“Sadly, I don’t believe I can keep up with you and your friends. But I think David should take you up on your offer. He’s seen as much of the city as I can show him tonight. My Dubai usually ends where Mr. Seebeck’s version begins.”
Seebeck winked at David. “What do you say, New York? Ready for a second act?”
Part of David would have been content to stay talking to Khaled, but another part of him figured there wasn’t any better way to get to know a city dominated by foreigners than by following a European kid out into the night. He grinned back at the Londoner, then made his good-byes to his new Arab friend. After Khaled had shaken both their hands, Seebeck walked David down a set of stairs to a back entrance behind the VIP balcony. As they pushed past a group of dancing Southeast Asian women, Seebeck leaned in close to David’s ear.
“Khaled’s a good egg, and piety’s a wonderful thing. But—no disrespect intended—why spend your time trying to pray your way into some future paradise when it’s right here in front of you?”
They reached a pair of double doors at the back of the club, and Seebeck pushed his way through with an outstretched palm. They burst out into a back street that ran perpendicular to the club. Parked a few feet from the curb was a bright red Porsche 911 convertible: top down, black leather interior, ivory-white dashboard glistening in the low evening light.
With a flourish, Seebeck produced a set of shiny keys and flashed an equally ostentatious smile.
“In Dubai, this is what we call a company car.”
A minute later, David was hastily strapping himself into the bucketed passenger seat, his body vibrating as Seebeck revved the RPMs. David took a deep breath—the smell of the leather from the seats mingling with the scent of burning gasoline—as the expat shifted the car into reverse, burned a streak of pitch-black rubber into the pavement, and skidded away from the curb.
T
he swimming pool was enormous and shaped like a kidney; curved, tiled in marble, and brightly lit from below by more than a dozen underwater spotlights, its double-ellipsed circumference spanned the entire length of the gated modern condo-complex that rose up, four stories high, above its shimmering aquamarine surface. Surrounding the pool was a vast stone-tiled patio teeming with wicker deck chairs and tables, umbrellas, and potted palm trees. Mingling between the palm fronds and twists of wicker were about fifty people, maybe more—and from the looks of things, the party was just getting started. Throbbing hip-hop music echoed off the stone tiles as model-hot girls in skimpy bikinis cavorted with young men in designer jeans and fitted T-shirts. Waiters in white uniforms carried trays overflowing with Arabic delicacies—stuffed vine leaves, olive cakes, hummus dips, and Syrian bread—while pool boys in pale blue uniforms handed out towels and bathrobes. No matter that it was probably close to midnight; the air was a balmy seventy-five degrees, and the mood seemed as bright as the spotlights at the bottom of the pool.
“My God,” David said as Seebeck led him through a gated en
trance toward a mildly less crowded section of the patio. “What is this place?”
“A pool party, David. Haven’t you ever been to a pool party?”
Seebeck paused to give hugs to a threesome of lithe girls in matching white bikinis, sitting together on a reclined deck chair. Then he continued forward, David rushing to keep up.
“I know it’s a pool party. I mean, why here? Who are all these people?”
Seebeck grinned back at him.
“You mean who are all these girls. These condos are owned by Emirates Air. This is where they house their flight attendants. So my friends and I, in our infinite wisdom, have turned this place into the best after-hours scene in Dubai. With the help of some corporate credit cards, of course.”
David watched a group of girls in the shallow end of the pool playing a form of volleyball with what looked to be some sort of Middle Eastern melon.
“These girls are all flight attendants?”
“That’s right. Australians mostly. That’s why they’re all so goddamn tall. They grow them like that in Australia. Emirates Air picks and chooses the prettiest of the pretty and puts them all up here. Sometimes as many as seventy girls.”
Seebeck slowed his swaggering gait as they approached a group of four well-dressed young men standing beneath a pair of palm trees. The four men all looked to be between David’s age and Seebeck’s. Actually, David had yet to see anyone over thirty; this could have been a party at any trendy club in downtown New York—except the girls were even prettier and the men were even better dressed. Also, David noticed, nobody seemed to be drinking any alcohol. Three of the four young men in front of him were holding clear bottles of water, and the fourth had a soft drink in a can.
Seebeck made the introductions; two of the young men worked at the same asset management company as Seebeck and were both from the U.K. One of the remaining two was an investment banker
from Germany, and the fourth was a real estate consultant from Barcelona. None of them seemed even remotely surprised when David told them where he worked; it was obvious that none of them doubted for a moment that Dubai was becoming the focus of every business—not just real estate, tourism, and banking. And from what he’d seen of Dubai so far, David had to admit that no upwardly mobile young man would need any excuse to want to be there.
“And this is just one of a dozen parties going on tonight,” Seebeck said to David as his friends bantered with each other about some soccer league they had started with a group of Indian money managers. “There’s another set of condos about four blocks away full of corporate secretaries—mostly Swedish and Swiss—that we may visit if this gets tiresome. Then there are nine or ten after-hours clubs where the Eastern European girls hang out. Mostly prostitutes actually, but they’re really nice to look at.”
He winked in a way that made David think that he’d done more than look, but then he quickly changed the subject by grabbing a pair of bottled waters off a tray carried by one of the waitstaff.
“I know, it’s not exactly vodka and Red Bull, but we have to show some semblance of respect. For the most part, we’ve traded excess for alcohol. Even so, of course, the emirate doesn’t exactly condone these parties. And certainly, Khaled and his bunch don’t like the idea of bikini-clad Aussies and Bulgarian prostitutes. But there’s sort of an unwritten rule here: you live how you want to live, you just don’t flaunt it when you’re around the Arabs. You don’t stumble down the street drunk, you don’t hold hands with a girl in public, and unless you’re about to jump into a swimming pool, you don’t dress like you’re on your way to an orgy. Even if you are.”
“Did someone say ‘orgy’?” the German banker butted in, and Seebeck gave him a smack across the cheek.
“Focus, Hans. It’s way too early for orgies. Our young Ameri
can friend has only been in Dubai for a few hours. We need to break him in slowly. Or maybe we need to break him in real fast. Real goddamn
fast
.”
David assumed Seebeck was kidding about the orgies. But then he noticed that all five of the Euros were grinning at each other and nodding as if they’d just come to some unspoken conclusion.
Seebeck clapped his hands together, then suddenly all five Europeans were heading back toward the gated entrance to the patio. David stared after them—then quickly rushed to catch up.
“We’re leaving already? We just got here.”
“Change of plans, New York. Just stick close—I promise you’re going to like this.”
Considering they were leaving a pool party filled with Australian flight attendants, David couldn’t even begin to imagine what Seebeck had planned for them next.
C
ROUCHING AT THE
edge of a makeshift parking lot in the middle of the desert, staring at a pitch-black stretch of the Sheik Zayed Highway, his thighs starting to ache and the exhaustion from twenty-four hours of pure culture shock beginning to set in, David was starting to believe that his new expat guide had actually gone insane. They’d left a perfectly good pool party for this? Even though there were a dozen of the nicest luxury sports cars David had ever seen in his life parked behind them, and twice as many expats crouching alongside them, staring out at that blank highway, this was by no means a party. In fact, in the past ten minutes since they’d arrived in Seebeck’s Porsche—parking between a BMW 5 series convertible and what looked to be a souped-up Lotus—and taken their position in the sand, nobody had uttered a word. No explanations, no pleasantries, nothing.
Finally, David couldn’t handle the silence any longer. He leaned close to Seebeck.
“Man, what the hell are we waiting—”
Seebeck suddenly held up a finger.
“Shh. Here they come.”
David stared at him, then turned back toward the highway. He didn’t see anything. They were so far from the center of the city, apart from their makeshift parking lot, that there were no signs of civilization. They could have been on the surface of the goddamn moon. So what the hell was Seebeck talking about—
And then David heard it. At first it was just a low rumble, at the very edge of his hearing. Then the sound grew, getting louder and louder, turning from a rumble into a thunderous roar. David’s eyes widened—and suddenly, in the far distance, two sets of headlights flashed into view. The headlights were right next to each other, moving straight down the stretch of highway. Except “moving” wasn’t the right word. The lights were fucking flying, like two jets screeching along the highway right next to each other—and now the roar really was like jet engines, so loud that David could feel it in his chest.
“Hold on!” Seebeck shouted, and a roar rose up from the gathered, crouching expats.
Barely a second later, the two sets of headlights became two sleek, speeding blurs of metal, fiberglass, and rubber tires. Both cars were low to the ground, curved and polished, and futuristic—except that in that moment David recognized the two beautiful racing beasts from pictures he’d seen in magazines: a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari Modena, pitch-black with tinted windows, and a three-hundred-grand Lamborghini Diablo, bright green with backward-spinning silver hubcaps. The two cars sped by in a flash of sound and motion, barely inches from each other—and then, just as they’d come, they were gone.
“Holy shit,” David said as the crowd of expats roared again.
“Hell, yeah!” Seebeck shouted back. “Riley’s definitely taking that one. I think they’re doing about one-eighty. Fucking A, that Modena is a sweet ride. Riley’s bosses at SwissBank would have a shit fit if they knew how he was using his transportation ‘al
lowance’—to kick all our asses from one end of the Sheik Zayed to the other!”
David shook his head.
“You mean you all do this? Race your cars along this highway?”
Seebeck smiled, shaking his head. “Hey, not everyone goes for the sports cars. And you can’t very well race a fucking Rolls, can you? But most of us have tried a little street race now and then. There’s nothing like driving a fast car really fast.”
David shook his head again. His adrenaline was really going. It wasn’t just the cars—it was everything. On the ride over, Seebeck had described to him the ten-thousand-dollar-a-month apartments the expats were all renting—on company credit, of course. And then, on top of that, there were the girls—
my God,
David thought,
there were so many girls
. Not just the Australian flight attendants; even during the twenty-minute trip to the deserted stretch of highway, Seebeck had managed to introduce David to dozens of girls from so many different backgrounds. There were the staggeringly tall Russian models coming out of an after-hours party that one of Seebeck’s banking buddies was throwing two doors down from the Emirates Air condos. Then the half-dozen German and Polish blondes they’d run into outside of a falafel hut on their way to the drag strip.
And now that the first race of the evening seemed to be over, the girls had started to arrive even here—a makeshift desert parking lot in the middle of fucking nowhere. Interspaced between the Porsches and BMWs and Ferraris, David counted at least twenty more girls who must have just arrived in the past few minutes, all of them model-beautiful and elegant, European, Eastern European, and Southeast Asian, mingling and flirting with the young men. In New York, girls like that would be around only if there were twenty bottles of Cristal lined up in the sand, but here the girls didn’t need champagne to light their way to the money. The very nature of this place seemed to be about money—and where there was money, there were always girls.
“This is pretty amazing,” David said, watching a group of Italians in silk skirts who could easily have passed for swimsuit models chatting up a pair of bankers in suits. “It’s like New York or London—but times ten.”
“Actually,” Seebeck responded, brushing sand off his slacks, “you’ll find this place is pretty unique. Not just the quality of the girls—which I’m sure you’ve noticed by now—but the way they behave.”
He flicked a hand toward a group of seven more girls, stepping one at a time out of an oversize stretch limo that had just pulled into the parking lot. David noticed that the girls were all wearing long trench coats—which they quickly removed, revealing more miniskirts and tiny lace designer tops.
“That about sums it up right there,” Seebeck continued. “In Khaled’s Dubai, those birds would keep themselves wrapped up and proper, but here in our Dubai it’s a very different story.”
David watched as two of the girls grabbed one of the bankers—who couldn’t have been older than twenty-three, a skinny kid with glasses and slicked-back blond hair—and dragged him back toward the limo. The three of them landed on the backseat in a laughing heap, and as they shut the door behind them, David caught a quick glimpse of connected lips and intertwined limbs.
“Are they—”
“Hookers? No, actually. In this town, the hookers are much more refined. Those girls are tourists. I swear, this place is becoming more and more like Ibiza every week. Hard to believe you’re in the Middle East, isn’t it?”
It was hard to believe this existed anywhere—let alone the Middle East. David stretched his legs as Seebeck and his friends started back toward their hundred-thousand-dollar cars. In his head, he was mulling over what he had seen—from the moment he’d arrived in the Dubai airport to the moment he’d watched those two maniacs race down the Sheik Zayed Highway.
And somewhere in the midst of all that sat Khaled’s intriguing proposal. To open a branch of the Merc, here, in this crazy desert
kingdom full of parties, expats, and race cars. To try to bring a truly Western, capitalistic market to a place of such juxtapositions, such dichotomies. Old and new, Arab and expat, religion and excess.
Was David crazy enough to try to make Khaled’s proposal a reality? Because really, he’d have to be crazy to think that he and Khaled could pull off such a thing.
Then again, listening to the dwindling roar of the Ferrari and the Lamborghini, watching the young Euros mingling together with the models and the hookers and the flight attendants, David wondered: when you’re standing in the middle of an asylum, aren’t you supposed to go a little crazy?