He invited one of the students, a shy-looking one with brown hair falling into his eyes, to touch the book, to pick it up. The whole room held its breath as the lucky boy lifted the book by the tips of his fingers. One of the students asked about gloves—they always asked about gloves—and Max dispelled the myth, telling the boy, the class, that the book was safer when the holder had full use of his senses. Max invited the boy to lift the book, to feel it, to run his fingers over it and get to know it. When the boy lifted the book to his nose, and they always did—it was human nature to smell it—Max told him the thing about the rats.
He shot his arms forward, disgusted by the idea of centuries-old rats, and then he almost dropped the book and was horrified that he almost dropped the book, so he grasped it tighter, inviting bubonic plague, and then the whole group of undergraduates laughed and unclasped their hands from behind their backs and began to really see the treasures that Max had selected so lovingly.
It was already becoming dark outside; there were long shadows out the library window as she waited for the elevator. The elevator, the basement, her proximity to the work she was meant to be doing was getting colder, colder. She pressed the button for B2. In the holding cages, right outside the elevator, a new donation had been unpacked by an army of graduate-student assistants earlier in the week. They were all editions of the works of Thomas Hardy. Thousands of them. First editions and foreign-language editions and illustrated editions. Editions that had been owned by other writers and editions that had been owned by heads of state and editions that had been owned by Hardy himself. They were bound with wood and cloth and leather and paper.
The man who sat cross-legged on the floor inspecting one of the volumes was the proprietor of a local rare-books shop who was often called in to do appraisal work for the library. His khaki trousers were covered in dust from perching on the floor. He held up an autograph on the title page of an edition of Jude the Obscure for Liesl to see.
“Look at this,” he said. “Is this a convincing Emile Zola, or is my imagination running away with me? Do you have a Zola autograph on file?”
Liesl left him to his work with promises to send someone down with research about Zola’s penmanship. He pulled another volume off the shelf as she stepped into the elevator.
When she returned to her table, the reading room supervisor asked if she’d like to have the catalogs tidied up and put away until the morning. Liesl shook her head. The room was quieter and dimmer now that the readers had left and the desk lamps had been switched off. It was exactly the way that she wanted to work. The supervisor wavered for a moment, unsure if she was meant to stay and supervise her boss or if she should leave as scheduled. Liesl assured her that she would lock up the room before leaving.
Once alone, she shrugged out of her cardigan and returned to her creaky wooden chair. She found it difficult to focus. There was a major collection going up through Christie’s, and she had to decide whether she wanted anything for the library, and if so, how much she might be willing to spend. Turning the catalog pages, she saw only smears. There was a mechanical click as elsewhere in the building someone turned the main lights off. The rest of the staff, save for maybe Francis, had left. Liesl stood to stretch and wandered over to the book truck full of materials that were currently in use by readers. A first edition of the score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. John Nash’s doctoral thesis. They were so small, most of them. Slender enough to fit into a laptop sleeve. She didn’t especially want any of them; what would Liesl do with the score to Don Giovanni? But she could take it; that was the point. There was no one who could stop her.
She looked at those books for a long time. They looked so ordinary. After a while she turned back to her work and reopened the abandoned Christie’s catalog. There was a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Livre de paix that would be coming up. A fifteenth-century woman who made her living as a writer. Liesl wanted it.
After she had scratched out some figures in the margins of the auction catalog, Liesl closed all her volumes. She ran her fingers along the spines of the lonely books in the reading room, and then she turned off the light and closed the door. Francis surprised her as she was putting her things away on Christopher’s desk.
“I was certain I was the last one here,” Francis said.
She set the auction catalogs and her notepad on the desk at a neat right angle. She could return to them in the morning.
Francis had his coat in his arms, a red knit cap already on his head. The red made him look more grandfatherly than she had ever seen him. He cocked his head at her, waiting for a reply.