Crossbones (9 page)

Djibouti is a small country caught in the crosshairs of several tendencies—it shares a border with Somalia; is close to Yemen; lies along a stretch of an important waterway, the Bab el Mandeb; and exists cheek by jowl with Ethiopia and Eritrea. The eyes of the Western
world are trained on it, and NATO has a prominent presence on its soil. It is a miracle that Djibouti continues to exist and fight for its corner in its own wily ways.

The country, rich in history, replenishes Ahl’s sense of nostalgia, and he walks with the slowness of a hippo after a fight, taking in Djibouti’s polyglot of tongues—Yemeni Arabic, Somali, Amharic, French, and Tigrigna. He’s read somewhere that there is proof of sophisticated agriculture in the area, dating back four thousand years. Important evidence comes from the tomb of a young girl going back to 2000 BC or earlier. Now he is impressed with the city’s cosmopolitanism.

The noise of children running in every direction attracts his attention: a dog is giving chase to five, six boys, one of whom has apparently run off with its bone, maybe to eat it; his mates are in the running for fun, but the dog wants its bone back. A Somali-speaking Yemeni who is standing in front of an eatery observes that the boys are not so much engaged in mischief as they are in finding something to eat. They won’t let a dog eat its bone in peace.

Ahl asks the man if he is open for business. He asserts that he is, and they talk. It turns out that the man relocated from Mogadiscio to Djibouti after the eruption of the civil war there. Ahl orders a meal of mutton and injera, Ethiopian pancakes made from teff, the millet-like grain grown exclusively in the highlands of Ethiopia and ground into flour. Ahl loves the spongy feel of the injera, and its sour taste.

The Yemeni asks him where he is from, and Ahl says he is going to Bosaso.

“You must be in business, then,” the Yemeni says.

“Do you know Bosaso at all?”

The Yemeni sings Bosaso’s praises, describing it as a booming town. He claims to know a couple of people who are making a mint out of shady businesses such as piracy and people smuggling. Pressed, he
won’t give their names, only their broad identities. This is not of much help in a region more varied in hyphenated identities than even the United States. But the man is becoming suspicious, knowing that Djibouti is chockablock with spies from the United States, Ethiopia, and other countries. His conversation comes to a halt, and he goes away and returns with the bill, announcing that it is time for him to close up and join his mates. Ahl isolates the key word
sit
, which in Djibouti, Yemen, and everywhere else Somalis live means to chew
qaat
.

On the way back to his hotel, the streets are empty; everyone, it seems, is chewing
qaat
. Ahl comes across an abandoned building, with the paint coming off in layers, birds nesting in its gable, and a dog and its litter of pups sheltering in a quiet corner. The lintel is engraved with the Star of David. A huge lock the size of a human head, and an equally large chain, both brown with rust and old age, hang on the door.

In Mogadiscio, the cathedral was razed to the ground in the general mayhem at the start of the civil war, but here in Djibouti, the synagogue stands as testimony to peace. One of the first victims of the Somali strife was an Italian, Padre Salvatore Colombo, who lived in Mogadiscio for close to thirty years as the head of the Catholic Church–funded orphanage, one of the oldest institutions in the city. More recently, a Shabaab operative desecrated the Italian cemeteries, digging up the bones and scattering them around. To Ahl, the presence of a synagogue in a country with a Muslim majority is a healthy thing: cities, to qualify as cosmopolitan, must show tolerance toward communities different from their own. Intolerance has killed Mogadiscio. Djibouti is a living city, of which its residents can be proud.

At the hotel, he learns that the building served as a synagogue during the colonial era, but lately it has not been active as a place of worship. The man at the reception adds, “But do you know, there are Somalis claiming to be the true lost tribe of Israel.”

“What’s their evidence?” says Ahl.

“Their professional clan name—professional, because they work with metal and leather, and act as seers to other clans—sounds almost like a bastardization of ‘Hebrew.’”

The pin drops. Ahl knows the name of the clan.

He watches some more TV news, and when the airline office has reopened, he buys the ticket to Bosaso, paying in U.S. dollars. Then he goes for a long walk, luxuriating in a day in Djibouti before flying out to Somalia.

To savor the city at night, he goes for a stroll without worrying about his safety. A clutch of men and half a dozen ladies of the night are at the entrance of a nightclub. He pays for a ticket and goes in. The music is terrible. There are four couples on the floor, only two dancing, the others talking and smoking. Despite this, he finds a corner table and sits. What has he to lose? He doubts there are nightclubs in Bosaso or that alcohol will be openly available for fear of what the religionists might do.

A woman with a cigarette between her lips, her dress tight across her chest, her cleavage showily pushing through, wants a light. Instinctively, Ahl feels his pockets, as if he might find a lighter there, or a box of matches. He shakes his head, and with the white of his palms facing her, shouts over the music, “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.”

“No need to be sorry. But are you alone?”

He pretends he hasn’t heard her question. Even so, she sits down, and as she bends down to do so, he gets a whiff of her perfume. Whatever else he may do, he mustn’t lead her on. But how can he tell her that he is in the nightclub just for the experience of it? Granted, he hasn’t had sex with his wife since Taxliil went missing.

“If you have no objection to sitting with me for a chat and no more,” Ahl says, “then I can offer you a drink of your choice.”

“I’ll sit with you until I find a client.”

He agrees to the deal. She orders hard liquor, a packet of cigarettes, and a lighter. The waiter insists on advance payment for the liquor. Then she asks, “Where are you from?”

“I am on my way to Somalia.”

“Why would you go to a place everyone is leaving?”

“Maybe there is a purpose to my visit,” he says, and falls silent.

The waiter arrives with the order.

“Why come into a nightclub when you are not drinking, dancing, or picking up a woman for the night?” she asks.

“As I’ve said, I am on my way to Somalia,” he says.

“But I know many women like me from your country.”

“But they aren’t open about it, are they?” he asks.

“Like Arab women, they whore secretly.”

He asks, “How do you mean?”

“Veiled in public,” the woman says, “Arab women strip naked and are game faster than you think. Maybe that is what they do in Somalia these days. They whore secretly, covered from head to toe. You can’t believe the stories we hear.”

Ahl leaves when she spots a white client, and he suggests that the man come and take his place. He says, “All the best. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“Take care,” she says.

BIGBEARD, FOOTSOLDIER, AND TRUTHTELLER APPROACH THE HOUSE
from different vantage points at the same time.

BigBeard wraps his purple keffiyeh around his waist, tucks in a revolver, just in case, and scales the back wall. FootSoldier, a black keffiyeh around his neck, accesses the compound from a neighboring garden. At the wheel of a pickup truck parked to the left of the front gate, TruthTeller, wearing a red keffiyeh, waits until the other men confirm that they are both in and it is safe for him to join them. He starts the pickup and waits for one of his mates to open the gate; then he maneuvers in the truck with caution, pulling a wheeled vehicle on which guns and other weapons are mounted, hidden under a tarpaulin.

The front gate securely fastened, the men assemble in the house to set up their operation center. BigBeard calls YoungThing over and without any warning punches him so hard in the face that he collapses in a heap on the floor. Everything is still for a while. The other two men
watch as YoungThing pulls himself up, half kneeling, his cheek swollen, his lower lip bleeding. When YoungThing has recovered his balance and stands at attention, BigBeard says to him, “Do you realize that your negligence had the potential to cause the movement unnecessary loss of life?”

TruthTeller goes on, “We wouldn’t be here if one of our sympathizers had not, by chance, informed our intelligence of your presence in the neighborhood.”

“Imagine what would’ve happened if we had not been alerted to your grievous error,” FootSoldier adds.

BigBeard, still angry, says, “Go. Off with you.”

Then TruthTeller instructs him to stand guard at the gate while they have their initial meeting. With YoungThing gone, BigBeard assigns to FootSoldier the task of liaison duty to link the cell they are now forming to the principal cell in Wardhiigley District, where the presidential villa is situated. He charges TruthTeller with the responsibility of bringing in the gun parts. With FootSoldier on the phone to the command center, BigBeard starts to assemble the weapons.

Dhoorre, who is in the bathroom with the door bolted, eavesdrops on their conversation. When he hears all three men leave the house, he takes a hurried birdbath by letting the water drip into his cupped hands in the manner of somebody performing an ablution in an arid zone where water is scarce. In Islam, it is incumbent on a Muslim performing ablution to use even the sand if there is no water. Allah will look favorably on one if one is “clean” at the moment of death. He looks at his face in the mirror and confirms that he badly needs a shave—it’s a pity that the blade is dull and he has no replacements.

Just then there is a sudden escalation of noise as TruthTeller returns, grumbling about the weight of the machine-gun and bazooka parts. Dhoorre hears weaponry being dropped near the door of the
bathroom. It won’t be long before one of the men invades the space where he is confined, Dhoorre realizes. Then he hears the sound of chairs pulled back from the table and the men sit down.

Straining his ears, he makes out the odd word. The arrival of these men, and their continued presence in the house, can mean only one thing: trouble. He surrenders to the wish to know more, if only to prepare for what is bound to come. He kneels down directly behind the keyhole, through which he can glimpse the faces of the men, discern their movements.

BigBeard, as the others call the one in the purple keffiyeh, is in his thirties, prodigiously built, hirsute, with a husky desert voice; his facial muscles knotted, forehead furrowed, he listens to his companions, now encouraging one of the men to speak, now dismissing another’s comments. Dhoorre assumes that BigBeard is the leader of the group. His purple keffiyeh is folded almost in quarters, and wound around his forehead. His hand keeps coming into contact with the fold, caressing and readjusting it in a way that reminds Dhoorre of a vain young woman just returned from her hairdresser, whose hand keeps straying to her expensive hairdo. Dhoorre does not need to be told that keffiyehs have lately become fashionable among Mogadiscio’s religionist elite. He remembers watching Peter O’Toole wear one as Lawrence of Arabia, and how in recent years Arafat turned it into a symbol of Palestinian nationhood. But Dhoorre can’t tell if the color of the keffiyehs that these men wear points to their membership in a given cell.

BigBeard addresses a question to the wearer of the red keffiyeh—TruthTeller—a man with a big nose; he teasingly inquires, “What’s bothering FootSoldier?”

TruthTeller replies, “He needs the bathroom. He’s trying to get the door open.”

BigBeard asks, “Has YoungThing come back without our permission?”

FootSoldier assures BigBeard that YoungThing is outside. “In fact, I can see him standing by the gate saying his rosary.”

BigBeard now looks troubled. “Why won’t the bathroom door open if we are the only people in the house?”

TruthTeller goes over to check if there is a key in the door on the outside. He pushes the door, kicks at it, and then puts his shoulder to it and shoves. But the door does not give. He says to BigBeard, “It’s locked from the inside, I think.”

FootSoldier asks, “Who is inside, then?”

BigBeard is growing impatient. He slaps FootSoldier, shouting, “What kind of a man are you that you can’t hold your pee?”

He turns to TruthTeller and orders him to call YoungThing in. TruthTeller knocks into the furniture as he goes, kicking at chairs. From the door, he shouts to YoungThing. He asks, “Is someone in the bathroom?”

Dhoorre does not know what to do. He checks his face in the mirror—even a dying man wants to look comparatively clean. He realizes with concern that it’ll be the end of the boy. One moment, he has a good mind to open the door and be done with it; the next moment, he feels inadequate to the task. He is dizzy, gulping air into his lungs, fearing that he will faint before he can open the door.

Then he hears the boy say, “Old man, open the door.”

He unlocks the door and steps out. FootSoldier can’t wait any longer and hurriedly pushes past him. Meanwhile, TruthTeller and YoungThing step out of Dhoorre’s way and keep their distance. BigBeard asks Dhoorre to come closer to him; his eyes penetrate deep into Dhoorre’s fear. In a film, the old man thinks, BigBeard would be the one who pulls the trigger, a hard man with not one iota of gentleness.
With such a man you can never work out the cut and thrust of his intentions.