Secret Skin (8 page)

He frowned and tried to work out if I’d just called him a coward.

‘You can stop patronizing me. I’m not a complete idiot, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said and waited.

‘Promise you’ll hurt the fuckers.’

‘Well, that depends on what you tell me.’

‘I was bullied…’ he began, embarrassed by the admission.

‘Yes?’ I said, showing interest, but knowing it was hard to trust information from someone who left under a black cloud.

‘…by this silly little gobshite with a Napoleon complex. He liked to pretend he was an old Etonian, went to Oxford, that he was plugged into the British old boy network. But that was all bollocks of course, he’s as common as muck. James Lawrence, Jamie, Jimbo to his mates.’

I started to ask a question but was quickly cut off.

‘I mean what did he do that was so fucking special?’ he asked for me. ‘I’ll tell you. The miserable little worm married the ugliest daughter of a well connected Syrian family and used their influence to maneuver himself into a position of authority at the bank where I was working. And for that little favor he had to keep his new family and especially his new wife very happy.’

‘Let me guess, kids, big house, lots of money?’ I said.

‘You got it, if she was going to marry a foreigner they still had to make the right impression. He didn’t even like her. That much was obvious from all the tail he chased and the whores he charged to expenses. But they had an agreement, you see?’

‘No. Tell me.’

‘Well, in return for her overbearing family’s persuasive powers he would provide her with a certain amount of liberty and financial independence. They could then happily avoid each other's company.’

‘I see.’

‘Not quite. With her family’s help he brought in big clients and big money. That’s how I ended up working with him,’ he said, jabbing the air with his pen. ‘He took over a new platinum investment program for preferred customers that I created.’

‘‘So what happened?’

‘Well if a customer had $70,000 or more to invest or save over a fixed term they would receive exceptional annual returns of between 12 and 15%. When he took over that figure suddenly jumped, 20 to 50% annually over a five year period.’

He looked at me expectantly. They were the kind of returns that have seasoned investors spluttering the froth off their frappes to tell you it sounds too good to be true. The returns were far more than you could hope for from any high yield, savings or bond account, or from any sensibly managed stock portfolio or index tracker.

‘How was he going to produce those kinds of returns?’ I said.

‘Ah well that’s the trick, Lawrence cultivated a large group of young local nobodies who would each receive 15,000 square feet of land on their 21st birthdays as per generous UAE law. The incentive was that they had to build on the land within five years or lose it. They had no capital to invest themselves but for every 50 laborers the nobodies employed the administration would give them another 460 square feet.

‘So Lawrence brought in thousands of laborers and the group received more than enough land to kick-start a new development. Are you with me so far Mr. Bryson?’

‘No problems here, so then what?’

‘Well for a start these locals weren’t favorites of the ruling family. They were given one of the most useless stretches of land in the emirates just over the Dubai border in neighboring Abu Dhabi, a large ditch of shifting sand with zero infrastructure in place.

‘As these kids had no money Lawrence made a few enquiries within his new family. They introduced him to two people. First Mohammed Akbar, a distant relative who specialized in heroin smuggling, arms to Somalia, and training fighters in the remote mountains of Yemen, they go on to cause havoc as insurgents in various regional conflicts.’

‘Nice guy.’

‘Yeah, a real Samaritan. Second was an aging ex-Soviet colonel, Vladimir Orsa who had fought in Afghanistan and Chechnya.’

That guy again. ‘Tell me more about him.’

‘He made his money smuggling arms and oil through the Caspian Sea and Iraq, as well as trafficking drugs and people on the side. Basically he’ll trade anything to anyone for a profit.

‘His biggest success has been staying alive so long. Apparently, Dubai is where he’s come to retire.’

‘Do you know all this for sure?’ I said. ‘I’ve heard he’s still into arms. It doesn’t sound like he wants to retire just yet.’

‘That’s what that short little shit told me. Lawrence likes to brag and play the big man. To him it’s a buzz that these people come to him to make money. He has a penthouse in the marina where he likes to “entertain”,’ he said bitterly.

I raised an inquiring eyebrow.

‘Entertain means listen to him spout off about how fucking wonderful he is.’

He looked out of the window at the Sheikh Zayed Road traffic hurtling along. I waited a few beats as he unconsciously picked the neat little emblem off the base of his expensive pen, devaluing it instantly.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘He was probably born with a small cock and his mother teased him about it, that’s probably what fucking happened.’

I couldn’t help laugh. My source joined in.

The laughter made him relax. ‘He brought them in as the initial financiers of the project. They needed to wash money and this was a perfect way for them to do it.

‘The project now appears to be underway. But Lawrence needs to give these guys their laundered dividends and quickly, they’ve got other projects to finance.’

‘So let’s see, the local guys want their money for nothing, the terrible two want their clean cash and profits and Lawrence wants his fairly sizeable cut off the back end,’ I said.

‘That’s about it. They all want it yesterday of course.’

‘Where’s the money coming from?’

‘The deposits from the platinum investors and off-plan sales go straight to them. The project continues to be built, but only because they haven’t paid the laborers or creditors in six months. The first interest payments are due in four weeks which will come from the next round of off-plan installments. They’ve got another investment show next week.’

‘What sort of figures are we talking?’

‘The project is supposed to cost $200 million and return around half that again. The guys have washed about 80 mill’ already with about 20 reinvested. There was 60 mill’ from the platinums when I left and about 40 in off-plan sales. All gone of course.’

I wrote furiously in my notebook, doing the math.

‘Let me get this right, $180 million has gone in, but only $20 million to the project. The rest just goes straight to these guys?’

‘That’s it. Just enough to keep up appearances and pay the first round of interest.’

‘You think they would just build the damn thing. They’d make a killing.’

‘Yeah but fucking people over is a way of life for these idiots. The guns and small wars they are involved in already make them plenty.’

‘Right. Why would you want to keep a bunch of needy middle class investors happy when you’ve got dictators with billions of dollars of development money to spend?’

‘You bet. Money for nothing.’

‘Is it Sunset Heights?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, suspicious, ‘how did you know? Lucky guess?’

‘Nope, I wrote it up as a good buy for European investors last week. Eight designer skyscrapers on the edge of nowhere, with some landscaped desert for the kids to burn in.’

He sat there grinning inanely, as if the joke was on me.

‘Did you make anything from it?’ I said.

‘Just my salary and bonuses. I’m an honest man after all.’

He wouldn’t stop mugging me with that conceited grin.

‘So let me see, you’ve just ripped off millions of dollars for a giant Ponzi money laundering scheme and you haven’t got a penny to show for it?’

He shrugged his shoulders, still cheerful, as if it had nothing to do with him.

‘Don’t you get it? You created it. When the walls come tumbling down on this make believe development who do you think is going to be their fall guy?’

He stopped smiling.

I finally had a story. A killer story. If I could corroborate the bank manager’s information it would sell in any country where investors in the project read newspapers. That could easily lead to some healthy syndication, Middle East correspondent offers and the chance to work on some meatier subjects.

It deserved following up and I told him so. Not that this calmed him down. I assured him that if he could give me names of anyone who might confirm his story it would take attention away from him as the sole whistleblower.

Dipping into my bag of clichés I mixed a few metaphors and told him that it was ‘better to go down fighting than to be left hung out to dry’.

He gave me the name of a local investor, a signatory for the holding company, Sheikh Hamza. Apparently he had been unaware of the real motives of his partners and was set to lose everything. I would approach, but carefully.

I left the banker’s office and tried to figure out how to get to him. My phone rang. This time I recognized the number.

‘Yasmin,’ I said, ‘hey, I was hoping you might call.’

‘David, I can’t talk now. Can you meet me in half an hour at the café on Beach Road?’

‘Sure, wait upstairs for me. It’s quieter. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

***

Sheikh Zayed Road was the main highway through the heart of Dubai. It wavered in notoriety as one of the most dangerous roads in the world with a daily body count higher than some war zones.

The driving was so bad that alien anthropologists could be forgiven for imagining the road as some sort of elongated sacrificial altar to a pagan god.

Top of the line cars bore the image of the roads namesake, Sheikh Zayed, the UAE’s first ruler. They tore along each lane of the highway casually breaking the speed limit of 120kph. At 140 they set off the speed cameras. At 200 they might get accused of dangerous driving.

For insecure individuals with tribal status to maintain, driving like an idiot and paying the weekly fines was the mark of a man. Those with the appropriate level of wusta, immune to the vagaries of point-free speeding tickets simply said ‘I don’t want to pay’ when presented with their fines, and they didn’t.

Imagining that this localized power and influence carried over to their dealings with god they drove in writhing snake-like columns, four and five cars deep, each vehicle just inches away from the car in front. The cars in the body of the snake flashed their lights and tail-gated aggressively forcing the lead car to pull over. The snake’s new head then received the same treatment from the furious tail behind. This continued until they made it home, traffic slowed, or someone died.

‘Insha’allah,’ the drivers casually said – if god wills it – only then will you die. It was originally a phrase used to show humility to the almighty. Heaven forbid the driver with his eyes closed had anything to do with his own mortality.

The speedometer crept relentlessly upward as I tried to prevent a white Mitsubishi Pajero a few feet off my rear bumper from crashing into me. The dishdashed driver flashed his headlights repeatedly demanding that I let him pass. Even if I had wanted to, the bumper to bumper lane on my right offered no gaps as we passed the Al Quoz industrial area and sped towards the city.

I tried to put distance between us and hit 140. Instead of granting me the room to maneuver he sped up to maintain his lethal position behind me. My speedometer pinged wildly as I broke the speed limit, but if I slowed the aggressive retard would plough straight into the back of me.

Statistically he had a better chance of survival in his 4x4. In my humble modern classic I had virtually none – a shoot out between a gun and a catapult – Insha’allah my arse.

I caught the driver’s eye in my rear view mirror and raised my hand to the traffic around us. I shrugged my shoulders to indicate I had nowhere to go. The man in the red and white Kuwaiti style head dress showed me his middle finger.

I laughed from the shock. As a foreigner if the police saw me doing the same thing I could be deported.

I gave him the finger back.

Hurt that I hadn’t kowtowed in abeyance to this obvious double standard, he swerved to the right without slowing, cut across three lanes of traffic and veered back into the fast lane ahead of me, narrowly avoiding more cars than I could count in a glance.

The 4x4 pulled ahead to reveal a rear window filled with a smiling picture tint of Sheikh Zayed himself. Almost instantly a large black Mercedes roared up behind me flashing its headlights, the driver anonymous behind a blackened windscreen.

I jammed my car into the next gap, slammed on the brakes to avoid shunting the car in front, and left the never ending car chase of Sheikh Zayed Road two junctions earlier than planned.

The quiet back streets to Beach Road slowed me down, but better to arrive alive and late than become yet another sacrifice to such a blood thirsty god.

***

The tissues Yasmin had torn to pieces during her wait lay neatly arranged in front of her, a small part of her life that she could control. She sat alone in the empty interior of the Icy Palm’s upper level, her back to a floor wide balcony window.

Against the dark interior the balcony outside was lit like a stage. No sound penetrated the glass in between. Two middle aged housewives, Jumeirah Janes, sat opposite a young trio of Dubai divas in wraparound sunglasses, lenses the size of begging bowls. They ignored a token male with swollen hung over features hoping to give alms.

Yasmin sat in silence as if waiting to deliver a dramatic monologue.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said instead. ‘I was going to leave.’

‘I’m sorry. Too many psychopaths on the roads today, I’m here now,’ I said.

She stared forlornly into the middle distance, not offering any words. Her shoulders heaved a sigh.

‘So tell me.’

‘Faisal knows about you,’ she said, looking directly at me, worry in her eyes.

‘Oh.’

‘I came to warn you to be careful. He thinks I am working today. I cannot be gone too long.’