"His name was Stanislaw Makarski. A veteran of the third European intifada," the man in the ecclesiastical robes denoting his station as a junior researcher assigned to give tours said.
I couldn't help but think how young I was compared to the man in this painting. I was just days away from my 18th birthday. How I ended up in the remains of old Rome, I don't know.
I'm not studious; I'm not, I chuckle at the thought, religious. Yet, I was the only one out of the greater Chicago public school system to be here.
"Lance Corporal Makarski was a devout Catholic," the man said as the group moved on to another painting of the scarred warrior kneeling in a pew. He figured out the relationship between silver and the hordes emerging from the Kola Borehole."
I turned my attention back to the original painting, which showed the warrior carefree of a death that might come. My gut told me that the cheroot in his lips signals the 'to hell with it' nature. I felt as if he was at the midpoint of inhaling the hand-rolled tobacco in the painting, delivering death to the demons.
What battle is this painting of? I thought to myself as I looked at the small brass plate at the bottom of the frame.
There is a sharp clap, and I turn from the painting of a man now dead 30 some years and spy the guide in the ecclesiastical robes waiting across the room for me. It was an uneasy few seconds as the rest of the "arbiters of faith," as we all hoped to one day be called, turned and looked at me.
"He's not using 'Vatican registered silver,'" I said, pointing to the painting.
"Lance Corporal Makarski only found the correlation between the Demons and silver, not the alloy itself," the quasi-priest said indigently. "The holy formula took a direct intersession from the Pope to God to achieve."
I forced myself not to roll my eyes and move towards the group of prospect arbiters.
"Next, we have the room where Pope Franklin the Fourth blessed the first Vatican silver," the man said as he swung the door open for everyone.