Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

“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 NIGHTit 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.”

Constance 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.