“I am looking for work, Sheikh. I have a job as tally clerk at the fish dock, but I hoped for something better in Marka.”
“And how did you come by these papers?”
Opal told his rehearsed story. He had been motoring through the night to avoid the blinding heat and sandstorms of the day. He noted his petrol was low and stopped to fill up from his spare jerrycan. This was, by chance, on a concrete bridge over a dry wadi.
He heard a faint cry. He thought it might be the wind in the high trees that stand near there, but then he heard it again. It seemed to come from below the bridge.
He climbed down the bank into the wadi and found a pickup truck, badly crashed. It seemed to have come off the bridge and dived into the wadi bank. There was a man at the wheel, but terribly injured.
“I tried to help him, Sheikh, but there was nothing I could do. My motor bicycle would never carry two, and I could not bring him up the bank. I pulled him out of the cab in case it caught fire. But he was dying, inshallah.”
The dying man had begged him, as a brother, to take his satchel and deliver it to Marka. He described the compound: near the street market, down from the Italian roundabout, a timber double door with a latched door for the lookout.
“I held him while he died, Sheikh, but I could not save him.”
The robed figure considered this for some while, then turned to look through the papers that had come from the satchel.
“Did you open the satchel?”
“No, Sheikh, it was not of my business.”
The amber eyes looked thoughtful.
“There was money in the satchel. Perhaps we have an honest man. What do you think, Jamma?”
The Somali smirked. The Preacher let out a torrent of Urdu at the Pakistanis. They moved forward and seized Opal.
“My men will return to that spot. They will examine the wreck, which must surely still be there. And the body of my servant. If you have lied, you will surely wish you had never come here. Meanwhile, you will stay and wait for their return.”
He was imprisoned again, but not in the decrepit shed in the yard from which an agile man might escape in the night. He was taken to a cellar with a sand floor and locked in. He was there for two days and a night. It was pitch-dark. He was given a plastic bottle of water, which he sipped sparingly in the blackness. When he was let out and brought upstairs, his eyes puckered and blinked furiously in the sunlight from the shutters. He was taken to the Preacher again.
The robed figure held something in his right hand, which he turned over and over in his fingers. His amber eyes moved to his prisoner and settled on the frightened Opal.
“It seems you were right, my young friend,” he said in Arabic. “My servant had indeed crashed his truck into the bank of the wadi and died there. The cause”—he held up the object in his fingers—“this nail. My people found it in the tire. You spoke the truth.”
He rose and crossed the room to stand in front of the young Ethiopian, looking down at him speculatively.
“How is it you speak Arabic?”
“I studied in my spare time, sir. I wanted the better to read and understand our Holy Koran.”
“Any other language?”
“A little English, sir.”
“And how did you come by that?”
“There was a school near my village. It was run by a missionary from England.”
The Preacher went dangerously quiet.
“A nasrani. An infidel. A kuffar. And from him you also learned to love the West?”
“No, sir. Just the opposite. It taught me to hate them for the centuries of misery they have inflicted on our people and to study only the words and the life of our prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace.”
The Preacher considered this and smiled at last.
“So we have a young man”—he was clearly speaking to his Somali secretary—“who is honest enough not to take money, compassionate enough to fulfill the wish of a dying man and wishes to serve only the Prophet. And who speaks Somali, Arabic and some English. What do you think, Jamma?”