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'être.
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.
“She's going to meet us?” I asked Kekela.
Her nod was curt, staring straight ahead. Since leaving the hotel, she'd refused to meet my eyes, and her body language now was all about anger, though she was doing her best to conceal it. I'd hurt her, and she didn't like that. Perhaps of all the things I could've done to her, that had been the worst.
“What more did she say?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just that she thought she'd found the girl.”
“Do you trust her?”
Her jaw worked, lips compressing tightly. First I hurt her, then I insulted her friends.
“I trust Xia with my life,” Kekela said.
I didn't press. I wasn't going to get anything more even if I did. Instead, I went back to watching Dubai zip past, then pulled out the BlackBerry and checked it again for any messages I might've missed. I hadn't. I tucked the phone back in my pocket. Aside from it, I had my Danil Joshi passport and my wallet. My wallet held almost three thousand euros, twice that much in dirhams. I hoped it would be enough to purchase Tiasa's freedom, but if it wasn't, it didn't matter.
If she was at our destination, she was leaving with me.
The skyscrapers and fields of construction cranes fell away abruptly, and for another ten minutes we sped through the desert. The terrain was harsh, browns and yellows, packed earth and then sand, clichéd as a movie set. Traffic that had been light and constant thinned out even more. Our driver slowed enough to keep from rolling the car when we turned inland along a freshly paved road that seemed to lead to the middle of nowhere. After another two minutes, an apartment block came into view, as if it had been dropped from above onto the landscape.
The cab pulled into the makeshift dirt lot, amidst a battery of other vehicles, most in considerably worse condition than our own, pickups and vans, even a couple heavy-class construction vehicles. Two caught my eye, a new BMW sedan and a Toyota SUV. Both lacked the thick layer of desert dust that seemed to coat everything else. I paid the driver, and Kekela and I got out. Heat collapsed on us like a curtain, drier than it had been in the city, yet more severe. The car pulled away, wheels crunching gravel, then sped off the way we'd come. For a moment after it left, there was the illusion of silence, and then noise began filtering to us from the building.
Now that we were out of the cab, I could see the structure was actually multiple buildings, all of the same design, as if modeled on some old Soviet-style housing plan. They'd been built so close together it looked like there was barely room enough to walk abreast between them. This was further complicated by the fact that a chain-link fence ran around the perimeter, topped with concertina wire. Piles of trash, some of it in bags, most of it not, sat heaped along the fence.
There was noise coming from within the buildings, the voices of too many men in too small a space, barely heard behind the din of two dozen air conditioners. I could smell overflowing sewage.
“Now what?” I asked Kekela.
“I don't know. She said she would meet us.” She looked confused.
“There's a brothel here?”
“At least one, yes.”
“Why here? Why not in the city?”
“Your girl, Tiasa, she's young.” Kekela glanced around, perhaps searching for Xia, perhaps afraid we'd be overheard. There was no one in sight. “A lot of men like them young, but the young ones, they can't work the bars. So they put them in houses, they hide them in places like this.”
I pointed to the BMW and the SUV. “Either of those Xia's?”
“I don't think so. I don't know what she drives, though. Customers, probably.” She shifted, uncomfortable with the subject. “Like I said, a lot of men like them young.”
I looked the buildings over again. The heat was intense enough that my sweat evaporated the moment it reached my skin, made my flesh tighten. When I looked back in the direction of the city, I could just make out the tops of the high towers, the upper floors floating in the heat haze.
There was a clank from the fence, and Xia was opening the gate, motioning us to her. Kekela moved first. I followed. The gate had a padlock, and Xia replaced it once we were through, but she didn't lock it.
“This way,” Xia said. “Quickly.”
She started immediately along the narrow alley between the blocks. Laundry lines made from scavenged work-site cable were strung between support posts, draped with clothing and bedding, obstructing vision everywhere I turned. Xia hurried, Kekela close after her. Every door we passed was closed, every window set high and made small, impossible to see or escape through.
“Over here, this way,” Xia said.
We turned, came around the corner of one of the buildings into a courtyard, this one devoid of laundry or refuse. In the meager shade provided by the balcony above him, a man sat opposite us, beside a closed door. He looked in his twenties, wearing the traditional shirt-dress dishdasha that Emirati men favored, but this one was teal instead of the old-fashioned white. His head was bare, no gutra, his hair cut fashionably, just a little long. A cigarette burned in one hand.
“Here he is,” Xia said, indicating me.
The man let a mouthful of smoke leak free as he looked me over. Then he showed me an anemic smile.
“Mar haba,” he said.
“Al-salaam alaykum,” I answered. Peace be upon you.
“Wa alaykum e-salaam,” he answered. And upon you peace.
The insincerity was palpable to all of us.
He rose from his seat, dropping the cigarette and grinding it out with his toe, his attention, for the moment, on its destruction. He was wearing Nikes. They looked new. When he was certain he'd ground the butt to shreds, he looked up again, this time at Xia.
“You can go,” he told her.
Xia took hold of Kekela's forearm, started trying to move her back in the direction we had come. “Come on.”
“No,” Kekela said. “No, I'm staying with him.”
“Keke, please,” Xia said, trying to move her again. “We should go.”
I'd been keeping my eyes on the man, the same way he'd been watching me. There was no question, now, that Xia had set me up, and from her behavior, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, that she'd done so against her will. There had always been the chance this was how things would play out; the moment I'd handed over the picture of Tiasa, it pretty much guaranteed that the wrong people would take notice. But the wrong people for Xia were the right people for me, and I'd played the gamble willingly, and I'd settle it now, no matter the cost.
At least, no matter the cost to me.
“It's okay,” I told Kekela. “You should go.”
“No! What's going on?” She jerked herself free from Xia's grip, turning on her. “What did you do? What have you done, Xia?”
Xia didn't answer.
“I told him he could trust you! I told him because I trust you!”
“If she won't leave,” the man said to me, “she's welcome to come inside with you. I have friends who would be happy to keep her company.”
“I'm sure you do,” I answered. “That's why she's going to leave.”
“No, no I won't, I won't go. I'm staying with you, Danil!”
I broke from the staring contest, faced Kekela. She looked miserable, guilty and afraid. I put my hands on her shoulders, spoke in Georgian.
“Either they have Tiasa, or they know where I can find her, and that's why I'm here. You got me this far. You did everything I asked you to. But now you have to go.”
“Oh God, oh my God.” Her voice had gone tight. “This is my fault. It's all my fault.”
“It's not.”
“They're going to kill you. That's what's going to happen, isn't it?”
“First they'll have some questions for me.”
“Oh God, oh God. No, no, I can't leave you.”
“If you go in there, Kekela, they'll use you against me. It's like you said by the pool. I need to concentrate on saving one woman at a time.”
It took her a second to parse, to remember, and then she half laughed, half sobbed.
“You are fucked up,” she told me.
“Without question,” I agreed. “Go. Please.”
This time, when Xia took her arm, she didn't resist. I watched them round the corner, going out of sight. Kekela didn't look back.
When I turned again to face him, the man's smile was exactly as it had been before. He indicated the door he'd been seated beside. “Shall we go inside?”
“After you.”
“No.” The smile died, turned to ice in the middle of the desert. “After you.”