She had worn jeans and an oxford shirt. The jeans made Liesl look younger. Looking younger undermined her authority. The white shirt collar made her skin look pinker. She wouldn’t have worn it if she thought she needed her authority on that day, but the library was closed. Rhonda rang and asked if she could come by.
In her jeans and white button-down, Liesl was too impatient to sit and wait for Rhonda. She had tried the humanities building, the religious studies library, the coffee shop, and the garden behind the music building where faculty liked to go to think. The class schedule was an afterthought but one that was rewarded because the class schedule answered for Liesl the question of where Professor Mahmoud was at that exact moment and where he would remain for the next ninety minutes. It was only days from the auction, so no matter how strange it was to go visit Professor Mahmoud in a lecture hall, Liesl was carried by her loafers and her determination to Lecture Hall LL 104 in the Sid Smith Building.
This late in the term, the classroom was full. Liesl had to head for a standing spot, leaning against the back wall, to step over a toppled blue backpack and balance herself over two sets of outstretched legs before she reached the bare patch of wall located, happily, next to the other adult in the room, a man as tall as he was skinny, crooked into a question mark against the too-low wall, pulling laconically on his chin as he listened to an adolescent with a spectacular beard deliver the lecture.
“Is that Professor Mahmoud?” Liesl whispered.
“Speaking down there?” the man next to her said with a grin.
“Well, yes.”
“Please, ma’am. Though I’ve head Professor Mahmoud described as impossibly youthful and dynamic, I think the young man at the podium still has spots.”
At the podium the presenter paused his speech. He had a graphic that was meant to be animated on his slide and the failure of the animation, a failure that his facial expression suggested he interpreted as a failure of his entire presentation and perhaps academic career, was a paralyzing force.
Professor Mahmoud smiled at Liesl. “I tell them that relying on such sparkles takes away one’s power as a speaker, but they never listen. People like you and I, we’ll be the last to revere oration. These kids all want a PowerPoint presentation.”
He waved his arms, straightening into an exclamation point and offering a smile and a keep-it-moving motion with his hand to break the paralysis.
“Mahmoud? You’re Professor Mahmoud?” Liesl asked.
Satisfied that the lecture was continuing, he greeted her with an exaggerated bow. “In the flesh. Have you paid to be in this class, young lady?”
Liesl extended her hand, disarmed by his vivacity. “I’m Liesl Weiss. We’ve spoken.”
“The librarian. Lovely to meet you. Can you wait for just a moment?” He held up a finger to pause her and raised his voice so three hundred students could hear. “Please disregard the last thing Samer said. Al-Hallaj’s ashes were thrown in the Tigris, not consumed by a tiger.”
“The auction is next week,” Liesl said.
“I’m afraid I’ve disappointed you, Liesl. I’ve been doing my research—great fun, by the way—and the inventory of the Great Mosque of Kairouan mentions a manuscript which I think is the lot for sale. If that’s true, it’ll be worth at least half a million. We’ve only managed to raise about fifty grand.”
Liesl nodded. Leaned into Professor Mahmoud like a coconspirator. “Did you find that published somewhere, or did you put together the pieces yourself?”
“Well,” said Professor Mahmoud. “Research is my whole job, isn’t it?”
Liesl gave the professor a bemused shrug, and they both turned back to the speaker.
The poor student giving the presentation was still projecting a giant image of a tiger onto all five screens in the lecture hall.
“The library hasn’t expressed any intent, officially.” Liesl gazed at the tiger. A Siberian, she thought. The poor boy could have at least displayed a geographically appropriate tiger. “There’s no reason to think the lot will reach its estimated price.”
“Will you go bid?” Professor Mahmoud asked at the same moment he kicked the back of the chair of a student in the back row who had switched his laptop screen to a YouTube video.
“You will,” she said.
The scheme was set. Taking the suggestion of the acting director of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Professor Mahmoud, feeling like a secret operative, resolved to arrive at the auction as an interested layman, not a representative of the university. Giving no prewarning of the library’s interest or his own suspicions about the piece’s value, he would cautiously raise his paddle and hope to bring the blue Quran home for no more than the $50,000 he had raised, a tenth of its suspected value.
In those blue jeans and that white Oxford, energized by her scheme, made even more youthful by her scheme, Liesl returned to the library just in time for Rhonda’s arrival.
“There’s no one here,” Rhonda said.
“No,” Liesl said. “We closed for the day in Christopher’s honor. Did you hear?”
“No,” Rhonda said. “Has he died?”
Liesl nodded.
“My condolences.” They stood by the elevator, Rhonda holding a report and Liesl holding her own elbows, offering Christopher a moment of silence.
“Liesl,” Rhonda said. “It’s probably for the best there’s no one here.”
There was warning in Rhonda’s tone, but Liesl was so caught up in the grief and anxiety of a thousand other problems and in her excitement about the blue Quran that she didn’t think to listen for it.
“Let’s go sit,” Liesl said. “Shall we?”
“Sure. Good idea.” She allowed Liesl to lead her to the small reading room, the one used for reading. “Not as grand as the other one, is it?” She stood, waiting for instruction. Holding on tight to that report. Liesl pulled two chairs up to a table for them.
“I had put the work with the Peshawar totally out of my head,” Liesl said. “Had just about forgotten it. Isn’t that awful?”
Rhonda nodded. She placed her stack of papers on the reading table. Smoothed the smooth pages.
“It’s not good news, Liesl,” Rhonda said. She turned over the first page as if the papers themselves would speak the words for her.
“It never is,” Liesl said with a laugh. “But tell me all the same.” She leaned forward and whispered, “It’s not the oldest zero, is it?”
“It’s not,” Rhonda said. “But I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this.”
“Tell me. Will we have to remove this particular claim from the library’s Wikipedia page?”
“I’m going to try my best to explain.”
“Please do,” Liesl said. “I imagine I’ll have to explain to the marketing department why they need to update the library’s brochures.”
Liesl leaned back in her chair. Crossed her legs at the ankles. Rhonda remained upright, hands folded on the report.
“Liesl. My high-school calculus textbook used the zero before the manuscript we tested did.”
The stone that Liesl had been carrying around in her stomach since September was back. She let her head roll backward so she was looking at the ceiling. There was a light bulb out.
“It’s a fake?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rhonda said. “Now I know mathematics, and I know libraries, but I’m not a physicist. But I’ll try to explain what the physicists found.” She slid the report across the table.
“There’s always been some variation in the estimates,” Liesl said. “It could be eleventh century.” Her response was perfectly rational. Her behavior, perfectly rational, but she could feel her pulse beating in her throat, and her muscles and bones and tendons were begging her to get out of that chair, out of the library, and run as fast as she could from this stack of problems.
“Yes,” Rhonda said. “That’s what we thought at first. So the lab redid the testing when the first result was so confusing.”
“And?” said Liesl.
“Again, I’m not a physicist. But there’s something called the bomb peak.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“In the 1950s and 1960s, the frequent testing of nuclear weapons caused large variations in radiocarbon concentration.”