SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,58

we had already studied well enough. The tiny eyes bulged from the dense cotton swabs, and he uttered a pressed groan.

»Holy Mary, Mother of God, help us! Holy Mary, Mother of God, help us ...« he kept moaning. He was sincerely shocked, yeah, one could really see how razor-caused wounds gaped inside him. He began to weep bitterly. The others also got bleary eyes, and gave full scope to their grief. In the end a heartbreaking sobbing raised above the dead, which lasted for a long time and reminded of a chorale. I was a little embarrassed of my recent thoughts, which hadn’t exactly shown sympathy for Miracolo. Each of us must live as he sees fit, and if someone chose faith for his own fulfillment, what was wrong with that? Fooey, Francis!

»Il diavolo!« Miracolo finally said after he had calmed down a little and had wiped away the tears. By now the others had adapted themselves to His Excellency’s mood and gazed into space with solemn faces. Nobody made a sound.

»Il diavolo rose from hell, o my dear brothers and sisters!« he boasted unctuously and rolled his tiny eyes. »This is the work of the devil. Because nobody would raise his paw against the other in such a brutish way. And no human would be capable of laying hands on us this harmfully. This is il diavolo!«

»I once knew a poodle whose master was called Sebastian Devil«, Pius tossed in and rolled out a tongue that was so long that it could easily host a tug war. »I guess you’re not talking about him, are you?«

»Reserve yourself with your stupid remarks, Pius, while His Excellency is talking!« the piebald ranted.

»Excuse me, dear community«, I said and rose. By now I felt steady enough to add a little secularistic logic to the issue. »The offender is a devil indeed. Whether he has horns on his head and trails a cloven hoof is pretty doubtful though.«

»You contradict His Excellency?« the piebald asked cantingly.

»Not exactly«, I replied. »It’s just that the evil has many faces. It has the power of shape shifting, I mean, it can invade even the best soul and exploit it for its noxious purposes.«

»Sapiently spoken, my son!« Miracolo called out. I didn’t really want to add the question, who actually was to call whom his son to the already complicated devil-issue.

»What is your name?«

»Francis.«

»O Francis – you have the name of a saint! What brings you here, my son, and what are your thoughts on this tragedy?«

Meanwhile I had lost count of how often I had told my story within the last twenty-four hours. But denying it to the pet of pope of all people would have been pretty indecent. Thus, I started with Gustav’s phone call from Rome and ended with the gathering at St. Peter’s Square. Of course I left out the hot encounter with Sancta, as I wasn’t sure of how this kind of sensuous delight would come across with this group.

Due to the smell we had given ground to the mass grave by now, and in our small group we strolled to a small chapel close by. At its door, so I was told, the food for the feline members of Vatican City would be served on the noblest china, punctual to the minute. Miracolo invited us all for a funeral party. Only Pius was left with the dead, a giant with a giant vacuum inside his head, incapable of getting the world, yet literally in God’s hands.

The chapel that we approached was downright sensationally plain, compared to all the bombast around us. She had rather fit in a Sicilian village with only a couple of inhabitants in the middle of bleak landscape than in an area that had been grafted by the greatest artistic geniuses, sometimes on pain of excommunication. It actually looked like a scrubby farmhouse with a plain cross on the roof. I assumed that it belonged to one of the first Christian churches, which had either been miraculously preserved for centuries or had been laboriously reconstructed.

»So you’ve come to Vatican City just because my name is Miracolo and exactly this word has been dropped at the theosophists’ meeting, my son?« the Persian asked. I got the faint idea that it wasn’t the tradition of the wake but hunger that urged him to go to the chapel. The brothers and sisters who accompanied us hung on his every word as if he was about to disclose the secret of Christ’s Shroud