Chief  Judge of the Supreme Court, Chukudi Amadiora, was a  brilliant student in his days. He drank with a vengeance, staggered through Law School and promptly arrived at The Bar in quite a state, his ears wet with beer. Actually, he was called to The Bar by a retired army General, who had set up a beer-bar as a political watering-hole. General Sulaimon Babayaro  foresaw huge profit in him. Babiavelli -  as the General was fondly hailed at The Bar for his ruthless machiavellian politics, missed the brute excesses of soldier-power, the glory of the green-cloth, the envy and naked hatred in the eyes of those on whom he necessarily wrecked his power. General Babayaro hoped to shoot himself back into the seat of a political influence -receding now like the hair on his head - through this ‘mop’ of a lawyer.

Amadiora did not however see himself as a mop. He had always suspected this condescending opinion of himself in the General’s superior drinking airs, which sat on him arrogantly like the army-issue cap he could not bring himself to stop wearing - even in sleep. Presently Babiavelli pulled at the flap of the cap with growing irritation, thrusting his face into a deeper shadow in the dimly lit room, shaking an unusually large head from side to side in disapproval. With each new bottle of beer, it seemed, the head got more water-logged and expanded a bit.

“Why don’t you drink like a man, Chucks? You are ‘chewing’ your beer!“ And slapping open palms against his big beer-belly,  “ abi you tink sey na kolanut?“. Unconsciously the other men in the room reached for their beer bottles. As a rule no one drank out of a glass. It was taboo at The Bar. Sometimes Babiavelli broke this rule. But it went without comment from the others. “Drink like a man!“ Babiavelli ordered. What does he think I am - a recruit soldier to be bullied around - the imbecile! Amadiora said nothing.

How, he never ceased to wonder, could his very drinking stomach, notorious in the case-history of The Bar, for weighing down heavily upon both plaintiff and defendant alike, be so maliciously dragged across the floor alongside a sodden mop? It was true, according to the department of statistics, the army consumed more beer - especially in idle peace-time, than the entire population of the country during a forty-day long burial ceremony of his royal highness, who himself probably died of a most royal high. But that was not enough reason for the General to kick at the judicial tankard with both feet. Amadiora saw himself as an honest drinking man, who took in his bitters without any bitterness. But Babiavelli’s whole bearing seemed to shout ‘my beer-belly is bigger than yours’. To correct this slight upon the reputation of his learned friends across the country on his own account and as a matter of honour to the judiciary, he picked up his bottle, raised it to his angry lips, drained the golden precious froths  without effort and gave a supreme hiccup.

A hush fell on the room. All background conversation ceased. The music from a hi-fi standing by The Bar became unusually loud. They had been at it the whole night and nobody expected such a singly deft-handed execution like this. Especially not when  each member of The Bar knew he had to perform the ‘salute’ at the end of the night anyway and, surreptitiously reserved such a feat for the exit like any good soldier.

“oh, my bottle!“, Babiavelli exclaimed. Very goot, goo’. Babiavelli was tipsy already Amadiora noted from the unclear words. But he had not yet gone near the dangerous edge. Then he demurred and revealed the philosopher in himself, the ghosts of  Thomas Hobbes and of Ogun in his drunk-destroyer aspect sitting on his left and right shoulders respectively.

They were assembled in that section of his home on the fifth floor, which Babiavelli liked to refer to as the ‘reception area’ of a fifty-room mansion. The reception area was a home within a home in itself, with a cluster of guest-rooms forming a half-circle on each side of a main sitting room, around which five men were now seated. Each guest-room was installed with all manner of modern convenience, from  water-beds to huge high-definition television screens on the walls, where the guest could enjoy pornographic films whenever it suited him.

Babiavelli loved the army colour green and the sitting-room was rugged in a muted green in agreement with leave-coloured walls. Couches in various shades of green were arranged on the perimeters of the floor to form a rectangle, with smaller rectangles - glass-topped  low tables of burnished silver for drinks - in front of them. At tangents to the seated men, in the usual dinning area, stood The Bar itself.  Here the floor was much higher, such that the huge structure of smoked transparent glass - shaped like a palm-wine keg - dwarfed the men in the room. The ceiling, wood-panelled and  high-arched as in a cathedral swung up away from them as if a giant’s hand had angrily flung it skywards, dropping the men in the room into a Lilliputian depression, which made of them insignificant little bundles of straw. The Bar rose up from a round base to balloon out and sheer inwards again, narrowing into its thin and long  upper stem. It terminated in a small rim topped out by a sculptured longing arm, with its glass fingers caressing the outer bulge of the rim, missing actually grasping the object. Inside the hollow of the arm a neon sign in calligraphic green spelled  out, ‘The Fountain of Wisdom’.  The whole thing was symbolic,  Babiavelli liked to explain whenever roused from the depths of his inebriation by any careless look in that direction.

 His voice usually trembled with emotion at such moments, the veins stood in his neck and his muscle-bound arms grabbed the arm rest of his seat as he expounded The Vapour Theory. “Power is a vapour“. It was the voice of an oracle and no one dared contradict it. “Just as the palm-wine keg preserves the essence of  burukutu from escaping, those who wield power must preserve it by  being worthy receptacles for this rage which takes hold of us like the virulence of  strong juju. You must be able to contain your drink without letting it go to your head“. Amadiora never failed to note that the drinks did climb up to the head. He would usually wait till late in the drinking session to corroborate this fact because at such points in time even Babiavelli’s speech would become slurred, his sentences and thoughts disconnected and truncated. Amadiora knew for example that a bee buzzed in his own head for days afterwards and his pronouncements at the court were never entirely his own, only a staccato response to the antics of the bees in his head. And suddenly throwing his head forward as if in telepathic response to Amadiora’s disagreement or as if aiming at an enemy position during the civil war, Babiavelli would continue, “and why do you think the brandy was named after Napoleon; drink, gentlemen!“

Inside the bar a young man of about twenty-five presided over the thin glass shelves, which held row upon row of makes of beer from every brewery in the country. A battleship of a refrigerator stood in a corner. It was always three-quarters filled with star-beer. This was Babiavelli’s favourite brand and by  tacit agreement, only he drank them. The bar-man could be seen bustling with empty activity behind his glass prison.

He had to overwhelm his powerful clientele with his efficiency. Jobs were hard to come by, degree or no degree. All his years at the university ended here. He did not mind. He was paid well. And sometimes Lady Macbeth - that was the General’s wife -  even threw him a coquettish smile whenever she came down late in the night to serve the men a round or two of pepper-soup or  passed by early in the day in those thin see-through house-wears. Little wonder. The General could not be much use to her after these heavy nightly binges. But he was careful. He pretended not to note.  From time to time he observed the men and gauged the mood in the air. But right now he could not decide how far gone they really were. He could never rely on the General. That one was as hard a drinker as the bottles in which the beer came. His prodigious belly attested to his prowess. Besides he could not see clearly through the gloom. Their faces were permanently in a shadow just as their lives - for him - were permanently in a shadow. He knew nothing about them except their names, their iron public profiles, and the fact that a dangerous plot was been hatched here.

The room was lit only by a faint low-wattage lamp standing in a corner and by the neon glow from the bar, such that the figures reclining on the couches appeared like human ghouls just arisen from the floor in a mist of colours. Somewhere in the background, an air-conditioner hummed. The air was one of hushed conspiracy, with Babiavelli’s voice riding it lightly.

“Now, about this sorry business at the high court...“  Babiavelli paused. Amadiora smiled. Here he was on sure ground. He knew his law books too well, knew them so well he could read them upside-down when it suited his purposes. And this was what the General asked him to do from time to time.