Bram put the gap list on top of the notebooks.
He had written the dates as well as he could remember them. One missing volume had been left in a security office he no longer controlled. Another might have been destroyed during a hurried evacuation, but he could not verify its destruction. A third had gone with a colleague who had stopped answering him. He distinguished those possibilities rather than labeling every absent book lost.
The commissioner read the list before touching the first cover.
“You know what it looks like.”
“Yes,” Bram said.
“Useful routes preserved. Inconvenient history missing.”
“There is inconvenient history in these.”
“That doesn’t prove you haven’t selected it.”
