“Been taking oration lessons from Churchill, hasn’t he?”
Liesl hadn’t seen Francis enter the room or take up a spot behind her. She shared his sentiments about the fervor of the speech, although she might have drawn a parallel to another early-twentieth-century European orator.
By eleven that morning the pastries were gone, as were the attendees. Liesl was fielding phone calls about late invoices and scheduling appraisals of new collections and finding herself interrupted every time she tried to step out to go to the bathroom. Then she blinked and it was six o’clock and she was alone in the library again, typing the code into the alarm panel. Liesl had broken her promise and had failed to speak with Miriam at all that day. In the coming days and weeks and months, Liesl would reflect on that broken promise. But that evening, Miriam was the furthest thing from her mind.
Ten Years Earlier
Miriam snuck downstairs at the first sign that Dan was alone in the basement. She wanted to speak with him without anyone else around, without Christopher around, to see if she could make an appeal on her own behalf that would stick with him.
“I hope, Dan,” Miriam whispered as she came up behind him in the stacks, “I hope this can be it. And that we never have to talk about what you saw again.”
“It’s Miriam, right? Miriam, you’re putting me in an unreasonable position. It was wrong. You know it was wrong, and you know that I should report it.”
A pipe clanged overhead, indicating that the heat was switching on. Miriam and Dan stood facing each another by the oversized map books, fifteen feet from where Dan had walked in on Miriam’s secret a month earlier while he was bringing in a skid of author papers that had just come through the shipping department.
“It happened once,” Miriam said. “It didn’t hurt anyone.”
He stopped stacking books onto his book truck, wriggled his toes inside the tip of his combat boot. He was still dressed like he belonged in shipping and receiving. He hadn’t seen anything to make him eager to fit in with this new crowd. How could he know whether it was true, whether anyone had been hurt by what he saw?
“I could lose my job,” she said.
Dan cleared his throat and looked at his shoes. He almost told Miriam that he was a new father, that he had a daughter, because he thought it would make her trust him more, but then he didn’t say it because what he mostly wanted was to remain uninvolved in Miriam’s mess.
“Maybe someone should lose their job,” he said, looking up at her with golden retriever eyes and hoping she would understand his meaning.
“I love working here. You’re new, but you’ll see, we’re so lucky to work here. I don’t want to have to leave.” She didn’t understand his meaning. Or she did, but she understood the world better, because she was right that if responsibility were being apportioned, she would probably be the one sent somewhere else.
“I liked working in shipping and receiving,” Dan said. “I get that I’m supposed to view the transfer to rare books as a favor, as some sort of promotion, but it’s all the same shit to me. Buying my silence with this ever-so-slightly fancier job? I’m delivering books instead of packages.” He tapped his pen against his clipboard. “It’s all the same shit,” he repeated.
It brought Dan no pleasure, none that Miriam could see, to make his new coworker so miserable. She sat on a step stool next to him and wrapped her arms around her body. He could feel she was waiting for reassurance that her secret wouldn’t become public, but he was in no position to offer her that. He wished her no malice, but that was perhaps the best reason of all to tell someone what he’d seen.
“You know,” Dan said, “everyone always says that the time they were caught doing something was the first time they ever did it.”
Dan scratched a book title off his list with a pencil. He looked only at the call numbers on the flags that poked out of the books, and not at the titles. He didn’t have any interest in the titles, in the books that some upmarket surname working on their second PhD would pore over for weeks.
“I promise this is a really good job,” said Miriam. “I know that it pays the same as the job in shipping, I know that, but it’s not all skids and loading docks. It’s beautiful books and brilliant minds. If you stick around, if you get to know the place and the people, you might be softened by the work. Inspired by it even. I was trying to do a good thing, bringing you here.”
“Listen. You seem nice. I have no quarrel with you. I’ve seen plenty of what I needed to see of the people to make my judgments,” Dan said. “And as for being inspired by work, you and I must come from different worlds. I don’t need to be inspired by my work. I need to be paid for it, and for it to not interfere with the rest of my life.”