SEX, DRUGS, SAUDI ROYALS

INSIDE SAUDI ELITE MORAL HYPOCRISY

‘What you got against Saudis?’ This is a paralegal speaking, a woman I have not met before. I smile politely and say nothing. I never answer stranger’s questions. Who is she? Maybe not who she seems. The paralegal should not have looked at the papers she is carrying for me to sign. Just because she looks like Emma Watson, she thinks she can break rules. She must be used to getting away with many things. We are in an empty bar in the front in Netanya. Some old-timers jog by, while others just look out at the sea, turgid in the rain.

‘So, the Saudis?’ Emma asks, petulantly.

‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘I’ve nothing against them.’ Except perhaps that small matter of their being an illegitimate tyranny, which defies the views of 93% of their people over Palestine; and that small matter of using torture and capital punishment prolifically against minorities and political opponents; and that small matter of their elite being decadent hypocrites; and that small matter of their throwing the Palestinians and the Arab Spring under the bus so as to continue to enjoy their marble mansions, their Gulfstream jets, their super yachts, their prize whores; and that small matter of their using the most vicious of Western munitions to commit war crimes against innocent civilians; and that small matter of their abusing and denying rights to their domestic and migrant workers; and that small matter of their strangling and dismembeing my friend and in-law, Jamal Khashoggi, at the Consulate of the Kingdom of Saudi in Istanbul on the 2nd October 2018.

I was collaborating in a small way on a film, while in Gaza, about this murder. The Khashoggis are old friends from Beirut and Marbella. Adnan’s compound was on top of the hill in Madronal, and we were at the bottom in a much more modest house. About six months after Jamal’s murder, a member of the Khashoggi family passes me some manuscripts. I translate them , adding and editing— money has been pledged by Qatar to film the material. Now, I am asking for legal permission to publish parts of my own English versions online; and Emma Watson has brought the paperwork for me to sign.

"Emma Watson" (Copyright the author/consented)

I plug in the memory stick and transfer some fragments onto a file for this story. The narrator is a young elite Saudi lady with royal connections. The location is the upscale resort of Marbella in Spain, where the Saudi Royals have their summer palaces. I read quickly, as they are my own words, my own dirty Athena pushing to be let out, and add the sections chosen to my story for Medium.

Saudi luxury hotel, Marbella (Copyright the author)

It is during one of those late winter evenings at our beachside villa on the low-season-empty Golden Mile when Murad tells me he is sending me back to Allah. He may be winding me up, but equally, he may be about to take my life. We are in the Salon de Banquete, a room dark and sparsely furnished, the walls covered in ancient spider cracked Meknes tiles. An age blackened table takes up most of the space, and we sit on either side. It is not such an unsuitable place to hear one’s death sentence.

‘It’s best you don’t dwell on it, so you do not spoil the time left to you,’ Murad says; his tone between the sincere and the mischievous.

When it happens, I will not even know it. Didn’t Henry the Eighth call a master swordsman all the way from Calais so Anne Boleyn would feel nothing at the end? Murad does not say I will be sleeping when it happens, but it will be a drugging, then a suffocation. Then again, he might keep me awake. He is a cruel man, and such men are curious like that.

It is on a blustery winter evening two years previously to the day when Murad asks me to act as an informant. A bitter Levante blows in from the Straits, pushing the palmetto strands so they claw at the sand. Nobody is about. The only sound is the shutters of the closed-up chiringito shacks rattling in the wind.

The woman sitting in the back of the Mercedes is Nena Al-Taweel, the club singer. She was married to the playboy Prince, Faisal bin Abdullah, but two months later he divorces her by Talaq law. The talk is Abdullah injures Nena and becomes disgusted by her. He inserts a probe into her anus, which he operates remotely for his amusement. One night, it catches fire and burns through her perineum. Nena is so beaten around the face by Abdullah, she is unable to work the clubs on the strip anymore. Sleeping rough in the back alleys of Puerto Banus, Murad hunts her down and makes her his creature.

‘Yalla Habibti.’ Nena tells me what I must do. With a shake of her Cleopatra bob, she tells her driver to pull away. Our lane is filled with flocks of blackcap and swallows, so all light from the beach lamps and the sunset’s afterglow is suddenly extinguished, as if is already late into the night.

Nena tells me that after returning from Dreamers nightclub off the Banus strip, her former husband, Abdullah, and two palace pimps, Afif Haddad and Sammy Al-Ras, get high on Ketamine. They are at Abdullah’s villa on Mistral Beach, next to the former home of Sean and Micheline Connery. This trio are so wasted, they take a life-size cut-out of our Crown Prince and urinate on it and act as if to sodomize it. Then they post this online, where the image gets copied and linked around.

Panicking as they come down from the Ketamine, the trio pack some basics and go into hiding. Nena says a former friend of mine, Zeinab, is taking the offenders food to a remote cabin in Sierra Nevada. An aide of the Prince has offered 20 million dollars to anyone who provides information leading to the arrest of the three criminals. Immediately, I smell a rat. Even on Ketamine, Abdullah and the two pimps would not commit such an imbecilic act. Abdullah is rumored to have drug and gambling debts. More likely, the play of Abdullah and the pimps is to provide a phoney lead to their hiding place, extract the twenty million from the aide, hand in some scapegoats to the palace and lie low.

‘Ya Allah, what devils,’ I say to Nena. ‘Of course, I’ll help find them.’ Needless to say, I have no intention of getting involved; I start mulling exit strategies.

Memories return of first seeing Nena performing at the former drag club, Alibi, on the strip. She is dressed as her namesake in biker leathers and thigh-high boots, covering ‘Im meinem Leben’ and ‘Leibe ist’. Nena gives her own version of the banal lyrics. ‘Bich ich oft geflogen Bich icht gaffalen’ becomes ‘they make me fall and drown’. ‘Weglaufen geht nicht das ist mir klar’ becomes ‘Running away doesn’t work, I’ve tried and failed.’ Where the original Nena is forthright and brims with positivity, our ptribute Nena sings deadpan, with not a trace of sentiment, as if the songs mean nothing to her and she would rather be doing something else. She sings some verses in English, others in a lazy Egyptian Arabic, with echoes of Ruby, of Asfahan. When I tap onto her site and listen, her undisguisable hopelessness sends me.

A few days later, the local paper says that Nena has gone into the Clinica Ochoa for further body enhancements. She has 100,000 followers, so keeps them posted on her movements. It would not surprise me if Nena is in on the hustle with Abdullah and the pimps. I do not return her calls. However, her Mercedes pulls up by the beach. How can she be in hospital and driving about simultaneously? There are pardah curtains in the back, and that is where the chauffeur puts me. The car drives into the hills, burnt-out by wild fires; I keep double-taking I am in Malibu; brushy bluffs, ocean glimpses, the high walls of unseen mansions. When we stop, I am bundled into a back basement. Several men in dark glasses block the door, but the room is empty except for a metal desk and screen.

Murad appears in front of a Fujitsu aircon, dressed in a thobe. Murad rages, using overblown curses, like Tintin’s Captain Haddock, against Abdullah and the other criminals. ‘You must go to Zeinab to locate their hiding place.’ If I do not? He will tie me to his gates and his dogs will devour me.

The men in shades lift me up and take me to an apartment on the top floor. There are outfits I recognise from Nena’s influencer videos; rows of boots, liquid leggings, black tops, and black denim jackets. The door is locked, and a phone with Zeinab’s number stuck to it is in the middle of the brick loft space.

I use it to call Jamal. He does not sound too pleased to be woken, or maybe he is with one of his women. How many? His two first wives, now the Turkish and the Egyptian cabin crew. Do they know of each other? Well, Jamal is a believer, after all, never missing his five prayers, still of the Brotherhood.

‘Ya roje, I’m on a beach flat as a pancake with lush forests all around,’ I say.

‘Got it,’ Jamal says in English. He already knows my situation, it seems.

‘Just call Zeinab as they want, but before you meet her, someone will take you to London.’ In the background, as we speak, there is the ping of his billiards app. Jamal likes this game, because he is like a billiard ball, a humble, single projectile, yet setting off chain reactions that change the entire pattern on the baize.

Jamal Khashoggi entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, the last picture of the Post's lead reporter seen alive
(Open source image, released by the Turkish government)

A rare photograph taken by Jamal of early Yemeni rebels, with a US reporter he was mentoring (permission the Khashoggi family)

When Jamal hangs up, I go into the bathroom. There are prescriptions with Nena’s full name on. I mash up some Oxycodone and Buprenorphine and push the powder into a pitillo. Lying face up on the floor feels not quite so uncomfortable now. In my head are visions of a search for the perfect leather jacket, the sort with a button collar that racing drivers wear. We go from the Riyadh mall in the Financial district, to Al-Nakoul, Centuria, Hayat, the Royal, and finally at the last mall, I forget its name, the Crest I think, I find the jacket. Now, I am ready to drive across the burnt-out hills to the airport. I call Zeinab, telling her to do the same.

‘But driving is still forbidden,’ Zeinab says. ‘They will take us home and put us in Dhahban prison or Al-Hair and we’ll be buried alive, coming out old women.’

‘Allah will protect us,’ I say.

‘Not before Murad comes for us with his dogs, you know what those dogs do to a woman.’

I laugh, floating on the opiates and starting to descend the trellis on the wildfire blackened wall.

‘Taxi,’ I call, when I am on the road above Marbella. A car pulls up, not an official Taxi, but it will be cheaper.

‘Al aeropuerto,’ I say, ‘lo mas rapido por favor, proximo vuelo Londres.’

‘Si Senora,’ the driver replies, without turning around and we set off down the toll road towards Malaga airport.