By Its Cover by Donna Leon

to come up with explanations of how it could have happened. Brunetti gave a vague estimate of the sizes of the pages and stressed that it was essential to the thief that they not be wrinkled or damaged in any way. Raffi, who had been given a Mac Air by his grandparents for Christmas, went to his room and brought it back. He opened it, set it aside, and pulled a few pages from last week’s issue of l’Espresso . He folded them neatly, placed them on the keyboard and closed the lid, then looked around the table for approval.
    Chiara pointed to the slivers of paper visible at one side. ‘If I had the one with the larger screen, you wouldn’t see the edges,’ Raffi insisted.
    Without asking, Chiara went down the hall to Paola’s office and returned with the battered leather briefcase her mother had not carried for a decade but could not bring herself to throw away. She took the magazine from Raffiand pulled out a few pages herself, placed them into the curve of her left palm, then gently lowered the thicker edge of Raffi’s computer on to them. When she closed her hand, the pages nestled tight against the sides of the computer without reaching the top. Gently, she worked it into its padded case and zipped it closed along the top, then slid the case into the briefcase. ‘That’s how I’d do it,’ she said. Then, to stifle any doubts, she walked around the table and let them all look inside the briefcase, where all they could see was the top of the innocent computer safe in its case.
    Brunetti stopped himself from pointing out that guards would have long since learned about those tricks.
    ‘And the other people in the library would just sit and watch you do it, and then applaud?’ Raffi asked, irritated that her suggestion was as good as his own.
    ‘If there was no one else in the room at the time, they wouldn’t,’ she said.
    ‘And if there was someone?’ Brunetti asked. He had not mentioned the stolen books but did not want to initiate another round of demonstrations.
    ‘It would depend on how intent they were on what they were reading,’ Paola broke in to say. Brunetti knew, from decades of experience, that Paola would fail to notice Armageddon itself, were it to occur when she was reading – and for the seven hundred and twelfth time – the passage in The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer realizes Madame Merle’s betrayal. Had she reached that point, kidnappers could enter the house and remove the three of them, kicking and screaming, and she would read on. And on.
    Chiara having shown her expertise at a skill Brunetti hoped she would never use, they went back to their fusilli with fresh tuna and capers and onions. Talk turned to other subjects, and it was not until Paola and Brunettiwere sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, that he thought to mention the ecclesiastical reader.
    ‘Tertullian?’ Paola asked. ‘That creep?’
    ‘The real one or the one who’s been reading in the library?’
    ‘I have no idea who the reader in the library is,’ she said. ‘I mean the real one, what was he, third century?’
    ‘I don’t remember,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But about then.’
    She placed her empty cup on the saucer and set them on the low table in front of the sofa, then leaned back and closed her eyes. He knew what she was going to do, and even after decades with her, it still astonished him when she did it: it was all in there, behind her eyes, and she had only to concentrate sufficiently to bring it up from he had no idea where. If she had read it, she remembered the sense and general meaning; if she had read it carefully, she remembered the text. At the same time, she was hopeless with faces and could never remember having met someone, although she would remember the conversation they had had.
    ‘“You are the gateway of the devil; you are the one who unseals the curse of that tree, and you are the first one to turn your back on the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom