Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Malik says, “Let’s begin,” and switches on the tape recorder, supplementing the recording by taking notes by hand, in the event of a malfunction or mishap.

Isha has hardly spoken his first two full sentences when they hear heavy shelling in the distance, and some small gunfire close by. The sounds of fighting erupt and Malik’s headache returns with a vengeance. The pain rips into him, as if his head were severed in two, as his recall revisits ancient, scabbed aches. He cannot bear it. Maybe Jeebleh was right, after all.

Malik lets the tape recorder run, registering the noise of the bombing as if for posterity. A couple of bombs fall nearby. In the pauses between the shelling and the falling of bombs, they hear a child bawling.

When the bombardments cease at last, Malik asks what business brought Isha to Mogadiscio in the first place. Isha explains that he worked as an accountant before emigrating to the United States as a refugee, in the early nineties, going first to Nashville and then moving to Minneapolis. When he couldn’t find a job matching his qualifications, he set up a travel agency, and when this began to do well, he expanded the business, taking on two Indians and a Chinese from Hong Kong as his partners. In 1996, the company moved into the business of quick moneymaking, specializing in laundering dirty money from the piracy ventures. They made immense profits, as much as 25 percent. At one point, they invested some of their own money, now laundered, into funding the piracy themselves.

However, just when they expected their profits to be quintupled, the money dried up. The banks in London where all the piracy funds ended up explained that payments would be staggered, so as to deflect attention from large amounts of money changing hands in the post-9/11 world. With the passage of time, though, Isha and his partners saw no money, only numbers chasing figures. He and his Asian partners visited London to confront the bank official charged with receiving the money and distributing it among its rightful recipients, and he showed them an affidavit and a power of attorney allegedly signed by the pirates in Xarardheere, authorizing a man called Ma-Gabadeh to collect the funds on their behalf. In the attached handwritten note, the pirates swore they would kill several hostages, two of them British, unless the banks duly paid the funds into Ma-Gabadeh’s accounts in Abu Dhabi. Isha explains, “It is a case of thieves situated in different dens located in different continents swindling small thieves, whose local middlemen and contacts have been bought.”

Dispatched to Mogadiscio, Isha met Ma-Gabadeh with a group of clan elders, who persuaded him to pay off at least Isha to avoid their family clans declaring war on each other.

“And you accepted this deal, in which the Asians who invested in the adventure just as much as you did would get gypped?” Malik asks.

“I was buying time, since Ma-Gabadeh said in my presence to the elders of my clan and his that he needed time to pay up,” Isha claims. “This was the case of a bird in hand. You take what you can get.”

“Then what happened?”

“The Ethiopians invaded! And Ma-Gabadeh fled.”

“Where to?”

“Where else? Eritrea.”

“And where does that take us?”

“I am now penniless and stuck in Somalia.”

“What if you try to leave?”

“I risk ending up in detention in the United States.”

“What have you told your Asian partners?”

“They believe I’ve received my share and absconded. I can understand why they are baying for my blood. They are threatening to report me to the U.S. authorities, claiming they had no knowledge of any of this.”

No wonder he looks angry and at the same time guilty.

When Fidno knocks on the door, Malik lets him into the suite, and he and Isha hug and pat each other on the back. Malik tries to take a quick reading of Fidno’s face. He looks like a character out of a crime novel: deviously handsome in a Humphrey Bogart way, with a smile so captivating you have to fight to get your heart back; eyes alive with promise — a promise that will leave you cursing the day you met him. But he can’t be all bad, he imagines Ahl saying. After all, he has helped to reunite him with Taxliil.

Fidno is carrying a white cotton bag with “The Body Shop” written on it in black. Begging Malik’s pardon, Fidno wants to get one thing out of the way: he hands over the cash in the bag to Isha, glad to have the presence of a witness. To this end, Fidno counts out several thousand U.S. dollars and pushes the rest of what Malik presumes to be Isha’s share toward him. Isha counts the cash, putting it in the black polyethylene bag that he came in with; he has the gall to ask Malik if he is interested in having some of it. Offended, Malik declines.

Fidno picks up a bundle of qaat and starts to chew in silence, until his cheeks are filled with a wad of leaves the size of a lemon. His eyes are red, bulging with increased alertness. Malik smiles a makeshift grin as catharsis runs through every inch of his tense body. His head hurts, and his groin, too. He concentrates on his physical pain to the exclusion of all else, blocking out past, present, and future, and residing in a fenced-off territory of bodily agony. Unable to shut out the recent past, he sighs, sweating richly, and then breathes as unevenly as a man who has climbed a high mountain very fast without preparation. He wipes oily perspiration from his forehead, using the wet cloth that had held Fidno’s bundle of qaat .

“I hear you were hurt yesterday,” Fidno says. “Though not badly hurt, from what I can see.”

Malik is in some discomfort. He does not wish to talk about how badly hurt he is — God knows he knows enough about Fidno’s past not to want his medical services! And Fidno affects a harried mood, like a heckled man; he wants to get on with it, to “talk myself silly and at length.”

And as he speaks, Malik is less certain why he thinks that Fidno is a dangerous man. Fidno repeats the story he has already told Ahl, with palpable insistence that no one has paid the ransom due to him and his men; that Somalis are not receiving a hearing; that the pirates are not receiving the money to which they are entitled. Most important, Fidno says, “What the rest of the world has been made to believe is untrue. Please, please write that down.”

“So who is getting the money if the Somali pirates are not growing rich from their pickings?” Malik asks, trying not to provoke Fidno’s ire.

“That’s what I want to know,” Fidno replies.

Malik says, “I understand that every criminal activity known to humankind is occurring in Somalia, from drug dealing to money laundering, people smuggling, and the importation of illegal arms. Not to mention aiding and abetting, or at a minimum endorsing, what in the West is referred to as terrorism. What do you say to that?”

Fidno stops chewing. He acknowledges Malik’s go-ahead nod, but waits, then speaks with a cultivated slowness.

“In a required rhetoric class at my university in Germany, the professor spent more than half of our first class on a question an attorney put to a husband accused of beating his wife. He asked the husband when he had stopped beating his wife. The question was formulated in a way that made the husband incriminate himself regardless of what reply he gave. Now I insist that you reformulate your question so that I have a fair crack at it.”

Malik says, “Does piracy work, and if so, for whom?”

“We are not sea bandits of the ilk of Captain Hook and Captain Blood. The world capital of piracy is not located in Eyl or Xarardheere, which if you visited them you would see are two of the most underdeveloped towns in the backwaters of Somalia.” He pauses. “Here is the answer to your question. Piracy does not work for Somalis.”