Crossbones

27

MALIK IS IN THE KITCHEN OF THE MAIN HOUSE, PREPARING BREAKFAST. He has been up almost all night — he couldn’t bring himself to sleep after his exchange with Jeebleh. He won’t consider calling off the interview with Fidno and Isha. It would be a cowardly thing to do, especially as he wishes to live up to the memory of those killed while performing their jobs — journalists, the Dajaals, and the large number of innocent civilians terrorized into submission by the barbarism of Ethiopians, Shabaab, and half a dozen other fifth columnists. He will do as he has agreed: conduct this one interview and then leave on the flight to Nairobi on the morrow.

The breakfast comprises greens, cheese, toast, peeled and sliced oranges, and leftovers from the night before, including lentils. Cambara is partial to caffelatte in a mug; Bile loves his with half a spoon of sugar; she likes her liver cooked rare; Bile likes his well done.

Cambara comes to the table in a tropical cotton dress and no bra, as if playing at Shabaab’s recent edict that Somali woman should not wear such American-inspired, un-Islamic breast contraptions. Does she know she makes Malik pine for the company of women, especially when, as they kiss each other on the cheek, she presses her full chest against him, too?

What a pleasant surprise that Bile joins them, his complexion healthier and his appetite robust. Malik observes how Bile and Cambara take pleasure in touching, whenever a pretext permits it. Bile asks Malik how he is doing, and insists on feeling the bump on his forehead, which has gone down enough to satisfy him.

Bile says, “Have you heard about the predator attack on a human target in the town of Dhuusa Marreeb at dawn?” He tells Malik about a report on the BBC Somali service, that a Tomahawk cruise missile launched from a U.S. submarine off the coast of Somalia has killed several innocent civilians in addition to their target, a killer and one of the desecrators of the Italian burial sites in Mogadiscio. “Now my fear is that the U.S. action may lead to further protraction of the war, with more foreign jihadis volunteering to join Shabaab.”

“Same old thing, dressed differently,” Malik says. “Attacks by America, which are meant to tame terrorists, embolden them.”

Cambara says, “You don’t sound bothered by it.”

He replies, “Not so much bothered as disturbed. As I said before, one must know what to expect from poorly thought-out attacks — by Ethiopians doing it at the behest of America or by America herself.”

Bile picks up a cherry tomato and eats it.

Cambara says, “I’d probably be stretching it if I say that by their very nature, suicide bombers are remote-controlled. For me, however, there is no difference between the imam remote-controlling the suicide bomber and the guy orchestrating the Tomahawk launch from the safety of his Colorado base. One could be having his coffee and joking with his pals, the other could be crouched on his rug, allegedly praying.”

Bile says, “It’s the mindless killing of noncombatant civilians that annoys me about distance killing of any sort.” Then he turns to Malik and asks, “Will you write about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Malik pretends not to hear the question, because he doesn’t see any point in answering, and Bile doesn’t press him.

Cambara asks what his plans are today.

“I have an appointment with two subjects whom I’ll be interviewing in a suite I’ve booked in a hotel for the day.”

“Who are you interviewing?” Bile asks.

And before he has answered the question, Cambara urges him to use the annex, reasoning that it is easier to monitor the movements of who is entering the compound and who is exiting. “With a hotel, it is always impossible to keep track of people’s goings and comings.”

When he insists on keeping the arrangements as he has made them, however, neither puts any pressure on him to reconsider.

Eating his breakfast, Malik cannot help but contrast their reaction to Jeebleh’s, who said that interviewing these “criminals” was a gamble “not worth a candle.” Probably because he hasn’t named his interviewees or mentioned how they make their living — he doesn’t actually know what Il-Qayaxan does for a living beyond being an associate of Fidno. He attributes Bile’s understanding to his own obstinate loyalty to Somalia by staying on, despite all the drawbacks.

Once again, Qasiir takes Malik to his appointment. As they enter the hotel grounds, his eyes fall on BigBeard, still clean-shaven and dressed in a suit, sitting in a car with the window down and speaking on his mobile. Two unknown men sit in the car with him. Malik stops dead in his tracks, exchanges a knowing look with Qasiir, and then resumes walking into the hotel foyer. Before he gains the reception, Qasiir says, “Maybe we should consider canceling the appointment.”

“Have you the requisite security in place?”

“Of course.”

“Can they cope with any eventuality?”

“I can get backup, if you like.”

“Do that, and let the arrangements stay.”

Before he takes another step in the direction of the reception, which is farther off than he has pictured, Malik remembers Hilowleh telling him that he was lucky to be alive. Turning, he receives comfort from knowing that Qasiir is near. “Who are the two men in the car with him?”

Qasiir replies, “One of them is called Al-Xaqq.”

“What deadly business is he in?”

“Explosives.”

“And the other?”

“Dableh, a former colonel in the National Army,” Qasiir says. “All three are suspected of being active members of Shabaab.”

Malik finds it astonishing that three men known to be leading the insurgency can be sitting in a car in the parking lot of a four-star hotel, and the intelligence of the so-called Transitional Federal Government hasn’t the wherewithal to apprehend them, let alone take them into detention.

“I wonder what brings all three together.”

Qasiir says, “Maybe you.”

“Are you trying to scare me into canceling the appointment?” Malik says.

“I want to make sure I am able to save you.”

“They don’t scare me. I’ve seen worse.”

“You remind me of Grandpa — and he is dead.”

Malik’s insides are home to butterflies, thousands of them turning his guts into a battle zone. He is perspiring heavily as well, and continuously wipes his forehead to no avail. How sweet of Qasiir to look away, pretending not to notice.

“Maybe they are here for some other business, and not because of you,” Qasiir says. “Let’s hope that is the case.”

“I doubt that I am that important,” Malik says.

“Your security is in place anyhow.”

“That’ll provide me with needed comfort.”

Qasiir adds. “And I’ll be here, too.”

“Brilliant,” Malik says.

While Malik is at the reception filling in the forms and supplying the receptionist with his credit-card details, Qasiir sees two of his men in the foyer. Then he goes ahead of Malik, taking the elevator to the fourth floor, and also makes sure that the guard detail he hired are in their places. Malik crosses paths with Qasiir as he is going up, and says, “I’ll call when I am done.”

The suite has two rooms separated by a sitting place, in all probability meant for qaat chewers, as evidenced by the carpets and the cushions pushed against the wall. The entrance is through the middle door. It is expensively furnished, the walls embellished with photographs of Mecca and with brief Koranic verses, framed. The arrangement included plenty of Coca-Cola and bottled juices and bundles of qaat sufficient for three, although Malik has no intention of taking part in the chewing of the stuff, and packets of cigarettes. The air conditioner is blasting.

Il-Qayaxan, also known as Isha, is the first to arrive, right on time. He knocks on the lounge door so gently it takes Malik a long time to hear the tapping under the roar of the air conditioner. He lets him in. They shake hands, each speaks his name and mutters at the other, “My pleasure.” All the while, Malik’s heart is beating against his rib cage in panic, his vision fogged with fear. What a foolhardy man I’ve been, he tells himself, that I’ve allowed myself to be talked into this.

He points to where he has placed his recording devices and says to Isha, “Please take a seat.” He takes his time, the better to make sense of the man at whom he now smiles. “And go ahead and help yourself to a beverage and some qaat.”

Isha has a worry-hardened face and the muddled grin of a man awakening from a nightmare. One minute he strikes Malik as ill-humored, the next instant his expression suggests that of a guilty man. Malik’s conjecture is based on his nervous, shifty body language. He is also obnoxiously smelly, and he carries a black polyethylene bag.

Malik says, “Let’s begin,” and switches on the tape recorder, supplementing the recording by taking notes by hand, in the event of a malfunction or mishap.

Isha has hardly spoken his first two full sentences when they hear heavy shelling in the distance, and some small gunfire close by. The sounds of fighting erupt and Malik’s headache returns with a vengeance. The pain rips into him, as if his head were severed in two, as his recall revisits ancient, scabbed aches. He cannot bear it. Maybe Jeebleh was right, after all.

Malik lets the tape recorder run, registering the noise of the bombing as if for posterity. A couple of bombs fall nearby. In the pauses between the shelling and the falling of bombs, they hear a child bawling.

When the bombardments cease at last, Malik asks what business brought Isha to Mogadiscio in the first place. Isha explains that he worked as an accountant before emigrating to the United States as a refugee, in the early nineties, going first to Nashville and then moving to Minneapolis. When he couldn’t find a job matching his qualifications, he set up a travel agency, and when this began to do well, he expanded the business, taking on two Indians and a Chinese from Hong Kong as his partners. In 1996, the company moved into the business of quick moneymaking, specializing in laundering dirty money from the piracy ventures. They made immense profits, as much as 25 percent. At one point, they invested some of their own money, now laundered, into funding the piracy themselves.

However, just when they expected their profits to be quintupled, the money dried up. The banks in London where all the piracy funds ended up explained that payments would be staggered, so as to deflect attention from large amounts of money changing hands in the post-9/11 world. With the passage of time, though, Isha and his partners saw no money, only numbers chasing figures. He and his Asian partners visited London to confront the bank official charged with receiving the money and distributing it among its rightful recipients, and he showed them an affidavit and a power of attorney allegedly signed by the pirates in Xarardheere, authorizing a man called Ma-Gabadeh to collect the funds on their behalf. In the attached handwritten note, the pirates swore they would kill several hostages, two of them British, unless the banks duly paid the funds into Ma-Gabadeh’s accounts in Abu Dhabi. Isha explains, “It is a case of thieves situated in different dens located in different continents swindling small thieves, whose local middlemen and contacts have been bought.”

Dispatched to Mogadiscio, Isha met Ma-Gabadeh with a group of clan elders, who persuaded him to pay off at least Isha to avoid their family clans declaring war on each other.

“And you accepted this deal, in which the Asians who invested in the adventure just as much as you did would get gypped?” Malik asks.

“I was buying time, since Ma-Gabadeh said in my presence to the elders of my clan and his that he needed time to pay up,” Isha claims. “This was the case of a bird in hand. You take what you can get.”

“Then what happened?”

“The Ethiopians invaded! And Ma-Gabadeh fled.”

“Where to?”

“Where else? Eritrea.”

“And where does that take us?”

“I am now penniless and stuck in Somalia.”

“What if you try to leave?”

“I risk ending up in detention in the United States.”

“What have you told your Asian partners?”

“They believe I’ve received my share and absconded. I can understand why they are baying for my blood. They are threatening to report me to the U.S. authorities, claiming they had no knowledge of any of this.”

No wonder he looks angry and at the same time guilty.

When Fidno knocks on the door, Malik lets him into the suite, and he and Isha hug and pat each other on the back. Malik tries to take a quick reading of Fidno’s face. He looks like a character out of a crime novel: deviously handsome in a Humphrey Bogart way, with a smile so captivating you have to fight to get your heart back; eyes alive with promise — a promise that will leave you cursing the day you met him. But he can’t be all bad, he imagines Ahl saying. After all, he has helped to reunite him with Taxliil.

Fidno is carrying a white cotton bag with “The Body Shop” written on it in black. Begging Malik’s pardon, Fidno wants to get one thing out of the way: he hands over the cash in the bag to Isha, glad to have the presence of a witness. To this end, Fidno counts out several thousand U.S. dollars and pushes the rest of what Malik presumes to be Isha’s share toward him. Isha counts the cash, putting it in the black polyethylene bag that he came in with; he has the gall to ask Malik if he is interested in having some of it. Offended, Malik declines.

Fidno picks up a bundle of qaat and starts to chew in silence, until his cheeks are filled with a wad of leaves the size of a lemon. His eyes are red, bulging with increased alertness. Malik smiles a makeshift grin as catharsis runs through every inch of his tense body. His head hurts, and his groin, too. He concentrates on his physical pain to the exclusion of all else, blocking out past, present, and future, and residing in a fenced-off territory of bodily agony. Unable to shut out the recent past, he sighs, sweating richly, and then breathes as unevenly as a man who has climbed a high mountain very fast without preparation. He wipes oily perspiration from his forehead, using the wet cloth that had held Fidno’s bundle of qaat.

“I hear you were hurt yesterday,” Fidno says. “Though not badly hurt, from what I can see.”

Malik is in some discomfort. He does not wish to talk about how badly hurt he is — God knows he knows enough about Fidno’s past not to want his medical services! And Fidno affects a harried mood, like a heckled man; he wants to get on with it, to “talk myself silly and at length.”

And as he speaks, Malik is less certain why he thinks that Fidno is a dangerous man. Fidno repeats the story he has already told Ahl, with palpable insistence that no one has paid the ransom due to him and his men; that Somalis are not receiving a hearing; that the pirates are not receiving the money to which they are entitled. Most important, Fidno says, “What the rest of the world has been made to believe is untrue. Please, please write that down.”

“So who is getting the money if the Somali pirates are not growing rich from their pickings?” Malik asks, trying not to provoke Fidno’s ire.

“That’s what I want to know,” Fidno replies.

Malik says, “I understand that every criminal activity known to humankind is occurring in Somalia, from drug dealing to money laundering, people smuggling, and the importation of illegal arms. Not to mention aiding and abetting, or at a minimum endorsing, what in the West is referred to as terrorism. What do you say to that?”

Fidno stops chewing. He acknowledges Malik’s go-ahead nod, but waits, then speaks with a cultivated slowness.

“In a required rhetoric class at my university in Germany, the professor spent more than half of our first class on a question an attorney put to a husband accused of beating his wife. He asked the husband when he had stopped beating his wife. The question was formulated in a way that made the husband incriminate himself regardless of what reply he gave. Now I insist that you reformulate your question so that I have a fair crack at it.”

Malik says, “Does piracy work, and if so, for whom?”

“We are not sea bandits of the ilk of Captain Hook and Captain Blood. The world capital of piracy is not located in Eyl or Xarardheere, which if you visited them you would see are two of the most underdeveloped towns in the backwaters of Somalia.” He pauses. “Here is the answer to your question. Piracy does not work for Somalis.”

“Would you like to explain?”

“Let me try,” Fidno says. “Through the combined efforts of the community and the fishermen who were affronted by the mechanized fishing that was causing not only damage to the environment but the loss of livelihood to the fishermen, the people of Puntland established a coast guard, initially with the sole aim of stopping illegal fishing in our waters. When these efforts resulted in failure, because the foreign fishing vessels employed strong-arm tactics and used guns to intimidate the communities, a handful of former fishermen resorted to ‘commandeering’ the fishing vessels owned by the nations fishing illegally and in an unregulated manner.”

Malik has heard all this before, but he is curious about how it actually works. How, for example, can young men in twenty-foot skiffs with free boards and only seventy-five horsepower or so take ships the size of an apartment block?

“We do it with the help of others,” says Fidno.

“Who?”

Fidno responds, “As Somali ‘privateers’—we are not pirates, we insist — we avail ourselves of a network of informers of different nationalities and in disparate professions: ship brokers, marine insurance brokers, security officials with access to information about ship movements, bankers, accountants; a run of the entire gamut to do with shipping. We communicate with London on secure satellite phones; receive info from someone at the Suez Canal with the schedules of the ships, the nature of the cargo, the name of the owners, and their final destination. Dubai. London. Sana’a. The world is at our fingertips. How do you think we commandeered the ship from Ukraine carrying tanks to Mombasa, tanks meant for the regional government of the south of Sudan? How did we know about an Israeli ship carrying chemical waste? We know everything about the ships, a few days before they sail through. We have negotiators based in North America who deal with the owners of the ships. What is happening here is beyond your or anyone else’s imagination.”

Fidno looks at Isha, who endorses his claims with a nod.

“Here”—he points again at Isha—“is one of our negotiators. He started off as an accountant, now he is stuck here, penniless, because the due payments have not been paid.”

“Where’s the money?”

“In London — at a bank,” Fidno says.

“Who gets paid — who has been paid, if not you?”

“Apart from the Somalis, everyone else has been paid. Our consultants in London have received their shares; the Abu Dhabi middlemen, too; ditto the Suez Canal folks. Not a cent to the Somalis. We’ve done the dirty work and are the ‘bad guys’ who are terrorizing the world’s shipping lanes, but we haven’t been paid.”

“Can you name names, give addresses?”

“Of course.”

Malik asks Fidno about the cash they’ve just shared out, despite the fact that he realizes he risks being told off.

“As men of all seasons, we have our fingers in different pies to survive,” Fidno says. “The money we are sharing out is from a speedboat-building venture we’ve set up in Seychelles. I’ve agreed to lend half of my share to Isha, who promises to pay it back when he receives what is owed to him — eventually. And as you can see, it is not millions of dollars I am doling out; only ten thousand dollars in small denominations of ten and twenty.”

Malik has no reason to disbelieve him, especially because Fidno sounds convincing, but then that is not saying much. As a journalist, he seldom trusts the truth of the version he hears until he has dug deeper and deeper and gotten to the bottom of the matter. Alas, it is not possible to do so now, as time is against him. Not to overlook the fact that his fear is making a worrying comeback, and he feels a little feverish.

Still, he won’t let go. He asks, “But surely the pirates receive bagfuls of cash. We’ve seen pictures of these — bags delivered to the hijacked ships on TV, with the correspondent reporting a couple million dollars within.”

“How can you tell from the clips you saw on your TV at home that the bags you were shown contained cash?” Fidno asks.

“So what did the bags in the pictures contain?”

“I suggest you go and ask the person who took the picture of the bags of alleged cash being delivered to the alleged hijacked ship and the correspondent who reported it. Maybe they would know. The problem with many people who are otherwise intelligent, well read, and well intentioned is that they believe what they see from the comfort of their couches, not what we here in Puntland are saying.”

“The bags dangling down from a rope held by a man in a helicopter are supposed to have contained two million dollars,” Malik repeats.

“Someone is lying.”

“Tell me who is lying and why.”

“I am not,” Fidno says. “We’re not.”

“So who is?”

“Maybe it is all an insurance scam.”

“They claimed to have paid when they didn’t?”

Fidno goes on, “I bet you were also taken in by reports in the international media of the blatant lie that someone found the body of a pirate, drowned after receiving his share, that washed ashore with one hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars in cash in his pocket. Ask yourself this: what happened to the money? The author does not tell us that, does he? In the same article, there is the incredible story of five pirates drowning, reportedly carrying three million dollars: ransom from the Saudi oil tanker? Again, what has become of the money? In Somalia, there would be war between the residents of a town over a hundred dollars. Why not over one hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars or, better still, three million? Did you hear of any wars taking place because of money found on the body of a drowned pirate washed ashore?”

Malik asks, “What about the sweet life in the pirate towns of Eyl and Xarardheere I’ve read about in the Guardian in London?”

“Eyl is a run-down village, the poorest in Puntland,” Fidno says. “I doubt the journalist who’s written the article has been there. I have. There is nothing, nothing in Eyl.”

“The BBC has aired similar pieces,” Malik says.

Fidno says, “Who am I to challenge the BBC?”

Fidno’s cheeks are almost empty of qaat now, the slim wad left no bigger than a weal raised over his cheekbone. Isha’s eyes are like the eyes of a man drunk on some cheap brew, his tongue soaked in the stewed greenness of his addiction.

Malik switches the tape recorder off and says, “We’re done. Thank you both.”

Then they chat off the record about other matters, and Fidno inquires if Malik has been in touch with Ahl and if he can tell him how he is doing. Malik replies in general terms, without going into any specifics. In fact, he makes an effort not to mention Taxliil’s name, even once. Polite to the last minute, they part in good humor, Malik promising that he will base a piece on their conversation and will send it to them if one of them provides him with an address. Fidno gives him an e-mail address.

Malik phones Qasiir to pick him up, and leaves Fidno and Isha where they are, in the suite, chewing. At the reception, he settles the bill, making sure that he is not responsible for further incidentals. Then he finds Qasiir in the car, parked where he left him.

Malik says, “Please take a different route from the one we took when we came earlier. I suggest you pretend we are going to the apartment.”

Qasiir looks often in the rearview mirror, to make sure no one is following them.

Malik says, “Also I want you to book my flight.”

“Your flight to where?”

“Nairobi. First thing in the morning.”