The driver helped him out. “‘Marabou’ is the nickname by which the guy who runs Funeral with a Difference is known in some circles of our city.”
“He introduced himself as Af-Laawe,” Jeebleh said.
“And you met him for the first time today?”
When Jeebleh nodded and the driver vouched for him, this angered the Major. He turned on the driver, saying, “Why do you keep speaking for him?”
“Because I’m the one who offered him a lift, that’s why,” the driver said.
And when the Major continued to stare furiously first at him, and then for a considerably longer time at Jeebleh, whipping himself into a giant fury, the driver was compelled to add, “I know this gentleman’s reputation, and of the high respect his name is held in, in many quarters. What’s more, I know this to be their first encounter, because Marabou told me so.”
There was silence.
A few minutes later, the driver said, “I am reminded of a story in which Voltaire, who is on his deathbed, receives a visit from Satan. Eager to recruit the French philosopher for his own ends, Satan offers him limitless pleasures that would make his afterlife more comfortable in every possible way. But Voltaire turns down the offer, and speaks a stern rebuke to Satan, saying that this isn’t the time to make enemies, thank you!”
In a fit of pique, maybe because he had no idea what to make of the parable or why the driver had recounted it, the Major barked a command. “Stop the car!” he shouted.
No sooner had the vehicle come to an abrupt halt than the armed youths leapt from the roof, fanning out, their guns at the ready. But the youths inside did not move at all. On edge, the Major got out.
“Why this unplanned stop?” the driver asked.
Miffed, the Major said, “I’ll return shortly!” He went around to the driver’s side, and told him, “You’re a volunteer, and I’m in charge of this outfit, and you take orders from me. Keep in mind that we’re at war, and I’ll have you come before the disciplinary commission of the movement if you disobey my orders.” Then he swayed off down a dusty road, along with two youths detailed to escort him, their weapons poised menacingly.
“What’s eating him?” asked one of the youths in the vehicle.
The handsome youth with his leg in a cast speculated that the Major was due to go on a dangerous mission, and was living on his nerves.
Everyone retreated into the disarray of an imposed silence, embarrassed. Jeebleh sat unmoving, like a candle just blown out, smoking its last moments darkly.
OUTSIDE, THERE WAS A FAINT WHIRLING OF SAND. AND THERE WAS LIFE AS Jeebleh might have imagined it in its continuous rebirth, earth to dust, dust to earth, wherein death was avenged.
With the vehicle parked by the side of the road and the Major and his young militiamen off on some mysterious mission, Jeebleh felt increasingly like a sitting target. His heart beating faster from fear, it occurred to him that they could all be dead at the pull of a trigger. The dead would be mourned and buried — Marabou would see to that — but the militia would regret the loss of the vehicle more. In the mid-eighties, before the collapse, corruption having reached unprecedented levels, poems had circulated on cassette about the ill-gotten money that had brought many Land Cruisers into the country. Jeebleh wished he could remember the words. Nowadays, many of these four-wheel-drive vehicles had ended up in the hands of the fighting militiamen, who mounted their weapons on them, turning them into the battlewagons that became a staple of the civil war footage shown on CNN and the BBC. He kept a wary eye on what was happening outside, in the dusty alleys. Two of the armed youths who had climbed down from the roof of the vehicle stood with their backs to each other, in imitation of what they must have seen in American movies. They nursed immense bulges in their cheeks, great wads of chewed-up qaat, a moderately mild stimulant. They might have been cattle ruminating.
The driver spoke: “Once again, I feel I must apologize for the behavior of our countrymen, who do not know what is good for them, or how to say thank you to those who mean them well. Our moods swing from one extreme to another, but we haven’t the courage to admit that we’ve strayed from the course of moral behavior. I suppose that is why the civil war goes on and on, because of this lack in us, our inability to appreciate what the international community has tried to do for us: feed the starving and bring about peace in our homeland.”
Jeebleh wanted to know more about Af-Laawe. “What is Marabou’s story?” he asked.
Thunderclouds of worry gathered on the driver’s forehead; readying to speak, he made throaty noises similar in intensity to the rumble before a lightning bolt splits the heavens. “Marabou, for a start,” he finally said, “has many aliases, and he changes them as often as we change our shirts.”
Jeebleh wondered to himself whether Af-Laawe — meaning “the one with no mouth”—was also an assumed name, which, to a Dante scholar, might allude to the Inferno. He asked, “How well do you know him?”
The driver answered in a burst of impassioned speech, “How does one know anyone in a land where people are constantly reinventing themselves? How well can anyone know an Af-Laawe who does his damnedest not to be known?”
“My impression is that you’ve known him a long time.”
“True, I’ve known him for long, since his student days, when he was doing his doctorate in Rome. Then, I was the head of the chancellery at the Somali embassy there. I remember him coming to see me, when he learned that the National Security had put his name on a blacklist and issued a directive instructing us to discontinue his government-sponsored scholarship. Knowing I couldn’t help him, I asked a junior officer to deal with him. He left the chancellery, angry and abusive. A few days later he visited me at home. This time, he pleaded that I extend his passport. I told him that there was no point in extending his passport if he no longer had a scholarship allowing him to live in Italy, but my son assured me that Af-Laawe, who was his friend, had received another grant to help him continue his studies and all he needed was a valid passport, with a valid residence. I renewed the passport, at some risk to myself, I must add, and heard no more about him until I met him several years later in France, with an Italian woman, his fiancée. By then he had set himself up somewhere in Alsace, in a town called Colmar, and he eventually married the woman.”
“And when did he get here?”
“Soon after the U.S. troops flew into Mogadiscio. I’m told he carries French papers now, and speaks several languages. It’s said that he was hired by the European Union at a very high salary, with the vague job description ‘facilitator for all things European.’ He was sent out on some sort of troubleshooting mission, and had a driver, a cook, a bodyguard. He lived in a huge three-story house by himself, testimony to his high-rolling lifestyle.”
“What happened?”
“It’s rumored that together with two other Europeans, a Frenchman and a Norwegian, he effected the disappearance of some four million U.S. dollars from the United Nations coffers. Nobody knows how it was done.”
“Four million dollars?”
“Didn’t you read about it in the American press?”
“I don’t recall anything about this!”
“Rumor has it too,” the driver went on, “that he lost his job with the EU because they suspect him but can’t prove anything. And he doesn’t dare return to Colmar, where his two teenage children and wife live, because the Frenchman and the Norwegian will ask him to hand over their share of the heist. Those in the know think that he was the brain behind it all, and many Mogadiscians assume that the money is buried somewhere in Somalia, and he is the only person who knows where.”