Read Converging Parallels Online
Authors: Timothy Williams
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