Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Ahl asks, “How does he gain access unless he has a master key, or collects one from reception? I chased him out a few minutes ago.”

“He has no business being in your room, or collecting a master key from here,” the one-eyed man insists. “I’ll report him to the management. Action will be taken against him soon.”

“Please do that,” Ahl says, although he doesn’t believe for a moment that the man will take any such action.

A car horn honks, and the outside gate opens to admit a battered jalopy. Fidno is at the wheel. Ahl wonders whether it makes sense for him to carry all his cash and his computer with him when Fidno evidently thinks the village they are driving to rates no better than the bucket of bolts he is driving rather than his usual posh car. But what else can he do? He puts his faith in his good fortune, trusting that all will be well for now. Maybe he will check out of the hotel at the first opportunity and move in with Xalan and Warsame, if the offer still stands.

Barely has Ahl clambered into the four-wheel wreck, placed his laptop at his feet, and put on the seat belt when Fidno squeals out of the gate and steps on the gas, as if eager to be clear of the place. Within half a kilometer they are in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, where the huts are built of coarse matting reinforced here and there with zinc, or from packing material bearing the names of its manufacturers, although they are moving too fast for Ahl to make out the letters. The doors to the dwellings, which are improvised out of cloth, blow in the wind. Everything about these huts and the lean-tos that serve as their kitchens has an air of the temporary about it. The residents are those displaced by the fighting in the south of the country. They have come to Bosaso because there is peace here.

Fidno climbs through the gears in quick succession, the clunker rattling so loudly that neither man talks, not even when Fidno nearly runs over a couple of pedestrians loitering in the center of the road. At the last second, they scatter, and Fidno roars on, like a race-car driver participating in an autocross relay through an uninhabited countryside. The ride is as disagreeable as mounting a bad-tempered young male camel that spits, kicks, and foams furiously at the mouth.

Straining to be heard over the ruckus, Ahl asks, “Why the rush? Are we late?”

“Our man is restless,” Fidno says. “We may not find him still there if we delay.”

“What’s his name?”

Fidno responds irritably, “If you really must know, he is known by his nickname, Magac-Laawe. A no-name man.”

“Have you spoken to No-Name yourself, then?”

“I’ve spoken to his henchman.”

Ahl wishes Malik were here, Malik who knows how to deal with this specimen of humanity, the dirt no one dare clean up, in a land with no laws, in a country where brute force earns high dividends. If warlords have deputies, and presidents their vice presidents, then it follows that, in a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.

“What have you told No-Name about me?”

“That you are my friend.”

What does that make him? Ahl wonders. An associate of a known criminal? Is this what children do to you, knowingly or unwittingly, make you into an accomplice of outlaws? He prays that Fidno does not run afoul of the authorities while they are together, especially not with so much cash and his laptop on him, in this beat-up vehicle on the way to Guri-Maroodi, a hot spot with few equals in notoriety, even within Puntland.

“What else did you tell him?”

“That you are looking for your runaway nephew.”

“My nephew — why nephew? He is my son.”

“Makes no difference. Nephew, son, stepson!”

Of course it does make a difference; but Ahl says nothing.

Fidno says, “I was worried that No-Name might think you would become too emotional, irrational, or hard to please if things do not go the way you want them to. ‘My son’ is different from ‘my nephew.’ I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but that is what I thought. I did it for your sake. To make things happen.”

Again, Ahl thinks that he is not suited for this kind of assignment the way Malik is, having interviewed Afghani drug lords as well as Pakistani Taliban warlords. It requires a familiarity with the criminal mind that is beyond his experience. Ahl worries that once he’s endorsed a lie, he will be open to telling more, and there will be no end to it.

He says, “I’ll set No-Name right on this. A lie does not run off my tongue easily, and I’ll have to beware of what I say all the time.”

“Do what suits you,” Fidno concedes.

They go through a drab-looking hamlet that boasts of only a few low shops built of stone, atop a wood foundation, the zinc roofing painted in different colors, mainly blue. Billboards advertise cigarettes, soda, milk, and other products, Ahl guesses more for decoration than because they are actually available. They have slowed to a snail’s pace, and Ahl can see people in clusters of three and four, with their curious eyes trained on the jalopy. He can even hear them: they are speaking a babble of Swahili, Oromo, Tigrinya, broken Yemeni Arabic, and Somali. A microcosm of the Horn, a cosmopolitan misery marked with unforgiving poverty.

Minibuses ply the road to Bosaso, and young men and women walk along the road, hitching a ride or footing it; almost everyone here is young, and there are more men than women.

“I could hear Amharic, Swahili, and Tigrinya as we passed,” Ahl says. “How on earth do they all get here?”

“The Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Somalis from the south of the country walk for several days to get here,” Fidno responds. “Some of the Kenyans and the Tanzanians arrive by plane or by boat. But only a few make it to Yemen. The owners of the fishing boats have been known to throw three-quarters of their passengers overboard before they make it ashore to avoid the possible confiscation of their boats.”

There is a group of young men gathered around a pickup with the back open. A woman has set up a stall close by selling qaat . Ahl sees one of the youths carrying a bundle and a number of his mates following, some clearly asking him to give them a share.

“Tell me how you described Taxliil,” says Ahl.

Fidno says, “A bright young fellow with excellent language skills, impeccable manners, assigned to welcome foreign Shabaab recruits here to join the insurgency in Somalia.”

“In what capacity does No-Name enter the scene?”

“It makes business sense for the boat owners not to return empty after transporting the migrants to the shores of Yemen,” Fidno explains. Ahl considers how this works to the advantage of several groups operating outside the law. Likewise, it makes sense for the pirates and the religionists to work together, not only for profit but also for mutual security.

They have reached the outskirts of the village. As they continue south, the landscape turns desolate, burned. Then there is a sudden change in the wind, which picks up and brings along with it a cooler breeze from the sea. The vegetation is sparse, much of it of the thorny sort, with a few trees to provide shade to humans and fodder for camels. A young boy, shirtless and in a sarong, with a chewing stick in his mouth, looks lost as his camels chomp away at one of the treetops. Ahl says, “There is a world of difference between the young Somali nomad looking after his beasts and the migrants wanting to cross the sea, isn’t there?”

“Do you suppose the young nomad is content because he knows no better life?” asks Fidno.

“I would imagine that many of the migrants, being city born and city bred, are unhappy with their lot and eager to seek adventure elsewhere,” Ahl observes. “Perhaps because they’ve seen too much TV and believe that life elsewhere is more comfortable.”