Liesl greeted him with a hug. He motioned for her to wait and reached back into the van where he retrieved a large box of sweets marked with Arabic script. She pulled it open and selected a honey-soaked pastry.
“You’re a terrible driver,” Liesl said.
He couldn’t immediately respond as his mouth was full of halvah. So he shrugged, indicating that he didn’t necessarily disagree.
“I didn’t think we could eat in here,” he said when he had finally finished chewing. He was right. Eating was strictly forbidden in the library unless one was a donor attending a cocktail reception. But stealing millions of dollars’ worth of rare books was also forbidden, and that had been allowed to go on for years, so she wasn’t going to let herself sweat over some baklava on Christmas Eve. She offered him another piece, but he refused. He could tell she was stalling. He walked with her to the staff area so they could wash the honey off their hands, and then they returned to the van and popped the latch on the back doors, revealing the boxes of books inside.
Liesl had prepared several book trucks for the job. They were lined up by the fire exit. Detective Yuan hopped into the van and began to hand boxes down to Liesl. She didn’t open them to see what was inside. That would come later. For now she loaded, truck after truck, until the van was empty and the reading room was lined with brown-paper packages waiting to be torn open and inventoried for insurance purposes. Detective Yuan slammed the van door closed, and the fire exit door behind it.
The boxes didn’t need to be immediately opened. She could leave them on the book trucks in the basement and worry about the unpacking after the Christmas break. The empty campus was necessary for the delivery, but not for the unpacking. Even still, she could not help herself.
“Which one is the Plantin?” Liesl asked. “Do you remember?”
He remembered. The officer in the evidence room had asked for Detective Yuan to come down and help pack the boxes, even though Yuan insisted he had no idea how to properly pack a rare book. He was certainly less qualified than the officer who spent most of his days keeping guns and cocaine contained. But his colleague had insisted that Yuan would have a feel for it. He was right. The books were arranged snugly, the boxes labeled neatly.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Liesl said when she opened the box, the sumptuous red Spanish leather appearing to glow within its cardboard confines, the light dancing against the gilt on the spine that was so brilliantly preserved that it might have been applied that very morning. There were some scuffs on the bindings, a bit of a watermark in the gutter of one of the volumes. The little flaws only made the set more beautiful, a beauty mark on a perfectly proportioned cheek. She pulled one of the large volumes out, opened the creaking vellum pages so she could run a finger down the handsome columns of text, feel the slight raise of the intricate floral woodcut that marked the beginning of each section with the pad of her index finger. Yuan looked at her, unconvinced, as she looked at the pages. He shrugged.
“It’s got nothing on the baklava.”
***
Christmas Eve, near sunset. Liesl arrived at the downtown television studio to find her suit, chosen with care and donned moments before her departure, looked shabby next to the tight and trim and tone of television people all around her. She was self-conscious, and she looked it.
“You look like such an authority,” said Professor Mahmoud, rounding the corner to greet her.
Liesl was pliable, the emotion of the day making a compliment enough to set her straight, and she regained her footing. “Are you wearing makeup, Professor?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t ask for it, but I’m not mad about how it looks. The producer wants to run through some details before we film.”
“I’m ready when they are.”
Professor Mahmoud led her to the makeup room where she was seated under bright lights, her face dabbed with powders as an obscenely young television producer confirmed details for the segment.
“So you suspected the blue Quran might be a hidden treasure?” he asked.
“I knew only that the catalog description speculated as to Tunisian origin and that Professor Mahmoud was a great scholar of the library of the Tunisian Great Mosque of Kairouan.”
“You’re being modest,” the producer said.
“I only asked some good questions of some smart people.”
“That’s just it, though, isn’t it? The key to treasure hunting? Know when to shut up and ask good questions?”
Contrary to Liesl’s expectations, this was not taking shape as a fifteen-second feel-good clip on the local news. The producer was beguiled. He dug into their story, and while the money bit was important, the steal of a price at auction and subsequent valuation, he wanted to know about the history of the thing and about the nature of the discovery itself. How they knew what they knew and turned a paragraph-long description in an auction catalog into a treasure missing from the library that contained the oldest Arabic manuscripts in existence. He filled the room with the details of their discovery. Every bibliographical reference, every footnote in someone else’s story, every clue that others had ignored.