by Donna Leon
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.’
‘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 bo
oks.’
‘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 univers
ity 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.’