“Oh good,” said Liesl. “I wanted to ask about something you said to me when I ran into you at the book fair.”
It had been stuck in her brain like a splinter since they’d had the conversation. Not in deep enough to find some tweezers to remove it, but an irritant nonetheless. Something she could never quite forget about.
“Good turnout this year,” Don said. “And they poured a lovely rioja at the reception.”
“Do you remember we talked about the Peshawar facsimile?” Liesl said. She cleared a smear of dust off a book jacket with her thumb as she spoke.
“Still hasn’t sold, I’m afraid. Would you like to see it?”
“No, thank you.”
“Pity,” said Don.
“You said I probably wouldn’t be interested in it,” Liesl said. She asked it without making eye contact, without looking up from the dust.
“Well, no. It’s already in your collection.”
“Right,” Liesl said.
“Christopher bought another copy of that facsimile from me, was it five years ago now?”
“From the same printer?”
“From the very same print run,” Don said. “He was amazed by the quality of the reproduction. I suppose you use it for teaching alongside the original?”
She’d thought the truth would be more violent, a confrontation with a savage stranger. But it was gentler than that. It was recognizing someone you were certain you’d seen before and then having their identity reveal itself in your memory.
“We do something like that,” Liesl said. “Thanks so much for your time, Don.”
***
Garber’s office door looked like a fortified bank vault, protected by a twenty-six-year-old administrative assistant armed with hair spray and a pencil skirt.
Liesl watched Garber’s door from the outer hallway and waited for the assistant to need to pee. At her desk, the woman sat with perfect posture, fingers flying over a keyboard that she never once looked at.
A woman like this, Liesl thought, might never abandon her post. She would rush the bank vault; it was the only way.
She walked right past the woman’s desk to Garber’s door. He was sitting in his office chair with his feet up on his desk. Across from him there was another man, another suit, another set of feet on the desk. The men were laughing. Until they saw that they had been interrupted, and then slowly, they were not laughing anymore.
“What is this, Liesl?” Garber said, rising from his desk.
“I’m here to cancel our lunch.”
“My assistant handles my calendar.”
The assistant was standing at the door, powerless despite her hair-spray-and-pencil-skirt armor.
“Fine. Would you like to know why I’m canceling?”
“You’re not canceling. We’re meeting Langdon Sibley.”
“Make up your mind,” Liesl said. “Do you handle your calendar or does your assistant?”
The other suit slowly swung his legs off the desk.
“Are you quite all right, Liesl?” Garber asked.
“Yes. I’m perfect. Better than I’ve long been.”
“So good that you’re barging in on my meeting. Canceling an important commitment?”
She turned her head to the suit. Gave him a long look and a raised eyebrow. He stood and left the room.
“We should go, President Garber,” she said.
“Where?”
“To see the police.”
“I have an appointment to have lunch with a prospective hire, and so do you.”
“I have an appointment with a police detective.”
“You are acting inappropriately.”
She walked to the coat closet in the corner of the room and retrieved his overcoat.
“You’ll want to come to this,” Liesl said.
“And what about Sibley?”
He pulled the coat over his suit jacket, but in his rush and confusion, the sleeve of his suit coat kept bunching and forcing him to take it off and try again.
“Talk to your assistant. She handles your calendar,” Liesl said.
The taxi dropped them off in the middle of a puddle of slush in front of the police station. Uniformed officers were smoking cigarettes in the heat from a subway grate. They stopped to watch as first Liesl and then Garber maneuvered their way out of the cab and over the puddle. Liesl held the doorframe for leverage and swung her foot over to a solid-looking snowbank. Garber tried to leap and wound up in slush up to his ankle.
Garber had tried to ask her questions in the taxi, but she had refused him. The pink-stone brutalist police headquarters was busier than Liesl had expected. Detectives in ill-fitting suits streamed out the doors; witnesses clutching their subpoenas streamed in. A news van from a local broadcaster was parked outside, and an unmanned camera was set up pointing at the police station doors. Off to the side of the camera, a woman wearing heavy makeup, a purple blazer, and gray sweatpants was doing vocal exercises. Garber held the heavy glass door for Liesl to go through, and then found himself continuing to hold it for a boy who wasn’t more than fifteen and his mother who wasn’t impressed as they walked into the building sniping at each other.
“Imagine finding yourself in a place like this,” Garber said. “We’re very lucky, you and I, aren’t we?”
“We have found ourselves in a place like this.”
“Well, not really we haven’t.”
“We’re not better than the other people here.”
“No, of course,” Garber said. “That wasn’t what I was implying.”
“Funny,” Liesl said. “It sounded like that was exactly what you were implying.”
By the elevator, Detective Yuan was waiting for them, just as Liesl had arranged. He shook President Garber’s hand and reminded him that the men had met before, on more than one occasion. Garber began to ask what was going on, but Yuan stopped him and told him it was best that they had their discussion in private, with all of the relevant parties there. They stepped into the elevator together, and Garber crossed his arms tight, making himself as small as possible so that he would not accidentally touch anything.
“Let’s do whatever it is we are here to do so I can get back to work.”
Detective Yuan smiled at President Garber and led him into an office. Waiting inside was a man who looked like he had been lifted directly out of a network television drama. He was only about Liesl’s height, but he was roped with muscle. His head was shaved and polished to a spectacular shine, but it was his outfit that stole the day. He wore immaculate jeans that hugged every curve of his body and a perfectly crisp, perfectly fitted, perfectly blue jean shirt, a slightly different shade of denim, tucked into those jeans. The garments had either been lovingly cleaned and ironed or had been procured from a store that very morning and would be discarded that evening when they were no longer fresh. Around his shoulders he wore a holster with a handgun tucked neatly under each arm. He was introduced as a detective from the property crimes unit. Liesl heard and immediately forgot his name—the tight jeans, the gun, it was all too overwhelming to be real, easier to leave him as an abstraction.
“Detective Yuan laid out some basic information about your case,” Detective Denim said.
Detective Yuan was wearing a suit, as he had been wearing every time that Liesl had encountered him. She would have thought that a missing persons detective would have the need for guns and breathable fabrics and a property crimes detective would be the one in the suit, but very little up until this point had met her expectations about the city police. The room was set up as an office, not an interrogation room, but the lack of personalization and the convenient availability of four chairs and a bare table where evidence could be laid out made it clear that it was, in fact, an interrogation room, though perhaps one that was meant to make its occupants feel as though they were having off-the-record conversations. Garber took off his wool coat and looked around the room for a coatrack. Finding none, he gave a disappointed sigh, folded the coat neatly, and hung it from the back of his chair, being careful to make sure that it did not touch the floor or anything else that could transfer dirt or parasites from the room onto his body.