Ripper by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page B

who can’t take oral medication. She told Carol to put two drops of niaouli into the locket every day to ward off the nausea, put a few drops of lavender on her pillow, and rub the peppermint oil into the soles of her feet to lift her spirits. Did she know that peppermint oil was rubbed into the testicles of elderly bulls in order to—
    “Indi!” Carol interrupted her. “I don’t even what to think about what that must be like! Those poor bulls!”
    Just at that moment the great wooden door with its beveled glass panels swung open—it was as ancient and tattered as everything in the Café Rossini—and in stepped Lulu Gardner, making her daily rounds of the neighborhood. Everyone except Carol Underwater immediately recognized the tiny, toothless old woman. Lulu was as wrinkled as a shriveled apple; the tip of her nose almost touched her chin, and she wore a scarlet bonnet and cape like Little Red Riding Hood. She’d lived in North Beach since the long-forgotten era of the beatniks and was the self-professed official photographer of the area. The curious old crone claimed she had been photographing the people of North Beach since the early twentieth century when Italian immigrants flooded in after the 1906 earthquake, not to mention snapping pictures of every famous resident from Jack Kerouac (an able typist, according to Lulu), Allen Ginsberg, her favorite poet and activist, and Joe DiMaggio, who’d lived here in the 1950s with Marilyn Monroe, to the Condor Club Girls—the first strippers to unionize, in the 1970s. Lulu had photographed them all, the saints and the sinners, watched over by the patron saint of the city, Saint Francis of Assisi, from his shrine down on Vallejo Street. She wandered around with a walking stick almost as tall as she was, clutching the sort of Polaroid camera no one makes these days and a huge photo album tucked under one arm.
    There were all sorts of rumors about Lulu, and she never took the trouble to deny them. People said that though she looked like a bag lady, she had millions salted away somewhere; that she was a survivor from a concentration camp; that she’d lost her husband at Pearl Harbor. All anyone knew for certain was that Lulu was Jewish—not that this stopped her celebrating Christmas. The previous year Lulu had mysteriously disappeared, and after three weeks the neighbors gave her up for dead and decided to hold a memorial service in her honor. They set up a large photo of Lulu in a prominent place in Washington Park where people came to lay flowers, stuffed toys, reproductions of her photos, meaningful poems, and messages. At dusk the following Sunday, when a dozen people with candles had gathered to pay a reverent last farewell, Lulu Gardner showed up in the park and promptly began to photograph the mourners and ask them who had died. Feeling that she had mocked them, many of the neighbors never forgave her for still being alive.
    Now the photographer stepped into the Café Rossini, weaving between the tables like a dancer to the slow blues from the loudspeakers, singing softly and offering her services. She approached Indiana and Carol, gazing at them with her beady, rheumy eyes. Before anyone could stop him, Danny D’Angelo crouched between the women, hunkering down to their level, and Lulu Gardner clicked the shutter. Startled by the flash, Carol Underwater leaped to her feet so suddenly she knocked over her chair. “I don’t want your fucking photos, you old witch!” she yelled, trying to snatch the camera from a terrified Lulu, who backed away as Danny D’Angelo intervened. Astonished by this overreaction, Indiana tried to calm her friend, while a murmur of disapproval rippled through the café’s customers, including some who had been offended by Lulu’s resurrection. Mortified, Carol slumped back into her chair and buried her face in her hands. “My nerves are shot to shit,” she sobbed.

Thursday, 5
    A manda waited for her roommates to grow tired of