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everywhere, making them appear to have fallen the way the petals of a geranium fall to the ground. Books—in a plethora of tongues and genres, about a miscellany of subjects—lie by the entrance into the apartment and sit orderly in the kitchen, spines showing. Books stand every which way in a metal rack; at the foot of the dining table; and in the toilet, on a low side table. Cleaned, dusted, the books are a great welcome to a professor of Italian literature and his journalist son-in-law. There is a TV set, too; from the wires showing, it looks to get cable as well.
    There are flowers in vases and new curtains, and the rooms have been aired, the beds turned down—details that point to the delicate touch of a woman. In the bedrooms, there are hand towels, soaps, flyswatters, and mosquito nets, along with notes of welcome from Cambaraand Bile, saying among other things, “We wish you were staying with us, and maybe you will—eventually. We’ll see.”
    “Wow, so many books,” says Gumaad, who from the looks of him may never have read a book from cover to cover, and is amused at the excitement they have produced in the visitors, like children in a toy shop. He looks from Jeebleh to Malik, and then at the apartment, adding, “I’ve never known a place like this.”
    Dajaal insists on pointing out where things are, like a hotel bellhop. Here is the soap; here are the towels. The security system includes a metal plate huge as a door: you lock it from the inside when you are in and use the burglar bars on the windows and the one on the door when out. Jeebleh shows them how to work these contraptions, explains which metal extension is meant for which hole. He tells them how best to engage the locks in haste, in the event of an unexpected danger. “Securing the place is very important. You must be prepared at all times. Mogadiscio is a dangerous place, but you can make it less so. Please keep that in mind.”
    Lately, the apartment has been unoccupied. Bile has moved in with Cambara. Raasta, Bile’s niece—a friend to peace, who liked to say that “in a civil war, there is continuous fighting, because of grievances that are forever changing”—and simple Makka—“who smiled, crying, and cried, laughing”—are now grown and in Dublin. They are attending university and remedial school, respectively, under the eye of Bile and Jeebleh’s friend Seamus, who is spending more time in Ireland in order to be close to his bedridden mother. Jeebleh hopes to see them all there shortly, after he has helped Malik to settle in and hopefully helped to find the missing Taxliil.
    Dajaal leads Malik and Jeebleh to the kitchen. He opens the fridge and points out the pantry, where the tinned foods are. Then he runs them through the mobile phones, which have local SIM cards, with prepaid airtime, as U.S. mobile phones are not compatible with thoseavailable here. He dials his number on each, to register it in electronic memory so that they may call him whenever they wish to do so. Then he makes sure that Bile’s and Cambara’s coordinates are there as well. Satisfied, he gives each of them a mobile phone, ready for use.
    They all end up in a room with a sea view—it was Seamus’s for much of the time he was in the country, and later it served as Bile’s. Jeebleh offers it to Malik. Out of deference to his father-in-law, Malik declines, since Jeebleh is going to be in Mogadiscio for only a few days, but Jeebleh won’t hear of it. “I want you to have the best there is in this city, my dearest Malik,” he says, and they hug and touch cheeks.
    From there, they go to Bile’s former room, which will become Jeebleh’s. Malik is looking more relaxed, realizing perhaps that he has been caught in the crosscurrents of a century-old quarrel between Dajaal’s family and BigBeard’s, and has simply stepped into a counterpunch. And since no one has said anything to cause a conflagration, there are no flames to douse. There is truth in the