The Guard Read Online Free PDF

Olano calmly closes the door. He sits down on the side of the bed. Only after a while does he lay a hand on her hip, which rises up high under the sheet. A big, warm hand that gently explores her body, then moves her hand to his crotch. It doesn’t take long, especially when he feels her other hand, which has found its own way. This is all Mr. Olano requires. He touches her cheek for a moment and disappears.
    But Claudia doesn’t look at all as if she’s let something slip or as if her words were meant to make me guess a secret. Perhaps she assumes that his hands are warm because he has a good character. In her world the two things go together. Maybe she dreams of one day feeling his hands on her hip in the darkness of her room, while he sits on the side of her bed and gently whispers her name. In her dream his hands are always warm.
    20
    The entrance gate starts to move. Harry and I move over to the residents’ elevator and assume the appropriate stance: feet apart, hands behind our backs. Although we serve the residents, we don’t take orders from them.
    It’s Mr. Glorieux’s Aston Martin. He is accompanied by his daughter, her blond hair catching the light behind the flat windscreen. The gate has now closed again. Vehicles have to wait a full minute in the sally port between the street gate and the building before the entrance gate opens.
    A servant, a friendly youth who rarely stops to talk, steps out of the service elevator. He assumes a pose that is scarcely different from our own. He is wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat over black pants.
    The deep growl of the eight-cylinder engine creeps closer, a predator that can surge forward with all its power in the blink of an eye. The car stops and the servant opens the door for Mr. Glorieux’s daughter. She doesn’t deign to look at him. The oversized sunglasses on the top of her head are keeping her curls under control. In his brown leather pilot’s jacket, Mr. Glorieux walks around the back of the car and says, “Thank you, Ben.” The servant nods and climbs in behind the wheel. With that same controlled growl, the Aston Martin creeps off to its cage, Garage 14. When the elevator doors slide open almost silently, Mr. Glorieux lays a gallant hand on his daughter’s lower back and says, “Gentlemen.”
    21
    Arthur leans against the wall with one outstretched arm. He says that Mr. Glorieux was one of the founders. That the plan to sell luxury apartments with the service of a five-star hotel was his. There was clearly a market for it, because all forty floors were sold before the derelict factory on the site had even been demolished. A spinning mill the city had been ignoring for years. Red brick, of all things. Trees growing up through the roof.
    He thinks back on it with evident pleasure. He is a twelve-year-old boy whiling away countless afternoons on the factory grounds. His secret spot is under the roof on a weathered rafter that looks out over everything, where he rules like a king and smokes cigarettes like his father. He lures a girl here. She walks through the weeds on long, pale legs. Her name is Els. It takes hours before she lets him steal a kiss. In the very spot where the three of us are now standing.
    Arthur tells the story of the body and the colony of cats. That the body of a toddler was once found here, or what was left of it, because at the end there were 163 cats living on the factory grounds. Not one adult cat was unscathed, they all bore the marks of furious battles: sockets where eyes had been clawed out, scars where ears had been ripped or bitten off, bald spots and suppurating wounds. Despite that, the neighborhood always stuck up for the colony, especially when Mr. Glorieux displayed interest in the land and began developing his plans. Petition followed petition, there were demonstrations, the factory gate was picketed, a brick went through a stained-glass window at the town hall. Not long afterward they found what the cats had