As she approached him, he stuck out his hand, holding a stack of messages. It was too late to contact the Plantin donors proactively. She wanted to stick the stack in the trash and run away. The authority she had entered with evaporated in an audible puff.
She didn’t have a full list of the Plantin donors. She didn’t tell Max that part. Christopher hadn’t saved anything on his computer, so it could be anywhere on one of the thousands of sheets of loose paper in his office. Max was already panicking, so she didn’t tell him that part. He was the type who still received the morning paper. Liesl imagined him wearing a dressing gown. Not a robe, but a dressing gown. His husband becoming increasingly concerned as he watched the horror spread over Max’s face as he read the article, letting his coffee get cold. Or maybe there had been no horror at all. Maybe he was the one who leaked to the press.
She clutched the stack of messages with her sweaty hands. She was panicking too.
“We can split them up,” he said.
“They’re going to want to hear from me,” Liesl said.
“All they want is to have their call returned.”
She didn’t argue because she didn’t want to. She wanted someone to offer to help her, and he had. If he had an agenda, she didn’t care. Max had a talent for soothing donors.
“Should I handle Percy?” Max asked.
The right answer was no. Percy was their most important donor, Percy had fronted most of the money for the Plantin, Percy would be among the angriest of the donors because Percy was often angry anyway. Liesl nodded. Percy would prefer to hear from the one of them who came to work in a tie. He pulled Percy’s message slip from the pile.
“Don’t be more honest than you have to,” Liesl said.
The phone was ringing again, the bomb ticking again. He reached for it, but she shook her head. If the reference desk phone went unanswered, the call would be rerouted to an open line in the workroom. Right now they were doing triage. Someone inside could deal with new messages.
She handed Max his pile of messages. His skin drooped against his eye sockets and his tie had skewed to the left, but he didn’t look like he was panicking anymore. He was a man who knew about secrets. He had done this before.
“We tell the truth,” Liesl said. She placed a message from a retired faculty member and good friend on top of her pile.
“But not too much of it?”
“The Plantin disappeared. With Christopher’s illness, there was a delay in reporting.” She paused. “We believe it will be recovered.”
“What about Miriam?”
“I went and saw Vivek this morning.”
A flinch. A blow making it past his armor. He had imagination enough to think of what the conversation must have been like. The elevator door opened, and Liesl crushed the pile of messages in her fists. A young man, a graduate student, walked out into the artificial light. The university marched forward. He had requested the use of the papers of a prominent songwriter and poet. There were dozens of gray archive boxes in the main reading room waiting for him.
“Can I have your student card?” Max asked. His hands weren’t shaking; his fists weren’t clenched. He had done this before. He noted the young man’s details, directed him to his papers. They stayed quiet until he was through the door.
“Where does Vivek think she is?” Max said.
“Nowhere good,” she said. “He asked her for a divorce.”
“Goodness. When?”
The graduate student—buzz-cut brown hair, Labrador grin—came back out front. He had only brought a pen to take notes. He didn’t know the rules. He’d been sent out to the reference area in search of a pencil. Liesl opened the top drawer of the desk and rooted around for a sharpened pencil. She handed it to him, and instead of looking grateful, he looked amused. He likely hadn’t used a pencil since grade school. No matter. He trotted back into the reading room, tail wagging as he went.
She unclenched her fists and smoothed the messages. Impossible to know how much she should tell Max, how much she should trust him. In the end, trust didn’t matter. It was a grim morning. She needed to talk to someone, and Max was there.
The reading room door swung open again. The graduate student came back out into the reference area, holding up the pencil, its tip snapped. She motioned to the pencil sharpener.
Liesl and Max watched him make his way over, insert the pencil into the old steel sharpener bolted to the long desk, and begin to turn the hand crank. It roared. He smiled to himself, the graduate student, at the noise he was making.
Finally, they were alone.
“He said that Miriam was mentally ill,” Liesl said. Vivek had not asked her to keep it a secret.
“Depression, or something else?” Max asked. “My father was a depressive. Terrible thing.”
“Could you tell?” she said. “The way that Vivek described it, I should have been able to tell.”
“In hindsight, I guess,” Max said. “But a depressive can be like an alcoholic. Masters of disguise.”
“He said there’s no way she could be the thief. That she wasn’t functional enough to do something like that. But she was functional enough to fake being well?”
“Not the same,” Max said. “And she wasn’t faking being well. If we were paying attention, we’d have seen it.”
“She got her work done. She functioned enough to get her work done.”
He straightened his tie. He was almost totally Max again.
“If you still suspect her, then go ahead and suspect her. You read the paper; you’re not the only one.”
“She stopped joining us in the staff room when we would stop for tea. I shouldn’t have let her do that. It was obvious she was ill, wasn’t it?”
“Quite obvious. But it’s an ugly thing, mental illness. No one will fault you for not asking.”
“Having a suspect would be a comfort.”
“Liesl. Try and show a little sense. You have a suspect. It’s not the same suspect who has an unflattering photo on the front page of today’s newspaper, but if we are playing Sherlock Holmes, then there is some bloody suspicious behavior you seem desperate to ignore.”
“What suspect?” Liesl said. The phone was ringing again. “Ignore it.”
“Don’t act as though we haven’t had this conversation before, as if I haven’t brought this up before. When you act this way, it makes me feel as though I’m grasping at something, as if I’m seeing something that isn’t there. But I’m not. I know suspicious behavior. And insisting, against all good judgment, that the police should not be called when it is clear that a crime has been committed. That is suspicious behavior.”
“You mean Francis.”
“Of course I mean Francis. Of course I mean Christopher’s protégé who even Christopher must have suspected of some sort of wrongdoing. Why do you think you were promoted to Christopher’s deputy when you and Francis have both been here for so long? Christopher must have suspected something shifty. He’s just not awake to point a finger.”
“Because I was better. I was promoted over Francis because I’m better than him at schedules and budgets and tax fillings and all the things that the leader of this place has to do but Christopher didn’t want to bother with. Can you not believe that?”
“How many languages do you speak then,” Max said. “More than he does?”
“There’s more to it,” Liesl said.
“Your education then. Better than his?”
If she asked him to stop, she knew he would. But she didn’t.
“Tell me,” Max said. “Tell me that I’m wrong.”
She didn’t tell him he was wrong, because their conversation ended. They were no longer alone. Francis walked into the reference area. There was no way to know if he had heard them.
“A fine morning for the library, wouldn’t you say?” Francis said. “The reference desk calls have been coming to my desk.” He held a pile of messages.
Did he look smug? Did he look suspicious? He just looked like Francis.
“Thank you for answering them,” Liesl said.
“Two were really reference questions,” Francis said.
“What a treat,” Liesl said.
“One was researching armorial bindings.”