They tell Malik more about the killing, which occurred in the Bakhaaraha market complex. Shire, the deceased journalist, was waiting for his interviewee, a top insurgent, in the back room of the computer shop. Known for his lack of fear and his outspokenness, Shire put his name to his editorials even when he knew they would upset all parties to the conflict. He had often spoken of his “foretold” death at the hands of assassins, although he couldn’t predict, and didn’t seem to care, whether the Ethiopians or the insurgents would get him first.
He was struck by balaclava-wearing men in the shop’s back room, which was adjacent to the manager’s cubicle. Three men gained access to the room, where he was waiting for the interview, and one of them shot him, using a silencer. “They emerged, waved salaam to the manager and the staff, and departed, having accomplished their mission,” Fee-Jigan says.
“Who found the corpse?”
“The young tea boy, delivering tea to the room.”
Malik thinks, What a sad way to die!
“That’s the story,” Fee-Jigan says, his eyebrows raised. His expression seems to suggest that there is something not right here.
“And what explanations do the manager and the staff of the shop proffer so far?” asks Malik. He thinks this must have been an inside job, and vaguely recalls an incident in Afghanistan, when a warlord was killed by Arab men posing as journalists.
Fee-Jigan replies, “Everyone in the shop claims to have been in the dark about the arrangements, because Shire had insisted that his interviewee and his escorts, who would come into the shop wearing balaclavas, be granted entry to the room in the back, where he would be waiting.”
“Where is the corpse now?” Malik asks.
“At a mosque near his home.”
“Are we going to the mosque or his home?”
“First the mosque, then the cemetery.”
It takes the convoy of vehicles a long time to turn into a procession and get into a proper line. Malik thinks that someone with authority, in a uniform, like a traffic cop, is needed to clear the way if twenty or so cars wish to form an orderly file in a city enjoying peace. Organizing a column of cars into a well-ordered cavalcade during a civil war, however, is an impossible task.
But eventually they are under way, and Malik, while making no direct reference to their last encounter in Ma-Gabadeh’s company, asks how the book Fee-Jigan has been writing is coming along.
Fee-Jigan says, “I’ve put it on a back burner.”
“So what are you working on at present?”
“I’ve been working on matters closer to home.”
“Such as what?”
“I’ve been writing pieces of great topical interest in the international media,” says Fee-Jigan. “There is nothing more important these days than the targeting and killing of journalists, one dead every two days.”
“Who do you think is behind the killings?”
Fee-Jigan seems unduly worried about Qasiir, whom he stares at. Malik assures him that Qasiir is trustworthy not by speaking but by nodding his head in Qasiir’s direction.
Fee-Jigan says, “There are freelancing fifth columnists comprising former senior army officers, many of whom are allied to the Courts. These do the killings.”
“But why would they kill Shire, who, from what I understand, was interviewing an insurgent presumably sympathetic to the Courts?”
“They kill to confuse the issue.”
Malik can’t follow his logic. He asks, “What issue?”
“Shire favored the truth,” Fee-Jigan says. “He dared speak his mind, unafraid. At times, his hard-hitting commentaries upset Shabaab and their allies. The freelancing fifth columnists do anyone’s dirty work as long as it confuses the issue.”
Malik appreciates that Qasiir is doing what he can under confusing circumstances to make sure they are not left far behind, now slowing down, now going fast, and now communicating with a couple of the drivers with whom he exchanged mobile numbers before the convoy set off. They’ll keep in touch in the event of a problem. When they get to the mosque and discover they are late for the funeral service, there is disagreement over where to go, some suggesting they head for Shire’s family home, from which the bier will be carried on foot to the cemetery, a kilometer and a half away, others insisting they drive straight to the grave site and wait there. Malik concurs with Fee-Jigan that it is best to go to the family home and to help carry the bier.
They arrive in time to witness the bier already being carried out of the house. The street fills up with a crowd of well-wishers, passersby stopping to say, “Allahu akbar,” and the entire place reverberating with brief prayers of supplication addressed to the Almighty. Everyone hereabouts cuts a forlorn figure, head down in sorrow, mourning for the untimely death of a man who did no one harm and was loved by many.
The pace of the procession is quick, and a number of the journalists who arrived at the same time as Malik hurry to catch up with the coffin and help carry it, even briefly. In Islam, burial is quick, in hope that the dead will arrive at his resting place in a more contented state, with Allah’s blessing.
Malik finds himself for the first and only time in his life carrying the bier of someone he didn’t even know, and moved to be participating in the ritual. He gives his place over to Fee-Jigan, who in turns passes it to Qasiir, until they reach the edge of the waiting grave.
Just then Malik’s mobile, which is in vibrate mode, makes a purring sound in the top of his shirt pocket. He checks most discreetly at the first opportunity, having stepped out of everybody’s way. It’s a text from Ahl. “Taxliil here. All well, considering. Talk when you can.”
Malik recalls drafting a text message to Ahl, but not whether he sent it before the improvised roadside device struck the van he was traveling in. He remembers he’d been with others on their way back from the funeral of a journalist. Now, half-unconscious and lying on his side, in pain, he composes more text messages in his head: Talk of the walking wounded! But he can’t press the send button. One needs hands to write a message, and Malik can’t feel his hands. This does not stop him from adding a PS: Imagine the injured working through much pain, the wounded autographing the death warrants with a great flourish.
It is curious, he thinks, that he has not made personal acquaintance with an improvised explosive device until now.
In Somalia, IEDs did not figure much among the signatures of any of the armed factions in the Somali conflict until the Ethiopians arrived. Before, one would hear of two men on a motorbike or two or three on foot and in balaclavas, armed with pistols, hiding around a curve in the road as they waited for their victims to come out of a mosque or out of a car. The killers would ride away on their bike or they would run off, unidentified. Of late, however, roadside bombing has become the insurgents’ favorite mode of operation. They study the movements of their victims and plant custom-made, pre-designed explosive devices accordingly, to pick off by remote control a government official traveling by car or an Ethiopian battalion decamping from one base to another, or journalists covering a momentous event.