Deceptions Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed in steady streams. The spring sun reflected at Gianni off cans and pieces of glass, off the windows of stores and buildings.
     He breathed slowly and evenly, and the air seemed to breathe with him.
    Earlier in the day, near dawn, he had caught brief snatches of sleep in the wagon, followed by breakfast at an all-night truck
     stop. It was characteristic of the place that no one looked twice at his battered face. And sitting there, he had suddenly
     envied the truckers the sweet, simple clarity of their lives, of their daily comings and goings. As never before, he understood
     the appeal of what they did in their big rigs. Everything was open, known, laid out for them like the rules of a supportive
     religion. Unlike him, they had no mortal decisions to thrash out with their eggs and fries.
    The thing was, would it be better for him to go back to SoHo and watch for more visitors? Or head straight for Greenwich and
     find out if Mary Yung was dead or alive? Gianni settled for getting the woman’s number and making a call. But all he heard
     was a voice on an answering machine saying she was unavailable at the moment and to please leave a name and number.
    Yes, but is she dead or alive?
    So now he sat behind the tinted windows of his Cherokee, on his street in SoHo, lunching on the sandwich and soda he had picked
     up early that morning, and popping aspirin to keep his head from going off like a bomb.
    Shortly after 4:00 P.M., two men Gianni didn’t recognize stopped on the sidewalk in front of his loft building. They wore business suits and dark
     ties and, from a distance, might have been blood brothers to Jackson and Lindstrom. After peering at the cast-iron facade
     of the old building for several moments and looking up and down the block, they went inside.
    Gianni fixed his eyes on the entrance and kept them there for almost two hours before the men finally came out, walked down
     the street and disappeared. Then Gianni waited another fifteen minutes and went upstairs.
    What he found was a charnel house with the gore removed.
    Nothing was whole.
    Floorboards were ripped up and scattered like driftwood. Upholstered pieces, chairs and couches, were disemboweled, their
     insides streaming. Whatever paintings he had in the studio, both completed and in work, were cut to shreds. Closets and drawers
     had been emptied onto the floor. Not even Teresa’s things, still undisposed of after all these months, had been spared.
    None of this stuff had been alive, yet things had died here, thought Gianni, and felt he had just lost his wife into another
     depth of separation.
    Teeth clenched, he moved through the ruin.
    These men in their quiet ties and neat suits. They were looking for connections to Vittorio, but this was far more. Where
     did such rage and savagery originate? What was its purpose? He knew. The invading Germans in World War I had called it
Schrecklichkeit
… frightfulness… and it was meant to demoralize the enemy. A calm, deliberate horror.
    Searching for answers, all Gianni found was the fine residue of ruin from a trash pit.
    There was nothing left for him here.
    Wrong. There were still a few things.
    He found a small leather bag that had escaped the generaldestruction and filled it with a few toilet articles, a couple of shirts, and some slacks and underwear.
    Finally, he climbed a ladder, dug behind a lighting cove under the ceiling, and pulled out a 9mm automatic wrapped in an oil-soaked
     cloth. He checked the ammunition clip and found it fully loaded.
    Then he tucked the gun inside his belt, closed his jacket over it, and walked out of the door without glancing back.
    He tried calling Mary Chan Yung once more but still reached only her answering machine.
    It was a bit past 8:00 P.M. when he drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and headed for Long Island.

5
    C ARLO D ONATTI LIVED in a house, comparatively modest for its five acres of land and Sands Point address, but it
was
built of brick and stone. For