by Donna Leon
Signorina Elettra considered this for a while and finally said, ‘No, nothing, but I wasn’t looking for anything specific when I read the letters.’ Without asking, she picked up the copies of Claudia Leonardo’s letters, divided the pile in two, and handed half to Brunetti.
He moved his chair back from her desk, stretched out his legs and began to read. As he read his way through these records of Claudia’s truncated life, he recalled a present an aunt of his had once, decades ago, given him for Christmas. He had been disappointed when he opened the matchbox and found nothing more than what looked like a bean made out of paper. Unable to disguise his disappointment, he had asked his aunt, ‘But what’s this for?’ and in answer she had filled a pan with water and told him to put the bean into it.
When he did, it swam magically on the surface of the water and then, under his marvelling eyes, gradually began to move and twist around, as the water unfurled what seemed like hundreds of tiny folds, each one pulling another one open after it. When it was finally still, he found himself gazing down at a perfect white carnation, the size of an apple. Before the water could soak and ruin it, his aunt plucked it out and set it on the windowsill, in the pale winter sun, where it stood for days. Each time Brunetti looked at it, he recalled the magic that had turned one thing into such a wonderfully different other.
Much the same process took place as he read Claudia’s words and heard her natural voice. ‘These poor Albanians. People hate them as soon as they learn where they’re from, as though their passports (if the poor devils even have passports) were pairs of horns.’ ‘I can’t stand to hear my friends complain about how little they have. We live, all of us, better than the Emperors of Rome.’ ‘How I long to have a dog, but who could make a dog live in this city? Perhaps we should all keep a pet tourist, instead.’ Nothing she said was particularly insightful, nor was the language distinguished, but then that pale dollop of compressed paper had hardly merited a second glance; yet how it had blossomed.
After about ten minutes he looked up and asked, ‘Found anything?’
She shook her head and kept reading.
After another few minutes he observed, ‘She seemed to spend a great deal of time in the library, didn’t she?’
‘She was a student,’ Signorina Elettra said, looking up from the papers. Then she added, ‘But, yes, she did, didn’t she?’
‘And it never sounds like she’s doing research there, I’d say.’ Brunetti asked, turning back a page and reading out, ‘“I had to be at the library at nine this morning, and you know what a horror I am that early, enough to frighten anyone away.’“
Brunetti set the page down. ‘Seems a strange concern, doesn’t it? Turning people away?’
‘Especially if she’s going there to read or study. Why would it matter?’ Though Signorina Elettra’s question was rhetorical, both of them considered it.
‘How many libraries are there in the city?’ Brunetti asked.
‘There’s the Marciana, the Querini Stampalia, the one at the university itself and then those in thequartieri and maybe another five.’
‘Let’s try them,’ Brunetti said, reaching for the phone.
Just as quickly, Signorina Elettra opened the bottom drawer of her desk, pulled out the phone book and flipped to ‘Comune di Venezia’. One after the other, Brunetti called the city libraries in Castello, Canareggio, San Polo and Giudecca, but none of them had an employee or a volunteer working there called Claudia Leonardo nor, when he called them, did the Marciana, the Querini Stampalia, or the library of the university.
‘Now what?’ she asked, slapping the directory shut. Brunetti took it from her and looked under the B’s. ‘You ever heard of the Biblioteca della Patria?’ he asked.
‘Of the what?’ she asked.
‘Patria,’ he repeated and read out the address, saying, ‘Sounds like it might be down at the end of Castello.’ She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
He dialled the number and, when a man answered, asked if someone named Claudia Leonardo worked there. The man, speaking with a slight accent, asked him to repeat the name, told him to hold on a moment, and set the phone down. A moment later he was back and asked, ‘Who’s calling, please?’
‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he answered, then asked, ‘And Claudia Leonardo?’
‘Yes, she worked here,’ the man said, making no reference to her death.
‘And you are?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Maxwell Ford,’ he answered, all the Italianate softness of his voice slipping away to reveal the Anglo-Saxon bedrock. In response to Brunetti’s demanding silence, he explained, ‘I’m co-director of the Library.’
‘And where, exactly, is this library?’
‘It’s at the very end of Via Garibaldi, across the canal from Sant‘ Anna.’
Brunetti knew where it must be, but he had no memory of ever having been conscious of the existence of a library in that area. ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Brunetti said.
‘Of course,’ the man answered, his voice suddenly much warmer. ‘Is it about her death?’
‘Yes.’
‘A terrible thing. We were shocked.’
‘We?’ Brunetti asked.
A brief pause, and then the man explained, ‘The staff here at the library.’ When Ford spoke Italian his accent was so slight as almost not to be there.
‘It should take me about twenty minutes to get there,’ Brunetti said and put the phone down.
‘And?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘Signor Ford is the co-director of the Biblioteca, but seemed uncertain at first about whether she worked there or not.’
‘Anyone would be nervous, being asked about someone who was murdered.’
‘Possibly,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll go and talk to him. What about Guzzardi?’ he asked.
‘A few things. I’m trying to check on some houses he owned when he died.’
Brunetti had been moving towards the door, but he stopped and turned back.
‘Were there many?’
‘Three or four.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘How did you learn about them?’
‘I asked my father.’ She waited to see what Brunetti would say in response, but he had no time to talk to her about this now: he was reluctant to keep Signor Ford waiting. In fact, he already regretted having called and told the library director he was coming: people’s response to the unexpected arrival of the police on their doorstep was often as illuminating as anything they subsequently said.
Brunetti walked back towards the Arsenale, turning and choosing bridges by instinct as he allowed the tangled story of Claudia Leonardo and her grandfather to take shape, evaporate, and then reform in his mind. Facts, dates, pieces of information, fragments of rumour swirled around, blinding him so that it wasn’t until he found himself at the entrance to the Arsenale, the goofy lions lined up on his left, that he came back to the present. At the top of the wooden bridge he allowed himself a moment to gaze through the gateway into what had once been the womb of Venice’s power and the ultimate source of her wealth and dominion. With only manpower and hammers and saws and all those other tools with strange names that carpenters and boat builders use, they had managed to build a ship a day and fill the seas with the terrible power of their fleet. And today, with cranes and drills and endless sources of power, there was still no sign that the burnt-out Fenice would ever be rebuilt.
He turned both from these reflections and the gateway and continued, weaving back towards Via Garibaldi and then, keeping the canal on his left, down towards Sant’ Anna. When he saw the facade of the church, he realized he had no memory of ever having been inside; perhaps, like so many others in the city, it didn’t function any longer as a church. He wondered how much longer they could continue to serve as places of worship, now that there were so few worshippers and young people were bored, as were his own children, by the irrelevance of what the Chur
ch had to say to them. Brunetti would not much regret its passing, but the thought of what little there was to replace it unsettled him. Again, he had to summon himself back from these thoughts.
He crossed the small bridge on his left and saw, on his right, a single long building the back of which faced the church. He turned into Calle Sant’ Anna and found himself in front of an immense green portone. To the right were two bells: ‘Ford’, and ‘Biblioteca della Patria’. He rang the one for the library.
The door snapped open and he walked into an entrance hall that must have been five metres high. Enough light filtered in from the five barred windows on the canal to illuminate the enormous beams, almost as thick as those of the Palazzo Ducale, that spanned the ceiling. The floor was of brick, set in a simple herringbone pattern. He noticed that, towards the back door and particularly around the stairs that ran down to the water gate, the bricks glistened slickly with a thin coat of dark moss.
There was only one set of steps. At the first landing a short, thickset man dressed in a very expensive dark grey suit waited at the door. A bit younger than Brunetti, he had thinning reddish hair the curious dappled colour such hair turns on its way to white. ‘Commissario Brunetti?’ he asked and extended his hand.
‘Yes. Signor Ford?’ Brunetti asked in return, shaking hands.
‘Please come in.’ Ford stepped back and stood just inside the door, holding it open for Brunetti.
He entered and glanced around. A row of windows looked out over the canal, towards the opposing flank of the church. To his left, at the far end, more windows looked out over what Brunetti knew must be the Isola di San Pietro.
Four or five long tables, each of them bearing green-shaded reading lamps, were placed around the room, and glass-fronted bookcases lined the walls between the windows. The other walls were covered with framed photos and documents, and in a glass case in one corner objects Brunetti could not identify lay exposed on three shelves.
The room had ceilings as high as those in the entrance hall, and from many of the beams hung flags and standards which Brunetti did not recognize. To his left a long, glass-topped case, like the ones used in museums, contained a number of notebooks, all of them spread open so that the exposed pages could be read.
‘I’m glad you came,’ Ford said, making towards a door on the right. ‘Please come into my office. We can talk there.’
As no one was in the reading room, Brunetti didn’t understand why this was necessary, but he followed Ford as requested. His office, carved into the angle of the building farthest from the Isola di San Pietro, had windows on two sides, though those on the shorter wall looked across at the shutters of the house across the calle.
Here, too, the walls between the windows were filled to the height of a man with bookshelves; half contained box files, rather than books.
Taking the seat offered him, Brunetti began by asking, ‘You said Claudia Leonardo worked here?’
‘Yes, she did,’ Ford answered. He sat opposite Brunetti, declining the opportunity to place himself behind his desk and thus in some sort of position of authority. He had light brown eyes and a straight nose and was, at least by English standards, a handsome man.
‘For how long?’
‘About three months, perhaps a bit less than that.’
‘What did she do here?’
‘She catalogued entries, helped readers with research questions ... all the jobs it’s normal for a librarian to do.’ Ford’s voice was level as he answered Brunetti’s questions, as if to suggest he found them understandable and expected.
‘Presumably, as a student at the university, she hadn’t been trained as a librarian. How did she know how to do all of this?’
‘She was very bright, Claudia,’ Ford said with his first smile. His eyes grew sad as he heard himself praising the young girl. ‘And, really, once a person knows the basic principles of research, it’s all pretty much the same.’
‘Doesn’t the Internet change all of that?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course, in some fields. But the information we have here at the Library and the sort of things our borrowers are interested in, well, I’m afraid most of it isn’t available on the Internet.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Personal accounts of the men who served in the war or in the Resistance. Names of people who were killed. Places where small battles or skirmishes were fought. That sort of thing.’
‘And who is interested in this information?’
Ford’s voice grew more animated as the subject turned to material he was familiar with, the death of young men more than fifty years ago, and away from the recent death of a young girl. ‘Very often we get requests from the relatives of men who were reported as lost or who were listed as having been captured. Sometimes, in the journals or letters of men who fought in the same place or who were perhaps captured at the same time, some mention is made of the missing men. Because most of the information we have is unpublished, this is the only place people can find it. And find out what happened to their relatives.’
‘But doesn’t the Archivio di Stato provide this sort of information?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m afraid the Archives provide very little information of this sort. And I choose the verb intentionally: provide. Of course, they have the information, but they seem reluctant to provide it. Or, if they do, it’s only after heartbreaking delays.’
‘Why?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Only God knows why,’ Ford answered, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation. ‘I can tell you only how it works or, more accurately, doesn’t work.’ As with any historian warming to his subject, Ford’s voice grew more animated. ‘The process of making a request is unnecessarily complicated and, to be fair, the Archive functions at its own pace.’ When Brunetti did not ask for illumination of this last, Ford offered it anyway. ‘I’ve had people come here who made official requests as long ago as thirty years. One man even brought me a folder of correspondence concerning his attempt to discover the fate of his brother, who was last heard from in 1945. The file was filled with standard letters from the Archive, saying that the request was being processed through the proper channels.’ Brunetti made a noise that displayed interest, and the Englishman continued. ‘The worst part of this one was that the original letters asking for information, the ones from the family, were all signed by his father. But he died about fifteen years ago without hearing anything, so the son took over.’
‘Why did he come to you?’
Ford looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think it’s right to boast about what we do and so I try not to, but we have found records for many people who failed to get information from the Archive, and so the word has got round that we might be able to help.’
‘Is there a charge for your services?’
Ford seemed genuinely surprised by the question. ‘Absolutely not. The Library receives a small grant from the state, but the bulk of our money comes from private contributions and from a private foundation.’ He hesitated, then continued. ‘The question is offensive, Commissario. Excuse me for saying that, but it is.’
‘I understand, Signore,’ said Brunetti with a small bow in his direction, ‘but I ask you to understand that I am here, in a sense, as a researcher myself, and so I have to ask everything that occurs to me. But I assure you I meant no offence.’
Ford accepted this with a small bow of his own, and the atmosphere between them grew warmer.
‘And Claudia Leonardo?’ Brunetti asked. ‘How is it that she came to work here?’
‘She came, originally, to do research, and then when she learned what we were doing here she asked if she could work as a volunteer. It really wasn’t more than a few hours a week. I could check my records if you want,’ Ford said, starting to get to his feet. Brunetti waved him back with a motion of his hand.
‘She quickly became familiar with our resources,’ the Englishman continued, ‘and just as quickly she became very popular with many of our borrowers.�
�� Ford looked down at his hands, searching for a way to say what he wanted to say. ‘Many of them are very old, you see, and I think it did them a lot of good to have someone around who was not only helpful, but who was very ...’ he trailed away.
‘I think I understand,’ Brunetti said, himself unable to use any of the words which might do justice to Claudia’s youth and spirit without causing himself pain. ‘Do you have any idea how she came to learn of the Library in the first place?’
‘No, not at all. She showed up here, asking if she could consult our records, and as she was interested in our material she came back often and then, as I said, she asked if there were any way she could be of help.’ He cast his memory back to the young girl and her request. ‘We do not have a large grant from the state, and many of our borrowers are poor, so we were very happy to accept her offer.’
