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
