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?
Chapter 2
Whenever a public property was missing in the neighborhood, folks suspected the gentle-looking Jerry Smith. Whenever a neighbor came home from office and found his wardrobe broken and jewelry stolen, he walked up to Jerry and begged him or ordered him to return it. If Jerry swore he didn’t take it, it was certain someone would soon bring it to him to help sell it.
From the extreme end of the street, an old couple had come to Jerry’s house to ask if he knew the whereabouts of their wayward teenage daughter who hadn’t come home the previous night.
The twenty-four years old, six-foot-two, slim and handsome Jerry was the dream of every young girl in his neighborhood. Before terrible circumstances and society remolded his character, he was a law-abiding gentle soul who could have been in one of the noble professions.
A closer look at him would reveal a black dot below his left eye, which eventually added to his handsomeness. Temporarily, on his cheeks, he had a fading wound that could be mistaken for a tribal mark. Unfortunately, they were on both sides, looking very deliberate—the result of a horse whip or purposeful wickedness during gang torture.
He was now going through another round of torture, but this time, by the police.
On the day he was arrested, he wore a beautifully cut white shirt and a roughly knotted yellow silk tie under a light yellow suit, proving to neighbors that he wasn’t what they took him for. He was a good citizen like them.
Kane Duncan had been his best friend since they were both four. His aunt, with whom he lived, became a family friend to Kane’s mother because of the lads’ closeness. And when Clara Duncan was found dead, Kane had gone to live with Jerry’s family.
Throughout their lives, whenever either of them departed to a secret place for one reason or the other, his friend knew where to find him. For three months now, however, it had not been so. Kane had gone in search of his last business, and Jerry had gone in pursuit of a rich uncle.
As soon as he arrived home, the police were waiting for him.
He was waving and flashing his well-positioned set of white teeth to a young admirer when he was bundled off by men from the Caston police department. They only needed him to answer some questions about Kane. He was a victim, and Kane Duncan was also a victim. Judas Duncan was the target.
A police department on the Mainland knew that a man, Judas Duncan, who had a son in Clackamas Estate, was into money printing. They knew he had just served a sentence and was going to see his son. He had only escaped by thin luck before they could nab him.
After some days of searching for Judas or Kane without success, the police department to which the case had now been transferred settled for seeking Jerry’s help. This was made possible by information from his neighbors. “If you are looking for Kane, you might as well ask for Jerry,” the sixth person had confirmed after seeing the detective’s ID card.
Soon Jerry was sitting on a chair in a dark room under a bulb, crying but pretending exhaustion. For over an hour he had been subjected to questioning and inhuman treatment. To the sadistic low-ranking officer conducting it, the interrogation process seemed to be flagging. The elderly officer knew that he was not good at interviewing suspects, but any tyrant could rely on him for extracting information from dissidents through torture. He had made many criminals talk, but Jerry wasn’t one of them.
For the fifteenth time, he demanded. “Where is Judas Duncan?”
“Judas Iscariot, my ass.” Jerry said low, under stress, and in an instant received another high-grade cop slap. Again he muttered a provocative word and received yet another slap.
The officer put his hands on the table, bending. “All right . . . I’m, er . . . sorry—I didn’t mean to . . .”
“Sorry for your dick.” That earned him a heavy slap on the throat. “Your bitchy wife will beg me on a Sunday morning to lick my crazy motherfuckin’ balls—bet on it.”
The officer moved impetuously, giving Jerry the impression of a sudden attack. Quickly, the suspect tossed his head backward an inch in an effort to escape the blow.
“Even if you are the commander-in-chief, you can’t threaten me. I am not an uneducated civilian. I know something about the UN charter on my rights.” His voice was hardly audible. “And you can’t force me to answer what shit I don’t know anything about.” He felt some pain in his jaw. He watched his assailant move to the window, and waited silently. He was looking outside and speaking to himself as if he was asking someone hiding there what the next question should be.
Dusk was rapidly descending.
Trying to look as if he were really experienced at scenes like this one, the interrogator returned to his seat and said, “Now let’s forget about Judas Duncan. I know that Kane Duncan is your friend. You told me this yourself, right?”
“Yes, I can’t deny my friendship with Kane, but I have not seen him for a long time. That Judas you mentioned, I don’t know.”
“Tell me anything about Kane.”
Twisting his mouth, Jerry wiped his tears, assuming that his ordeal was gradually coming to an end. That silly question should give him some edge over the black shirt as he normally called them. “This game is not worth the crazy candle. It is a character assassination exercise. Everything my neighbors told you was constructed under biased minds. I don’t know no Judas or Kane. Believe me, If I knew them, I wouldn’t have been enduring these crazy motherfuckin’ beatings.” He soon realized that he was contradicting himself. He didn’t care, knowing that the black shirt was not mentally organized. He stuck to the newer ground. “I’m serious. What am I going to gain by covering for a criminal? I know neither of them.”
The officer stood still, trying not to believe him. When he came to his senses, he queried, “Which Kane did you tell me you knew then?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me very well. I didn’t say so.”
“My Jesus! Just now! You are a lying bastard.”
“Two years ago, I stopped seeing the only Kane I know when I heard he was blackmailing me, telling my girlfriends I had gonorrhea. Later on, he was telling everyone I was a hermaphrodite.”
The officer was scared out of his mind. He opened his mouth and stared, wondering if Jerry truly had two sexual organs. Looking at the interviewee’s trousers, he sipped his coffee and wiped the corners of his mouth delicately with the back of his hand.
Briskly, the door flung open and Superintendent Kelvin Lucas strode in gallantly, his face drawn and pinched.
An upsurge of fear assailed Jerry. He fastened his eyes on the intruding officer’s hands to see if he had brought in some weapons of
