SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,37

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 concourse 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