SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - U.S. Edition (17 page)

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Iste non est miraculum, sed vir stultissimus!
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»Okay, he may be a moron. But an unerring instinct tells me, that there may be much riding on this conversation. But how on earth can I arrange a meeting between him and me? He is a star, and I’m just a miserable tourist.«

»Don’t worry, Francis.« Sancta smiled mildly like a mother to her small son, who is scared Santa won’t come because he hasn’t been quite good enough during the year. »A star needs his audience, and Miracolo doesn’t have a lot. He will meet you for sure. And I will let you know about the easiest way to him when you leave me for good.«

She didn’t smile anymore now. Quite the opposite, sheer cloud fields browsed her face.

»Are you that lonely, Sancta?«

»Sometimes«, she said and struggled to keep her composure. But her whiskers vibrated, and her snout trembled persistently. She was about to burst out in tears. »This area suits our kind better than any other place, and yet sometimes I don’t hear a single meow for weeks, or even for months. It has nothing to offer for our brothers and sisters. Awestricken, the tourists don’t even dare to throw away a half-eaten bologna sandwich. Everything is nice to look at, but this beauty is due to those whose bones crumbled into dust ages ago. Life itself doesn’t live here anymore. But I’m alive, and that’s my tragedy.«

My heart tensed up listening to her words. Though to me she had appeared to be a beauty queen, now I knew that actually she was a queen without a kingdom. How said she must feel, wandering about this whole splendor all day and never walking into a fellow at all? Without using the worn thin comparison to a golden cage, I sensed that even sparkling beauty and fabulous wealth couldn’t make up for everyday occurrences like tender rubbing against a friend’s cheeks or a little scrap about the best place in the sun. No, Sancta didn’t live in a golden cage nor was she kept hostage by some monster. She herself was the cage; that was the nub of the matter! The Forum, the old myths and legends, the Latin language, this whole freaking sunken world had rubbed off on her and had made her a ghost. She wanted to live, only she didn’t have the guts to go outside to the living.

»Sancta, believe me, if I leave you for good, love itself will leave me for good. That would be my doomsday! After I have solved this tiresome issue and stopped the bloodshed amongst our kind, I will come back to you. This I swear! Though, you shouldn’t rely on vows and promises and wean yourself from waiting. If you really want to live, you got to leave the netherworld. Let me recommend this to you as your therapist. Out there countless dangers are waiting for you, at every turn evil is lurking, and disappointment is a dime a thousand. At the same time of all things you be compensated by these devils that are responsible for all those bad things. Why? Because there’s still blood running through their veins. You will face countless opportunities, and eventually true happiness. And you will realize: The Forum Romanum is beautiful, but life amongst the living is even more beautiful!«

A smile returned to her silvery face. Still, it couldn’t hide a sparkling trickle of tears. Maybe it was sadness about the many lost years, in which she had dwelled on thoughts without ever dari
ng to put them into operation.

»So now you will say
Vale!
Francis?« she said.

»No, there are so still many things I want to know about you.«

»What? If I can cross a street without your help?«

Now the smi
le also turned back to my face.

»Yes, and what is it with the many confusing colors on those street lights?« I replied. »What I’m also deeply interested in is this glorious security technology that Umberto apparently installed here. Quite honestly, I see precious little of it. Unless your master nailed down every single column and every single stone single-handed.«

»You’re not totally off base, Francis«, she said, jumped down the terrace rudiment and ran down the hill. I followed her, full of curiosity. Meanwhile it was noon, and down there whole battalions of tourists shoved themselves through the landscape of ruins. Even from afar, one could easily identify them by their clothes. Weird that humans think that in regard to clothes they even have to outdo circu
s clowns during their vacation.

»Every single ancient stone has been numbered, cataloged and photographed a bunch of times. Umberto also did something else to them. He didn’t nail them down, but injected a very modern version of these things, microchips. The newest development of these chips is called smart tags, if I remember that correctly.«

In a split second I got the ingenious security concept that Signore Umberto had come up with. Here the magic words are: data transmitting labels! Skeptics have another term for it though: prying chips. I had heard of it in a TV report, even though only fragmentarily as Gustav’s monster snoring had drowned out the announcer’s voice. The smart tags or RFID-, namely radio-frequency-identification-chips, represented the fulfillment of every observation fetishist’s dreams. So far people noticed the barcode of grocery store products no earlier than the minute they get scanned at the checkout counter. Shortly, they’ll have to hope that they themselves don’t get noticed by its multifunctional successor. Namely, a current-independent radio chip – barely visible to the naked eye – that is attached directly to the product and is thought to displace the barcode at retail. By means of a new technology the tiny chips transports the data to remote sensors by radio. But also in other respects this transponder sets new standards: It also qualifies for the activation of CCTV and allows the tracking of customers, who come in contact with the p
roduct. The cashier can go home
– an automatic register gathers all goods by radio and collects the customers’ money. By use of a hidden so-called transponder it can be registered when a thief stuffs something into his pocket and leaves the store as well as in which street or which house ent
rance he disappears after that.

And at this point our smart Umberto got into the game. He had realized the opportunities, which this chip offered to security systems, a little earlier and had used it to prepare every single ancient thing at the Forum. So stealing only a single stone from this site, for a thief amounted to voluntarily turning himself in. Security guys were able to track his every single footstep on a compute
r screen and, thus, locate him.

»Furthermore, there are several cameras hidden around here, which are connected to a central processor«, Sancta kept talking, after she had superfluously tried to quite ponderously explain the role of smart tags to me. Out of courtesy, I didn’t want to interrupt her of course. We had reached the Forum by now, but followed outlying trails, so that the flow of tourists didn’t get in our way. If I hadn’t lost track in this rubble jungle, we must be on our
way to the Arch of Titus again.

»Every newly arriving face gets scanned and matched with the biometrically recorded mugshots of previously convicted crooks. But even the biometric data of innocent people won’t be deleted as they are hypothetic first offenders.«

»Fortunately, we don’t fall in any of these categories. For animal shapes the program is probably blind«, I replied with a cheeky attitude.

»Not at all«, Sancta said unaffectedly, as if it was the most casual thing in the world. I just wanted to shrivel up from embarrassment, or at least blush to a bordeaux-violet, if that would be possible for our kind. As at the thought that we had secretly been filmed at our passionate fling at dawn made me tense up so much that I almost turned into one of the statues we kept passing. Sancta though didn’t seem to mind that she was watched at every turn. Why would
she, having grown up like this?

Close to the Arch of Titus my lover suddenly sidestepped into an area that was covered with wild bushes. We crawled through dense undergrowth, stopped and squeezed us through sprawling roots like flounders, and finally we battled liana-like plant curtains, which stood comparison to a real jungle. Suddenly our paws unexpectedly stood on glass. It was bulletproof glass, about 2 inches thick, rectangular and so broad that one could e
asily have built a house on it.

My eyes became aware of a high-tech-center that was hidden in the ground. The faces of the newly arrived visitors appeared on countless monitors on the wall. The moving pictures froze in a matter of seconds, and a program calculated the measures of specific facial features and analyzed color of skin and hair on the basis of bright point of lights and flashing lines. After that the faces changed into abstractions consisting of rough structures and blinking dots and disappeared in a window in the upper part of the monitor. On other monitors numerical series scrolled through. On the next one though a special program, which recognized solid geometric patterns, compared the current look and the position of the single ruin elements with the old data from archival footage without a single break. This total electronic monitoring proceeded almost automatically, as there was only a guard in a blue uniform sitting at the monitoring desk with the many controllers and keys, who now and then brought himself to get a call and used to the rest
of the time to yawn of boredom.

»Now you know the secret why the Roman empire will stay at its ancestral place for ever and always, Francis«, Sancta said, and her face couldn’t hide the pride in her master and his thaumaturgic feats.

»This is all very impressive indeed, Sancta«, I replied. »Compared with your Umberto, George Orwell was a fanciless mediocrity. Do you maybe know in which technical field he did research before he turned towards religion?«

»I believe he thought of some funny things.«

»Funny things?«

»He owns a sparse cabin underneath the broken bridge next to the Ponte Rotto. But his real home is a Volkswagen transporter that probably dates back to the Gallic War. Among other things, he keeps the few mementos of his former life in there. I once went there and found yellowed magazines and sheets with scientific notes under the junk that is scattered all of the place.«

»So?«

»Well, like I already said, at that time he used to work at silly things. For example, he considered the question of whether the coating of water-repellent plant leaves can be synthesized and how the result can be converted to modern car paint. Stuff like that.«

In a row of columns at the threshold to the Piazza del Colosseo it eventually was time to say farewell. After leaving the hidden glass bunker Sancta had guided me here unerringly. The elliptic square sort of built the end of the Forum Romanum. The Colosseum towered in its center. My lover couldn’t hide that she was afraid to leave her ghost land and just set just a single paw outside its borders. Although the cobblestoned square was a care-free zone, which served as collecting point for tourists and as an elegant promenade for walkers, nervousness make itself at home 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 in
stead 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 melanchol
ic 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:

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