By Its Cover Read Free Page B

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 books.’
    ‘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, Isuppose 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