With a mournful look that Liesl would have thought an impossible undertaking for his arrogant features, he nodded.
“I know. No one has. Until today. And it’s gone.”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “It can’t be missing.”
“It was last used six weeks ago,” Dan said. “I know for certain that it was returned to the right place.”
He was combing his hands through his thick gray hair. Pulling at it.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “I put it back. I returned it to the right place.”
It had never occurred to her that it would be him. Only the librarians had alarm codes for the building and could come and go unsupervised. She didn’t say it, but the status of his position, which Dan resented so much, saved him from her suspicion.
“You’re certain it wasn’t misshelved?” Liesl asked.
“It’s gone. The Vesalius has been stolen.”
“Why the Vesalius? It has nothing at all to do with the Plantin. A work of religion alongside a work of science. Why those two books?”
“It might be more than those two.”
“What do you mean?” Liesl opened her office door and motioned to Dan to follow her. “Do you have reason to think that something else is missing?”
She unlocked the fire stairs to get down to the basements so she could be sure they would have privacy.
“No. Not yet.”
She stopped on the stairs, waited for him to explain.
“We only know the Vesalius is missing because an instructor requested it for a class this week.”
She leaned against the wall of the stairwell, letting the obvious sink in.
“So we won’t know what else is missing until we go looking for it.”
They walked down into the basements together, toward the Vesalius’s permanent home. She did a mental inventory of the library’s treasures: the Peshawar, the Vesalius, the Shakespeare First Folio. It made her uncomfortable how closely the list hewed to the table of contents of the book Francis had shown her. Like he had written a shopping list. She leaned against a shelf as if she was too sad to remain upright, her shoulders slumping in despair.
“You’re sure it was reshelved after the last use?” Liesl asked.
“Stop asking that. I did it myself.”
“And it couldn’t have been used in between?”
“It couldn’t,” Dan said. “I haven’t taken a day off between then and now. I would know.”
They came to the spot. Dan had pulled the large acid-free box that housed the Vesalius onto a book truck. The box was empty.
“They took it without the box,” Liesl said. “They could damage it.”
“The missing box would have tipped us off.”
“Has anyone else been around here? Is there anything suspicious?”
The hole left by the Vesalius’s box gaped like a missing tooth. Inside the box, the thief had left the cardboard flag that identified the book. This had been no mistake.
“It’s been weeks.”
“This is a nightmare,” Liesl said. “Say something to make me feel better. Something about how collecting rare objects is a capitalist diversion that ultimately doesn’t matter. That private property should be abolished, so it was never really ours.”
“I could say that, but my heart is broken. I love the Vesalius.”
“Do you?” said Liesl. She stood up straighter, taken aback. “Please don’t choose this moment to get mad at me, but it’s not the type of thing I picture you reading. Vesalius didn’t talk much about the proletariat.”
“It’s the corrections.”
She pictured the handwritten scrawls on the perimeter of the text.
“The annotations? I guess I see that. It’s why it’s so valuable.”
The library’s copy of the Vesalius was a first edition. The author’s own copy where he had jotted in the margins the corrections and improvements he wanted for future editions.
“Oh hell,” Dan said. He refastened the acid-free box with care and slid it, empty, to its home on the shelf. “It has nothing to do with value.”
“What then?”
“The imperfection of genius. The man is understood to have founded the field of modern anatomy. There was a fortune spent at the time to print this grand pictorial work. But it wasn’t good enough for him. He kept working at it. I find it inspiring.”
“That’s lovely,” she said, running her fingers over the box, then fixing the flag, making sure it was perfectly upright. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”