Candleburn

by Jack Hayes

Aarez flicked the side of the glass.

  It released an angelic ping.

  14

  In contrast to the Asian mafia’s hang out in the depths of International City, the Russian mob had its head office in the decidedly corporate Business Central Twin Towers.

  Near identical clones of New York’s Chrysler Tower, the elegant art deco style structures sprung from nowhere and dominated the Media City portion of town. Unlike Dubai’s other super-tall skyscrapers, these graceful spires stood alone among half a mile of low-rise offices. At night their curvaceous, chrome steeples were illuminated, providing a breath-taking landmark often overlooked by tourists.

  “It’s a shame about the bland name,” Asp said.

  “I agree,” Zain replied. “These have got to be the two most under-rated structures in the country.”

  “They also perfectly sum up the mind-set of the Gulf,” Asp said as they crossed the unpaved sand-lot car park that fronted the mall beneath the buildings.

  “How so?”

  “You have one Chrysler Tower,” Asp replied in a deep comedy voice. “We have two! Ha ha! And ours are thirty per cent bigger!”

  The Twin Towers were mostly home to advertising agencies, salesmen and dot-coms. Several of the companies within were clients of Chrome and Asp used this to get two security passes.

  Exiting the elevator on the 43rd floor, they entered a typical bean-bag chairs and funky lamps office that was the double of any other trendy agency they might find around the world.

  “White Wolf Consulting,” Asp noted as he walked past the Perspex sign outside the door. “For all your prostitution and extortion marketing needs.”

  A meeting of ‘pretty, young things’ was happening around a whiteboard in one glass-walled office. Each of the twenty-somethings listened to their boss as they stood around a foosball machine. Another empty room contained a pool table.

  “You really think this is the hangout of the Russians?” Zain asked.

  “It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Asp replied. “Best money laundering operation ever. They can run anything through the books here that they like and claim it comes from the legit business. Then, with zero corporate tax, it instantly becomes totally useable cash anywhere in the world. Outstanding.”

  Zain silently agreed.

  “Half these girls probably graduated to posts here after working the hotel circuit for their pimps,” Nate added, “that is, if they’re not doing it still while trying to get a permanent post here.”

  They moved through into the jazzy neon lobby area. Asp resisted the urge to put his sunglasses back on. A voluptuous receptionist stood from her immaculate workstation and asked:

  “Can I help you?”

  “Sure,” Asp replied, “I’m looking for an appointment with Fedor.”

  The secretary visibly hesitated.

  “Mr Milanovich doesn’t usually take unsolicited meetings in this office.”

  “He’ll make an exception for me, I’m sure,” Asp replied. “Tell him it’s Nate Aspinal of Chrome and I need to discuss with him the aggressive restructuring of my staffing levels that he’s been making.”

  “Er,” the lady took a step back from her desk. “Sir, I don’t think that will be possible. He leaves the office at this time of day for lunch.”

  Zain looked at his watch.

  “It’s an unusual time of day for eating,” Asp responded.

  “Sir,” the secretary replied, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave...”

  “Oh,” Asp replied, “that sort of eating... well that puts a different spin on things. He’s in a meeting with Carlotta?”

  “You’re going to have to leave right now,” the receptionist blushed.

  Asp turned.

  “We’re going?” Zain asked.

  “Yep,” Asp replied. “I know exactly where he is.”

  ***

  Qasid examined the puzzle box cautiously.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I thought you’d appreciate her,” Blake replied, sitting comfortably on the sofa in Qasid’s open plan lounge.

  Qasid Al Ghaf was an athletically built Emirati. His voice was low, dark, and silky. Yet, for all its gentleness it carried the considered weight of one of the greatest intellects Blake had ever met.

  Qasid was always immaculately dressed. His alabaster white kandura was pristine at all hours of the day. Pure cotton, yet somehow never stained or wrinkled. His closely cropped beard seemed never to lengthen or get shorter. There were never bags under his eyes or lines from a bad night’s sleep around his face. At all times, he seemed ready to be called for a cover shoot for GQ.

  Despite having the strong jaw and high-cheekbones of a catwalk model, Qasid ran his own company. He worked as a self-employed cultural ambassador – arguably the best in the country – used by every major multinational to provide lectures to expats from London, Paris or New York when they arrived.

  He probably did more than any other single person in the nation to keep new arrivals from falling foul of the many culturally specific laws that so often seemed to ensnare the unwary. For the British, per capita, more people fall afoul of the law in Dubai than in any other place in the world.

  Qasid taught them how to avoid offending the locals.

  He was the best because he avoided the usual simplistic mechanism of ‘don’t do this’ or ‘make sure you say that’. Qasid had a subtler technique. He taught you why the Emiratis thought and acted the way they did.

  While a single lecture could never reveal the true depth and complexity of a culture as esoteric as the UAE, Qasid correctly assumed that once you had an inkling of how Emiratis thought, you could understand or at the very least appreciate what would be appropriate and what was out of bounds.

  On the whole, Blake had always found Emiratis to be an exceptionally tolerant and forgiving people. If you showed the merest hint of trying to appreciate their customs, they would bend over backwards to accommodate yours in return.

  “Now, if I’m not mistaken, this particular design is Afghan in origin,” Qasid said.

  “You can tell that?”

  “Yes,” the Emirati replied. “The patterning is similar to a Persian device – but the wood, and in particular this decoration here, means...”

  He trailed off as he dug his nail into one of the inlaid panels. There was an audible click that echoed from the walls of his home. A small section of the wood lifted fractionally.

  “Aha! As I suspected,” he exclaimed with triumph.

  Blake leaned forward. The beautiful white and grey tiles of Qasid’s marble floor were cool under his feet. He’d left his shoes beside the door when he entered his friend’s palatial home.

  “It’s open?” Blake asked hopefully.

  Qasid creased with laughter.

  “Oh, goodness me no!” he said as he caught his breath. “But it’s ready to begin the process. The way it works is very simple. Watch.”

  Qasid’s fingers moved dexterously. He rearranged the tiles, shifting stamp-sized panes around each face of the box.

  “In olden times, when you wanted to keep an item safe you’d have a devil of a time – so this is like a safe. Now in early ones you had to reorganize the panels to form a pattern that worked like a combination lock,” he said, as he continued working the mechanism.

  “Inside is a small space – large enough for a photo or a message or a broach. There’s also a phial. Usually it contains a potent acid. Try to break in, the phial breaks and the contents are destroyed.”

  “So you need to be careful?” Blake said.

  “Exactly. Now this one is a later design and incorporates the combination lock theme with the need for a key. You see these holes here? There are five of them. It’s a final safety device. Only one keyhole is real. The others are fake. Put your key in the wrong hole and once again...”

  “The phial shatters,” Blake finished the sentence, “destroying the contents.”

  “Right,” Qasid said.
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  With a final snap of his wrist Qasid finished manipulating the panels and showed off the five small keyholes, one in every face except the top.

  “You have the key, right?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately not,” Blake replied.

  Qasid paused. He thought for a few moments, then picked up his phone.

  “Well, let us circumvent the obvious ethical problems of breaking into a locked box. We’ll assume the person who sent it to you didn’t mean you to be unable to open it.”

  Qasid stood and walked across the wide expanse of the room to the back corner. Here a large breakfast bar extended away into the kitchen. He opened a cupboard and pulled out a large glass pitcher, which he filled with water and placed on the side.

  “You think I might have been sent it for safekeeping?” Blake asked, as he appreciatively accepted a glass of iced drink.

  “It’s possible but I don’t believe so.” Qasid said, pulling up a number on his phone. “I think you were meant to have the contents and use them.”

  “Why?” Blake asked.

  “You’re a journalist. Who would send you a locked box and expect you not to look inside? And fortunately for you I know just the gentleman to help us do just that.”

  15

  Asp and Mehr Zain walked through the landscaped gardens around the base of the Flamenco Towers in Dubai’s marina district. They sipped store-bought coffees as they mingled among the joggers and mums taking their children for a trip around the small lake. On the far side of the high-rise apartments, yachts of the Gulf’s super elite bobbed gently on the artificial harbour waters.

  A bird looped low, trilling as it flew between the jacaranda trees.

  “Dubai is amazing,” Zain commented as it began hopping along the branches.

  “It’s an Indian Warbler,” Asp said dismissively. “It’s a common and familiar bird in North Oman. You can tell from the long beak, grey back and bright turquoise plumage about the neck and belly.”

  Asp’s head was bowed. He hadn’t even looked up, identifying the bird simply from its song.

  “Ten years ago,” Mehr continued, “this was an arid desert wasteland in the middle of nowhere. When I arrived there was no wildlife. The place was sterile.”

  Mehr loved birds.

  He didn’t go bird spotting or read about them in books, there was hardly time in his life for that kind of frivolity. Yet, he had always thought them beautiful creatures. Often, in his most wistful moments, he imagined how his life might have been if he’d been born wealthy or been brought up somewhere other than the slums of Cairo’s downtown district, say in America, or Ireland – he’d visited that country on work with Asp: its green beauty, happy people and troubled history seemed different, yet somehow so complimentary to the Middle East’s.

  An ornithologist. Or a falconer. Perhaps he’d have owned an aviary. In another life, birds with their delicacy and freedom, their speed and strength, would have been a poignant symbol for him, he decided.

  Asp drank his Americano. Mehr watched his friend let the acidic taste of the thick, black liquid wash around his tongue before he swallowed.

  “It’s funny to think we’re witnessing life colonise a completely new place,” Zain said, waving his arms with enthusiasm. “Now the parks are slowly filling with nature to compliment what man has restored.”

  Asp stopped and stared out across the pond. He picked up a palm-sized pebble.

  “You’re right it’s amazing,” he said, throwing the stone out across the water and watching it skip across the surface. “You’d think they’d have all been eaten by the stray cats.”

  The stone ricocheted, bouncing as surely across the cobalt flatness of the lake as a well struck ping pong ball dances across a table.

  “Boss, with the greatest of respect, you’re a buzz kill,” Zain replied. “Dubai is in the neighbourhood from hell. If you were buying a house, you wouldn’t want one on this street. Living around you, you’ve got Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The fact that this place is so free – so easy-going – is a wonder of the modern age. Dubai is truly a blessed and special place.”

  The arches of the pebble lessened until, with a satisfying plop, it sank from view. Asp pointed along the shoreline to a car-sized piece of modern art, nestled by the lake edge near the topiary hedges. It was a series of twelve, sharp, upturned shimmering steel spikes, poking from a curved bronze base to chest height like a small section of a hedgehog’s back.

  “You see that sculpture?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Zain replied.

  “What does it look like to you?”

  The sun was bright in the polished metal of the spikes, reflected back and forth between the individual spines until it shot out like an undirected laser.

  “It’s... well,” Zain struggled. “It looks like the shell or casing of one of those trees you have in England.”

  “A conker?” Asp asked.

  “That’s it. A conker tree.”

  “No, the tree’s called a Horse Chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, it means…” Asp trailed off.

  He was quiet and took two sips of his coffee. He continued staring at the artwork.

  “What I mean is,” Asp started again, rubbing his forehead. “What does the sculpture say to you? Not ‘what does it look like’ – think more: ‘what does it mean’?”

  Zain was stumped.

  It didn’t say anything to him. It certainly didn’t seem to mean very much. He could infer from it, and the other sculptures around the park, that Dubai had too much money. It simply bought works to fill its public areas without much regard for quality. Usually, the artists were given only a single criterion for their production – that they must contain no sexual references.

  By the nature of their personalities, that obviously led the artists to push boundaries simply to see what the most ridiculous thing they could get erected was; and erected, in many cases, was truly the appropriate word for the many vaginal cusps, phallic obelisks and random columns with spherical balls at the base and top.

  But what did this piece mean?

  Frankly, Mehr thought it looked like an echidna’s arse.

  “It doesn’t really say anything,” he said after running through the possibilities. “It sort of looks pretty. It’s not deep. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re just meant to experience it, go ‘that’s nice’ and move on.”

  “Exactly,” Asp replied and began walking again.

  ***

  It took forty minutes for Saleem to arrive at Qasid’s house. They exchanged the traditional greeting at the door and then after a brief discussion in Arabic of the problem, the beautiful artistry of the box and the morality of examining its contents, Saleem pulled out a small, black wallet.

  Cautiously, he worked the brass zip around the wallet’s edge. It opened to reveal a set of lock picks.

  “You’re sure this won’t break the phial?” Blake asked.

  “Saleem is a magician. He’s the best in the Middle East. One of his specialisms is escapology.”

  Saleem said nothing. He simply began tapping a small tool, like a dentist’s sickle probe, on each face of the box.

  “You’ll forgive me,” Blake said hesitantly, “but I thought magic was sorcery and therefore technically punishable by death in most of the Gulf?”

  Saleem raised an eyebrow.

  “Are you sure he’s not secretly a Saudi?” he asked Qasid. “He sounds like my uncle.”

  He took a scalpel from his set of tools and rapped the lid of the box twice.

  “Very clever,” he muttered.

  “What is?” Blake asked.

  “Did you not wonder why there are only five keyholes on a six-sided cube?” Saleem said. “Each of these holes is a fake.”

  He twisted the lid slightly and altered the pattern once again. He dug the scalpel under a newly rearranged tile and delicately lifted it out. Underneath, a sixth keyhole was revealed.

  Saleem placed the device
back on the table so they might all see closely the intricacy of its design. His face was genuinely proud of the magnificence of the puzzle box, as though he personally knew its manufacturer or could somehow take credit for its splendour.

  “It’s a marvel of engineering.” Saleem said. “I can’t tell you how unusual it is. The idea is Omani. That means the talents of many cultures went into this little device. It’s ingenious.”

  He returned the scalpel to its place in the wallet and set to work on the freshly revealed lock. A minute later, the lid clacked and rose by a millimetre.

  “I believe the honour is yours,” Qasid said, passing the puzzle box across.

  Blake breathed deeply and lifted the lid.

  16

  “Are you sure I don’t need to be armed for this?” Zain asked nervously.

  “What do you want, a gun?” Asp replied as they watched the front of Flamenco Towers 7 from a wharf-side bench.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mehr said, snorting derisively. “Jesus, you’d have to be an idiot to try and use a gun in Dubai. No, I meant a cricket bat or something.”

  “Yes officer,” Asp used his comic voice, “I was just out playing a spot of cricket along the docks with my friend and accidentally happened to whack the most powerful Russian in the city repeatedly about the noggin. Mistook him for a croquet ball. It won’t happen again.”

  “Don’t be an arse,” Zain growled.

  “You started it,” Asp replied. “We’re not here to kidnap him. We’re just going fishing to see if we can bring anything to the surface.”

  “He’s killed several of our colleagues and you’re on a fishing expedition?”

  “You have a better idea?” Asp asked.

  Zain slapped his friend on the shoulder.

  “There he is.”

  ***

  Blake stared down into the open puzzle box.

  An intact phial of fluorescent yellow liquid was firmly attached to the underside of the lid. The two-centimetre wide walls were lined on the inside with metal, clearly to prevent the device being drilled open without the acid being released.