She felt like she was testifying before Joseph McCarthy. Listing the names of her friends and colleagues and thinking about all the ways they could have stolen the book, all the reasons they would have stolen the book. Garber was putting every accusation in his mental ledger. She wanted to stop, but she couldn’t. Because if they weren’t guilty, then she might be.
“Remind me if you were alone when you opened the safe,” Garber said.
“I wasn’t alone.” She shook her head, a little girl indignant at being accused of dipping into the cookie jar, and then she regretted the break in composure and began to answer more slowly and purposefully. “Marie was with me. She called me at home when she heard that we couldn’t get the safe open. When she couldn’t reach me, she just came in.” She looked at him. His mouth half-open with the question that she answered before he could ask it.
“Embarrassed, I think that Christopher had shared the combination with her. I think she was overly helpful because she was embarrassed on Christopher’s behalf at the break of policy. Useful though it was. So she came in and gave me the combination and was standing behind me when I opened the safe and saw it was empty. Marie can attest to all that.”
Garber looked past Liesl’s head, and she turned to see that Max was standing behind them.
“Sorry to interrupt, President Garber,” Max said with his quiet, buttered-up energy. “It’s almost time for your speech, sir. I wanted to make sure you had time for a sip of water and to look over your notes before things got started.”
“No notes, but thanks all the same, Max.”
“I’m happy to help,” he said. “It sounds like you and Liesl are discussing the Plantin. Terrible, isn’t it? That such an important artifact in our church’s history would be misplaced. Once we recover it, it will really be a cornerstone of our collection. I predict that it will attract donations of other religious publications from the same period.”
Liesl stood, half in and half out of their circle of conversation, her core engaged to try to mimic the rigidity of Max’s posture, her hands suddenly moved to cover the few inches of exposed skin at her throat. Misplaced? she thought. Misplaced. Max wasn’t just brownnosing; he was taking Garber’s temperature about the missing Plantin.
“We’ll have to recover it first,” Garber said. “I trust that you and the rest of the team are providing whatever support Liesl needs in that regard. We are in a defining moment for our institution, and the people here will be remembered by how they weather it.”
“As soon as Liesl provides direction about how she’d like to proceed, the team and I will provide whatever support she needs.” Max’s hand tapped his collar as he spoke, a tic from a previous life. “While acting with great discretion of course. It’s 9:59, sir. You said you wanted to speak promptly at 10:00.”
Garber bared his teeth at Liesl. She gave him a nod, indicating that there weren’t any trail-mix scraps caught behind an incisor. He took his place at a microphone that had been set up at the front of the space. The room fell quiet immediately.
“A very warm welcome to you all, and thanks to Liesl Weiss and the team at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections who are generous enough to host new faculty for this welcome reception every year in this wonderful space. I hope you’ll see that we’re showing off a bit, introducing you to the wealth of resources you’ll have during your career here.” He gestured at the beautiful books, as he did every year at that part of the speech. The humanists looked up in awe. The scientists looked down at their muffins. “Tremendous opportunities await you here, where the best students, faculty, staff, and alumni are embracing innovation, teaching, learning, and research. If this is your first faculty appointment, welcome to the academy. If you are joining us from another institution, from government, from business, or from the nonprofit world, we are grateful that you have brought your experience here. We will offer you the tools to be exceptional. We will offer you state-of-the-art laboratories, we will offer you cutting-edge technology, we will offer you administrative support that year after year attracts over one billion dollars in research funding, and we will offer you unrivaled library collections that you will use to teach and discover.
“Today, our university is a success story with a distinct identity. That identity is excellence. That should be daunting, and it should be exhilarating. Because now that you are part of our community, we expect that excellence from you. We are giving you the tools: the labs, the tech, the administration, the library. But we want something in return. From every single member of our community we expect excellence because that is this university’s reputation, and we will not compromise it. I will not compromise it. My job as president is to give you an unimpeded path to excellence. And your job as faculty is to not let me down. I want to thank you for joining the university. Thank you for your commitment to discovery, to collaboration, to teaching, to excellence. You have my best wishes as president, and as your colleague.”