By Its Cover by Donna Leon Read Free Book Online Page A

else she’s given them. That’s what any sensible person would do.’
    It certainly sounded like what Patta would do, though Brunetti would need more than the help of the saints to believe that the Vice-Questore would ever donate a book to a library.

    Then, abruptly, Patta asked, ‘Is this what you meant about the press? That they’ll be interested in her?’
    ‘I think it’s possible, sir. Her family is very well known in the city, and their appetite has certainly been whetted by her stepson.’
    Patta’s look was fierce as he replayed Brunetti’s remark, scanning for criticism of the higher orders. Brunetti ironed all emotion from his face and stood, attentive, neutral, waiting for his superior’s response.
    ‘Do you mean Gianni?’ Patta asked.
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Brunetti watched as Patta’s memory, which was elephantine for scandal of any sort, flashed across the photos and headlines that had filled the gutter press for years. Brunetti’s favourite was ‘ Gianni paga i danni ’, for the rhyme between his name and the damages he had had to pay after destroying the sound equipment of a band whose music he had not enjoyed in a club in Lignano. ‘ Nobile ignobile ’ had followed his arrest for shoplifting from an antique dealer’s in Milano, and then the delightful headline in the British press, ‘No-account Count’, after he was stopped trying to steal from a shop in New Bond Street. As Brunetti recalled, he had been serving as an attaché of some sort to the Italian embassy in London at the time, and so he could not be arrested, only declared persona non grata and expelled from England.
    Though Gianni was in no way, at least to the best of Brunetti’s current knowledge, involved with the library or the theft, the mention of the family name would be enough to work the Miracle of San Gennaro on the press: give it a good shake, and the blood would flow afresh. The young man – who was no longer young and not much of a man – had so saturated the press that any combination, no matter how accidental, of his name and a crime of anysort would quickly become a headline; the Contessa would hardly want to see the family name exposed to the public eye in this fashion.
    ‘Do you think … ?’ Patta began.
    Brunetti waited, but his superior left the question unasked.
    Patta shifted his attention, and Brunetti saw the very moment when the Vice-Questore remembered that Brunetti had, by virtue of his marriage, slithered in among the nobility. ‘Do you know her?’ Patta asked.
    ‘The Contessa?’
    ‘Who else have we been talking about?’
    Brunetti, instead of correcting him, said only, ‘I’ve met her a few times, but I can’t say I know her.’
    ‘Who does?’
    ‘Know her?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My wife and my mother-in-law,’ Brunetti answered reluctantly.
    ‘Would one of them talk to her, do you think?’
    ‘About what?’
    Patta closed his eyes and sighed deeply, as one does when forced to deal with lesser intellects. ‘About how she might answer the press, should they find out about this.’
    ‘And how should that be, sir?’
    ‘That she has no doubt that this will be resolved quickly.’
    ‘By the hard work and intelligence of the local police?’ Brunetti suggested.
    Patta’s eyes blasted away at Brunetti’s sarcasm but his voice said only, ‘Something like that. I don’t want the public institutions of this city to be the victims of criticism.’
    Brunetti could only nod. Citizens have complete faith in the police. Libraries that allow theft should not be criticized. He wondered if Patta believed this amnesty shouldbe extended to all public institutions in the city. And in the province? The country?
    ‘I’ll see my mother-in-law at dinner tomorrow evening, sir, and I’ll mention it to her,’ Brunetti said, reminding Patta which of them it was who would sit down to dinner with Conte e Contessa Orazio Falier, and who it was who would some day live in Palazzo Falier and look across at the