The second night, for nine hundred dirham, I brought a hooker back to Danil Joshi's room at the Marina Palais Royale Hotel, which was as luxe an establishment as the name implied. I walked her openly past the security guard at the door the same way I'd seen countless other male guests do. We didn't touch, and we kept a reasonable distance between us, and no one looked at us twice, even though everyone on the staff knew what she was and my intentions with her, and never mind that sex outside of marriage was against the law. I was a business traveler, she was my guest, and in the end, weren't we only helping the economy?
Her name was Kekela, which means “beautiful” in Georgian, and it suited her. She was tall, almost Alena's height, tanned and fit, with black hair that dropped in a glossy cascade to only a few inches above her hips, held away from her face by a pair of pearl-inlaid hair clips. Her features were sweet, even innocent, and she knew how to apply makeup for best effect, highlighting her cheekbones and drawing out her auburn eyes so they shone with anticipation and passion.
Once inside my room, Kekela went straight to the couch, kicking off her high heels on the way. The shoes were black and shiny, part of her nightclub ensemble. I fixed the locks on the door, and when I turned around again she was already lounging, one long leg extended on the cushions, the other curled beneath it. The pose made her skirt ride up, revealing the top of one stocking and the elastic from the garter belt that held it secure. The stocking was black and sheer, the garter belt black and lace. With her right hand she pulled the clips from her hair, tossing each onto the coffee table, while her left worked the buttons on her blouse, unfastening them one after the other. As I watched, she teased her top open. Her bra matched the garter belt.
“I'd like something to drink, Danil.” She spoke in Georgian, using the same husky register that had made me strain to hear her in the club. “What do you have to drink?”
“Vodka?” I asked.
Her smile, like everything else she did, sold me even more promise.
I opened the minibar and got out the two tiny bottles of Grey Goose, cracked them and poured them together into a glass, seeing her watch me in the reflection off the dead television screen. The act stopped when I wasn't looking at her, the eagerness and accommodation turning dull, but she was very quick, and it was right back as before when I returned to her and put the glass in her hand.
“You're not drinking with me?”
“I don't drink much.”
I took the chair nearest where she had been resting her head on the armrest of the couch. She pulled from the glass, half of the alcohol vanishing, then lowered it and ran a finger around its rim, meeting my eyes as she did it. As innuendo, it should have been absurd and ineffective, but she gave it as much commitment as Bacall had ever done for Bogie, and I was surprised at its effectiveness.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-two.”
It was a lie, but it was to be expected. Every prostitute I'd spoken to had claimed to be twenty-two, even the ones who'd looked forty, the same way every bribe in Georgia and Turkey had been fifty euros. In Kekela's case, though, it didn't appear to be a big one, and I couldn't imagine her much older than twenty-six.
“Where're you from?”
“Mtskheta.”
“Where's that?”
An eyebrow rose slightly. “The mountains. North of Tbilisi, on the river.”
“Right,” I said. “That's right.”
“You work in the capital?”
“Used to. Since the war I've been in Batumi most of the time.”
She nodded slightly, slowly, then finished the rest of her drink and set it on the coffee table. The glass met the glass without a sound. She straightened up on the couch, ran her hands through her hair, stretching to give me the show as she brought up her arms. The movement caused her blouse to open wide, and her breasts strained against her bra. Even at two in the morning it was still almost 35 Celsius outside, and humid, and the air conditioner was running, keeping the room cool, and it was that rather than arousal that had turned her nipples hard.
Kekela held the pose for a beat longer than she needed to if she had been merely stretching, once more boldly meeting my eyes. Her mouth opened slightly, the start of a naughty smile.
Then she froze, and her arms came down, palms planting on either side of her on the cushions, as if preparing to spring. The performance mask disappeared, too, and her jaw set. The warmth in her eyes died.
“All right,” she said, and the husky tone had gone the same way of the warmth, her voice turning hard and climbing half an octave higher. “What is this?”
“What do you mean?”
“What the fuck is this?”
“I don't know what you mean, Kekela,” I said.
“I mean you keep looking in my fucking eyes. You don't look at my legs. You don't look at my tits. You don't look at my ass. You look me in the goddamn eyes.”
“Well,” I said, “you've got very pretty eyes.”
She snorted. “Are you going to fuck me or not?”
“I'd rather talk.”
“I don't do talk.” Kekela pushed off the couch and onto her feet. She began buttoning her blouse. “I do oral. For extra, I let you cum in my mouth. I do anal, I do threesome, I do ass-to-mouth and I do ass-to-cunt, I do just about anything you can think of.”
Her blouse was closed. I hadn't moved. She scooped her two hair clips from the coffee table with one hand, then fixed a glare on me.
“But I don't. Do. Talk.”
I stayed exactly as before, not moving, presenting no threat, unless she took the slight smile I had on my face as one. She turned from the hips, locating her shoes, then snapped her attention back to me, as if expecting that I'd have tried something in the second she'd looked away.
When she saw that I hadn't, she added, as if I was an idiot, “And you're not from Tbilisi.”
“No, I'm not. If you want to leave, you should. I won't keep you here against your will.”
“I am going to leave.”
“It's just that you're from Georgia,” I said. “And I was hoping that would give us a connection, no matter how small. Hoping that the language would give us a foundation of trust.”
Suspicion danced on her face. “Why?”
“I need help.”
“You need help?” She snorted at me again, much the same way Alena did when she felt I was being unreasonably dim-witted. “Fucking obvious, you need help.”
I shrugged.
“You're paying me nine hundred dirham because you need help?”
“I can pay more.”
I expected greed, but what I saw on her face then was curiosity, instead. She looked me over, this time much more thoroughly than she had at the nightclub, then gave the room another survey. It was a very nice room. Considering how much I was being charged for it, it damn well better have been.
“What kind of help?” Kekela asked.
I indicated the couch. Her mouth drew tight, nearing a scowl, and she snorted yet again. Then she sat back down, this time at the opposite end. Her feet stayed on the floor.
“What kind of help?” she asked again.
“I'm trying to find a girl,” I said, and I told her the story of Tiasa Lagidze.
“The ratio of men to women in Dubai, right now, at this moment, is three to one,” Kekela told me over a late breakfast at the pool bar. “That's a lot of men looking to get laid.”
She was feasting on a plate of fresh fruit and yogurt, washing down bites with her second mimosa. We were speaking in English and Georgian alternately. Her English was very good and barely accented, and when I'd asked her about it, she'd explained that it was the lingua franca of Dubai. It was almost eleven in the morning, and hot, already nearing 40 degrees Celsius. June marked the beginning of the off-season, the weather cruel enough to send even the most die-hard hedonists running for milder climes. Only a dozen guests moved around in the pool, and beyond it I could see perhaps half that number playing along the shore. The water of the Gulf and the water in the pool were almost the exact same shade of impossible blue. Almost everyone I saw was Caucasian-European or CIS-though two were Chinese. The service staff at the hotel, on the other hand, was almost universally Southeast Asian or Filipino. Of the few guests I was seeing, the majority were female, uniformly young and beautiful. There were no kids.
Kekela followed my gaze, then forked another piece of mango. “You're wondering if the women are all prostitutes.”
“Are they?”
“The Marina isn't so good for that, at least, not during the daytime. Other hotels are better. But maybe all of them, they are whores of one kind or another.”
“What does that mean?”
“They're here the same reason I'm here, Danil. They're looking for money.”
I moved my attention back to her. She was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit she'd picked out and that I'd bought for her from one of the multiple hotel shops this morning, after she'd finally awoken. I'd slept on the couch, despite her offer to share the bed, a freebie bonus to the “consulting service” deal we'd negotiated the night before. Bathing suits and breakfast, it seemed, were part of the package, as well. Compared to what the other women were wearing, her suit was practically modest. Outside of the hotel, it would get her fined; on the road to Abu Dhabi, it could get her killed.
“That's why you're here?” I asked. “For the money?”
“Not at first.” She finished chewing, swallowed, smiling ruefully. “No, you wouldn't believe me.”
“Try me.”
“Maybe I'm looking for Mr. Right.”
“Your search has taken you far from home.”
“I sure as hell wasn't finding him in Tbilisi.”
“And how's it going?”
She sipped again at her mimosa. “I've been here for three years, and I'm still single. The money is good, but it's not enough, not for what I want.”
“Nine hundred dirham a night, that's-”
“About a hundred and fifty euro,” Kekela said. “Most of the time it's not for the night with me. Three hundred for two hours. If it's a good night, I can make six hundred euro. At home that's good money; here, it's enough to get by. I have to pay the government, I have to pay rent, buy clothes, food, medical, everything. Then there are bribes-you have to pay the places you work out of, the clubs and the bars. I try to send money back home, too, you know. And because everyone here has so much money, everything costs so much money.”
“You pay the government?”
“For my work visa, as an entertainer. Sixteen hundred dirham, every couple of months. Prostitution isn't legal, but it isn't so illegal they want to stop it. Three to one, like I said, and of those three, many are like you, traveling alone on business of one sort or another. Dubai wants their money, so they make it easy for them to spend it on the things they like.”
“Maybe you should raise your rates.”
“I'd price myself out of the market,” she said, without a hint of irony. “I already charge the most I can get away with for what I am. The Chinese and Asian girls, they're the cheapest. Then you get the Africans, then girls like me, the CIS girls they call us, all the Confederation of Independent States that used to be the Soviet Union. Russians, Uzbeks, Georgians, Ukrainians, Kazaks, you know. We're mid-range. The really high-end, expensive ones, those are the regional girls. Except for the Iraqis, they used to be more expensive, but there are so many now, the price for them has dropped.”
I drank some orange juice, thinking that Kekela talked about her work with the same disconnect that Alena and I talked about ours.
“Still doesn't tell me how you got here.”
Kekela brushed stray hair out of her face. “A friend from my village, she had been abroad. She came home, said that there was a lot of work for girls in Dubai, that I could get a job in a restaurant, or maybe even singing in a club.”
“You believed her?”
“I didn't have a reason not to. And rich Arabs had to be better than where I was.” She turned her champagne flute in her fingers, looking at her reflection in the glass. “It's not like with your Tiasa, Danil. I came on my own, I paid my own way, I had my own papers, so I was in a better position, I could make a choice.”
“Is that what this is for you? A choice?”
“You are asking me a lot of questions.”
“That's the arrangement, isn't it? I ask questions, you answer them.”
“The deal didn't cover questions about me.”
“I'm curious.”
She put the glass down, removing her sunglasses. I'd bought them for her at the same time I'd bought the bathing suit. At her request, of course.
“Worry about saving one girl at a time,” Kekela told me. “I'm going swimming. Would you like to join me?”
I shook my head.
“Then I'll see you back in your room. Say, three hours.”
She headed into the water, diving from the edge of the pool, breaking the rippling sheet of blue. I watched as she swam the length, reached the opposite end. She took hold of the ledge, looking back toward me, and there was enough distance between us that I couldn't make out her expression. She was probably laughing.
I charged the meal to my room, then went to find the health club, hoping for an outlet for my impatience and my doubt. Two hours managed most of the impatience, but the doubt still lingered as I made my way back to the room and into the shower. Kekela's game was obvious, and we both understood it. She would take me for everything she could, but in the end, she would have to balance that with a result, something to square the account. The money didn't matter to me. What mattered was the time.
But until the sun went down and the expats flooded the clubs, there wasn't much either of us could do but wait.
I was out of the shower and going through Bakhar's address book for the eleventh time when there was a knock on my door. When I checked the spyhole, I saw Kekela, in her swimsuit, towel wrapped around her hips and another around her hair. Beside her, with a hand on her upper arm, stood a grim-looking Filipino man, short and burly, in the plainclothes uniform of hotel security.
“He needs my passport,” Kekela told me when I opened the door. She spoke in Georgian, her tone flat as a board.
“Mr. Joshi,” the man said, using English. “This woman says she's your guest?”
“I hope that's not a problem,” I said.
He released her, and I could see the color on Kekela's skin from where he'd held her arm tighter than he'd needed to. I moved out of her way, letting her into the room.
“We need to make a photocopy of her passport,” the man said. “It's hotel policy.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just a second.”
I left him holding the door open, stepped around into the bedroom, where Kekela had left her clothes from the night before. She'd already opened her purse, had her passport in hand. I took it from her.
“It's not a problem,” Kekela said, in Georgian. “It happens, it's happened to me before.”
“Did he hurt you?” I asked.
She looked surprised, needed half a moment to recover. Then she shook her head. “No. No, I'm fine.”
From my wallet, I took out three five-hundred-dirham bills, folding them together once and then once again. I tucked the money inside the front flap of her passport. The document looked legit, dog-eared and well thumbed, and according to the vitals, Kekela's name was Kekela Alkhazovi, and she was twenty-seven years old.
“Get dressed,” I told Kekela, then went back to the door, where the man from hotel security was waiting patiently, just as I'd left him. I handed him her passport.
“I trust you'll bring it back promptly,” I said.
The man ran a stubby thumb along the edge of the document, feeling the bulge made by my bribe. “Right away.”
“And I trust this won't happen again.”
He frowned slightly. “Will you be bringing any other female guests to the hotel, Mr. Joshi?”
“Not planning on it.”
“Then this will certainly be the last of the matter. You have my apologies for any inconvenience.”
I thought about saying that I wasn't the one he should be apologizing to, then thought it would be an absurd thing to say. Prostitution was clearly such an open secret the hotel felt obliged to keep their own records of the transactions, the same way they kept records of their guests. Everyone, it seemed, knew the part they were to play, except for me.
He departed, and I shut and locked the door. The shower had started in the bathroom. I returned to the desk where I'd been working, pulling out Bakhar's little black book once more, again checking it against the files I'd pulled off the BlackBerry. Neither had any numbers for Dubai, and I wasn't finding anything new.
Eight minutes after hotel security departed, there was another knock on the door, this time a bellboy returning the passport. He'd brought a complimentary bottle of champagne up, as well. I sent him away with a tip, thinking that it bordered on farce, that I was giving money in return for a gift that had come from a bribe as a result of the prostitute in my room.
I locked the door yet again, turned back to see Kekela emerging from the suite's bedroom. She was naked. She also, it turned out, shaved her pubic hair.
“You're not looking in my eyes,” she remarked.
I corrected myself. “Put on some clothes.”
“We're not going to be able to start looking for your girl until tonight.” She started coming toward me, grinning. “Ten at the earliest. That gives us seven hours.”
“Plenty of time,” I said. “Get dressed, I'll take you to the Deira Souq, we can go shopping.”
“It's too hot to go out.”
She stopped in front of me, took the champagne and the passport out of my hands, then dropped them on the floor. The champagne hit the carpet with a solid thump.
“Kekela,” I said. “Put on some clothes. Now.”
“If you're afraid that you'll catch something, Danil, please, don't be. I get checked every two weeks, and I have an AIDS test every month.”
“Yes, you're very clean, I can see that.”
I stepped around her, heading toward the bedroom. She followed me quickly, rushing past at the last minute and throwing herself across the bed. Then she rolled onto her side, flipping wet hair back over one shoulder. She held open her arms for me. I didn't break stride. There were two complimentary terrycloth robes in the closet, and I yanked one free from its hanger and tossed it onto her on the bed.
She sat up, and from her expression I could see she still didn't get it, that she was trying to puzzle my behavior into something that made sense to her. She pulled the robe onto her lap, but didn't open it, made no further move toward covering herself up.
“Is it a kink? Do you need me to play with myself first? Do you want to watch?”
“No,” I said, and the exasperation started to creep into my voice. “I want you to get dressed, Kekela.”
“You don't like my body? I don't turn you on?”
“Don't be stupid.”
“Then why not? What are you so worried about? You have a wife? A girlfriend? She'll never know.”
“I'll know,” I said.
She stared at me, and I couldn't tell if it was simple incomprehension or pure disbelief I was seeing. Then she snorted, began pulling on the bathrobe as she slid off the bed. When she had tied it closed, she spun around once, in place, then threw up her hands.
“Happy now?”
“No,” I said. “But I can work with what I've got.”
“You are fucked up. Are you gay, is that it? I mean, seriously, it's fucking sex, that's all it is.”
“I know what it is.”
“Everyone cheats. Every single one cheats. Your girl, she cheats, too. Right now, I'll bet she's cheating on you. But you won't touch me.”
“Not everyone.”
“Yes. Everyone.”
“No wonder I feel so lonely,” I said.