Converging Parallels (38 page)

Trotti pushed the chair away from under him and stood up. He went to the window and stood beside Magagna. He looked out over the roofs, now drying. Before long, they would regain their terracotta glow.

“When I visited her this morning, she had a stole. A stole I gave her nearly a quarter of a century ago. She must’ve been wearing it and it lay on the floor—mocking me. Reminding
me of a time when Agnese didn’t care about clothes, about her pearls and her hand-made shoes from Vigevano. In those early days when we were first married she didn’t care—oh, she’s always liked to be well-dressed, but there was something more important for her. She had given up her life with her parents to live with a young country boy from the hills—an unsophisticated flatfoot. But she knew that I loved her. She knew that I found her beautiful—each morning when I woke up and saw her head asleep on the pillow beside me, I loved her. That was enough for her. And a cheap stole—probably made from the skin of a rat—was more important to her than anything else.” He turned away from Magagna. “I have always thought that it was Agnese who’d changed. I couldn’t understand. The woman who had once loved me—each day I saw her growing away from me. Growing to dislike me. Despising me. And I didn’t know why. At times I thought that she was jealous—jealous of Pioppi and me. But if I began to show more and more affection for Pioppi, it was because Pioppi responded, whereas Agnese no longer seemed to want me.” He shook his head. “Agnese didn’t want me. She didn’t need me.”

Magagna stared out of the window. A swallow dropped through the air.

“It wasn’t Agnese. It was me. With my arrogance, my professional pride, my private crusade against corruption, dishonesty and incompetence. My obsession. My life.” He was now leaning against the cold radiator, his hands folded and his eyes staring at a pile of dossiers on the floor. “I had married my job. I had no time for her, she felt forsaken and betrayed. Because she didn’t understand, and not understanding, she felt perhaps that I was deliberately betraying her. This is Italy. Look after yourself or go under. Kick them in the balls before they can stab you in the back. Survival of the fittest, survival of the most cunning. And she couldn’t understand me. Instead of furthering our interests—her interests, the interests of Pioppi—instead of keeping my mouth shut and going up the ladder, I tried to do my duty. Or what I considered to be my duty.”

Again he stopped. Magagna looked at him.

“I betrayed her,” he said simply.

“Then you’ll let the matter drop—the entire Ermagni affair, you’ll let it drop?”

Trotti laughed. “No.”

“Leonardelli will destroy you.”

“I am already destroyed—but at least I have twenty years of service. I am entitled to a pension.” He glanced at Magagna. “You are still young—perhaps you can’t understand—but this has been my life. Dingy offices, empty corridors in Questuras, piles of accumulated, dusty dossiers. Yes, and even coffee dispensing machines.” He tapped his chest. “And these have been my values. I have been wrong—but I can’t go back on them. The values that they taught us at school along with the guns and the uniform. I can’t go back on them. I can’t deny them. I have my own self-respect.” He went over to the desk and, opening the drawer, pulled out the paper block containing the stamped headed paper. R
EPUBBLICA ITALIANA. PUBBLICA SICUREZZA
. He sat down. “I will inform the Procuratore—and I will arrest Renzo Perbene.”

“You can’t, Commissario. You are destroying yourself—all that you have stood for. You are destroying it all. It is too dangerous to arrest Perbene. He is the mayor’s son-in-law. You will have the mayor against you—and you will have Leonardelli against you.”

Trotti picked up his pen, unscrewed the cap. “Ermagni was my friend. Anna is my goddaughter. I owe them something.”

“Leonardelli will destroy you. You will have nothing—perhaps not even a pension.”

“I have a wife and daughter. It is time that I started looking after them.” A ray of unexpected sunlight came through the window, casting a bright square onto the dusty floor.

Trotti smiled. “Perhaps it is not too late to become a good husband and father.” He began to write.

The pigeons had started to coo again.

Quentin Bates

(Iceland)

Frozen Assets

Cold Comfort

Chilled to the Bone

James R. Benn

(World War II Europe)

Billy Boyle

The First Wave

Blood Alone

Evil for Evil

Rag & Bone

A Mortal Terror

Death’s Door

A Blind Goddess

The Rest Is Silence

Cara Black

(Paris, France)

Murder in the Marais

Murder in Belleville

Murder in the Sentier

Murder in the Bastille

Murder in Clichy

Murder in Montmartre

Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Murder in the Rue de Paradis

Murder in the Latin Quarter

Murder in the Palais Royal

Murder in Passy

Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Murder Below Montparnasse

Murder in Pigalle

Grace Brophy

(Italy)

The Last Enemy

A Deadly Paradise

Henry Chang

(Chinatown)

Chinatown Beat

Year of the Dog

Red Jade

Death Money

Barbara Cleverly

(England)

The Last Kashmiri Rose

Strange Images of Death

The Blood Royal

Not My Blood

A Spider in the Cup

Enter Pale Death

Gary Corby

(Ancient Greece)

The Pericles Commission

The Ionia Sanction

Sacred Games

The Marathon Conspiracy

Colin Cotterill

(Laos)

The Coroner’s Lunch

Thirty-Three Teeth

Disco for the Departed

Anarchy and Old Dogs

Curse of the Pogo Stick

The Merry Misogynist

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

Slash and Burn

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die

The Six and a Half Deadly Sins

Garry Disher

(Australia)

The Dragon Man

Kittyhawk Down

Snapshot

Chain of Evidence

Blood Moon

Wyatt

Whispering Death

Port Vila Blues

Fallout

Hell to Pay

David Downing

(World War II Germany)

Zoo Station

Silesian Station

Stettin Station

Potsdam Station

Lehrter Station

Masaryk Station

(World War I)

Jack of Spies

Leighton Gage

(Brazil)

Blood of the Wicked

Buried Strangers

Dying Gasp

Every Bitter Thing

A Vine in the Blood

Perfect Hatred

The Ways of Evil Men

Michael Genelin

(Slovakia)

Siren of the Waters

Dark Dreams

The Magician’s Accomplice

Requiem for a Gypsy

Timothy Hallinan

(Thailand)

The Fear Artist

For the Dead

(Los Angeles)

Crashed

Little Elvises

The Fame Thief

Herbie’s Game

Mick Herron

(England)

Slow Horses

Dead Lions

Nobody Walks

Adrian Hyland

(Australia)

Moonlight Downs

Gunshot Road

Stan Jones

(Alaska)

White Sky, Black Ice

Shaman Pass

Village of the Ghost Bears

Lene Kaaberbɸl & Agnete Friis

(Denmark)

The Boy in the Suitcase

Invisible Murder

Death of a Nightingale

Graeme Kent

(Solomon Islands)

Devil-Devil

One Blood

James Lilliefors

(Global Thrillers)

Viral

The Leviathan Effect

Martin Limón

(South Korea)

Jade Lady Burning

Slicky Boys

(Martin Limón cont.)

Buddha’s Money

The Door to Bitterness

The Wandering Ghost

G.I. Bones

Mr. Kill

The Joy Brigade

Nightmare Range

The Iron Sickle

Ed Lin

(Taiwan)

Ghost Month

Peter Lovesey

(Bath, England)

The Last Detective

The Vault

On the Edge

The Reaper

Rough Cider

The False Inspector Dew

Diamond Dust

Diamond Solitaire

The House Sitter

The Summons

Bloodhounds

Upon a Dark Night

The Circle

The Secret Hangman

The Headhunters

Skeleton Hill

Stagestruck

Cop to Corpse

The Tooth Tattoo

The Stone Wife

Jassy Mackenzie

(South Africa)

Random Violence

Stolen Lives

The Fallen

Pale Horses

Seichō Matsumoto

(Japan)

Inspector Imanishi Investigates

James McClure

(South Africa)

The Steam Pig

The Caterpillar Cop

The Gooseberry Fool

Snake

The Sunday Hangman

The Blood of an Englishman

(James McClure cont.)

The Artful Egg

The Song Dog

Jan Merete Weiss

(Italy)

These Dark Things

A Few Drops of Blood

Magdalen Nabb

(Italy)

Death of an Englishman

Death of a Dutchman

Death in Springtime

Death in Autumn

The Marshal and the Madwoman

The Marshal and the Murderer

The Marshal’s Own Case

The Marshal Makes His Report

The Marshal at the Villa Torrini

Property of Blood

Some Bitter Taste

The Innocent

Vita Nuova

The Monster of Florence

Fuminori Nakamura

(Japan)

The Thief

Evil and the Mask

Last Winter, We Parted

Stuart Neville

(Northern Ireland)

The Ghosts of Belfast

Collusion

Stolen Souls

The Final Silence

Ratlines

Eliot Pattison

(Tibet)

Prayer of the Dragon

The Lord of Death

Rebecca Pawel

(1930s Spain)

Death of a Nationalist

Law of Return

The Watcher in the Pine

The Summer Snow

Kwei Quartey

(Ghana)

Murder at Cape Three Points

Qiu Xiaolong

(China)

Death of a Red Heroine

A Loyal Character Dancer

When Red Is Black

John Straley

(Alaska)

The Woman Who Married a Bear

The Curious Eat Themselves

The Big Both Ways

Cold Storage, Alaska

Akimitsu Takagi

(Japan)

The Tattoo Murder Case

Honeymoon to Nowhere

The Informer

Helene Tursten

(Sweden)

Detective Inspector Huss

The Torso

The Glass Devil

Night Rounds

The Golden Calf

The Fire Dance

The Beige Man

Janwillem van de Wetering

(Holland)

Outsider in Amsterdam

Tumbleweed

The Corpse on the Dike

Death of a Hawker

The Japanese Corpse

The Blond Baboon

The Maine Massacre

The Mind-Murders

The Streetbird

The Rattle-Rat

Hard Rain

Just a Corpse at Twilight

Hollow-Eyed Angel

The Perfidious Parrot

Amsterdam Cops: Collected Stories

Timothy Williams

(Guadeloupe)

Another Sun

The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe

(Italy)

Converging Parallels

The Puppeteer