An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [34]
I crawl under the blankets with my clothes on. It’s too cold to take them off yet. I’ll wait until I’m warmer and hope I don’t fall asleep before then. I reach for the Robinson Crusoe sticking out from under my mattress. I stay with him until my eyes are too tired to focus anymore. By then, he’d been living on the island for four years or long enough to stop regretting his fate:
I could hardly have named a place in the uninhabited
part of the world where I could have been cast more
to my advantage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
the apocalypse of the book
HENRY AND I SIT IDLY like spectators at intermission for some sports event except that our intermission is the main event. In the Room below, they’re trying to wake a man who’s asleep in a chair. Henry shifts his attention like someone channel surfing. “Behold the geometry on her. Where’s the binoculars, Carl?”
“I brought them to the flat.” They catch my eye. They’re on top of my filing cabinet behind him.
Henry notices instantly. When I make a move to reach them before he does, I trigger a painful muscle spasm in my leg. I don’t know if it was the hiking or the horseback ride but I can barely move. “We’re not using those anymore,” I tell him.
He takes them from the cabinet then puts them to his eyes with his glasses resting on top. He focuses on me. “Don’t go saying there are no binoculars when they’re glaring directly at you. Lying is a despicable, dirty act. If you’d been raised a Catholic, you’d know that.” He laughs then shifts his view from me to the window. He sits with them glued to his face. “You’d be better off wasting your time with a woman like her instead of one who’s mixed up with Francis,” he says.
I reach across to take them from him “You don’t know that for certain. Anyway, I spent one day with her. Give me those binoculars.” The muscle contracts and I gasp with the pain.
He leans away from me. “Francis and Myrick are a duo, a pair, a two-some.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I keep my eyes and ears open and my prick pointed, unlike some people around here,” he says.
“I tried dealing with Francis. I asked for his inventory. He told me–”
Henry lays the binoculars on the floor under his chair. “You’re wasting your time with inventories. What library really keeps an accurate account of which books they have? The proof’s with Blumberg. He stole twenty million dollars worth. After they caught him and found the loot, most of the titles had to be auctioned off. The libraries didn’t know they’d lost them. You’re the one who fancies numbers. Imagine how many books go missing that we don’t even know about. Imagine the books that are never requested, never borrowed. That’s the majority of our collection. If someone can devise a scheme to steal the books, most of the time, no one will ever notice anything’s been stolen. If a man eats a can of beans, does he know which one caused the fart?” Henry lays his empty cup on my desk, picks up the binoculars from the floor then puts them in front of his eyes again. “The view is grand today.”
“You’re doing that to irritate me because you know I can’t move.”
“Don’t be assuming you’re the focus of my behaviours,” he says. “You’re not that fascinating.”
“If I was after twenty million dollars, I’d rob a bank instead of a library.”
“That’s because you have no imagination,” he says. “Bibliophiles are driven by passion, not profit. Theft is merely interlibrary loan for them. They want to free the books and give them the attention they deserve.”
“It’s still stealing.”
He lays the binoculars in