the literary donors, who would recognize in her a kindred spirit.
“That’s Christopher’s role, to work with the donors. It wouldn’t be right for me to interfere.” She said it so plainly, like Liesl had suggested she request a pop song from an orchestra conductor. And later, years later, when it was arranged for Miriam to meet with poets and novelists who were considering donating their papers, when Miriam impressed them, as she always did, Miriam would still come back to the library, signed donation agreement in hand, apologetic that she was breaking from the prescribed order, taking on a task that wasn’t meant for her.
Miriam had always been that way, effective but effectual but self-effacing, with a rigid sense of responsibility to move through the world in a way that was sure to never disappoint anyone, with a look in her eye that made you want to ask her for a favor because you knew she would be happy to complete a task for you. And then at the reception when her eyes had turned pleading and she’d needed something from Liesl. What? To confess she’d stolen the library’s Plantin? Impossible. That some harm had come to her was the only scenario that made sense.
Liesl told John all of the theories. About the maybe-lover. About invisible women who are allowed to vanish. Modest Miriam. He didn’t believe the thing about a lover. He told her that she had to report Miriam missing; he told her what she had already talked herself into. And he sat next to her on a bench and held her coffee as she called the police and answered their questions.
***
“Do you know something I don’t?” Liesl jerked her head up. Dan slammed her office door closed.
“Is it Miriam?”
“Miriam? I don’t give a crack about Miriam. Miriam? It’s the Vesalius.”
Liesl sighed as Dan puffed up in his denim for what was sure to be a lecture about some perceived break in procedure.
“I haven’t so much as thought of the Vesalius,” she said. “Thought of, touched, referenced, requested, nothing.”
With a mournful look that Liesl would have thought an impossible undertaking for his arrogant features, he nodded.
“I know. No one has. Until today. And it’s gone.”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “It can’t be missing.”
“It was last used six weeks ago,” Dan said. “I know for certain that it was returned to the right place.”
He was combing his hands through his thick gray hair. Pulling at it.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “I put it back. I returned it to the right place.”
It had never occurred to her that it would be him. Only the librarians had alarm codes for the building and could come and go unsupervised. She didn’t say it, but the status of his position, which Dan resented so much, saved him from her suspicion.
“You’re certain it wasn’t misshelved?” Liesl asked.
“It’s gone. The Vesalius has been stolen.”
“Why the Vesalius? It has nothing at all to do with the Plantin. A work of religion alongside a work of science. Why those two books?”
“It might be more than those two.”
“What do you mean?” Liesl opened her office door and motioned to Dan to follow her. “Do you have reason to think that something else is missing?”
She unlocked the fire stairs to get down to the basements so she could be sure they would have privacy.
“No. Not yet.”
She stopped on the stairs, waited for him to explain.
“We only know the Vesalius is missing because an instructor requested it for a class this week.”
She leaned against the wall of the stairwell, letting the obvious sink in.
“So we won’t know what else is missing until we go looking for it.”
They walked down into the basements together, toward the Vesalius’s permanent home. She did a mental inventory of the library’s treasures: the Peshawar, the Vesalius, the Shakespeare First Folio. It made her uncomfortable how closely the list hewed to the table of contents of the book Francis had shown her. Like he had written a shopping list. She leaned against a shelf as if she was too sad to remain upright, her shoulders slumping in despair.
“You’re sure it was reshelved after the last use?” Liesl asked.
“Stop asking that. I did it myself.”
“And it couldn’t have been used in between?”
“It couldn’t,” Dan said. “I haven’t taken a day off between then and now. I would know.”
They came to the spot. Dan had pulled the large acid-free box that housed the Vesalius onto a book truck. The box was empty.
“They took it without the box,” Liesl said. “They could damage it.”
“The missing box would have tipped us off.”
“Has anyone else been around here? Is there anything suspicious?”
The hole left by the Vesalius’s box gaped like a missing tooth. Inside the box, the thief had left the cardboard flag that identified the book. This had been no mistake.
“It’s been weeks.”
“This is a nightmare,” Liesl said. “Say something to make me feel better. Something about how collecting rare objects is a capitalist diversion that ultimately doesn’t matter. That private property should be abolished, so it was never really ours.”