By Its Cover (6 page)

Patta gave him a long look and said, ‘It doesn’t sound like you’ve done very much at all, Brunetti.’

Brunetti again consulted Saint Monica. ‘I’ve just got back, and I wanted you to know about it in case it’s necessary to deal with the press.’

‘Why should that be necessary?’ Patta asked, as though he’d been channelled the information that Brunetti was deliberately hiding something he should be told about.

‘One of the patrons of the library is the Contessa Morosini-Albani. In fact, it was she who donated at least one of the books that are missing. They’re concerned about what her reaction will be.’

‘She’ll probably take back anything else she’s given them. That’s what any sensible person would do.’

It certainly sounded like what Patta would do, though Brunetti would need more than the help of the saints to believe that the Vice-Questore would ever donate a book to a library.

Then, abruptly, Patta asked, ‘Is this what you meant about the press? That they’ll be interested in her?’

‘I think it’s possible, sir. Her family is very well known in the city, and their appetite has certainly been whetted by her stepson.’

Patta’s look was fierce as he replayed Brunetti’s remark, scanning for criticism of the higher orders. Brunetti ironed all emotion from his face and stood, attentive, neutral, waiting for his superior’s response.

‘Do you mean Gianni?’ Patta asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

Brunetti watched as Patta’s memory, which was elephantine for scandal of any sort, flashed across the photos and headlines that had filled the gutter press for years. Brunetti’s favourite was ‘
Gianni paga i danni
’, for the rhyme between his name and the damages he had had to pay after destroying the sound equipment of a band whose music he had not enjoyed in a club in Lignano. ‘
Nobile ignobile
’ had followed his arrest for shoplifting from an antique dealer’s in Milano, and then the delightful headline in the British press, ‘No-account Count’, after he was stopped trying to steal from a shop in New Bond Street. As Brunetti recalled, he had been serving as an attaché of some sort to the Italian embassy in London at the time, and so he could not be arrested, only declared
persona non grata
and expelled from England.

Though Gianni was in no way, at least to the best of Brunetti’s current knowledge, involved with the library or the theft, the mention of the family name would be enough to work the Miracle of San Gennaro on the press: give it a good shake, and the blood would flow afresh. The young man – who was no longer young and not much of a man – had so saturated the press that any combination, no matter how accidental, of his name and a crime of any
sort would quickly become a headline; the Contessa would hardly want to see the family name exposed to the public eye in this fashion.

‘Do you think … ?’ Patta began.

Brunetti waited, but his superior left the question unasked.

Patta shifted his attention, and Brunetti saw the very moment when the Vice-Questore remembered that Brunetti had, by virtue of his marriage, slithered in among the nobility. ‘Do you know her?’ Patta asked.

‘The Contessa?’

‘Who else have we been talking about?’

Brunetti, instead of correcting him, said only, ‘I’ve met her a few times, but I can’t say I know her.’

‘Who does?’

‘Know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘My wife and my mother-in-law,’ Brunetti answered reluctantly.

‘Would one of them talk to her, do you think?’

‘About what?’

Patta closed his eyes and sighed deeply, as one does when forced to deal with lesser intellects. ‘About how she might answer the press, should they find out about this.’

‘And how should that be, sir?’

‘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.