Garden of Lies Read Online Free PDF

sighed wistfully, then, at
    the squeak of footsteps outside their door, she jerked upright and quickly stubbed out her
    cigarette. “If the sisters catch me smoking in this old firetrap ... say, I didn’t get your name.”
    “Sylvie.” She instinctively felt that Angie was someone she could trust.
    Angie flopped back on her pillow, elbow cocked, hand supporting her head. “You look like
    hell, Sylvie. No offense. I know I do too. Why don’t we get some shut-eye while we still can?”
    Sylvie managed a weak smile. “Yes. I am tired.” She felt half-dead, as if she could sleep for a
    year.
    The same picture of Jesus she’d had in the other room hung on the wall opposite her bed.
    Bloody palms outspread. Eyes upturned in agony. A bloody welt on His chest, making her think
    of the purple scar above Nikos’s left knee.
    Drifting asleep, Sylvie thought of her lover.
    She remembered that first day. She had expected the person applying for the handyman job to
    be elderly, or a kid like the others she’d interviewed, males not eligible for the draft. She’d
    opened the service door, and there was Nikos. She saw him as clearly as if he were standing
    before her now. It had been raining, and his boots were wet and dirty. At first, that was all she’d
    noticed. Those knee-high, heavy-duty work boots, so unlike the sleek black rubbers that fit neat
    as sealskin over Gerald’s Italian shoes. And this new man was tracking muddy footprints all
    across her immaculate kitchen’s black and white tiles. He walked with a slight limp, and she
    wondered if he’d been wounded in battle.
    Then her gaze had traveled upward, taking in the stocky figure in a beat-up khaki mackintosh,
    a mass of black curls glistening with raindrops, a pair of eyes black as new moons in a face that
    seemed to throw off light. Tiny creases radiated from the corners of his eyes, though he couldn’t
    have been more than thirty.
    [18] A sturdy arm thrust forward, and she had taken his hand. Huge, she remembered, the skin
    calloused, his wrist matted with black hair. She had stared at that hand, fascinated, unable to meet
    those piercing black eyes.
    Then he took off his mack, and she saw the small triangle of black hair that crowned his sturdy
    chest, disappearing into the collar of his khaki shirt. She’d never seen so much hair on a man.
    Gerald’s body had practically no hair, except for the sparse silvery fluff between his legs. And
    Gerald had small hands for a man his size, smooth and dainty as a girl’s. He sometimes reminded
    her of the tenors in the operas he loved so, barrel-bodied men with a woman’s grace, flitting
    about the stage like bumblebees.
    “I am Nikos Alexandras,” he boomed. Then grinned, a brilliant show of teeth. “You have
    work? Good! You work for me.”
    She thought his broken English oddly charming.
    She learned he was from Cyprus, that he’d been a seaman on a British tanker, torpedoed near
    Bermuda, but survived six days without food or water on a raft. He was one of the lucky ones, he
    explained in his halting way, though his leg had been nearly crushed. Sylvie understood, now,
    about the limp.
    What she didn’t understand was the sudden breathlessness that had come over her. Sylvie
    nodded, and said, “Yes. I think you could work for us. You look very ...” she’d been about to say
    strong, but she quickly supplied “... capable.”
    He grinned, and pumped her hand once again. The feel of his warm calloused flesh against hers
    had a strange effect. She felt frightened and exhilarated at the same time, which she could
    remember happening only once before. When she was fourteen, alone in the house one evening,
    she’d spied from her window a naked man and woman entwined on a couch in the apartment
    across the alley. She’d quickly yanked the shade down, but she’d seen enough to make her hot
    and shaky, as if she had a temperature.
    And through the whole year Nikos worked for them, when he was near, those