SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,7
only pray that my savior was also traveling to Rome. Despite the tenuous situation, I insisted on sticking my head out and looked back. Four security guards attacked the backpack as it came out of the scanner and picked it to pieces full of as much dedication as if they were disemboweling a pig. Gustav stood there in complete astonishment, observing the scene unbelievingly, and as he actually felt like he had been smuggling a foldable atom bomb, at the end he even put up his hands.
The last thing I could see was that the situation began to calm down after they couldn’t find an animal or its skeleton inside the backpack and apparently they started to believe in an optical illusion or a technical breakdown. Nevertheless, Gustav’s stupid facial expression revealed that he somewhat had an idea about what just had happened without knowing anything about it.
I let my eyes wander across the hand that held the bag up to its owner. How nice, I was carried by a young man of God. The black suit with the white round collar, that emerged a little from underneath the shirt’s collar, proved it. It was a young man of handsome appearance. His face resembled that of an angel in a Pre-Raphaelite painting and only his gold-framed glasses indicated something earthly about him. His hair was brushed back with gel in an elegant way so that it was shining in thin flicks, his delicate hands of such stainlessness as if they didn’t abstain from a manicure and fine creams for just a single day. A silver cross dangled around his neck, looking like bling jewelry. Years ago, a guy like him would have been called a »Yuppie«. But who knows, maybe after the tanked stock market and Internet booms the Yuppies had found their salvation at the Good Lord’s meanwhile.
As he headed for the departure lounge he talked to another suit walking next to him. This guy was a little older though and, in all likelihood, not a churchman. Quite the contrary, military insignia on the snow white-haired, butch man’s lapel marked him as being a member of the US Army. If my long lasting studies of TV shows hadn’t fooled me, he even belonged to the top brass of this club. The conversation between these very different fellows resolved about some event at some church. But I didn’t try to overhear it, as I was too busy with figuring out where they were carrying me. At some point, the two men’s paths went separate ways and, oh gracious wonder, on the display above me blinked in neon writing: »Rome«!
I considered myself lucky, as my new partner didn’t deposit the bag inside an overhead bin but on the empty chair next to him. Accommodation inside another darkroom had certainly triggered some irreparable claustrophobic trauma. Pleasant also that he traveled Business Class, as if he had known how much I set value on journeys befitting my rank. This way I had saved myself the brashly impertinent redneck chatter of an all-inclusive-tourist including his constant jingle for the stewardess to bring him cheap hooch in a plastic cup. But the lucky coincidences wouldn’t come to an end. The dear priest wasn’t at all led into temptation to grab inside his bag and expose the blind passenger. As far as I could see through the slot, during the whole flight he kept typing some complex calculations into an uber-modern laptop with a plastic pin. He was probably calculating today’s income of the collection box. After about an hour and a partially nibbled serving of lobster meat, he stood up and went to the board bathroom.
Finally, I spotted a chance to gasp some air and stuck my head completely out of the bag. As I hadn’t had a single bite in a whole day and already hallucinated about how I attacked a grownup manatee and ate it up including the bones, I wanted to feast on the remaining lobster before the man of God returned. What he was about to think when he faced a plastic bowl that had been licked clean as a whistle by now mattered as much to me as if the plane was about to land in Baghdad instead of Rome. So I crawled outside the bag, put my forepaws on the armrest and stretched my snout towards the tidbit on the tray.
At that point a shadow was cast upon me. A tremendously big shadow. And a well-known one! Gustav, coming