The Catch: A Novel (14 page)

She tipped her head in response and he started laughing again.

“How?” he said, shoulders shaking, and she allowed him his moment of self-reveling humor. He sighed. “You were on it,” and then with a forced straight face said, “How did you get here?”

“I stole one of their boats. Followed the sun to the coast. I’m not as innocent or as young as I look.” She paused for effect and then scooted the small stack of bills in his direction. “If the hijacking was paid for by Somali money, then tell me nothing, return me half the money, and I’ll be on my way. If it was foreign investment, then I only ask that you give me whatever rumors are passing through on the wind, and the payment is yours.”

“All you want to know is if there was foreign investment?”

“Yes,” she said, “and if it is foreign, from where the investors hail.”

His focus skimmed over the money, then returned to her, and he held eye contact a long time before replying. “What makes you so certain I’m able to learn anything?”

“Everyone knows something,” she said. “Everyone has ears. Eyes. Intuition. And because your business relies entirely on trust—and it involves money—you’re in a better position than most to hear, see, feel.”

He tapped a forefinger on the bills, refused to break eye contact in a way that under other circumstances would have come across as a threat, but which she read as a search for words. “I don’t need this,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then why did you offer it?”

“Earnest money.”

“What for?”

“To prove I’m not wasting your time.”

“I’m opposed to piracy,” he said. “I’m a religious man and pirates are
haram
. If you understand my culture, then you understand
haram
, yes?”

“I do.”

“I’ll play your game,” he said. “I will ask and see what I can find, only because I am curious about the implications in what you’ve left unsaid.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said, and stood to go.

“Communication moves slowly,” he said. “It’ll be a few days before I have anything for you—assuming there’s anything to be had. Do you have a number where I can reach you if I come by anything?”

“I’d rather just stop by for news,” she said. “Unless you have a number you want to give me.”

“Do you have a name?” he said.

“Michael.”

“Michael what?”

“I’m not asking for yours, so how about we just leave it at Michael.”

“Abdi,” he said. “Like your warlord friend.” Paused. “You are really Cameroonian?”

She nodded and stretched a hand forward and he shook it, gripped hard and tight and held on long enough to communicate the silent message that fucking with him would be a mistake. When he released her and she turned to go, he picked up the stack of bills and slid them into a pocket in the ledger. “I expect I’ll be giving half of this back to you,” he said.

She paused at the door. “I doubt it,” she said, and when she left him, she did so with the conviction that no matter how many other lines for information she might lay out, or whose path she crossed in this search, she had already found the man whose connections would lead her to what she needed.

Munroe exited the
hawaladar
’s alley for the cluttered confusion of Nehru Road, for dodging cars and crowds as she walked the street to its beginning to trace her way back to Moi Avenue and begin again. The next destination came with a street name, and since she’d found pictures of nearby buildings posted to online street maps, it would hopefully be easier to find than the
hawaladar
had been.

Munroe paused at the periphery of a crowded bus stop to glance at the map on her hand and in her slowing felt a tug on her pants leg. In violation of the natural inclination to look down, her head ticked up in the opposite direction of the pull, searching for a threat that, if it came, would come from elsewhere: a skill taught by a continent where safety was never taken for granted.

The teenage boy who’d grabbed at her pants continued to follow her, reaching for her leg, pointing at her shoe, supposedly calling her attention to something at her feet. She refused to acknowledge him and in her peripheral vision spotted his partner coming up behind her on her left.

She pivoted to face him slightly. Hand to his chest, she shoved him back, not hard enough to injure or cause a disturbance, just enough to keep him beyond arm’s length and allow her to get through the crowd unmolested.

A woman inadvertently blocked Munroe’s path, and when Munroe stepped around her, the boys, unwilling to let go of their target, closed in again. If they continued to follow her, a pack of wild dogs on the hunt, they’d eventually draw others in, and Munroe didn’t want that fight.

Not today.

In a heartbeat she reversed a half pace. Right fist across her chest and under her arm, she punched the boy hard beneath his sternum. Felt his expulsion of breath. Spun fully around just long enough to glare at the one on her right, giving notice that she’d fight back and that they’d be better off with an easier target, then continued away from those thirty seconds of conflict and another part of what made Africa’s big cities what they were. At some point today, a tourist wouldn’t be so lucky.

On Mombasa Road Munroe found the bright blue two-story building that marked the turnoff to a side street where, supposedly, she would find Kefesa, a local NGO whose mission statement claimed to advocate for Somali refugees within the Mombasa-area prison system. Not exactly the type of outfit she was looking for, but the organization had current connections to Somalia, and its blog contained pictures and stories less than two weeks old that made the office easier to find than any of the dozens of potentially outdated data-aggregated listings available for other Somali-centric NGOs. If nothing else, someone at Kefesa should be able to point her to a government branch or aid-oriented outfit better suited to her needs.

Bars ran up the face of both fronting windows, but the grille that would have been pulled down over the entry was still up. Inside, peeling paint mixed with mildew and just enough cool to take the edge off the humidity.

From the back a woman’s voice, pleasant and lilting, said, “A minute please,” and a moment later she rounded the corner. Munroe recognized her from the blog photographs, and she approached now, short and plump with a purse slung over her shoulder, keys and clipboard in her hand, and a welcome on her face.

Munroe’s story wasn’t long: a journalistic interest in local xenophobia against Somalis and the desire to interview one of the directors, and this scored her an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, because they were already gone for the day.

The woman reached into her purse and fished out a fat wallet stuffed with scraps of papers and clinking coins. She found a dog-eared business card and offered it to Munroe. “You call tomorrow, ask for Peter,” she said. “He can confirm.”

Munroe accepted and for the sake of pretense took a moment to read the card. Courtesy of the blogs, she knew the name and the face, knew where to find the number printed on it. Counting on interoffice gossip to pave the way before she called, she said, “I’ll do that.”

T
HE STREETS WERE
less crowded now, most of the sidewalk merchants having packed up their cardboard and their goods, most office workers already on
matatus
and buses headed toward home. Munroe left Kefesa for the Aga Khan Hospital, her long stride picking up the pace the emptier the streets grew, thoughts matching speed as she plotted the lines for information she’d put out today against the one she would throw tomorrow.

There was danger in working too many too fast: The more people asking questions, the greater the odds that word would leak that she was on the hunt, and those who might previously have been willing to talk would become suspicious and grow silent. After Peter Muthui at Kefesa, she would make the effort to ingratiate herself with someone inside the local office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and when that was finished, she’d return to the Somali market to converse again among the merchants, and then she would wait before beginning once more.

This was always the way of learning what went unspoken, of listening for rumors and absorbing details from the undercurrents: a time-consuming cycle of pretenses and follow-up, of establishing trust and allaying defenses, of creating one ruse and then the next and so becoming whatever her mark needed to allow him to talk.

M
UNROE PASSED THROUGH
the front doors of the Aga Khan Hospital, where the woman at the desk was distracted with a file. Bypassing her, Munroe continued on, made it across the foyer, up one flight of stairs, and all the way down the hall to the captain’s room without being noticed.

She stepped inside the small private suite and shut the door behind her.

Accommodations here were a far cry from where he’d been stashed in Lamu: This room had only one bed and its own attached bathroom, though he’d never have the opportunity to put it to use. The floor was tiled and the walls were painted white, and the room was climate-controlled and smelled faintly of antiseptic and medication. The captain’s sheets were clean, his port was recently bandaged, and the IV bag was half full; the filthy clothes had long since disappeared—hopefully had been destroyed.

The air conditioner groaned on and the curtains rustled with its breeze. Munroe sat, watching the captain, studying the tranquillity on his face, waiting for a reaction and for his instinct to kick in—that uncanny ability of the human animal to sense, even during sleep, that it was being watched—waited for him to open his eyes. But either he was still trapped in his state of unconsciousness or the doctor had been true to his word and had put him under, because the only movement was the rise and fall of his chest.

She returned to the front desk and paid for the next three days. Burning through cash as she was, the room and medical attention didn’t come cheap, but costs were a small fraction of what a similar stay would have been in the U.S. Pockets lighter, she stepped back out into the nighttime air and made the long walk back to where the
matatu
had left her earlier in the day.

M
UNROE EXITED THE
matatu
not far from the hotel beyond the pier and, in a pattern that had become familiar enough that now was the time to alter it, followed the dirt road down toward the beach. Knew something was wrong before she reached the sand.

The menace came in spaced silences, gaps in conversation and laughter where the night should have been fully alive: the urban equivalent of the scattering of birds fleeing danger in the jungle canopy. The immediacy of death crawled up her spine, an animal instinct honed in her savage teenage years, and the uptick in awareness primed her for a fight and drowned out everything but the focus of the moment.

Munroe slowed and scanned for clues to this thing that lurked. Slipped out of the beige tunic, which had been camouflage on Nehru Road during the day and which was now a neon light beneath the moon. Left the dirt path for the low stone wall that hedged in the hotel grounds, went up through a break and onto manicured grass, then balled up the tunic and shoved it under a bush.

Munroe’s breathing slowed and she took each step forward in measured calculation, followed the hotel grounds inward toward lampposts and the winding paved trails they illuminated, followed toward the pool and the thatched cabana with colorful lights strung about, to where hotel staff catered to drinking and partying guests oblivious to the possibilities that lay outside the boundaries of their perceived haven.

She slipped past the edge of the pool and continued to the foremost retaining wall, beyond which was the beach under the moonlit sky, and on the beach a crowd where there should have been no crowd: shadows without gender, without race, without any purpose but to gawk and hover around a lump of something at the foot of the pier while at the far end of the dock the empty boat lifted and lowered with the rolling waves.

Had this been in the heat of the day when Sami typically slept, Munroe would have found no oddity in the seemingly empty vessel, but in the evening, when the world came alive, the shape of Sami’s form should have been visible—on the boat itself, or the pier, or somewhere nearby as it had always been since the beginning—but she couldn’t pull his silhouette from the crowd.

Munroe strained to see clearly. Had nothing but a history of violence and the roiling in her gut on which to draw, but that was enough to know that Sami had been stolen from her.

She clenched and unclenched her fists. Turned from the scene and inhaled the night, a long deep breath in countermeasure to seething violence, hatred toward an invisible hand that had once more moved against her.

Calculation turning against calculation, she walked beneath palm trees and around flower bushes, back to the lighted pathways. Found one of the hotel staff on his way to the pool, a stack of towels in his arms, and stopped him. Nodded toward the beach and said, “What’s going on with the crowd down there?”