By Its Cover (3 page)

‘And he was?’

The guard nodded emphatically. ‘The books were stacked in front of where he had been sitting. His desk light was turned off. So I knew he wouldn’t come back. That’s why I took the book back down to the main desk.’

‘Was this unusual?’

‘For him it was. He always packed up everything and took the books back himself.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘I don’t know the exact time, sir. Before I came back at two-thirty.’

‘And then?’

‘As I said, when Riccardo told me he’d left, I went up to make sure and see about the books.’

‘Is that something you’d normally do?’ Brunetti asked, curiously. The guard had seemed alarmed the first time he asked this.

This time he answered easily. ‘Not really, sir. But I used to be a runner – a person who brings books to the readers and puts them back on the shelves – so I sort of did it automatically.’ He smiled a very natural smile and said, ‘I can’t stand to see the books lying around on the tables if no one is there, using them.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Go on, please.’

‘I brought the books down to the circulation desk. Dottoressa Fabbiani was just coming in from a meeting, and when she saw the Cortés she asked to look at it, and when she opened it, she saw what had happened.’ Then, speaking more slowly, almost as if having a conversation with himself, he said, ‘I don’t understand how he could have done it. There’s usually more than one person in the room.’

Brunetti ignored that and asked, ‘Why did she open that particular book?’

‘She said it was a book she’d read when she was at university, and she loved the drawing it had of that city. So she picked it up and opened it.’ He thought a moment and then added, ‘She was so pleased to see it, she said, after all these years.’ Noticing Brunetti’s expression, he said, ‘People who work here feel that way about books, you know.’

‘You said there were usually more people in the room?’ Brunetti inquired mildly. Sartor nodded. ‘There’s usually a researcher or two, and there’s a man who’s been reading the Fathers of the Church for the last three years, sir. We call him Tertullian: that’s the first book he asked for, and the name stuck. He’s here every day, so I guess we’ve sort of begun to depend on him as a kind of guard.’

Brunetti forbore to ask about Tertullian’s choice of reading matter. Instead, he smiled and said, ‘I can understand.’

‘What, sir?’

‘That you’d trust someone who spent years reading the Fathers of the Church.’

The man smiled nervously, responding to Brunetti’s tone. ‘Perhaps we’ve been negligent,’ he said. When Brunetti did not respond, he added, ‘About security, that is. Few people come to the library, and after a while, I
suppose we begin to feel as though we know them. So we stop being suspicious.’

‘Dangerous,’ Brunetti permitted himself to say.

‘To say the very least,’ a woman’s voice said behind him, and he turned to meet Dottoressa Fabbiani.

2

She was tall and thin and, at first sight, had the look of one of those slender wading birds which were once so common in the
laguna
. Like theirs, her head was silver grey, its covering cut very close to the head, and like them, she leaned forward when she stood, back curved, arms pulled behind, one hand grasping the other wrist. Like those birds, she had broad black feet at the end of long legs.

She strode towards them, released her right hand and brought it forward to offer to Brunetti. ‘I’m Patrizia Fabbiani,’ she said. ‘The Director here.’

‘I’m sorry we have to meet in these circumstances, Dottoressa,’ Brunetti said, falling back on formulaic courtesy, as he always found it best to do until he had a sense of the person he was dealing with.

‘Have you explained things to the Commissario, Piero?’ she asked the guard, using the familiar
tu
with him but as she would with a friend and not with an inferior.

‘I told him that I brought the book to the desk but hadn’t noticed that the pages were gone,’ he answered, not addressing her directly and so not allowing Brunetti to discover whether this was a place where everyone was allowed to address the Director informally. It might be expected in a shoe shop, but not in a library.

‘And the other books he was using?’ Brunetti asked the Dottoressa.

She closed her eyes, and he imagined her opening them and seeing the stubs where once pages had been. ‘I had them brought down after I saw the first one. Three more. One of them is missing nine pages.’ He assumed she had done this without putting on gloves. Perhaps a librarian, in the face of books that might have been vandalized, was as incapable of leaving them untouched as a doctor at the sight of a bleeding limb.

‘How serious is the loss?’ he asked, hoping by her answer to get some idea of what was at stake in a crime such as this. People stole things because they had value, but that was an entirely relative term, Brunetti knew, unless a thief took money. The value of an object could be sentimental or it could be based on the market price. In this case, rarity, condition, and desirability would determine that. How put a price on beauty? How much was historical importance worth? He stole a look at the books on the rack against the wall but glanced away quickly.

She looked at him directly, and he saw, not the eyes of a wading bird, but the eyes of a very intelligent person who understood the complexity of any answer she might give to his question.

She took a few sheets of paper from the table next to her. ‘We’ve started to assemble a list of the books he’s consulted since he’s been here, including the ones I saw today,’ she said by way of answer, ignoring the books on
the rack behind her. ‘As soon as we know all the titles and examine them, we’ll have an idea of what else he’s taken.’

‘How long has he been coming here?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘May I see the books you’ve already found?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Of course, of course,’ she said. She turned to the guard and said, ‘Piero, put a sign on the door saying we’re closed. Technical problems.’ She turned to Brunetti and with a bitter smile said, ‘I suppose that’s true enough.’ Brunetti thought it expedient not to reply.

While Piero was writing the sign, Dottoressa Fabbiani asked the guard, ‘Is there anyone still in the reading room?’

‘No. The only other person who checked in today was Tertullian, and he’s left.’ He took paper and a roll of tape from a drawer behind the counter and stepped over to the front door.

‘
Oddio
,’ Dottoressa Fabbiani said under her breath. ‘I forgot all about him. It’s almost as if he’s part of the staff or a piece of the furniture.’ She shook her head in exasperation at her own forgetfulness.

‘Who’s that?’ Brunetti asked, curious to see if her explanation would match that of the guard.

‘He comes here to read. It’s been years,’ she answered. ‘He reads religious tracts and is very polite to everyone.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, deciding to ignore this information, at least for now. ‘Would you tell me how a person gets to use your collection?’

She nodded. ‘It’s very straightforward. Residents have to provide their
carta d’identità
and proof of a current address. If they’re not resident in the city and they want access to certain books, they have to give us a written explanation of their research project, a letter of recommendation from an academic institution or another library, and some form of identification.’

‘How do they know that they can do their research here?’ Seeing her confusion, he realized he had phrased his question badly. ‘I mean, how do they know what’s in your collection?’

Her surprise was too strong for her to disguise. ‘Everything’s online. All they have to do is search for what they want.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said, embarrassed that he had asked such a stupid question. ‘The system was different when I was a student.’ He looked around and said, ‘Everything was different.’

‘You came here?’ she asked, curious.

‘A few times, when I was in
liceo
.’

‘To read what?’

‘History, mostly. The Romans; sometimes the Greeks.’ Then, feeling it proper to confess, he added, ‘But always in translation.’

‘For your classes?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Brunetti said. ‘But most often because I liked them.’

She looked at Brunetti, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then moved off towards what Brunetti calculated must be the back of the building.

Brunetti remembered his own university career and the eternities he had spent in libraries: find the title in the card catalogue, fill out the request form in duplicate (maximum three books), give the forms to the librarian, wait for the books to be delivered, go to a desk and read, give the books back at the end of the day. He remembered bibliographies and reading through them avidly in hopes that they would provide other titles on the subject of his research. Sometimes a professor would mention a few useful sources, but this was the rare exception; most of them hoarded what information they had, as if they
believed that to give it to a student would be to lose control of it for ever.

‘Was there some common element in the books requested by the American?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Travel,’ she said. ‘Venetian explorers of the New World.’ She rustled the papers. ‘At least that was the subject of his original requests. After two weeks, he started asking for books by writers who weren’t Venetian, and then …’ She broke off to consult the last of the pages in her hand. ‘Then he began to ask for books on natural history.’ Returning her attention to Brunetti, she said, ‘They’re all here.’

‘But what did they have in common?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Illustrations,’ she said, confirming what he already suspected. ‘Maps, drawings of native species made by the explorers and the artists that went with them. Many of them were watercolours; done when they were printed.’ As if surprised by what she had just said, the Dottoressa lifted the hand with the papers to cover her mouth and her eyes snapped shut.

‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘The Merian,’ she said, confusing him utterly. She stood stock still for so long Brunetti feared she was about to have some sort of seizure. Then he saw her relax: her hand fell to her side, and she opened her eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What was it?’ Brunetti asked, careful to make no move towards her.

‘A book.’

‘Which one?’

‘A book of drawings by a German woman,’ she said, her voice slowly growing calmer. ‘We have a copy of it. I was afraid he might have got his hands on that, but it’s – I
remembered – it’s on loan to another library.’ She closed her eyes and whispered, ‘Thank God.’

Brunetti let a long time pass before he dared to ask, ‘Do you have his application?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, smiling, as if she were glad of the change of subject. ‘It’s in my office. A letter from his university explaining his research with a recommendation, and a copy of his passport.’ She turned and started across the room.

At the door she used the plastic sensor card she wore on a long lanyard around her neck to open it. Brunetti followed her inside and closed the door behind them. She led him into a long corridor illuminated only by artificial light.

At the end of the corridor, she used her card key again and let them into a vast room filled with rows of bookshelves so close together that only one person could pass through them at a time. Here inside, the scent was more pronounced: Brunetti wondered if the people who worked here ceased to smell it after a time. Just inside the door the Dottoressa took a pair of white cotton gloves from her pocket. While she put them on, she said, ‘I haven’t had time to check the other books he used, only the ones he left behind today. Some of them are here. We can do it now.’

She glanced at the top sheet, then turned left and went to the third row of shelves. Without seeming even to bother looking at the spines of the books, she stopped halfway along and reached down to pull one from the bottom shelf.

‘Do you know where everything is?’ he asked from the end of the aisle.

She came back and placed the book on a table beside him. She bent to open a drawer and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves and passed them to him. ‘Almost. I’ve been here seven years.’ She looked at the paper and again waved an arm towards the end of the same aisle. ‘I’m sure I’ve walked hundreds of kilometres in these stacks.’

He was reminded of a uniformed officer in Naples he’d known when stationed there, who once remarked that, in his twenty-seven years on the force, he had walked at least fifty thousand kilometres, well over the circumference of the Earth. In the face of Brunetti’s patent disbelief, he had explained that it worked out as ten kilometres each working day for twenty-seven years. Now Brunetti glanced down the aisle, attempting to estimate its length. Fifty metres? More?

He followed her for twenty minutes, going from room to room, his arms gradually filling with books. As time passed, he realized he was far less conscious of the smell of them. At one point, she stopped him beside the table and unpiled them before setting off again. She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and again to pass another one to him. Brunetti was quickly lost: he could orient himself only if a window looked across to the Giudecca: the nearby buildings he saw from the windows gave him no clues.

Finally, after giving him two more books, she flipped the list back to the first page, signalling to Brunetti that she was finished. ‘We might as well look at them in here,’ she said, leading him back to the table of books. He waited while she took the last books from his arms and stacked them on the table.

Standing by the first pile, the Dottoressa took the top book and opened it. Brunetti moved closer and saw the end sheet and flyleaf. She turned the page, and he saw, to the right, the title page. The missing frontispiece was present only as a stiff vertical stub. Though this small slip of paper looked like anything but a wound, Brunetti could not stop himself from thinking of the book as having suffered.