Roman

Roman was your average everyday cat. I'm not saying cat in the sense of the fur-coughing, roof-shitting, on-the-feet-landing creatures that plague our existence. He was a cat in the way the yellow feller in the purple waistcoat living in the trashcan by the post with the telephone was a cat - inherently feline in a wily, insolent and holier-than-thou way but imbued with only the threshold quantum of human traits to be allowed to roam collarless as against being dragged to the pound. My unfavourable assessment of cats aside, a more apt description of Roman's nature could be given by likening him to a gecho. Having said that, if you can find any characteristic common to both cat and gecho...I salute you.

Roman is an odd name, you might think. But so is Greek or Cuban or almost any other name his mother could've thought of. I can't even tell you if that was indeed his real name, as a seasoned man of his profession might think it wise to use a pseudonym, but the fact was that Roman was Roman and being such, possessed that certain nuance of haughty recklessness that drives a man to casually scratch his bottom when told to hand over the money by goon with a gun to his head. Hence, for all intents and purposes, we shall assume that his name was, in fact and utterly, Roman. Roman was Greek.

People say he suffered from a kind of partial mental aphasia that caused him to thrust words into sentences that had no business being there. Close companions seem to agree that he suffered particularly with conjunctions. Roman wasn't bad with language, not on any account, in fact he was renowned for having seized the Norman Telly Award for Impassioned Poetry twice when he was fourteen for his commendable and adolescent cyphers about the meaning of life, happiness and the downy growth below the waistline. Why the award was bestowed twice in the same year, however, none could say. But it's largely true that you'd be greeted, should you chance upon Roman in one of Oldtown's seedier pubs, with a fond and cheerful 'Here's our friend Blue-Balls. Nads his horrendous hairdo'.

Roman liked his suits. The majority were pinstriped with a smattering of blood and just a hint of dried brain, but mostly always black. He wore a bowler hat to cover his bald spot and a tommy gun to placate his fidgety fingers. His ties were always immaculate and his moustache neatly trimmed so as to shadow his lips when he spoke. Indeed, when he opened his mouth, the words seemed to emanate from the bushy hair on his filtrum.

You might think of Roman as quite an eccentric sort. But the truth is he needed these quirks and oddities to manage his image; one that was tempered to strike his imminent victims as zany if not to strike them with terror. But I can tell you from experience that Roman is an altogether balanced character. He has a chip on both his shoulders. But dang it if he isn't the best at what he does!