“Well then.”
“Christopher was so particular.”
“And you owe him respect. But I’m owed it too.”
“So I should have ignored his policy?”
“So you should have come to see me if there was a question about policy. Instead of defying instructions with no comment at all.”
She went to meet Marie in the lobby and, unable to find words for comfort, words for apology, she greeted her with a hug. Then, with an arm around her, Liesl guided Marie into the office. She was surprised that Marie hadn’t just come to the back the way she would almost daily when Christopher was working. Her white hair looked whiter. Her small frame looked smaller. Liesl supposed that she wouldn’t have come on back either, being in Marie’s place.
“I called you yesterday,” Marie said.
Liesl nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. It was an overwhelming day. Christopher’s shoes…”
“Don’t apologize. I should apologize.” Marie was looking around the familiar room. “You didn’t have what you needed to be successful.”
Liesl looked back at the tiny woman, wanted to hug her again.
“It’s hardly your fault, Marie.”
“I’m sorry all the same. If this created an embarrassment for you,” Marie said.
“You’ve had much more important matters to worry about,” Liesl said. “Tell me, how is he?”
“The same,” Marie said.
Liesl closed the door to the office. She thought the stale smell that bothered her so was probably giving Marie comfort. She was sorry now that she had reshelved Christopher’s volumes so quickly. Marie might have liked to know what he was working on, what he was reading.
“You do have the combination then?”
“Shall we try it right away?” Marie said.
“We can sit a bit if you like.”
“I should get back to the hospital.”
“I hate that I dragged you all the way down here.”
“You did no such thing. I came myself. I needed a bit of a break.”
“You could stay, and we could have lunch?”
“He might wake up.”
The way she said it, Liesl understood for the first time the severity. The truth.
That he would probably never wake up.
“Well,” Liesl said. “Let’s get you back to him then.”
Liesl crouched on the floor by the safe, ready to enter the combination as Marie read it to her. Marie reached into her handbag—brown, sensible—and retrieved a small datebook. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Whenever you are.”
Liesl spun the dial right, then left, then right again, and when she got to the last digit, the safe gave an almost imperceptible click that indicated the right combination had been entered. Liesl closed her eyes with relief. She stood and jotted the numbers down on a pad before she could forget them. She’d have to change the combination. Marie was hardly a risk, but policy was policy, and having the numbers out there wasn’t secure. She lifted the handle with her foot and crouched back down to the safe.
“It’s empty. Marie. Marie, the safe is empty,” Liesl said.
Fourteen Years Earlier
Stumbling over a two-inch heel, Miriam fell into the messy kitchen with much less grace than she had intended.
“Oh no. Is that what you’re going to wear?” Vivek asked, looking up at her.
“Yes. No. Why? What’s the matter with it?” Miriam smoothed her gray blazer, her only blazer.
“I’m joking. Oh my gosh, I promise I’m joking. You look great. Professional. Beautiful.”
“Please don’t make jokes like that, I’m nervous enough.”
He took her face between his hands and gave her a kiss. “There isn’t anything to be nervous about. I’ve told Liesl all about you, and you met Christopher at the interview. They’ll love you.”
“They’re all so smart.”
“They’re kind. If I ever do get this PhD, it should be Liesl’s name on it, not mine. Every time I go in there, she’s dug out a new thing for me to read that I otherwise never would have heard of.”
“That’s what I mean; they’re so smart. Am I supposed to be able to do that?”
“Miriam. They’ve all been there for a million years. Once you’re there for a million years you’ll be able to do that, but no one expects it on the first day.”
“Christopher seemed a bit scary in the interview. I’ll bet he expects it.”
Vivek handed her a piece of toast. “He seems pretty intense, yeah. But in a good way. A bunch of the undergrads in my seminar section think he’s hot. And there are rumors he’s a bit of a tomcat.”
Crumbs rained down on Miriam’s blazer as she chewed her toast. “You know, I was so petrified during my interview that I don’t even remember what he looks like. If you paid me money right now, I couldn’t describe him. In my memory, he’s a terrifying blob wearing a very nice suit.”
“All the better that you don’t remember him as handsome. The last thing I need is you running off with Indiana Gutenberg.”
Miriam turned her head to hide her blush, her loose curls brushing against the collar of the big gray blazer. “I’m not the type that type goes for. Does he really have a reputation?” She buttoned the blazer and then unbuttoned it. Vivek walked up to her, wrapped his arms all the way around her, and whispered in her ear.
“You’re totally the type who would have gone in for an affair with a professor, aren’t you?”
Miriam swatted him away and went back to fussing over her clothes. Sighing at the uselessness of trying to look attractive, she only hoped she wouldn’t look embarrassing. She took a last bite of toast and a deep breath as she turned to leave.
“You really think they’re going to like me?”
“They’re going to love you. How could they not?”
4
Liesl gathered them in the large reading room for a cross-examination—everyone who had seen or touched the Plantin Bible since it had been in the library’s possession. The room was soundproof when the doors were closed, well suited for events when the donors overdid it with the Chablis. And perfect for an interrogation.
The campus buildings were scattered across a parcel of land in Toronto, just north of downtown on the dividing line between a neighborhood where the Korean noodle shops were celebrating their fiftieth year in business and where the owners of Victorian mansions wrote strongly worded letters to the city council to ensure that nothing so tacky as a condominium could be built in their neighborhood. The coffee shops had literary names where baristas with unironic mustaches shared their artistic ambitions as they made perfect pour-over coffee. Until about ten years ago, the students had their pick of spacious flats above the noodle shops, but all at once the streets had come to be lined with shiny Subarus instead of rusted Hondas. Days, young mothers pushed their strollers down well-swept sidewalks. Nights, the students vomited four-dollar dim sum into alleyways. And it was the university, the bricks and the books and the brilliance, that tied those two Torontos together.
Francis sat by the door across the room from Maximilian Hubbard, the head of religious acquisitions, and Miriam Peters, the head of the modern manuscripts division. Light streamed across their faces through the window, the city peeking in. The library stacks rose up above the room in an octagon over six stories, a cathedral of dark volumes barely illuminated by yellow lights lining the walls. It gave the space the feeling of a panopticon, but it was the people in the room who were being watched by the silent books.
Dan might emerge on one of the catwalks along the walls to retrieve a volume, but it was unlikely. These books had been chosen for their aesthetic beauty, to lend the space a sense of grandeur. They were rarely read. The real collections were on book trucks in the small reading room or in the layers of basements beneath the building. Liesl pressed her lips together as she prepared to address the group.
“The Plantin Polyglot Bible,” she said. “The volumes are not in the safe as they should be. The book is missing.”
“Where is it?” Francis asked.
“Can I look myself?” Max said.