by Frank Coles
Three million dollars.
That was a lot of options.
My dry lips tore when I smiled.
That was better than death right?
I looked to where the laborer sat quietly with his arms wrapped around his legs.
Three mill’ and Mani would live. That was a good thing right?
Of course it was, we’d both live, where was the downside?
I could buy Yasmin‘s freedom. That would shut Newman up, and my nagging conscience.
Screw my conscience, take the money, keep it, spend it. Fuck Mani, Fuck Yasmin, Fuck Newman, Fuck Akbar, Faisal, Khadim, Orsa, fuck everybody. That was me, set for life.
A no brainer right?
Mani was staring at me. I was saying all this out loud. Some crazy white man talking his own head off.
I smiled at him and gave a cheerful little salute.
‘Hey,’ I said in greeting.
He nodded his head, unsure of the correct response. I smiled again nodding back.
The phone was still in my pocket, but the casing had cracked when I hit the ground. The display beneath it was undamaged and the red record button flashed a message: memory full.
I unplugged the earphone jack put it back in the correct socket and listened to the recording. I could hear Akbar’s words but only faintly. I wouldn’t know if they were any use until I got them on the computer and listened to some decent playback.
‘C’mon,’ I said to Mani, holding out my hand.
He grabbed it and I pulled him to his feet. I rested a hand on his shoulder and guided him to the lift. He pressed the call button and we waited.
On the way down the lift operator glared at me, his loathing barely concealed. He knew someone had scared his friend and he thought it was me. The man’s thick moustache twitched as he asked a few subtle questions of the laborer in a shared language. From the way he spoke to him Mani was clearly the confused runt of the litter.
I could sense the protectiveness of the lift operator as I pretended to look out over the wisps of clearing fog that evaporated into the desert behind us. Finally, he looked me in the eye and gave a brief nod of approval.
‘Okay,’ he said to me in English and smiled.
When the gate opened at the base of the building, the atmosphere had changed, someone had raised the roof while we were gone. Invisible only minutes before, seemingly endless columns of concrete and metal now rose from the sand.
A large group of men in blue uniforms rushed over to us, the men who’d left the floor when we arrived. They caught sight of Mani and one of the men began to shout at me in what I thought was Hindi. His colleagues joined in.
I let go of the laborer and pushed him towards the angry crowd, they inspected him and then focused on me. One man in particular, taller and rangier than the rest jabbed a finger in my chest, jerked his chin at me and began to shout in my face.
The foreman who had reluctantly left Mani upstairs pushed his way to the front. Made his own inspections and then spoke to me in heavily accented English.
‘You,’ he said. ‘What did you do to him?’
‘I…’ began but didn’t finish my sentence, the lift operator put his hands on my shoulders and talked to them for me. The champion of my cause.
A couple of the men shouted back at him but the foreman told them to be quiet. I understood that much.
He asked for confirmation from Mani, who nodded agreement and managed to string a few words together. All heads turned and I was looking into a wall of bright smiling eyes set against the burnt faces of the Indian men, their skin almost black from the extreme temperatures in which they worked.
‘Haaah,’ one man called out at me, then said something that made the others laugh.
The lift operator tapped me on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay now,’ he said and shook his head, ‘You go.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
I moved out into the crowd of men and the foreman caught my eye. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘that man, that Arab, is he a friend of yours?’
‘Definitely not, no.’
He shook his head and sucked his teeth. ‘He is a bad man, a very bad man. Thank you for Mani. He is helpless.’
‘No problem.’ I said.
‘He has a young wife back home, and children, his children are not like him up here,’ he said, tapping his temple. ‘We take care of him.’
‘I can see that,’ I said, nodding approval.
We walked in silence a little way.
‘Where is your car?’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I may need a little help.’
***
The men forgave me the first time I revved the car too much and covered them in sand. The second time I did it the foreman yanked the keys off me and got behind the wheel. I joined the six men who had come along to help.
One of the men, the tall one who’d shouted at me, rotated his forefingers slowly. One over the other, then rapidly, his hands flew wide and created an explosive gesture. He pointed at me and laughed. He then repeated the slow turn of the wheels gesture again, whipping one hand off ahead of him.
‘I get it,’ I said, ‘I was going too fast…’
He repeated the turning gesture.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ I said. ‘I get it, honestly I do.’
He grinned and placed a friendly hand on my arm. The foreman shouted from the driver’s seat and the tall man leapt into a crouched position behind the little car. The foreman edged the wheels back and forth, widening the groove in the sand until the wheels found traction, with a push from us he was out and away. He made it look effortless.
‘Thanks,’ I said to the men. ‘It’s nothing,’ their casual smiles and relaxed waves replied.
The foreman pulled up and left the car running with the air-con on full. When he got out I thanked him too.
‘Mani,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you sir. For looking after him.’
‘Please not sir, David, just David.’
‘Thank you Mr. David,’ he said.
‘No problem, but listen, you need to do something else for me.’
‘Tell me?’
‘I need you to hide him.’
‘Why,’ he said. ‘He is okay.’
‘What’s your name friend?’
‘Just call me Sunil.’
‘Sunil, for the next day or two Mani is in danger, not from me,’ I said responding to a sudden change in Sunil’s body language. ‘From that man, the one who was with me.’
He nodded understanding.
‘If I don’t do something by tomorrow Sunil…he’ll kill him.’
His shoulders tensed. He blew a sharp breath at me. ‘Then do it. Why must he die for something you must do?’
‘He mustn’t, that is why you must protect him. I will do what I can, but what that man has asked of me, if something goes wrong, if I fail, then you must protect your friend, okay?’
‘I will do that,’ he said. ‘Good bye Mr. David.’
‘Yeah, good bye Sunil, thanks again.’
He called for his men to walk back to site. Reluctantly they moved off, their impromptu break rudely interrupted.
Sunil turned to follow, and then turned quickly back.
‘Mr. David,’ he said, ‘what is it that you must do?’
‘Sell my soul Sunil.’
He gave me a look that said ‘don’t talk in riddles Mr. David.’
I sighed, how do I explain this? ‘He has offered me three million dollars of someone else’s money, if I don’t accept it, Mani will die.’
Sunil’s cheeks swelled and then he erupted with laughter. He bent at the knees to catch his breath and then grabbed me by the hand with stubby fingers that were soft like worn nubuck but tough from wear.
He forced himself to breathe and chuckled again. ‘Mr. David,’ he said, meeting my eyes, ‘Take it.’ He shook his head, ‘Just take it,’ he said again.
He turned for a final time and waved his helmet at me, following the
path of his friends, laughing to himself.
What was the problem? Three million dollars of a dead crook’s money?
No problem at all. I drove home through easy traffic, listening to Maria B and feeling like I’d won the lottery.
***
When I got home I fired up my computer and set to work on the Akbar recording, a celebratory beer in hand. I was going to be a dollar millionaire. The Dubai dream come true.
I opened the recording in an illegal copy of Adobe Audition that I’d downloaded from the internet. I was a criminal too it seemed.
Not the same thing I told myself.
Then I thought it through. Akbar would presumably take the victor’s share of what was left of Sunset Height’s and Orsa’s capital to build his legacy. What would happen to the investors’ money? What would Akbar really do? 300 million was an awful lot of power if you were buying guns wholesale. Would he really just hand over three million dollars when I gave him the recordings?
I opened the audio file and changed the format to a workable size. The program visually mapped the recording, identifying the peaks and troughs of bass and treble, sharp spikes indicating where the wind picked up speed or voices were raised.
I clicked play halfway along one of the peaks and heard Akbar’s voice. Loud but not clear, distorted by distance, wind noise and a crappy microphone.
The sound editing software’s adaptive reduction tool filtered out the background noise. I gave the levels a few manual tweaks and then played back what I had. With the wind noise toned down Akbar was audible, slightly higher end than real life but enough for anyone who knew him to make the connection. I heard:
‘You have 24 hours to decide whether you want to take Orsa’s money and write the story of his demise.…’
Then the recording became a garbled electronic mess as a gentle breeze moved against the unprotected microphone. Even that sounded like a hurricane.
I clicked another earlier peak.
‘Why would you want to give me so much money?’
My own voice.
‘Ah, there you go, typical journalist, making assumptions. It’s not my money.’
‘Orsa?’
‘Yes, Orsa.’
‘Let me guess, he won’t be around to spend it?’
‘You are more perceptive than you look.’
‘So you are going to kill him?’
Akbar hadn’t responded, he’d been playing it careful. But a man trying to prove something always says too much. It was dynamite.
God how I loved computers when they worked.
I skimmed through the rest of the recording, lowering the scales and adding more filters to take down the hiss of the cheap microphone. When I finished what I had wasn’t perfect but good enough for an idea that was forming in the back of my mind.
Forget the three mill’.
It was hard enough making rich publishers hand over small sums for the articles they commissioned. Akbar would never do it. The only reason he hadn’t finished me off up there was because he thought I had something on his family.
And did I have anything? Not really, enough for an article but not to work over the captain and his promising career.
Akbar had a good line in smoke and mirrors though – an introducer’s fee indeed, all legal and above board. As if.
Someone was going to die here, that’s what it came down to.
If I fell for his line he’d have a dead Orsa, my recordings, some damn good PR and a scapegoat for the scandal of Sunset Heights. After that I was no use to him anymore. If he’d kill the big Russian, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. But then again he didn’t know I had this recording.
There it was. I had him. I had my three million and maybe more. If I still wanted it. Orsa would go down, the laborer would live, Yasmin would be free and I’d be rich.
Was that what I wanted?
Akbar had been right; the leap from hack to blackmailer was all too easy.
I re-entered the file and pasted a snippet of wind noise wherever I heard my name. Listeners would know who Akbar was but not the other speaker, not unless I told them.
Just in case.
I’d almost forgotten about the camera. I downloaded the mpeg video of Akbar and Orsa having their heated boardroom discussion, then backed up copies of all the files online as an insurance policy, my get out of Dubai free card. Finally I copied the Akbar file to a memory card and put that in my wallet.
Then there was nothing left to do but wait until morning. I cracked open another bottle of beer and imagined how I would have spent millions of dollars somewhere safe with Yasmin by my side.
***
The fantasy didn’t last long.
As Akbar predicted, sleep was never going to happen that night. I was too hyped up and tense running all the angles through my mind. After several hours of uncomfortable darkness the phone rang. No caller ID. Yasmin?
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Mr. David?’ a man replied. ‘Mr. David Bryson?’
‘Yes,’ I said cautiously.
‘Mr. David, I am Sergeant Walid of Dubai Police. You must be at the abra mooring outside the Grand Mosque in 45 minutes.’
My stomach sank. ‘Why?’
I could hear him shrug, ‘Captain Khadim orders it.’
‘It’s four in the morning, tell me why.’
‘I do not know,’ he said impatiently, he obviously didn’t like people asking questions. ‘You identify body. Talk to Captain Khadim.’
‘A body? Wait. What body?’ I said, but he had already hung up.
My mind raced. I swallowed the rising panic and drowned it in disbelief, but the same name kept bobbing to the surface. A dead body and Khadim wanted me to identify it.
Yasmin.
***
I probed the swollen eyelid as tenderly as I could.
‘No,’ I said, relieved, ‘no, it’s not her,’ and then repulsed by the sight of the damaged stranger before me.
‘It is her,’ the captain commanded.
‘It bloody well isn’t,’ I said, ‘and you know it.’ We glared at each other, neither willing to back down. ‘What would you like me to say?’ I said, keeping my voice flat, emotionless.
‘That it is her, Yasmin Souri, a common prostitute, illegal immigrant, and your lover. Cause of death—drowning while intoxicated.’
‘Captain Khadim, I can’t say that because it’s not her, and she hasn’t been out of the water long enough for you to know what caused her death.’ My emotions showed. He seemed pleased. ‘The official line is that there is no prostitution in Dubai. Are you now admitting that there is?’
‘Did you hear me say those words?’
‘What are you hiding Khadim?’ I said dropping the title he was so proud of. ‘Where is Yasmin? And who,’ I said pointing to the woman’s corpse, ‘who the hell is that?’
He scowled at the morning sun and pretended I didn’t exist.
‘You don’t give a damn, do you?’
‘Mister Bryson,’ he said, the hint of an English boarding school accent breaking through, ‘Do you see anyone else here?’ He gestured around us. ‘Apart from you, no one is even slightly interested in Miss Souri’s demise.’
‘I’ve already told you, it isn’t her.’
‘Actually I’m afraid that Miss Souri’s death is now a matter of public record and her body will be disposed of immediately. She will then simply cease to be.’ With that he allowed himself a sneer, a swift click of the heels and walked away.
He hadn’t brought me there to identify the body; he had brought me there to make a point. He controlled the truth, his friends controlled Yasmin and they thought I was theirs to control as well.
‘My sympathies are with the bereaved,’ he called back.
He meant me. But then I knew she wasn’t dead. Or maybe I just hoped she wasn’t.
With Khadim gone I stood for a few moments feeling useless and uncertain. I walked back to my car in a daze and watched the men lug the bloated corp
se into the back of a medical van emblazoned with red crescents. No stretchers. I tried to get my head around what had just happened.
Was it Akbar’s final warning?
What if it was her?
It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
What if I was wrong?
The neck brace was on the passenger seat where I’d left it. I should have been wearing it since I’d left the hospital but I was just too vain. I wondered whether it would really be any easier to drive with it on.
Then my carefully controlled story completely unraveled.
The men on the quay side stopped to stare at the western madman as he smashed his neck brace to pieces on the dashboard, pulled on the steering wheel until it unlocked; punched the roof, windows and seats and screamed at the top of his lungs.
It helped.
If it wasn’t her then who was the dead woman? And where was Yasmin? Was she safe?
I had no expert answers to placate a reader or an editor’s curiosity this time. No one else wanted to know. This was the reason I never went fucking jet-skiing or fell for nice girls. The only person asking questions about this was me. It was a full time job, plenty of overtime, low wages, no holiday pay, and definitely no sick cover. Just little old me, asking awkward questions and making as much noise as humanly possible.
Millions of dollars just didn’t compare.
Chapter Twenty Seven
‘Martin.’
‘Bryson, why do you keep calling me in the middle of the night?’
‘It’s the morning already.’
‘It’s just gone six.’
‘Yeah, well, I need a favor.’
‘Of course you do, why else would you be calling.’
‘I need your contact for Orsa.’
‘Orsa?’ he said waking up. ‘What do you want with him?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘You can’t tell me?’