That Fatal Roses Bunch

By Raphael Canossa

Geneva set happily on the granite embankments of its famed Lake is not the place to get your heart broken. But this is what happens to Raymond Knight as he relocates from New York to his estranged mother Marie living in Geneva and bumps into pretty brunette Paola Barelli coming to his car dealership to buy a new Alfa Romeo. Suddenly, Raymond is oblivious of everything but his burning desire for Paola. And while Paola seems to be distancing from his he is desperate to do anything to bring her close, his heart set on winning back the love of his life. So when she finally agrees on dating him and asks him to rent a flat across from one of Geneva’s best hotels where they could have their little love paradise, he is only too happy to pay for it. The fabulous love night however turns into a lingering nightmare as it turns out that Paola was a professional assassin hunting her prey, intent on using Raymond only as a cover up. While he is fated to spend the next decades of his life in a Swiss jail for the complicity in a murder he had no idea about. The explosive story of a man and a woman, caught in a relentless storm of love-hate relationship, ends up behind the iron bars of Geneva prison de Champ-Dollon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raphael Canossa
• Release date: Mar 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463618325

Raphael Canossa

Raphael Canossa was born in 1968, the year the Prague Spring was crushed. He is very mixed-race, his ancestors being Jewish, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian and German.He worked as a builder, a bricklayer, a welder, a wood-cutter (logger), a lathe operator, a bee-keeper, a stud-farm worker, a driver, a tourist guide, a book translator, a teacher of English as a foreign language and an art gallery manager. In the pre-Covid era he used to travel to European and Asian countries searching for inspiration and vivid details that inevitably found their way into the books he’s written, along with a love for various places dotting our globe, the people living there and their rich history and intricate stories. His intimate knowledge of life aspects of various Eastern European peoples and deep insight into their histories and cultures lets him create fascinating stories based on true events and real people’s fates.

Book preview

That Fatal Roses Bunch

By Raphael Canossa

Copyright 2021 Raphael Canossa

Smashwords Edition

CHAPTER 1

You look wonderful, Mom. Your body shape, first of all. You shouldn't have any doubts about that, Mom! Raymond Knight leaned forward and kissed mother lightly on her rosy cheek.

You must be joking, Raymond, sighed Marie. I'm already sixty. I simply cannot look wonderful.

You know, Mom, cinema stars and fitness coaches and TV presenters and in fact even as many housewives, especially if you think of America, make face-lifts and tightening and all sorts of plastic surgery procedures routinely, but they don't look as fine as you do. You must possess some special secret, mother! Bound to.

They do all sorts of things in America, but not all of them are to be considered good. Marie's face tightened. Raymond understood that she came to grips with his clumsy mentioning of America and that his remark about Yankeeland wasn't really timely and wasn't any good at all. We had always been squabbling about that with your father... until we just divorced.

Raymond looked to the side trying to conceal what his eyes might say. In fact, he loved both father and mother dearly. And he couldn't decipher whom he loved more. Or maybe it would just vary all the time. At one certain moment he felt more affection for the mother, then his heart would be filled with great warmth towards his father. When he was younger, he was simply obsessed with America and the American way of life and lifestyle and everything else connected with this great country, and that was to explain why he had been more fond of his father, if you may put it this way. But as he grew older, and encountered more things in his life, and traveled more and could see and compare more things and more countries, his attitudes were subject to a change. So he came to think more and more about his mother, who lived alone in Geneva, where she had been born. And after quite a few trips to her and to Switzerland and to nearby France and nearby Italy, and Austria, and not really nearby but still dear Netherlands and Denmark and Sweden he began to fantasize about the life in Europe, or rather in good old Europe, as they'd put it. The idea was as vague as might be, it resounded more of the impression left by travel booklet - something warm and alluring but just as firm as a house of cards.

And then Trump's first campaign arrived.

Or was it precisely the second? Google mentioned his trying to run for the President for the first time as far back as in 2000, when he sought his nomination for the Reform Party, but then withdrew from the race. Google also said that his slogan then was The America We Deserve. In 2016, it became Make America Great Again. With ever growing concern, Raymond Knight was following that concern - and taking in Trump's controversial remarks on various issues from building a wall along the Mexican border to stopping illegal immigration to trade agreements. As his concerns and overall awareness would grow, he registered as a voter, although before that he'd often wear I'd Rather Vote for My Cat T-Shirt he had ordered from Amazon.com specially for the Election Days. At some point, the voices of those who'd swear to move to Canada as soon as Trump might be elected President became so overwhelming that he started looking for a house in Canada's east coast province of Nova Scotia as actress Chloe Sevigny said she was doing. Lena Dunham was mentioning Vancouver, so he considered it too. When Barbara Streisand said she would move to Australia or Canada in case Trump wins, he started researching this option too and was shocked as to how many people were putting the same request via Google. Cher's tweet IF HE WERE TO BE ELECTED, IM MOVING TO JUPITER put him in a state of shock because neither Boeings nor Airbuses were flying there.

Right on Election night, the online searches on moving to Canada rocketed so that the country's main immigration site collapsed due to the requests from the Americans, and Raymond had a strange feeling that he was losing the opportunity of the runaway. But after Trump was confirmed in office the general sentiment to move however started to abate. Raymond could see that neither Snoop Dogg nor Chelsea Handler nor Miley Cyrus were any good on their promises to resettle in Canada. Only some asylum seekers living in the USA, driven by fears of what Trump presidency would mean for refugees, began braving freezing temperatures and fields of deep snow and icy rivers to cross into Canada at unguarded remote locations at the border to secure their chances of staying in the First World. This had nothing to do with him, so he started debating whether the whole idea had been any good from the outset.

And then his mother called him and told about the job offer emanating from an old friend of hers. That was to be in Geneva. In the same car sales business Raymond was engaged in New Jersey. And Marie's friend promised to take care of issuing the residence permit at the local cantonal employment services and the visa required for working in Switzerland. As Donald Trump was doing his phone conversation with the newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky which eventually led to his first impeachment, Raymond was sorting out the papers he was to submit to the Swiss consulate in New York to apply for the work visa. It was an avalanche of papers, including even the CV and the details about Raymond's previous education and copies of his qualifications including the diplomas and certificates, as well as the proof of his professional activity. When he was through he realized why many of those who had once expressed desire to relocate to Canada would later drop it, for immigrating turned out to be a longer and