Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [75]
“Dubai tries to be as westernized as any place can be, but first and foremost it's a Muslim country and there are limits. Myself, I reckon,” he says, stepping inside and closing the patio door, “I've got another year to go here. Maybe less. Then I'm off.”
“Oh yeah? Where to?”
“New York. I've always wanted to live in New York.”
“Ah. A real city, you mean.”
We exchange looks and laugh. “Yeah, a real city.”
The final showdown has arrived. Time to meet the monster everyone's been warning me against. The top-ranking government official who, with a few words in the appropriate ear and a “clap-clap make it so,” could have the lot of us evicted from Dubai—which, strangely, is something I would actively welcome by this point. It's nothing anyone's done specifically, just that, after everything Nick told me about life here, all the dos and don'ts, the way the rich treat those who aren't as fortunate as they are, I can't help feeling jittery and vulnerable. It's only been a couple of days, but I'm ready to scram and never return.
Jay comes limping over, stoically soldiering on despite the constant nagging pain of his sciatica. “Remember, you can't needle this guy the way you do other people.” Last-minute instructions. “Don't ask him any difficult questions. Go easy on him.”
I won't. I will. Stop worrying.
We rendezvous inside an elegant creamy-white showpiece auditorium that someone has striven to make perfect, and in so doing scrubbed it clean of all personality, like so much else around here. It's reached by crossing a bridge decorated with towering palm trees made from beaten copper. These are continued in the interior.
On the shout of “Action!” from Jay, I enter, wearing My Mystified Look again. As I do so, a cultured and charming man with an easy smile steps out to greet me, his frame concealed beneath a gleaming white dishdasha.
“Hello, Cash, how do you do, I'm Hamza.”
Conveniently overlooking the anomaly of why a senior figure in Dubai commerce would be just standing there in the room, ready to talk about his projects to a guy he doesn't even know, wink wink, we shake hands and do our spontaneous interview.
Actually, he's agreeable enough. Certainly not the ogre he's been painted. Tasha and Nick needn't have panicked. I guess they were expecting a grizzly bear. In fact we got Yogi. The real reason everyone walks on eggshells around him, I quickly discover, is that he's the general manager of Dubai's most audacious project to date: the Palm Jumeira—you've probably seen reports; it's been all over the news—a splayed peninsula packed with villas, hotels, and shops, built on reclaimed land in the Gulf and shaped like an elegant palm tree. Constructed by fourteen thousand poor people to enable a few rich ones to enjoy an even better life than they have already, it includes marinas, beaches, cafés, lavish spas, a monorail, and an artificial reef for divers and wildlife, created, I read somewhere, by sinking fighter jets into the ocean. They're already calling the Palm the Eighth Wonder of the World. Which is a shame, because, the way things stand, this will push poor Angkor Wat down to ninth. That's bound to make somebody mad.
What's more, it turned out to be such an off-the-wall crazily marketable idea that Nakheel, the construction company (owner: Sheik Mo), built two even bigger ones farther along the coast: the Palm Deira and the Palm Jebel Ali. But then—then—guess what! Even as these were getting under way, Sheikh Mo, who I'm guessing never sleeps, hatched his greatest brainchild yet. This required another impressive model, which takes pride of place in the showroom, depicting a wondrous archipelago of three hundred manmade private islands individually fashioned into a map of the earth's continents and countries, and called The World.
Ooh, The World,