He was met at the airport by a young Indian man in a dark-gray suit and peaked cap holding a clipboard with his name on it. Webster let him take his luggage and followed him across the marble hall, through the slowly revolving doors and out into the dry heat of the evening. There was perhaps an hour before the sun disappeared. In his thin wool suit, a staple of trips to warm climates, he felt dehydrated, sweaty and decidedly unpressed.
A little way from the terminal his driver put his bag down and asked him to wait for a moment before disappearing into a concrete parking lot. Webster watched the cars driving past: a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Porsche. A lowly Mercedes taxi. He thought about calling Elsa, took his phone from his pocket and remembered that it was early afternoon in London and that she would still be at work. There were e-mails, though, and he started to go through them: one from Constance suggesting they meet for dinner the next day; several from Ike.
Something brilliantly white distracted his eye in the growing gloom, and when he glanced up he saw a Rolls-Royce, glisteningly new and looking like it had just arrived from the rich man’s afterlife. It was obscenely massive, with great square headlights and a brutish expression, as if to say that this was Dubai and ostentation not merely normal but required. He moved back a couple of steps, giving it room, and then with a flush of real embarrassment saw the door open and his driver get out.
“Please, sir,” he said, moving to the back of the car and opening the door for Webster, who for several moments simply stood, not quite knowing what to do. In the end, holding his phone at arm’s length, he took a picture of his car and its driver and got in, sliding back into deep leather seats.
“I have arrived,” he wrote to Elsa, and sent her the photograph.
THROUGH THE ROLLS-ROYCE’S TINTED GLASS Dubai was getting steadily darker, and as they approached Jumeirah the last glints of reflected sun on the skyscrapers were giving way to garish digital billboards and fluorescent office lights. In the three years since he had been here the buildings appeared to have doubled, in size and number. Now they crowded around each other in tight rows, straining ever higher, competing for air and sunlight, and Webster found himself wondering how many this dry desert earth could eventually support.
In twenty minutes they had reached Jumeirah Beach, where two hotels, one in the shape of a sail, the other a wave, both in pristine white, commanded the skyline and the shore.
Webster was staying in the sail. It rose up from its own artificial island and could only be reached by a private bridge, which curved gently toward the hotel so that guests could gaze up at it as they arrived. Webster did so now. He remembered reading that it had been designed to resemble the sail of a dhow, an Arabian fishing boat. A single mast of white steel rose a thousand feet out of the sea and from it a sheet of glass seemed to billow out toward land, as if it had just been caught by the wind and at any moment would run aground on the beach. As they approached, the top of the building drew back from sight under the bulge of the sail, and the Rolls-Royce slowed to a stop.
Webster pulled himself out of the car, thanked his driver and was shown into the hotel by two smiling staff, a man and a woman, both young, both from Southeast Asia—Malaysia, perhaps, or Singapore. His eyes automatically looked up as he entered the lobby, which rose to the full height of the sail, endless white landings narrowing slowly to a point above. Outside, the Burj Al Arab was modern, pristine, the only color the blue of the sky reflected in its glass; inside, the decorators had combined luxury cruise ship with the Arabian Nights. The carpet was thick and blue, the chairs green and red, and everything was edged and trimmed and patterned with gold. Columns carved as palm trees reached up four or five floors, their golden fronds forming arches around the giant room. Webster, entranced and horrified, was asked to take a seat on a sofa under a real palm tree. In moments two women in Arab dress had appeared with dates and coffee in a golden pot that gave off the scent of cardamom as it was poured, and then he was left alone to watch the well-heeled guests in their shorts and sports shirts and wonder what on earth he was doing in this demented place.
The coffee was good, sweet and thick. After five minutes, during which time, he assumed, he was meant to acclimate to the extraordinary atmosphere of the Burj, a new flunky appeared, introduced himself as Raj, and asked him whether he was ready to go to his room. Webster resisted the temptation to say that he had been ready for a little while, and was led into a twinkling glass elevator that shot them at stomach-lifting speed to the twenty-third floor.
The room was several rooms; four thousand square feet, Raj told him, with a king-size bed, two bathrooms, a dining area, a cocktail bar, and a living room on each of its two floors. Webster wasn’t very good on areas, but he was fairly sure that his house in London was rather less. Beyond the curved double-height window that formed the outside wall was the flat sweep of Dubai, dark now but studded with lights that glared beside the unbroken black of the sea. Against the eastern horizon a thin band of purple and bronze mirrored the sunset he couldn’t see.
“Would you care to join me in the office, sir?” said Raj, and Webster, beginning to tire of this elaborate induction, asked him why.
“We need to check you in, sir.”
“Couldn’t we have done that downstairs?”
“We think it is more private in your suite, sir.” This was undoubtedly true, although even Webster, who might have had greater reason for discretion than most, had never found checking in to hotels particularly exposed before. “It won’t take a moment.”
Sitting at his desk—inlaid with gold-embossed leather—he was presented with two documents for signature. Neither made any reference to his name (the “client” in each case was Tabriz Asset Management Ltd.)—nor to the rate of the room.
“How much is this place?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“How much does it cost to stay here? A night?”
“Tabriz have a special rate, sir.”
“I’m sure they do. What’s the standard rate?”
Raj hesitated.
“I could look it up on your website,” said Webster.
“Sixteen thousand dirham, sir.”
“About four thousand dollars.”
“Yes, sir.”
Webster thought for a moment.
“Raj, do you have a smaller room?”
“The hotel is full, sir.”
“No doubt.” Webster looked up at him, looked down at the papers, signed them with a gold hotel pen, and watched Raj leave.
AN HOUR LATER, in fresh clothes and feeling something like himself again, Webster found himself sitting by a wall of glass watching fish swim in an undersea playground of seaweed and rocks.
This was the Al Mahara restaurant, the Oyster, and was not to be confused with the Arab restaurant, or the Japanese restaurant, or any of the other dozen places to eat throughout the hotel. Guests reached it by way of a vestibule mocked-up as a submarine. They entered, had the door sealed behind them, and watched the old-fashioned portals slowly fill with water and various forms of sealife. Once on the sea floor, at the end of this phantom journey, Webster had been shown to a table beside the aquarium, a colossal drum of glowing blue at the center of a circular room whose chairs and walls and carpets were velvety and deeply red. He was the only single person there, and as he surveyed the menu realized that the food was simply too expensive to indulge in alone; at the other tables husbands and wives talked in softened tones, their tans fresh, enjoying the theater. A waitress came and brought him his whisky in a heavy tumbler filled with shaved ice. None of this seemed very Qazai, he thought. Perhaps Timur would turn out to be the gaudy playboy of the family.