SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,2

for a restart. Despite the stunning sunshine, the shadow of a dark cloud dampened our spirits.

I was in two minds about the lure outside and my sense of duty for assisting Gustav in his darkest hour. I saw him at the desk in his office, staring into space, stony-faced. Again, two conflictive impulses were battling inside me. What should I do? Quickly run outside, like it was in my plan and nature, and try to forget about everything while hitting at a beauty with pointed ears? Or walk through my collapsed friend’s legs to comfort him my way? But how would that change this bad situation?

The phone rang. Apparently some guy at the phone company had slipped his mind and totally forgotten about our arrears. Yet! Gustav let the phone ring and kept staring outside the window like he was cast in resin. In the backlight of the streaming sunshine he became a silhouette of a sad Buddha. The phone kept ringing sharply and cruelly, and I was tempted to run there and pick up the stupid thing myself, just to restore calm.

Eventually Gustav answered the phone, moving intolerably slow. He still seemed like narcotized when he put the phone to his ear and moonily and quietly answered »Uh huh ... uh huh ... uh huh« and »Yes ... Yes ... Yes«. Usually nobody called him, and when someone did, they only brought bad news. Maybe the sleepy head at the phone company had noticed their failure and called to disclose that our landline will be shut down immediately.

Then something seemed to happen inside Gustav. The sad Buddha’s posture showed some spectacular change. The massive upper body straightened up little by little, bend forward and backward nervously as if he was devoting himself to something, the melon shaped head sea-sawed and nodded like crazy, and the bloated face was haunted by a thousand twitches. Oh my God, they wouldn’t disclose the launch of capital punishment by lethal injection for clients in arrears! Then he stood up and indicated a movement that looked a lot like a salute. At the end of the conversation he once more said »Uh huh ... uh huh ... uh huh« and »Yes ... Yes ... Yes ...«, though this time almost euphorically. Supposably, the double blind of life had finally driven him insane.

He kept standing motionless for a long time after he had hung up. Turning his back on me, a gigantic silhouette in the with dust particles compound light of the window, framed by floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall, each holding at least two thousand books and pictorials. A defeated king in the kingdom that he was soon to be banned from. And so was I. Alas, I was close to bursting out in tears – mainly because of myself, as I thought of this kingdom and one square mile around it more as being mine rather than his.

Suddenly Gustav turned towards me with an elegant twist, and I was afraid he might make heinous faces, begin to bleat or something like that, just like it was to be expected from someone stark raving mad ... But no, none of that. He smiled blissfully, like someone who just had happened to answer the one-million-dollar-question.

And as my lifetime companion just didn’t have any listeners to share his happiness with (something he never happened to have by the way), without further ado he made do with me. In a soliloquy the good news from the call came bubbling out of him, although of course he didn’t know that I understood every word. I listened to him observingly, while I gave the impression of a creature with an IQ of a balloon. After he had finished his report, he ran to the bedroom and began to pack. Thunderstruck I stood behind and tried to not fret too much about the loss of the rope that the bailiff had taken at that time.

Just now the object of my sympathy, within just a few minutes Gustav had managed to get in line with some of the worst sleazebags of the human race. So what had been the topic of the telephonic twitter that had cast out the darkness at Gustav Lobel’s house one hundred percent? Quite simply: The two hundred percent foiling of my plan!

The first part of the message still sounded like a literal last-minute rescue. The call had been from Bella Italia, from Rome more precisely, and to be even more precisely, from the »Sopraintendenza Comunale ai