By Its Cover

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti had forgotten, but he said, ‘Yes, I know. Why do you ask?’

  ‘In her language, this is referred to as learned helplessness,’ Sella said, then asked, ‘Have you seen these books you’re talking about?’

  Ignoring the first remark, Brunetti answered, ‘Some of them.’ The thud of the boat against the dock made him dance around a bit, but he kept his hand on the phone and his mind on the conversation.

  ‘What sort of shape do they seem to be in?’ Sella asked.

  ‘The ones I looked at seemed fine, but I’m not an expert.’

  ‘Well,’ Sella said with a laugh, ‘I am. So send me a list of everything that’s written on the title pages and tell me if something looks in bad condition to you.’ He paused for a long time before saying, ‘Am I correct in assuming these are stolen books?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then they’ll be in good shape.’

  ‘Why are you so sure of that?’

  ‘No one would go to the trouble of stealing a book that wasn’t.’

  It took them more than an hour to add the thirty-eight titles and publication information to the list that already contained the other books. Griffoni sat at the computer and Brunetti opened the books one by one and read out the information on the title pages about author, date, and place of publication. As Sella had foretold, all the books were in very good condition as far as Brunetti could judge. The work went even more slowly because, when a book had the stamp of a library or collection, Griffoni copied that information to a second list, one that was not meant for Sella.

  Twenty-one of the books were from libraries, and three had indications that they were from private collections; two of these had the dolphin insignia and the letters P D. Brunetti suspected that the remaining fourteen had been taken from other collections, either by Franchini or by the persons who had sold him the books. The same was true of those with the library seals. As to a client list, Franchini probably kept that in his head, though his bank statements might provide names.

  If Sella was half as good as he had always told Brunetti he was, he should be able to discover their value quickly.

  When the lists were done and the first one sent to Sella, Griffoni swivelled away from the screen to face Brunetti. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘We see what’s come in and then we both go home,’ Brunetti said, nodding in the direction of the computer. They exchanged places. The first email was from Rizzardi, who confirmed that three blows from a thick and heavy object, most likely a shoe or boot, had shattered the victim’s skull and broken his jaw. The blow to the jaw, which would not have been fatal, was the source of the heavy bleeding. The blows to the back of the head had fractured the man’s skull and pounded his brain to such a degree that death was inevitable. There were other signs of violence: bruises on his upper arms and another on his right shoulder, where he had hit the wall or floor. A splinter from the parquet was lodged in the palm of his right hand.

  He might have survived minutes, though very few, Rizzardi wrote, after the kicks to the back of his head, although his motor skills might still have got him to his feet and let him take a few steps in an instinctive attempt to escape. But the blows had initiated a process that could lead only to death as the brain shut down the various systems necessary to maintain life. Then, in the last sentences, and as if in response to a question from Brunetti, the pathologist added, ‘It is unlikely that he suffered anything other than the immediate pain of the blows. His brain had received sufficient damage to render him unaware of what was happening to him.’

  So he would have been spared the knowledge that he was injured or dying. But how could Rizzardi be so sure of this? And why did he think it important that Brunetti be told?

  There was an email from Bocchese stating that the three right-side footprints found in the room had been made by a size forty-three boot with a thick waffle sole. He did not speculate on the reason for the prints’ disappearance, though he did add that it had rained heavily the night after the murder, thus eliminating any chance of finding traces of blood in the campo in front of the house.

  The technician also reported on the fingerprints, stating that his laboratory had had time only to check those pages facing the pages that had been sliced from the books from the Biblioteca Merula. The fingerprints of the dead man had not been present on any of those books, though all of them did bear prints from the same unknown person, as well as many other unidentifiable prints. Dottoressa Fabbiani’s prints and those of the guard, whom Bocchese referred to as Pietro Sartorio, appeared on the binding of the Cortés as well as on some of the facing pages.

  In a third paragraph, he wrote that the only blood found in the apartment was the victim’s. They had found traces of other DNA material on his clothing, but that information was useless until a suspect was arrested and the samples could be matched. Or not.

  Brunetti stepped aside to let Griffoni read both emails. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked.

  ‘So much violence,’ she said, and then, in a heavy voice, ‘Kicking. Whoever did it lost control.’ Then she added, ‘No one plans to do something like this.’

  Brunetti agreed with her. This was rage or madness.

  He looked at his watch and saw that it was after midnight. ‘I think we should go home,’ he said, needing to be away from the thought of violence and madness. ‘There’ll be a pilot on night duty. We can go together. My place is on the way,’ he added, though he had only a vague idea that she lived in Canareggio, over near the Misericordia. She nodded and they left the Questura together.

  20

  Brunetti went in early the next morning and was sitting on a chair outside Bocchese’s laboratory, reading Il Gazzettino, when the technician came in at eight. The two boxes of books were on the floor beside his chair. ‘Can you check the bindings, just the bindings?’ Brunetti said in greeting.

  ‘For fingerprints?’ Bocchese asked, opening the door with his key.

  Brunetti bent down and picked up one of the boxes, followed the technician into the lab. ‘Yes,’ he said and went outside to bring in the other.

  ‘You get any sleep last night?’ the technician asked, flipping on the lights.

  ‘Very little,’ Brunetti answered as he set down the second box. ‘Can you do it? This morning?’

  ‘Will I have any peace if I don’t?’ Bocchese asked, removing his jacket and slipping on his white lab coat. He walked to his desk and tapped his computer into life.

  ‘No,’ Brunetti admitted.

  ‘Don’t bother me before noon,’ Bocchese said, picking up the first box and carrying it to a table at the back of the room. ‘Now go and get yourself another coffee and leave me alone.’

  Nervous with lack of sleep and too much coffee, Brunetti could not wait to be summoned, but went down to Patta’s office at eleven, by which time he thought his superior might have arrived, as indeed he had. Brunetti found him in the corridor that led to his office, talking to his assistant, Lieutenant Scarpa.

  ‘Ah, Commissario,’ Patta said. ‘We were just talking about you.’

  Brunetti nodded a greeting to them as he approached, choosing to ignore the Vice-Questore’s remark. ‘I’ve come to tell you what we’ve learned about the death of Aldo Franchini, Dottore,’ he said with rigorous formality.

  As he waited for Patta’s response, Brunetti calculated the situation in terms of rank: Patta could say just about anything he chose to either one of them; Brunetti could be passively aggressive to Patta, actively so to Scarpa; while Scarpa was limited to deference and respect in his dealings with Patta and dared not exceed ironic disrespect with Brunetti. All three of them, however, treated Signorina Elettra with the maximum respect: Patta from what he probably didn’t realize was fear, Brunetti from open admiration, and Scarpa from a mixture of active dislike and unacknowledged fear.

  ‘What is that?’ Patta asked in his brisk leader-of-men voice.

  Scarpa, taller than Patta and the same height as Brunetti, glanced in hi
s direction as though he were owed part of the explanation. He would occasionally display curiosity, the way a snake might every so often take an interest in the temperature.

  ‘It would seem that he knew his killer. He left a book face down in his living room when he went to answer the door and returned to the room with the person who killed him.’

  ‘How was he killed?’ Patta asked, adding, ‘I haven’t had time to read the pathologist’s report.’ Just as he had not, Brunetti added to himself, had time to learn the pathologist’s name in all these years.

  ‘Dottor Rizzardi believes he was knocked or thrown to the floor and kicked in the head but that he still had sufficient strength to pull himself to his feet. He died of the blows to his head, probably within a short time of the attack.’

  ‘And his killer?’ Scarpa interrupted to ask, then turned to Patta and said, ‘If you don’t mind my asking, Vice-Questore.’ If he had been wearing a hat with a plume, he would have removed it and bowed, sweeping it in a graceful arc.

  Brunetti spoke directly to Patta. ‘We have no information suggesting who he might be, Dottore. We have found evidence, however, that Franchini was involved in the theft of books from libraries and private homes, and that might help lead us to his killer.’

  ‘He?’ Scarpa asked. If voices had eyebrows, his would have been raised.

  ‘He,’ Brunetti said. ‘Or a woman wearing size forty-three boots.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ This from Patta.

  ‘There were three footprints from a size forty-three boot.’

  ‘Three?’ Scarpa asked, as though Brunetti had tried to tell a joke the Lieutenant had failed to understand or appreciate. Brunetti turned and looked at him until he looked away.

  ‘Anything else?’ Patta asked.

  ‘No, Dottore.’

  ‘What are you doing about all of this?’ Patta asked in a cooler voice.

  ‘I’m waiting for word from banks in Lugano and Luxembourg, to find out who transferred money to Franchini’s account, probably in payment for stolen books. And I’m still waiting to see if Interpol has an identification for the man called Nickerson.’

  ‘Who?’ Patta asked.

  ‘It’s the name used by the man who stole the pages from the books in the Merula,’ Brunetti said evenly, quite as if he believed this was the first time his superior would have had reason to hear this name. ‘We’ve contacted the Art Theft police and Interpol, but we haven’t had any response.’

  Patta put on a long-suffering expression and sighed as though he, too, were familiar with the long delays of Interpol. ‘I see, I see,’ he said and turned away. ‘Let me know when you learn anything.’

  ‘Certainly, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti answered and, ignoring the Lieutenant, left them there.

  He stopped in the officers’ squad room on the way to his office and heard from Vianello that their hours of questioning in the neighbourhood had contributed nothing that might be of use. If the neighbours remembered Franchini, it was as a boy and then as a young priest: none of them had had contact with him since he had returned to live in the family apartment after his parents’ death. No one Vianello and Pucetti had spoken to seemed to find his isolation strange in any way: they seemed to assume that his decision to leave the priesthood had somehow removed him from the purlieus of human contact.

  No one could, or would, say anything about him, or had any memory of ever having seen him in the company of another person; everyone they talked to expressed astonishment at his murder.

  Back in his office, Brunetti sat at his desk, thinking of Tertullian – not the one Saint Jerome said lived to extreme old age, but the one kicked to death in Castello.

  He seemed to have had no close dealings with another person. A weekly phone call from his brother, even after he’d stolen part of his inheritance, and a woman he seduced so that he could steal books hardly counted. He wanted to rise in the world, and he did this by theft, seduction, and blackmail.

  Brunetti’s thoughts wandered to the other Tertullian and, prompted by curiosity, he turned on his computer and started to search for him there. Having found him, he looked for what he had said, or, at least, what was attributed to him. ‘The entire fruit is already present in the seed.’ ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire.’ So that’s where that one came from. And then this: ‘He who lives to benefit only himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.’ Oh, they were a savage bunch, those early Christians. And another: ‘If you say you are a Christian when you are a dice player, you say what you are not, for you are a partner with the world.’

  Under his breath, as he always did when a book said something that antagonized him, Brunetti responded, but the only thing he could think of to ask was, ‘What’s wrong with playing dice?’

  Then it came back to him: Sartor had distanced himself from gambling by referring to it as ‘roba da donne’. Women’s things. Why would Sartor be calculating odds on the sex of a woman’s child if he had no interest in gambling? And why would his pocket be full of lottery slips? Would he lie about such a trivial thing and, if so, why? To save face with the police? With the police?

  He looked at his watch and saw it was three minutes after noon. He took the phone and dialled Bocchese’s number.

  ‘You’re turning into a nagging old woman, Guido,’ the technician greeted him by saying.

  ‘Those books – have you had a chance to check them?’

  ‘Nagging, impatient old woman,’ Bocchese amended.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ The sound grew muffled as Bocchese covered the mouthpiece with his hand and shouted to someone in the laboratory with him. He came back. ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Are there prints from Sartor – not Sartorio – the guard?’

  Again, the sound grew muffled and all he heard was the hum and thud of Bocchese’s voice. He was back. ‘Six.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the covers.’

  ‘Book people call them bindings,’ Brunetti said, hoping he sounded like a nagging, impatient, fussy old woman. Then, in order to leave no doubt about that, he asked, ‘Were they from the Merula?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Bocchese said and set the phone down loudly. Brunetti could hear his footsteps as he stomped away from his desk. After a moment, they stomped back and Bocchese said, ‘Yes. His prints were on the binding’ – which word he pronounced with heavy emphasis – ‘of all six books from the Merula.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘When will you be finished with them?’

  Bocchese’s sigh was theatrical. ‘If you’re interested only in his prints, I can tell you tomorrow morning.’ Then, perhaps to save Brunetti the trouble of further nagging, he offered, ‘If you promise not to call me again and ask about it, maybe by the end of the afternoon.’

  ‘If I want to know about all of the prints?’

  ‘Minimum two days.’

  ‘I’ll wait for your call,’ Brunetti said and hung up.

  The inconsistency between Sartor’s dismissal of gambling as ‘roba da donne’ and his apparent interest in it was so insignificant as to be nothing. Perhaps the lottery slips did belong to his wife, and perhaps his interest in his colleague’s child was only innocent concern. But his fingerprints were on those books. Brunetti pulled out the phone book and opened to the Cs, hunting for the number of the casinò, a place that had been the subject of frequent investigations, although not for the last year or so. He dialled the main number, gave his name, and asked to be connected with the Director.

  The call went through immediately and without question: Brunetti wondered if that was what Franchini meant by rising in the world.

  ‘Ah, Dottor Brunetti,’ he heard the Director say in his friendliest tones, ‘how may I be of service?’

  ‘Dottor Alvino,’ Brunetti responded, honey in his voice, ‘I hope things are fine there.’

  ‘Ah,’ came the drawn-out sigh, ‘as well as can be.’

  ‘Still losing money?’
Brunetti asked, using his best bedside manner.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes. No one can explain it.’

  Brunetti could, but this was a friendly call, and so he said only, ‘I’m sure things will change.’

  ‘We can but trust in good fortune,’ Dottor Alvino said, echoing the faith of his clients, and then, ‘What can I do for you, Dottore?’

  ‘I’d like to ask a favour.’

  ‘A favour?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like you to give me some information.’

  ‘About what, if I might ask?’

  ‘About a …’ What was he to call those poor deluded saps? ‘About a client of yours, or a possible client.’

  ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘I’d like to know how often he visits and whether he wins or loses, and how much.’

  ‘You know we’re required to register all guests,’ Dottor Alvino said, pretending that Brunetti had not, over the years, become an expert in the laws governing the conduct of the casinò, as well as its less formal organizational practices. ‘So of course we have the names of the people who come and the dates when they do. I’d be happy to give those to you.’ Allowing a significant pause, the Director added, ‘Is this in response to a request from a magistrate, by any chance?’

  ‘Dottore, how astute of you to ask. There’s need for haste, you see, so I thought I’d come to you directly. Personally.’

  ‘For a favour?’

  ‘Yes. A favour.’ It was so like what they did at the casinò: Brunetti was placing his chip on the table, offering it to the Director for him to pick it up and use at some future time.

  ‘As to the second part of your question: you know we have no official record of that.’ The Director, his tone made it clear, was a person familiar with poker and with upping the ante.