The Second Day of the Renaissance (Inspector Trotti, Band 6) - Softcover

Buch 6 von 6: A Commissario Trotti Investigation

Williams, Timothy

 
9781616958985: The Second Day of the Renaissance (Inspector Trotti, Band 6)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1616958987 ISBN 13: 9781616958985
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Timothy Williams was selected by The Observer as one of the “10 Best Modern European Crime Writers” for his series featuring Northern Italian police detective Piero Trotti. Now, 20 years after his last investigation, Trotti returns!

After decades as a police detective in his Northern Italian hometown on the River Po, Commissario Piero Trotti has retired. But retirement brings him no respite. An old friend calls him to Siena to give him urgent news: a notorious hit man has returned to Italy to kill Trotti. The former inspector isn’t surprised to learn of the vendetta against him; Trotti has plenty of skeletons in his closet. His mistaken accusations and failed gambles have cost innocent lives in the course of his investigations. Though Trotti carries the burden of these deaths with him each day, now someone else has appeared to enact his own, long-awaited retribution.

Traveling across Italy to escape his pursuer, Trotti revisits his own past and searches for clues to the cold-case murder of Valerio Gracchi, a leftist radical who became a national media sensation. But even the right answers may not save Trotti and his loved ones.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CWA award-winning author Timothy Williams has written six crime novels set in Italy featuring Commissario Piero Trotti, as two novels set in the French Caribbean, Another Sun and The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe. In 2011, The Observer placed him among the ten best modern European crime novelists. Born in London and educated at St. Andrews, Williams has taught at the universities of Poitiers in France, Bari and Pavia in Italy, and at Jassy in Romania. He taught for thirty in the French West Indies but now spends his time between Europe and Africa. For more information, visit his website: https://www.facebook.com/thdw.co.uk.

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Chapter 1: Florence
 
The city of Florence was packed with tourists, with Germans and French and Japanese, talking loudly and flaunting their currencies.
     Trotti cursed under his breath. It was another week to Easter, and yet every reasonably priced hotel in the city was full. There had been no reason to expect this sudden drop in the temperature; nor had Trotti been expecting the main railway station to close for the night. Foolishly, he had lingered in a restaurant and now he was shivering in the street. He did not even have a coat. Half past two and the train for Empoli would not leave for another couple of hours. There was no escape from the cold, and Trotti was cursing his own stupidity when he noticed the African girl. She had been standing there for some time, but he had assumed she was just another whore. He looked at her from behind; the overhead neon highlighted her hair and for a moment Trotti thought it was Eva. There was a lurch in his belly, but as the girl moved towards the main entrance of the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, Piero Trotti realized she was a lot younger than the prostitute from Uruguay.
     A couple of barefoot children were begging in front of a mobile bar. The bar—probably the only place open in Florence at half past three in the morning—was selling hot drinks on the far side of the road. Trotti scraped money from the bottom of his flimsy pocket and bought two cups of steaming chocolate. He gave the change to one of the children.
     He went back across the road.
     “For you, signorina.”
     She turned and the plucked eyebrows rose in surprise.
     “Hot chocolate to warm you against this chill,” Trotti smiled.
     Her lips were almost white in the feeble glow of the station lights. “My mother told me not to take presents from strangers.”
     “Just a retired policeman.”
     “Men like you she warned me about.” Without taking her eyes from his, she put the styrofoam to her lips and drank.
     She must have been in her early twenties. The girl was almost as tall as Trotti, and the appearance of height was accentuated by curly hair, combed outwards. A blue ribbon ran through the curls and was tied into a knot above her neck. She held the cup between her hands—hands that trembled.
     She did not have any luggage other than a small bag at her feet and the clothes she was wearing—cotton skirt, blue tights, a sweater and a denim jacket.
     “You missed your train?”
     Her scuffed tennis shoes were no protection against the Siberian cold. “Perhaps.”
     “You missed it or you didn’t?”
     The eyes appraised him from behind the rim of the paper cup. Widely-set brown eyes; Trotti realized why she reminded him of Eva. He felt the pinch of nostalgia.
     She blew across the surface of her drink before taking another sip. “I have nowhere to sleep.”
     “You’re not Italian, signorina?”
     “Just one of my problems,” the girl said in a lilting accent, and then she started to cry.
 
 
Chapter 2: Empoli
 
They had to change trains.
     At Empoli, side by side, they sat in an empty waiting room and before long, the girl’s head slumped onto his shoulder. Trotti felt the rasp of the girl’s thick hair against his cheek and he could smell its warmth.
     He closed his eyes and recalled the first meeting with Eva in Milan. A long time ago, before the beating they gave her and her hurried, frightened departure for Uruguay.
     He dozed off; the local train pulled into the station and the girl woke Trotti with a sharp jab of her elbow. Grabbing his arm and her bag, she pulled him out into the feeble light of morning and bustled him onto the impatient train, an old, rust-colored Littorina.
     After the stuffy coziness of the waiting room, the compartment was cold and the train empty. They collapsed onto upholstery that smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. The locomotive gave a melancholy hoot to the grey sky and the outskirts of Empoli were soon falling behind them.
     They were both too weary to talk, but Trotti was no longer tired enough to sleep. He stared through the window at the rolling countryside of Tuscany, grey-green beneath the leaden sky.
     It was quite unlike the flat expanses of Lombardy. Tuscany could have been a different country; it was a different world.
     “You’re not from Florence?” she asked, as if reading his thoughts. One eye was closed, one eye was looking at him.
     “Padania.” He laughed.
     A frown.
     “I’m from the North.”
     After leaving Bari in the mid-seventies, Trotti had traveled South on only three occasions, and never for pleasure. It was not that Piero Trotti disliked central Italy or the South—unlike the leghista Ubertini in Scientifica, who maintained that you needed a pith helmet and a rifle to venture anywhere south of the Po.
     Florence, Rome and Palermo were as much a part of the republic as Milan and Bergamo, Crema and Lodi. It was just that Trotti had no call to go there. He had always been happy where he was, in the city where he belonged, with its winter fogs and with its mosquitoes and its airless heat during the summer.
     The softness of the Tuscan hills, even on a freezing April morning, was quite alien to him.
     The girl sat before him and soon the second eye closed again as she dropped off.
     Surreptitiously, Trotti studied the graceful hands and the long fingers where they loosely clasped the cloth bag. He smiled to himself.
     Her name was Wilma Barclay and, speaking in idiomatic Italian, she had told him that she was from America. She was twenty-one—the same age as Pioppi when his daughter had decided she no longer wanted to eat.
     No young woman with all the challenges of life before her, American or otherwise, deserved to be left to fend for herself on a freezing night outside Florence SMN.
     The train emitted its mournful hoot, a hoot made more mournful by the first snowflakes that battered against the window.
     The 6:45 local from Empoli pulled into Siena.
 
 
Chapter 3: Pétain
 
“General Spadano’s waiting for you.”
     “General?”
     With a remote, patrician smile, the uniformed officer leaned forward and opened the door. “Kindly enter,” he said in an educated voice.
     Although a policeman himself for nearly forty years, Trotti still imagined that most flatfeet were called Quagliarulo or Scognamiglio and spoke in Neapolitan or Sicilian. Surprised, Trotti thanked the man and obediently did as he was told, entering the office softly, almost on tiptoe, almost intimidated.
     He had never seen anything like it; or at least, Piero Trotti had never seen a police...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616958987
ISBN 13 
9781616958985
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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Pärnu mnt. 139b-14
Tallinn
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Estland

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9781616957209: The Second Day of the Renaissance: The Sixth Commissario Trotti Investigation Set in Northern Italy (Inspector Trotti, Band 6)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1616957204 ISBN 13:  9781616957209
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2017
Hardcover