Читать книгу Dirty Diaries - Bayo Inc. David - Страница 3

The young man switched off the light and drew the dirty curtain to block any illumination from outside. Looking around, he decided the room was dark enough to force anyone in it to grope around. But to achieve the pitch black he desired, he put on his dark glasses, nodding his satisfaction. That was how he wanted the world to be, as it was before God said, “Let there be light”—a formless place where brutality, wickedness, and injustice reigned. He closed his eyes behind the glasses and allowed himself a mental picture of people young and old, weak and strong, innocent and guilty, stupefied by repeated blows, screaming and crying in his beloved darkness. Only the smart ones would survive.

He sat on a worn-out gilt chair in the center of his dusty, empty room, staring into an unseen future, weighing the possibility of what was echoing in his mind. “I can make you a motherfuckin’ millionaire in, eh . . . months, six at most.” A dark part of his mind said it wasn’t possible; the even darker part said it was. A man he’d met by chance, who’d claimed to be his biological father, gave him that assurance.

The man’s soft voice sounded in his head again. “I know what you want, Schoolboy. I have master spies in your brain. You want money? I can make ya a motherfuckin’ millionaire in . . .”

He groaned as he realized how meaningless his life would now be without his mother—even if he did eventually become a million-dollar man. The thought of his late mother quickly injured his emotions, causing the little excitement in him trundle into a twinge of anger. His groan was the only sign of life in the dark room.

He tried to push aside the image of his dear mother, sitting and resting against a wall covered with dried blood from her head downward. About twenty people were staring at her lifeless body. He was only ten when she was murdered in the club where she spent her leisure time. He’d cried like the baby that he was. Nobody had taken care of him. Mama never told him he had any family except Judas, his father, who was in prison with eight years left of his sentence. The boy that he was then had been taken in by his friend’s family, hoping that one day his father would find him after his release.

But that didn’t happen.

He sat motionless in his dark room, not feeling anything. If his senses were functioning, he would have noticed that he was footsore and parched—and, to his shame, that he was crying for the first time in sixteen years. He could only think, and he continued to do so. He carefully made a mental assessment of his life.

When he was twenty, he’d started killing everyone he’d suspected of killing his mother. He’d carried out a secret, intelligent, but highly illogical investigation, during which he’d come across nine people who Mama had spoken with, seen, or visited three days before her death. And like a professional, leaving no trace of himself, he’d murdered them. Most of them had been ordered at gun point to drink five or six bottles of alcoholic ferimo after which they were thrown from the tops of various multistory buildings. Mama had taught him not to forgive and forget.

He cleared his throat, concluding that his life was a success, that it couldn’t have been better. He adjusted his slipping glasses, wiped his greasy face, and continued to think.

During his twenty-four years of existence, he’d been involved in things that would give the cops hell, things they wouldn’t have been able to prevent even if they’d known about them beforehand. He’d carried out several kidnappings and bank robberies. His fortune rose when he was asked to help get some chaps who had the talent to see clearly in the dark. And he’d promptly found two good albinos. He’d found buyers for stolen goods. He’d been to prison twice to serve terms of a few months.

If no one would praise him, he would hail himself. It was true that he’d sent twenty-three innocent people to their graves in his effort to get two guilty ones—although he didn’t actually get them. But he suggested that if people of his ilk were honored, he was worth some gold medals. He gathered his lips to one side of his mouth in what he called a smile, then inserted a long, thin toothpick into it and began to stab his gum, whistling through the teeth and swallowing the blood.

He could have been two million dollars richer, but his loot had gone as quickly as it came. His hobbies were gambling and watching pornography. His name was Kane Duncan, and he stood six-feet-one. Disliked by most females on sight, he hated men.

Some months earlier, he’d vowed to retire from active crime after he thought he would have his way with a successful politician who was running for governor in six months. This fellow was having an extramarital relationship with a teenager. Kane, a very patient human being, had hidden behind their window with a powerful camera intermittently over four months to observe their love making. He’d taken a lot of pictures. The effort, Kane calculated, could fetch him twenty-five thousand dollars.

Mission accomplished, he presented the photographs on a Monday morning. It was business as unusual because, to his surprise, the politician told him to go to hell and show them to the press. In the elevator, while Kane was counting his losses, the time and the resources he’d invested, he was called back.

“So what am I to do with all these?” the politician asked as he glanced from one embarrassing nude picture to another, not minding the presence of his secretary. He cried. “My opponents paid you to do this, eh? Jim sponsored this trash, eh? You want to blackmail me?”

“Gimme forty thousand and you’ll have everything, including the negative.” Kane brought out more copies from his black duffel bag.

“You must be joking.” He turned to his secretary, who seemed to be rearranging a desk. “Damn it, excuse me. You can see I’m dealing with a stiff ass here, couldn’t you?” Directing bloodshot eyes to Kane, he barked, “I said you all must be joking—you, Jim, and whoever sent you.”

“I wouldn’t come all the way from Clackamas Estate to crack a joke.”

“You must be out of your mind. You just burst into my office, show me some collections and tell me to part with four thousand?”

“I said forty thousand,” Kane corrected him.

“Ah! You’re a crazy fool.” A sudden spasm of fury swept over him. He was banging everything. “How would you like it if we started chasing each other with guns and cutlasses?”

“Are you ready or not?” Kane was adamant.

Two hours passed before they settled on twenty-thousand dollars.

Kane collected the money and turned over the photographs and their negatives, although he kept back some, which he would save for when he was broke.

He actually returned with them two weeks later. The politician was alarmed when he saw more copies displayed on his table, with Kane quietly pulling enlarged, framed copies from his bag. The man became weak and talked through clenched teeth, stammering with eyes closed, saying that he could go to hell and publish it or show it to anyone, this time meaning it.

Kane was frustrated. He had to complete one more operation before he allowed himself a voluntary retirement at twenty-four. Just one more. After a fleeting moment thinking about what he could do, he decided to rob the Zenith International Bank, whose manager had boasted about the bank’s profits after taxes in a newspaper Kane had stumbled upon and read by accident. In his own view, before the profits were distributed to shareholders, he had to take his own.

He quickly gathered four amateurs who’d been released with him the last time he’d been to jail. The car they drove had just been snatched. They emerged from it dressed in plain white kaftans concealing machine guns tucked under their armpits. Outside their garments, each carried a Koran that helped hold their guns firmly. Their left hands were busy counting rosary beads while badly wrapped turbans sat on their heads.

Kane, a deceptive character with irrational thinking, had ordered his cohorts to wear dark glasses like himself, and as usual, during robberies, he limped. Failing to open the vault, they resorted to searching the hostages. They soon made away with booty worth twenty-two thousand dollars. Kane’s lion share of eleven thousand had disappeared in a casino immediately after a gambling spree with a former professor of criminology—a man who told everyone to call him “the Dean,” but whose real name was Judas Duncan.

An enemy of the state as a result of the unjust treatment he’d suffered, Judas believed he was Kane’s father. He’d chosen that day to divulge his identity known to only two men—his badge boys Black Man Kazeem and Superintendent Kelvin Lucas.

Throughout Judas Duncan’s stay in prison and since he got out two years back, Superintendent Lucas and Black Man Kazeem had reported on everything Kane was doing. Most of the time they correctly predicted where Kane might be the next day. Now Judas had made up his mind to reveal himself and have a reunion. He chose a casino as the venue for their meeting.

Two days a week, for almost two years Judas had been going to the First Silk Casino with a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill and returning home with several thousand in genuine currency. Nobody ever beat him in gambling. Nobody he knew played with him anymore—just strangers. Kane fell into that category at that moment.

As he entered the casino with his loot from the last robbery, Kane’s eyes moved around, searching for a cool-looking face with the same spirit as his.

Before he found a seat, he strolled around, as he usually did in an unfamiliar environment, looking for emergency exits and escape routes in case he had to bolt. As he walked around, he noticed a man staring at him. He’d packed the money in his pocket properly. What could that fool be staring at? he wondered, still walking down the long hall. He brought out a small glittering knife from somewhere near his belt and put it in his hip pocket, making sure anyone thinking of robbing him saw that he had a weapon. That should make them think twice. As he settled in a chair near one of the exits, he fixed his eyes on the man who was now putting down his glass of sherry to steady his gaze at him.

What could this clown be looking at for so long? Kane was now sure that it wasn’t his fat pocket. Did he want to play some games? Or was he a cop who’d found out something?

As if to answer the questions, the man moved closer to Kane and whispered. “Hey boy, do you have an ambrosia?” He lowered his head. “Your spirit man could be set astir, Beano. Toss dice? This is not a place to present a woebegone picture in pretense. We are all hoi polloi.”

Kane turned sideways to see the face that was nearly touching his and admitted to himself that the man looked extraordinarily handsome, in good physical shape for a man of fifty-something. He hadn’t seen many old men who still possessed such youthful vitality. His was a dull, gentle, innocent, good look.

Kane replied in a louder whisper: “You’re sure you really want to play?”

The man nodded, smiled, and motioned to him to come along.

“I don’t like fomenting trouble,” Kane said.

“I don’t either.” The man slipped a hand inside his suit to find two ugly dice as they moved closer to the poker room.

“If you think you’re crazy and decide to pull a fast one on me, I’ll prove I’m crazier.”

The man was not dissuaded by Kane’s mannerism—he just nodded and walked in visible nervousness to a safe corner.

Trailing behind, Kane noticed a girl gesturing to him to go back. No one had made a computer smart enough to defeat the Dean.

He got the girl’s message, but who was she to give him a piece of advice? His mother had taught him to use his discretion all the time. Nobody witnessed their bout. They sat opposite each other with hunched backs, giving a hundred percent concentration to the dice. The Dean brought out his $100; Kane place his on top of it and it began.

In a short while it was all over. Kane’s money was gone.

While the Dean was busy hiding his profit in his inner pants, Kane, for the first time, was thinking that he’d seen the old fool who’d just defeated him before. Maybe he’s someone I robbed once, he thought. No, he’d seen a younger carbon-copy of him somewhere. But where and when? Then Kane realized he’d been a boy of about seven or so when he’d seen the fool. Yes, he was right.

Across the table, calculating how gradually he would reveal his identity, Judas alerted himself to the fact that he was in the wrong place with so much money. The casino was filled with thugs, retiring criminals, robbers, aspiring terrorists, unemployed youthful-looking weight lifters, and gentlemen who could all pass for bouncers—all killing time or waiting for someone or something to happen that they could get involved in.

Judas sensed danger, and in a sudden flash of memory he remembered a bad dream he had that morning, in which he was stoned to death. Those were the kinds of dreams he had. If he was not stoned, he made love to big cats or some strange animals, waking up to find his bed soiled with his own sperm. Other times, he was tried in law courts presided over by animals—especially dogs. He had terrible dreams.

Without wasting more time, he stood up impetuously and without a word to his defeated opponent walked to the exit. Standing on the threshold of one of the doors, he flashed a look at Kane, locking eyes with him. He knew there would be a chase, a game he wanted for fun. “This is a red-letter day to exchange long-kept amaranths,” he murmured as he disappeared among the people in the dimly lit atmosphere outside. As he leaned against a car away from the dispersed night crawlers, waiting for Kane to come out, he told himself, “I am the specter.”

Inside, Kane sat still on the bench where he’d been beaten. He fixed his eyes on the floor, as if it had been the cause of his downfall. Tightening his fists, he raised his head to look around. The girl who’d warned him about the Dean was now hovering around him.

Was it a setup? Damn, how could it be? Their eyes met and she produced an affectionate, sexy look, which was not attractive to Kane. He stared at her tight little butt as she walked away.

A peal of laughter roared behind him. He gathered himself and peered left and right. They surely wouldn’t laugh at him. He got angrier, again looked at the girl who was now negotiating with a customer, and felt he would have killed her with his bare hands if she was alone. They were all whores.

He stood up, dusted off his faded jeans, put on his dark glasses, and with quick step headed for the door. He took a cursory glance at the three directions the old fool could have taken. Then he spotted him beside an old Pontiac, motioning to him with a fingertip.

“Just come here, Schoolboy,” Judas called laconically.

With his hands tucked in his pockets, Kane walked slowly to him. When he got what must have been too close for comfort, he was told to hold it.

“This is a séance. You are not here by fortune. Skeleton keys will change hands now, so we’ll see what’s been happening. I feel it’s necessary because the hair-raising adenoid harms and it’s causing an unbearable choke. It makes essentialities stand at gross variances with realities. They should be transmogrified. That was one. Second. Under my able tutorship, you’re going to imbibe the logic of granite throwing into the state’s glass house and at the scum of our earth, mine and yours.”

Not interested in anything the old fool was saying, Kane whispered in a wicked tone, “Where’s my money? I told you I don’t want trouble; don’t make me give it to you.”

Judas, who had a knack for reading facial expressions, jumped down from the car and stood opposite Kane. “Listen to me, wounded Schoolboy. I know you are only trying to form a pus, right? From . . .” He changed his mind—he didn’t have to go too fast. “I can stem all deficiencies parading unmolested in your hazy, maladroit, happy-go-lucky fringing life.” He paused to give an unhealthy smile, pounding his own palm. “You want to know how, Schoolboy?”

Strange. What was he to know? “Know what?” Kane demanded. “Don’t want to know anything, just gimme my money.”

“I can make you a motherfuckin’ millionaire in, eh . . . months, six at most.”

As blood ran through his veins two or three times faster, Kane assessed the five-foot-six figure in front of him, from the hair of his head to the soles of his weather-beaten Italian shoes, thinking that anyone who could make another a millionaire should be one himself. But this fool didn’t look like one. He looked like a super hustler trying to make ends meet without much success. Anyway, Kane reasoned, sometimes he might not know who was rich because some folks could pretend not to be. Intuition told him to play along. He broke the silence. “You have to convince me how it can happen—otherwise I’m going to have my money, peacefully or forcefully.” His voice became shrill and serious. “I don’t give a ditch how old you are. Don’t ever in your remaining life call me a schoolboy. Now, tell me how. I’m a very impatient person with a bad temper.”

“You don’t even possess a trait of bonhomie in your gut. I wasn’t lighting an alteration. We are treading the same route. I only want to lead you to a blue ribbon and place you under the aegis of the Dean.” He formed a smile. “Little Schoolboy, now tell me a little about yourself.”

Kane cautioned himself to be careful in his chat, because this clown could be a cop and cops really can arrange anything. “By the way, who are you?”

“If you are not ready to be initiated, I’d be on my fringing way, then.” Judas turned to go but didn’t move an inch.

“Well, my name is Kane . . . er . . .” He remembered his best friend, Jerry Smith. “Yep, I’m Kane Smith, computer engineer, from Clackamas Estate. I’m preparing to go to college after next summer.”

“Just going to college in your old age? Are you sure your scion’s name is Smith?”

“Damn it, what a fuckin’ question. You think my name is Malcolm X Jr.?” Kane frowned. “Now tell me how am going to make my millions, or else I’ll twist your arms and have my money back.”

That was, in fact, the best environment to beat and rob without any interference. He quickly descended on the left arm and was about to twist it, first gently, when Judas cried and jumped away.

“Chill, you crazy son of a motherfuckin’ bitch. Now come with me and show characters worthy of hailing.” Judas led him to the adjoining street, down Walter Avenue, along the 24th Street gift shops that overlooked the New European Quarters, through Camron, and finally to the St. Philemon. “There is a cabal waiting.”

It was past 11 p.m. and the entire area was so silent that after some few minutes’ walk, the noise of rock music from the casino could still be heard faintly, though the distant voices of those therein had long faded.

Walking with long strides, Judas, at intervals, craned his neck sideways to see how the other was faring. At a certain junction, he leaned on an oak tree to have a good squint at a lone bungalow under the shade of another stand of trees a few kilometers away. That was his house. One would have to travel a great distance before another building was sighted. He was used to checking his house from afar, to be sure there was no police officer disguised as a town planner loitering with measuring equipment. He lowered his head and screwed his eyes more carefully, to Kane’s amazement.

After spending some considerable time for that purpose, he motioned to the other to follow him. In a strange language to Kane, he bugged him with theories for solving mathematical problems and occasionally paused to ask if he understood.

“Didn’t I tell you I’m about to go to college? How on earth do you want me to understand?”

“I think you should go back to the second grade.”

Kane imagined himself sitting at the back of a classroom with seven years olds. “Man, fuck you. Will you please answer these two questions, but briefly?”

Judas nodded.

“Tell me your name and the deal you have for me.”

“The terminology is a fecund sub-subject under the act of your own profession.”

“My profession? What do you mean? How am I going to make . . .”

“Don’t feign—you know what I mean,” Judas said. “I mean species of a kind of struggle Urugeria’s law doesn’t tolerate.” On an open palm, he gestured with four fingers in pursuit of the thumb. “I have two loyal phalanxes who carry my badge. You don’t need one because you have my blood.”

In bewilderment, Kane shouted. “Blood? What the fuck do you mean?”

Judas opened the door to his apartment. “I have known you since you were an embryo. Follow me, Kane.”

How did this clown know my name? Kane asked himself.

***

Judas’s sitting room, ablaze with light, was luxuriously furnished, though not well arranged. The overlapping white curtains, thought to be a window blind, were already turning brown. Some kitchen paraphernalia dishonorably stationed there were also not receiving attention. Among them were a clothes hanger and a colored basket containing cooking utensils placed at an angle on the far right just beside a little cupboard displaying his shoes. There was a newly polished shelf filled with assorted wines. Posted boldly on the shelf was a penciled placard reading, “This is my bar.”

Judas could be found in the house anytime of the day sleeping, smoking, or buried in his laboratory printing money, so he had enough time for unnecessary interior designs and placards.

Kane, who was going through the collection of video cassettes strewn on the floor to see if there was porn, quickly threw a look at his back and saw his host mixing wine into two cups, covering them cautiously, as if he were putting poison in one of them.

Smiling deceitfully as he turned, revealing just two front teeth, Judas stretched a hand with a cup. “Have your drink.” Did he see his august guest hiding a cassette in his jacket? Judas was not aware of that. He watched Kane sit on a floral patterned couch pretending he didn’t see the cup extended to him. Judas sat opposite him to study his facial tics and nervous mannerisms. He extended the left hand with a cup again. “It is not a plonk. I don’t drink cheap wine.”

“Thanks, I’m okay.” He didn’t think he was going to poison him. He leaned forward slightly, clasped his hands and stared at his host in anticipation of whatever he had to say.

“I don’t want to be too discursive. I want you to swallow everything hook, line and sinker. Listen, Mr. Kane.” Judas began a story.

After speaking for over ten minutes, mentioning names and places, and consolidating premises that were consistent with conclusions, he said, “You are not moved. Do you call that a shaggy dog tale? Did it sound like a non sequitur in your fuzzy judgement?”

Kane remained motionless. An intelligent gambler he had met by chance few minutes ago was trying to lure him with million dollars, and then claimed he was his damn father. Was he a fool to accept such nonsense? “You are not serious.”

“You didn’t even utter a cry of surprise to my resplendent revelation. Those cats have bought your emotions.”

“If you think I’m going to jump up, cry, and hug you in jubilation, then I’m sorry, you’re wrong.”

“Mind your manner of language to me. I don’t expect such an unsavory catechism from a helpless and frustrated illiterate like you. Besides, you don’t have the striking attribute to rave. I am twenty-nine years older than you are because I know you are twenty-four next month. Wasn’t your stubborn ass born on the sixteenth? A nitwit needs not to have the sixth sense to see the bloody gulf. Anyway . . .” Judas’s voice was mollified and rather superior. He was never angry. “I will not enter into another verse of academic diatribe on that case with you.” When he saw Kane staring into space, evidently lost in thought, he moved to his bar to fetch another cup of wine after having already downed two.

Kane took a long look at the dirty curtains and realized there was no window behind it. He suspected there was something behind it though. Regular contact with dirty and sweaty hands must have caused its change of color.

Feeling he had not achieved his purpose, Judas sat down again to recount further the story of his life. He was born into what he often referred to as “colorful poverty.” At a tender age he’d nurtured an ambition to have a Ph.D. in physics before twenty-five. That dream had however been hindered by inadequate funds. He’d eventually ended up studying Sociology, Criminology, and Criminal Justice.

All along, to live fulfilled, he tutored himself in physics and chemistry, not lagging behind in seminars and conferences scientists attended, but not without the assistance of his childhood girlfriend, Clara, who later became his wife.

“She was ingenuous but exceedingly ingenious. She was my sole plantation. I still don’t know why a cretinous defoliant could have uprooted her. It was so merciless, a tragedy to me of unqualified proportion. Before we got married, my Clara lived with her uncle that had the temperament of a Levite, who added promiscuity shamelessly.”

One night, after refusing him a request Judas did not want to talk about, Clara was driven out in the night. “I don’t know why people always send the helpless out at night when it’s raining. She came that night with all her bags to squat with me in the school hostel. She was soaked to the pants. It was so petrifying and shocking. Seeing her in that condition that night, I felt like I’d just stumbled on a faulty electrical appliance with a wet and naked body.” He hurriedly rubbed his wet eyes and waited a little before continuing. “She had nowhere to go. I had no place to put her either. Our source of livelihood, her uncle, had ceased to help. I was financially paralyzed. Months later, we were married. She was seventeen. I was not ready for this express eventuality. It was tough. We managed to live in my hostel, a boys’ hostel we shared with four lustful men. Imagine, a married couple. Very sardonic and untoward.”

Kane was listening attentively, believing every word. His mother had told him the same story. He remained very attentive, eyes and ears itching with dramatic anticipation.

“Clara was so supportive. Nobody needed to tell us to get a job. The slender proceeds from her work were joined with the little I received from a fuckin’ factory to pay the immoderate school fees. I was at my wits’ end. Everything seemed a lost cause, but your mum insisted I must graduate.”

Kane interrupted for the first time. “Where did you really get your name from? And didn’t you have some parents?”

“I was never given anything as much as a welcome. The colors of poverty were brighter at home. Many heads in my family wanted my shoulders to rest on.” Twice, he swallowed saliva before going further. “My Clara was a rare specimen of humanity. She gave me all that she earned. She had no clothes, no shoes, nothing. I nearly chickened out of school, but for her. She was a facile princile of her kind of breed. I don’t know why you, an eyesore, a moronic jailbird, became the product of her white womb. When I was your age, I was already filing my third degree, after which . . .”

Kane cut in angrily. “I don’t give a ditch if you were already filing a diploma in fortune telling. What kept you away from me for almost two years after your jail term?”

Judas ignored the question, and without looking up, he continued.

He had managed to graduate from St. Agnes College, Hertford, and was lecturing criminology in the same school, leaving his wife and little Kane behind in Palm City.

Occasionally, mostly on weekends, he visited them, but regularly sent money and gifts. He had been on his job for some years when he was arrested in class one afternoon, hands and legs handcuffed.

“I was stigmatized in the eyes of the students, who molested the cops with babbles of abusive protests for partial conduct. I created an ugly scene because I was never told what my offense was.”

At first, he had thought it was a setup organized by a lady who had approached him earlier in that year to take up an espionage job. She’d promised that her spymasters would fix him in the post they wanted. It was a task he had categorically refused. The other probability for his arrest, he had considered, was that the school authority had been informed that he was selling secret badge numbers to students who wanted first grades.

“I was later told in prison that somebody had confessed that I was his boss. Who the hell was that somebody? The cops said it was one James Hart. Who the hell was James Hart? He was a notorious armed robber who had probably killed as many people as Garbbar. Where on earth was he? They said he had died in prison as soon as he had confessed.” Judas had then employed the services of three intelligent lawyers to whom all his life savings had gone in the course of defense.

“In court I was confronted with two over-loquacious parrots who gave execrable evidence that all conspired to present me with eighteen achromatic years holed in four sealed walls in Gashua. A sorry digression.” He swallowed hard, with red and wet eyes. “The third tragedy: the cops are hunting once more to rape me.”

“What for?”

“They will break any wall sheltering a Duncan to see if it’s Judas.”

“It seems you talk too much. Why are the police still searching for you after completing eighteen years?”

“There’s a serious typographic business going on right in this house.” Probably, to give himself time to think whether to go further or not, he lit a cigarette and held it between loose fingers. He did not look up for a long time.

Kane asked calmly, “So?” He should behave mature. His father seemed to be taking him for a kid. “You print, right? Then what happened?” Of course he knew it wasn’t textbooks.

“The cops know.”

“How?” Kane asked with a grimace. “Be brief, please.”

“One amorphous adder—a nark, you know—was creeping at an alternating current to sleep on my bed.” He stood up abruptly and bent to demonstrate somebody trying secretly to do something harmful. “We suspected, of course. We don’t sleep with our two eyes closed.”

After a long pause, Kane said languidly, “Why can’t you answer a simple question? Why are you still a wanted man.”

“When I was released in Peace Area, I started printing my own copy of the Urugeria’s currency. One of my last two badge boys, BM Kazeem, perceived that a female corgi, in the cop’s uniform, was tip-toeing disguisedly behind him lengthwise for a lead, and he was sure they had known my roof. So to evade another publicity, I closed shop there, came here to resume duty.”

“Why didn’t you get in touch with me for such a long time?”

“Invincibly, I was taking good care of you through my men.” Fixing his eyes on his son, Judas gathered himself together and paced about for a minute. “Let me show you something.” He dropped the cup he had been drinking from on a small table in front of his bar, and resting on it as if posing for a photograph, he pointed with his mouth. “Draw that thing.” The dirty curtains he pointed to hung on a ten-foot spring stretching from one edge of the wall to the other, seeming like a demarcation in the west. It actually concealed a door, three feet tall, that led into what Kane would soon regard as a mini IRA armory. The door could hardly be detected. It was parallel with the wall and they had the same blue color. Entrance into it could only be gained by crawling or stooping. The strenuous task of reconstructing the building to suit the criminal purpose had taken Judas and BM Kazeem two months, a task that would take professionals four hours.

Remaining calm, Kane concealed a smile and thought he succeeded in hiding his anxiety. Slowly, he drew the curtains sideways and crawled inside. Judas followed suit, and in that posture, they looked like two adults playing silly and ridiculous children’s’ games. The room was twenty-four feet long, fourteen feet wide, and had some degree of heat. A strong smell of paint filled everywhere, even though the wall was painted long ago. The paint itself was self-made. As his son continued to wonder at the new findings, Judas dusted his pants and began to crawl again to a loaded table under which there was a switch. The inconvenience in the room was supported by a sudden burst of noisy hum from an old air-conditioner.

Kane was secure in his confidence that with all he was seeing, with a careful plan, he could actually retire from crime next month. His heart raced with intense excitement. No longer concealing his smiles now, admiringly he watched Judas switch on buttons or sockets one after the other.

He ran his eyes over everything in the room: different designs of guns, a few bombs, grenade launchers, magazines, and some components meant for making letter bombs. These materials were all lumped in one corner on the far right. Some space away from them were marked woods, pipes, nails, hammers, and some metals of different shapes.

Kane returned his gaze to his left-hand side and saw a mini-scientific laboratory emitting the combined odor of rotten eggs, paint, and petrol. On a small table placed before a long stool were acids of different colors, old and torn physics and chemistry textbooks, and some roundish substances bubbling in test tubes. Still behind that table was a large metal box filled with black papers the size and shape of the country’s dollars. Another box, a smaller one containing what only a few counterfeits detectors would doubt were real hundred dollar bills, was left open to dry. They were newly washed papers.

Kane squinted. Was he seeing rightly? He realized he needed to start wearing sharp glasses lest the eyes should fail him when he had to see something crucial in a flash. A large quantity of powdered soap was on top of an unnamed medieval machine that had the design of a printing machine. It leaned to the side on a pile of sack beneath it like a sinking house. He ignored the other ugly looking materials scattered around.

There were six bags on the uncarpeted floor. One of them contained some thousand dollars in one-dollar denominations, which would soon become one hundred dollars each after taking them through a conversion process. Judas did such good work on these bills that the figures and images he tampered with would receive passing marks from secret service confiscators who pried with naked eyes. The smooth line patterns, micro printing, and other delicate marks that the mint authorities systematically plotted to make the bills uncompromising to counterfeiting were left untouched.

Judas was among the counterfeiters and scam artists scattered all over the country who made over two million dollars monthly from that business. He dominated the Hertford-Clackamas-Caston areas of the spurious scheme.

Some of the other bags had in them low value currencies illegally imported from Afghanistan and Ecuador. He and BM Kazeem would have sleepless nights bleaching the bills, and then printing the dollar image over them, though the security strip was already in them.

An XC-30 note detector perched in a corner.

“This is my idea of retaliation against the Urugerian state’s eighteen years of uneven-handed justice. I think there is fair play now.”

Kane was not interested in anything more. He was deeply engrossed in how to locate his friend, Jerry Smith. He crouched to examine the texture of the printed paper. “This must be first grade.”

“Don’t touch anything or else you’ll provoke me to high dudgeon.”

Kane was not attentive. How could he find Jerry Smith? He folded his arms, stared absently at the short exit, and noticed there was a bill posted on the wall reading, “My laboratory.” He quickly removed his eyes from it lest it should interrupt his thought.

Stuffing some dry bills into his pocket, and hiding the ones he’d won in the game with Kane, Judas said seriously, “Listen, Kane, besides my loyal phalanxes, Kelvin and BM Kazeem, I can’t trust anyone more than you. My blood flows in you. I want you to trim your sails, hold your tongue, and face the world. Create a Janus face. Let me vouch for your changed character. You’ll be blowing the gaff if you keep exhibiting your non compos mentis attitudes. It would be mysterious. I know you’re not smart because if you were, you should have been noticing a pitch-black man carrying a well combed afro, sitting next to your table in restaurants and clubs all this while. You are not intelligent, and you can’t protest it. I am prepared to take the risk, though. I want you to keep the laws of silence. I have been a felon for years, and can’t digest the reality of being caught by anxious narks and be shown on ABC or channel five at prime time, spilling some damn beans, telling a myriad of journalists how I started, simply because I was playing a good father to a prodigal son. Do you get the color?” He paused to take a breath. “The fuckin’ color is black. Be dumb and be careful. Voila.” He opened the little door and crawled out. “Let me show you your room.”

Kane was shown a dusty room furnished with a long iron bedstead and two fragile chairs placed opposite a reading table. He shut the door behind himself, spread the window blind, drew a chair to the center, and extinguished the light. He wore his dark glasses and thought, Where on earth is Jerry Smith?