Dead Water (37 page)

He presses a slip of paper into her hand. ‘The documents will be PDF’d inside Ester’s BlackBerry. Email them to me on this number. Memorize it. When you’ve made the call, take the chip out of the phone and throw the phone and the chip into the creek.’

Roopa says nothing.

He puts his arm around her shoulders, drawing her in. ‘Yes?’ It is a role Rishi has got down pat and he is so very good at it and, oh, so very weary of it: Yash Yadav’s little helper.

They are sitting together on the threadbare sofa in his workshop in Darukhana, under the pitiless overhead lights Rishi needs for the close work he does: weaving money out of paper, foils, thread, ink. Rain hammers against the workshop walls. Roopa spent the afternoon helping him lay canvas offcuts over the worktables, printers, screens and tablets, cutting mats and laminator. Together, they’ve waterproofed what they can against the coming storm. Now the wind is driving the rain under the wooden shingles of the roof. In one corner of the hut it’s actually raining. Raindrops wind down plastic wires and drop, fizzing, on to the naked bulbs that light the room. Rishi’s had to turn off the fan because the air it blew was so damp that it started to short and filled the hut with the smell of burning. Roopa can still taste it on the roof of her mouth.

‘How much longer, Rishi?’

He kisses her.

‘How many more?’

He runs his fingers through her hair ‘Roopa. Darling. Something will turn up.’

Roopa leans into his hands. A strange ménage, this must seem to her: two broken people, both with reasons to see Yash Yadav expunged, both nudging each other nervously towards the point of action, both becalmed. She will not take much more of this, but what else can Rishi do? Yash cannot be killed twice.

By now, Roopa has pretty much reconciled herself to the idea that Rishi is and always will be Yash Yadav’s creature. A coward. Roopa does not trust him. She thinks that if Yash Yadav ever left his Western eyrie and visited Mumbai, Rishi would shop her to him in seconds. Not because he does not love her, but because he fears Yash Yadav more.

After all these years of waiting it’s got to the point where Roopa, unillusioned, is pretty much relying on Rishi betraying her. It’s the only way she can see to draw Yash Yadav into the open.

Does Rishi see yet how this works? Does he see how elegant this is?

He unbuttons her. He bares her. He encircles her with his arms. He brings his mouth down to her breast. Poor Rishi: it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. We’re going to strip him of every comfort. We’re going to rob him of every happiness. Because he deserves it, yes. But most of all because this is our idea of fun.

In the 1970s, when neighbours like Abu Dhabi were letting their harbours silt up, confident that all the wealth they’d ever need would well up out of the ground for ever, Dubai’s Sheikh Rashid chose to play the long game. He kept his city’s harbour dredged. He built up imports, offered tax breaks and brought the builders in. Now the clothes on every Middle Eastern back and every luxury good, not to mention every bite of food they eat, passes through Dubai.

Whole nation states have been suckered into Dubai’s fantasy. Ukrainians. Iranians. India thinks it runs Dubai: who else builds its buildings? China thinks it owns Dubai: who else lays its roads? Nobody runs Dubai. No surprise, then, that it’s the money-laundering capital of the world. Occasionally armed police raid an attic in Deira, Dubai’s old quarter. A man is led away and sometimes shot. Now and again a headless corpse is found slumped in a pool of blood in one of the city’s subterranean car parks, and children fishing in the creek watch as a heron rips beakfuls of hair from a human head. In Dubai everyone is anonymous and significant at the same time. Roopa feels it. Roopa loves it. Bent on killing Yash Yadav, who ruined her and all her hopes, still, Roopa allows him this: she enjoys working for him. Yes, she loves her job!

Now, here come the Jumeirah Janes. Ex-pat TEFL-ers, HR managers, trophy wives close to expiry date. They run things in Dubai. They’re the Emirates’ unacknowledged power, First Ladies all. Only they’re not getting any younger.

From the shadows of the surf shop, half-concealed and unremarkable, Roopa Vish watches them. Yash Yadav had her beaten long ago into such a shape no observer can ever hold her in mind for long. She could sneer at these white bitches if she wanted: they would pay her no attention. She could laugh and spit at all that vanity on depilated legs. She does not sneer. She does not envy them or think them spoiled. She understands. She knows they know that age will do to them, and soon, what Yash’s pliers did to her years ago: their every smile will break. Unnoticed, disregarded, crouched there in her grim blue salwar and baggy kameez, Roopa feels for them, that they have to cross this sandy lot on their way to nips and tucks (it’s wall-to-wall plastic surgeons round here), and run the gamut of all the twenty-something hardbodies strolling in and out of the surf store, bronzed muscles quivering, unbrassiered breasts gambolling like puppies under Rip Curl vests. When the surfer chicks pass by, Roopa imagines she hears the Janes clench their capped and whitened teeth in rage.

It’s not their fault: Dubai has maddened them. In the car here, as Nitesh drove – at fourteen, an adept at the wheel, and Rishi has cooked him an international licence the fiercest traffic cop would pass – Roopa remarked the adverts on Dubai’s towers: ‘Live the Life’, ‘We’ve set our vision higher’. Even the white-goods retailers have names like Better Life and New Hope.

Their mark parked up in front of the surf shop and Nitesh parked three rows down and stayed in the car while his mother got out and crossed the lot and settled herself in the shadows of the shop; and now even Nitesh, even her own son, finds it hard to spot her in the rear-view mirror, or even to hold in memory that she’s there.

Every once in a while Roopa turns and looks in through tinted plate glass.

Ester’s toying with a wind-meter.

She’s buying herself some heel straps.

She’s leaving the shop.

She’s wearing cut-off jeans and a running bra. Over her shoulder she’s lugging along her kitesurfing bag: a black flying fish against bright red and white. She’s young – young as Roopa was when her looks were torn out with pliers. She has her more than sun-bleached hair done up in a fussy topknot. From her features Roopa can see what she will look like when she’s old. If she lives that long. She’s far too young for this game. White, besides – an outlier in the pirate demographic. She’ll be some nigger’s moll, is Roopa’s guess, playing above her age. Then again, what is the right age to be carrying stolen shipping information through Dubai? The thugs that form Yadav’s front line – gambol-toed monkeyboys swinging
bolo
swords and box-cutters – they’re barely in their teens. Give her another year and Ester will be capable of anything. ‘Radicalized’ is today’s buzzword. A pirate queen, shackling Bangladeshis to an anchor chain.

Roopa follows Ester to her car and walks on past to where Nitesh is waiting. Traffic’s heavy: they join the stream two vehicles behind their mark and trickle after her in second gear. Again, Roopa’s eye is drawn to the messages on Dubai’s innumerable hoardings, and here and there covering entire faces of a complete but empty high-rise. Every time she visits Dubai – three, four times a year – Roopa finds the ads have grown yet more extreme, evoking, with a welling hysteria, the dream-logic of this fabricated place. Aspiration as an endless Jacob’s ladder. Perfect your car, your phone, your home, your face. Perfect your labia. Plastic surgeons line the way to erotically sterile encounters at the Burj Al Arab hotel. Then what? Then where? The elevators only go up. Take a helicopter ride into the future. Cheat death. Chrome the flesh. Every advert they ride past features a robot. A perfected man. A smoothly milled thigh or tit. A cyborg sits at the wheel of a latest-model four-wheel-drive, limbs webbed promiscuously around the controls. A phone blinks in a stainless-steel hand.

Dubai’s a vital entrepôt but most of its goods are containerized and handled by machines outside the city. A different, small-time trade holds sway along the creek road, in the centre. Its pavements and central reservations teem with tourists and Russian prostitutes in roughly equal numbers. Ester is heading back to her hotel. Nitesh parks up at the kerb. Roopa gets out and waits. Nitesh drives off. Across the creek, dhows packed to the gunwales with second-hand Toyota Hiluxes prepare for their voyage to Somalia. Piles of tyres, plucked off wrecked and defunct cars, are being hauled by hand and dropped into the rusted holds of boats bound for retreading factories in Navlakhi and Karachi.

Ester reappears. She’s changed her clothes. She’s wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, under a beige, loose-fitting trouser suit: clothing to blend her into that part of Dubai life lived almost exclusively by ex-pat men. Roopa crosses the road after her.

Some dhows are made of fibreglass these days, but there are plenty of wooden hulls left, white with lime, and plenty being built. The deckhouses are almost always wooden, cut here and there with repeated decorations. Easy to imagine that these tiny break-bulk ships are the last survivors of a dying trade, but they’re no such thing. Container shipping serves the great ports of the earth, but there are few enough of them, and none in northern Africa. For the behemoths of Maersk and Moyse, Hapag-Lloyd and Evergreen, that coast offers no haven. So, with no deep harbours, north Africa depends on little ships, and all of them, every few months or so, tie up along the creek in Dubai. From China, mattresses. Piles of flashlights. Chairs, tables, oxytetracycline injections. Chilean softwoods. Foam mattresses. Drums of sorbitol from Mumbai.

Ester boards a passenger ferry for Deira. Roopa follows her on board. They cross the creek. It is prayer time when they land and the alleys of the old quarter are swimming in shoes, shoals of them, abandoned while men pray barefoot in its many mosques. At the end of prayers the streets are suddenly full again. Crowds of men – Turks, Somalis, Emiratis, Pakistanis – hustle this way and that with mats rolled under their arms. The poor, who have made do with collapsed cardboard boxes to kneel and bow on, are tucking them under gates and behind municipal bins, saving them for another time, another worshipper. The crowds clear.

Roopa has lost sight of her mark, but she is practised at this and does not panic. She moves, fast and purposeful, and relocates her a minute later, two streets over, in a cafeteria that keeps its stock on shelves above the customers’ heads as though against the threat of shortage. Through plate-glass windows, the mark’s bright trouser suit stands out against a ground of impeccable navy white. A couple of dozen Pakistani sailors are eating egg sandwiches, nursing cans of Mountain Dew. Most have wild red beards from making hajj. Their once in a lifetime visit to Mecca hasn’t cheered them up at all. Roopa makes a call. ‘She’s clean. No minders. Here we go.’

‘One minute, Mum.’ Nitesh, grown up to this, is idling by the kerb barely two blocks away.

The call to noon prayer empties Deira as Ester enters the arcades of the souk. Her surf bag swinging from her shoulder, she weaves a path through shoals of shoes towards the junction of 38th and Al Jazira. She takes a seat in the cafeteria. Her contact’s late. She orders a tea.

The cafeteria is filling up. Dapper Pakistani sailors with bright red beards exchange looks of conspicuous spiritual profundity over mint teas and egg sandwiches. A plain-faced Indian woman with loose dentures sits surrounded by bags from half a dozen boutiques, watching as her son breaks into his latest toy. Impossible to tell what it is. A handheld game console. A toy, a phone, an MP3 player. Some indeterminate consumer good. He tugs at the packaging, lumpen and frustrated, a boy for whom bubble wrap and adhesive tape are the only barriers he has ever encountered between a wish and its fulfilment. There are bits of egg-box packaging all over the table. Occasionally his mother snaps at him: ‘Careful, Nitesh!’ She is one of those sour-faced women who are secretly frightened by their own children – and the boy, who looks about fourteen, overdressed in expensive, conservative jumper and slacks, shoots back looks of pleasure and gratitude: he has her measure.

He gets the thing into his hands eventually, whatever it is, and peels adhesive plastic strips from its screen and sleek black shell. The strips stick to his fingers and dangle, faintly amniotic, from his fingertips. Prissily he balls them up, rolling them until they drop, exhausted, on to the table.

It is a phone. It’s no bigger than a credit card and yet the box is full of odds and ends that somehow plug into it – piece after piece, how do they fit into such a small space? Still, he can’t get a signal. He leaves the table and wanders around the cafe, studying the screen, staring at it, or not even at it: through it, into the streamlined, solid-state future.

Ester looks at her watch. Where is her contact? What if something has gone wrong? She is afraid of being spotted. If she is being paid to watch Havard, then who is being paid to watch her? Sensitive cargoes move over the earth. Nuclear cargoes. Biological cargoes. Living cargoes. Rerouted and delivered, on time, and with plausible deniability, thanks to her: her necessary work. This is what her father tells her. Who could have predicted her current importance? Who, seeing her move animated containers back and forth on a Dell flat-screen in Port Rashid, would ever imagine –?