GB_23: By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

by Donna Leon

  ‘Yes, I know there’s no formal record of that information, Dottore, but I thought you might have a sort of informal list of special guests, perhaps those who come most frequently or who play for stakes higher than the average. Something like that.’ How many of the croupiers he had questioned over the years had told him that?

  ‘So this is the favour you mentioned, Dottore?’

  ‘Yes, it is. I’d be more than grateful.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Alvino said in a normal voice, and then, ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Sartor, Piero.’

  ‘One moment,’ he said, and the phone clicked against a hard surface.

  Minutes passed. Brunetti gazed from his window. Four swallows flew by from right to left. The Romans would have seen an omen there.

  ‘Dottore?’ he heard and harkened to the voice of the Oracle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s been here twenty-three times in the last year.’ Brunetti waited: this was not the part of the question his favour would pay for. ‘And he’s lost something between thirty and fifty thousand Euros in that time.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said. Then, as if he had no idea how it happened, he asked, ‘How is it you know this amount, Dottore?’

  ‘Our croupiers keep an eye on certain guests and let us know what it is they win or lose. In an approximate sense, you realize.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti agreed, stopping himself from saying how pleasant it must be for the Director to hear of a guest who lost so heavily. Though they all did in the end, didn’t they, or why have a casinò? Opening the honey jar again, he said, ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your information, Dottore.’

  ‘I’m always happy to be of service to any agency of the state, Dottore. I hope I’ve given proof of that.’

  ‘You have, indeed. Amply,’ Brunetti said, wondering if Alvino was going to say he hoped Brunetti would keep that in mind, should they ever meet again.

  But he did not, and Brunetti liked him for that. All the Director said was, ‘If I can ever be of service again, please don’t hesitate to call, Dottor Brunetti.’

  There followed the usual pleasantries, and then Brunetti set down his phone.

  21

  Brunetti thought of Griffoni: which would she think worse – that Sartor might be a killer or that he had stolen and sold as much as fifty thousand Euros’ worth of rare books from the Merula and perhaps from other libraries and then gambled away this small part of the patrimony of Italy? He thought the first would be her final choice, but not before she overcame the temptation of the second.

  His own response was more measured. He realized he had proof neither that Sartor had stolen the books nor that he had killed Franchini. You couldn’t hang a man for prevarication, nor for fingerprints on a book. He thought of how blithely he had listened to Sartor’s talk of his interest in the books Nickerson and the other researchers read. Brunetti ran his memory back to their first conversation and the charming sincerity of the unschooled man who affirmed his admiration for books. He had displayed the just and fitting modesty of the man of low station who could still aspire to things beyond him. He was not a guard: he was a reader.

  Like a ripe pear, Brunetti had fallen into believing in the man Sartor presented himself to be.

  His phone rang. ‘Commissario,’ Signorina Elettra said when he answered. ‘Interpol has got back to me. Doctor Nickerson, the American scholar, is not a doctor, nor is he Nickerson, nor is he American, nor is he a scholar.’

  ‘Italian?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘One of Napoli’s own: Filippo D’Alessio,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to send you their file?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s on the way,’ she said and was gone. He liked it that she had called him first to tell him what she had, like a child on the beach who wants to be praised for finding the lovely seashell before passing it proudly to you.

  By the time he turned on his computer, the mail had arrived. Filippo D’Alessio had a long history of impersonation and theft, the first at the service of the second. He was fluent in German, Italian, English, French, and Greek and was now sought by the police of the countries where those languages were spoken.

  He had been arrested in Italy twice for credit card theft and three times for postal fraud. He was also wanted in three countries for the theft of books and pages from books. The pattern was the same: he assumed an identity as a scholar and started his research, sometimes in a museum, but most often in a library. Josef Nicolai had served for Austria and Germany, and José Nicandro had worked in Spain. Joseph Nickerson was wanted by the police in New York and Urbana, and his cognates in Berlin and Madrid. No one knew what the Greek police wanted.

  Interpol had sent his photo to some libraries; the librarians had sent it on to colleagues, many of whom had already registered the desolation left in the wake of the affable young scholar. Brunetti suspected that many libraries had still to discover the results of the research conducted by, say, Joseph Nicollet at the Bibliothèque Nationale or Jozef Something Else at the library of the University of Kraków.

  To the Art Theft police, he was a professional who could be hired to steal specific volumes or pages to order. His family claimed to have lost touch with him, but recently his father, a retired shoemaker, had bought a six-room apartment in the centre of Naples: the money for it was sent to his bank from an ‘aunt in the Cayman Islands’.

  Brunetti finished reading the file and found himself, after the intense activity of the last few days, with nothing to do save wait for Bocchese’s call. He pulled a piece of paper towards him and began to sketch out a possible scenario, putting ‘Books’ in a circle at the centre of the page and drawing a straight line to another circle, in which he wrote, ‘Nickerson/D’Alessio’, then going back to the first circle and connecting it to ‘Franchini’ and to ‘Sartor’. Then, as possibility offered itself to him, he connected ‘Nickerson/D’Alessio’ and ‘Franchini’ and drew a question mark above the line.

  What had occupied the ex-priest’s mind over the years as he sat reading Saints Ambrose, Cyprian, and Jerome? He was already trafficking in books with the help of Durà and adding to the store of books he had probably acquired from libraries in Vicenza during the time he worked there as a priest. After all these years, he would have a client list, Brunetti was certain.

  Three years of reading in the Merula would have given Franchini time to enlist Sartor, and so he could connect them with a double-headed arrow. But then Dottor Nickerson had arrived to start mining what Franchini had staked out as his claim. And then what? And then what?

  Brunetti got up and went to stand at the window and contemplated the newly opened door of the church of San Lorenzo at the far end of the campo on the other side of the canal. The archaeological excavations had recently been resumed from one day to the next: one day the door to the church was closed, as it had been for decades; the next it was open. He watched people enter and emerge from the church, some of them wearing white overalls and yellow hard hats, others suits and ties.

  He returned to his desk, his thoughts on the dead man. With Franchini lying unconscious or dead on the floor of his apartment, the killer had free access to the books, yet the books, their antiquity glaring at even the most ignorant glance, had not been touched. The killer had stopped only to remove his shoe.

  How dispose of a shoe? Would he be foolish enough to keep it? In the garbage, in the water?

  He dialled Bocchese’s number.

  The technician picked up on the eighth ring and said, ‘What is it now, Guido?’

  ‘The blood that was on the floor, that the killer stepped in – could it be removed from his shoe?’ He wondered if anyone ever called Bocchese to ask him when it was time to plant dahlias or whether he thought Juve was going to be league champion.

  The answer was almost a minute in coming. ‘There were traces of Franchini’s blood in the sink in the kitchen,’ the technician said.

  ‘Fingerprints?�
��

  ‘I would have told you that, wouldn’t I, Guido?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Sorry. Could he get rid of the blood?’

  ‘No. He could wash it off. But he couldn’t get rid of it. They were waffle-soled boots: worst thing a killer could wear.’ Bocchese paused, then added, ‘If he watches television, he’d know that, so he’d try to get rid of them.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, ‘for all your help.’

  Bocchese made a noise, then said, ‘You’re keeping me from those books, Guido.’ But then he laughed and was gone.

  Brunetti decided that this conversation and these thoughts were not what he wanted on a fine spring day. He called home and asked Paola if she thought they could meet over on the Zattere and go for a walk and have lunch outside, on the riva.

  ‘And the children?’ she asked in that pro forma maternal voice he knew so well.

  ‘Leave them lunch and a note and meet me at Nico’s for a drink; then we can walk down to the end and eat.’

  ‘What a wonderful idea,’ she said. ‘Though you’re missing gnocchi with ragù.’

  A man less versed in the ways of married life would have said they could order the same at the restaurant, but such a remark would lead only to trouble. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to miss them.’

  ‘I can cook half of them for the kids, and then you and I can have the rest for dinner,’ she said.

  ‘If we stuff ourselves with moecche, we won’t be very hungry tonight,’ he suggested, eager for the first soft-shelled crabs of the season.

  ‘You?’ she asked in her best false-innocent voice. ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Very funny,’ he said, added that he’d leave immediately, and hung up.

  Because he kept himself from mentioning his speculations about the men who had met at the Biblioteca Merula, lunch was a pleasant meal, during which they agreed they would go to the seaside – though not which seaside – that summer. They walked back together as far as the Accademia imbarcadero, where they got on their separate boats going in different directions, Brunetti conscious of how unwilling he was, ever and always, to see Paola move away from him. Much as he chided himself for his unmanly behaviour, he could never overcome the continual fear that – in this most peaceful of cities – Paola was somehow in peril the instant she was out of his sight. It passed off as quickly as it came, but the impulse never disappeared, just as he could never bring himself to confess it to her.

  They had lingered over coffee and idle chat, so it was after four when he got back to his office. When he entered, he saw a blue plastic folder on his desk. Inside, as years of working with the technician had told him it would be, was a copy of Bocchese’s report, left there with no explanation. It contained two lists: the first contained all of the books examined, followed by the names of the persons whose prints had been detected on the bindings of those books.

  Franchini’s prints were present on all of them. Sartor’s were on all of the books taken from the Merula; Dottoressa Fabbiani’s were on three of them.

  It might not persuade a judge, but it was more than sufficient to send Brunetti back to his desk and to his original diagram. He darkened the circles around ‘Franchini’ and ‘Sartor’. It was enough for him. He dialled Griffoni’s number to ask her to come up. He wanted to see if it was enough for her.

  22

  It was. ‘The Trojan Horse,’ Griffoni said and smiled. ‘He’s inside, trusted. For God’s sake, his job is to see that the books are safe. Who’s going to be curious if they see him coming from the stacks with a book? Who’s going to take a look in his bag when he goes home at night?’

  ‘And Franchini?’ Brunetti asked.

  She said nothing for so long that he thought she had nothing to add, but then she said, ‘We can’t talk to him, but we can talk to Sartor.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s still early enough to go and have a word with him.’

  Brunetti thought he should call to see if the guard was at the library and was glad he had when he learned that Sartor’s wife had called two days before to say he was very sick and would not be in until he felt better.

  So as not to call special attention to their interest in Sartor, Brunetti told the person he thought was the young man who had been at the front desk that they wanted to ask Piero – Brunetti was careful to use Sartor’s first name and say it in a friendly manner – if he could remember any other conversations he might have had with Nickerson but that it could easily wait until the following week.

  When the young man asked if there had been any progress or if they thought there was any hope of getting the books back, Brunetti said, making himself sound sad, that he thought it unlikely. If for any reason the young man were to talk to Sartor, it was best the guard be told the police were pessimistic about finding the books.

  When he hung up, Brunetti explained the missing half of the conversation to Griffoni, who had figured it out in any case.

  Her voice could not have been more dispassionate when she said, ‘His wife called the day after you talked to him. The day after Franchini died.’

  Brunetti called Signorina Elettra and asked her if Sartor’s address was on file. After a moment, she told him the guard lived two calli behind the Accademia, gave him the numero civico, and told him where to turn left, and then right.

  Calle larga Nani. He hadn’t been there for years, perhaps decades. He remembered that there had been a tobacco shop on the corner, but beyond that, he had no memory of the place. They took the Number Two, got off at Accademia, and found the house with no difficulty, four doors down from the tabaccaio, who was still there.

  Before Brunetti rang the bell, he looked at Griffoni, wondering if they should decide on a strategy for questioning Sartor. ‘We just do it,’ she said, and he realized she was right: there was no way to prepare for it. He rang the bell.

  Minutes passed and no one answered. He rang again and asked himself why he had not thought of requesting a warrant from a magistrate to search for other books. He feared the cause was his refusal to abandon his belief in readers.

  The door opened. A woman who might have been in her fifties stood there: tall, too thin, haggard, confused to see people at her door. ‘Are you the doctor?’ she asked, staring first at one and then the other. ‘You said you couldn’t come, and now there’s two of you.’ She was puzzled, not angry. The dark circles under her eyes spoke of worry and lack of sleep, as did the way she glanced from one to the other, as if hoping to force one of them to speak.

  ‘We’ve come to see Signor Sartor,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Then you are the doctor?’ she asked, in exasperation.

  ‘No, not a doctor.’ When she seemed to have registered that, he said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that he’s sick. What is it?’

  She shook her head and looked more pained, more confused. ‘I don’t know. He came home two nights ago and said he was sick. He hasn’t said much since then.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In bed.’ Then, as if she thought they might be able to help, she said, ‘The Ospedale told me to call Sanitrans to take him there, but I told them we can’t afford that, and besides, he won’t go. That was …’ she looked at her watch and continued, ‘two hours ago. I had to go out to call: I can’t find Piero’s telefonino, and we don’t have a phone in the house any more. So I thought maybe they changed their minds and finally sent a doctor.’ She gave a short smile, little more than a grimace, and said, ‘He really won’t go.’

  ‘If you’d like us to try, Signora,’ Griffoni said in a soft voice. ‘We could call the Guardia Medica.’

  A young couple appeared at the far end of the calle, and the woman said, ‘Come inside, please.’ She put her hand on Griffoni’s arm and all but pulled her into the house. Brunetti followed, and the woman closed the door behind them and stood with her back against it, looking relieved.

  He was surprised to see that they were not standing in an entrance hall but in what must be the living room of the apartment itself. It
was on the ground floor, with windows to the calle on either side of the door, both of them protected by heavy curtains and, visible in the narrow opening that let in a bit of light, bars. A light fixture hung from the centre of the ceiling and tried to illuminate the room. An enormous old-fashioned television with a rabbit-eared antenna stared at a spavined green sofa. There was nothing else in the room: no chairs, nothing on the walls, no carpets. Nothing. It looked as though human locusts had passed through but had scorned the television and the sofa and had decided to leave the single light bulb to its futile attempt to relieve the gloom. The tile floor glistened with humidity as if to show its eternal resistance to sun or warmth or the arrival of springtime.

  The woman stood with one arm across her chest, hand gripping the opposite shoulder, her lips pulled tight, still not certain who they were or why they were there. She blinked a few times to try to get them into clearer focus. She took a step to one side and braced herself on the back of the sofa.

  ‘Signora?’ Griffoni asked. ‘Have you had anything to eat today?’

  The woman’s head swivelled to look at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Have you had anything to eat today?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. I’m too busy,’ she said with an agitation of hands.

  ‘Could I trouble you for a glass of water, do you think?’ Griffoni asked.

  Her request seemed to reignite the sense of social obligation that required the neighbours not to know anything about what was going on. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I can offer you a coffee. We still have some.’ She turned away from the sofa and, now that their eyes had adjusted to the diminished light, Brunetti and Griffoni saw a curtained doorway leading off to the left. The woman started towards it, Griffoni a step behind her. As she reached to pull the curtain aside, she looked back at Brunetti and pointed to a door behind the sofa. ‘My husband’s in there. Maybe he’ll …’ she began, but abandoned the sentence as if she were no longer able to think of what her husband might do.