“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.
“Oh dear,” Miriam said.
“My understanding is that each of you saw the Plantin after it arrived here.”
“What are you accusing us of?” Max asked.
“Of seeing the Plantin after it arrived here. Of being able to help find where it was mislaid.”
Max was a small man who got his thinning hair cut every Friday afternoon, and he had never come to work without his pressed white shirt buttoned to the chin. At a library where not much interesting ever happened, there was gossip any time Max opted for a sweater vest instead of a sport coat. Liesl tried to sound open-minded when leveling the question at Max, but there was no softening him; he was all angles.
“She’s right that we all saw it, and she’s right that we might be able to help,” Miriam said.
Miriam had her arms crossed and her legs crossed and her voice was just above a whisper. She looked in Liesl’s eyes while the men, who had both risen from their chairs, were pacing around the room. As the only two women at the library, Liesl and Miriam had often found themselves bound together, and Liesl appreciated her support now. She just wished that support wasn’t quite so hushed.
“You managed shipping and receiving, didn’t you, Miriam?” Liesl asked.
“Well, yes,” she said. “But only because Christopher asked me to.”
“Why would he have asked you?” Francis asked. Against the September heat he’d left the top three buttons of his shirt open, which was really too many buttons. With his hands on his hips, the dark fabric stretched and showed quite a lot of chest.
“Liesl was away, I guess?” Miriam said. “I handle all the shipping for my own division, so I know the paperwork.”
“So you just did the paperwork?” Francis said.
“That’s enough, Francis. No one has asked you to conduct an interrogation,” Liesl said.
Francis was still standing and Miriam was still sitting, and Liesl felt like she was losing control of the situation. She turned the attention off Miriam.
“When did you see it, Francis? Had it been placed in the safe yet?”
“The Plantin isn’t a set of house keys,” Max muttered. “You don’t just mislay a priceless religious artifact.”
“I’m trying to think of the simplest solutions first, Max.”
“No, I mean you shouldn’t have mislaid it.”
“It was meant to be in the safe before I ever arrived.” He wasn’t looking at her; he was running a thumb over the razor’s-edge crease ironed into his trousers. “I would like to take a systematic approach and understand where the book went in the building after it arrived. I’d like your help doing so.”
“Well,” Max said. “I’d like a leader who shows some regard for the sanctity of that book and the reputation of this library.”
Liesl looked to Francis. Over the years they had joked about Max’s self-importance, his irrationality. She waited for Francis to jump to her defense, to acknowledge that Max was being irrational now. He didn’t.
“You always handle shipping,” Max said. “For an acquisition this significant, our most significant in maybe a decade? You couldn’t have come back for one day to handle shipping?”
“You saw it after it arrived?” Her voice was flat as she said it.
“Christopher is a brilliant man. He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the thing. You couldn’t have handled the shipping?”
She ignored the question, pushed the implication that she was good for FedEx paperwork and little else into storage, to be examined later.
“I need to know,” she said, “what happened after it arrived here.”
“We all have our responsibilities here. You failed at yours,” Max said.
“There are hundreds of thousands of volumes here,” Francis said. “If it was shelved in error somehow, the volumes separated, mixed in with the general collection…”
“Then we will find it, in time,” Liesl said.
“At what cost to our reputation?” Max asked, so agitated that he ran the risk of a wrinkle in his button-down.
The room fell back into silence. Liesl thought of the volumes that had been scattered around Christopher’s office, thought if the Plantin volumes could have been among them, but she didn’t say anything. From the other side of the door she could hear the rumble of book trucks, the grind of the pencil sharpener, bursts of footsteps as they crossed from carpet to tile. She didn’t have instructions or actions or a way forward. She’d hoped one of them might have volunteered an idea, might have been good for more than panic. But no. She thanked them and ended the meeting with instructions to prepare for the next day’s reception for new university faculty and to keep their eyes peeled for the Plantin. Dan and his combat boots were waiting for Liesl at the door to the reading room.