Necropolis Read Online Free PDF Page B

a gherkin is my favorite, my God, just like a pre-Raphaelite painting, the photographer’s quite a promising talent, don’t you think so, doctor? The Italians said all this to the doctor, and although the poor man insulted them and told them their methods were illegal and amounted to entrapment, and threatened to fight back in the courts, in the end he gave in and Walter was able to take possession of his inheritance.
    The house in South Beach, Miami, turned out to be a mansion overlooking the sea, with seven bedrooms, its own jetty, and an extensive wooded garden, a real tropical paradise, a miniature Caribbean, if you don’t mind me saying so, the kind of house that people look at from the outside and wonder what kind of bastard can afford to live in a mansion like that, and can’t even conceive that all that could belong to one person.
    And there, in the middle of that luxury and all that space, young Walter de la Salle, who now owned everything, also started receiving an income of two hundred thousand dollars a month, just for pocket money. But he continued working at the hospital, although he’d arrive there in the old man’s Cadillac, driven by his Cuban chauffeur, because Walter didn’t want to dismiss any of Ebenezer J.’s staff. And that’s why they themselves taught him how to give orders and how best to use their services. In those early days, Walter was just like another member of the staff, having coffee and chatting with the cook or the gardener, or with the Filipino maids, and as he didn’t know what to do with the money he’d take five-dollar bills and leave the house and hand them out to the people most in need, especially the fraternity of the needle and the rubber knot, if you follow my meaning.
    In order not to be alone, he settled on the first floor of the mansion, in the servants’ area, but gradually the staff convinced him that he ought to use the upstairs rooms and they taught him how to use the bathrooms with their Italian tiles and the jacuzzi and the best hour of the day to have one of those delicious liqueurs that were kept in the cellar.
    Some time later came what he himself described as “the day God showed me the future, showed me what was hidden and beautiful, but above all showed me how to communicate with humanity,” and it happened more or less like this, let’s see if I can tell it properly: imagine Walter de la Salle waking up very early one Sunday because he thinks he can hear a kind of moaning sound, like the crying of a cat in danger, and goes out to look for it in order to help it. Day has only just broken and the sky is still gray as the young man advances between the bushes toward the jetty. He walks through the reed bed to the sea, and then, in the middle of the reeds, he again hears the moaning but louder this time and he can hear his own heart pounding in his chest, he’s breathing with difficulty at each sob he hears and he knows that if he doesn’t find the source of that pain he’s going to explode, until he sees it, or rather, sees her, because it isn’t a cat but a girl of seventeen, with cuts on her arms, and blood around her mouth and nose, covered in grime and mud, with scabs all over her body thanks to untold nights exposed to the elements, and at first the girl bristled like a cat as Walter approached, ready to defend herself, then her eyes met his and it seemed to him that an intense fire was blazing out of those wild ovals, that’s what he said, my friends, I’m not exaggerating, real fire, the kind that burns, not the poetic kind, and that’s why Walter thought that it was old Satan, Satan the Traitor, Satan the Tempter. His veins turned to tubes of shattered glass and his eyes to the bottoms of Sprite bottles, and he said to himself, this is what you’ve brought me to, God, this serpent will burn me, but the girl started to come closer without taking her eyes off him and he