Driving the Saudis Page 21

  “San Diego? That’s more than two hours away.” I didn’t want to drive to San Diego for a bunch of bras. The job was almost over, and I was so strung out that I couldn’t trust myself to make the trip back and forth alone. I would’ve just FedExed the lot of them, but that’s not the Saudi way. The Kingdom didn’t abolish slavery until the 1960s, so maybe having limitless human resources at the royal family’s beck and call was still too ingrained to do things any differently.

  “I’m no fairy godmother. There’s no way I can order them to have them by tomorrow. Maybe next week if you’re lucky, but not tomorrow. There’s no way. Not gonna happen. You’re gonna have to drive,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you can, please, then I guess we should check all the stores. I have no choice.”

  Sheila did end up being like a fairy godmother. She scored me over thirty bras at the various Neiman Marcus stores in the area, and with her help, I was able to locate many more from other luxury stores that carried the same line. “As many as I could get” turned out to be close to sixty, all exactly the same, but in different muted lingerie hues. It was trippy driving around in the car bursting with propagating bags of pale pink tissue and dozens of bras that weren’t even mine and then hitting it in the Crown Victoria at 90 miles an hour driving back from Newport. I decided that if a cop—hopefully a beefcakey, sweet-natured one like the sergeant in Beverly Hills—stopped me, I would gesture sweepingly at all the sexy satchels around me, say that I was going to a bra parade in Hollywood and ask him if he cared to join me. Who could turn that down?

  It took me a full day to get all the lingerie. And it had actually been quite pleasurable to be in so many lovely lingerie sections of luxury stores buying thousands of dollars’ worth of sexy undergarments. Even the bags smelled nice—like perfumed money. For a moment, it was as if one of my little daydreams had come true. I noticed that the salespeople in the high-end stores made a quick assessment of me when I entered—their eyes quickly scanned me up and down to determine if I was capable of spending some real money—and their treatment of me was based on that estimation. After my hit at the first Neiman’s, I made a point of carrying a few already purchased bras in their fancy bags on my arm, and my trips through each subsequent store were much more pleasant.

  I had worked well into the evening the day Asra had asked for them, driving hundreds of miles, and had been at the last store as soon as it opened in the early morning securing as many bras as I could before the family’s afternoon departure.

  I was certain that none of the other drivers would have been able to get their hands on that many bras. I doubted that even the concierge at the Four Seasons or the Beverly Hills Hotel could have done it, and I was pleased with myself. I hoped that Basmah would notice and appreciate my hustle and that she would relay my efforts to Princess Zaahira. I knew Asra wasn’t going to do it, and I wanted the family to know how diligently I had accomplished my assignment. It was important to me that they know this, and not just because I was banking on the chance it might be reflected in my tip. I wanted them to know that I was still doing a great job and that even though I was at my wit’s end and weary beyond belief, I still had staying power.

  My sense of what was important was so skewed at this point that somehow I equated my undergarment treasure hunt with something of great significance—as if what I was doing was going to better the world in some way. I wasn’t working on a cure for cancer or solving world peace issues, which would’ve been truly admirable. In actuality, I was simply procuring enough bras to outfit the entire Los Angeles Lakers cheerleading squad to satisfy a Saudi princess with a new boob job.

  I went up to Basmah’s hotel suite and tried to pass off the booty to her servant, Mouna, who took one look inside the bags and chirped with delight. She fingered them lovingly. These bras weren’t nearly low-cut enough for her but she still marveled at them.

  “You must to show to Princess Basmah,” she said as she pushed me out the door. “She is asking, you must to show her.” I left most of the bags with Mouna and went downstairs with a few bras in one bag in order to present them to Basmah. I spotted her SUV downstairs in the hotel driveway, parked in the shade, and went over to talk to her regular driver, my friend Charles.

  The SUV was immaculate at all times, as if Charles owned the vehicle himself. He continuously cleaned and polished it with gentle adoring attention and a smile on his face; he looked as if he was bathing a woman he cherished. Because Princess Basmah chain-smoked, Charles had crafted an ashtray made of a highball glass filled with colored sand that he placed in the cup holder in the backseat next to where she sat, refreshing it regularly to make sure that the SUV always smelled inviting.

  “How’s my sunshiny girl?” he asked when he saw me approach the car. It was absurd that he called me “sunshiny girl” because I knew I was never even close to being sunshiny the whole seven weeks. I am sure I was much closer to morose, frazzled, and catatonic in varying and unpredictable spurts. He said it just to make me feel better, and I appreciated that; no one likes to be told they’re unpleasant to be around even if it’s true.

  “We’re almost done. I’m going to sleep for a week as soon as they leave.” I slid into the backseat. It was cool in the idling SUV because he always had the air-conditioning cranked, ready for Basmah’s arrival.

  “Yep, it’s almost over. Looks like we made it,” he said.

  Charles kept a constant supply of assorted snacks in the SUV that he’d share with everyone whenever our sugar levels dropped dangerously low. “You looking drawn, girl, like you could eat a cookie,” he said as he passed me a bag of Oreo Bites. What he meant was that I was losing my feminine lines and he hated to see that happen. Both Charles and Sami had politely intimated to me that I looked better with a few more pounds. They didn’t care for skinny chicks, bless their hearts. It wasn’t lost on me that I was never offended when my two chauffeur friends expressed their unsolicited opinions about my looks. I knew that they were fond of me and cared about me as a person and not just as a piece of ass.

  “Can I have the Fig Newtons instead, please?” I asked. I wolfed down a few cookies and chugged a frosty can of Red Bull that he kept in his cooler, probably just for me. He didn’t drink Red Bull, Basmah didn’t drink it, and her security didn’t like it either, so he was possibly stocking it just to keep me hydrated and awake. Charles was considerate that way.

  “I’m looking for Basmah,” I said. “I have some goodies she wanted me to fetch for her, and she wasn’t in her room.” I didn’t add that I had secured thousands of dollars worth of unmentionables for her, and he didn’t ask what the goodies were in the bags that I was holding. We both knew to be discreet.

  “My princess said she’d be ready to go out at noon, but you know how they is. I been waiting over two hours now,” he said. He called her “my princess” affectionately, as if she were his baby daughter.

  “They take care of you yet?” asked Charles.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You know, they take care of you?” he said again. I remembered that this was chauffeur speak for a gratuity.

  “Oh, you mean did they tip me yet? No, nothing. Did you get tipped already? I thought they were going to do it at the airport,” I said.

  Charles smiled and “My princess, she already took care of me.”

  “Nice!” I said. “Did you do all right?”

  “I did just fine,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him how much “just fine” was worth, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it without being rude. I’d never discussed money in this way with anyone before, so I wasn’t clear on the protocol, but I did know that chauffeurs are notoriously secretive about their earnings.

  “So you’re happy?” I asked.

  “Just fine,” he said again.

  “Fine but not happy?”

  “Not unhappy,” he said. Now I was confused. I couldn’t crack the code. I needed a specific number. I had just worked seven weeks straight an
d I needed a dollar figure that would allow me to feel that it had all been worth it. Five thousand dollars would have been just fine with me. Ten thousand dollars would have made me very happy. Twenty thousand would have made me hysterical with joy. But maybe his idea of happiness was different than mine.

  “Was it way more than on your last Saudi job? The one that lasted a month?” I asked. I figured that maybe as long as I didn’t name a number, he’d be more forthcoming.

  “Let me think about that now . . . nope,” Charles said. Perhaps he didn’t remember that he had already told me how much he made on that job and I felt no need to remind him.

  “Was it way less?”

  “Nope,” he said. Okay. I concluded that he received somewhere between an $8,000 and $12,000 tip. That was promising. Charles was a very senior chauffeur, however, and was also driving a princess who was quite high up in the entourage hierarchy; I am sure that was factored into his gratuity. As the afternoon wore on, I learned that many of the other drivers had already been tipped and most of them had received $5,000 and some even more, and most had received costly watches as well. I knew that I was going to be on the high end of the tip disbursement. That would be the only correct thing to do.

  I started daydreaming about massages, mimosas, and movie marathons. My palms pulsed with excitement.

  A short while later, I found Basmah and tried to show off the hard-won lingerie I had spent hours procuring for her. She dismissed me with a wave of her hand without even looking in the bag as if to say, “Do not trouble me with the details of your effort. It is of no consequence to me.”

  Well, goodie on you, I thought. At least your new boobs will be happy encased in all that lovely silk even if you are a miserable wretch. And I am about to get a shitload of cash, so I forgive you for being the way you are. You probably can’t help it.

  24

  My Big Fat Envelope

  On the last day of the job, the chauffeurs were again asked to wear black suits as we’d been required to do on the first day, when we’d picked up the group. I pinched in my suit pants with a safety pin to keep them on since I was now so much thinner than I had been at the beginning of the seven weeks, but they still hung off my hips like ghetto saggers. Even my fingers were smaller; I’d had to put masking tape around my grandmother’s wedding band to keep it from slipping off my ring finger. A friend who hugged me good-bye one night just after the job ended pulled back in alarm saying, “I can feel your ribs! Gosh, you really need to take care of yourself.” It wasn’t just that I had lost weight. I had also aged considerably from the stress and massive sleep deprivation, and my friend was just too polite to say so.

  The family was departing from a private airport in Long Beach, another cushy FBO with a VIP waiting lounge that served cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at all hours of the day. We had been told that we’d be driving in a caravan to the airport. The chauffeurs began assembling in the hotel breezeway close to the arranged time, and when I pulled my car up, I saw that there were drivers milling about and that the Saudi colonel was standing on the stairs passing out thick white envelopes. He looked completely spent. The black pouches under his eyes had grown to the size of ripe plums, and his face was caved in as if he had lost several teeth. He no longer had a soft round belly, and his shirt hung off him in loose folds. I wondered what it must be like to be a decorated military commander now acting as a travel agent, party planner, and babysitter for a princess and her children while they traveled the world shopping and undergoing plastic surgery. It was clear his job wasn’t easy, or he wouldn’t have looked so hellish.

  I approached him and waited for him to acknowledge me. I didn’t have to wait long. For the first time ever, he looked me in the eyes. I was so surprised that I almost tripped backward on the stairs. In all the seven weeks that I had worked for the family, we had never made eye contact. The colonel smiled wearily at me and then even spoke to me. He asked my name, and then confirmed that it was the same name on the envelope that he was holding for me.

  “Thank you for your effort,” he said as he handed me my tip envelope. I took it as a good sign that he had finally communicated with me in some way, and he obviously appreciated my work or he wouldn’t have said so. He seemed like a man who meant what he said.

  The envelope was fat and damp from the midday heat, with Arabic writing on it that I couldn’t read. I knew it couldn’t be a check. The envelope was too thick and, besides, the Saudis never wrote checks. I assumed my tip was in hundreds since they always paid in hundreds, and I concluded happily that there was undoubtedly a big stack of them. I quickly put the envelope in my pocket. I didn’t want to open it then, not in front of the valets and other hotel staff, and I didn’t want to be seen counting hundred-dollar bills to determine how much it was.

  I wanted to ask the colonel something, anything really, so that we’d have some small version of a conversation, but he had already turned away to speak with another driver. I lingered for a few moments, the way people do when they are hoping to catch someone’s eye, have a private word, or make contact with a celebrity ensnared by admiring fans. But he didn’t look in my direction again. Eventually I felt silly just standing there near him and made my way to the hotel elevators.

  As I waited to go upstairs, I watched the hotel guests and workers hustling and bustling around me. I could hear several languages being spoken, none of them English. Several guests smiled at me in recognition, and the lobby attendants wished me a good afternoon. They all presumed I was a regular guest or perhaps a hotel executive. I had now been in steady attendance at the hotel for many weeks, in and out at all times of the day and night, so it did feel somewhat as if I were walking into my own marble-floored and crystal-chandeliered 600-square-foot front foyer. In the center of the lobby was a colossal exotic floral arrangement, with blooms that I did not recognize but whose intoxicating scent I could smell from 20 feet away. It was a lovely room, but even with the warm sunlight glinting off the chandelier’s prisms and the perfume of the flowers, it had the cold feel of a mausoleum.

  As the elevator doors opened, I glanced once more at the colonel and saw that he had been looking at me as I surveyed the lobby. His eyes swept over me once quickly when my eyes met his; he nodded tersely and then looked away again. I understood that he had known that I was waiting to speak with him but had not wanted me to do so.

  25

  The $300 Million Getaway

  Maysam had called me and asked me to come upstairs to say good-bye to her and the other servant girls. They were leaving the hotel earlier than the rest of the group in order to prepare the plane for Princess Zaahira and the family, and I wouldn’t see them before I drove Malikah and Rajiya to join the group for the family’s departure later in the day. Charles had told me that when he had worked for another Saudi prince, a flamboyant character, servants always went to the airport ahead of time to spread out a carpet of red rose petals for the prince’s favorite wife to step on as she entered and exited the plane. The petals had to be fresh, completely unsullied, and she was to be the first to tread on them or he would become irate.

  The servants’ hotel room was in a flurry of activity, with a hum of orchestrated chaos pulsing the air. The ironing boards were out again, and there was a team working on clothing, a team working on final packing, and a team working on the family’s last-minute demands. Huge boxes were set up around the room, piled on top of each other, which Maysam was filling with the remains of the incense, spices, and smaller accoutrements that had traveled with them from Saudi Arabia. The servants had spent most of the last few days packing away the more cumbersome items; they’d been doing a staggering amount of work, the job of twenty men really.

  “Here, sit, sit, Janni,” Maysam said as she pushed me into my little tufted throne armchair, plumping the pillows once I was settled. She placed a large blue and gold enamel tin covered in Arabic handwriting in my lap.

  “Here, take, Janni. Is gift.” The box was filled with aromatic tea leave
s. “Oh, thank you, Maysam. I love this tea. Shukran [thank you].” The tea had helped me through many long, punishing days, and of course it could grow hair on your chest, as my dad would say.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that we might be exchanging gifts so I was empty-handed. Zuhur then passed me what looked like a book wrapped in thin gold tissue paper. I realized with dismay that they were all going to present me with gifts, and I had absolutely nothing to give in return. I had some aged and crumbly energy bars in the glove compartment of my car, and that was it.

  “No, no,” I said. “You have given me enough. No more. I will enjoy my tea and think of you all when I drink it.” I pushed the book back at Zuhur; she pushed it again at me.

  “Please,” she said. “This gift for you to make the life peaceful and so cozy. Please to take.” I had no choice but to take it and carefully unwrapped the package. The book had a soft Moroccan green leather cover stamped with gold lettering and ornamental motifs. Its pages were almost translucent, like onionskin, and were perfumed with sandalwood. The text was in Arabic with English translation on each facing page; the lettering was elegant and ornate. Zuhur watched me with pleasure as I fingered the book.

  “Al Quran,” she said. She touched the book, and then my chest above my heart, and then my temple. “To make you so cozy.”

  “Thank you, Zuhur,” I said. “It’s beautiful. I am sure it will make me so cozy.”

  Maysam pulled a small velvet pouch from her pocket and set it on my lap. It was maroon with raised gold lettering in Arabic, and I knew right away it contained a piece of jewelry. I untied it slowly and inside was a 24-carat-gold filigree ring with thin pieces of gold twisted, curled, and soldered to form a bas-relief crescent moon and star that is symbolic of Islam.

  “For you, Janni,” said Maysam. “We love you, Janni. We love you.” I put the ring on my finger. It was delicate and tasteful, truly lovely, and a hugely generous gift. It was so precious I didn’t know what to say. I knew these girls earned very little money, and I was humbled by their gift to me. They’d obviously planned and thought about this day, the day we would be saying good-bye, and had spent time considering what I would like and what would appropriately reflect their affection for me. I had done nothing. I had been thinking about the sleep I was going to get and what I was going to cook for dinner now that I would have the time to actually make a hot meal. And I had been thinking about the money that was burning a hole in my pocket, waiting to be counted when the family’s plane was finally wheels up. I had been thinking about myself.