He was met at the airport by a young Indian man in a dark-gray suit and peaked cap holding a clipboard with his name on it. Webster let him take his luggage and followed him across the marble hall, through the slowly revolving doors and out into the dry heat of the evening. There was perhaps an hour before the sun disappeared. In his thin wool suit, a staple of trips to warm climates, he felt dehydrated, sweaty and decidedly unpressed.
A little way from the terminal his driver put his bag down and asked him to wait for a moment before disappearing into a concrete parking lot. Webster watched the cars driving past: a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Porsche. A lowly Mercedes taxi. He thought about calling Elsa, took his phone from his pocket and remembered that it was early afternoon in London and that she would still be at work. There were e-mails, though, and he started to go through them: one from Constance suggesting they meet for dinner the next day; several from Ike.
Something brilliantly white distracted his eye in the growing gloom, and when he glanced up he saw a Rolls-Royce, glisteningly new and looking like it had just arrived from the rich man’s afterlife. It was obscenely massive, with great square headlights and a brutish expression, as if to say that this was Dubai and ostentation not merely normal but required. He moved back a couple of steps, giving it room, and then with a flush of real embarrassment saw the door open and his driver get out.
“Please, sir,” he said, moving to the back of the car and opening the door for Webster, who for several moments simply stood, not quite knowing what to do. In the end, holding his phone at arm’s length, he took a picture of his car and its driver and got in, sliding back into deep leather seats.
“I have arrived,” he wrote to Elsa, and sent her the photograph.
• • •
THROUGH THE ROLLS-ROYCE’S TINTED GLASS Dubai was getting steadily darker, and as they approached Jumeirah the last glints of reflected sun on the skyscrapers were giving way to garish digital billboards and fluorescent office lights. In the three years since he had been here the buildings appeared to have doubled, in size and number. Now they crowded around each other in tight rows, straining ever higher, competing for air and sunlight, and Webster found himself wondering how many this dry desert earth could eventually support.
In twenty minutes they had reached Jumeirah Beach, where two hotels, one in the shape of a sail, the other a wave, both in pristine white, commanded the skyline and the shore.
Webster was staying in the sail. It rose up from its own artificial island and could only be reached by a private bridge, which curved gently toward the hotel so that guests could gaze up at it as they arrived. Webster did so now. He remembered reading that it had been designed to resemble the sail of a dhow, an Arabian fishing boat. A single mast of white steel rose a thousand feet out of the sea and from it a sheet of glass seemed to billow out toward land, as if it had just been caught by the wind and at any moment would run aground on the beach. As they approached, the top of the building drew back from sight under the bulge of the sail, and the Rolls-Royce slowed to a stop.
Webster pulled himself out of the car, thanked his driver and was shown into the hotel by two smiling staff, a man and a woman, both young, both from Southeast Asia—Malaysia, perhaps, or Singapore. His eyes automatically looked up as he entered the lobby, which rose to the full height of the sail, endless white landings narrowing slowly to a point above. Outside, the Burj Al Arab was modern, pristine, the only color the blue of the sky reflected in its glass; inside, the decorators had combined luxury cruise ship with the Arabian Nights. The carpet was thick and blue, the chairs green and red, and everything was edged and trimmed and patterned with gold. Columns carved as palm trees reached up four or five floors, their golden fronds forming arches around the giant room. Webster, entranced and horrified, was asked to take a seat on a sofa under a real palm tree. In moments two women in Arab dress had appeared with dates and coffee in a golden pot that gave off the scent of cardamom as it was poured, and then he was left alone to watch the well-heeled guests in their shorts and sports shirts and wonder what on earth he was doing in this demented place.
The coffee was good, sweet and thick. After five minutes, during which time, he assumed, he was meant to acclimate to the extraordinary atmosphere of the Burj, a new flunky appeared, introduced himself as Raj, and asked him whether he was ready to go to his room. Webster resisted the temptation to say that he had been ready for a little while, and was led into a twinkling glass elevator that shot them at stomach-lifting speed to the twenty-third floor.
The room was several rooms; four thousand square feet, Raj told him, with a king-size bed, two bathrooms, a dining area, a cocktail bar, and a living room on each of its two floors. Webster wasn’t very good on areas, but he was fairly sure that his house in London was rather less. Beyond the curved double-height window that formed the outside wall was the flat sweep of Dubai, dark now but studded with lights that glared beside the unbroken black of the sea. Against the eastern horizon a thin band of purple and bronze mirrored the sunset he couldn’t see.
“Would you care to join me in the office, sir?” said Raj, and Webster, beginning to tire of this elaborate induction, asked him why.
“We need to check you in, sir.”
“Couldn’t we have done that downstairs?”
“We think it is more private in your suite, sir.” This was undoubtedly true, although even Webster, who might have had greater reason for discretion than most, had never found checking in to hotels particularly exposed before. “It won’t take a moment.”
Sitting at his desk—inlaid with gold-embossed leather—he was presented with two documents for signature. Neither made any reference to his name (the “client” in each case was Tabriz Asset Management Ltd.)—nor to the rate of the room.
“How much is this place?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“How much does it cost to stay here? A night?”
“Tabriz have a special rate, sir.”
“I’m sure they do. What’s the standard rate?”
Raj hesitated.
“I could look it up on your website,” said Webster.
“Sixteen thousand dirham, sir.”
“About four thousand dollars.”
“Yes, sir.”
Webster thought for a moment.
“Raj, do you have a smaller room?”
“The hotel is full, sir.”
“No doubt.” Webster looked up at him, looked down at the papers, signed them with a gold hotel pen, and watched Raj leave.
• • •
AN HOUR LATER, in fresh clothes and feeling something like himself again, Webster found himself sitting by a wall of glass watching fish swim in an undersea playground of seaweed and rocks.
This was the Al Mahara restaurant, the Oyster, and was not to be confused with the Arab restaurant, or the Japanese restaurant, or any of the other dozen places to eat throughout the hotel. Guests reached it by way of a vestibule mocked-up as a submarine. They entered, had the door sealed behind them, and watched the old-fashioned portals slowly fill with water and various forms of sealife. Once on the sea floor, at the end of this phantom journey, Webster had been shown to a table beside the aquarium, a colossal drum of glowing blue at the center of a circular room whose chairs and walls and carpets were velvety and deeply red. He was the only single person there, and as he surveyed the menu realized that the food was simply too expensive to indulge in alone; at the other tables husbands and wives talked in softened tones, their tans fresh, enjoying the theater. A waitress came and brought him his whisky in a heavy tumbler filled with shaved ice. None of this seemed very Qazai, he thought. Perhaps Timur would turn out to be the gaudy playboy of the family.
Whatever he was, he was late. It was now twenty past nine. Webster read every last word of the menu and then watched the aquarium. Swimmer he might be, but he knew nothing about fish. That on
e, an intense orange with two bands of white, he had a good idea was a clown fish, and some deep vault in his memory told him that another, its shining yellow stripes drawn as if by hand on turquoise skin, was an angelfish. But the others were anonymous to him, and the thought that he could be so ignorant of something so beautiful shamed him. One, smaller than the rest, its black satin body flecked with tiny dashes of luminous blue, came and floated by, its steady eye appearing to ask a question of him through the thick glass: What are you doing here?
A beep from the table broke his reverie. A text message, from Timur:
Caught on NY call. Many apologies. Come to ours for dinner tomorrow night.
Webster had been caught on New York calls himself; they happened. Looking around him he realized he had no desire to remain in this place; his friend the fish had gone, and he felt a sudden need for company, and air. He dialed a number.
“Webster, you fraud,” Constance’s voice rolled down the line, so loud that a man at the next table looked up in disapproval. “Are you here?”
“I’m not only here, I’m in the Burj.”
“Ha!” Another look. “The Burj? Al Arab? What the fuck are you doing there, my friend? Prospecting for rich widows?”
“It seems the Qazais are keen to impress me.”
“Jesus. That’s no place to be. We have to get you out.”
“We do. Are you free for dinner?”
“Fuck dinner. You must come and stay. If I’d known they were going to stick you in that upended gin palace . . . Jesus. Be outside in fifteen minutes.”
And before Webster could say another word he had hung up.
Feeling relief and a sort of giddy mischief, as if he were sneaking away from a dreary party or a weekend in an unfriendly house, Webster left the restaurant, took the elevator to his room, collected his still-packed suitcase, and made his way through the lobby into the thick, dark heat outside, stopping only to tell a receptionist that room 2307 was now free.
• • •
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT it was for a getaway. The last of the sun had disappeared from the west and at the edge of the sky he could see a dozen stars, their light impossibly fine above the dazzle of the city. He moved out from under the bulbous sail of the Burj to see the whole of the night, and by a conscious effort tried to picture this place just fifty years before, when the tallest buildings were the mosques and the planes landed on runways of sand. It wasn’t so hard, to his surprise. With its artificial islands, its indoor ski slopes, Dubai was so much a work of the imagination that it wasn’t hard to imagine it out of existence, to return it to a time when the desert ran without interruption into the sea.
The rasping pulse of an angry-sounding engine broke his train of thought and he looked down to see an old American convertible, low to the ground, the roof lowered, its paintwork black and so polished it was like looking into a pool of oil. Constance was at the wheel, in cream linen suit and bright-red cravat, and as he pulled it around in front of Webster he looked up and beamed through a thick tangle of graying beard.
“Quick!” he yelled, louder than was necessary. “Get in. Before they realize you’re trying to escape.”
Webster smiled, threw his bag onto the backseat and was still shutting his door as Constance edged the big car casually past a waiting Maserati and sped toward the hotel’s bridge, the engine shrieking in low gear.
“I feel like fucking Lancelot!” he shouted over the noise.
“Delighted to be rescued,” Webster said.
“They didn’t want to let me in. But when I told them I was a close friend of Darius Qazai their mood changed.”
Webster laughed. “This is quite a jalopy.”
Constance looked over at him with indignation. “You Brits have no class. This, my ignorant friend, is a 1978 Cadillac Seville. Friend of mine took the roof off. I’m glad you like it. Do you want one?” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pocket, deftly flipped the top and pushed one out for Webster.
“No, thank you.”
“I thought you did?”
“Not yet.”
They drove for twenty minutes, Constance switching the Cadillac between lanes every thirty seconds to try in vain to get past the traffic. He explained that they were heading for Deira, Dubai’s twin city across the creek, the only place he could stand to be for long, and that they’d eat before they went to his house. As he drove he gave Webster a distinctive tour of the city, mixing history with vivid summaries of corporate crime, prodigious debt and countless ludicrous schemes that had died during the financial crisis.
“You see that tower there? With the scaffolding on it?” he shouted at Webster, looking over at him every time he spoke, his long gray hair streaming behind him one minute and pasted across his face the next. “Headquarters of United Development Bank. They started building that in early o-eight. Not very sexy, is it? They’ve just started work again. The bank will take half the floors and the rest will stay empty for a long time. But they don’t care. All they care about is it’ll have more parking than any other building in Dubai. People here are obsessed with parking. Height and parking. Your skyscraper may be a mile high but mine can park ten thousand cars.”
“Ten thousand?”
“I exaggerate a little.” Constance laughed. “But they have a hard-on for this shit. They just love to build. There, that’s the proof.” He pointed excitedly across Webster at an immense silver needle transfixing the night. “That, my friend, is the other Burj. The Burj Khalifa. Tallest building in the world. Wasn’t here when you came last. Amazing, isn’t it? Looks like the biggest Biro refill you ever saw.”
Webster watched it move across the horizon with a kind of wonder. It was a shining lance of light half a mile high—so tall that his brain struggled to place it in the landscape. Constance might be cynical about all this but it was difficult not to be awed by the fearlessness of Dubai, the extraordinary faith that underlay the whole project.
“So what is it about this place?” he said with a smile, glancing across at his guide. “Why do you love it?”
Constance looked back at him with real interest, as if he’d never considered nor been asked such a question before.
“Jesus. Dubai?” They were crossing the creek now and a smell of sea and fish and sulfur hung on the bridge. Constance stopped flitting from lane to lane, as if this deserved his concentration, and when he spoke again his voice was almost restrained. “The possibility. It’s like building from scratch in the sand. A blank slate. Nobody told these crazy bastards what the rules were. Nobody told ’em you can’t ski in the fucking desert. Nobody told ’em you can’t have all this property without some sort of proper economy. They don’t care. And look what they’ve done,” he gestured around him. “It’s unbelievable. It’s fantastic. Literally. That’s what I love. This is the most entertaining place on earth.”
They were now in Deira, he explained, once a town in its own right and less inflated than its neighbor across the creek. Here fish and spices had been sold in the souks for centuries, here dhows had docked with precious cargoes for the Gulf and here, in dusty little pockets behind the main roads and the office buildings (shabbier and shorter than their counterparts to the east), between unlit parking lots and patches of waste ground, one could find bits of what Constance called “old Dubai,” where houses the color of sand huddled together out of the way of progress.
“Do you know how difficult it is to find somewhere to live in this city that’s over ten years old?” he said, turning into an unlit street, weaving the Cadillac between potholes. “Damned near impossible. This used to be a beautiful place when I first came here. No building higher than a house. You could see the minarets. Took me six months to find my place. Built in 1936. You’re going to love it. It’s got more class in the fucking can than in the whole of that beached liner they put you in. But first we eat. We eat well.”
Co
nstance grinned at Webster and slowed the car to a stop by two low buildings, each of two stories and built of coral stone and clay, that ran parallel to each other into the darkness. In the wide passageway between them, dark but for the yellow light cast from their small square windows, two old men in Arab dress sat smoking and playing backgammon at a low table. As Constance and Webster passed they looked up.
“Salaamu Alaykum,” said Constance.
“Salaamu Alaykum,” they replied, watching the two strangers as they walked toward the darker end of the buildings and in through the only doorway to bear any decoration: a small red awning and two fabric banners that framed the door itself. Webster hung back on the threshold of a cramped, rug-lined vestibule, a tiny replica of Qazai’s grand hall, while Constance talked in Arabic to a small man with bright white hair who wore a jacket embroidered with silver thread. The man bowed and ushered them through one of three doors into a much larger room, where rugs again covered every surface and three or four groups of men, all in the long white dress of Dubai, some wearing gray suit jackets over the top, sat on the floor, eating and talking. The small man bowed again and gestured for them to sit. Constance bowed and sat on the floor; Webster did the same opposite him, his back to the wall.
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