by Ings, Simon
Ester boards a passenger ferry for Deira. Roopa follows her on board. They cross the creek. It is prayer time when they land and the alleys of the old quarter are swimming in shoes, shoals of them, abandoned while men pray barefoot in its many mosques. At the end of prayers the streets are suddenly full again. Crowds of men – Turks, Somalis, Emiratis, Pakistanis – hustle this way and that with mats rolled under their arms. The poor, who have made do with collapsed cardboard boxes to kneel and bow on, are tucking them under gates and behind municipal bins, saving them for another time, another worshipper. The crowds clear.
Roopa has lost sight of her mark, but she is practised at this and does not panic. She moves, fast and purposeful, and relocates her a minute later, two streets over, in a cafeteria that keeps its stock on shelves above the customers’ heads as though against the threat of shortage. Through plate-glass windows, the mark’s bright trouser suit stands out against a ground of impeccable navy white. A couple of dozen Pakistani sailors are eating egg sandwiches, nursing cans of Mountain Dew. Most have wild red beards from making hajj. Their once in a lifetime visit to Mecca hasn’t cheered them up at all. Roopa makes a call. ‘She’s clean. No minders. Here we go.’
‘One minute, Mum.’ Nitesh, grown up to this, is idling by the kerb barely two blocks away.
The call to noon prayer empties Deira as Ester enters the arcades of the souk. Her surf bag swinging from her shoulder, she weaves a path through shoals of shoes towards the junction of 38th and Al Jazira. She takes a seat in the cafeteria. Her contact’s late. She orders a tea.
The cafeteria is filling up. Dapper Pakistani sailors with bright red beards exchange looks of conspicuous spiritual profundity over mint teas and egg sandwiches. A plain-faced Indian woman with loose dentures sits surrounded by bags from half a dozen boutiques, watching as her son breaks into his latest toy. Impossible to tell what it is. A handheld game console. A toy, a phone, an MP3 player. Some indeterminate consumer good. He tugs at the packaging, lumpen and frustrated, a boy for whom bubble wrap and adhesive tape are the only barriers he has ever encountered between a wish and its fulfilment. There are bits of egg-box packaging all over the table. Occasionally his mother snaps at him: ‘Careful, Nitesh!’ She is one of those sour-faced women who are secretly frightened by their own children – and the boy, who looks about fourteen, overdressed in expensive, conservative jumper and slacks, shoots back looks of pleasure and gratitude: he has her measure.
He gets the thing into his hands eventually, whatever it is, and peels adhesive plastic strips from its screen and sleek black shell. The strips stick to his fingers and dangle, faintly amniotic, from his fingertips. Prissily he balls them up, rolling them until they drop, exhausted, on to the table.
It is a phone. It’s no bigger than a credit card and yet the box is full of odds and ends that somehow plug into it – piece after piece, how do they fit into such a small space? Still, he can’t get a signal. He leaves the table and wanders around the cafe, studying the screen, staring at it, or not even at it: through it, into the streamlined, solid-state future.
Ester looks at her watch. Where is her contact? What if something has gone wrong? She is afraid of being spotted. If she is being paid to watch Havard, then who is being paid to watch her? Sensitive cargoes move over the earth. Nuclear cargoes. Biological cargoes. Living cargoes. Rerouted and delivered, on time, and with plausible deniability, thanks to her: her necessary work. This is what her father tells her. Who could have predicted her current importance? Who, seeing her move animated containers back and forth on a Dell flat-screen in Port Rashid, would ever imagine –?
She forces herself to breathe, to calm down. She’ll wait another ten minutes. No more. She reaches into her pocket for her phone. She finds nothing. The blood in her fingers fizzes. The sweat she worked up walking here chills her armpits and the backs of her knees. On the floor, under her chair, she finds a mobile phone. Not hers. She turns it on. Stored in the memory are the numbers she needs. The exchange has gone ahead without her. It is accomplished. How –?
She looks round. It is a busy time. Most of the people who were here when she arrived have left already, replaced by strangers. The sailors have left, replaced by grumpy Turks in threadbare jerseys.
The shopper and her boy are gone.
Now it is evening.
Russian girls line the central reservation of the creek highway: a bed of human flowers. Saudis in tinted four-by-fours roll up and pluck them, one by one. Along the embankment the dhows are moored eight-deep. Behind stacks of Titanic mineral water, behind tables and mattresses and rolls of carpet, Roopa Vish leans against the rail reading Ester’s BlackBerry.
Roopa Vish: a forgettable face travelling under an alias on a false passport. A deep-cover freelance who works for no one but herself. Who answers to no one, and who has never, in all the years she’s known him, from’95 till now, spent more than three nights in a row with her boyfriend, Rishi Ansari. She is a perfect blank. An unstamped silver dollar. This, she supposes, is what people mean when they talk about freedom. Freedom is one of Roopa’s more questionable attainments. If she was being perfectly honest with herself, right now, she would sooner be cuddling on the sofa with Rishi – but that’s all done with. She is doing away with it. There is no going back.
Information on the Yadav syndicate’s next target is stored as PDFs in the phone’s message memory. She taps in the number of Moyse Line’s anti-piracy hotline, hits a button, and waits.
The phone purrs in her hand. She hits the green button.
‘Who is this?’
Roopa smiles a shark-grey smile. ‘I thought that would get your attention.’
‘Who is this?’
‘A friend. I suppose you want to know which ship it is you’re about to lose.’
A pause. ‘If you have information relating to the seizure...’
‘Oh,’ says Roopa, airily, enjoying herself, ‘I can do better than that.’ She takes the phone away from her ear, scrolls the wheel, and presses a button.
Expected vessels in Jebel Ali Terminal 1 as of Tue Dec 11 16:24:50 GMT+04:00 118 items found, displaying 1 to 15
Vessel KA-BHAM
Voyage KB1103
Rotn 406945
Arrived From SITTW
Sail To AEBRM
Berth Date 07-DEC 23:00
Berth
ETD
Another, longer pause.
‘ What do you want?’
What does she want? She wants a job. Working counter-piracy for
Moyse Line would set her up for life, she reckons. Assuming she can stay alive long enough to cash her first pay cheque. She’s given Moyse Line notice of an imminent pirate attack, but she can do so much more. She can blow the gaff on the Yash syndicate’s whole deep-water operation: blow it in a way that will demonstrate to Yash Yadav that he can’t trust anyone – not even his creature, Rishi Ansari. Then – this is the idea – Yash will decide to deal with this mess himself.
Once Yash comes calling, Rishi will give her up, of course. So be it. Hatred’s hotter than love every time, and she is her father’s daughter. Kabir Vish, who pissed his home and family away to tread the reeking slums of Bombay. Who favoured legal kills over a warm bed and a loving wife. Who chose to die in a hail of bullets sooner than come home to kiss his infant daughter goodnight. Roopa’s hatreds outshine even her dad’s. Dad slaughtered half a dozen in police ‘encounters’. She’ll kill one – but such a one! Yash Yadav, the pirate-king himself. She wipes her eyes and grits her cheap ceramic teeth. It’s time to summon the wobble-hipped, pliers-wielding monster from its lair.
She unfastens the brooch from her salwar and uses the pin to prise the SIM card from the phone. She throws the phone and the card into the water. She turns away and crosses the creek road to where Nitesh is waiting with the car. ‘The airport,’ she tells him, dry-eyed, her mouth set in a wrinkled line. Nitesh does not yet know that he will be returning to Mumbai alone. She won’t tell him until the very
last moment. Everyone is a coward in their own way and Nitesh brings out the coward in her. ‘Let’s have your phone, then.’
As he drives, Nitesh digs out the phone she bought him when they arrived in Dubai. She digs around in its menu for the gallery. Roopa has taught Nitesh well. Rattling off shots in the cafe, he didn’t try to hide what he was doing. He wasn’t discreet. He acted the way you’d expect a boy to act given an expensive toy to play with. He took photographs of everything. There are close-ups of the cafe tables, of catering drums of cooking oil, shelves of fish sauce and piri piri. There are blurred portraits of Pakistani sailors, beards bright red, naval whites immaculate. There are close-ups of cans of Mountain Dew. There are only four pictures containing the mark, Ester, and every portrait is clear and perfectly framed.
‘I need this phone.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll buy you another in Mumbai.’
Nitesh shrugs. ‘Okay.’ It’s all one to him. For Nitesh and his generation these things are just one more common good, like light, like running water.
She hits a button and Nitesh’s snaps of Ester – the syndicate’s insider in Moyse Line – wing their way over to the line’s counter-piracy office in Ramonville-Saint-Agne, France.
The phone rings.
‘ Are you the same –?’
‘Yes. If you value the Ka-Bham at all, I think it’s time we met.’
The next day Roopa hires one of those new, impractically low-slung Land Rovers, its dashboard full of dinky all-terrain controls, and heads east, out of the city, towards a rendezvous in Musandam with officials of the Moyse shipping line. This cloak-and-dagger approach seems silly to her, but they are badly spooked: ‘ If our Dubai operations are compromised so far, we cannot guarantee your safety. We have to get you out of there.’ In vain she’s protested her skill as a detective, her ability to look after herself. ‘ If this is the Yadav syndicate we’re dealing with, then we’re not taking any chances.’
Even with customs stops she expected to cross into the Musandam peninsula before sundown, but in the desert she’s hit convoy after convoy of trucks – unreal, outsize vehicles returning to the crusher plants of Ras al-Khaimah – and it’s already 3 p.m. by the time she reaches the outskirts of Wadi Almar.
The town, bleeding unimpeded along the Al Rams road, has become a sort of mall, laying out, as though on a conveyor, the aspirations of a developing world. Tasselled curtains, plaster lamps and flushing toilets. Carpets with dolphins woven in. Camel caravans moulded into the plastic headboards of super-kingsize beds. Brass-look bedsteads. Sofas soft and brown as turds.
Where the parade of tat begins to dribble off, Roopa stops for a hitchhiker. He’s a Bihar man. A construction engineer. A crane nerd (‘... and they say the 960 will lift thirty tons more!’). He’s on the usual eightmonth contract: a seven-day week followed by four months’ paid leave – so long as he stays the course. ‘Men go crazy, you know?’ Roopa knows. Construction in the Gulf stops altogether in summer, when the skies are white and people (if they’re outside at all, which is seldom) huddle in pitiful scraps of shade. Even the more temperate months prove too much for some. The furnace-light, the dust, the scale of things.
A fence, not much higher than a man and topped with razor wire, runs rifle-straight beside the road all the way to a granular horizon. Behind the fence stretch mile after mile of prefabricated houses. The narrow lanes between them are slung with clothes lines. Construction workers sit in circles of shade, knocking pallets together. Here and there mounds of graded gravel rise in parody of the great, dying ranges to the south. The road begins to disintegrate, its surface crazed and sunken under the weight of so many trucks bound for Dubai with loads of boulders and gravel. The World and The Palm began life here, as the insides of mountains. Roopa pulls up under the shadow of a great artificial cliff, its face networked with scars and cuttings. Vehicles move against the rock. In the flat light of afternoon they look as though they’re clinging to a sheer surface. Factories at the mountain’s foot lift jointed fingers to stroke the cliff-face: conveyors so distant Roopa cannot see the belts moving. The distance from ground level to cliff-top is at least a kilometre. Slice by vertical slice, they are tearing the mountain down and crunching it up. Roopa opens her window. The sound of conveyors, graders and crushers is too distant to be deafening, but the scale of it insinuates itself inside her mind: a mountain being ground, day by day, to nothing.
Her new friend wants to swap addresses: the world’s a village to him, one long Grand Trunk Road. She’s happy enough to scribble her address on the back of one of his business cards. The legend on it reads: Oriental Crusher. She drives away, hazard lights blinking in farewell. Not long afterwards she loses her way.
She comes to a roundabout. There is a fountain at its centre: a dry cement tower clad in blue swimming-pool tile, sterile as a bathroom fitting. There isn’t a hint of what places the roundabout might one day serve. No buildings. No traffic. No signs. It’s just a tarmac sunburst in the sand, its exits blurred and feathered by encroaching dust. On the horizon there are whole city blocks that aren’t even on a map yet. New developments, bankrolled by the Saudis. University cities thrown up at miraculous speed by Bangladeshi guestworkers. Fawn crenellations hover inches off the horizon on a carpet of illusory blue.
It’s late afternoon by the time she finds her way again. The foothills of Musandam come into view.
She’s booked a room in a guest house in Khasab, Musandam’s only sizeable town. From here it’s less than sixty miles over the water to the Iranian mainland. The Iranian island of Qeshm is only forty miles away. The border is so porous the police permit the smuggling of just about anything they can’t see the harm in. The smugglers are Iranian and far wealthier than Khasab’s local youth, who gather by the quayside to stare enviously at the speedboats: shallow spoons of fibreglass each powered by two 200hp engines.
‘These days it’s all goats for cigarettes.’
Roopa turns. Her contact is a white man, not any taller than she is, in a dark suit and a shirt without a tie. ‘There was a time these boys bartered hashish for white goods. Dishwashers. Washing machines.’ He holds out his hand. ‘David Brooks.’
‘Roopa Vish,’ she says, returning the shake.
They stand together on the quay, watching the work.
‘You gave us a hell of a scare,’ he says.
‘Where’s the Ka-Bham ?’
‘In Sittwe, taking on a fresh crew.’
‘There you are, then. It’s as good as lost.’
‘It’s a tub. A tramp. Not remotely valuable.’
‘You’re happy to lose it?’
David shrugs. ‘We’re happy to wait and see what happens.’ ‘And the crew?’
‘What about the crew?’
They watch the smugglers prepare. Their boats are more like planes; they can make the crossing to Bandar-Abbas in less than an hour.
David says, ‘We brought you here to ship you out. If what you say is going to happen happens, then we think you can be valuable to us.’
Roopa shakes her head. ‘There’s something I have to do first.’
‘Oh?’
‘I have to be getting back to Mumbai.’
‘Into the jaws of the tiger, then.’
Roopa says nothing.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We have time to talk this through, at least. You coming all this way. Let’s eat.’
There are expensive restaurants in town, but David leads her past them all and to a bare cream shell without a sign. Plastic chairs, stacks of mineral water in boxes, two industrial-strength ceiling fans and bulbous steel ceiling lights. Torn grey linoleum. David orders for them both and whole kingfish are brought to them on outsize plates. On the next table a party of eco-tourists are bragging at each other. Bulging waists over khaki combat pants. Camouflage camelbacks slung over the backs of their chairs. Big yellow scarfs to protect them from the sand. They’re looking for leopard, they say. They insist on being friend
ly. They insist on leaning over and talking.
When Roopa and David leave the eco-tourists are lined up in the car park, eyes turned towards Iran. They’re comparing GPS readings, getting wet over the number of satellites that hover above the Strait. David wishes them goodnight. ‘Are they yours?’ Roopa asks him, once they’re out of earshot.
David smiles. ‘Now that would be telling.’ He leads her back across the apron of reclaimed land towards the harbour and her Land Rover. He’s tucked her arm in his, old-school. He has a crabwise gait. If it’s an injury, it’s an old one; something he is used to.
The boys and the boats have vanished. ‘Their boats are so shallow you can’t see them on radar. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have fishing boats out there armed with rocket launchers. They never hit anything.’ David is full of these factoids and little anecdotes. He has it in him to be a bore: a fact that Roopa finds strangely reassuring.
Now they are back where they started, looking over the water. David tells her: ‘If we take the correct channels, if we pass your information to the International Maritime Bureau, our insurers will hike up our premiums across the entire fleet.’
Roopa shakes her head. ‘An open and honest game is the only game I’m prepared to play.’
David’s exasperated. ‘Who made you World Policeman?’
Roopa shrugs. ‘If that’s your attitude, I’m sorry to have troubled you. To hell with it. I’ll send everything I have to IMB’s anti-piracy centre in Kuala Lumpur, let them sort it out.’
David reaches into the pocket of his suit for cigarettes. ‘Jesus.’ He doesn’t offer her one. ‘You really are pulling the tiger’s tail, aren’t you?’