SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,34

trigger for the brothers to grant their brains to some nice long vacation. Because, as if they had totally mutated into similar programmed roboters, they reached into their jacket pockets, took out some sort of packets and threw them at the stage. First I thought that it must be little tracts, although the sheer mass of this flood of paper made me wonder. But then the significant color and the typical volatile property of the paper made me realize the outrageous: The lads pelted the master with real bank notes! Countless bills rained on the platform, blew down on the big cheese until they softly slit to the ground. Had they thrown confetti, the scene hadn’t looked any different. The master showed his gratitude by bowing humbly. When the carol ended and the platform was almost completely cluttered with bills, he continued his speech. »Grazie grazie mille grazie, o voi fratelli generosi!« he said, panting and exhausted from the schlep of collecting the donations.

»Dear brothers, today we are ahead of the founders of our teaching. To them it felt unthinkable that the race which came from the First Reich in the Atlantic Ocean would remain a minority. They didn’t think that the majority of people will be kept frozen in the physical world, on the lowest level, and that they would so vehemently refuse to move up the ether and astral level, that the world would choose dispeace over the singing of angels. In short, our masters, which by now have reached the highest level, didn’t have a clue that mankind nowadays wouldn’t differ a single bit from the morons, lazy hacks and monsters of the ancient world.«

Although the brothers were literally steaming from the recent sportive performance, an almost dignified silence lay all over the place. The last sound of the choir’s singing had died, no one made a sound, and there wasn’t a single movement.

»Life is beautiful – mankind is ugly«, the hooded man said in a low voice. »That is the sad conclusion, even today. The world is full of demons, which keep those we need to guide from ascending to a higher form of being. Ancient images of God, narrow-minded views on the so called only saving way of living, but even more than that brute force, this is the message which is spread by the demons, and this is how they act. On that account we will no longer hole up in our ivory tower, but we will step into world history with the help of the miracle. We will shatter the furies of darkness, cari fratelli!«

A murmur went through the crowd, when actually I had been waiting for another roaring applause. This was a clean-cut case: Although the theosophists – esoterically dressed up – had a lot of skeletons in their closet, they hadn’t yet left their cozy simsalabim-bunker to enter the depths of world politics. They’d rather sing mantras, incarnate a little, magic up some angels and let things slide for the rest of the day. The evil – if there was something like that in their teaching anyway – to them came in an abstract figure, from a dark kingdom without further description, maybe somehow gassy and in the shape of a fantasy dragon. In the end, they didn’t really want to know. This charismatic master though demanded something concrete from them, an involvement in some dirty deal, reality. Little by little it probably dawned on them that what the master was trying to sell them as a miracle and for what they had been very generously donating until now might turn out to be something really earthly, maybe even real dynamite.

I for one didn’t have to battle with less mental stomach pain. Questions upon questions buzzed in my mind. Among what kind of morons had I ended up? What did this megalomaniac master have in mind, who didn’t plan for any less than saving mankind from the evil? Who was »the evil«, »the misanthropist« anyway? And the most important question: What was this miracle? And I almost forgot this little unimportant question: Which relation did this absurdity bear to the murders? Not with all the will in the world it would make sense to me. Because the only miracle that Giovanni and his friends were able to perform was identifying different shades of green on Spaghetti Bolognese.

But I didn’t have any time to think this through as the master now went to his ceremony, which kept me from wondering. This item