Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon Page B

his name, though he knew he knew it - and took the steps up to the first floor.
     
    Pucetti stood and saluted when he came in. Paola looked up at him from where she sat facing Pucetti, but she didn’t smile.
     
    Brunetti took a chair on Paola’s side of the desk and pulled the arrest form that lay in front of his colleague towards him. He read it slowly.
     
    ‘You found her there, in Campo Manin?’ Brunetti asked the officer.
     
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Pucetti answered, still standing.
     
    Brunetti motioned to the young man to sit down, which he did with obvious timidity. ‘Was anyone with you?’
     
    ‘Yes, sir. Landi.’
     
    That cuts it, then, Brunetti thought and pushed the paper back across the desk. ‘What did you do?’
     
    ‘We came back here, sir, and we asked her, your wife, for her carta d’identità. When she gave it to us and we saw who she was, Landi called Lieutenant Scarpa.’
     
    Landi was bound to do that, Brunetti knew. ‘Why did you both come back here? Why didn’t one of you stay there?’
     
    ‘One of the Guardia di San Marco heard the alarm and came, so we left him there until the owner showed up.’
     
    ‘I see, I see,’ Brunetti said, then, ‘Did Lieutenant Scarpa come in?’
     
    ‘No, sir. He and Landi talked. But he didn’t give any orders, just left it to us to do it the normal way.’
     
    Brunetti almost said there probably was no normal way to arrest the wife of a commissario of police, but instead he stood and glanced down at Paola, addressing her for the first time. ‘I think we can go now, Paola.’
     
    She didn’t answer, but immediately got to her feet.
     
    ‘I’ll take her home, Pucetti. We’ll be back here in the morning. If Lieutenant Scarpa asks any questions, tell him that, would you?’
     
    ‘Of course, sir,’ Pucetti answered. He started to add something, but Brunetti cut him off with an upraised hand.
     
    ‘It’s all right, Pucetti. You had no choice.’ He glanced at Paola and added, ‘And besides, it would have happened sooner or later.’ He tried to smile at the man.
     
    When they got to the bottom of the stairs, they found the young policeman at the door, his hand already pulling it open. Brunetti let Paola pass in front of him, raised a hand without actually looking at him, and walked out into the night. The liquid air surrounded them, instantly turning their breath into soft clouds. They walked side by side, the sword of discord as palpable between them as their breath was visible in the air.
     
    * * * *
     
    7
     
     
    Neither of them spoke on the way home, nor did they sleep for the rest of the night, save for odd patches of troubled dreams. A few times, as they drifted between waking and moments of forgetting, their bodies rolled together, but there was none of the ease of long familiarity in the contact. Quite the opposite: the touch could have been that of a stranger and each responded by moving away. They had the grace not to make it a sudden move, not to start in shock and horror at the touch of this stranger who had invaded their marriage bed. Perhaps that would have been more honest, to let the flesh give voice to the mind and the spirit, but both of them managed to control that impulse, to beat it down out of some idea of loyalty due to memory or the love both of them feared had been damaged or somehow changed.
     
    Brunetti forced himself to wait for the seven o’clock bells from San Polo, refused to let himself get out of bed until then, but they had not finished sounding before he was into the bathroom, where he stood under the shower for a long time, washing away the night and the thought of Landi and Scarpa, and what was bound to be waiting for him when he got to work that morning.
     
    As he stood under the water, he told himself that he would have to say something to Paola before he left the house, but he had no idea what that would be. He decided to let it depend upon how she behaved when he went back into the bedroom,