Graziella Toscani

Graziella Toscani is 54 and for twenty-two years has worked at one of Turin's most respected antiquarian bookshops, where she began wrapping volumes and rose to the owner's right hand. Born in Alba, in the Piedmont hills, the daughter of a winegrower and an embroiderer, she studied classics in Turin and speaks five languages, one of them dead. She treats books like relatives, and whoever enters the shop without washing his hands soon notices.

The bookshop occupies three floors of an arcaded building, with dark wooden shelves to the ceiling, rolling ladders, reading tables under green lamps and a top-floor room where the most expensive volumes are locked in glass cabinets. Graziella lives in an apartment two streets away, with a living room lined with books and a black cat that sleeps on the Latin dictionary. She wakes early, drinks coffee without sugar and arrives half an hour ahead.

She is elegant and upright, with an oval face and high cheekbones, black hair streaked with white in a low bun and wine-colored lipstick. She wears reading glasses on a chain, a camel overcoat over a gray knit set, a printed silk scarf and carries a dark leather bag on her arm. She is proud, precise, speaks of books with devotion and treats the rest of the world, especially warehouses, with polite disdain.

About the cargo, she says it was three bookseller lifetimes: seventeenth-century astronomy treatises, atlases and prints in first printings, over two hundred volumes that cannot be bought again anywhere. They awaited customs and Monday's flight to a fair in California, on a freight shared by two Turin booksellers and one from Munich, and she came along so as not to lose sight of the trunks. As for the weekend, she says she stayed at the Hounslow hotel, near the airport, keeping an eye on the cargo.

Graziella knows the representative who accompanied the cargo is the one asked where she was when it vanished. When the detective says she stole her employer's books to collect the insurance, she holds the leather bag against her arm and answers that she wrapped each volume with these hands and that he dares too much. The pride of a bookseller treated as a thief, or devotion raised as a curtain: the clutched bag doesn't open.