GB_23: By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

  ‘That she has no doubt that this will be resolved quickly.’

  ‘By the hard work and intelligence of the local police?’ Brunetti suggested.

  Patta’s eyes blasted away at Brunetti’s sarcasm but his voice said only, ‘Something like that. I don’t want the public institutions of this city to be the victims of criticism.’

  Brunetti could only nod. Citizens have complete faith in the police. Libraries that allow theft should not be criticized. He wondered if Patta believed this amnesty should be extended to all public institutions in the city. And in the province? The country?

  ‘I’ll see my mother-in-law at dinner tomorrow evening, sir, and I’ll mention it to her,’ Brunetti said, reminding Patta which of them it was who would sit down to dinner with Conte e Contessa Orazio Falier, and who it was who would some day live in Palazzo Falier and look across at the façades of the palazzi on the other side of the Grand Canal.

  Patta, fatuous but not a fool, backed away from this by saying, ‘I’ll leave it to you, then, Brunetti. See what the Americans can tell you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said, pushing himself back from the chair.

  Signorina Elettra had returned to her desk, which now held a large vase. In this she was adjusting dozens of bright red tulips. The windowsill held the same excess of daffodils, the two colours in competition for the viewer’s attention. Brunetti turned his, instead, to the creator of this floral exuberance. Given that she was today wearing an orange woollen dress and shoes so narrow with heels so high that either they or the toe could have delivered a mortal wound, this was not hard to do.

  ‘And what was it the Vice-Questore had to say to you, Commissario?’ she asked amiably.

  Brunetti waited until she was seated before leaning against the windowsill that had no vase. ‘He asked where the flowers came from,’ he answered, straight-faced.

  It was rare that Brunetti had the pleasure of surprising her, but this time he obviously had, and so he decided to continue with it. ‘It’s Monday, so there’s no market at Rialto, and that means you bought them in a florist’s.’ He put on a stern face and said, ‘I hope the office expenses can cover the cost.’

  She smiled, a glow to match that of the flowers. ‘Ah, but I’d never abuse that account, Dottore.’ She let three beats pass and added, ‘They were sent to me.’ The glucose level of her smile soared and she asked, ‘And what was it the Vice-Questore had to say?’

  Brunetti waited for a few seconds to acknowledge his defeat and then smiled to show her he appreciated it. ‘I told him about a robbery – quite a few of them – at the Biblioteca Merula.’

  ‘Books?’ she inquired.

  ‘Yes, and a lot of maps and title pages cut from others.’

  ‘Might as well steal them, then,’ she said.

  ‘Because they’re ruined?’ he asked, surprised to hear her repeat what he now thought of as Dottoressa Fabbiani’s opinion.

  ‘If you break the nose off a portrait bust, you’ve still got most of the face, haven’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘If you cut a map out of a book,’ he said right back, ‘you’ve still got all of the text.’

  ‘But it’s ruined as an object,’ she insisted.

  ‘You sound like the librarian,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘I hope so,’ was her response. ‘They spend their lives working with books.’

  ‘So do readers,’ Brunetti said.

  This time she laughed in return. ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘That the missing page doesn’t change the book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He lifted himself up by his hands until he was sitting on the windowsill, legs dangling down. He studied his feet, waved one and then the other. ‘Depends on how you define “book”, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Partly, yes.’

  ‘If its purpose is to present a text, then it doesn’t matter if you pull out the maps.’

  ‘But?’ she asked.

  He wanted to show her that he could see the other side of the argument, so he said, ‘But if it’s an object that captures information about a particular time – the way the maps are drawn, for example – and representative of …’

  Patta’s door opened and the man appeared. He shot a glance at Brunetti, sitting as casually as a schoolboy on a flowery bank, and then at his secretary, seen consorting with the enemy. The three people in the room froze.

  Finally Patta said, ‘Could I see you for a moment, Signorina?’

  ‘Of course, Vice-Questore,’ she answered, getting smoothly to her feet and sliding her chair back in place.

  Wasting no words on Brunetti, Patta turned back to his office and disappeared. Signorina Elettra did not look at Brunetti as she followed him into the room. The door closed.

  Brunetti hopped down and, looking at his watch, saw that it was justifiably time to go home.

  5

  The children were interested in the story of the theft and tried to come up with explanations of how it could have happened. Brunetti gave a vague estimate of the sizes of the pages and stressed that it was essential to the thief that they not be wrinkled or damaged in any way. Raffi, who had been given a Mac Air by his grandparents for Christmas, went to his room and brought it back. He opened it, set it aside, and pulled a few pages from last week’s issue of l’Espresso. He folded them neatly, placed them on the keyboard and closed the lid, then looked around the table for approval.

  Chiara pointed to the slivers of paper visible at one side. ‘If I had the one with the larger screen, you wouldn’t see the edges,’ Raffi insisted.

  Without asking, Chiara went down the hall to Paola’s office and returned with the battered leather briefcase her mother had not carried for a decade but could not bring herself to throw away. She took the magazine from Raffi and pulled out a few pages herself, placed them into the curve of her left palm, then gently lowered the thicker edge of Raffi’s computer on to them. When she closed her hand, the pages nestled tight against the sides of the computer without reaching the top. Gently, she worked it into its padded case and zipped it closed along the top, then slid the case into the briefcase. ‘That’s how I’d do it,’ she said. Then, to stifle any doubts, she walked around the table and let them all look inside the briefcase, where all they could see was the top of the innocent computer safe in its case.

  Brunetti stopped himself from pointing out that guards would have long since learned about those tricks.

  ‘And the other people in the library would just sit and watch you do it, and then applaud?’ Raffi asked, irritated that her suggestion was as good as his own.

  ‘If there was no one else in the room at the time, they wouldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘And if there was someone?’ Brunetti asked. He had not mentioned the stolen books but did not want to initiate another round of demonstrations.

  ‘It would depend on how intent they were on what they were reading,’ Paola broke in to say. Brunetti knew, from decades of experience, that Paola would fail to notice Armageddon itself, were it to occur when she was reading – and for the seven hundred and twelfth time – the passage in The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer realizes Madame Merle’s betrayal. Had she reached that point, kidnappers could enter the house and remove the three of them, kicking and screaming, and she would read on. And on.

  Chiara having shown her expertise at a skill Brunetti hoped she would never use, they went back to their fusilli with fresh tuna and capers and onions. Talk turned to other subjects, and it was not until Paola and Brunetti were sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, that he thought to mention the ecclesiastical reader.

  ‘Tertullian?’ Paola asked. ‘That creep?’

  ‘The real one or the one who’s been reading in the library?’

  ‘I have no idea who the reader in the library is,’ she said. ‘I mean the real one, what was he, third century?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But about then.’

  She placed her empty
cup on the saucer and set them on the low table in front of the sofa, then leaned back and closed her eyes. He knew what she was going to do, and even after decades with her, it still astonished him when she did it: it was all in there, behind her eyes, and she had only to concentrate sufficiently to bring it up from he had no idea where. If she had read it, she remembered the sense and general meaning; if she had read it carefully, she remembered the text. At the same time, she was hopeless with faces and could never remember having met someone, although she would remember the conversation they had had.

  ‘“You are the gateway of the devil; you are the one who unseals the curse of that tree, and you are the first one to turn your back on the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not capable of corrupting …”’ She opened her eyes, looked at him, and gave him a shark’s smile.

  ‘Or, if you’d like more about women, there’s my special friend Augustine.’ Again she slipped into trance mode and, after a moment, said, ‘“How much more agreeable it is for two male friends to live together than for a man and a woman.”’ Coming back to the present, she asked, ‘Isn’t it time all these guys came out of the closet?’

  ‘That’s an extreme position,’ he said, though he had pointed this out to her countless times and treasured her because she defended so many such positions. ‘I think he was talking about conversation in that passage, that men speak together more easily than they do with a woman.’

  ‘I know that. But it’s always seemed strange to me that men can say things like this about women – dare one call it holding “extreme positions”? – and yet become saints.’

  ‘That’s probably because they said a lot of other things, as well.’

  She shifted towards him on the sofa and said, ‘I’ve also found it strange that people can be made saints for what they say, when what we do is so much more important.’ Then, with one of those sudden changes of subject that still managed to surprise him, she asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll call the Americans tomorrow and see if it’s a real passport. And ask Signorina Elettra to contact the other libraries in the city to see if this Nickerson has paid any of them a visit. Call this university in Kansas to see if he really worked there. And I’ll see if I can locate Tertullian.’

  ‘Good luck. I’m curious about a man who would read him.’

  ‘So am I,’ Brunetti said, wondering if there might be a copy of Tertullian in the house and whether he should take it to read in bed. Because that would mean putting aside his current book, The White War, an English history of the war in Alto Adige, a war in which his grandfather had fought, Brunetti resisted the not very strong temptation. He decided to return to the rocklike stupidity of General Cadorna, he of the eleven futile battles of the Isonzo, the man who returned to the Roman idea of executing every tenth man in any battalion that retreated, the general who led half a million men to their deaths for little purpose and no gain. Would Paola be comforted, Brunetti asked himself, by the fact that almost all of the victims of Cadorna’s savagery had been men, not women? Probably not.

  As he walked to the Questura the next day, Brunetti reflected on the press and began to wonder if he had been precipitate in mentioning it to Patta. Dottoressa Fabbiani was certainly not going to notify them, and he suspected that Sartor was sufficiently loyal to keep his mouth closed. Only Dottoressa Fabbiani and Sartor were certain about what had taken place in the library, and only they had seen the papers with the names of all of the books Nickerson had consulted, although she and Brunetti were the only people who had seen all of the vandalized books. It was in her best interests to keep this quiet until she found some way to inform the Contessa. Brunetti was a public official and could imagine how the press would treat this, so he saw no reason to inform them of the thefts. The authorities had been alerted: the press could go to hell.

  The first thing he did when he got to his office was call Dottoressa Fabbiani, who told him, not at all to his surprise, that Dottor Nickerson had not returned to the library that morning. He thanked her and called the American embassy in Rome, identified himself, then explained his need to verify Nickerson’s passport, saying only that the man was a suspect in a crime and the passport the only identification they had. He was transferred to another office, where he again explained his request. They told him to wait, after which he found himself speaking to a man who did not identify either himself or his office, although he asked Brunetti to give his name. When Brunetti offered to give his phone number, he was told that was not necessary, and they would call him back. Twenty minutes later, he received a call on his telefonino from the secretary of an undersecretary at the Italian Foreign Office, asking if he was the man who had called the Americans. When he said he was, the man thanked him and was gone. Soon thereafter he received a call from a woman speaking excellent Italian with the slightest of accents, who asked his name. When he identified himself, she said that the United States government had issued no such passport, and did he have any further questions? He said he did not, they exchanged polite monosyllables, and he ended the call.

  They still had his photo. Nickerson – for want of a better name – might well look different by now and could very likely be out of the city, even out of the country entirely. But what had prompted his sudden departure?

  Piero Sartor had said the man spoke excellent Italian: perhaps he would not waste that talent by going to some other country. Besides, Italy was rich in museums and libraries, public, private, and ecclesiastical, all providing an endless field in which he could work. Brunetti was not unaware of how grotesque his use of that word was to describe what the man was doing.

  He took the photocopy of Nickerson’s passport and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office. It was only a little after ten, far too early for Patta to have arrived. She was behind her computer today, wearing a pink angora sweater, the sight of which caused him immediately to revise his low opinion of both the colour and the wool.

  ‘The Vice-Questore expressed his concern about the theft at the library, Commissario.’ He wondered if the Vice-Questore had also expressed his concern about summoning the Eumenides of the press down upon their heads.

  ‘I’ve checked with the Americans, and the passport is fake,’ he said, putting the photocopied page on her desk.

  She studied the photo. ‘That was to be expected, I suppose.’ Then she asked, ‘Shall I send this to Interpol and the art theft people in Rome and see if they recognize him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, having come down specifically to ask her to do this.

  ‘Do you know if the Vice-Questore has talked about this to anyone else?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The only person he talks to is Lieutenant Scarpa,’ she said, pronouncing ‘person’ as if she weren’t quite sure it applied. ‘I believe neither of them would consider the theft of books a serious crime.’

  ‘I was concerned about the press,’ he said, turning his attention to the tulips on her desk and telling himself it would be nice to take some home that evening. He reached across to move one slightly to the left and said, ‘I doubt that the Contessa would enjoy the publicity.’

  ‘Which contessa?’ Signorina Elettra inquired mildly.

  ‘Morosini-Albani,’ Brunetti answered, his attention still on the flowers.

  She made a noise. It was not a gasp and it was not a word, merely a noise. By the time he glanced at her, she was looking at the screen of her computer, her chin propped on and covered by her left hand. Her face was impassive, her eyes on the screen, but the colour of her face more nearly approached that of her sweater than it had a moment ago.

  ‘I’ve met her a few times at my parents-in-law’s,’ Brunetti said casually, moving another tulip into place in front of the broad leaf that had been hiding it. ‘She’s a very interesting woman, I’d say.’ Then, oh so casually, ‘Have you ever met her?’

  She hit a few keys with her right hand, chin still propped on the left. Finally she said, ‘Once. Years ago.’ Sh
e turned her attention from the computer and looked at Brunetti with an expression devoid of emotion. ‘I once knew her stepson.’

  Brunetti, curious, was silent, then finally thought to say, ‘She’s the major donor to the library. I don’t know how many of the books that were vandalized were once hers, or if they were part of the original collection, but she gave them one of the books that were stolen, and one that was vandalized. It’s hardly news that would please a major donor.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said in a tone meant to display little interest in the matter.

  He pulled out his notebook and opened it to the page where he had written the names Dottoressa Fabbiani had given him. ‘There’s an edition of Ramusio and a Montalboddo,’ he said, quite proud of the ease with which he named them.

  She murmured something appreciative, quite as if she were familiar with them.

  ‘Do you know the books?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve heard their names,’ she answered. ‘My father’s always been interested in rare books. He owns a few.’

  ‘Does he buy them?’ Brunetti asked.

  She turned to him and laughed outright, banishing whatever tension had been in the room. ‘You sound as though you think he might be stealing them. I assure you he’s been nowhere near the Merula for months.’

  Brunetti smiled, in relief that her good humour had returned after her strange response to the Contessa’s name. ‘Do you know much about rare books?’

  ‘No, not really. He’s shown me some of them and explained what makes them special, but I’m a disappointment to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, I think they’re beautiful enough – the paper, the bindings – but I can’t get excited about them.’ She sounded genuinely displeased with herself. ‘It’s collecting: I don’t understand it, or I don’t feel it.’ Before he could ask, she continued, ‘It’s not that I don’t like beautiful things: I just don’t have the discipline for collecting in a systematic way, and I think that’s what real collectors do: they want one of everything in the classification they’re interested in, whether it’s German postage stamps with flowers on them or Coca-Cola bottle caps or … or whatever it is they’ve decided to collect.’