“We haven’t had the pleasure until now,” he says. “I know your name is AhlulKhair. My full name is Ali Ahmed Fidno, but I am known among friends as Fidno.”
Ahl asks, “How do you know who I am?”
Cautious like a feral cat defending its catch, Fidno bares his teeth and makes some sort of animal noise emanating from deep inside him. Taken aback, Ahl focuses his stare first on Fidno’s hands, whose fingers now form into a fist, with the knuckles palely protruding, and then on his heavy jowls, which seem to expand, as if intimating impending trouble. Fidno looks away, and then, pulling from under him a large brown envelope on which he has been sitting, leans forward and says to Ahl, “Here. I have brought you these photographs.”
Ahl’s imagination runs off ahead of him: he envisions photographs of Taxliil posing in fatigues in some training camp close by.
“Photographs of who or what?”
“Of some boys doing their own thing.”
Ahl hopes that Fidno is not taking him for a sex pervert. Does he think that Ahl is a fifty-something tourist after young things with whom he wants to play sex? Ahl has lost his appetite. He puts down his utensils and asks, “Of whom are the photos?”
Fidno favors the question with silence.
“Why, of all people, have you brought them to me?”
Fidno says, “Someone at the airport who saw you arrive has said to me that you are a Somali journalist, based in America.”
“Let me have a look at them.”
Ahl removes them from the envelope and takes his time studying them, a picture at a time, as he listens to Fidno’s running commentary. They are all indeed of young men — in boats, in ships, manning guns, holding men, faces covered with balaclavas. Young men eating, sleeping, fooling around with one another, speaking on their mobile phones, some of them dressed in the jackets of which they dispossessed their hostages, of whom there are also photos. The names of the ships and their provenance are written on the sides: Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, Filipino, Indian. The haul is big. But the young men wielding the AK-47s, the collapsible machine guns, are skinny, hungry-looking, many appearing as ill prepared for what life may throw at them as Paris Hilton might be going into the ring with Mike Tyson. Are these youths pirates? And if they are not pirates, then who are they, what are they? Six months is a long time in the life of a teenager, who may grow a beard or start wearing contact lenses.
Will Fidno, sitting at Ahl’s table, stripping the last morsels of fish off the spine, be able to tell him more? Will he involve Malik? Can Fidno help him track down Taxliil?
“Where did you get the pictures?” Ahl asks.
Fidno is champing at a toothpick, taking his time.
“I had them taken by a photographer I hired.”
It is a pity Fidno is not a pirate, a privateer, or even a buccaneer, because he has the charm that makes women lift their arms, place them right behind their heads, their armpits exposed and their breasts raised. Why do women find pirates charming, why do they giggle invitingly in their presence? Ahl recalls that the Sicilian woman did just that within an hour of his meeting her. Like a cat going on her back, waiting to be petted.
Ahl says, “In your capacity…as what?”
Fidno looks at their lunch things, not yet collected. Ahl beckons to the waiter standing close by to take the plates away and bring the bill.
“And coffee, if possible,” Fidno says.
“Make it two coffees. Mine espresso,” says Ahl.
Fidno says, “Make mine lungo, with lots of sugar.”
The waiter gone, Ahl asks again, “In what capacity?”
Fidno responds, “I’ve had the photographs taken in my capacity as a mediator, a negotiator, an interpreter, and, most important, a go-between, when matters get too sticky between the pirates and the negotiators on behalf of the shipowners.”
Ahl asks, “With whom do the negotiators deal?”
“They use intermediaries,” Fidno replies, “often through middlemen based in Mombasa or Abu Dhabi.”
“So they don’t come to Puntland, and prefer assigning intermediaries to negotiate on their behalf?”
Fidno says, “They remain at their desks in London, Tokyo, or Moscow, wherever they are normally based. One of my jobs is to iron out unexpected difficulties when things get sticky, which they do a lot of the time. Each of these men — insurers, middlemen, facilitators — gets his cut, depending on his rank and his importance in the company hierarchy, without any direct contact with us.”
“Too many people, too much money, and no direct communication — isn’t that a recipe for possible disaster?” Ahl ventures.
Fidno says, “It is a recipe for deceit, double-dealing, and counterfeiting. And we are the marquee pawns of the greatest dupe. We’re cheated, and yet there is no way we can prove any of this to the world, because they have the backing of the international media and we do not.”
“Wait, wait. What are you saying?”
“Let’s imagine you reading in your newspaper, wherever you are, that the owners of a ship hijacked by Somali pirates have paid five million dollars as ransom,” Fidno proposes.
“Let’s imagine I do.”
Fidno says, “What if I told you that, to begin with, the largest bulk of the five million does not leave London, where the insurers are based, because no bank in Britain will countenance approving of so much money going out of its vaults to pay off a ransom?”
“That makes sense,” Ahl concurs.
“What if I told you that in the end, after months of negotiations, proposals and counterproposals, broken agreements and delays, only half a million of the five million dollars will reach the pirates. First the negotiators of the insurers based in London, the middleman based in Abu Dhabi, and the intermediaries in Mombasa have each taken their huge cuts, so that the final payment is reduced to a pittance from which the funder financing the hijacking still has to pay the pirates holding the ship. You know the Somali proverb ‘Mana wasni, warna iraac,’ said to have been spoken by a woman suspected of having enjoyed lovemaking, when the man never even touched her. We’re buggered, however you want to put it, and needless to say, we don’t enjoy it at all.”
“That’s hairy,” Ahl says.
“This utter disrespect makes us indignant.”
Ahl says, “That is criminal.”
Now Fidno is nervous, like a Mafioso not used to explaining the reason for his actions. In a telltale sign of confession, he leans forward, as though sharing a secret, and then changes his mind after policing the surroundings and seeing the waiter returning with the bill and the two coffees. Ahl settles the bill in U.S. dollars. Then they resume their conversation.
“What’s your precise role in this business?”
Fidno replies, “Among the pirates, I am all things to almost every one of them. I am a link, a connector, an in-between man, an extinguisher of fires when fires need extinguishing. I am all things to the shipowners, the London men at their desks, bowler hats or not. I deal with insurance and safety matters with the captain, the crew, the ship, and the cargo, when held. I am all things to the men at the Suez Canal and many other men stationed at different ports in different countries, men privy to the secret details involved in the movements of the ships, the nature of cargo, whether legal or illegal, whether the cargo is chemical waste and who is carrying it and where it is to be dumped. I log in the departure details and the ships’ destinations, too.”
Ahl says, “You are something, aren’t you?”
Fidno continues, “Sea banditry is a very risky business. It can get you killed easily in these lanes. You can make pots of wealth, depending on how you play the game. Questions to do with who gets to collect the ransom when the young Somalis hold a ship; who gets to receive the funds; who gets his due cut; who gets paid and who gets swindled. These pirates are not like the pirates of old, who got to keep a portion of their booty and share the loot among themselves — democratically! I am not in fact sure you can call the Somalis pirates.”