“There’s a second part of the question,” Marie said. “Ask me.”
Marie was very drunk, and Liesl was very sober. They were not on even ground, and the right thing to do would have been to pour Marie a glass of water, put her to bed, and continue the conversation another day. Liesl refilled Marie’s glass.
“Why?” Liesl said. “Why send me the chapter once you found out?”
Marie. Marie with the chapped lips, Marie with the finger-spotted wineglass pulled herself into a chair by the kitchen counter.
“I never went into his home office. Did you know that?” Marie set her glass down on the counter. Too hard. Liesl cringed, sure it would crack, but it held.
“No,” Liesl said.
“We agreed. It was his private work space. A brilliant man can’t be interrupted.”
Feeling awkward about Marie’s condition, Liesl tried to sound maternal.
“I’m surprised you agreed to that.”
“The cleaning lady would go in,” Marie said, her face breaking into a mean grin that put her stained gums on display. “So there was really no reason for me to ever enter.”
“Until after.” Liesl reached forward from where she was standing, and Marie pulled back as if Liesl were coming in for a hug, but she was reaching for Marie’s glass, sliding it out of the way of the woman’s hands that were waving the more agitated she became.
“He was so sure of my stupidity that he didn’t even try to hide it.”
“We’ve had too much wine,” Liesl said. “Let’s talk another day.”
“You haven’t had any wine.”
“All the same,” Liesl said. “Another day.”
“It’s Christmas,” Marie said. “You won’t leave a poor old widow alone on Christmas.”
She swayed her way down from her stool and stumbled out of the kitchen. Liesl wasn’t sure what to do, wasn’t sure whether Marie was going to go to bed, was going to go vomit. But she didn’t feel right leaving the woman alone, so she finally got up and went to follow her. She found her standing in the doorway to Christopher’s office.
“He couldn’t even respect me enough to try to hide it.”
“He did, though,” Liesl said. “They were in the filing cabinet.”
Liesl walked into the room where uniformed officers had removed thousands of books from built-in shelves. They’d left only papers. Piles and piles of papers that Christopher had refused to read on a screen, had refused to save in a folder so that someone after him could make sense of them. Marie staggered forward and grabbed a pile of printouts from the desk, sloppily handing them to Liesl.
They were emails. They were emails from Miriam to Christopher. The old man had set up an email account after all.
“Right here on the desk,” Marie said. “He left that woman’s pleading letters to him right here on the desk under his manuscript.”
Liesl glanced at the stack and almost immediately wanted to look away from the ugliness of what the messages exposed, but in the brief moments she laid eyes on the typed lines, she saw references to embraces held, to promises broken, to a heart shattered, to a mind that was fragmenting, and to a man who didn’t care any longer.
“Marie, I’m so sorry,” Liesl said.
“That poor girl killed herself, and that snake got to die quietly without ever taking any responsibility.”
With that, Marie buckled over and vomited red wine all over the polished wooden floorboards in Christopher’s office.
Twenty-One Years Earlier
The library basement, 3:30 p.m. Liesl had just about made it; ninety minutes and the workday would be over.
Francis was waiting for her by the elevator. “Hello, stranger.”
Liesl pressed the elevator call button. “I have a list I have to pull for a class tomorrow. Head of the history department, he can be a real shark. Sorry to have missed you on your first day.”
“Sorry to have missed me, or sorry to be avoiding me?”
He stepped toward her; she stepped back. “Christopher had a lot planned for you,” Liesl said.
“And I have a lot planned for you, darling,” Francis said, stepping closer still. “I’ve had a lot of time and a lot of miles to think about it.”
“Francis. You can’t call me darling.”
“There isn’t anyone down here to hear.”
Liesl shook her head. “I mean not ever. Not ever again.”
“Liesl, what is this? I haven’t seen you since the Boston conference. You just about arranged this job for me…”