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 torture. He was not aware that Kelvin was staring at him studiously, wondering if he had revealed anything.
As the interrogating officer moved from his seat in concealed annoyance to shut the door that had been left intentionally open, Kelvin seized the opportunity to ask Jerry, with a gesture of mouth sign, if he had said anything about the Duncans.
Jerry found the indecorous gesticulation meaningful, but took it for mockery. He also twisted his mouth in reaction.
Has this chap revealed anything? Kelvin wondered. If he has, it would only be a matter of time before his own treachery against the police and the state was known. The exposition would not be a good piece of news.
Kelvin’s inquisitiveness was dispelled when Jerry reaffirmed to his interrogator, “I don’t know any Judas or Kane. I swear. Let me go my own way and mind my damn business.”
Confident that there was no leakage yet, Kelvin, leaning on another desk with folded arms, said furiously, “Look Marvin, how many times have I told you to leave this Judas-Kane thing alone? You are not the one to handle it. Why don’t you check out more important matters? This is your second week on this case and all you have to show for it is a young man sitting before you and crying his eyes out. Again, I will advise you to stop wasting your time acting like you’re investigating Kim Philby. Later on, we might have some fresh and better evidence against the Dean . . . I mean Judas . . . er, whatever. Then we would not have to depend on an indefinite piece of information passed through the phone, ordering you to stop your more taxing jobs and start chasing an invisible Judas. The case was not even properly filed.”
Marvin only frowned, mumbling unintelligible protests. He gave a careless salute by merely flinging his right hand past his nose like he was swatting off flies, then excused himself.
Watching him as he went out, Kelvin thought of what he could do to the stubborn elderly Marvin. He could open his gate of sudden retirement, or simply get him some long weeks of leave. Kelvin Lucas’s connection in the State’s police was far and wide.
Since his university days, he had been loyal to Judas Duncan. Whenever he had problems with the school authorities, he always had the Dean’s brotherly support. Every day after school, he always went to Judas’s house for free, extra lectures in such phenomena as economic crime, corruption, fraud, assassination, drugs and narcotics abuses, and trafficking. But in practical, he was a dull student theoretically. And despite all odds, his godfather, the Dean had made sure he passed through with first-class honors.
Kelvin had joined the police out of pressure from parents who wanted a uniformed man in the family, thereby tarnishing his dream of becoming a professional thief who was going to break the record of the most dangerous robber in history. While Adolf Hitler was his hero, Judas, the Dean, was his mentor.
He had concocted a very dangerous plan to get Judas out of prison in the third year, but it was abandoned because the Dean disliked the method of execution. And then he had promised that one day he would unravel the mystery behind Clara’s death and also the brain behind his boss’s eighteen-year imprisonment.
Judas had told him as he held the iron bars of the prison, “I know you would, my dear Kelvin, and when the masquerades are uncovered, nobody would be able to circumvent my own intransigent type of requital.”
At forty-two, with three legal wives and eleven children, Kelvin still believed that his dream of becoming what he originally wanted to be was not a lost one. He would soon check out of the police and face the