SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,53

in her silver face. Her hypnotizing smell still reached my nostrils like a spell, which irreversibly had been cast over me. And the sight of her smooth, slim body with the fur, which glistened in the midday sun, the extraordinary long tail and the big paws for a few minutes caused me to consider to just stay here instead of hunting some monsters.

»Right over there on the right the Via dei Fori Imperiali leads to the Piazza Venezia, Francis«, my Roman lover said, and agitatedly she looked around as if it was possible that she got sucked into the metropolis’ dangerous whirl any second. »There are traffic lights in abundance. You just need to wait long enough until a moped with the Vatican license plate number stops at one of them. The letters SCV and the Vatican crest are stamped in them. Most of the time, a cleric sits on the moped, on the back there’s usually a basket for the daily shopping. Just hop in, be quiet as a mouse during the drive, and eventually you will end up in Vatican City. However, how you are going to find Miracolo once you got there, I leave to your aptitude.«

We rubbed at each other’s cheeks and moist noses for one last time.

»Vale, Francis!« she said and gave me a long melancholic look. Then she turned to go.

»No, not farewell, Sancta!« I replied. I guess that my facial expression was also dripping with melancholy now. »I will come back to you and induct you in the pleasures of chaos. And not only that. You are in Rome, the culinary Mecca of the whole planet. You are going to shovel so many delicacies into your stomach that you will eventually long for a rotten fishbone. I know some restaurant with an excellent cuisine. In other words, I ask you to dinner!«

The jubilant smile that spread on her face resembled the midday sun.

»O, just one more thing«, I said. »Do you maybe know the reason for Umberto’s life crisis, which made him become a priest?«

»I don’t really know details. But he once talked to himself, and at that he mentioned very sad things. He said he used to have a family who were killed three years ago in a catastrophe abroad. His wife and his three little children apparently died in the most awful way one can imagine.«

A pause ensued, in which all sounds around us seemed to be sucked off by a vacuum pump and as if time stood still. In my mind’s eye, the movements around us, but above all the movements of my lover expanded into intolerable slowness, when she spoke to me with her sweet black mouth:

»Nisi ad me redibis, non melior eris quam stupida mortuaque larva, Francis!«

And the slow motion effect still lasted when she turned her back at me and finally disappeared between the line of columns and rampant bushes. It’s certainly true what people say about the korat cat and its halo. When she was gone, it seemed to me as if someone had suddenly turned off the light at this idyllic tableau. But also her last words to me were true. If I didn’t come back to her, then I certainly wasn’t better than some stupid dead ghost. At that one that was to be dipped into sulphur and lava in hell every day!

But I would come back. For that reason alone that not for all coffee in Brazil I wanted to miss out on watching this petite body bloat like a pumpkin in ideal weather conditions two weeks from now. And exactly with this alleged blemish I would constantly tease the mother of my future children. At our morning meeting, Sancta had been on the climax of her fertility, which I had sensed. A thing that made me even more happy than sprouting father’s pride was something not a single dad nowadays can hope for: My children would speak Latin

fluently! (4)

12.

Sancta’s tip turned out to be worth a mint. I scampered along the busy Via dei Fori Imperiali to the Piazza Venezia, where the artificial mountain Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II made from light travertine towers with its giant perrons. The Italians also disdainfully call this »the typewriter«, due to its unusual shape. Here, I only had to wait next to a traffic light for a cab with a Vatican car sign, and off I was to the state of the Impeccable.

The churchman on his moped, who stopped next to the sidewalk because of