Liesl said nothing.
“We have to be honest here, Liesl. If there’s an odor, we have to say it stinks. That woman, that panicked-looking woman who just came to see you as you were reporting the possible theft of the Plantin to me… She did or she did not have physical access to it?”
“She did.”
“She did. So let’s have an honest conversation about that woman. Let’s look into that woman a little further. Let’s think about everyone who might have had access to the Plantin, and let’s create a little plan, and let’s do our due diligence. Then when Chris wakes up he can have a good chuckle at our panic, and he can tell us exactly where the Plantin has been all along, or we can have a good chuckle and tell him how we lost sight of it but only for a moment.”
“What about the police?” Liesl didn’t sound as sure about the police as she had when the conversation began. She’d been warned that Garber wouldn’t want them called, but now that the warning was coming to pass, she didn’t know what to do with it.
“We’re not there yet. There is no way to involve the police without further undermining our credibility with our donors.”
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Will it not undermine us further if they find out that we knew the Plantin was missing and didn’t call?”
“How would they find out?”
“All right. Putting that aside for a moment, I’m not sure how you’d like us to proceed. If the goal is to recover the Plantin before anyone suspects it is missing, but we can’t use the police to help us recover the Plantin, what’s the next step?”
She didn’t have to put on her glasses to tell he was glaring, and she was embarrassed for having asked because it was clear that she was supposed to be in possession of the answer herself.
“You look for it. You ask intelligent questions, like why does the woman who arranged shipping and receiving of the Plantin all of a sudden look so panicked? You take initiative.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Do you understand what this does to the reputation of not just the library but the university?”
“I do,” Liesl said. As the people in the room had crept closer to the private zone that Liesl and Garber had established around themselves, the volume of their conversation had dropped lower and lower, and the volume of the “I do” was almost imperceptible.
“To my reputation, Liesl.” He dropped all pretense of looking cheerful in front of the crowd. “We are in the middle of a billion-dollar fundraising campaign.”
Liesl pictured Christopher’s office; the doubt crept in. When she imagined the office now, the red volumes were there. Stacked up on the filing cabinet. Mixed with others on his desk. On the other hand, she had already convinced herself that the Plantin was stolen. Liesl thought of the odds that she and Dan could have looked right past it. Unlikely. But impossible? She thought of all the empty wine bottles in her recycling bin.
“We’ll begin to systematically go through the stacks today. Today.”
“You will, Liesl. Because a loss of this magnitude doesn’t just impact our ability to buy fancy old bibles. It impacts our ability to find money for telescopes, for lab facilities. It’s all the same money.”
“No one will know. Not from me.”
They turned to open themselves up to the room once again. The turnout for the event was good, the suits delighted by their proximity to historical artifacts.
“Who else would have had access?” Garber asked. “Who would have touched it?”
“As a bible, it falls within Max’s collection area.”
“Max is a good man, but he’s a man with secrets,” Garber said.
“His secrets aren’t secret anymore. He lives with his partner openly now.”
“You don’t know everything,” Garber said, his eyes still scanning to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “And you don’t have to defend the character of everyone we discuss. We’re taking an inventory.”
“Francis, too, then,” she said, showing that she too could remove emotion from their discussion.
“If it’s in Max’s area of collection, and Chris arranged the purchase, and that Miriam woman was the one who shipped the thing, then where does Francis fit in? Why would he have touched it?”
One of the suits waved at Garber from across the room. Garber smiled back at him.
“The text has Syriac and Aramaic. Francis has a reading knowledge of those languages and Max doesn’t, so it’s likely Francis would have taken a look at some point.”