The House of Serenades Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat, back to the bookcases, the sheets glared at him from the open drawer. For a moment, he was still. When he reached, his arm felt disconnected from his body, moving on its own. A shiver ran through him while he placed the letters on the desktop. In whispers, beneath the warm light shed by the ivory shade, he read the text of letter number one.
Shame on you, Giuseppe Berilli ,
and on your household of sin .
The time has come for you to stand
in front of the Supreme Judge .
     
    “No mistake here,” Giuseppe grunted. That was definitely a threat, a subtle one, which made the message all the more daunting. To make matters more abstruse, below the fourth line, in black ink, the writer had drawn a horse galloping with its mane in the wind. What the drawing meant, Giuseppe had no idea, but he shuddered at the thought that perhaps his horse accident had not been an accident after all but part of the writer’s scheme. As for the second letter, there was no subtlety in its text at all:
Before you know it, Giuseppe Berilli ,
you will roast in Hell .
Your home will burn with you
in the flames of eternal damnation .
     
    No drawing accompanied this letter. He stared at the handwriting in silence then clenched his fists, causing the edges of the paper to crumble. “Damn it,” he hissed, angry at himself for allowing those two letters to upset him to the point of insomnia. They were only letters, were they not? So why was he so agitated? Why was he taking those words so literally? Perhaps the letters were a prank, he thought, the joke of youngsters trying to kill their boredom, and he should burn them and forget they ever arrived. Horse accidents happened practically every day in the jungle of the downtown traffic, Giuseppe knew. What happened to him could have happened to any passerby. It happened to him though, and one day before a letter with the drawing of a horse on it had arrived. What if the writer was a dangerous man, someone with a sick mind?
    “I’ve got to do something,” he said, “or I’ll drive myself crazy.”
    Lots of people, of course, had reasons to dislike him. He was a visible man, with scores of bitter enemies, all envious of his social and professional standings and of the wealth his family had preserved and grown for generations. Perhaps the letters had been written by members of the labor unions, he thought, men of low extraction looking to make a statement against the class the Berillis belonged to. Many a time, he was aware, fingers had been pointed at him with accusations of being an outdated defender of privilege and a promoter of social injustice. He had dismissed the charges without blinking.
    “I will not be intimidated by some cheap, demagogic Socialist propaganda,” he had told Raimondo and Umberto, his sons, on the day a group of longshoremen had surrounded the building that hosted Berilli e Figli . For hours the port workers had stood in the street, voicing their anger in repetitive, chant-like slogans. The target of their wrath was Umberto, who earlier that day had represented the shipowners association in a dispute over the longshoremen’s right to a guaranteed minimum number of working hours. Umberto had won the case, causing the longshoremen’s right to be repealed.
    But the longer Giuseppe looked at the words the anonymous writer had chosen, the more those words seemed to him the product of fanaticism rather than the rational thought of a political opponent. If that was the case, he had every reason to be concerned about his safety and that of the rest of his household. Frowning, he brought the tips of his fingers to his throbbing temples. Should he call the police? With some luck, the police could find the culprit and put a halt to the harassment, but there would be negative publicity coming from the investigation. Should he show the letters to the police, he’d be forced to discuss his personal
    and professional affairs with the officers in charge of the case, and there was plenty