—
They were not being given a choice. For the night, at least, they would be the paying prisoners of the local Djiboutian authorities. This was the second time in a week that Mokhtar had been forced to fund his own detention. The governor told them that authorities from the U.S. embassy would have to approve their release, or would have to come and retrieve them. Then he said his goodbyes, telling them he would see them the next day.
Mokhtar knew it was a six-hour drive to the capital, where the embassy was. No one from the embassy would make the drive to Obock. And none of it made any sense anyway, because all they had to do was get back into the boat and make the two-hour water trip to the capital.
Guards took Mokhtar and Andrew to the hotel, an array of adobe huts on a cliff above the ocean. The guards waited with them as they checked in. Once they paid, in U.S. dollars, the guards left.
The rooms were spare. Each had a cot, an end table and a fan overhead. They were not guarded. They could, if they wanted to challenge the Djiboutian authorities, try to leave the hotel compound, find the road, and try to hitchhike to the capital. Or they could take their chances at the waterfront. Find the captain. Sneak away by sea.
Neither was possible. There were too many unknowns. And the guards in their blue camouflage were likely at the waterfront. And the town was dark and desolate. There were no cars moving, no people on the streets. It was a broken-down town with a sinister air. People could disappear in a place like this.
Andrew tried his phone and found he had coverage. He called Jennifer and told her where they were. She found the number for the U.S. embassy in Djibouti City. He called, and in his most charming southern drawl, he told the woman what had happened. She promised him hospitality and safe passage once they got to Djibouti City.
They had no choice but to wait till morning.
—
At breakfast, there was a bizarre tableau of people in the tiny hotel restaurant. A group of mismatched army officers from North Africa. An Italian family—the parents, perhaps aid workers, whispered while their child watched cartoons on an iPad. Strangest of all was a table full of nuns, chatting amiably and seeming excited to be in Djibouti, where the temperature was now 115. Mokhtar and Andrew ate in numb silence.
After eating they took a taxi to the governor’s office, where the guards told them they could take the regular commuter ferry from Obock to the capital.
“When does the ferry leave?” Mokhtar asked.
The guards weren’t sure. It often left at twelve-thirty, they said. But that schedule wasn’t dependable. In fact, they said, the ferry might not run at all that day.
Andrew grew agitated, and reminded Mokhtar of their timetable. They needed to be back, the beans needed to be roasted, then they needed rest. Mokhtar and Andrew came at the officials from both sides. Andrew played the demanding American, while Mokhtar spoke in more conciliatory tones. When this didn’t work, they switched places and tried again. Finally it became clear that the officials couldn’t countenance the two Americans getting back onto a random fishing boat and arriving in Djibouti City that way. There would be questions there, and what if they told the officials what had transpired in Obock?
Their captors were worried. They’d never stamped these two Americans in—they had no power to do so, given Obock was not an official port of entry—but at the same time, they couldn’t simply let them back onto the water.
The problem was the means of passage: Mokhtar and Andrew weren’t going to be allowed to get back on a boat, any boat. So they offered an alternative: they would rent a truck and hire a driver, and they would drive to the capital. The officials accepted this alternative, and soon they had secured an SUV and hired a driver, loaded their samples and were off.
—
It was 120 degrees, and with the humidity it felt like double that. The drive took six hours, and there was an extra man in the car—a low-level Djiboutian officer who had insisted on coming along, no doubt expecting a bribe once they got to the city.
They passed through largely uninhabited landscapes, charred red by drought and relentless heat. They drove along the Djiboutian coast, occasionally cutting inland, across parched riverbeds and rust-red valleys. All the while Mokhtar and Andrew discussed, in English, various possibilities and eventualities. They needed to be driven to the U.S. embassy, and if they made it there, the bribe, and the fact of this uninvited official tagging along, would no longer be an issue.
But they had to make it there. All along they wondered if this would be as simple as the truck taking them to the capital. What would prevent the Djiboutian official from suggesting a detour, a stopover until the matter of the bribe was worked out? There were checkpoints along the way. The Djiboutian government was trying to control the rising tide of refugees from Yemen. The first two checkpoints were easy and quick. At the third, the officer and their driver were questioned, and Andrew and Mokhtar had to present their passports. Eventually they were allowed to pass. It was late afternoon when they got to Djibouti City, a dusty city of 529,000 oppressed by the same grievous heat that kept the rest of the country under its boot heel.
Mokhtar and Andrew assumed they would be driven to the U.S. embassy, but instead they were taken to a police station, where a young officer in stylish civilian clothes—he looked more like a model than a cop—interviewed Mokhtar and Andrew individually about why they were in Djibouti and how they got there. While Mokhtar was giving his statement, Andrew called the U.S. embassy and spoke to the woman he’d reached the night before. Carol. She said she would send someone to retrieve them.
The statements done, the stylish cop said Mokhtar and Andrew were free to go. The official from Obock did not agree. He was still waiting in the lobby. He demanded two hundred dollars, but he couldn’t decide how he would define the fee. It was for his services in guiding them to the capital, he said. When Mokhtar and Andrew didn’t buy it, he said it was a processing fee for their arrival in Obock. That didn’t work, so he threatened to have them arrested in the police station.
“Can you help us?” Mokhtar asked the stylish cop. The stylish cop stepped in and sent the official on his way.
“I almost feel bad for him,” Mokhtar said.
The embassy envoy arrived. She was a Djiboutian American from Washington, D.C., and she was so friendly and competent that Mokhtar and Andrew almost hugged her. Still, Mokhtar thought it better to have the Louisianan talk, so he stayed silent, thinking there was a remote chance he’d be detained, sent to Guantánamo.
Instead, she brought them to a travel agent and found a flight leaving the next day that would get them to the U.S. in time for the SCAA conference. It left Djibouti City at 3:00 a.m.
When they got to the airport, the customs officials were flummoxed. Mokhtar and Andrew had never been issued visas to come to Djibouti and never had their passports stamped. Without an entry stamp, the customs officials couldn’t give them an exit stamp. In a rare moment of pragmatism in the middle of the night, the customs officials decided to simply let them get on the plane. No stamps. It was as if they’d never been in Djibouti at all.
BOOK V
CHAPTER XXXIX
RETURN TO THE INFINITY
MOKHTAR’S RETURN TO THE U.S. was a circus. In San Francisco, he was met at the airport by television cameras. He did interviews with local news, NPR and Al Jazeera. He spent the night at home, with his bewildered and grateful family, and the next day, he flew to Seattle, where the Specialty Coffee Association of America conference was an unbounded success. Mokhtar gave a keynote speech, the audience stood and applauded, and he and Andrew shared a booth introducing Yemeni coffee to the specialty world. After the conference, Mokhtar was in a taxi on his way to the airport when he heard his own voice on the radio. It was an interview he’d done with the BBC.
“This guy’s crazy,” the driver said, not realizing the crazy man was riding in his car. When he and Andrew had hired that boat, they hadn’t quite grasped how people back home would see i
t. They’d left Mokha during multiple firefights, hired a skiff and crossed the Red Sea—because they didn’t want to miss a trade show.
Half his friends in the Bay Area thought, at least for a few hours, that he was dead. The day that Mokhtar escaped, another Bay Area Yemeni American, Jamal al-Labani, had been killed by mortar fire. Before his name had been released, scraps of information had ricocheted around Mokhtar’s network, and his friends had feared the worst.
After the conference, in San Francisco Mokhtar was met by Miriam, Justin and Giuliano, who commented on how put-together he looked for someone who just escaped a war. He was in demand from the Arab American community, from Muslim American advocacy groups, from coffee people. But finally all that died down and it was back to work. He went to Blue Bottle. James Freeman had heard his story, and now cupped his Haymah samples. Freeman scored them at 90 plus.
“How much of this can you get?” Freeman asked.
“A container. Eighteen thousand kilos,” Mokhtar said.
Freeman was quiet for a moment. “That might not be enough,” he said. He wanted to buy it all.
The math was preposterous. If Mokhtar could sell a container’s worth of Yemeni coffee to specialty outlets, the profit margin would be significant. His farmers would be making 30 percent more than what they’d been making before.
But he needed capital. Far more capital.
He asked Ibrahim if he had ideas. Ibrahim made lists. They had tapped out everyone they knew in the Yemeni American community. They had to look elsewhere.
Mokhtar was telling Miriam about all this one day in the Mission. Miriam was just glad Mokhtar was alive—after all, she’d been the one to point him toward coffee, and he’d gone to Yemen and almost died. Now he needed money to pay for more coffee, to presumably continue going to Yemen and almost dying.
They were at Ritual Coffee Roasters, a café on Valencia Street, and were talking about all this, Yemen and its troubles and its coffee, when a woman at the next table took an interest. She was tall, blond, thin. Her name was Stephanie. “You should come to where I work,” she said.
Mokhtar didn’t know what coming to her work had to do with anything. But then she said she worked at a venture capital firm called Founding Fathers. It sounded intriguing.
He called Ibrahim. “Founding Fathers. That’s a great name for a VC firm,” Ibrahim said. But when they looked online, they found there was no VC firm called Founding Fathers. They looked up Stephanie on Facebook.
“Holy shit,” Ibrahim said. “She works at Founders Fund.”
Mokhtar didn’t know what that meant. “Is that good?” he asked.
Ibrahim educated him. Founders Fund had made early investments in Facebook, Airbnb and Lyft. They had billions in play. Their imprimatur could make any vague notion real. They told Stephanie they would be happy to come to her work.
Then again, they thought, Founders’ founder was a man named Peter Thiel, who was most recently known for his appearance at the Republican National Convention, espousing his devotion to Donald J. Trump.
“Can’t worry about that yet,” Mokhtar said. Founders was full of progressives, including one of its partners—a woman Stephanie thought they should meet. Her name was Cyan Banister. They looked her up. She was a noted angel investor who had bet early on SpaceX and Uber. She was also genderqueer.
“We can go,” Mokhtar said. Somehow her politics, they thought, would balance out Thiel’s. Then again, Thiel was gay, too. It was all very confusing.
Founders’ offices were in the Presidio, a former military base on the northern shore of San Francisco, in a building renovated by George Lucas. There was a full-sized Darth Vader replica in the lobby.
“James Freeman says your coffee tastes like angels singing,” Cyan said. She was very kind, and very interested and she’d done her research. There was real money in quality coffee, she knew, and she was emboldened by Blue Bottle’s faith in Mokhtar. But, she said, Founders Fund couldn’t be a lead investor. They didn’t lead early-stage rounds.
“We have a lead investor,” Ibrahim said. This was not strictly true, but Ibrahim had been thinking that if they could get a commitment from Founders Fund, they could leverage that to bring in lead funding from another VC firm, Endure Capital, based in Dubai and run by a friend of Ibrahim’s, an Egyptian named Tarek Fahim.
They left the Presidio that day with an improbable plan that, a few months later, had been realized. Based on Founders’ pledge, they brought in Endure. Based on Endure’s commitment, they brought in funds from another firm, 500 Startups. They were suddenly a very real company. They could pay for the coffee to get to the U.S. They could pay their farmers. And they could pay themselves.
—
Mokhtar had a new thought. Now, he might even be able to afford his own apartment. For the time being, he was still sleeping on the floor at his parents’ house in Alameda—they’d moved again—and inches from Wallead, whose snoring was an affront to propriety and the enemy of slumber.
—
Mokhtar had a friend who had a friend named Homera, a realtor, so he looked up her rental listings online. He laughed. He knew, immediately, that he could not afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. But out of grim curiosity he scrolled through Homera’s listings and stopped when he saw one in the Infinity. The pictures were astounding. Views of the Bay, all of downtown, Berkeley, Oakland, the Bay Bridge, Angel Island, Marin. In all the time he worked at the Infinity, he’d never been into one of the units. He’d delivered packages occasionally, helped residents carry things to and from the elevators, brought takeout to their doors—but he’d never been invited inside.
The price per month was farcical. He couldn’t afford anything. For the hell of it he went on Craigslist. Again he saw a listing at the Infinity, this one from someone looking for a roommate to go in on a two-bedroom in the building. Thinking a shared room on short notice might be a subletter’s bargain, he e-mailed the mailbox listed, saying he worked in coffee and was interested.
A reply came from someone named Shagun. He looked her up on Facebook and found she was a woman. A very attractive Indian American woman in medical school. He knew he couldn’t cohabitate with her, with any woman he wasn’t married to—his parents would collapse—but it couldn’t hurt to meet her and see the apartment.
For the first time since he left the Infinity, he returned. He was dressed in his Rupert attire and made a point to show up a few minutes late. He didn’t want to linger in the lobby, in case someone he knew was working at the desk. Shagun didn’t need to know he’d been a doorman.
When she appeared, she was far too beautiful to live with, so any lingering notions he had about defying Yemeni customs were gone. Also in the lobby was a resident, an older white man, a financial manager named Jim Stauffer. Mokhtar had opened the door for Mr. Stauffer a hundred times, received and sorted his packages. Mokhtar’s eyes met his, and he assumed Stauffer would come over, ask why he was back, how he was doing. Mokhtar resigned himself to being found out.
But Mr. Stauffer tilted his head, like a nearsighted man unsure what he was seeing, turned, and went on his way. Either he couldn’t remember Mokhtar’s name, or didn’t recognize him at all.
—
Soon Mokhtar was alone in the elevator with Shagun, rising through the Infinity to the apartment on the twenty-third floor. She talked about medical school, about how she was looking for a roommate who worked, who was clean, who wouldn’t be a distraction—she didn’t say all this in so many words, but Mokhtar understood. He’d opened doors for professionals like this. He knew.
Inside, the apartment was just like the pictures in the brochures. The light was everywhere. Blue was everywhere. The city and all its glass—it was all inside the apartment. Just standing in that room would take a radical adjustment of one’s equilibrium. It was like standing on the wing of a plane.
They sat down, and now she asked, gently, the questions Mokhtar assumed she’d had since shaking his hand in the
lobby. How does a man your age, working in coffee, afford an apartment like this? Was he heir to some Bahraini fortune?
He told her about Yemen, about dodging bombs and Houthis to get coffee out of the country. About his farmers, how in a few months, God willing, he’d be shipping a container full of the finest coffee in the world out of Yemen and to Oakland. And how he wanted to be in the Infinity, overlooking the Bay, when that ship come in.
“And I used to work here,” he said.
“In the sales office?” she asked.
She didn’t believe he’d been a doorman. He rattled off the names of half a dozen Lobby Ambassadors he knew, a few she might have met, and finally she took him at his word. He knew he couldn’t live with her, with any single woman, but now there was a hunger within him. He had to live in the Infinity to prove that he could.
—
Two weeks later he found another listing, another sublet in Infinity B. Apparently there was a guy named Matt who lived with a guy named Jeff, who owned an analytics firm in Berkeley. Matt had to move to Ohio for work but kept the apartment and was subletting his room. His most recent lessee was a Russian business student who was moving out.
The price for the one-bedroom sublet was more than Mokhtar had ever spent on anything in the United States. But he had a vision. The vision featured him, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, living on the thirtieth floor or whatever floor Jeff and Matt lived on, standing on a balcony with everyone he loved, watching his coffee come into port.
Mokhtar called Matt, and Matt thought Mokhtar seemed a worthy successor to the Russian oligarch. All Mokhtar had to do was meet Jeff, who would have final say. Mokhtar walked through the lobby, not recognizing anyone working the front desk, and got into the elevator. On the thirty-third floor, Jeff opened the door. A tall white man in his forties, he offered Mokhtar wine. Mokhtar declined. Jeff poured himself a glass and they talked about the Russian, about their work schedules, and all the while Jeff seemed to want to ask the same question Shagun had implied. Are you some kind of Saudi prince? When Mokhtar had said he was in coffee, Jeff assumed he was a barista. Eventually Mokhtar noticed a high-end hand grinder on the counter, and found a way to work Blue Bottle into the conversation. Then it was over. Jeff went to Blue Bottle every day. He offered Mokhtar the sublet, and Mokhtar, defying all fiscal responsibility, took it.