Crossbones (41 page)

“What work did Fidno do?”

Finally, Marduuf is in his element, and the words pour out of him, with little stammering and fewer pauses. “Fidno is book-educated,” he says. “He reads all the time. Every time we saw him he had a new book in his hands, books in the white man’s language, not English. Maybe German, or so somebody said, because he lived in that country, a very powerful man there. When he talked on his mobile in one of these languages, he spoke fast, as fast as water running down a glass window after it has rained. But he is a bad man. He cheats his own pockets.
He is the kind of cheat who puts something in his shirt pocket but makes sure that the ‘thief pocket’ in the front of his trousers has no idea what is in the shirt pocket. Do you know what I mean? You can’t trust him. He is too clever. With money, Fidno is a dangerous man.”

“Did you make a lot of money from piracy?”

“Not much,” Marduuf says.

“What do the pirates do with what they make?”

“Many buy Surf, a four-wheel drive.”

“Did you buy one yourself?”

“I have bought a small pickup. More useful.”

“Not lots of money in piracy, eh?”

“We went into piracy when we were told there was a lot of money in it,” Marduuf answers. “The BBC says that people on the coast of Somalia were rich, the pirates all getting the most beautiful women, every night a wedding. But I never saw any of the money everyone was talking about, even after working as a pirate for several years. The largest share I received was seven thousand dollars.”

Malik asks, “Can you name any of the ships you took hostage?”

“A Korean ship; a very, very big Saudi one, bigger than the biggest house I’ve seen in Mogadiscio—don’t ask me to tell you their names, because I cannot remember them. There was that Spanish one, we caught the Spanish ship fishing in our waters,” Marduuf says. “We used small boats to chase them and made gun noises heavier than rockets, and they stopped. We took what the ship workers had in cash, maybe three hundred dollars, we took their smart phones and expensive watches and ate their food and waited for three months. After that we received a thousand dollars each. I swear no more than that.”

“What business do you do now?”

“I sell rugs straight to some of the mosques. I have a shop high up in the Bakhaaraha,” Marduuf replies. “That is how my youngest brother entered his first mosque. Kaahin was with me, a young thing then,
when one day I went into a mosque to conclude a sale. He said when we went out of the mosque into the sun, which beat into our eyes, that he felt comfortable inside the mosque. He left me a week or so later and joined the mosque as a pupil. He said they were teaching him to read the Koran and to write. A month and a half later, he showed me he knew how to write his name in Arabic. I was happy. Then I heard from Wiila, my sister, that someone from our family who also had a son in the mosque had heard that Kaahin had taken an oath and joined a special group inside Shabaab, very secret. He came back to see me less often after that. And then I learned he was dead, killed.”

“How did you learn that he was killed?”

“I asked his
mucallim
where Kaahin was.”

“What was his teacher’s reply?” Malik asks.

“He said that Allah willed Kaahin to die.”

“Did you ask the mentor to explain his meaning?”

“That Kaahin was in heaven,” Marduuf says.

“Did you ask how he knew Kaahin was in heaven?”

“He told me that Kaahin gave his life for Islam as martyr.”

Malik asks, “What did you do then?”

“I asked to see his body.”

“And then what?”

“He said he would kill me if he saw me again.”

“Then what did you do?”

“Nothing yet.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing yet’?”

“I will take action. I will avenge my brother.”

Malik is tempted to ask Marduuf if he is planning to report all that has happened to the authorities, but he checks himself. He realizes that such a question will mean nothing to someone like Marduuf, born in a lawless country and brought up in post–civil war conditions, who has never known authority in the positive sense of the term.

The tape recorder switches itself off. Marduuf is startled. He looks at the machine as if he might strike it for giving him a fright and then, for the first time, acknowledges Malik’s grin with a similar one.

Qasiir shows Marduuf to his pickup truck, parked in the lot, and then returns to find Malik happy with the interview, but clearly too exhausted to stay awake.

Qasiir asks, “How early do you want me to come in the morning with Liibaan?”

Malik knows that tomorrow will be a bugger of a day, what with several important interviews and the move to Bile and Cambara’s. “First thing in the morning,” he says.

SAIFULLAH HAS DISAPPEARED.

No one, not least Ahl, understands how this could happen. He’d been upstairs listening to tape recordings of the Koran. Or so they believed. They trusted he was taking his time and would come down at some point, relaxed and willing to talk to them. They were trying to wait for things to be revealed—in time.

Then, at teatime, Faai, bearing a cup of tea with lots of sugar, goes upstairs and taps at his door. When he doesn’t answer, she shouts his name and, for good measure, calls him by the endearments she used when he was a child. No reply. Xalan joins her, and the two women shout louder the longer they wait for him to answer their calls. Xalan wonders, What if he has jumped out of the window and is lying in the garden, unconscious? What if he has killed himself? Faai, keening, prays louder and more earnestly, “Please, God, no—please, God, no.” Xalan orders her to be quiet. Faai shuffles her way downstairs and sits at the bottom of the staircase, still pleading, “Please, God, no—please, God, no.” Then Ahl goes up to add his voice to the chorus, begging Saifullah to come out.

Xalan telephones Warsame and tells him to return urgently. When Ahl suggests he break down the door, Xalan collapses with nervous tension. She averts her head and presses her eyes closed with the tips of her fingers, as if attending to the self-tormenting questions that crowd one another out.

By the time Warsame arrives, Xalan is short of breath, and he worries about an asthmatic attack. He gets her inhaler from the bedside table and sits beside her, more worried about her than about Saifullah, of whom he has never been fond. He lifts her by the elbow, and together they walk toward the bedroom, their feet faltering in unison as Xalan leans on him for support. Warsame almost falls over when he misses a step.

Ahl goes in search of a hammer or something heavy with which to break the lock. It is clear that he has no idea what he is doing, because he mounts the steps again, empty-handed. Then he does what he has been wanting to do all along: he puts his shoulder to the door. He is astounded when he forces it open without much resistance. Then he announces loudly, “But he is not here.”

Warsame joins him. The two men look at each other, and their eyes converge on the unused bed. They then wander in tandem toward the open window, neither speaking. Ahl turns off the tape recorder, which still blares the Koran. Xalan rushes in and stares openmouthed at the window. It is clear that she has arrived at the same conclusion: that Saifullah must have jumped out, down to the ground. Ahl, leaving nothing to chance, goes over to the window and sticks his neck out, searching the ground for a body. Finding none, he shakes his head. Then they go downstairs to contemplate their next move.

Xalan says under her breath, “At least he hasn’t killed himself in our house. I don’t know what I would do if he did that.”

Ahl is not sure of her meaning. Does Xalan mean that she wouldn’t know what to do if he had killed himself, or wouldn’t know what to do
if he committed suicide in a room in their house? His eyes range over the others in the no longer cheerful living room, coming to rest on Faai, who is standing in the doorway, quietly tearful.

Warsame calls in the guard and asks him if he has seen a young man leave. He doesn’t give a name, but he describes Saifullah in some detail.

The guard, boasting a right cheek the size of a bird’s egg from chewing leftover
qaat
, replies that he hasn’t seen any young man come in or leave.

Xalan turns to her husband. “What do we do now?”

Warsame observes that it is time they zeroed in on the places he might go and the persons he is likely to seek out. Warsame asks Xalan if it is possible that Saifullah has gone to her sister’s house, across the street from the main mosque. “Did he say that he had seen her on his way here?”

“Shall we go to her house and find out?” Xalan says. “A pity we were so excited at seeing him, and we forgot to ask if he had seen or visited her.”

Warsame answers, “I see no harm in doing that.”

“And if he isn’t there?”

“More important, will she receive us or will she throw us out?” Warsame says.

Ahl doesn’t want to tempt fate by saying anything. He knows of the bad blood between the two sisters, resulting from differences in character and outlook, the one very devout and uncompromising when it comes to her faith, the other of a secular cast of mind. He rises to his feet, ready to go to Zaituun’s place, but not prepared to speak.

Xalan feels ill at ease calling on Zaituun, her elder sister. They have not exchanged visits for years, even when they have lived in the same cities—previously in Toronto, currently in Bosaso. Zaituun is prayerfully
devout, expending all her energy on worship. She and Xalan fell out because Zaituun does not approve of her younger sister’s lax ways, and said that she had rape and worse coming to her unless she changed. Xalan has no time for those who think she shouldn’t blame Islam for what the vigilantes did to her, raping her in a mosque as three imams looked on and did nothing to stop the defilers.

A young woman lets them into the house. She informs them that Zaituun is praying. Annoyed, Xalan looks at her watch, as if to determine the name of the prayer her sister would be performing at this time of day. When Xalan wonders if it is worth asking the young woman if she has seen Saifullah, Warsame counsels patience. They take off their shoes at the door to the living room. Ahl is unprepared for this; he is wearing boots, and he knows that his socks are dirty and that one of them has a big hole in the heel.

Zaituun’s house is a modest affair, with no flourish of any sort. Each room is conceived as separate from the others; it is not a house put together as one afterthought leads to another. Prayer rugs are in every corner, some standing against the walls, others laid out flat and ready for use, while others are expectantly hanging, as if awaiting a community of worshippers. The room faces the
qiblah
. The image comes to Ahl of a woman who will die praying, the words of worship stirring her lips.

And yet, Xalan has told him, as a young girl Zaituun played soccer with the boys and broke every school rule, challenging her teachers and correcting them when they were wrong. She was at loggerheads with her husband from the day they married until he died, killed in a shoot-out when armed militiamen came to loot their house in the initial stages of the civil war. Then, two years into her widowhood, the first spent at a refugee camp in Kenya, the second in a run-down two-bedroom apartment in Toronto, waiting for her Canadian refugee papers, she surprised everyone by deciding to dedicate her life to the
study of the Holy Scripture. Her four daughters married and she relocated with her son to Bosaso, where she has lived ever since. Asked to explain what prompted such a sea change in her behavior, Zaituun once said to Warsame, her voice calm, her pauses well-timed, “All I recall is standing before an underground door, which opened onto a bright room awash with light from the sun. I recall going farther in until I felt totally immersed in the blessed waters of inner joy. It was only then that I realized how our daily realities are but chinks of light opening onto the darkness of our eternities.”

Zaituun arrives just when the young woman has served them tea. She enters the room clear-eyed, soft-footed, a person with an inner calm. She smiles gently and nods in the direction of Warsame and Ahl and, in passing, the two sisters touch shoulders in greeting. Unable and unwilling to give themselves over to a lengthy exchange, for fear that one of them will speak out of turn, they confine themselves to this token, hastily executed salutation, the best compromise they can manage on the spot.

Xalan asks, “Have you seen Ahmed?”

Zaituun makes a “be my guest” gesture, and then takes her sweet time, pretending not to recognize the name. To draw her out, Warsame says, “Maybe you call him Ahmed-Rashid or Saifullah?”

Zaituun remains standing upright. She says, “We prayed together. I asked him where he had been, where he was going, what his plans were. He didn’t answer any of my questions. We shared a meal in silence, he prayed more devotions. He kissed and hugged me, as if embarking on a journey from which he would not return, and I wished him Godspeed and God bless.”

Panic sets in, Xalan straightaway displaying clear signs of agitation; this gets to Ahl and Warsame, who have equal reason to be concerned. Warsame, because he is worried Xalan might go off balance; Ahl, because he has been of the view that any possible recovery of Taxliil
hinges on Saifullah providing them with up-to-date information. It takes all his energy to control himself.