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.