The Black Tide

‘He was my friend.’ He gave a half-shrug. ‘What else? And such a nice boy, from Indo-Chine.’ He wouldn’t say anything more, only that it was a long time ago and he had had to jump a big dhow bound for Muscat. The baggage appeared, and when we were through Customs we were met by a pock-marked Libyan in a smart new suit who drove us into town through dusty, crowded streets, to a hotel just back of the Creek.

It was five years since I’d been in Dubai, yet now it seemed but a few weeks, the smell of the place just the same, a compound of spices, charcoal fires, sweat, putrefaction and desert — the dust of ages everywhere, the dust of old mud stucco crumbling into decay, of desert sands swirling against the concrete breakwaters of high-rise blocks, the scuff of countless human feet. I removed my tie and put it in my pocket. The sun was already throwing deep shadows and it was getting hot.

Deeper into the town I saw how quickly oil had made its mark, the skyline altered and new buildings everywhere. The Persian wind-towers, those dainty filigree turrets that were the earliest form of air-conditioning, tunnelling the sea breezes down into the

rooms below — they were all gone now. They had been such a feature of the place when I had first come here with my mother, and the business section of the Creek had been crowded then with great merchant houses, ornate stucco walls that kept the world at bay, the secret inner courtyards inviolate. Now banking houses and company offices paraded their wealth in a facade of marble and glass.

So much had changed since those faraway days before the oil-tide reached Dubai. But not the crowd. The crowd was still as thick, still as cosmopolitan, a constant flow of movement, with only the Bedu Arabs motionless in the cafes waiting for the metallic Tannoy voice on the minaret of the nearby mosque to call them to prayer. And the Creek itself, that was still the same, except that even more of the dhows had converted entirely to power, hardly a mast to be seen. But there were just as many of them rafted against the wharfs, a jumble of sambuks, booms and jalibuts loading tramp ship goods from all over the world for distribution through the Gulf, most of them still with the traditional thunderbox built out over the side like a small pulpit.

When we reached the hotel, the Libyan, whose name was Mustafa, gave us his card, which was gold-embossed with an address in one of the back alleys near the suk, also the name of a nearby store where we would be provided with lightweight trousers and sleeveless shirts. We would be at the hotel for at least two days, he said — until LB arrived. No, he didn’t know the name of the tanker, or where it was berthed.

He was a travel agent. He knew nothing about ships. Anything we spent in the hotel would be paid for, food, drinks, everything, but if there was something special required we could contact him. The dark eyes stared at us coldly and I wondered what a Libyan was doing running a travel agency in Dubai. He left us with the information that two of our ship’s officers were already billeted in the hotel and another would arrive tomorrow. Choffel was not among the names he mentioned.

After checking in, I went straight to the store. It was a cheap place, if anything could be called cheap in Dubai, the trousers and shirts poor quality cotton and not very well cut. But at least they were cool, for by the time I had had a shower the sun, beating on to the balcony of my room, was very hot. I went down to the desk again and had them check through the names of all the guests in their hotel. The place was a microcosm of modern Dubai, business men from Japan, Germany, France, Holland, Britain, anywhere that produced the machines and infrastructure the Gulf exchanged for its oil. There were even two Chinese and a little group from Byelorussia, all of them with briefcases brimful of specifications and optimism. There were oilmen, too, and air crews staying the night, as well as men like ourselves, officers from coasters in the Creek and ships in Port Rashid, all vocal testimony to the fact that Dubai remained the mercantile centre of the Gulf, the entrepot for the United Arab Emirates.

But there was no Choffel, no Speridion, not even

anyone with a name that looked as though it might be Welsh. Something I did discover, however — there had been half a dozen guests booked in by Mustafa’s agency the previous week and they had left three days ago, not in taxis, but in Land Rovers. Again, Choffel had not been one of them. Before that there was no record of any of Mustafa’s clients having stayed at the hotel, though back in October he had booked accommodation and then cancelled it. The receptionist remembered that because the hotel had been fully booked and the last minute cancellation of four rooms had upset the management.