She heard the floorboards creaking above her. He was still awake. They didn’t need this big old house, spread over three narrow stories that increasingly made her knees ache when she came down to get coffee in the morning. Hannah rarely spent the night and had no real attachment to her childhood room, which was now mostly used to store canvases. John loved his attic studio and its dancing morning light, but Liesl would be happier if he rented a studio space and moved his operation there. She had once considered it romantic being married to a painter. But romance stories never detailed how much stuff came along with the profession. Blank canvases, abandoned canvases, completed canvases, oil paint, latex paint, paint remover, brushes, jars for brushes, scrappers, easels of every size. It was suffocating.
“I can’t even list it until you get rid of all this stuff,” a real estate agent had told her a couple of years ago when she had first begun to consider retirement and hoped to downsize to a smaller, easier home. The problem was that to John it wasn’t stuff. It was evidence of his work, the output of his heart, the proof of his talent and worthiness. He wasn’t suffocated by it; he was nourished by it. Liesl was awoken from her procrastination by the phone ringing.
“Hello,” Liesl said to the empty office to see how it would sound. She overpronounced the L. She held the O too long. She sounded drunk.
A second ring. Liesl glanced at the display. Marie Wolfe. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe, who Liesl had not yet spoken to since his stroke. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe, who Liesl would not speak to for the first time after all that Chablis.
Liesl clicked the red button on the phone to reject the call and went back to her work, building a rudimentary understanding of carbon dating so she could sound halfway intelligent denying the young professor’s request in the morning.
Mostly drunk and alone in one’s office is not a good way to build an understanding of carbon dating. “How do you get a book in a test tube?” Liesl asked herself. There was no one listening, of course, but she was embarrassed for having even thought it.
She sent an email to Rhonda that she could come see the book the next day and that they would discuss the rest then. It was time to go to bed.
***
Seven in the morning and Liesl had a headache. Not enough food, not enough water, more wine than was wise. She’d need to be more careful. She got to the library early enough that she was the one to switch off the alarm that she’d set the night before. She walked through reading rooms and work areas and row after row of cages and stacks in the basement, flipping on light switches. She would have liked to linger longer, but she wanted to feel more prepared than she had the day before. She wrote a note for Dan, asking him to pull the Peshawar back up and to bring it into her office. She checked her email to be sure that President Garber wasn’t springing another donor visit on her, and then she sat and processed invoices for recent acquisitions. The headache was nearly enough to convince her to break the rules about food and beverages near the books and risk a coffee stain on a medieval manuscript, but Liesl was ultimately a rule-follower, and throughout the morning the headache faded, even without the coffee she so craved.
The library was open. The staff had all arrived. Liesl walked out to the workroom. Dan was sitting at his desk wearing headphones plugged into the Discman and frowning. She tapped him on the shoulder and their dance—she attempting to exert authority and he rejecting it—began anew. He looked at her. He found the pause button. He pressed it. He took the headphones off and laid them neatly on the music player. Everyone in the workroom was watching.
“Good morning, Liesl,” he said. “Here to mingle with the commoners?”
“I need the Peshawar again this morning.”
“The Peshawar?”
Francis with his summer tan and his slicked-back hair was seated at the desk closest to Dan’s. He was pretending to read a bookseller’s catalog.
“I left a note on your desk this morning,” Liesl said.
“Right.”
“For you to bring up the Peshawar when you got in.”
“Right.”
“And you haven’t.”
“Right.”
Dan was the union representative for library workers. So if she fired him to exert some control or acquiesced to his bullying and burst into tears, there were sure to be consequences.
“Well, you’re in now. So I’m hoping you can fetch the Peshawar.”
“Christopher had a policy about pulling the Peshawar out for faculty,” he said. “It’s very fragile.”
Liesl found that she had knit her hands together and was clenching them tightly. She dropped them to her sides. “We had it out just yesterday.”
“For donors,” he said. “It was an extraordinary circumstance, you’ll admit.”
“Of course it was an extraordinary circumstance,” Liesl said. She immediately wished she hadn’t conceded this point, even though it was an obvious one.
“President Garber himself requested it,” he said.
“Well, no,” Liesl said. “I did. As I am again today.”
Francis looked up from his catalog. “Come on, Dan,” he said. “Quit being lazy and giving Liesl a hard time. Just fetch the Peshawar if she says she needs the Peshawar. She’s Christopher’s proxy now.”
“The white-collar man accusing the working man of laziness. What a cliché.”
Liesl cut in.
“Francis didn’t mean that.”
“I bloody well did,” Francis mumbled into the catalog.
“Francis, can you tell me of a single time Christopher pulled the Peshawar out for researchers?” Dan asked. “We had the thing photographed for a reason.”
Liesl looked over at Francis, waiting for him to take her side even if it was just to prove Dan wrong. She waited and waited until the prolonged silence became uncomfortable for all parties. Help wasn’t coming. Dan put his headphones back on, pushed the sleeves of his plaid shirt higher up his forearms, and looked at his computer screen.
Liesl was in an impossible position. She would look like a fool and an amateur in front of Rhonda Washington, who had been promised a visit with the Peshawar, or she would look like a fool and an amateur in front of a workroom of her staff who all knew of Christopher’s policy that she was trying to violate. She needed the staff to respect her. She could handle Rhonda by email.
“The photographs are very good,” Francis called as she walked away.
“Are they? I’ll let her know.”
“I’ll get Dan to pull up the prints so she doesn’t have to work at a screen.” He had followed her out of the workroom.
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
“It’s just so fragile, you know,” he said.
She nodded. “I’m happy to defer to your expertise. I’m sure the photos will be fine.”
They were huddled in the hallway now, out of earshot of the others.
“They’re better than fine,” Francis said.
“Is that what I’m meant to tell her?” Liesl asked.
“Yes. The photographs were made before that terrible binding. The mica sheets have caused the birch bark to darken.”
He was probably just placating her. “It did look quite dark to me yesterday.”
Francis nodded. “The photos were done before decades’ worth of deterioration. She’ll have a hell of an easier time.”
“You’ll take care of Dan then?” Liesl asked.
“As best I can,” Francis said. “Within the confines of the law.” He winked one of those impenetrable brown eyes at her, and for that moment she felt as though someone was on her side.
“Marie called me last night,” she said to Francis.
“I’m glad. I told her about the fuss with the safe. She had the combination then?”
Liesl tried not to think of the security implications of Christopher sharing the safe’s combination with anyone, even his wife.
“You told her?” she said. “You didn’t tell me you were speaking with her.”
“Keeping in touch. Seems right.”
“I guess.”
“So did she find it then? The combination?”
“Will you excuse me?” She left him without answering. When she returned to the office, she should have called Marie immediately, but her mind went to Rhonda instead. She had to email to call off the meeting or rearrange the terms of the meeting or somehow gently explain that the woman would have to do her work from photographs, yet that was easier than the long-overdue call to the wife at the sickbed.
The Plantin, she thought, could wait a few more minutes while she thought of the right thing to say. But the wife at the sickbed had other plans.
“Marie’s here to see you,” Dan said from the doorway of her office when she’d scarcely hit Send on her email to Rhonda.
“Thanks, Dan.” Liesl put her palms on her desktop to steady herself. “I’ll be right there.”
“No hard feelings?”
“Should there be?”
“No.”