“Yeah, well. I’m sure you and the other white collars would be surprised to learn the rest of us are even literate.”
“You weren’t going to do this now.”
“Okay. Before it all goes into motion, before we tell the instructor that he can’t have the book for his class, before we tell Garber that he has a serial thief, and before someone whispers it in Christopher’s ear at his bedside and kills him, can we just sit here a minute and be sad about it all?”
She nodded, slow and stricken. He sat on a shelving stool and she sat down next to him.
They only took five minutes, and as they breathed their silent prayers for the book to the soundtrack of the humming fluorescent lights, ideas for what to do arose and then were dismissed before they were ever spoken. Liesl was alternately sure a solution would come to her and terrified it wouldn’t.
“The police, a detective from the police.” Out of breath, Max interrupted the séance. “I’m thrilled that you listened to me, but you can’t call the police and then go hide in the basement. They’re looking for you.”
“When did you call the police?” Dan asked. “Did you already know?”
She had to get up, of course. But she wanted to refuse. To keep her basement vigil for what had been lost. Light candles, shed tears, say prayers. She rose to her feet instead.
“It’s not for this,” Liesl said. “We have so much bad news. So much bad news.”
“What’s he talking about?” Max asked. “Why exactly are they here if not for the Plantin?”
“Don’t say anything,” Liesl said to Dan. “I’ve reported Miriam missing. The rest we’ll talk about as a team later. Everyone needs to get back to work.”
The detective was not in a uniform and looked neither like a gumshoe from the movies of her youth nor a bodybuilder from the crime movies Hannah watched.
“Professor Weiss,” he said. “Detective Peter Yuan.”
“It’s not professor. Just Liesl is fine.”
“Great,” he said. “Let’s talk in your office, and you can let me know what’s been going on.”
“You’ve spoken with Vivek?”
“Yes,” he said. “He reported her missing before you did.”
“Why didn’t I know about that?” she asked.
“In all honesty, it seemed like a marital issue more than a missing person.”
“Are you going to tell me you thought she ran off with a lover?” Liesl said. “But now that her boss has complained…？”
“Something like that.”
“What happens now?”
“Quite a bit already has. Professor Patel—Vivek—gave us credit card and cellular phone information for Miriam, and we have someone following up on that. We’ve been in her apartment this morning, but there isn’t anything suspicious there. In any case, she’s not at home, and it seems she has not been in a while. Her car is not in its parking spot, so the most likely solution is that she left for a trip of some sort.” He stopped.
“Is this where you bring up the lover?”
“No,” he said. “Do you have reason to think that’s a possibility?”
“No,” she said.
“But you brought it up.”
The detective produced a leather notebook from the inside pocket of his too-big jacket. In that respect he was exactly like a gumshoe, asking Liesl questions to which he already knew the answers and scrawling her responses in tiny print into the notebook, which might hold the answers to Miriam’s whereabouts. Liesl described Miriam: what she looked like, what she acted like, what she was working on, what time she had her morning coffee. On the wall, there was a framed photograph of James Joyce. At some point Detective Yuan stopped scrawling and started staring in the direction of the celebrated scribe.
They went on like that for a bit, but then he stopped asking questions, and she stopped offering information. He asked to see Miriam’s desk. She agreed. The detective sat in her chair. The burgundy sweater that Liesl remembered her wearing that last day, the sweater she was now certain was Christopher’s, hung off the back of the chair. Without touching anything, the detective began to write what he saw in his notebook.
The hackles in the room went up. Max looked up from his bible, and Francis laid down his pencil, and Dan pressed Pause on his Discman. They watched the detective.
Liesl was standing in silence, also watching. She was telling two lies. She didn’t give the detective the full context surrounding Miriam’s disappearance. And she didn’t pick up the phone to tell Garber that another book was missing.