“There’s nothing to it, Liesl. Whatever it is you want to say isn’t worth dwelling on.”
“I treated you badly.”
“You believed something unbelievable about me.”
“I think I did.” Liesl said. It was hard to come to terms with the depth of her suspicion. Liesl had drawn a thorough picture to settle the case—Francis’s skulking around with his manuscript-as-shopping-list, using old intelligence connections to sell the books on the black market—but once all the detail of the picture was filled in, it revealed itself as ridiculous. So there she was. A cold bench in a cold playground.
The detail that made Francis’s innocence true to Liesl was the first bit of the picture Liesl had drawn: Francis rolling his manuscript into the office on a book truck. A stack of papers with the clue that the Vesalius was about to be found missing （if she had known then the depth of what would follow!） and asked her, begged her, to read his words, the words that his mentor had, until that point, asked him to keep a secret. This had been in September, but it took everything that came after for Liesl to understand it.
“What I need to know,” Francis said, “is if you kept me close to, I don’t know, crack the case?”
Liesl shook her head. “No, Francis. I just liked having you close.”
“But you don’t anymore?”
“I wasn’t being fair,” Liesl said. “To you or to John.”
Robespierre came barreling back over to their bench. “Grandpa,” he said. “Give me a stick.”
“What’s that?” Francis said.
“Give me a stick.”
“Why on earth would I give you a stick?”
“F-I-T-E. Do you know what that spells?”
“What?”
“F-I-T-E. Do you know what word that spells?”
“That doesn’t spell anything. F-I-G-H-T spells ‘fight.’ You want me to give you a stick so you can go fight?”
“Yes.”
“Go away.”
He hurtled himself back into the pack of children at the other end of the playground. Francis crossed his legs and, in doing so, turned his body away from Liesl.
“Did you really believe I could have done it?” Francis said. “That I would have done that to Chris, to the library, to you?”
She got up from the bench and stood over him, stomping her feet to keep them warm. On the street beyond the playground fence, a streetcar rumbled past. The sun was nearing the horizon, and one by one, the mothers and fathers who had been standing at the park’s periphery were taking small mittened hands and walking them home for warm dinners.
“You haven’t asked me,” Liesl said. “Why I no longer suspect you.”
Without the sun to warm them, the cold came quickly.
“I supposed you had come to your senses,” Francis said. “It’s getting cold.”
“We’ll leave in a minute.”
“Should we just leave the boy here, do you think?”
“Are you going to ask me?”
“He’s feral as it is. He’d survive out here.”
Robespierre was alone now at the top of the play structure. Quiet and cross-legged.
“Ask me who the thief is, Francis.”
Liesl was not surprised to discover that he wouldn’t meet her eyes then. Gazing off, he confirmed for Liesl that he wasn’t blind to what had been in front of him all along.
“I won’t, Liesl. Knowing it for certain will break my heart.”
***
Two minutes after its scheduled opening the next morning, she pushed open the heavy door of Don Lake’s shop. The bookshop was dark. There were stacks of books and papers on every surface, covering every window and lighting fixture. She ran her fingers over the embossed cover of a Thomas Hardy novel that might have been valuable if Don could convince anyone to come into his dusty shop to buy it.
“Who’s there?” Don said, poking his head around the corner. “Liesl Weiss. What a pleasure.”
Don was wearing a dust-streaked shirt and carrying a mug of what Liesl hoped was only coffee but was probably something stronger.
“You’ve been avoiding my calls,” Liesl said. “So I thought a field trip was in order.”
She rested her elbow on a stack that wobbled perilously.
“I’ve been doing no such thing,” Don said. “But I’m damn glad to see a friendly face.”
“Has business been slow?” Liesl said. “I’ve been hearing that from some other sellers.”