Layover in Dubai

by Dan Fesperman

  “My sons,” Sharaf said, rolling his eyes, although he already felt better now that the matter of Sam Keller was resolved. He had been preoccupied by worry all morning, especially after what he and Keller had learned the night before.

  They had returned home from the Burjuman to huddle in Sharaf’s sanctum, where they pored over the information from Charlie Hatcher’s datebook. The enigmatic scribbles below the underlined reference to “Monday, 4/14!” had intrigued Sharaf the most, although neither Keller nor he had any idea what they meant.

  “He talked about the fourteenth like it was some kind of deadline,” Sam said. “He said he was canceling his flight to Hong Kong and was going to stay in Dubai.”

  “Maybe one of these people will know,” Sharaf said, gesturing toward the three names. “Let’s give it a try.”

  Sharaf quickly discovered why two of the phone numbers seemed familiar. The first one connected him to the front desk of the Palace Hotel at the Royal Mirage resort. Sharaf had visited there twice on police business—a jewel theft, and a robbery on the hotel’s private beach. He asked for the name Charlie had written.

  “Rajpal Patel, please.”

  The cordial male voice at the other end turned officious. “Who is calling?”

  “Does it matter? I’m a friend.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me why Rajpal hasn’t bothered to show up for the past three nights, or why he won’t answer his phone.”

  “Three nights?”

  “Three very inconvenient nights, yes. Who is this?”

  Sharaf hung up and turned to Keller.

  “Did you and Charlie Hatcher visit the Palace Hotel at the Royal Mirage?”

  Keller told Sharaf the story of the hotel staffer in the garish uniform who had met Charlie in the lobby.

  “If he was dressed like that, then he was probably one of the bouncers at their exclusive little club, the Kasbar. It is a known gathering place for people like the ones we were observing tonight. Did you mention this meeting to Lieutenant Assad?”

  “Yes. He seemed pretty interested.”

  “In that case, my Bedouin friend Daoud will probably find Rajpal before we do.”

  “You mean—?”

  “That was the front desk at the Palace just now. Rajpal Patel has been missing for three days. Just like the woman from the York who Daoud found, who I am guessing is Tatiana Tereshkova, the second name on the list. It’s a mobile number. I’m betting there won’t be an answer.”

  He tried it anyway. On the third ring a recording announced that the number was no longer in service. Whoever paid Tatiana’s phone bill had been very efficient about closing her account.

  The third number was the other one that had looked familiar, although the listed name—“Basma,” but nothing more—hadn’t.

  A woman answered. “Beacon of Light.”

  “Of course,” Sharaf said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m sorry. This is Detective Sharaf with Dubai Police. I would like to speak with Basma, please.”

  The woman seemed to gasp. Then she paused just long enough to arouse his suspicion before saying, “There is no one here by that name.”

  “Not even for a policeman to speak to?”

  “No.”

  “Then is your director, Mrs. Halami, in?”

  “Not this evening.”

  “Please have her call me, then. On my mobile. And give her a message. Ask if she is familiar with an American named Charles Hatcher, of the Pfluger Klaxon company. I need to know if he has made contact with Basma or anyone else at the shelter.”

  “I will tell her.” The woman’s tone was stiff, tense. Sharaf couldn’t tell if Charlie’s name had made an additional impression. It was the mention of Basma that had set her off. “And your mobile number, please?”

  “She has it.”

  “Thank you. She will be back tomorrow, probably around midday.”

  “You know them?” Sam asked after Sharaf hung up.

  “It is a shelter for abused women. Housewives, mostly, although it has also become a place of refuge for prostitutes who manage to escape their pimps. So it is not very well liked by the people we were observing this evening. Some of my police colleagues are not crazy about the place, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “They believe disagreements between husbands and wives are personal matters, not issues for law enforcement.”

  “Even if he beats her? Do you believe that?”

  “I do not beat my wife, so it is irrelevant what I believe. Please, you are beginning to sounding like Laleh, who has already spent far too much time among those women. That is why I recognized the number. She donates her money, handles their PR account for free, that kind of thing. She is quite the friend to them. I probably would have gotten further by mentioning her name instead of mine.”

  “Maybe Charlie was a donor, too. Out of guilt, considering his track record. He did say something about atonement.”

  “Or maybe this Basma was a favorite of his from a past visit, and he was tracking her down. The Tatiana woman could have been his contact. I can see how that might have upset the wrong people, especially if he was helping Basma stay free. Sending her money or something.”

  “You really think that’s what happened?”

  “That, or a hundred other possibilities. Whores are not the only women who end up at the Beacon of Light, or even wives. They take in housekeepers, maids, nannies. Which in Dubai are just milder forms of prostitution. Shady companies import them by the thousands on hali-wali visas.”

  “What’s ‘hali-wali’?”

  “A ‘who cares’ visa. Obtained from some dupe in a government office.”

  “You mean like those fake ownership papers for Punjabi shopkeepers?”

  Sharaf supposed the remark was intended to get a rise out of him.

  “I’m guessing Laleh told you about that. But at least you are beginning to grasp the way things work here. Now if you could just tell me what these other scribbles in the datebook mean, you’d actually be contributing something worthy. Otherwise, all we have learned this evening is that, of the three names he listed, one is missing, one is dead, and one may or may not be staying at a place where women sometimes hide from their Mafia pimps. And the message of all that would seem to be pretty clear: If you are a friend of Charlie Hatcher’s, Dubai is not a very safe place.”

  That was the thought Sharaf took to bed with him, and the one he awakened with as well. It was why he was now so relieved by Ali’s assurances of Sam Keller’s safety, which left him free to enjoy his coffee and their game of dominoes, while venting about his wayward sons.

  “My sons,” he continued to Ali, “wouldn’t know how to handle a real estate transaction unless I did it for them. To them it’s a major crisis if their iPods crash. When those Internet service cables were severed on the ocean floor last summer I thought they were going to cry. You would have thought a ten-day sandstorm had just blown into town, followed by a plague of locusts.”

  “Locusts,” Ali said. “Now there’s a memory. Remember that old man in the souk who used to fry them in a big kettle whenever a bunch of them blew in from the desert?”

  “Yes. Very tasty. Until that year the British sprayed them all with poison, then went round the neighborhood with a bullhorn, telling us they were unsafe to eat.”

  “The visitors always end up ruining things,” Ali said. “And if this speculation market ever comes to ruin, well, at least this time they’ll be burned even more than the locals. Because we will still have our salaries and our homes, while all their precious new buildings stand empty, collecting nothing but desert dust. By the way, Sharaf, did you happen to invite some of your police colleagues to come and visit us here this morning?”

  Ali was looking toward the door, and Sharaf realized that the place had suddenly gone quiet. Old faces all around them were looking up from their card games toward the entrance. Sharaf turned to see what was happening as his last swallow of c
offee settled into a muddy lump at the base of his stomach.

  Three rank-and-file policemen stood just inside the doorway, led by a Sudanese sergeant in lettuce green—the very fellow who had handled a favor for Ali a few years back, even though he was known to have a steep asking price. The moment they spotted Sharaf they began moving in his direction, not even bothering to remove their shoes. A low murmur went up from the regulars. The scurrying waiters halted in their tracks.

  Sharaf sat still, but his mind moved quickly. By now, Keller would be alone in the house, assuming the police hadn’t already picked him up. Laleh was at her office. Amina was visiting friends, and probably wouldn’t turn on her mobile phone until after lunch. He could tell Ali to phone the house, but Sam Keller might not have the nerve to answer.

  “Call Laleh at her office,” he said under his breath. “Tell her what has happened. Find any way you can to get Keller out of the house immediately. And you’d better take him to one of those tougher locations you had in mind.”

  “What about you?”

  “Contact the Minister,” Sharaf said. “But unless you want to get me into even bigger trouble, don’t mention the American.”

  The policemen arrived at his side. One gripped Sharaf’s right arm, another took his left, and they raised him to his feet. The sergeant spoke loudly enough for all to hear.

  “You will hand over your phone, your keys, and your wallet and come with us, Lieutenant Sharaf. You are under arrest.”

  “On what charge? Under whose orders?”

  They said nothing in reply. Sharaf didn’t resist as they escorted him to the door.

  A police car was outside, with a detention van idling behind it. Already a crowd was forming. A show of force like this was for more than just an arrest. It was designed to humiliate him. Even Lieutenant Assad probably couldn’t have rigged up this big of a display, and that suggested involvement at a higher level. This train of thought led Sharaf to the most chilling possibility of all—that the Minister himself, for whatever reason, was behind this.

  An officer shoved Sharaf toward the van. He looked back toward the majlis and saw Ali standing at the entrance, grim faced.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Ali called out.

  Normally, such words from Ali meant the deed was as good as done. This time, to judge from his deepening frown, they both realized that the odds were against them.

  As if to drive home the point, the officer produced a blindfold and roughly tied it into place. He then gripped Sharaf by the shoulders and shoved him through the van’s open panel doors, barking Sharaf’s shins on the rear bumper in the process. The doors slammed shut, and the agonized Sharaf was in darkness. The driver revved the engine once, then they careened away in a clatter of spraying gravel. Sharaf took a deep breath and held it until the pain in his shins subsided.

  Between that and the darkness, it reminded him a little of diving for pearls in deep waters. Stay calm, he told himself. Relax and keep your eyes open. If further dangers arise, revel in them. Embrace them. But he had better keep holding his breath. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming up for air for quite a while.

  13

  Earlier that morning, Sam Keller awoke to an empty house. All was quiet. The window shades were drawn against the sunlight.

  Sam had been dreaming of his father, and as he opened his eyes he still heard the voice from some of his earliest memories; the old man telling him to live a little, to give it a try, to go ahead and see what happened and let the chips fall where they may.

  Flipping back the blinds onto a view of a scorched courtyard, Sam tried to pin down exactly when he had stopped heeding that advice. Or maybe he had never paid it much attention to begin with. Such words—on the surface, at least—had always seemed pat, even trite, the sort of pep talk that any father might offer.

  But now, after having been in the workforce for five years, he recalled the gray face of resignation his dad had always worn when he came through the kitchen door every evening at six—or more often at nine during tax season—looking frayed at the edges as he cracked open an ice tray to mix the ritual daily pitcher of gimlets to be shared with Sam’s mom. Paul Keller had hated his job, Sam realized, now that he could recognize the symptoms. Accountancy had paid the bills and then some, and the technical side had probably come easily enough for a man with such a mathematical mind. But what stood out now was all of the little ways in which his father had tried to steer Sam in other directions, not least by teaching him to sail at the earliest possible age under all conceivable conditions, even when the wind was up and skies were aboil. As if, by seducing the boy with a few thrills, he might guide him toward a more exciting vocation.

  “You’re a good man in a storm,” his father always insisted, whenever the boy held the tiller firm against a fresh gust. But it was really the old accountant who had needed to get out on the waves, Sam realized, if only for a way to unbend his mind and let it play among the angles of wind and water, pushing the boat to its limits. More math, when you got right down to it, but calculated on the fly, with a face to the breeze, tiller in hand, the hull’s trammeled force straining beneath his grip with the quiver of a saddled horse.

  Of course, when Sam’s aptitude had emerged along similar lines as his father’s—a head for numbers, a knack for analysis—the boy had inevitably begun tacking the same general course. His father had nodded stoically at the news that Sam would seek his MBA at that eggheads’ paradise, the University of Chicago. But the man hadn’t been able to bite his tongue when, on graduation day, Sam announced he had accepted an auditor’s position at Pfluger Klaxon.

  To Sam the job had sounded exciting—loads of travel, an apartment in Chelsea. Wasn’t that bohemian enough? But perhaps his father had foreseen where that course would really chart, and Sam now recalled with sudden clarity a long-forgotten conversation. They had just emerged from a downtown tavern after sharing beers with his two best pals from grad school and their dads. His father turned to him in the afternoon glare on a busy sidewalk and said quite solemnly, “Promise me one thing, Sam.”

  “Yes?”

  “That if this position doesn’t suit you or, worse, if it’s starting to confine you, that you won’t be afraid to give it up, or even start over.”

  “Dad, I’ll be traveling all over the world.”

  “I know. But still.” He shrugged, ammunition spent. Or perhaps what his posture was really saying was, “Hasn’t my own life taught you anything? Haven’t you been paying the least bit of attention?”

  But Sam hadn’t been able to read those signs just yet, so all he said in reply was, “Any job is taking a chance these days.”

  “True enough.”

  Now he understood, of course, because look at what all his careful behavior and painstaking work had gotten him—a reputation for dullness and rigidity, even as he slipped into a world of trouble, out here on the sharp glass edge of a barren land.

  So why not start over, indeed, just as his father had advised? Except instead of taking a new job he would be assuming a new role geared strictly for self-preservation, the good man in a storm facing the stiffest winds yet. He would have asked his father for advice, but that was no longer an option. The old man had died three years ago, killed on the highway that he had taken to and from the office every day for more than forty years—all his safest calculations failing to beat the averages, after all. Sam’s mother had followed six months later, succumbing to a cancer that had seemed to come from nowhere, an actuarial anomaly given her family history.

  But if Sam’s job had taught him one valuable thing, it was that he truly was a quick study, a whiz at problem solving. And that was where he would begin focusing his efforts this morning. With or without Sharaf’s blessing, it was time to take action.

  The policeman had left a note for him just inside the bedroom door.

  “I decided there was no need to lock you in my study today,” Sharaf wrote. The handwriting was neat, with European penmanship. “You
must realize how foolish it would be to wander off on your own. By my accounting you are now being sought by the police, your employers, your embassy, and the criminal elite of two nations.”

  “True enough,” Sam answered aloud. Even if he could show his face, he wouldn’t get very far without a wallet and a passport. Finding them was one of his priorities.

  “You will be pleased to know,” the note continued, “that I am meeting someone this morning who should be able to find you more secure accommodations. Then we can start thinking about how to get you safely back home. I hope that you have slept well. There is coffee, bread, and yogurt for you in the kitchen. I should be returning for you by noon.”

  Sam checked his watch. It was a little after 10 a.m. The extra sleep had done him a world of good.

  Sharaf must have told his prickly wife that he was giving Sam the run of the house, because she had disappeared. He smiled, wondering what the conversation had been like around the breakfast table. Both of the elder Sharafs probably made damn sure that Laleh was safely off to her office before they dared to leave.

  If Sam was to make himself at all useful in this investigation, he knew where he needed to begin, and having Sharaf’s house at his disposal was a plus. Would the Internet be available? Possibly. There was no computer in Sharaf’s hideaway, but Sam was betting Laleh had one. That would allow him to begin pursuing the questions uppermost in his mind, most of which involved Nanette.

  Who was she working with? Liffey, obviously, and Lieutenant Assad. But was the policeman a full partner or just an errand boy? What had brought the threesome together? Did she have an alliance with the Russians? The Iranians? Both? Neither? And if the mobsters had decided that shooting Charlie was an error meriting the death penalty, did that mean they had wanted to let Charlie run free? Had Nanette wanted that, too, so that Sam’s surveillance could have led her—or all of them—to a more interesting destination than the York Club? To this woman named Basma, perhaps?