Secret Skin Read online

  SECRET SKIN

  By Frank Coles

  Copyright © 2012 Frank Coles | Riding High Ltd

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved.

  http://www.frankcoles.com

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  License Statement

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  About the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  Bonus Content - Dark Market

  Dedication

  For my mother. Naturally.

  About the Book

  This was the first book I ever wrote as myself. I'm still proud if it. I lived in Dubai for a number of years and it was an exciting place to be. It was where the lowly could become powerful overnight, hairdressers became property tycoons, laborers import-export multi-millionaires. It was where politicians from the west mixed with gangsters, tribesmen, big oil and corporate rulers without anyone asking awkward questions. Spies went shopping, assassinations happened in hotel rooms where we partied.

  Stunning feats of architecture could be thrown up almost overnight and heritage demolished just as quickly. It was a town filled with good and bad and you either loved it or hated it. And as in the west there was brutality and slavery in the background, hidden, just as it is here.

  But sexual violence in fiction is nearly always focused on women. In real-life the other kind is hidden even deeper and rarely, if ever, talked about.

  Prologue

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

  The height of the last property boom.

  A painfully skinny forensics officer stood on the edge of the creek wearing an absurd, almost theatrical uniform. His young manicured hands trembled as he pulled back the grimy tarpaulin like a child removing the cover of a surprise birthday present.

  One arm slapped the empty cobbled promenade of Dubai’s dhow lined creek. The other arm stayed where it was, crippled, the elbow twisted at an impossible angle in its socket. Deep burns scored and bruised the dead woman’s wrists where they had been tied together. Graded nautical rope still bound her ankles. In a last final indecency her knees had fallen open, revealing everything to a disapproving but fascinated male audience of boatmen and police. Unashamed, each man’s eyes explored the bloody kaleidoscope of painful dark reds, soft purples, and long savage gashes where her naked flesh had been cleaved apart.

  The evidence of bondage and the obvious lack of clothes made it hard to believe she had fallen from a ship and been mangled by rotor blades.

  ‘So, is it her?’ the captain said.

  ‘There’s too much mutilation,’ I said. ‘I can’t be certain.’

  I looked again. Her hair and eyes were the same color, and the deformed skin also had a familiar sallow tint, but then so did half the population of Dubai.

  ‘Close her eyes,’ I said.

  Captain Khadim snapped his fingers and barked a short order. The forensics waif obeyed.

  Ignoring the patterns disturbed minds had carved into the body I moved in closer. My breathing shallowed, a feeble defense against its perfumed decay.

  There was one small feature that I knew intimately, something that would distinguish this disfigured corpse from any other, a small mole on her left eyelid. Her one imperfection she'd said.

  As the grand mosque’s early morning call to prayer echoed through the cool dawn air I probed her loose spongy skin and stifled a gag.

  Then I forced myself to look again.

  Chapter One

  The first time I saw her she strode assertively towards me, all but invisible behind the black folds of a traditional Muslim abaya. Then she purposefully flicked the flimsy fabric to one side to reveal the secret skin of a dark leg and the momentary sheen of a translucent hold-up stocking. Her movements disturbed the flat air of the afternoon and freed an intoxicating scent of hot flesh and heavy perfume hidden from the powerful Middle Eastern sun.

  As she passed she angled her head to capture my fascinated gaze with the desirable but uncommon green of her own.

  Emirati women rarely looked at a man so directly. And I almost never looked into the eyes behind a veil. I either ignored them or focused on the quality of their extremities and accessories instead. Designer handbags and jewellery, either real or fake, told you about their financial standing, or their aspirations. While heavy makeup, flashes of haute couture, or the impossibly perfect skin of surgery around the eyes confirmed that under the oh-so slimming black Emirati women cared about how they looked as much as any western woman with Voguish tastes.

  At the very least these cultural idiosyncrasies lent a helpful hop and a skip in my eager jumps to conclusions.

  She continued her teasing promenade along Al Diyafah Street, a working area of shops and offices by day, a family and couples area by night.

  As afternoon turned to dusk the street filled with crowds of transient men, either happily finishing a work day based on the cold climate hours of the western world, or returning to a sultry evening’s toil after the more practical siesta of Arabian time.

  The oversized pavement cafes bubbled over with flavored shisha water pipes and an everyday street theatre of well-heeled local young bloods entertained. They cruised by in showroom fresh cars and sped between columns of slow moving traffic on expensive Japanese motorbikes, scaring pedestrians with their front wheels in the air.

  Every few months an impoverished laborer would throw himself in front of the traffic hoping to exchange his life for enough blood money to satisfy a demanding family back home.

  For this woman to be so bold and for the men to let her get away with it she just had to be a prostitute. A stray from the back streets, out to exploit the ready market of overheated testosterone and clammy, repressed sexuality.

  Despite claims to the contrary, a woman for hire was as easy to find in Dubai as a designer knock-off in the souks. Any hotel, shopping mall or downtown street in the city would provide. Normally I ignored this aspect of the bullish city state. She had forced me to pay attention.

  Curiosity aroused, I turned to follow her.

  Two rotund men with Levantine features seated at one of the outdoor cafés c
alled her over. I took a nearby table and studied the routine conceit of their advances, imagining the tastes, smells and sights that she would endure pleasuring such damp little men.

  ‘What you like?’ someone said.

  I looked up into the smirking face of a waiter. His expression told me he knew I wanted the woman more than anything he could provide. He was right of course. I did want her. Only not for the reasons he thought.

  ‘You have Turkish coffee?’ I said.

  ‘Arabic coffee,’ he corrected, ‘yes, how you like it?’

  ‘Medium sweet.’

  ‘Anything else?’ he said, leering at the woman with the immodest legs. We both watched as she leaned in over the two men and listened obediently. She flashed her eyes at them, long fluttering lashes visible even from where I sat.

  ‘Maybe, yes. Maybe I have her too,’ I said and leered back at him. I made a thrusting, rotating, gesture with my fist and tried to make him believe that I meant what I said.

  When men shared desires to do painful things to others it disturbed me, awoke my past, and when that djinn escaped the bottle it was like the touch of a cold hand in an empty bed, nothing but trouble.

  The playground body language appeared to work though. For a moment the nodding acceptance of the over familiar waiter almost made me feel like one of the guys. He stalked off to a neighboring table and called out my order in Arabic to the front desk.

  I watched the woman and waited for my coffee, examining the way the abaya clung to her body to reveal the discreet curves hidden beneath the treacherously opaque fabric. If I was that type of man, I would definitely have been interested. But even without seeing her face I suspected that off duty she would probably have been out of my league.

  Happily, I mused, she would also outclass the two men in front of her, who by their gesticulations appeared to be haggling for a service that would involve both of them at the same time. As they negotiated she continued to ooze a casual sexuality and confidence that would make most men nervous. A nervousness that usually vanished once you realized that no matter how beautiful the woman, if she was a prostitute, she could be controlled.

  Although not always. Her patience with the men wavered. One hand moved to rest on a jutting hip. The haughty flick of her other hand signaled they had already bargained too hard.

  They didn’t seem to notice.

  The waiter moved in beside her and asked the two men if they wanted anything else. While they struggled to pull their thoughts out from between their legs he spoke briefly to the woman. Something along the lines of, ‘If these guys don’t bite there’s a westerner back there that will.’

  Because when I looked up from my first sip of the potent murk that is Arabic coffee, she stood directly in front of me, the seam of her abaya parted at crotch height. Not enough to reveal anything to those on nearby tables, but just a few inches from my face the spanked red color of her exposed underwear triggered an anxious carnal yearning throughout my body.

  ‘You want to fuck.’ she said, a statement, definitely not a question.

  ***

  ‘Slut, whore, hooker, lady of the night, working girl, call girl, pro, streetwalker, courtesan, floozy, harlot?’ I said.

  She sat on a king size bed in a mid-range but well used hotel apartment, head uncovered, legs crossed, and eyes so wide her pencil-thin eyebrows looked like they might fall off the back of her head.

  I continued, ‘Lot lizard, tochka, hostess, pickup, midnight cowgirl, party girl, tart, trollop, commercial sex worker, loose woman, sex slave?’ She seemed amused. I sighed. ‘Scarlet woman perhaps?’

  She was amused. ‘You can call me anything you like darling.’ She said in an accent that wouldn’t settle, French-Arabic one moment, American or English the next.

  ‘No, that’s not…I know I could, but….’ She laughed silently at my awkwardness. Her shoulders shook as she tried to suppress the giggles. I pressed on, ‘What I mean is, what do you call yourself? Do you use any of those terms to describe what you do?’

  ‘I am Yasmin. I work with men. What is this scarlet woman?’

  They say English is the business language of choice but after the words Coke and OK understanding usually makes its excuses and leaves. I sighed again, wishing I was adept at any language other than my own. I checked my notes.

  ‘Well, scarlet is a color, a vivid red.’

  ‘I like that. Souri, my family name, it means red.’ she said.

  ‘Okay, here we are. A scarlet woman….’ my notes defined an immoral woman and prostitute, but I wanted to gain her confidence not lose it. I leapt impulsively on the next hopeful sentence, ‘Let’s see, a biblical expression from Revelations 17:5 where St John describes a vision of a woman in scarlet with an inscription on her forehead “Mystery, Babylon the Great,”’ I intoned. ‘‘‘The mother of harlots and abominations of the earth....’’’

  I stopped speaking when she stopped smiling. ‘I’m sorry. I remembered it as being flattering. I really don’t think you are an abomination of the earth. I think they were referring to Rome.’

  We sat in silence. She examined me calmly for the first time without the prostitute’s mask of flirtatious body language. No teasing eyes or hostile pouting lips, no fluttering eyelids, thrusting bosoms or parted legs.

  She appeared to be a woman in her early twenties and like the city itself in between cultures. Occasional blonde streaks colored her dark hair, and she’d visibly lightened her soft brown skin. I couldn’t tell whether the green of her eyes was natural or colored contacts.

  For once I shut up and let the silence build, ignoring the questions struggling to be asked. Show me an open mouth and I’ll usually put my foot right in it. Mercifully she spoke first.

  ‘You want to just talk?’ she said, crossing her hands in her lap.

  I nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  I could have told an easy lie, but chose not to. ‘I’m a journalist of sorts,’ I said instead. ‘Or I was. Back home. Now I regurgitate press releases about the wonders of Dubai for news or feature articles. I basically earn money re-selling the development dreams of sheikhs to gullible foreigners. And I’m sick of it. I want to write something different, something more worthwhile.

  ‘Take prostitution,’ I said, ‘it’s not even supposed to exist in this holier than thou Islamic state. So when bad things happen, nobody hears anything apart from denials. I’ve heard stories of women who are trafficked, enslaved, and forced to be here against their will. About women who are abused, raped, or killed. I want to find out first hand if these stories are true.’

  She tilted her head to one side as if trying to figure me out.

  ‘I guess I just want to make a difference,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘A naïve ambition perhaps.’

  ‘Most people without money can’t ask questions and those with usually don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Except how can I make more, right?’

  Her eyes sparkled agreement.

  I took that as encouragement. ‘I don’t intend to take pictures where faces can be seen and I will never use the real names of the people I speak to.’ I said.

  ‘No pictures.’ she said waving a finger at me. ‘No. Questions only. But what about censorship?’ she asked. ‘I will be happy if they deport me tomorrow. If you say a wrong thing, you will either leave or go to jail.’

  ‘I expect a certain amount of trouble.’ I said. ‘It means I’m asking the right kind of questions.’

  Her lips pursed and she shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to scare her off.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a big corporation or government behind me but I do have a magazine published in the west and Middle East that will print anything I can find out. I also syndicate my articles through some of the agencies and I have the ear of a couple of news editors in Europe.’

  ‘That is good,’ she said, encouraging me, expecting more.

  ‘To be honest, I’m winging it. If I find a good story, someone will break it.
I hope.’

  ‘So you want me for what exactly? I hear so many stories from men,’ she said. ‘You really don’t want this?’ She opened her abaya to reveal the red underwear that clung to her hips and breasts like a second skin, covering but not concealing what lay beneath.

  ‘No!’ I said and focused my eyes intently on hers. ‘You are a beautiful woman Yasmin. But I just want you to talk to me. I want to learn about what you do. How it works here. I will even pay you for your time.’

  She sat there for a frustrating age holding the robe open, testing me, willing me to look down and fall for her easy charms.

  ‘Why did you ask me all those names?’ she said. Wriggling her hips from side to side and twisting her body until it was at its most seductive angle. She clearly understood the power she wielded.

  ‘The men who pay me call me far worse things,’ she said, ‘vile things, but I am not any of them. Your names were like a little boy’s.’

  I recoiled at the sting, embarrassed by the truth of it. ‘An editor asked me to do it,’ I said. ‘He thought it would be funny. I thought it was stupid. But, you know how it is…I have to keep my clients happy.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ she said and closed the abaya, finally letting me relax. I hoped believing in me.

  ‘So what do you call what you do?’ I said.

  ‘Work. What would you call it?’

  ‘Hard fucking work?’ She gave me a withering look. ‘Sorry. When I was younger I imagined that being a porn star or gigolo would be a great way to make money. Who wouldn’t? Sex on tap right? I was all hormones back then.’

  ‘You are not so old. What changed?’ she said.

  ‘A lot of drink, insecurity, too many one night stands. After a while it all becomes a little functional. Sex becomes just another physical act, like digesting food, nothing more. It becomes hard to connect with anyone. All those sensitive egos, especially your own. It’s tiring. Lots of conquests and the only person you really fuck is yourself.’