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
