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tracing the crime
Perhaps – who knows! – the imminence of the moment will bring him out of that lethargy. When he feels himself swimming in his own sweat, in a viscous, thick water, as he had swum in the uterus of his mother before being born. Perhaps he is alive, then.
Marquez, The Third Resignation, 1947
Habli Dali, 24, is sitting by himself on the porch of a rickety shack held up on stilts, swatting mosquitoes as he looks out on a country road in north Borneo. There isn’t much to do except try to keep from sweating, talk about the massive centipede tattooed on his upper arm and think of the man he almost murdered.
He was barely 18 when he founded his gang, and each member had to be initiated with the black insect crawling up his torso. “We were getting so wild,” he says, looking over the overgrown tangle of jungle below, “that we were holding people at knifepoint in broad daylight. We didn’t care if anyone saw us because it would be over in three minutes. And we’d always only steal money, not possessions. Money cannot be traced back to a villager. Sometimes, we’d make 300 ringitts a day, but the most we stole from a single person was 3,000. He was just walking out of the bank.”
But Habli was running too hot for his own good. The Centipedes clashed with the rival Scorpion gang, and Habli knifed one of them, leaving him for dead. The man survived, but Habli had finally committed a crime that could be traced to him.