Jeebleh sucked at his teeth, sensing there was no point asking the same question for the third time. He suspected she wouldn’t be goaded into giving away more than she wanted.
Now it was Shanta asking a question: “Why do you think Faahiye had a hand in my daughter’s disappearance? I understand from talking to someone that you believe this to be the case.”
“I don’t remember saying any such thing to anyone.”
“You’ve been to see Caloosha,” she said, “and you’ve talked to Af-Laawe, and you’ve also spoken at length with Bile. What are your views? What are your conclusions?”
“I haven’t come to any yet.”
“Has Faahiye kidnapped her? He would need help from one of the Strongmen. Or has he done it on his own? And if so, why?”
He noted this time that she spoke her husband’s name like a curse. Then she lapsed into a ruinous state of mind, appearing overwhelmed with the genuine emotion of a love gone sour, or hate gone seedy. Self-consciously, her hand went close to but dared not touch the well of her eyes. He remembered her as a child, remembered how she used to cry at the slightest pretext. By all accounts, hers was a life of high-flown emotions now, of days filled with incessant weeping.
“We’re under a curse, as a family,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Caloosha had you and Bile, his own brothers, locked up, and is suspected of killing his stepfather. More recently, since our mother’s death, several events, one after another, have turned what I, for one, first imagined to be blessings — the birth I had looked forward to all my life, and freedom for a brother who had been in prison and whom I waited to welcome — into curses. Times being abnormal, Bile touches me where he isn’t supposed to, and does taboo things that he isn’t allowed to. There’s talk of murder, and there’s talk of robbery. My husband questions, I take sides. We quarrel, my husband and I, and he leaves. My brother is hurt, and spends more time sulking than I’ve ever known him to do, telling me in so many words that I’ve brought ruin on our heads. My daughter and her playmate vanish mysteriously. Are they kidnapped? Have they been taken hostage? And if so, who’s got them? Does their disappearance have a political angle? When I was young, not given to reflection and not in the know, I used to think there was something remarkable about our family, something unique. Now it seems we’re uniquely cursed. And things aren’t what they’ve appeared to be for much of my life.”
“Has Faahiye been in touch?” Jeebleh asked.
“The phone rings.”
He stared at her, saying nothing, puzzled.
“My phone rings, and when I pick it up, it falls silent,” she continued, snuffling. “It rings again, and again no one speaks, no one says anything. So I don’t pick it up anymore.”
“Why would the kidnappers call and then say nothing?”
“I’m sure it’s Faahiye!”
“Why would he be doing that?”
“To torture me!”
Jeebleh waited warily for her to explain further, but she ceased speaking altogether, swept away by a violent torrent of emotion. There was a feverish intensity to her behavior. He offered her his handkerchief, which she accepted and held in her hand, staring at it as if she didn’t know what use to put it to. Again snuffling, she said, “Raasta was a wonder child!”
“Why ‘was,’ why not ‘is’?”
“Because when she’s returned to us, she’ll have changed from the child I knew as my baby, and will have become a total stranger to me. She’ll have been tortured. No child can survive this kind of torment. Her days of captivity will haunt her forever. My daughter is living in fear.”
“No hard news about her, none whatsoever?”
“No one tells me anything.”
“Why haven’t you spoken of your worries to Bile?”
“For fear that he might think I am inventing things,” she said.
“I feel certain that he won’t,” Jeebleh said.
“Unless it rings when he is here, he won’t believe me, he’ll assume that I am a distraught mother inventing things, like the ringing of a phone with no one at the other end. It’s possible that someone is keeping an eye on my movements, and on whoever comes here. The phone rings after Bile has come and gone, not when he is here. Am I mad and imagining things? I don’t know. Maybe I hear the phones ringing in my head, because I wish someone to get in touch with me. I am alone for much of the time, you see. I’ve no friends left. Many of them avoid me, because I keep talking about Raasta and Makka. But even in my madness, my daughter wants to come home, to me, away from the deceivers!”
When he heard her say “deceivers,” he concluded that she wasn’t completely mad, for he knew whom she meant. He felt more bound to her now, felt a deeper kinship, as a fellow sufferer at their hands.
She said, “I am a mother, deprived of the company of her loving daughter. It shouldn’t surprise you or anyone else if I follow a bend and go where madness, beckoning to my sense of despair, is the supreme authority.”
“You’re not mad!” he assured her.
“I only have circumstantial evidence,” she said, and the sad memory of what scanty evidence she had made her bend over. She held her head between her knees, sobbing.
They were back in her preteen years, when she used to embark on bouts of intense caterwauling, crying her throat sore until she got what she was after. Now she was a tantrum-throwing kid. She could contain herself one minute in lawyerese, her syntax perfect, her logic impeccable, and in the next minute burst into tears, and look mad and miserable.
He wouldn’t lose hope. He would badger her until he got some adequate answers out of her: “Has anyone that you know of seen Raasta?”
“Af-Laawe has seen Faahiye!”
Clever at taking advantage of anyone with needs, Af-Laawe qualified as one of the deceivers. He had the knack of turning up to offer a hand. Who was Af-Laawe, and what was his role in all this?
“Have you mentioned this to Bile?”
“I have.”
“And his reaction?”
“He promised he would look into the matter.”
“Will he, do you think?”
“I doubt that he ever will!”
She was on firmer ground now. This was clear from her body language and her voice. She sat facing the curtainless window, now open, and the sun reflected in her eye made her appear less sad, but a trifle sterner.
She said, “Because Af-Laawe sees himself as a rival of Bile’s, and as the other, that’s to say, Bile’s darker side, he’s difficult to catch out. Af-Laawe will tell you that he’s committed to the well-being of the dead, as if the dead cared, and that he buries them at no charge, which isn’t true, of course, and that, like Bile, he came upon a windfall of funds with a mysterious origin. The truth is different. We know where Af-Laawe’s money came from, that he is a devious fellow, and that Caloosha is his mentor — the overall head of what I’d like to call, for lack of a better term, the cartel. And don’t think I’m mad or a raving paranoiac — I’m not, I’ll have you know.”
She was making a convincing case, but he wanted to know: “What cartel? What’re you talking about?”
“The business interests of the cartel are suspect,” she said. “Initially established by Af-Laawe as an NGO to help with ferrying and burying the city’s unclaimed dead, it’s recently branched out into other nefarious activities. The cartel, my reliable source has it, sends all the receipted bills to a Dutch charity based in Utrecht. But that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is what happens before the corpses are buried. Terrible things are done to the bodies between the time they are collected in Af-Laawe’s van and the time they are taken to the cemetery. A detour is made to a safe house, where surgeons on retainer are on twenty-four-hour call. These surgeons remove the kidneys and hearts of the recently dead. Once these internal organs are tested and found to be in good working order, they are flown to hospitals in the Middle East, where they are sold and transplanted.”