SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - U.S. Edition

by Akif Pirincci

  »Dear friends, we want to turn to the actual reason of our meeting«, he said and raised the sparkling saber. The reflection of the thousand candle flames that emerged from it shortly blinded my eyes. The pitiful guys inside the cage, who had kept quite until now, got nervous again and began to meow pathetically, as there didn’t seem to be any doubt about what was going to happen to them.

  »These creatures are valuable vessels in which affiliated souls live. It needs the ritual that they can get in touch with us. Let us open our hearts and let them inside, hoping that they will open for us too. Let the freeing of the souls begin!«

  The batmen found this tremendously splendid, as they were able to devote themselves to this cozy necromancy than being dragged down by their master’s mysterious suggestions, which actually promised some rather comfortless future. Immediately another Latin tune was struck up fervently, which now sounded a couple of shades darker though. The dark sound was the final signal for me to finally give birth to a clever idea and get to work. If I didn’t want to attend a massacre, I really needed to do something soon. Samantha also piped up with a similar request.

  »Francis, Francis, I beg you, if you don’t want Rome to remain in your memory as the most terrible sight in your life, you need to perform an even bigger miracle as these murderers are about to! Hurry! In here’s a real bad atmosphere, and I’m afraid it’s about to explode into a gush of blood!«

  And as if this begging needed some more graphic underlining, I saw how the master turned his back to the audience, walked towards the cage and swang the saber dramatically. Okay, I was to perform a miracle on the spot. The only problem was that in contrary to the master I didn’t have any connection to the ether and astral level so I could accomplish this. The horror, which had silently been lurking in the depths of my mind, now rose with decimal power. I began to shiver, and inside the chaos in my skull fractures of Samantha’s words resounded in what seemed to be an infinite loop. »... bad atmosphere ... wonder ... gush of blood ...« I believed to hear again and again as I stared into my fellow sufferer’s sad eyes, idle and like crystallized. The master’s hand grabbed the bars of the cage.

  In my head a single phrase resounded: »... bad atmosphere ... bad atmosphere ... bad atmosphere ...« These two words rotated in my mind like the inside of a spin top, where it endlessly multiplied and interfered through an overwound segmentation. They had turned into a mantra, a repetitious prayer in which content played a far less role than the calming act of praying itself.

  It might have gone on like that forever, endless droning and frozen in fear, until the prisoners’ ears would have been »deseeded«. But then something yelled inside me: »If there’s bad atmosphere, then open the damn windows!« I furrowed my brow. Shortly after, I got the message. Yes, it was true, when there was bad atmosphere, one should let in fresh air. From there it was a short walk to suit the action to the word.

  »Francis, you really need to ...« I heard Samantha shout another time, and I knew immediately that she was gaping in astonishment. She had turned away from the frightening scene to face me, and so in the middle of her sentence she had noticed that I wasn’t sitting next to her on the balustrade anymore. Because I was already on my way to the cable control.

  »Follow me, Samantha!« I yelled without looking back. »I need your help.«

  »But what are you doing?« she shouted breathlessly. »Isn’t it too late already?«

  »No. It won’t be too late until you feel somehow strange and the thermometer tells you that your body has been brought down to room temperature!«

  The construction on the wall looked pretty much like the rolled out inner workings of a primitive hall clock. There was a real tower of ponderous old cogs, which were moved by chains with weights on them, rusty cranks and flywheels. Steel ropes ran from here through rings at the ceiling up to the hatches. Above all, the four massive levers on a panel caught my eye, as they were relevant for the opening and closing of the ventilation hatches. The first one was turned up, so I concluded that it must operate the open hatch. Somehow I had to get the other ones into the same position.

  »Samantha, come here and give me hand, quick!« I said and noticed at the same moment that she was already standing next to me, full of expectation.

  »We got to move this lever!«

  »But why?«

  »Bad atmosphere!« was all I said, while I jumped up with stretched forelegs. My paws hit the lever at full tilt. But it only moved in a narrow angle. I was falling down when I saw with a glimpse to the side that Samantha shot up and gave the lever another trouncing, using the same technique as I. With a dull snapping sound it finally veered! On the ground I watched how the cable control mechanism began to move, the cogs creakily meshed and began to turn, the heavy weights moved downwards, and a steel rope tightened. The second compartment slowly moved upwards.

  Samantha, who took turns in watching my satisfied face and the situation she created, had become a cartoon of skepticism by now.

  »And what is this about?« she said. It wasn’t a question, it was criticism.

  »The infiltration phenomenon«, I replied shortly and shrugged.

  Down in the vault a silent wind got up. The flames of the candles began to gutter, and even the fire of the torched on the walls got gradually plagued by a flicker. The batmen’s silk scarves were gyrated to the side and their capes were blown up a little. Some of them grabbed the brim of their toppers, so the good piece didn’t take off. Even the hooded guy paused his ritual, turned away from the cage and let his eyes wander to find the cause of the interference.

  This created a little bit of hope inside me. But I wasn’t allowed to pause now, if I wanted my plan to succeed.

  »Keep going!« I cheered Samantha up, who still didn’t get what I was aiming on but apparently sensed that I had something sensible in mind.

  Our hind paws vaulted us skywards once again, and our front paws hit the third lever. This time it was real torture. The thing hardly moved an inch. We had to jump again and again. I felt my paws begin to glow from the pain of hard jumps, they’d turn numb soon. Little by little the damn lever shifted upwards in the end, and with a little inching it leaped up. The rope started moving, the third hatch moved up and another airflow caused one more eddy within the already existing wind-chaos.

  It was a spectacle according to my taste! Based on their impact, we were able to study the roaring strength of the air so imposingly as if they had a physical appearance. Half of the candles in the room went out, after the flames had battled against the wind without a chance, also a couple of torches. But it was the textile part of the panoramas that amused me. As if all of the brothers had been brought into microgravity at once, the toppers took of from their heads, flew up in the air in dancing motions, gyrated in a circuit inside of a tornado, then drifted apart and hovered along before the whole game began anew. The capes were exposed to a sheer hurricane and streamed in the wind, trying to outdo each other. It wouldn’t be fair to say that they panicked. But among the passel of theosophists notable concern arose. They had stopped singing by now. Heads were raised or shaken nervously. The initial dumbness turned into some awkward whispering, and from that some excited and loud chatter emerged. A couple of the old buddies even took of their mask because they just couldn’t believe their eyes. Ours inside the cave watched the spectacle as astonished as us, but unlike the humans they seemed to sense that this windy turn happened to be in their favor. The hooded guy stood in a hurricane of flying bills and inched the edge of the stage, prepared for flight in case the situation sharpened.

  And it actually did sharpen! Samantha and I enjoyed the confusion for just a second and then pored on our act of sabotage. Compared to the last time it turned out to be a walk in the park. Like basketball artists, who aim to shoot the ball through the basket with dash, we took off simultaneously, and when our paws concurrently hit the fourth lever, it actually did us the favor to turn up immediately. Finally the fourth hatch opened, and the concours
e of the airflows from four directions created the utterest chaos.

  Before the candles and torches went black for good, for a couple of seconds I was honored with the very view that I had wished to invoke: The theosophists now stood in the epicenter of a real hurricane. The draft, which got increased in brute force due to the lengths of the tunnels and the property of the room, turned the tailcoat folks into human guinea pigs in some kind of cruel experiment in the middle of a wind channel. By now, they all held on to each other so no one got blown away. Several lost their masks. The black capes flapped so hard as if their owners were about to take off any moment. I could hear a scream here and there, which didn’t really speak in favor for this communities trust in god, and I could also see some of them looking for an escape from this squally hell in pure desperation. Only the cape man fled from our view – by now it was as if the earth had swallowed him up. Then even the last light went out and there was total darkness. But not for our phosphorus eyes.

  »Samantha, this is our only chance to free the whole gang!« I said. »We only have little time!«

  She nodded, and together we ran down the stone stairs next to us. The sprint towards the platform happened to be a dangerous slalom, as the panicking and bustling fratelli almost trampled and squashed us. Bolting legs dashed towards us like fragments of exploded astro-garbage. Just a teeny-tiny mistake, and we would actually have found ourselves on the astral level with a smashed skull or some broken rips. Even more, the enormous draft gave us a hard fight, even here on the lowest ground. It wasn’t just that our fur was ruffled like we had been blow-dried by a drunken haircutter, as a mater of fact we also feared to get swept away by a squall.

  Finally we reached our target unscathed and got to the podest in a single bound. Without hesitation I dived to one corner of the cage where matted drawstrings and sheer kinks held its bars together. Just a couple of blows with my paw did the trick and opened the knots. We both jumped and pulled on the strings, and Samantha and I made a good job of it in next to no time. Eventually, the front part of the cage was knocked over to the front, and our trapped brothers and sisters gushed out in all directions like they were a jinni leaving his bottle ...

  Everyone but Giovanni. Motionless, he stood in front of me and gave me such a deprecating stare as if I was the holy saber-rattler.

  »Signore Francis, ever since you showed up in our city, you’ve been perturbing the order«, he said. »Would you like to tell me, what this charade is all about?«

  »Just a second, let me think about that shortly«, I replied. »O yeah, now I remember: I wanted to keep you from listening to the thudding sound of spoiled Spaghetti being dumped across the fence with just one ear.«

  »Idiota«, he barked. »You were pretty self-defeating. Once a week, this here happened to be the only chance to wrap our laughing gear around something else than those freaking Spaghetti!«

  9.

  Giovanni’s surprising answer didn’t just leave me flabbergasted but also almost made me fall from the platform. But as the motto now was escaping at all cost, Samantha, »the released« and I saw fit to do this. When I turned around, there was a scene from a nuthouse or maybe better, a scene from a heavily shaken snow globe. Due to the hurricane that I had created, theosophists, conspecifics from the cage, toppers and bank notes were blown in all directions like they were down feathers. The arches, which led to the catacombs, functioned as some kind of vacuum cleaner for the flushed chaos particles, which buzzed around headlessly. »Keep your hair on«, I would have loved to shout at them, »it’s just air!«

  Anyway, we wanted and had to follow their lead and hurried down the stage with a dauntless jump. Our route led us through running human legs and the rest of the stuff that was flying around us towards the nearest arch. If we made it there, we might be off the hook for now, I thought.

  Tremendously mistaken, as we were about to find out, because the first catastrophe happened even before we reached the much longed for destination. When the arch was only a stone’s throw away, a fleeing theosophist’s foot suddenly appeared to our right and accidentally kicked Samantha’s stomach. With her eyes wide open, she got flung through the air, and the last glimpse I was able to catch of her was when she was catapulted into the bottomless darkness of another arch. It wasn’t the time to go look for her. I calmed my bad conscience with the thought of her knowing the maze of catacombs like no one else, she would find her way out without our help – of course given she had survived the kick in the gut!

  »You seem to have blossomed out into a real Rome expert, can you maybe tell me where this journey is headed, 007«, Giovanni said smugly, though he was catching his breath. We scampered down a corridor, which looked exactly like one of those that had led to the vault. The torches that grew out of the walls were still blazing, because the airflow weakened within the maze, little by little. Again we passed tombs in which skeletons with open jaws seemed to laugh at us, small nooks with carved religious symbols and pitch-dark rooms where I rather not guessed what was hidden inside. In the distance I could see a giant junction with several branches, which was about to ban the near end of this nightmare into the land of illusions. The thought of me wandering about this maze for days and going around in a circuit till my bitter end made me almost wish that the theosophist’s foot from a moment ago had also hit me here and now. There was at least something good out of this whole situation: There wasn’t anybody except Giovanni and I in this dark corridor. We were all on our own. Neither did one of the batmen follow us nor some ghost from the astral level.

  »You’re the most ungrateful creature I ever met!« I replied to the old buffer running next to me. The scarred, copper-eyed, flea-bothered gray reminded me of a brewery horse whom nobody managed to baffle.

  »Ungrateful?«

  Giovanni seemed to be capable of a mellow smile even on an endurance run.

  »What am I supposed to be grateful for?«

  »Maybe for me saving yours and your Largo-Argentina-fellows’ life!«

  »Saving our lives? You cut us out of the best food once in a blue moon, chief detective.«

  »What’s that supposed to mean? Are you actually saying that Signore Ku Klux Klan wanted to slash one of you open to feed you his intestines like some yummy delicacy?«

  »Stupidaggine! Nobody would have gotten slashed open.«

  »But then what was his plan?«

  Giovanni was irrigated.

  »Believe it or not, uber wise guy, but he was about to do the same as you!«

  »Excuse me? He had already raised his saber ...«

  »... to unravel the knots!«

  Our mazed route mirrored the abruptly starting chaos in my mind. Meanwhile we had reached a big junction and had to decide on one out of several tunnels. This fact though caused neither me nor my mysteriously talking fellow to panic as we didn’t have a freaking clue of the complex interlacing, so it didn’t matter which road we took anyway. But even for such wonder eyes as we had, it was always a good recommendation to stay away from the darkness. So in the end we preferred a catacomb which was illuminated by torches, just like the last one.

  All of this happened without thinking, and as for Giovanni, I doubt that he took notice of this junction issue at all. At least he kept talking as if nothing had happened. »Signore Francis, I had gotten the impression that in regard to education you slept on some ivy University’s foot mat, a least for a couple of months. These theosophist guys belief in reincarnation. If you were half the genius you act like, you might have figured out that fans of this reincarnation stuff would either cut their own ears off than to hurt, let alone kill an animal. Because after their own death their precious soul mind accidentally be reborn in some Giovanni, with what it would appreciate in value enormously, at least in my humble opinion.«

  »On the other hand the ear in these circles is considered to be the door to the soul«, I tossed in. »The soul is supposed to leave the body through the ear. At least this is what Samantha told me. And didn’t the
hooded bloke declare that you are about to experience the ritual inside the cage? He talked about the opening of hearts so that all souls could have a cozy chat. To me that sounded like ›Let’s do some exploratory ear drilling and let’s see what we can find.‹«

  »I don’t know your Samantha. But her theory creates the impression that she might get along perfectly with the pack of theosophists. The ritual the guy talked about is sheer acting. An, how do you call it, emblematic exoneration ceromy. Once a month, the penguins in tuxes collect us at the Largo Argentina, bring us to their bunker and build their cage around us, which can barely called a cage. We could easily escape from it without your air show, but instead we make tortured faces to increase the pity. Well, at first there’s some proper singing, a little abracadabra, some reincarnation and a lot of bloviating of otherworldly nonsense. Then comes the stunt with the saber. These idiots actually think of their race as equal to ours. Sheer megalomania, but whatever, Adriano Celentato also thought of himself as a great actor for a while! On the zenith of the fuss, the saber gets swung, the knots loosened and the poor, poor animals get released from the cage. Then there’s a right royal meal every time, in order to propitiate us for some exchange of souls later, and afterwards the travel back to misery. A little boring if you’ve been through the procedure for about thirty times, but still more sublime than stealing salami from an old woman’s sandwich.«

  I started to wonder. Could Samantha, who had studied the theosophical subject so hard, have been wrong in such a volatile matter? It didn’t seem very likely to me because she had identified the killing method of »deseeding ears« as a specialty within their theory. How could she have fixated on the exact opposite of what Giovanni had experienced? I took another try in showing the inconsistencies of the theosophists’ kind-hearted image.

  »Giovanni, during his preach hoody talked about a miracle that was soon to be revealed«, said while we still running like the devil himself was chasing our ears. »The whole thing didn’t really sound like an international understanding of souls. More like world politics. Can you maybe tell me what that was about?«