The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

  Chapter 6

  Why had I come to Dubai?

  Specifically: to rob the royal family. My target was the Chrysalis diamond, the centrepiece of a necklace created in 1912 for Afise Lakerba, wife of Mehmed VI, the last Ottoman Sultan. When the monarchy was abolished, the jewels went on a romp through the auction houses of the world, owned at various stages by petrochemical giants, Hollywood starlets and the wife of the President of Colombia before, made infinitely more valuable by its history, returning to the Middle East via Leena’s aunt, Shamma bint Bandar, one of nearly four thousand royal scions of the House of Saudi.

  Why those diamonds?

  Because three separate teams had all made passes at them in the last five years, and failed. Their failure meant two things: a challenge and a buyer.

  It’s easy, in my position, to be amateurish about these things. I find the buzz is greater when the puzzle fits together. On a whim, I once stole the President of Paraguay’s wristwatch, but it only fetched $250 and the buzz was nothing compared to the day I stole £98,000 in a casino heist that went off flawlessly, the most perfect execution of a beautiful plan, months in the making. You make your own highs in my line of work.

  Shamma bint Bandar was coming to Dubai to party and celebrate with the makers of Perfection, and with her came the Chrysalis.

  Leena was my way in, but as I circled round her, I found Reina ever more distracting.

  “We haven’t met yet,” I told Reina, the fourth time we went running together. “My name is Rachel Donovan.”

  And again, “We haven’t met yet,” I said, as we sat down together to listen to a recital of Syrian folk music in a bar beneath the hotel. “But I’m so very pleased to meet you.”

  “I am part of an important family, in a way,” she explained with a sigh, as we shared mango served on a bed of crushed ice. “But in this place that doesn’t mean anything. I’m trying to be better.”

  “Better at what?”

  “At everything. Better at talking to people. Better at learning, understanding, at expressing myself and understanding others. Better looking, better thinking, just… better. It is a good thing to strive for, no?”

  Have you considered buying any of these life-changing magazines? Read inspirational stories of women who found their Perfect Lives!

  “Yes. I think it is.”

  “I keep a blog.”

  “I think I’ve read it.”

  “Have you? Not many have – I should cherish you. Too many voices all at once on the internet, screaming, just all the time screaming, sometimes it’s hard to be heard. Sometimes I think that the world is full of screaming.”

  I said… something. Something flat, trying to find better words, good words like the woman eating mango with Reina bint Badr al Mustakfi should have said, but somehow, in the course of our talking, I’d slipped out of character, and only Hope Arden remained, and she had very little to say for herself.

  “I thought for a while that I would fight to find my place,” mused Reina, staring at nothing much. “Now I just want to be happy where I am.”

  The next day she was dead.

  I copied her emails onto my computer; threw her mobile phone into the sea.

  Emails from her parents, worrying about her. From a couple of friends, hoping she was well, pictures of happy families, children growing up, isn’t it wonderful?

  From activist groups campaigning for civil rights, immigrant rights, environmental responsibility, legal reform, etc.

  From Perfection itself, an automatically generated reminder.

  We see that you’ve been falling behind on your beauty and retail regime, it said. You have lost 400 points in the last week. Remember: perfection is in the mind as well as the body. Only you can chose to be perfect. Here are some inspirational stories of perfect people from the 106, to help encourage you to get back on track.

  A link – pictures, men, women. Beautiful – all of them beautiful. Teeth, hair, lips, smiles, chests, breasts.

  Antonyms of frigid: amicable, lovable, responsive, hot, amorous.

  I read through to the end of her little handwritten notebook.

  Leena is happy, she wrote. She is incredibly happy. She is stupid, and lazy, and spoilt, and dull, and perhaps at some time knew it, and then found a way to forget that she knew anything at all. I thought maybe her confidence was just a screen, a shield to protect herself from her own sorrow, but now I see that the surface is the truth, the depths are the surfaces.

  I ate a meal yesterday by myself, but when I looked at the bill I saw there were two meals ordered, and I hadn’t paid.

  Today, Perfection sent me pictures of a model at a wedding, to remind me of what I could be. When she fucks a guy, does he scream in ecstasy when he comes? Does she? I think I am meant to think that she does.

  The screaming is loud tonight. It’s so very loud.

  Those were her last words. I sat by the sea and watched the waves for an hour, then two. I wondered if she would be pleased, knowing that someone was thinking of her. I wondered if she’d be happy, given what I intended to do. I hoped she would be, and after much thought, I burned her notebook, and scattered the ashes into the sea.

  Chapter 7

  Types of theft: mugging, pickpocketing, smash-and-grab, autotheft, burglary, the long con, the quick graft, forgery, identity theft, shoplifting, fencing, embezzlement, larceny, looting, stealing, filching.

  Actus reus: guilty act.

  Mens reus: guilty mind.

  An innocent woman may perform actus reus when she picks up another woman’s handbag by mistake. A guilty woman has mens reus when she does so deliberately. One may be a civil liability; only with both does the matter come before a criminal court.

  I didn’t want to be a thief.

  My dad was a copper; he met me a few times down the station. Most people were there for things done while drunk, high or desperate. One, a drug dealer, grinned as they took his fingerprints, and laughed at the sergeant and called him “mate” and said, “It won’t go nowhere, you’ll see!” and he was right, and waved as he left the station, “Better luck next time, mate,” gold link necklace around his throat, grubby sneakers on his feet.

  The only thief I saw was seventeen years old, and even though I was just fourteen, he looked young to me. He was pale as a pillow, skinny as a stick, and he swung between inaction and violence like a weathervane in a tornado.

  Now: still, shoulders down, knees bent, feet turned inwards.

  Now: struggling, kicking, twisting, dropping onto the floor, trying to bash his own head out against the counter.

  And now: still, silent.

  And now: screaming, screaming, fucking, fucking, screaming, no words just fucking, fucking, screaming.

  And now: utterly calm. Utterly silent. Staring at a locked door.

  That day, my dad was supposed to take me to see a film, but he had to go back in to help apply restraints to the kid in the cell. They left him wrapped up like a carpet for twenty minutes, released him to avoid risk of suffocation, and Dad finally took me to the cinema, but the film had already begun, and the next night the kid was taken to hospital after smashing his skull on the cell wall.

  “Sometimes people say it’s easy,” mused my dad, as he drove me home from our failed outing, a desultory, apologetic pile of half-eaten chips on my lap. “Easier to steal than to work; easier to lie, to get away with it. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes – too much – the system just isn’t geared for the ones who have nothing better. The dropouts and the addicts; the ones with nowhere to go. Sometimes it’s easier to cheat, because life is hard. But you gotta have your mates and your family and people around you who love you and give a damn, and you gotta have hope, big hopes for the future, ideas about what you want, because if you’ve got all of that, then living becomes easier - not easy, just a bit easier - and you can see that cheating is desperate, and desperate is hard.”

  I said nothing, still fuming at my dad for having again been a victim of to
o much work, too many broken promises.

  He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive, and didn’t turn the radio on.

  Chapter 8

  The day after Reina died, Princess Shamma bint Bandar arrived in Dubai, bearing the Chrysalis diamond. I watched, bags already packed, as Leena met her aunty and her entourage outside the hotel.

  “Darling, you look beautiful!” exclaimed her aunt, and squeak, so much to tell you, oh my God, it’s been amazing, replied Leena.

  No one mentioned Reina.

  I stood awhile in the sun, ignoring the taxi the porter had called to take me to the airport.

  “Ma’am?” he said, and when I didn’t answer, “Ma’am? Do you still want the cab?”

  “No, thank you,” I replied, and was surprised by the certainty in my voice. “I think perhaps I’m not yet done here.”

  So saying, I picked my suitcase up, and walked back into the hotel.

  I gathered tools for my crime.

  Security can spot a scout a mile off, but security never remembered me long enough to care. I stalked queens and princes, shook hands with diplomats and spies, and no one looked twice. No one ever looks twice at me.

  The plastic explosive I acquired from an ex-demolitions expert who’d been sacked from his job in Qatar after eight workers died on his shift.

  “People die out there all the time,” he explained, as he handed over the goods in a drawstring bag. “People are cheaper than steel. Why does it matter? Scapegoat, they made me. Hypocrisy; the death of the middle man.”

  Shutting down the electricity on cue was harder, but far from impossible. The virus for the job I purchased from a supplier called BarbieDestroyedTheMoon. She – I hoped she was a she – had no issues selling to me over the darknet since, as she pointed out, Cop, thief, spy or fool, you ain’t never tracing me.

  And what exactly, I asked, was it I was purchasing for my bitcoins?

  It’s ripped off a CIA design, she explained. They went and used it on Iran to shut down its nuclear program, but it went public on their asses. CIA are fucking pussies. NSA are the ones you gotta respect.

  I set a timecode, and implanted the virus on the laptop of a junior engineer going through an unhappy and, it turned out, entirely irrational romantic trauma.

  “My wife is sleeping with another man!” he wailed, as we shared sushi and green tea at a Japanese café whose walls were coated with images of pink, wide-eyed could-be cats. “She denies it, and I tell her I’d forgive her if she admits it, but she won’t, and so I will never forgive her, never, not until the day she dies.”

  I smiled, skimming sushi over soy. Never over-dip sushi; a chef once screamed at me for this sin, but the waitress apologised on his behalf, explaining that his favourite newt had died that morning, and he was a very passionate man. I quite understand, I’d replied. It can be devastating, losing a newt you love.

  “Of course I can’t find any proof of her treachery,” sighed my almost-certainly-not-cuckolded junior engineer. “But that just proves how well she’s covering it up!”

  I implanted the virus into his laptop while he was having a piss, and the following day he, unwitting, uploaded it to the sub-station computers where he worked along with his timesheets and a series of home-penned poems about the passions of despised love.

  Chapter 9

  Criminal professionalism; it is more than good practice.

  Never steal in anger, and yet Reina was dead, and the Chrysalis had come to Dubai and so…

  Breathe in. Count every breath. One – in – one – out.

  Count to ten.

  Heart rate: 76 BMP.

  Blood pressure: 118/76. Systolic/diastolic. In 1615 a doctor called William Harvey published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus – On the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals. The Chinese and Indians had arguably got there first, but it wasn’t until 1818 that Samuel Siegfried Karl Ritter von Basch invented the sphygmomanometer.

  Knowledge is power.

  Knowledge is freedom.

  Knowledge is all I have.

  There is nothing in this world which can master me, save me myself.

  Days of pursuit in the Burj al Arab Jumeirah.

  On a Monday I was a stranger Leena met by the poolside. On a Tuesday I was a stranger in the spa. On Wednesday I was a stranger who approached her over dinner. I stole Leena’s mobile phone, copying all its information and linking its SIM card to mine. She was at 634,000 points in Perfection.

  By now you will be feeling the joy that can only come from knowing that you are approaching the pinnacle of potential. Your goals are not dreams – they are truths that you can, will and shall obtain to become the perfect, true you!

  A text message on her phone:

  Can’t believe Reina did this to us! Why would she be so stupid?

  After twenty minutes of being separated from her phone, Leena began to panic. I handed it back to one of her security men, who suspected me of being someone nefarious, but I was already gone and he forgot.

  It is not invisibility that I possess; more a steady blinking of the mind.

  “We’ve all got Perfection!” whispered Suzy-Sandy-Sophie-Something in my ear as we sat in the aromatherapy room. “Even the princesses! I’m from Ogema, Wisconsin, and my pa used to sell second-hand kitchen appliances from the garage, but now I’m here and I have dinner with royalty and you just mustn’t let it get to your head, because they’re all just people, really, even though they’re Muslim!”

  I smiled and said, “You’re a very foolish woman, aren’t you?” and when her mouth dropped in anguish and rage, I walked out of the aromatherapy room and straight into the cold pool, where I stayed, head pounding with the change of temperature as I counted to fifty, then surfaced and breathed, then sank down again, counting back to zero.

  Why had I said those words?

  A lapse in professionalism; unforgivable on a job. I watched my skin prickle with icy water, felt pressure build at the back of my nose, and chided myself.

  I mastered myself, always, no matter what. Discipline in all things.

  When I went back to the aromatherapy room, Suzy-Sandy was still there, lying on a white towel. She opened one eye as I entered, saw no threat, closed it again.

  “Hi,” I said, sitting on the bench opposite her. “I’m Rachel; I’m new here. What’s your name?”

  In the evening, I met Leena for the very first time, for the sixteenth night running, and having had the practice I went straight in with, “I love your dress.”

  Previous approaches: I’m interested in this amazing city. I work in finance. I’m interested in Perfection. I’m writing an article about women in Dubai. I knew Reina, sorry for your loss.

  None had worked, though the mention of Perfection had got me closest. Sometimes the truth is that the trivial route is the most successful, and thus:

  “I love your dress.”

  “Do you, it is amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Is it Vera Wang?”

  “It is! And you’re…?”

  “Dior.”

  “I just adore Dior.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Empty words.

  I am my smile.

  I am my lips.

  I lower my head as I speak to her, so that my eyes have to look up, seeming wider, rounder, more appealing. Animals reading animals. My jewels, my dress, my body, they speak for me, a woman with skin almost as dark as my mother’s, wearing the perfect perfume for the perfect night by the sea. First impressions matter, when they are all you have to live by.

  I am the delighted crinkle in the corner of my eyes. I am the woman she wants me to be. “I just love fashion,” I said through my polished lips. “You’re the most stylish woman here by a year.”

  Information, drifting:

  Vera Wang: fashion designer, former figure skater.

  Al Maktoum, royal family of Dubai, descendants of the Al Falasi of the coalition of Bani Yas tribes.
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  “You’re wonderful,” exclaimed Leena. “You’re just the kind of person I like to meet.”

  Once you have your prey, keep it in sight. It’s only when people no longer see me that they forget.

  I stuck close to Leena, flowed with her entourage, laughed at her jokes, shared my views on fashion, celebrity, travel. “The perfect people, the perfect clothes, the perfect words, the perfect holidays!” she exclaimed, and all around her people laughed.

  “I’m with Prometheus,” explained a man in a white and gold Nehru suit, iced cocktail in one hand. “We really want Perfection to be good for people, to help them live better lives. With the right help, anyone can be perfect!”

  I smiled and laughed, and thought of another kind of righteousness, expounded by a long-dead Indian prince. Right view, right wisdom, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. The eightfold path. Samyanc in Sanskrit; rightness as denotes completion, togetherness, coherence. (Can also be used to express the notion of perfection.)

  Leena and I circled together through a room latticed with gold, marble floor, fresh flowers – orchids, lilacs flecked with white. A party in full swing, barely a headscarf in sight, men and women mixing freely, a banner on one wall – The Future Is Perfect. The waiters were Indian and Bangladeshi, drawn from the labour camps hidden in the desert. Expats everywhere.

  I used to specialise in government bonds, but now I’ve moved into global futures…

  … the thing about insurance is…

  Why do they call it “tax haven”? I mean, don’t they realise how the press react to words like that?

  … oil is too short-term. Sure, there’s big bucks now, but I want my kids to get into digital rights.

  The United Arab Emirates has a population of somewhere between 75 and 85 per cent expats. What do so many foreigners do to a society? Volvos in Abu Dhabi, McDonald’s a good night out? Or does culture bite back by extolling ancient virtues: the poems of Dhu al Rummah, the music of Umm Kulthum, the words of the Hadith, the traditions of the peoples of the sands?