by Donna Leon
‘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.
He heard her sigh. She closed the book and turned it to look at the bottom of the pages, no doubt searching for gaps in the thick paper. Hands made clumsy by the gloves, she set it on the table, removed the gloves, and started to page slowly through it. Soon enough, she came upon the stub of another sliced page, and then another, and then another, and then she was at the end of the book.
She set it aside and picked up another. Again, the frontispiece was gone, as were seven other pages. She closed the book and set it on top of the other. As she leaned forward to pick up another volume, Brunetti saw something drop on to the red leather binding, immediately turning it from rose to burgundy. She used the edge of her hand to blot at it. ‘What fools we are,’ she said to herself. Who did she mean? he wondered. The people who would do this or the people whose laxity allowed them to?
They stood side by side while she went through, by his count, another twenty-six books. All but two of them had pages sliced from them.
She placed the last book to one side and leaned forward, hands braced against the edge of the table. ‘There are books missing, as well.’ Then, reminding him of the way people often refused to accept even the most certain diagnosis, she added, ‘But they might simply be mis-shelved.’
‘Is that possible?’ Brunetti asked.
Looking at the books spread out below her, she said, ‘If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said none of this was possible.’
‘What’s missing?’ he asked in open disbelief in the possible mis-shelving. ‘Books he requested?’
‘No, that’s what’s so strange. But they’re the same kind of travel books.’
‘What are they?’ Brunetti asked, not that he thought there was any chance he would recognize them.
‘A German translation of Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi et Viaggi and a Latin edition of Montalboddo’s Paesi noua from 1508.’ She spoke as she would to a fellow librarian or archivist, assuming that he would know the books and have an idea of their value.
She saw his incomprehension and said, ‘The Montalboddo is a collection of different travellers’ accounts of what they saw. Ramusio did the same thing, put together a collection of reports.’
Brunetti took out his notebook and wrote down the authors and what he thought the titles to be. Five-hundred-year-old volumes, and someone had simply waltzed into the place and walked out with them.
‘Dottoressa,’ he said, returning to the more immediate problem, ‘I’d like you to show me the information you have about this man.’
‘Gladly,’ she said. ‘I hope … I hope …’ she began but forgot about the sentence and stopped.
‘Can you see that no one else touches these books?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Some of my men will be here this afternoon to check them for fingerprints. If this comes to trial, we’ll need that evidence.’
‘If?’ she asked. ‘If?’
‘We have to find him and we must have proof that he took them.’
‘But we know he did,’ she said, looking at Brunetti as though he had taken leave of his senses. ‘It’s obvious.’
Brunetti said nothing. The obvious was sometimes impossible to prove, and what people knew to be true was often of no use to a judge: not in the absence of proof. He did not want to have to say this to her. Instead, he put a mild expression on his face and waved a hand towards the door.
He followed her down the corridor and into her office. On the desk was a blue cardboard folder which she handed to him silently, then went to stand at one of the three windows that looked across at the Redentore. He wondered if anyone was going to be able to redeem these books for her. He opened the folder on the desk and began to read through it.
Joseph Nickerson, born in Michigan thirty-six years ago, currently living in Kansas. This much the passport told him; the photo told him that the man had light hair and eyes, a straight nose a bit too big for his face, and a small cleft in his chin. His expression was neutral and relaxed, the face of a man without secrets, someone you could sit next to on a plane on a short flight and talk about sports or how terrible things were in Africa. But not, he thought, about antiquarian books.
Nickerson could be any man of Anglo-Saxon or Northern heritage, could surely change his appearance by putting on a pair of glasses and letting his hair grow, perhaps adding a beard. So little was notable that it would be difficult to recall anything about him other t
han a vague memory of his direct, honest expression.
This suggested to Brunetti that the man was a professional and was possessed of that quality that the great confidence men had: the appearance of easy, innate honesty. He would never brag, never make a statement about right or wrong, but his manner, the trust he put in you, his undisguised interest in what you had to say and curiosity to learn more would make him irresistible. Brunetti had known two men who had that quality, and even while interrogating them, he had felt uncertain about what he knew to be true of both of them. He had, over the years, come to see it as a gift, the way great beauty is, or intelligence. It was simply there, and the possessors could do with it as they chose.
Touching the paper lightly on one corner, he slid it to the left and read the next. The letter of recommendation came from the Provost of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, stating that Joseph Nickerson was Assistant Professor of European History with a specialization in Maritime and Mediterranean Trade History, which class he taught, and that he hoped the library would put their collection at the Professor’s disposal. His name was typed below an illegible signature.
He took the letter by its top two corners and held it up to the light coming in from the window. The letterhead had been printed on the paper, perhaps by the same printer that generated the letter. Well, just about anyone could do that. Kansas, he believed, was in the middle of America somewhere; he had a vague memory of its being to the left of Iowa or at least near it, but definitely in the middle. Maritime and Mediterranean Trade History?
‘I’ll have to take these with me,’ he said, then asked, ‘Do you have an address for him, or an Italian phone number?’
Dottoressa Fabbiani turned away from her contemplation of the church. ‘Not unless it’s given there. It’s required only for residents who use the collection,’ she said. ‘What happens now?’ she asked.
Brunetti replaced the papers and closed the folder. ‘As I mentioned, a team comes and takes fingerprints from the books and from the desk where he was sitting, and then we hope to be able to match them with prints in our files.’
‘You make it sound very ordinary.’
‘It is,’ Brunetti said.
‘To me, it sounds like the Wild West. Why aren’t we being informed about these people? Why aren’t we sent photos of them so we can protect ourselves?’ she asked, not angry but surprised.
‘I have no idea,’ Brunetti answered. ‘It might be that the libraries that are robbed don’t want it to be known.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Do you have patrons? Benefactors?’
That stopped her, and he watched while she put the two things together. Finally she said, ‘We have three, but only the private one counts. The other money comes from foundations.’
‘How would the private donor respond?’
‘If she learned that we allowed this to happen?’ she said, then held up a hand and closed her eyes for a moment. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the truth, and said, ‘Two of the books belonged to her family.’
‘Belonged.’
She studied the pattern on the parquet floor before looking at him and saying, ‘They were part of a large donation. It must be more than ten years ago.’
‘Which books?’
She needed only to name them, and he saw that she tried. She opened her mouth but could not speak. Instead, she looked again at the parquet, then back at him. ‘One of the ones that’s missing. The other’s lost nine pages,’ she finally managed to say. Then, before he could ask how she knew their origin, she added, ‘The family’s name is on the central listing in the catalogue.’
‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Morosini-Albani.’ Then she added, ‘They gave us the Ramusio.’
Brunetti did his best to hide his astonishment. That a member of this family should be a patron of anything would come as a surprise – even a shock – to any Venetian. Though the major branch of the family had given the city at least four doges, this offshoot had given it only merchants and bankers. While one side of the family ruled, this one acquired, a division that had gone on – if Brunetti had his lists right – until the reign of the last Morosini doge some time in the seventeenth century.
The Albani branch had then, in a sense, gone to ground, retreated to its palazzo – which they had chosen to build not on the Grand Canal, but in a part of the city where land was cheaper – and continued with the family passion of acquiring wealth. The current Contessa, a widow with three contentious stepchildren, was a friend of his mother-in-law. Contessa Falier had been at a private convent school with Contessa Morosini-Albani, at that time merely the younger daughter of a Sicilian prince who had gambled away the family fortune, her tuition paid by a maiden aunt. She had much later married the heir to the Morosini-Albani fortune, thus acquiring both his lesser title and his three children by a former marriage. Brunetti had met her a few times at dinner at the home of Paola’s parents, met her and spoken to her and come away with the sense that she was well educated, intelligent and broadly read.
‘Which of them gave you the books?’
‘The Contessa,’ she answered.
Like many foreigners – and anyone who was not born in Venice was equally foreign – Contessa Morosini-Albani had decided to become more Venetian than the Venetians. Her late husband had been a member of the Club dei Nobili, where he went to smoke his cigars and read Il Giornale while muttering vague things about the lack of respect shown to people of merit. She, in her turn, joined committees for the salvation of this and that, the protection of some other place or thing, attended the opening night of La Fenice without fail, and was a frequent and savage writer of letters to Il Gazzettino. That the family might have given away anything, let alone precious books, demanded of Brunetti the willing suspension of disbelief. The Morosini-Albanis were, or had always been, keepers and not givers; life had shown Brunetti precious little to suggest that people changed in profound ways.
But, he reflected, she was a Sicilian after all, and they were a legendarily profligate people, in the worst and the best sense. Her stepchildren were generally rumoured to be both thankless and feckless, so perhaps she had decided to spite them by giving it all away before they got their hands on it. Contessa Falier might know more. ‘Do you have any idea how the Contessa will react to this?’
Dottoressa Fabbiani folded her arms and leaned back against the windowsill, legs straight and feet neatly side by side, just as those birds kept them. ‘It depends, I suppose, on how negligent we are shown to have been.’
‘My guess is that this man is a professional and does this on order.’ He said this to suggest that negligence might not have been a major factor. ‘He probably works for certain collectors who want specific items, which he gets for them.’
She made a huffing noise and said, ‘Well, at least you didn’t say he “acquires” them.’
‘That would have been too much, I think,’ Brunetti said, ‘considering my job.’ He risked a smile. ‘Does she give the library money, as well?’ he asked, not bothering to name the Contessa.
‘A hundred thousand Euros a year.’
The Morosini-Albanis? When he recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to speak, Brunetti asked, ‘How important is that for you?’
‘We get yearly funds from the city and the region and the central government, but that’s just enough to cover operating expenses. What the donors give us allows for acquisitions and restoration.’
‘You said she gave you books. Were there many more?’
She turned her head away from his question but, finding nothing to look at, looked back at Brunetti. ‘Yes. It was an important donation. I’m sure it was her doing: her husband was … a Morosini-Albani.’ After some time, she said, ‘She’s promised the rest of the library to us,’ before pausing to add, almost in a whisper, ‘The family were the first patrons of Minuzio.’ Something stopped her from saying more; superstition, perhaps. Talking of it might stop it fr
om happening, and then the library would lose the family’s hoard of the books of the greatest of printers of the greatest of printing cities.
When Brunetti was still a reluctant schoolboy, his mother used to encourage him to get out of bed by telling him that every new day would offer him some wonderful surprise. She might not have had the generosity of the Morosini-Albani in mind, but she certainly had been right.
‘Don’t worry, Dottoressa. I won’t repeat this.’
Relieved, she added, ‘Their collection is … extensive.’ As if to make clear what she had said about the husband, she went on, ‘The Contessa is the only one in the family who understands the real value of the books, and appreciates them. I don’t know where she learned it – I never had the courage to ask her – but she knows a great deal about early books, and printing, and conservation.’ She raised a hand in a broad sweep meant to encompass, perhaps, the Contessa’s abilities, then paused briefly, as if uncertain how much she could say to Brunetti. ‘I’ve asked her opinion about conservation a number of times.’ Then, with the generosity he sometimes found in scholars, she said, ‘She’s got the gift, the feel.’
‘“Feel”?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘“Love” might be a better word. As I told you, she’s promised them to us.’
‘Promised?’
She looked around the office. ‘After this,’ she began, as though the Vandals had just crashed out of the room, leaving nothing but devastation in their wake, ‘she’ll never trust us.’
‘Couldn’t it just as easily have happened to her in her own home?’
‘You mean that someone could have tricked her?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered.
‘I can’t imagine that anyone could trick her out of anything,’ she said.
3
Brunetti smiled to show he was amused by the remark, which was certainly true, for it more or less mirrored his own opinion of the Contessa. Upon reflection, however, he realized that Dottoressa Fabbiani was expressing sincere appreciation of the Contessa’s ferocity, a word that sprang to his mind when he tried to find one that would describe her character. Though he had met her only five or six times over the years, she had so often been the topic of conversation between his wife and her mother that he had formed an impression of a woman with inordinately strong opinions who was also – something he had always admired – a good hater. Even more admirably, she seemed to be a democratic hater, dealing out her contempt equally to Church and State, Left and Right. Paola adored her, and her mother thought of her as a close friend, yet more evidence of the inherent democracy of women.