By Its Cover (27 page)
Authors: Donna Leon
‘How?’
Sartor turned suddenly and shot Brunetti a sharp glance. ‘By giving him books, of course,’ he said in a tight voice. Brunetti realized that either Sartor’s patience or his powers of invention were nearly exhausted.
‘Did he tell you what books?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. He found them in the catalogue and told me their titles.’
‘Did you give them to him?’ Brunetti asked, conscious of the verb and its suggestion that the books were Sartor’s to give.
‘I had no choice.’ Sartor sounded indignant.
‘And Nickerson?’ Brunetti asked, hoping to surprise him with the question.
Sartor’s response was immediate, his voice tight. ‘What about him?’
‘Did he know Franchini?’
Sartor looked across at him quickly, unable to disguise his surprise, and Brunetti wondered if he had asked the wrong question, or asked it too soon. Sartor’s glance sharpened, but then he closed his eyes and remained silent for so long that Brunetti feared they had reached the point he had known was coming when Sartor would refuse to say anything more. He waited, making evident his retreat from the conversation, but Sartor remained
motionless, eyes closed. From the other room, he heard a noise and hoped that the women would not choose this moment to return.
Sartor opened his eyes. His face looked different, more alert; even his beard, which had seemed scraggly and unkempt, now appeared to be the result of an exercise in studied negligence.
‘Yes,’ he said, finally answering Brunetti’s question. ‘He was very clever. Franchini.’
Not clever enough, Brunetti wanted to say but, instead, asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘He told me he recognized him, Nickerson. From before,’ Sartor began. Slowly, he continued, considering every word, as if it were necessary to make what he was saying clear. ‘He didn’t tell me where. Or when. Just that he knew him.’
‘Were they working together?’ Brunetti asked.
It took so long for Sartor to answer that Brunetti again feared he had decided to stop speaking, but then he said, ‘Yes.’
‘And you helped?’
‘Very little. Franchini told me to leave Nickerson alone.’
‘At the exit?’ Brunetti asked.
Sartor lowered his head to indicate embarrassment. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, as if he didn’t want even Brunetti to hear this confession. His eyes were rich with appeal when he asked, ‘What else could I do?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, he said, ‘I just didn’t bother to look in his briefcase.’
Sartor moved his left hand to the side of the bed and took hold of the hem of the sheet. He started to roll the edge between his thumb and middle finger, turning it into a thin cylinder. Back and forth, back and forth, like someone stroking a cat.
‘Then what happened?’ Brunetti asked, hoping this was the question Sartor wanted to hear.
‘Nickerson wanted the Doppelmayr.’
‘The what?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew the book of maps.
‘It’s an atlas of the heavens,’ Sartor said with the condescension of the expert. ‘There’s one in the library, and Nickerson said he wanted it.’
‘Why that one?’
‘For a client. That’s what Franchini told me.’
‘What happened?’
‘Franchini was a cautious man, and he said it was too important to take. And too big. He told Nickerson he’d have nothing to do with it, no matter what he said or what he offered.’
Brunetti made his face as blank as possible and asked, ‘What happened?’
Brunetti watched Sartor think of how to answer. ‘He told me, the day before Nickerson left, to go into the reading room and the next day say I had to take one of the books he was using back to the desk because it had to be sent to another library. He told me that would frighten him away. And it did.’
‘Why did he tell you to do that?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Franchini said they’d had an argument about the Doppelmayr; then they argued about money.’ Sartor saw what looked like raw curiosity on Brunetti’s face, and said, ‘He told me – Franchini did – that he wanted to get rid of him because he was afraid of him.’
Ah, there it was, Brunetti thought, finally, the thing he was meant to believe. He had no doubt that an argument about money was the cause of Franchini’s death, but perhaps not a fight between those two men.
Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine
intelligence. Though stupid people might know the word ‘intelligent’ and have seen that some people understood things more quickly, their own monochrome intelligence could never truly fathom the difference. So Sartor would never see how transparent his story was. Brunetti didn’t know whether to hit him or pity him.
He was distracted from the need to make that decision by the sound of footsteps, this time not from the
calle
but from the next room. ‘Commissario,’ he heard Griffoni call.
He got to his feet and went to the door. Claudia was in the middle of the room, Sartor’s wife in the opening that led to the kitchen. ‘We’ve been talking, the Signora and I,’ Claudia said, turning to the woman and smiling at her. The soft voice she used filled him with fear.
Brunetti closed the door to the bedroom and walked closer to Claudia.
‘We’ve been talking,’ she said, ‘about how hard it is to make ends meet with only one salary.’ In the background, the woman nodded in agreement with these truths only women seemed to understand. She looked calmer; perhaps Claudia had managed to get some sugar into her, even some food.
Turning to her, Claudia asked, ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Gina?’
‘Yes. And with the crisis, salaries stay the same and everything becomes more expensive.’ She was a more composed person than the shattered woman who had pulled them into the apartment.
‘So we all have to be careful,’ Claudia said with heavy emphasis. ‘No waste: make do with what we have.’ She turned to Brunetti and said, with shrieking falsity that the other woman could not sense, ‘The Signora’s told me that her husband’s frightened he might lose his job.’ A cloud crossed the woman’s face, and her hands came together to console one another.
Brunetti wondered if Claudia was perhaps in need of some sugar herself, but her voice had warned him that all of this was leading somewhere. Then, as if suddenly reminded of that fact, she turned to the woman and said, ‘That’s why it’s so wise of you not to have let your husband throw those boots away.’
The woman smiled, proud of her housekeeping skills. ‘They’ve got a good few years left in them,’ she said. ‘He paid a hundred and forty-three Euros for them, only four years ago.’ A pause, and then she said, ‘We couldn’t afford to buy them, not now: things are so bad.’
‘Can’t be too careful, Signora,’ Brunetti said with an approving smile, while thinking that it was going to destroy her to have done this. Then, his voice caught between two emotions, he said, ‘Signora, do you think I could have a glass of water, too?’
‘Oh, let me make you a coffee, Dottore,’ she said and turned back towards the kitchen.
As he followed her, he turned to Griffoni and said, ‘Call them and tell them we need a warrant to search this place for the boots.’
Instead of the easy compliance he had come to expect from her, Griffoni said, ‘I’ve been Judas once; I don’t want to do it again.’
Brunetti pulled out his phone and dialled the number of the Questura and requested the warrant, then he went into Signora Sartor’s kitchen to accept her hospitality.
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