2
That first morning, in the swampy heat of early September, exactly three minutes after Garber exited the library and just as Dan Haberer was about to hit Play on the secondhand Discman that he lorded over adherents to more convenient forms of technology, Liesl took him by the arm and asked him to retrieve the Peshawar manuscript. As an afterthought, she told him to bring a couple of book trucks to Christopher’s office to gather various scattered volumes for reshelving.
Dan made an offended display of removing his headphones. Liesl waited until they were all the way off—wrapped in their cord, placed gingerly upon the Discman—and the middle-aged man clad in head-to-toe denim was face-to-face with her before repeating her request. While waiting for the headphones and listening to Dan’s vague grumbles about book request slips and policies and work he had planned for the morning, Liesl had plenty of time to reflect on how unusual Dan’s heavy-denim-and-combat-boot ensemble was in the academic library. Corduroy slacks that stretched over thick thighs. Well-polished loafers concealing collapsed arches. A short-sleeved polo on a hot day, occasionally. These were the uniforms for their battalion. To be confronted with the workman’s ensemble over Dan’s slender frame as he ambled, for Dan always ambled, toward the elevator to get the Peshawar for her and the donors was a contradiction so acute that Liesl never quite trusted her eyes.
It was the too-obvious choice, the Peshawar, for the show-and-tell with the money. She could have been creative, could have asked some of the library’s people, could have phoned up a dealer for a one-day loaner. But Liesl wasn’t up on doing things just for the sake of appearances on her very first day of the number one job. Besides, she assumed that this accumulation of money-loving people would appreciate being in close proximity with these pages that had contributed to the invention of modern mathematics. You can’t have a bank balance with eight zeroes unless someone first invents the zero.
She flipped through an old exhibition catalog that featured the Peshawar. Finance money, pharma money, family money—she was looking for the angle they’d feel at the front of their trousers. She wasn’t an expert in Sanskrit, mathematics, or early writing, and while that hardly mattered when she was talking to undergraduates, she worried that this group might see through her. This group that flexed their fortunes to acquire pages like these. That, coupled with Garber’s lecture that morning about the need to convince the donors that the library was in stable hands, had her feeling like a schoolgirl about to sit for an exam. Had Christopher been there, he would have done the talking. It all made her rather doubtful of her own level of knowledge and nervous to even touch the book when Dan finally rolled it into the office on a book truck.
Then there was another thing. The pages of the Peshawar looked like garbage. The library had been playing a shell game for years, using photos of the leaves in lieu of the real thing. The photographs were just easier to read; they hadn’t been darkening over the decades like the birch leaves had. But Garber had been clear; photographs were going to do little to make this group feel important, so even if the real thing was barely legible and even if the lack of legibility might raise some questions, she was going to have to bring up the real thing. Dan left her alone in the office with it, and she opened the album. The Plantin volumes that were, at that moment, trapped in the safe in Christopher’s office, while finely bound and historically important, were not totally unique—there was a handful of sets in library and private collections. The Peshawar, on the other hand… Nothing like it existed in the whole world. She decided she would let them touch it if they wanted, stroke the leaves. That would have to be enough to get them off.
“Francis,” Liesl said when she walked into the workroom. “Can you be a bit late picking up your grandson today and give a bit of a talk on the Peshawar this afternoon?”
Francis strove for a personal presentation that resembled an MI6 spy and almost succeeded except, pity for him, for being older than and not as handsome as the well-known filmic representation of a British spook. He exaggerated his dark features: dark-brown eyes, yes, but a dark-blue button-down and his still-dark hair, which was worn slicked back when he was feeling rakish and to the side when he wasn’t. At this moment it was back. When he replied to Liesl, his Eton accent was much stronger than you’d expect from a man who’d left the isles behind nearly forty years earlier.
“You know I’m happy to leave that terror waiting in the playground until morning,” he said. “But seems an odd day to be pulling out the Peshawar.”