By Its Cover (15 page)

Sartor pushed his chair back from the table and crossed his legs. Apparently Vianello’s presence had calmed him
sufficiently for him to ask, ‘Are you sure you want to hear all of this?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.

Sartor sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘When he told me the names of the explorers he was interested in, the only one I recognized was Cortés.’ He cleared his throat a few times, then continued, ‘I wanted to take a look at it and … and surprise him by saying I was reading it.’ He paused to look back and forth between them, perhaps nervous about confessing his desire to impress the foreign professor.

‘And so?’ Brunetti prompted him.

‘So I read some of the first volume, as I told you. And then, the other day, when Dottor Nickerson came in, I told him how I’d enjoyed reading Cortés.’

‘Was he pleased?’ Brunetti asked in an easy voice. When Sartor didn’t answer, Brunetti asked, ‘Did he say anything when you told him?’

Sartor looked away, as if suddenly puzzled by his memory of the conversation. ‘That’s strange,’ he said in a low voice.

Brunetti was as quiet as a lizard on a rock. He permitted himself a small nod.

‘He seemed surprised at first. But then he said he was glad I’d liked the book, and then he went up to the reading room.’

‘Did you say anything else to him?’

‘Only how eager I was to read the next volume.’

12

Brunetti smiled and got to his feet. Sartor looked back and forth between him and Vianello a few times for signs of what was going to happen, before he stood. Brunetti reached across the table and shook his hand, saying, ‘You’ve been very helpful, Signor Sartor.’ He tried to make his voice as reassuring as possible.

The guard gave a weak smile. He pushed his chair back in place and turned towards the door.

As if the idea had just come to him, Brunetti asked, as Sartor was opening the door, ‘You said Dottor Nickerson spoke Italian very well. Did it ever occur to you that he might really be Italian?’

Sartor let them pass in front of him and down the stairs into the courtyard, then turned to lock the door. He left his hand on the key for a long time before putting it into his pocket. He came down the steps and stopped in front of Brunetti. ‘I never thought of that before, but he might be. He said he was American but that he’d gone to school
in Rome when he was a boy. I figured that would explain why he didn’t have much of an accent.’ He was silent for a while then started across the courtyard, stopped and turned to them. ‘Maybe I heard it because I thought it had to be there. Is that possible?’

Vianello spoke for the first time. ‘Eyewitnesses often remember seeing things that didn’t happen and people who weren’t there.’

‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ Sartor asked of no one in particular.

He started to walk towards the door to the
calle
, but Brunetti stopped him by saying, ‘I’d like to have a word with Dottoressa Fabbiani.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Sartor said and turned back and headed towards the main steps. At the top, Brunetti noticed that the sign announcing ‘technical problems’ was still taped to the door. Sartor opened the door, then closed and locked it after them. ‘If you gentlemen will wait here, I’ll tell her you’d like to see her,’ he said and walked towards what Brunetti thought was the back of the building.

‘It’s possible, isn’t it, that he imagined the accent?’ Vianello asked.

‘People have done stranger things,’ Brunetti answered. He went to the counter and looked down at the papers in the letter trays. He read the top sheets: a request for an interlibrary loan, a list of books on sale in an upcoming auction in Rome, and a letter of inquiry about the possibility of working as an unpaid intern at the library.

Hearing footsteps, he moved away from the counter and sat in one of the chairs. Vianello did the same, leaned back, and crossed his legs.

The door opened and Dottoressa Fabbiani entered, Sartor visible just behind and holding the door for her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and added, smiling, ‘You can go
back and plan for the Formula Uno.’ Sartor left, closing the door behind him.

Though it was none of his business, Brunetti asked, getting to his feet, ‘Formula Uno?’

She smiled. ‘Piero’s mad for it and for all sports. I don’t know how his wife puts up with it: all he thinks about is calculating the odds and winning.’ Then, seeing Vianello, she stopped.

‘This is my colleague, Ispettore Vianello,’ Brunetti said.

Ease and informality gone, she suggested they come back to her office. She led them through the stacks so quickly that Brunetti lost all orientation. After a time, she opened a door at the end of a long corridor lined with wooden bookshelves and ushered them into her office. Her desk held a computer, a telephone, and one manila folder: no other papers were in evidence, nor pen, pencil, paperclip. The surface of the desk was a smudgeless slab of black glass.

Four walls, four prints he recognized as being from Piranesi’s
Carceri
, cheerless and lifeless, regardless of their quality. Diamond-patterned parquet, two windows looking across to the Giudecca. She sat in a straight chair and indicated that they should sit near her.

‘What can I help you with, Commissario?’ she asked.

‘I’m curious about the financial loss to the library and wonder if you’ve had time to calculate it,’ he said.

She studied one of Piranesi’s ruins before answering. ‘The Montalboddo sold at auction earlier this year for 215,000 Euros. The Ramusio was only one volume of three, but it was a first edition.’

‘How does that affect the price?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Although it was volume two, strangely enough it was printed last,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, Dottoressa, but that doesn’t help me understand.’

‘Ah, of course,’ she said, running the fingers of her right hand through her hair. ‘One thing it means is that the thief was probably sent to get it for someone who needed it to complete his set.’ When neither Brunetti nor Vianello said anything, she continued. ‘If so, now he’ll have all three volumes and the total value will be much more than the total price of the separate single volumes.’ Both of them nodded.

‘Excuse me, Dottoressa,’ Vianello interrupted, speaking as though he could not contain his curiosity, ‘but how does that affect the value of your set?’

She looked at him in surprise, perhaps not having considered inspectors capable of thought. ‘It destroys it,’ she shot back. Then, immediately, with a weary smile, ‘No, that’s an exaggeration. It lowers it a great deal. But that’s not the point.’

‘Of course not,’ Vianello agreed with a sympathetic look. ‘You’re a library, not a bookshop.’

Her look grew more attentive and she said, ‘You’re right: we’re not. The financial loss isn’t what’s important to the institution.’ She returned her attention to the Piranesi.

‘How could someone have managed to take books from the library?’ Vianello asked, his voice filled with concern.

Again, she ran her hand through her hair. ‘I don’t know. Someone is always at the desks, both for the modern and the rare books collections. They check people’s bags on the way out.’ Brunetti wondered how thorough a check was made, especially of someone with whom you’d chatted about your shared love of fishing.

‘Only that?’ Brunetti asked.

‘We’ve begun a system of tagging,’ she said. Seeing their incomprehension, she went on, ‘Computer chips. They’re being put into the spines of all of the volumes, at least the ones up here. A sensor – like the thing you walk
through at the airport – will detect it if you try to carry one through without checking it out.’

Brunetti, who had seen no sign of such a thing near the desks on either floor, asked, ‘Is it installed?’

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘We ordered it six months ago, which is when we started inserting the chips.’ She opened her eyes and looked at Brunetti.

‘But?’ he prompted.

‘The machine that was delivered had been designed to respond to chips that used a different program. Or at least that’s what we were told.’

‘What happened?’

‘The company took it back, but they haven’t delivered the new one yet.’

‘Have they said when they’ll deliver it?’ Vianello asked.

Voice tight, hard, she answered, ‘No.’

Brunetti asked, ‘You told me you have eight thousand books here, Dottoressa. How many of them will you put chips into?’

‘All of them,’ she answered with a wave around them to indicate this floor of the library, then added, ‘And in the manuscripts.’

‘How long will that take, do you think?’

She gave him a sharp look and asked, ‘What has this got to do with the theft, Commissario?’

‘I hope this won’t offend you, Dottoressa, but I was thinking about future thefts.’

Her face froze. Brunetti wondered if she was going to tell them to leave. She folded her hands in her lap and began to work at a loose piece of cuticle on her left thumb. She looked at Brunetti. ‘It’s already happened.’ She took a long breath and tried to steady her voice. She started to speak, failed, tried again and finally managed to say, ‘There are more.’

A silence fell on the room. Brunetti and Vianello did not
move. More than a minute passed, and finally Brunetti asked, ‘More what, Dottoressa?’

‘More books,’ she said.

‘Missing?’

She lowered her eyes and scratched at her thumb. Soon she gave up on that and looked at Brunetti. ‘Yes. I wanted to be sure nothing else was gone, so I printed out every tenth page of the first hundred pages of the catalogue and looked to see that the books listed were either checked out or still on the shelves.’

‘How many books did that include?’ Brunetti asked.

He watched her consider his question and saw when she realized the sense of it. ‘More than a hundred and forty,’ she answered.

Brunetti saw no reason to waste time and asked directly, ‘How many are missing?’

‘Nine,’ she said, glancing at Vianello and back at Brunetti.

‘It’s getting worse,’ she added in a voice suddenly grown loud with anger. ‘I hear it from colleagues everywhere, not only in this country. Nothing’s safe any more.’ Brunetti saw her hands, locked together now, one crushing the other. Then, in a calmer voice, she said, ‘I don’t know what to do. We can’t stop people coming. Scholars need what we have here.’ She looked down at her hands and pulled them free of one another.

‘Have you completed the list of the books that Nickerson requested?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How many books were … ?’ Brunetti failed to find the correct word.

‘He vandalized thirty-one of them,’ she answered, using the proper word, then added, ‘That we’ve found so far, that is.’

‘And the loss?’ he asked, hoping she’d understand he was again trying to determine their financial value and
certain she would appreciate his failure to ask how this could have gone on unobserved.

She shook her head as at the inability of someone to understand a simple thing. ‘The books are ruined, at least as far as our standards are concerned. They might have kept a part of their value – one of them had only one map removed, so it’s worth only half as much – but they’re no longer the same things they were, and the ones he took more pages from are virtually worthless.’ Convinced that they finally understood, she went to her desk and came back with the folder. Opening it, she handed Brunetti a set of papers, kept one for herself. She sat back down.

‘These are the books that we know he vandalized and the prices we paid for the ones we bought.’ She leaned forward and pointed to the first column of numbers. ‘The rest were donated to the library, so all we can provide is their last price at auction. We haven’t had time, and I’m afraid I lack the ability to estimate what they might be sold for today.’ Then, after a moment’s reflection, she added, ‘I don’t know if it’s worth finding out.’

‘Why?’ Brunetti asked.

‘We’ll never have enough money to replace them.’

‘But the insurance?’

Her laugh was bitter and dismissive. ‘We don’t have it. Because we’re a public institution, the government is supposed to cover us. But that’s worthless.’ Before they could ask, she said, ‘We had water damage from a burst pipe about eight years ago, and we’re still waiting for them to send an inspector to look at the books.’

As if that weren’t enough, she said, ‘They don’t pay for anything that was a donation.’ She saw their astonishment and explained, ‘They maintain that, if we didn’t pay for the books, then we’ve suffered no loss.’

She allowed some time to pass so that they could absorb what she had just said, then leaned towards Brunetti and tapped at the numbers in a column on the right. ‘Those are the last auction prices for two of the pages that are missing. They’re the only ones we could find.’

‘Excuse me, Dottoressa,’ Vianello said, ‘is it common for people to collect separate pages?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘So people just
do
it?’ Vianello asked. He must have seen her confusion, for he added, ‘I mean, if there are auction prices for these pages, then some of the books have already been … damaged.’

‘It’s a common practice,’ she said austerely. ‘Once a single page is removed, many people decide they might as well cannibalize the whole thing and sell the individual pages. Until there’s nothing left. If it’s privately owned, there’s no one to stop them from doing it.’

Into the silence that spread out from that, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘You mean Nickerson?’

‘Yes.’

‘We spoke to one another a few times, but no more than to say hello.’ She opened the folder again and pulled out a stack of index cards. ‘These are his request forms,’ she said. ‘We still had them.’

Seeing Brunetti hesitate, she said, ‘Your men took prints from all of them, so you can touch them.’

Brunetti glanced at Vianello, who nodded.

Brunetti handed half of them to Vianello and began to examine the handwriting on the cards one by one; Vianello did the same. After less than a minute, they looked up from the cards, and their eyes met. ‘He’s Italian, isn’t he?’ Vianello asked.