If his shirt collar hadn’t been the perfect size, his Adam’s apple would have strained against the top button. But Max would never have allowed for such a thing.
Liesl turned to leave.
“Christopher would have wanted me. If he had to be away, if he was going to be ill, I’m the one who is best able to stand in for him. He knew that. I know he did. And you know it.”
She kept her back turned, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her face. She could not be certain about the validity of Max’s claim that he was best-equipped to stand in as interim director. But as for Christopher’s preference for Max as his proxy over Liesl? They both knew that was true.
“Don’t think I don’t know about the Peshawar either. Dan told me you were about to let just anyone work with it.”
“A respected faculty member.”
“So respected that she’s never been in here. We’ve never heard of her. Don’t you care at all about these collections?”
“I’ve worked here longer than you have, Max.”
“It’s hardly about tenure, is it? I know these books in my bones. The way Christopher does. It’s my calling. The library isn’t just somewhere I’ve worked a long time.”
“I didn’t volunteer for this.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t. But you didn’t say no either. You didn’t think of what Christopher would want. What the library would need.”
Liesl shook her head.
“Christopher will be back and well soon, I’m sure,” she said. “Until then, we have to find a way to work together.”
“Are you asking me to put on appearances?” Max said. “Well, I won’t. You’ve lost a piece of religious history. Of world history. I won’t put on appearances that everything is fine until that is resolved. Nor should anyone else around here.”
She turned back around to face him, finally. “I don’t understand, Max,” she said. “The Plantin never made it into the safe. Christopher didn’t put it into the safe. Why are you so insistent that I’m to blame?”
“Why not?”
“You need a more compelling reason than that.”
“Because you are the only one who doesn’t seem certain that it wasn’t their fault. I can see it in your eyes, the doubt.”
“That’s your imagination, I’m afraid.”
“Are you down here, going through book by book, because you think it was on Christopher’s desk and was mis-shelved? Is that my imagination?”
“Please make sure you sign out that manuscript if you’re to use it,” Liesl said. “Or put it right back.”
She finally walked out the door, finally went to the elevator, finally got into the office, finally closed the door, and finally let herself cry, but only a little. She looked around the office and tried to imagine where the books had been before she’d had them removed. Three on the desk? Four? A stack on the filing cabinet. The Plantin was bound in the eighteenth century, in a red morocco binding. She checked her copy of the invoice. Six volumes. Could she have missed that? Could Dan? She had heard the binding was beautiful. The deep-red goatskin, the gilt edges. Could she have missed that? She walked back to the door of the office and stood facing the room as she had when she first entered on Monday. No, she didn’t think she had missed anything. She was almost certain now. The Plantin hadn’t been taken out of the office and mislaid. It had never been there in the first place.
5
The students interfered greatly with Liesl’s enjoyment of the campus. The breeze rustling the old oaks, the September crispness nudging out the August humidity. It was a perfect time in a perfect place to remove one’s shoes and read Jane Austen, but, Liesl thought, how could one go barefoot and not risk having one’s toes crushed beneath all these undergraduates? There were students coming from every direction, heading toward the large lecture hall that was attached to the administration building. Liesl was a river rock, and they were the water that rushed around her.
There were serious types, wearing the leather bombers that branded them as engineering students, despite the warm weather. There were flighty types, in cutoff shorts and flip-flops, nothing in their backpacks or their heads. And the bicycles. Screaming by with no regard for traffic laws or personal safety. As she waited for a pack of them to pass, Liesl tried to see if Garber was among them, tried to make out the recognizable shape of his calves, but the cyclists all passed her far too quickly.