Black Opulence  (Paperback, Bertram Michael Sima)

STOLEN KISSES ARE THE SWEETEST What could be more cheeky than a plot and a plan to steal not just the Kohinoor from off the head of the Queen, but the whole darned caboodle of sparklers, lock, stock and barrel? I’ll tell you: eloping with the young crown princess, heiress to the throne, at dead of night, with her completely hornswoggled and powerless to resist her conniving abductors. Well, something very much similar to the foregoing hypothetical escapade found a prominent niche among the annals of screaming “make-believe”. It could only transpire thus with a bunch of six young no-good pranksters putting their heads together and coming up with something utterly audacious and outrageous – out-of-this-world stuff! It was a juicy apple, ripe for the plucking, and it was right there, hardly a hairsbreadth away from the dividing wall, just begging to be plucked. And so, “plucked” happened when the plucky pranksters got their act together. And would you believe it … the “apple”, in reality, was the ARK, the rarest of all artifacts in the entire world! In course of time – actually, lots and lots and lots of time – folks would wag their heads in disbelief to discover that the prank would rope in the likes of the Pope and a few Cardinals in Rome, one Knight Templar, a bunch of Jerusalem johnnys, architects, engineers, carpenters, and craftsmen, believers and disbelievers, natives with a high sense of righteousness, and locals reputed for their holiness and sanctity. You will meet a Pope with “itchy feet” and “butterflies in his stomach”, with a zucchetto that threatens to part ways with his balding pate; who would return to his home in the Vatican dripping with stories of supranormal magnificence just experienced, that caused his pontifical, exposed, tonsure to tingle uncontrollably.