Caloosha had risen out of his chair. Now he was threatening: “Watch out!”
“Your loyalties are despicable.”
“I’m warning you!”
Jeebleh forced himself to concentrate on the pale moons of his own fingernails, to focus on the evenness of the lunar shapes. Was he showing signs of malnutrition? Peace and compromise both had gone out the window, and the two of them were on a warpath. So be it. “What were you doing in the family home of the girl who’s now your kept woman?” he asked.
“I’ve never robbed corpses, like someone else I know!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I bet Bile hasn’t told you!”
“Af-Laawe spoke of the alleged crime, all right.”
“And did Bile own up to this crime when you met him?”
“We didn’t get around to talking about alleged crimes, Bile and I.”
“Ask him why he blacked out for a good three days.” Caloosha had regained some of his composure. Both of them sat down again. “Ask him if he killed and then slept it all off, woke up, and then robbed. Or whether the robbing came first, and the killing later. We have three unaccounted-for days, three whole days. We know when he ran out, a free man, and we know when Dajaal picked him up, lost to the world. My junior half brother killed, robbed, and then slept it off!”
“Bile wouldn’t lower himself to such a base level.”
Caloosha applauded with an informed sarcasm, only he didn’t clap with his palms, but instead knocked his fingernails together, in jest.
“Do you continue to drink the blood of your foes?” Jeebleh asked.
Caloosha had a gory sense of humor. “Maybe that’s why I’ve been sick lately,” he said, “suffering, as I do, from severe inflammation of my joints and from an abundance of uric acid in my own blood.” Then he added, “You make me sick.”
Jeebleh didn’t know what to make of Caloosha’s behavior, and he got to his feet, unsure where to go or what to say. He paced back and forth, then placed his foot on a stool. They had both gone too far, and it was his turn to compromise, if necessary, to make amends. He put on his professional act: “In the pressure cooker of a civil war, in which the sides at war have been intimates, everyone exaggerates. Okay? And when a society has lost its general sense of direction and, along with it, its self-respect, then every individual is on his or her own, miserably alone. Like ants with no hierarchy or order. Okay? I suggest we forget whatever either of us has said in anger. Okay?”
“I get your point!” Caloosha replied.
They were silent for a long while, and a semblance of calmness returned. Caloosha was where Jeebleh wanted him to be, in an amiable mood. “I am here to make peace,” Jeebleh said. “Okay? The past is not here, the present is war, so we must think about the future and marry it to peace. You get me?”
“I get you.”
Jeebleh hoped that it wasn’t too late in the day for him to introduce the subject that had brought him to Caloosha in the first place. He thought cautiously and elaborated the question in his head. Then he straightened his back, massaged it, and yawned. “Have you seen Faahiye lately?” he said.
Jeebleh talked about Faahiye when he actually wanted to talk about Raasta, and her disappearance. Because the girl’s father was as safe a topic as he could come up with at short notice.
“He came to see me the other day, to say hi.”
“Alone?”
“Af-Laawe brought him along.”
“When was this?” Jeebleh asked.
“I can’t recall.”
“What about my mother’s housekeeper?”
“What about her?”
“Could you tell me how I can reach her? I’ll do so without imposing on you.”
“It is possible,” Caloosha said, “that like Faahiye, your mother’s housekeeper went to a refugee camp in Mombasa. I’ll see what I can do, and get back to you when I have news of them.”
How convenient: a refugee camp in Mombasa!
“What about Raasta and Makka?”
Caloosha gave the question serious thought before responding. “Faahiye assured me, when I asked him, that he knew nothing about his daughter’s whereabouts. You know that the girl’s parents had separated before her disappearance?”
“I would like to see Faahiye.”
“If he is in the country, you will,” Caloosha vowed.
“And my late mother’s housekeeper?”
“If she hasn’t left for Mombasa, you will.”
They exchanged a few pleasantries, and Jeebleh helped himself to another cup of coffee, and then asked if Kaahin could take him back to his hotel, on foot. And of course, he would think about the offer to move in with Caloosha, thank you most kindly.
11
BACK IN HIS HOTEL, JEEBLEH ARRANGED TO PHONE BILE. WHEN THEY spoke, they agreed to meet, and Bile promised to send Dajaal to fetch him. Jeebleh was eager to talk, because Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s innuendos were beginning to bother him.
As he waited for Dajaal, Jeebleh replayed in his mind the two encounters — with Af-Laawe his first day, and Caloosha today — and his expression clouded over as he sadly contemplated how difficult it might be to discredit the accusations. Even though he did not think there was any truth to their insinuations, he did not want to dismiss them out of hand. It was possible that they were trying to trick him away from the direction in which he ought to be moving. And what better way to achieve their devious ends than to introduce such hard-to-challenge charges against Bile’s integrity? Jeebleh didn’t wish to rely only on his gut feeling: he wanted to hear his friend’s side of the story too.
There was much ground to be covered. But before getting to what interested him, or asking Bile to refute the allegations or own up to them, Jeebleh decided that he would inform him about his own activities so far. He would tell him about being shadowed and then approached by the military types who had escorted him to Caloosha’s villa, and how the place had crawled with suspicious movements, how he felt the armed men were out to intimidate him and make him stop asking questions about Raasta.
Once Jeebleh and Bile were together, they were anxious to get talking before Bile was called away on some emergency or another. They spoke fast, their words now merging and working well together, now jarring and making no sense at all.
It fell to Jeebleh to make coffee for himself and tea for Bile, and to serve them both. It fell to him too to ask the appropriate questions so that his friend might build a bridge between his elusive past and the murky present in which they found themselves now.
“What was your first day of freedom like?”
“I had a harrowing experience of it,” Bile responded readily, prepared for this question, “because fighting framed my life then in ways I’ll never be able to communicate well to others not familiar with the circumstances.” The stress on his face was evident. “My first day as a free man proved to be the most frightening day in my entire life.”
“Why?”
“As prisoners, we were entirely cut off. We had no idea what was happening outside our cells. We had no idea that the Tyrant had fled the city. Someone, Lord knows who, opened the prison gates, someone else the gates of the city’s madhouses, someone else the gates of the zoo. So you had humans, some mad and some not, you had animals of every shape, size, and description, all of them on the run. And running alongside them, or in the opposite direction away from them, you had the looters, and the frightened families fleeing. You had thousands of political detainees, and hardened criminals in the tens of thousands. The lions, the zebras, the hyenas, the zoo camel with its two humps — every single creature on the run. You couldn’t tell who was fleeing from whom and who was chasing whom. Left to myself, I would’ve stayed on in my prison quarters, where I might have felt safer.”