The lights switch off in one case, not the one he’s attempting to open, the other one, and there is a clanking noise. He goes to inspect the case and finds that the glass has remained in place but the base has sunk down about a foot lower, allowing access to the books.
Zachary hurries back to the switches and turns the eighth switch back on as he turns the seventh one off. The clanking doubles as the tables move.
The brown leather book is now accessible and Zachary takes it from its spot in the case. He inspects it as he walks back to the switches. It reminds him of Sweet Sorrows, the quality of the leather and the fact that it has nothing printed on the outside, no visible title or author. He opens the cover and the pages are illuminated with beautiful borders and illustrations but the text is in Arabic. He closes it again and puts it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
Zachary toggles switch number seven back on.
But the lights remain off, the case remains lowered. The clanking noise is replaced by the screech of metal on metal.
Zachary switches it off again. Then he remembers.
He takes The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology from his coat and places it in the spot where the brown leather volume had been and tries the switch again.
This time it clanks happily and the lights pop back on as the case slides closed, locking the books inside.
Zachary glances at his watch, realizing that he has no idea how long he has been in the room. He straightens the curtains and puts the book in his coat. He turns off the chandelier and steps quietly back into the hall.
He closes the door as softly as he can. His escort is nowhere to be seen but he hears a voice from the floor below as he makes his way toward the stairs.
When he is halfway down the stairs on the landing, about to turn down toward the main hall, the voice raises and he can hear it better.
“No, you don’t understand, he’s here now,” the escort who is no longer escorting him says.
A pause. Zachary slows his steps, peering around the turn in the stairs as the voice continues, sounding more and more anxious. There is an open door on the side of the hall close to the stairs that he had not noticed before.
“I think he knows more than we’d anticipated…I don’t know if he has the book, I thought…I’m sorry. I didn’t…I am listening, sir. Under any circumstances, understood.”
From the pauses Zachary guesses she’s on a phone. He creeps down the stairs as quickly and quietly as he can, careful not to start the doorknobs swaying on their ribbons as he reaches the hallway. From here he can see into the room where the young woman is standing with her back toward him, speaking into the receiver of an old-fashioned black rotary telephone that sits on a dark wood desk. Next to the phone is a ball of yarn and half a scarf looped on knitting needles and then Zachary realizes why the woman looked familiar.
She was in Kat’s class. The supposed English major who knit the entire time.
Zachary ducks around the back of the stairs as stealthily as he can manage and stops out of sight. The voice has paused but he hasn’t heard the phone receiver replaced in its cradle. He continues along the side of the stairs unseen until he comes to a door. He opens it carefully and quietly, uncovering a narrow flight of much less ornate stairs leading to the floor below.
Zachary closes the door gently behind him and creeps down the stairs slowly, hoping with each footfall that they won’t creak. Halfway down he thinks he hears the phone being hung up, and then a sound that might be someone heading up the stairs above.
These stairs end in an unlit room full of boxes but light filters through a pair of frosted-glass doors that Zachary guesses is his exit. There doesn’t appear to be another one, but he looks just in case.
The doors have several latches but all of them are easily undone, and it takes less time than Zachary expects to get back outside in the cold. A light snow has begun to fall, bright flakes catch in the wind and circle around him, many of them never finding their way to the ground.
A short flight of stairs leads down to a garden that is mostly ice and rocks with a fence of black iron bars that match the ones on the windows. The gate is at the back, the alleyway behind it. Zachary walks toward it, slower than he would prefer, but his dress shoes are not well-suited to the slippery stone.
A siren wails in the distance. A car horn joins it.
Zachary brushes a layer of ice from the latch on the gate, beginning to breathe a little easier.
“Leaving so soon?” a voice behind him asks.
Zachary turns, his hand on the gate.
Standing on the stairs in front of the open glass doors is the polar-bear woman, still in her fur coat, looking both more and less like a bear as she smiles at him.
Zachary says nothing, but can’t bring himself to move.
“Stay and have a cup of tea,” the woman says, casual and gracious, seemingly ignoring the fact that they are standing in the snow as he is in the midst of escaping into the night with stolen literature.
“I really must be going,” Zachary says, choking back the nervous laugh that threatens to accompany the statement.
“Mister Rawlins,” the woman says, descending a single step toward him but then stopping again, “I assure you that you are in over your head. Whatever you think is going on here, whatever side you have been coerced to think you are on, you are mistaken. You have stumbled into something you have no business meddling with. Please come inside out of the cold, we shall have a cup of tea and a polite discussion and then you may be on your way. I shall pay for your return train to Vermont as a gesture of goodwill. You will go back to your studies and we will all pretend none of this ever happened.”