Alena knew when to expect my call. That she'd missed it wasn't, by itself, a cause for alarm. We had fallback protocols in place, alternates we were to use if the initial contact failed. In this case, the rule was to wait two hours after the primary attempt, and then to call again. If that, too, failed, there was a secondary number either of us could call to leave a message for the other, similar to the way I'd contacted Sargenti. Each of our go-bags had a prepaid mobile phone, as well, never used, entirely clean. If all else failed, that was the phone of last resort.
I marked the time, began counting down the initial two-hour window, trying not to worry. It wasn't easy. Alena didn't make mistakes, not about things like this. If she hadn't been able to answer the phone at a quarter to nine in the morning, it was because she couldn't, either due to circumstance or misfortune.
I was really hoping it was because of circumstance. Kekela woke at twenty past ten, and I heard her thumping around in the bedroom. When she came out, she was wearing one of the complimentary bathrobes, her hair a wild tangle. She yawned at me before asking if it was all right to order up some breakfast.
"Go ahead," I said.
My tone earned a somewhat confused look, and then she went back into the bedroom. I listened to her pick up the phone, order breakfast for two, which was polite of her, but then again, she wasn't paying for it. She hung up, and a few seconds later I heard the shower start. By the time she was out and dressed, the food had arrived. She'd ordered light, the continental breakfast, and when the knock came at the door I answered and signed for the meal, then went back to where I'd been sitting at the desk. Kekela poured coffee for herself, orange juice for me, offering me the glass. I took it and set it down untouched, still watching the clock.
When it hit seventeen to eleven, I used the BlackBerry, dialed Alena's mobile again.
Same result as before.
I killed the connection, waited thirty seconds, hit redial. Six rings, and then to voicemail. I hung up and this time dialed into the service, cutting through the menus as fast as I could and punching up the mailbox to check for messages. There weren't any. I backed out of the box, reentered the code, waited for the tone.
"Call me," I said.
I hung up, tossed the phone back onto the desk.
"Something's wrong?" Kekela asked.
"No."
The question was apparent in her expression, but she didn't cave to it immediately, instead sipping at more of her coffee. She took it sweet and light, with so much cream it looked more like milk than coffee. She'd found a croissant that she liked the looks of in the basket, was dipping one end into her cup. She munched, walking to the windows, looking out at the water.
"She's your girlfriend?" Kekela asked.
"No."
"But you have a girlfriend? A wife? Someone?"
"Someone."
"I think you must love her very much." She sighed. "She's very lucky."
"You don't know me," I said.
It came out colder than I'd intended, and it caught her by surprise. She put her back to the window, her brow creasing, wondering what it was she could have done to offend me.
"I've seen enough," Kekela said.
"No, you haven't. I know what you want. I know what you're thinking, Kekela, I know what you've been hoping for. And I hope you find it, I really do, because I think you deserve it, I think you deserve better than hooking in Dubai. I hope the guy comes along someday with all the money, and that he falls in love with you because of who you are and not what you do, and he gives you your escape route."
She didn't move, staring at me, barely breathing. If I was hurting her with my words, I couldn't tell, but with my usual grace and style, I most likely was. I didn't want to, but I didn't want either of us deluding the other any longer.
"I'm not that guy," I told her. "I'm not Mr. Right. Not for you. Not for anyone."
There was a tremble starting in her chin. She fought to control it. When she spoke, it came out as a whisper.
"You could be," Kekela said.
"Maybe once," I said. "Not anymore."
She might've had a counter, might've tried again to convince me otherwise. I'll never know.
In the bedroom, her mobile phone began to ring, and she went to answer it, seizing the escape. I turned to the BlackBerry once more and confirmed that I hadn't missed a call, a text, or a voicemail. I swapped to my alternate SIM, had just started to check that, too, when Kekela called out to me.
"It's Xia," she said. "She thinks she's found your girl."
CHAPTER
Fourteen The reason the ratio of men to women in Dubai was three to one was precisely the same reason I could walk into Rattlesnake and twenty minutes later walk out with a woman on each arm willing to do whatever I wanted. The reason was money, Dubai's raison d'etre.
Most of the men in the equation are what the expat community refers to euphemistically as "skilled laborers," when, in truth, they are almost exactly the opposite. Like the women, they've come to work, they've come seeking respite from the desperate poverty of their homes. Like the women, many of these men have been tricked, either through willing self-delusion or honest ignorance. They have been recruited by construction suppliers, transported by traffickers, led under false pretense. Like many of the women, many of the men arrive to find their passports confiscated by their "employer." Like the women, they are told about the enormous debt they have incurred, the cost required to bring them to this new land of opportunity. Like the women, they are told they must now work to pay that debt off.
The similarities end there, and not only because the men work on their feet and not on their backs. As a group, they lack the broad diversity of the women, most hailing from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines, with a few from Egypt, Jordan, and the like. They live in worker camps, which sounds marginally better than "labor camps," but it's a syntactic distinction. Hundreds of them are packed into tents or prefab structures or nine-room homes. They sleep six, ten, twenty to a room. If they're lucky, they get an air conditioner or a window, but they never get both. A single bathroom serves thirty. There's room enough for only one or two meals to be prepared at a time. If they're industrious, they sometimes pool money together to buy a television. There are no phones allowed, but sometimes a supervised call is permitted once a week or a month, just to tell the folks back home that everything is fine.
They rise at five, arrive on the work site by six. While the rest of Dubai hides in climate-controlled shopping malls, restaurants, and hotels, the men labor nonstop in the heat. During the summer, the mercury effortlessly breaks 40 Celsius. The humidity is oppressive. They get an hour for lunch, eaten out of doors, in whatever shade can be found in the middle of the day. Then work resumes until six, seven, eight at night. Back to the camps. Do it again. That many, if not most, of these laborers are Muslims in an Islamic country mitigates nothing; the hammers fall, the drills whine, the machines clank, the sounds of construction drowning out each and every one of the muezzin's calls.
That's the day shift. Work goes on twenty-four hours. It's been estimated that work-site fatalities occur at the rate of two a day.
The men earn, on average, the equivalent of a dollar an hour. In many cases, they go months without seeing a penny of it, their wages withheld to keep them from running away. As it is, it's against the law for a worker in Dubai to change his job without his employer's permission. When they do get paid, almost every man sends his wages back home, retaining only enough to survive. Some are never paid at all.
By some estimates, there are over two million of these men.
And they get lonely. We were in a cab, speeding south along Sheikh Zayed Road, which was more of a highway than a road. Outside our air-conditioned bubble the sun was high and merciless, glare flashing off the rising towers of glass and metal. The driver was a local, wearing wraparound sunglasses. He drove like he was trying to qualify for Le Mans, which was possibly my own fault. I should never have told him we were in a hurry.