The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe strolled the street, browsing merchandise, dodging clustered foot traffic and mud puddles, a game of street chess that involved thinking many moves ahead to avoid ending up spattered with filth, searching for the familiar signs to indicate that she’d arrived at what she’d come for, but by the time she’d reached the far end of the road where the congestion eased, and the pedestrians and shops were far fewer, she’d still not found it.

  She hadn’t known where this market would be, had simply known that there would have to be one somewhere in the city—perhaps more than one. Decades of wars and clan fighting had bled the Somali diaspora out across the globe, but Kenya, because of its proximity, played host to the largest refugee population. The poorest were abandoned, living in squalor, unable to work and restricted to camps, though many others under better circumstances had become part of the Kenyan landscape, and in spite of rampant xenophobia, they had entrenched themselves as entrepreneurs of sorts, businessmen who worked hard and plied a variety of trades. There had to be a place where the culture remained intact, where those far from home could buy what little familiar comforts home had once provided. In answer to her inquiries, the East Indian proprietors at the Safaricom shop had pointed her to Nehru Road.

  She paused outside a clothing bodega and ran her fingers along the seam of an ornately stitched guntiino. The proprietor, a man on the upper end of fifty years, neatly dressed and with a koofiyad atop his head, was beside her almost immediately, high cheekbones and angular nose giving away his ancestry before he opened his mouth. She knew his look as he sized her up, and while he tried to determine the level of her interest in his wares, she rated his potential effectiveness as a mark.

  In English he asked where she was from, a handy question before negotiations because stereotyping worked well when intending to separate a target from his money. Munroe replied in Somali, and as always, when language appeared when least expected, the welcome widened.

  “You know my country?” the man said, and she smiled for an answer.

  They made small talk, a lighthearted conversation that ebbed and flowed as customers came and went: a sale here, a sale there, until Munroe had no more time to spare and asked the man where she could go to do hawala.

  “You want do hawala,” her host said, repeating her words as if perhaps she’d misspoken.

  “I have a friend in Galmudug,” she said, and the man nodded politely as if it all made sense now.

  “There are a few places,” he said, and with a broken ballpoint pen and a scrap of paper, he drew basic directions that relied on store signs, building color, and alleyways for markers. At the sidewalk, Munroe paused in front of a beige tunic. “How much?” she said.

  She would willingly have paid whatever price he named, compensation for the knowledge he had freely given, but he cocked his head, clasped his hands, and asked a fair price, probably exactly what the garment was worth. Munroe paid and slipped the tunic over her head. The extra clothing added to the heat, but this would allow her to cover the shirts and mask the pants, which, although perfect for working on a ship, had continually marked her as a stranger on land and so made her a perpetual target.

  It took time to track down the spots that coincided with the three sets of directions and descriptions the proprietor had given her, and once she had, she looped back to each, watched the entrances and waited for clients to come and go, analyzed one location against the next. And then, having seen all that limited time would allow, she wound back through the noisy street to the door sandwiched between a handbag bodega and a tailor shop.

  The entry was solid wood, built into cinder-block housing, raw and makeshift in a way that indicated it had been built long after the other shops along the street, that it more than likely blocked off what had once been an alley, and here she would find that thing for which she searched.

  All Somali hijackings were financed business endeavors, not the result of a group of rabble-rousers gathering in a boat and setting out to see what big fish they might find. The money to purchase boats and fuel, weapons, ammunition, and food sometimes came from individuals acting as venture capitalists in a start-up undertaking, but was more often paid by a consortium of investors, local as well as foreign—money from Kenya or Yemen or even farther abroad—black-market investors, word-of-mouth investors, who bought shares in upcoming hijackings expecting to make the money back with a hefty return when the ransom came in.

  This was the reason that the naval forces in the Gulf of Aden, and more, the armed maritime security companies, had done so much to deter piracy over the years: There were still plenty of desperately poor men willing to risk their lives on the promise of financial gain, but investors were far less willing to put their money on the line when the risk had increased to losing the entirety of their investment: skiffs, fuel, and arms blown up in a raid or a hijacking gone wrong.

  Hawala was an informal money transfer system based on trust and honor and personal connections, a transfer system that operated outside of and yet parallel to traditional banking. Local Somali boys hadn’t figured out on their own that the Favorita had armed guards and then come up with the strategy to stop the ship and overpower them. Someone, somewhere, had paid for the hijacking of the Favorita, and as it was impossible for money to flow into Somalia without some form of information flowing with it, there was no one better to talk to about the money movement that funded piracy than the men whose hands were on the taps of currency flow.

  Munroe opened the door and stepped inside a de facto hallway created between the concrete walls of two buildings and a Plexiglas roof. Humidity mixed with heat and robbed the narrow passage of air.

  The alley continued fifty feet inward, dead-ended at the back of what had to be another building, and in front of the dead end stood what she assumed was a bodyguard. He was within an inch on either side of her five foot ten, with Somali bone structure, had on a well-worn earth-brown Western suit with tennis shoes; arms crossed, he studied her as she shut the noise of the street behind her and headed toward him, hands by her sides where he could see them.

  Instinct and self-preservation drew her into reptilian calm. Like an injection into an addict’s vein, the first hit of adrenaline was soothing and jarring, a rush that pulled thought and action into a narrow focus where nothing mattered but survival and acquiring the thing she’d set out to get.

  CHAPTER 12

  Munroe walked slowly enough to buy time, to assess the level of threat in this enclosed space. The man uncrossed his arms as she drew near, sizing her up the way she did him, his face creased with the wearied disinterest of a soldier who’d seen too many fights and wasn’t looking for another: attentive nonchalance that said he was capable of slitting her throat but wouldn’t seek out violence for the thrill of it.

  Munroe drew nearer and a recessed doorway became apparent. Inside the shadow of the door frame was another man, dressed similarly to the standing man, seated on a stool, legs kicked out across the entryway showing bare ankles. She stopped a few feet from the door and looked askance at the standing man before attempting to enter.

  He hesitated and his gaze shifted, first to the sitting man and then back to her. She’d assumed she wouldn’t be the first white face to show up at this place, but his behavior indicated that she was an anomaly. He spoke in Somali to the man on the stool, his words accented and in a dialect different from what she was most familiar with, but she understood.

  “Tell the boss there is a white man here.”

  The man on the stool got up and unlocked the door. He let him self in and the door shut behind him with the click of the lock’s reengagement. In the resultant stillness and the several minutes that it took for him to return, neither Munroe nor the other man spoke, although he did step back to his spot by the wall and allowed Munroe her space.

  When the door opened again, the second man held the door wide, motioned Munroe inward to where a third guard stood. This hallway, too, was empty, a bare concrete strip adorned by a wooden c
hair by the front door where the third guard had sat, a light that hung limply from a plywood ceiling, and another solid door that filled the far wall.

  Munroe stepped through and the third man closed and locked the door behind her. She felt no malevolence: These were precautions meant to deter murderers and thieves from going after cash in a country where crime was high and Somalis were the enemy and easy targets.

  The inside guard walked with her to the end of the hall, knocked on the door, and then opened it slightly. She stepped into an air-conditioned office with a wall of shelves and meticulously marked ledgers on one side and two chairs on the other. In front of her was a wide, polished wooden desk, and behind it, a middle-aged gentleman in a suit far more costly than what his men out front wore. He smoothed down a tie when he stood, and stretched out a manicured hand in greeting.

  “How can I help you?” he said.

  His English was crisp with the enunciation of education somewhere posh in England.

  “I need to do hawala,” Munroe said. “I was told you were the man to see.” She glanced at the chairs off to the side of the room. Walked to the nearest, grabbed the back, and tipped it toward her. “May I?” she said, and when he nodded, she dragged it across serpentine tiles to the front of the desk, turned the seat toward him, and then sat down.

  He remained standing, grinning, chin cradled against his thumb. “You Canadian?” he said. “American? What?”

  “Cameroonian.”

  He raised his eyebrows and she sighed with mock impatience. “I carry passports from a few countries,” she said. “I was born in Cameroon.”

  “You’re white African?”

  She shrugged.

  “You do this often?”

  “First time.”

  “And you found me how?”

  “I asked around.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he sat in an oversize leather chair. Made a show of pulling out a ledger and poised the pen above a page half filled with enigmatic squiggles and figures. “How much do you want to send? To who? Where?”

  She smiled and, reading the nuance in his posture, the micro expressions that danced across his face, took the route of playfulness. “A thousand U.S. dollars,” she said. “To Abdi Hasan Awale Qeybdiid, in Galmudug.”

  He glanced up from the ledger for a second and then burst out laughing. Put the pen down, leaned back in his seat, and grinned again.

  He pointed a finger and said, “A young white boy wants to use a Somali hawaladar to send dollars to a warlord turned regional president.” Shook his head. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want or need your money. So really, why are you here?”

  From her boots and from her pocket, Munroe retrieved three of the small bundles that she’d rolled when she was in Djibouti and slowly, theatrically, unfurled them and laid the bills flat on top of the desk. “It really is a thousand dollars,” she said. “The money’s yours if you don’t want to send it, but I’m here because I need to learn something.”

  “I transfer money, not information,” he said. “Are you CIA?”

  “I’m not, but if I was, I don’t expect I’d tell you.”

  “I’ve known a few officers. They tell if it benefits them.”

  She paused at the little piece of intel that meant she wasn’t the only one who had come to him for things, which meant she’d come to the right place. “If I was CIA, it would benefit me,” she said. “But I’m not.”

  “What then?”

  “Just an individual trying to discover something.”

  “In the form of hawala to a man wanted for war crimes?”

  “It’s a challenge,” she said. “A game, if you care to play, which you should, because either way, you win.”

  He leaned forward in his chair. “I’m amused,” he said, “but just because the room is empty doesn’t mean I’m not busy.”

  Munroe switched to Somali, said, “I’m looking for a ship.”

  The hawaladar’s smile faded, his expression and his body tensed, as she expected they would, and the good nature shifted into guardedness.

  Knowing she had his full attention, Munroe said, “A hijacked ship, taken somewhere east of Mogadishu a few days ago. There’s been no news, no claims for ransom. I am trying to find something that has become invisible.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with pirates,” he said.

  “I’m not asking,” she said. “It would never benefit you to tell.”

  His shoulders relaxed slightly, and he nodded.

  She leaned forward, hands folded on the desk to mirror him. One couldn’t understand Somalia, its history and culture, its infighting and warlords and nonstatehood, without understanding the centuries of treaties and blood feuds, alliances and suballiances of clans, a shared cultural knowledge that only those raised within it were able to completely comprehend. Without knowing the hawaladar’s alliances, or who hijacked the ship, or why, even innocuous questions had the potential to blow back.

  “I am an outsider,” she said. “I understand that even though you were educated abroad and have probably lived more years away from Somalia than at home, clan identity is still part of who you are.” She paused to analyze his nonverbal responses, and with no visible opposition, continued. “It’s difficult to know how ludicrous my request might be to you, which is why I’m offering a game that will allow you to win no matter what, and will never challenge your loyalties to your people.”

  He waited a second to see if she had more, and when she remained silent, he leaned back in his chair again and studied her a long while.

  “Not CIA?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “What agency then?”

  “None,” she said. “Just an individual.”

  “With money to spare, and you speak my language.”

  She nodded.

  “There’s no way to guarantee you’re telling the truth?”

  “None,” she said. “But I don’t want anything from you that might incriminate you.”

  He shifted forward again, deeper against the desk than he had before, so that his face was closer to hers, his expression clouded with mistrust and accusation. “If there are no demands for ransom and the ship disappeared, where does your information come from? How do you know a ship was hijacked?”

  “I was on it,” she said.

  “You were on it.”

  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.