The Catch: A Novel (24 page)

Feeling weak and hating the weakness Munroe took a taxi back up the highway. Exited several hundred meters before her destination and, on foot again, stopped to buy bananas and bread and bottled water from a small roadside stall, ate again as she walked.

Sunlight was fast fading when Munroe entered the compound, where she found Mary in the lean-to kitchen, squatting beside a charcoal fire and fussing over an aluminum pot. The woman glanced up when Munroe approached; smiled her trademark smile as if there was no reason to be concerned that she was here outside and not in the room with the captain where Munroe had paid her to be.

“He is sleeping,” Mary said, and Munroe nodded and forced a half smile. Handed the woman a loaf of bread and the bag of Gabriel’s borrowed clothes.

She expected to find the captain awake and working at his bonds, or missing entirely, but he was indeed as Mary had said, fully out and snoring in a way that only old men could.

Munroe set the remaining loaf and the bananas beside him and he didn’t open his eyes. She dropped a couple of morphine tablets
into a water bottle and put it beside the food. Didn’t know if they’d dissolve but she didn’t have the energy to crush them. Swallowing a half-dose of morphine, she drank heavily to rehydrate, eased down onto the mattress, and sank hard into sleep. Woke to sunlight, and to a shaking movement: to the captain upright and shoveling food into his mouth.

Only a small portion of the loaf remained, and none of the bananas. He’d probably be rewarded with vomiting considering he hadn’t eaten solid food since she’d taken him off the ship. She lay watching until he registered her staring and turned to face her, eyes locked onto hers while he continued to feed bread into his mouth.

She stretched. Felt the aches a little less than yesterday and less still than the day before; rolled to the floor and to her knees, limped one room over, and confirmed that the house was empty. Opened the front door, peered out into the compound; and certain that they were as alone now as they could be, she pulled the handgun from the sofa cushion where she’d stashed it and carried the weapon back into the bedroom.

Standing in the doorway, she released the magazine, pushed it back into place. Pulled the slide, though her hand had barely enough grip to manage what should have been a straightforward maneuver. The captain stopped chewing and tracked her movements.

She walked to his side of the bed.

He put down the bread; swallowed his last bite.

She unhooked the rope that secured him to the wall and he blanched. “Where do we go?” he said.

“The latrine.”

“You’ll kill me there?”

“Only if you try to run,” she said.

Although she’d never seen him do it, he’d been using the empty water bottle to relieve himself, and considering that until today he’d eaten nothing after their flight from the
Favorita
, the bottle had been enough, but wouldn’t be for long; best to get him used to a new pattern.

Munroe nodded toward his makeshift urinal. “Might as well take that,” she said. “Get rid of it while you have the chance.”

The captain brushed crumbs off his chest and out of his beard. With hands still bound, he leaned over to pick up the bottle and twisted to get to his feet. His movement was agile for a man who’d been sedated and fed off an IV for a week, and Munroe took note of that; an assessment of what she’d be up against if he managed to run or take a swing. She motioned him toward the front door.

Rope in one hand, weapon in the other, she followed him out and took him around to the rear of the house, to the farthest edge of the property and another thatch-roofed wattle-and-daub structure. Its vertical sticks had been woven with horizontal ones and filled in with mud, and an open-hole doorway stood on the side that faced away from the houses and the kitchen. Inside was a dirt floor, a hole in the ground, the high-pitched whine of flies, and an unmistakable stench.

Munroe nodded the captain inward and let out enough slack so that she could keep hold of him without having to step in behind him. He sighed and walked to the middle. Even with his wrists secured he had the dexterity to dump the bottle and unzip his pants, and although it took him a while to get going, he did his thing and Munroe turned her shoulder to him, keeping an eye on him with her peripheral vision. When he’d finished, she nodded him to the nearby water bucket and scoop, where he washed his hands and then his face and neck, and she nudged him along and back into the house and to the bed, and when he was situated she said, “There are people looking for you.”

He inched farther into the mattress and grunted.

“They killed a boy working for me and then nearly killed me to find you.”

He lay back, put his bound hands behind his head, and studied the ceiling.

“They’re not the only deaths over this, either.”

She fastened the rope to the wall’s supporting beam, keeping it
taut enough that he didn’t have much in the way of leverage to get off the bed, though if he got crazy he’d probably pull down the house.

“I kept you hidden and saved your life,” she said.

The captain gave her nothing, not even eye contact.

“Your crew and the armed men you hired are still on the
Favorita
,” she said, “under guard by pirates off the Somali coast—at least the ones that are still alive.” She paused to allow for a response, didn’t get one, and so stood over him so that he couldn’t avoid eye contact without admitting weakness. “The vessel is pretty much worthless,” she said. “The hijackers didn’t go through all that effort to track and target the ship for the ship’s sake. And it seems that for now nobody but you and your crew even know about your weapons cache down in the hold, so I can think of only one thing valuable enough to keep them hunting, and that’s you.”

He closed his eyes and rolled over, turning his back to her. She said, “When they didn’t get you, they abandoned the ship to the pirates, which creates a problem for me because now the pirates are demanding three million dollars for the release of the crew.”

More silence.

“I haven’t got three million dollars to spare,” she said, “but I do have the thing that started the hijacking in the first place, and that’s something I can use to barter for the crew.”

He rolled back over.

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” she said. “I figure you don’t want to go to Somalia to be traded off in exchange for the ship and the crew, so if you can think of anything that would work as an alternative, now would be a really good time to start talking.”

“Where am I?” he said. “And who are you?”

“You’re in Mombasa, but the real question is
Who
are
you
?”

He grunted again, rolled over again, and she let him be. There was no point in attempting to interrogate him while she was weak and more exhausted than he. She’d get her answers eventually; would crawl inside his head and figure him out, and she had tomorrow for that and the day after, but today she would leave him and pursue the last of the threads she’d left untouched in the city.

Mary returned to the house late in the morning and Munroe greeted her with a smile and open friendliness. Accepted the offer of coffee and sat on the threadbare couch enduring the tedium of small talk until enough time had passed that she’d fulfilled social obligations and so offered another five thousand shillings if Mary would watch over the captain again.

She used the promise of real food and the last of the sedatives to put the captain under and stayed with him until his eyes closed. On the dirt floor, her back to the wall of sticks, she ordered and reordered pieces on a mental game board, fighting for checkmate against an invisible army and a king she couldn’t see while on her side she had but three pawns: Amber; the captain; and the
hawaladar
, who, because of his connections and business, could just as easily be one of the financial backers in the
Favorita
’s hijacking or, for that matter, responsible for Sami’s death.

Munroe left the compound for the highway, for another
matatu
into the city. This would be the last time. She’d already kept up patterns for longer than was prudent and every time she returned to her host family she increased the odds of bringing death with her. By tonight she’d have to have a better place to stash the captain.

Unwilling to squander what little strength she had, she stayed off
her feet, took a taxi to the nearest Internet café, and there set out the chessboard again, pulling up satellite images of Mombasa. Hunted through the maps for Nehru Road and, finding her target, enlarged over Bishara Street, a smaller road to Nehru’s west, gauging rooftops and building shapes, judging distance and pattern, searching out the closest match to what she’d come up against in the
hawaladar
’s alleyway.

She paid for printouts of the maps and, with the pages in hand, left for sidewalks teeming with the daily hustle; made another trip by taxi, this time to the mouth of Bishara Street, and from there followed the narrow road, crowded with smells and heat, squeezing between humanity: measuring, comparing, judging in person and in real time what she had scouted online until she located the match and stopped in front of a white four-story colonial building that angled off the road and stretched back far enough that it abutted against and possibly encroached on the buildings on Nehru Road.

Out of breath and hurting, Munroe found shade and a wall to lean against, dry swallowed another dosage of ibuprofen, and when she could finally push through once more she studied the printouts again, then folded a page and tucked it away. She was close. If this wasn’t the building, one of the others nearby would be.

Munroe opened the door and stepped into a long and unlit hallway, where the smell of acrylic lingered, as if the place had recently been painted, masking the age and must that permeated every part of the building. Scuff marks and dirt streaks along the wall made a mockery of the effort at improvement, while high ceilings and transom screens kept the air flowing.

A baton-wielding
askari
was sitting on a folding chair just inside the door stood when she entered. He gave her a half glance and sat down again, asked no questions as she continued on, stopping in front of each door to take note of the businesses that lay beyond: details mounted on plaques to the side of, or painted onto, the doors, most of which were half wood, half translucent glass, like something out of an old detective film.

She found what she wanted at the second-to-last door—a solid door with import/export signage mounted to the wall on one side, and a law office plaque with several names in increasingly smaller print on the other. She took the
hawaladar
’s name off of both: Abdi Geedi Bahdoon.

Then opened the door and stepped inside.

The receptionist stood when she entered and as Munroe continued around her and peered down the hall, the woman stepped forward and then hesitated, as if unsure as to the most appropriate action. Half out from behind her desk and half in the hall, she said, “Can I help you?”

Munroe said, “I’m sorry, I seem to be lost.”

“Who do you need?”

“Imperial Tea.”

“One door to the right,” the woman said.

With the mental map to the interior redrawn, Munroe left once more for the outside heat. She had to walk Bishara Street all the way back to its opening before she found another taxi, a slow effort that leeched off and stole energy she didn’t have. The persistent weakness, like getting knocked out in a fight she’d never before lost, was bewildering and frustrating.

At Abdel Nasser Road she flagged down yet another ride for yet another visit to an Internet café and another round of searching. Never a substitute for feeling and touching and breathing, this was a shortcut: a point in the right direction, and in the shortcut she lost an hour to learning what little there was to learn about the man who’d provided her with information on the
Favorita
.

She had his name and from her interaction with him knew where he’d spent his school years, but names were different for Somalis than for people of many other cultures: no surnames of which to speak, rather first names from father and grandfather to act as middle and last names, and nicknames that at times took on a multigenerational legacy.

She found him through school records, followed those threads,
adding to what she knew, and then having reached the point where the law of diminishing returns turned further queries into redundancies, she cleared the history and shut down the browser. Left for Nehru Road with enough knowledge to cold-read and bluff her way through to more.

The bodyguard straightened when she approached and she handed him the knife as she’d done a few days earlier; endured the same tedious procedure to get inside. There was no wait in the hall, and when she entered the
hawaladar
’s office, she closed his door with a shove of her foot, a little harder than necessary, and the slam reverberated loudly in the enclosed space.

She didn’t drag the chair to the desk as she’d done the last two visits, rather strode to the desk and, refusing to react to the pain screaming in response to the unnatural movement, sat on it and leaned in toward him. He pushed back and away from her encroachment and his gaze assessed her, top to bottom.

“Someone sent a group of street boys to kill me,” she said.

“It wasn’t me.”

“I didn’t accuse you.”

“All the same.”

“Who did it?” she said.

“How should I know?”

“I’m not one for letting slights go,” she said. “By my last reckoning, four of the men who came after me are dead. I intend to find the others. I want what you know about the foreign investors and if you refuse to give it, then I will treat you as if you’re part of what happened. I won’t kill you today, although I could. And not tomorrow, or even the next day, but there’s nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you and you have to ask yourself, is it really worth it?”

The
hawaladar
faced her, silent for a long while, and although nothing in his expression or in his body language betrayed fear, she could smell a hint of it on his skin and knew she’d made her point.