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shelf.
    ‘Do you know where everything is?’ he asked from the end of the aisle.
    She came back and placed the book on a table beside him. She bent to open a drawer and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves and passed them to him. ‘Almost. I’ve been here seven years.’ She looked at the paper and again waved an arm towards the end of the same aisle. ‘I’m sure I’ve walked hundreds of kilometres in these stacks.’

    He was reminded of a uniformed officer in Naples he’d known when stationed there, who once remarked that, in his twenty-seven years on the force, he had walked at least fifty thousand kilometres, well over the circumference of the Earth. In the face of Brunetti’s patent disbelief, he had explained that it worked out as ten kilometres each working day for twenty-seven years. Now Brunetti glanced down the aisle, attempting to estimate its length. Fifty metres? More?
    He followed her for twenty minutes, going from room to room, his arms gradually filling with books. As time passed, he realized he was far less conscious of the smell of them. At one point, she stopped him beside the table and unpiled them before setting off again. She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and again to pass another one to him. Brunetti was quickly lost: he could orient himself only if a window looked across to the Giudecca: the nearby buildings he saw from the windows gave him no clues.
    Finally, after giving him two more books, she flipped the list back to the first page, signalling to Brunetti that she was finished. ‘We might as well look at them in here,’ she said, leading him back to the table of books. He waited while she took the last books from his arms and stacked them on the table.
    Standing by the first pile, the Dottoressa took the top book and opened it. Brunetti moved closer and saw the end sheet and flyleaf. She turned the page, and he saw, to the right, the title page. The missing frontispiece was present only as a stiff vertical stub. Though this small slip of paper looked like anything but a wound, Brunetti could not stop himself from thinking of the book as having suffered.
    He heard her sigh. She closed the book and turned it to look at the bottom of the pages, no doubt searching forgaps in the thick paper. Hands made clumsy by the gloves, she set it on the table, removed the gloves, and started to page slowly through it. Soon enough, she came upon the stub of another sliced page, and then another, and then another, and then she was at the end of the book.
    She set it aside and picked up another. Again, the frontispiece was gone, as were seven other pages. She closed the book and set it on top of the other. As she leaned forward to pick up another volume, Brunetti saw something drop on to the red leather binding, immediately turning it from rose to burgundy. She used the edge of her hand to blot at it. ‘What fools we are,’ she said to herself. Who did she mean? he wondered. The people who would do this or the people whose laxity allowed them to?
    They stood side by side while she went through, by his count, another twenty-six books. All but two of them had pages sliced from them.
    She placed the last book to one side and leaned forward, hands braced against the edge of the table. ‘There are books missing, as well.’ Then, reminding him of the way people often refused to accept even the most certain diagnosis, she added, ‘But they might simply be mis-shelved.’
    ‘Is that possible?’ Brunetti asked.
    Looking at the books spread out below her, she said, ‘If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said none of this was possible.’
    ‘What’s missing?’ he asked in open disbelief in the possible mis-shelving. ‘Books he requested?’
    ‘No, that’s what’s so strange. But they’re the same kind of travel books.’
    ‘What are they?’ Brunetti asked, not that he thought there was any chance he would recognize them.
    ‘A German translation of