By Its Cover (2 page)

‘You think this is the beginning of spring?’ he asked the pilot.

Foa glanced aside and smiled: their agreement could not have been more congenial. ‘I think it might be, sir. I hope so. I’m sick to death of the cold and fog.’

As they completed their turn into the
bacino
and looked forward again, they both gasped. There was nothing theatrical about it, no attempt to make a scene or a statement. They did no more than express their human response to the otherworldly and impossible. Ahead of them was the stern of one of the newest, largest cruise ships. Its enormous rear end stared bluntly back at them, as if daring them to comment.

Seven, eight, nine, ten storeys. Was this possible? From their perspective, it blocked out the city, blocked out the light, blocked out all thought of sense or reason or the appropriateness of things. They trailed along behind it, watching the wake it created avalanche slowly towards
the
rivas
on both sides, tiny wave after tiny wave after tiny wave, and what in God’s name was the thrust of that vast expanse of displaced water doing to those stones and to the centuries-old binding that kept them in place? Suddenly the air was unbreathable as a capricious gust blew the ship’s exhaust down on them for a few seconds. And then the air was just as suddenly filled with the sweetness of springtime and buds and new leaves, fresh grass and nature’s giggly joy at coming back for another show.

They could see, scores of metres above them, people lining the deck, turned like sunflowers to the beauty of the Piazza and the domes and the bell tower. A vaporetto appeared on the other side, coming towards them, and the people on the deck, no doubt Venetians, raised their fists and shook them at the passengers, but the tourists were looking the other way and failed to see the friendly natives. Brunetti thought of Captain Cook, dragged from the surf, killed, cooked, eaten by other friendly natives. ‘Good,’ he said under his breath.

Not far along the
riva
of the Zattere, Foa pulled the boat to the right, flipped it into reverse and then neutral to let it glide to a stop. He grabbed a mooring rope and jumped up on to the pavement, bent and tied a quick knot. He reached down and grabbed Brunetti’s hand to steady him as he made the jump to the pavement.

‘This is probably going to take some time,’ Brunetti told the pilot. ‘You might as well go back.’

But Foa wasn’t paying attention: his eyes were on the stern of the ship as it made its slow progress towards the dock at San Basilio. ‘I’ve read,’ Brunetti began, speaking Veneziano, ‘that no decision can be made about them until all the agencies agree.’

‘I know,’ Foa answered, his eyes still on the boat. ‘Magistrato alle Acque, Regione, junta of the city, Port
Authority, some ministry in Rome …’ He paused, still transfixed as the boat moved farther away, hardly diminishing in size. Then Foa’s voice returned, and he named some of the men on these panels.

Brunetti knew many, though not all, of them. When Foa reached the names of three former city officials of the highest rank, he pounded on the pronunciation of each surname like a carpenter hammering the final nails into the lid of a coffin.

‘I’ve never understood why they divided things up like that,’ Brunetti said. Foa, after all, came from a family that had lived on and from the
laguna
: fishermen, fishmongers, sailors, pilots and mechanics for ACTV. They had everything except gills, the Foas did. If anyone were to understand the bureaucracy of the waters in and off which the city lived, it would be people like them.

Foa gave him the smile a teacher gives his dullest pupil: affectionate, poignant, superior. ‘Do you think eight separate committees are ever going to reach a decision?’

Brunetti looked at the pilot as illumination came. ‘And only a joint decision will stop the ships,’ he said, a conclusion which caused Foa’s smile to broaden.

‘So they can consider and reconsider for ever,’ the pilot said, in open admiration of the ingenuity of having divided the decision among so many separate governmental organizations. ‘Getting their salaries, making inspection tours to other countries to see how things are done there, holding meetings to discuss projects and plans.’ Then, mindful of a recent article in
Il Gazzettino
, ‘Or hiring their wives and children as consultants.’

‘And picking up small gifts that might fall from the table of the companies that own the ships?’ Brunetti offered, though he knew as he spoke that this was not the sort of example he was meant to give to the uniformed branch.

Foa’s smile warmed, but he said only, pointing along the narrow canal, ‘Down there, just before the bridge. It’s the green door.’

Brunetti waved his thanks for the ride and for the directions. A moment later he heard the motor spring to life, and when he turned he saw the police boat swinging out into the canal in a wide arc that would take it in the direction from which they had come.

Brunetti noticed that the pavement was wet, with large puddles against the walls of the buildings he passed. Curious, he walked back to the edge of the
riva
and looked down at the water, but it was more than half a metre below him. It was low tide, there was no
acqua alta,
and no rain had fallen for days, so the only way the water could have got there was by being washed up by a passing ship. And they were meant to believe, he and the other citizens the administration considered to be imbeciles, that these boats did no damage to the fabric of the city.

Weren’t most of the men making these decisions Venetians? Hadn’t they been born in the city? Weren’t their children in the schools and university? They probably spoke Veneziano during their meetings.

He thought memory would return as he walked towards the library, but it all failed to become familiar to him. Nor could he recall whether the
palazzo
had been Merula’s home when he lived in Venice: that was a job for the Archivio Storico, not the police, whose records did not go back a thousand years.

When Brunetti passed through the open green door, he told himself it looked familiar, though what it really looked like was any of the Renaissance courtyards in the city, complete with outside steps leading to the first floor and a metal-capped well. He was drawn to it by the beautifully preserved carving, still safe inside these walls. Fat pairs of
angels supported a family crest he did not recognize. The wings of some of the angels were in need of attention, but the rest of the carving was intact. Fourteenth century, he’d guess, with a garland of carved flowers encircling the well just under the metal lid: he surprised himself by having a strong memory of that, if of little else he saw there.

He started towards the remembered staircase, its broad marble handrail interspersed with the carved heads of lions, each the size of a pineapple. He climbed the stairs, patting the heads of two of the lions. At the top of the first flight, he saw a door and beside it a new brass plaque: ‘Biblioteca Merula’.

He stepped inside, into coolness. By this time in the afternoon, the day had grown clement and he had begun to regret wearing his woollen jacket, but now he felt the sweat drying across his back.

In the small reception area, a young man with a fashionable two-day beard sat behind a desk, a book open in front of him. He looked at Brunetti and smiled and, when he approached the desk, asked, ‘May I help you?’

Brunetti took his warrant card from his wallet and showed it. ‘Ah, of course,’ the young man said. ‘You want Dottoressa Fabbiani, Signore. She’s upstairs.’

‘Isn’t this the library?’ Brunetti asked, pointing to the door behind the young man.

‘This is the modern collection. The rare books are upstairs. You have to go up another flight.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, he said, ‘Everything was changed around about ten years ago.’ Then, with a smile, ‘Long before my time.’

‘And long after mine,’ Brunetti said and returned to the staircase.

In the absence of lions, Brunetti ran his hand along the bevelled marble railing smoothed by centuries of use. At the top, he found a door with a bell to the right. He rang
it and, after some time, the door was opened by a man a few years younger than he, wearing a dark blue jacket with copper buttons and a military cut. He was of medium height, thickset, with clear blue eyes and a thin nose that angled minimally to one side. ‘Are you the Commissario?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered and extended his hand. ‘Guido Brunetti.’

The man took it and gave it a quick shake. ‘Piero Sartor,’ he said. He stepped back to allow Brunetti into what looked like the ticket office of a small, provincial train station. A waist-high wooden counter stood to the left, on it a computer and two wooden trays for papers. A wheeled rack with what seemed to be very old books piled on it was parked against the wall behind the counter.

There might be a computer, which there had not been in the libraries he had used as a student, but the smell was the same. Old books had always filled Brunetti with nostalgia for centuries in which he had not lived. They were printed on paper made from old cloth, shredded, pounded, watered down and pounded again and hand-made into large sheets to be printed, then folded and folded again, and bound and stitched by hand: all that effort to record and remember who we are and what we thought, Brunetti mused. He remembered loving the feel and heft of them, but chiefly he remembered that dry, soft scent, the past’s attempt to make itself real to him.

The man closed the door, pulling Brunetti from his reverie, and turned to him. ‘I’m the guard. I found the book.’ He tried, but failed, to keep the pride out of his voice.

‘The damaged one?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, sir. That is, I brought the book down from the reading room, and when Dottoressa Fabbiani opened it, she saw that pages had been cut out.’ His pride was replaced by indignation and something close to anger.

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Is that what you do, bring books down to the desk?’ he asked, curious about what the duties of a guard might entail in this institution. He assumed it was his position as guard that made Sartor so unusually forthcoming in speaking to the police.

The look the man gave him was sudden and sharp and might as easily have been alarm as confusion. ‘No, sir, but it was a book I’d read – well, parts of it – so I recognized it right away, and I didn’t think it should be left on the table,’ he blurted out. ‘Cortés. That Spanish guy who went to South America.’

Sartor seemed uncertain how to explain this and went on more slowly. ‘He was so enthusiastic about the books he was reading that he made me interested in them, and I thought I’d take a look.’ Brunetti’s curiosity must have been visible, for he continued, ‘He’s American, but he speaks Italian very well – you’d never know – and we got into the habit of chatting if I was on the desk while he was waiting for the books to come down.’ He paused, and when he saw Brunetti’s expression, went on. ‘We have a break in the afternoon, but I don’t smoke and I can’t drink coffee,’ he said, then added, ‘Stomach. Can’t handle it any more. I drink green tea, but none of the bars around here has it, well, not a kind that I’d drink.’ Before Brunetti could ask why he was being told all of this, Sartor said, ‘So I have a half-hour and don’t much want to go out, so I started to read. Some of the people who come to do research mention books, and sometimes I try to read them.’ He smiled nervously, as if conscious of having overstepped some sort of class barrier. ‘That way I have something interesting to tell my wife when I get home.’

Brunetti had always taken a special delight in the surprising things he learned from people: they did and said the most unexpected things, both good and bad. A
colleague had once told him how, when his wife was in the seventeenth hour of labour with their first child, he had grown tired of listening to her complain, and Brunetti had fought down the impulse to slap him. He thought of his neighbour’s wife, whose cat was set free from the kitchen window every night to roam the rooftops of the neighbourhood, and who came home every morning with a clothes peg, not a mouse, in his mouth, a gift not unlike the interesting story Sartor took home to his wife.

Brunetti, interested in what he had to say, asked, ‘Hernán Cortés?’

‘Yes,’ Sartor answered. ‘He conquered that city in Mexico they called the Venice of the West.’ He stopped and added, afraid perhaps that Brunetti might think him a fool, ‘That’s what the Europeans called it, not the Mexicans.’

Brunetti nodded to show he understood.

‘It was interesting, although he was always thanking God when he killed a lot of people: I didn’t like that very much but he was writing to the King, so maybe he had to say things like that. But what he said about the country and the people was fascinating. My wife liked it, too.’

He looked at Brunetti, whose approving smile to a fellow reader was enough to encourage him to continue. ‘I liked how things were so different from how they are now. I read some of it, and I wanted to finish it. Anyway, I recognized the title –
Relación
– when I saw it in front of the place where he usually sits and brought it downstairs because I thought a book like that shouldn’t be lying around up there.’

Brunetti assumed this unnamed ‘he’ was the man believed to have cut the pages from the book, so he asked, ‘Why did you bring it down if he was working with it?’

‘Riccardo, from the first floor, told me he’d seen him going down the stairs when I was at lunch. He never did that before. He always comes in soon after we open and stays
until the afternoon.’ He considered that for a moment and then added, sounding genuinely concerned, ‘I don’t know what he does about lunch: I hope he hasn’t been eating in there.’ Then, as if embarrassed to have confessed such a thing, he added, ‘So I went up to see if he was coming back.’

‘How would you know that?’ Brunetti asked with genuine curiosity.

Sartor gave a small smile. ‘If you work here for a long time, Signore, you learn the signs. No pencils, no markers, no notebook. It’s hard to explain, but I just know if they’re finished for the day. Or not.’