By Its Cover Read Free

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 rangit 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