The Dog

I’ve got to find out what’s going on. If the Astrominium plot isn’t developed soon, and in accordance with the Excellence Ethos, the Privileged Three are sunk.

I do what I pretty much always do in Dubai when I need to know something. I ask Ali.

That’s a Dubai joke – ‘ask Ali’. When I first arrived here, I was given a couple of how-to books. The first was a how-to-work-with-Arabs guide titled Don’t They Know it’s Friday? The second was Ask Ali, on the cover of which the eponymous Ali, a cartoon individual in a dishdash, leans towards the reader, the back of his hand concealing his mouth, and mutters, ‘Psst …’ I permit myself a good laugh about the premise of Ask Ali, which is that, in order to learn about life in Dubai, you should follow a hissing informant to a hole-and-corner rendezvous where only things that are already matters of public knowledge will be disclosed to you on a hush-hush basis. Thus Ali will whisper in your ear about the local climate (hot), voltage (220), and body language:

Whenever you see two [Middle Eastern] people speaking loudly or pointing at each other, relax and remember they are probably just chitchatting and having a good time.

I found my Ali, if I may be so possessive, soon after I moved into The Situation. I needed someone to fix me up with a personal VPN. A virtual private network, more than one expat had assured me, was the best and safest way to access Skype and other websites blocked by the UAE authorities. (Here the eyebrows of the expat would rise. Their import was not lost on me. I was really quite excited about re-connecting with the porn sites that, in my last USA years, had given me what felt like near-essential sustenance, presumably with Jenn’s blessing, because she (who had once accused me of expecting her to be my ‘concubine’) was clearly counting on me (as I was on her) to be 97 or 98 per cent sexually self-sufficient, and must have understood that self-sufficiency of this kind would very possibly involve recourse to dirty movies. Even if she wasn’t – even if Jenn was under the illusion that sexuality, like water left standing in a pot for years, somehow disappears over time – then surreptitiously making use of porn was clearly preferable to ‘going outside the relationship’ and creating a serious risk of emotional injury to Jenn and/or the third party. (There remained, of course, the problem of the welfare of the erotic performers. Any anxiety I might have felt on their behalf was eliminated almost completely by my preference for what seemed to be husband-and-wife porno acts (often mask-wearing or otherwise incognito) who gave the impression, accepted by me as bona fide, of offering up their intimate doings for money-making reasons, certainly, but on a voluntary and fun and expressly ‘amateur’ basis. In fact, if I felt guilty it was on account of my decision to not subscribe to these sites but instead to jerk off as a freeloader and so take the benefit of the product without doing the decent thing of compensating the entertainers for their valuable if hobbyistic efforts. I did not lose sleep over this wrong, it must be admitted, if it was a wrong, which isn’t admitted. (Ideally, I should have found a way to content myself exclusively with cartoon porn, which is quite sophisticated in this day and age of digital technology, and in principle enables the viewer to erotically fuel him/herself without any question arising of humans being harmed in the course of the filming. But what can I say? I’m a flesh-and-blood kind of person, and I’m really not turned on by the animation of certain scientifically impossible and/or violent scenarios, e.g., the rapture of human women by reptilian extra-planetary creatures, or the rape of cartoon women by cartoon rapists.)))

At any rate, someone was recommended to me for the purpose of installing an illegal internet connection in my apartment. To my surprise, this person, Ali, was an Emirati – a surprise because Emiratis (so I had been given to understand) were protected from the socio-economic factors that incentivize a person to undertake relatively menial work or, for that matter, to exert him- or herself in order to make a living, the upshot of which protection (according to expat lore) was a nation afflicted thoroughly by a peculiarly cheerful form of Bartlebyism. In substantiation of this stereotype, the only UAE national I could claim to know, Mahmud, who officially functions as the ‘local service agent’ of Batros Family Office (Dubai) Ltd and bears technical responsibility for the getting of licences, visas, labour cards, etc., was never to be found or, if to be found, failed to turn up for meetings or, if he did, turned up at his own convenience and in his own sweet time and to no effect. Mahmud was put on the payroll by Sandro Batros on account of his professed wasta – his clout with the Emirati authorities. To this day Mahmud, who is always good-natured and pleased about things, has yet to procure a single useful piece of paper. His workload consists, as far as I can tell, of accepting his Batros emoluments and hanging out with his pals at the Armani Caffè in Dubai Mall. I have spotted him there several times. He never fails to greet me jovially. Invariably he and his friends pointedly disregard a nearby group of standoffish Emirati young women who have not covered their pretty faces and whose head-to-toe black is offset by red or electric-blue trimming. In order to make a powerful impression on the women they’re ignoring, the young men always talk gravely on the phone and urgently input their handhelds: each has placed two or three gadgets on the table. They work hard to generate for themselves a strong aura of possibility, as if the day were growing in excitement and they were in communication with some more interesting and important elsewhere and this interlude at the Armani Caffè was merely a parenthetical or trivial portion of some enormous indiscernible adventure. Whether in fact there exists such an exciting, adventurous elsewhere – this remains an open question. The question is especially open in Dubai, land of signs to nowhere: I have several times followed, in my car, signboards that direct you to roads that have yet to be built. Your journey fizzles out in sand. (The sand is natural. This is the desert. Disintegrated rock secretly underlies everything. It’s almost nauseating to see the sand wherever the effort to cover it has not yet succeeded.) What’s more, because of the velocity and immensity of the infrastructural operations, such roads as have been built are subject to sudden closure or transformation, and even old hands and taxi drivers are always getting lost and turned around. The U-turn is a huge manoeuvre here – and maybe not just because of the chaotic construction projects. Rumour has it that, in order to promote official control of the population, the traffic planning has been modelled on the oppressive urban development that apparently typified parts of Eastern Europe in the communist days, and it is no coincidence, say these rumourers, that cross-streets and turnoffs are strangely few and the driver who has missed his or her exit (very easily done) has nowhere to go but straight on, sometimes for a kilometre or more, until another interchange or roundabout finally permits a turning back, the total effect being a city in large part traversable only by peninsular, cul-de-sac-like routes of benefit mostly to the security forces, for whom life is much simpler if everyone is corralled into a near-maze from which there is no quick escape.

A clarification: I’m not seizing on this stuff as a gotcha. It isn’t some great telling symbol of the shallowness and witlessness and nefariousness and wrongheadedness of the statelet. I do not align myself with the disparagers. I’ll always remember a certain Western visitor who ominously murmured to himself, for my benefit, My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings – as if the poem were at his fingertips and the dude had not fortuitously run into it while browsing online for some bullshit reason; as if he habitually carried on with himself a quote-filled conversation steeped in the riches of Western civilization and by patrimonial cultural magic bore in his marrow the traces of Sophocles and Erasmus and the School of Salamanca. Oh, how these bozos make me laugh.

As for Mahmud: who can blame him? Sometimes I feel like high-fiving the guy. Here is someone who accepts without anguish his good fortune. Here is the hero for our times.

But Ali was the opposite of a Bartleby – a Jeeves. He turned up punctually; did the humble work he was asked to do; charged a reasonable fee; spoke good functional English. All of this was estimable. Outstanding was that he took it upon himself to fix the remote-control problem I was having with the ceiling fan and also, as I discovered after he’d left, to swap the bathtub and faucet characters so that faucet C no longer gave forth cold water, nor F hot.

Fittingly, it was while taking my first bath drawn with alphabetic correctness that I had my one solid-gold Dubai brainwave: I decided to hire Ali full-time, as my personal assistant. He has proven himself the perfect man for the job, which may be described as follows: to assist me with the challenge of day-to-day life in Dubai consisting of one goddamned glitch after another. (For example, the aforementioned bathtub had a built-in seat. I can only assume that this feature is highly sophisticated and aimed, like everything else in this country, at the mythic connoisseur, in this case the überbather who sits up in his tub and will not rudely immerse his/her head and torso in bathwater, i.e., bathe. I mentioned my dissatisfaction to Ali, and my wish was his command. He and a workman procured and installed a new, seatless, perfect tub.)

Even Ali is a glitch. Contrary to what his get-up led me to believe, he is not an Emirati. He is a ‘bidoon’ (Arabic for ‘without’, apparently), i.e., a stateless person, i.e., a person who is everywhere illegally present. I have not inquired into the whys and wherefores of Ali’s situation, but, according to The National, there are tens of thousands of bidoons in the Gulf States. Most Dubai-based bidoons, I read, are the descendants of foreigners (from Iran, from other parts of Arabia) who settled here before the United Arab Emirates came into being (in 1971, I can declare off the top of my head) and who for whatever reason didn’t register as citizens of the new state. Neither jus sanguinis nor jus soli avails bidoons. They are, as things stand, fucked.

Anyhow, none of this would be my problem if employing a bidoon were not technically cloudy. At Ali’s own suggestion, he and I have left things on an informal basis, which I’m comfortable with. Income tax is in any case not payable in Dubai, so no question of tax evasion arises. Because he is not permitted to have a bank account, Ali receives compensation in cash dirhams from my office disbursement account, and quite frankly I treat as a sleeping dog the compliance nuances of this arrangement. Los dos Batros have been informed in writing of the payments and their purpose. Sandro has been introduced to Ali and is well aware of what he does. Since it is customary in the emirate to employ bidoons, I can with justification proceed pro tem on the footing that all is hunky-dory or, since the case is not cloudless, that all is not not hunky-dory. That’s good enough for me. One can’t be Utopian about these things.

I call Ali into my office. I have taken photos of Project X and I bring them up on my desktop and invite Ali to take a look. Over my shoulder, he says, ‘What is this … building?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know. What do you think?’

This matter has no obvious bearing on my professional responsibilities, but I maintain that without Ali’s miscellaneous assistance I wouldn’t be able to begin to do my job.

Ali says, ‘I do not recognize this.’ He says, ‘I will check this out.’ What he means is, he will acquaint himself with the whispers and pass them on to me. I wouldn’t actually know anything, but at least I would be in the know.

‘No, thank you, Ali,’ I say. ‘That’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’ Now I feel bad about having involved him. Ali is not, nor is he ever likely to be, a resident of Privilege Bay. He is never going to be one of the Uncompromising Few. He will always be one of the Compromising Many. My impression is that he lives somewhere in Deira, which is no great shakes but is very far from the end of the world. I will put it this way: I am socially acquainted with people who have lived for a while in Deira. Ali has volunteered very little to me about his personal circumstances and I am not about to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. (This is one of the great perks of living in Dubai: there are few places where one’s nose does belong.) Nonetheless, I sometimes need to remind myself that I didn’t write the citizenship rules and certainly didn’t provide legal counsel to Ali’s ancestors. I apprehend that Ali has applied for Emirati citizenship, but I haven’t kept tabs on what must be, I don’t doubt, a demoralizing process characterized by barely tolerable uncertainty, and I’ve never asked Ali about how it’s going and don’t intend to. What it boils down to is, I can’t help it that Ali is a bidoon, and I can’t help it that being a bidoon is what it is.

I say, ‘Maybe we’ll talk about this another time. Thank you.’ I am already intently perusing my e-mails, as if there isn’t a minute to lose.

I doubt this performance sways Ali. He has seen for himself what my job entails, i.e., a couple of stressful hours of e-paperwork in the morning and an afternoon spent stressfully waiting around in case something should come up. The thought may have offered itself to him that I was crazy to quit what was, on the face of it, a secure and rewarding legal career at a good New York firm. (Ali knows a little about my old job, though he cannot be expected to appreciate what it means that I was of counsel, with a boutique but loyal private-client clientele.) I wasn’t crazy, though. The reasonable man, put in my position, might very well have made, or seriously contemplated making, the decision made by me.

White as an egret, Ali exits and shuts the door. He will take a seat at his desk, which is just outside my office, in the reception area, and productively busy himself. (Often he will read a book in English, in a private effort of self-betterment. The luckless fellow is not permitted a higher education, and of course he cannot leave the country to seek his fortune elsewhere.) I swivel away from the desktop, put my feet on my desk, and hope my head is below the parapet.

It might seem hyperbolic to bring up the proverbial parapet, which calls to mind whistling bullets and, speaking for myself, the Alamo. I don’t think it is.

At first sight, my job looks straightforward enough for a man of my qualifications and experience. As the Batros Family Officer, I am expressly charged (pursuant to the provisions of my contract of service, which I drafted) with the supervision of those specialized entities that perform the usual family office functions for the Batroses. These entities are (1) the Dubai branch of the multinational law firm entrusted with the Batroses’ personal legal affairs, many of which are governed by the laws of Dubai and the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC); (2) an elite wealth-management outfit in Luxembourg, which manages over two hundred million USD of Batros assets and devises the family’s investment, tax and succession strategies; (3) the international concierge service, Fabulosity, whose task is nothing less than to make sure that the Batros living experience goes as smoothly as possible and that the family’s huge wealth ‘actually adds some fucking value to our fucking lives’, as Sandro has put it; and (4) the Batros Foundation, which is principally operational in Africa but has its head office here, in International Humanitarian City. These supervisees are in a position to commit embezzlement or otherwise gravely fail the family. There is also the risk that a Batros will enrich himself at the expense of another Batros. My job is to make sure these bad things don’t happen.

I have two main tools. First, I instruct a Swiss accountancy firm to spot-check and continuously verify the numbers generated by the activities of (1) to (4) above. The Swiss verifications are then verified by me, i.e., I roll a dull and unseeing eye over them. I am not and have never held myself out as professionally competent in the realm of financial scrutiny. I pointed this out to Eddie right at the beginning. He did that thing of waving away an imaginary flying pest and said, ‘We’ve got experts to take care of all that. What we don’t have is someone we can trust. That’s where you come in – as our homme de confiance.’ This brings me to my second tool: I am the General Expenditure Trustee of the so-called General Expenditure Accounts (GEAs). The GEAs are trust accounts held in the name of an Isle of Man trust company, Batros Trust Company Ltd. Monies funnel into the GEAs from all parts of the Batros Group, and the GEAs serve as a reservoir of money for the ‘personal use’ (per the relevant trust power) of Batros ‘Family Members’. (‘Family Member’ means Eddie or Sandro or their father, Georges. Their wives and children are not ‘Family Members’.) If the trust powers are the dam, I’m the dam keeper: I am not empowered to authorize a GEA payment requested by a Family Member without the agreement of at least one other Family Member. In practice, this means that Georges and Eddie can withdraw as much as they want, because each has informed me that he agrees in advance to all GEA payments requested by the other; whereas Sandro, if and when he wishes to take out money, must go through the process of getting the permission of his father or his younger brother. In view of Sandro’s history of profligacy and unsuccessful gambling, this process can be complex.

(Let me say this: I am of course aware of the technical risk of money laundering and/or tax evasion. The Isle of Man trust company is a red flag. Because I have no way to assess the risk, I have sought and received written assurances from each Family Member that to the best of his knowledge all sums credited to the GEAs have been lawfully gained and that all movements of money in and out of the GEAs have a lawful purpose and are free from any taint of illegality.)

There is a very high volume of requests for GEA money transfers, not least because the term ‘personal use’ is very broad and is to be construed, according to Batros custom, as encompassing personal use for a business transaction. The sensitivity and unavoidable complexity of Batros financial doings means that very often the form and/or function of a transfer is opaque or unexplained and involves collateral documents – deeds of trust, contracts, cheques, licences and other legal instruments – which are themselves opaque, written in foreign languages, etc., and to which I must also put my name. This last obligation is, unfortunately, of my own making. My self-written contract stipulates that I, the Family Officer, and I cannot argue in good faith that documents collateral or adjunctive to a GEA transfer don’t fall within the ambit of ‘pertain to’. A lot of the time I’m signing off on stuff that, to be perfectly honest, I barely, if at all, understand. I’ve made Eddie aware of this, too, and here again his response has been to laugh and tell me not to sweat it.

shall execute such [documents] as pertain to an authorized transfer [italics mine]

It’s kind of Eddie to offer this reassurance, but mine is the inevitable fate of the overwhelmed fiduciary: inextinguishable boredom and fear of liability. To mitigate the latter problem, I am ordering customized stamps of disclaimer to use whenever I sign anything. The document in question will be stamped with a text delimiting the terms on which I lend my signature to it, the document. These stamps are still in the drafting stage. I am the draftsman, and I cannot say that I’m finding it easy: it is not my forte, as my father used to say. (‘It would seem that reinsurance is no longer my forte,’ he stated in 1982, when he was let go by Swiss Re and we left Zurich, where I was born and spent my first twelve years, and moved to Southbury, Connecticut, in the United States, that foreign country of my nationality. (I was so proud of my blue passport. Mon petit mec américain, Maman would call me, en route to the school in Zug.) ‘International business machines are not my forte,’ my father told me in 1992, when IBM fired him. More than once, after my mother had withdrawn to her bedroom, I heard him say softly, ‘Boy, the female is really not my forte.’ Fixing stuff around the house was not his forte, and neither was driving, nor understanding what was going on, nor doing crossword puzzles, nor playing games. A basketball in motion frightened him, as did Monopoly. I cannot forget one particular evening. I had forced him to play with me and some schoolfriends. The board was crowded with red hotels. My father’s silver top hat was sent directly to jail, and for a while he was blamelessly and correctly exempt from the buying and selling and bankrupting and bargaining. He wore a huge smile throughout his captivity. If he was ever happier, I don’t recall it.)

Perhaps my stamp should simply state:

NOT MY FORTE

Trying though these anxieties are, they come with professional territory I have voluntarily entered for reward. It doesn’t end there, however. I have to deal, on an uncompensated basis, with extra-territorial bullshit. Every day, I get about two hundred unwarranted work-related messages. From every corner of Batrosia arrive complaints and inquiries and electronic carbon copies invariably written in non-English English or non-French French and/or bearing lengthy and complex attachments and/or referring to matters about which I have no clue. If somewhere a fuckup has occurred or may be about to occur and/or if there is an ass out there that needs cover, you can be sure that the relevant correspondence will be cc’d or forwarded to me. Word has somehow got out that there is a chump in Dubai into whose inbox every kind of trash may safely be dropped. Every day I delete about one hundred and fifty of these intruders. That leaves around fifty messages to defend myself against. How dearly I would love to re-forward them! But there’s no one to send them on to: I am the final forwardee. Consequently I have become an expert in dead-end messages. For example, today I’ve written,

Hi, P – . Please particularize.

And,

This is beyond my ken, J – , but thank you. :)

And,

Many thanks, Q – . The inquiry as stated is premature.

And,

Hi. See previous e-mails, mutatis mutandis.

I’ll come right out with it: these incoming e-mails amount to nothing less than an around-the-clock attempt to encroach on my zone of accountability with the intention of transferring to that zone a risk or peril or duty that properly should be borne by the transferor. I’ve documented my predicament and brought it to the attention of the Batroses. They have not responded and, dare I say it, they don’t care. It is not their function to care. On the contrary: they hired me precisely in order that I be the one who cares.

But what should I care about? That is the question. In order to clarify, circumscribe, and bring order to the scope of my liabilities and responsibilities, I’m drafting (in addition to the rubber-stamp disclaimers) what will be, I like to think, the ultimate e-mail disclaimer. One happy day, it will automatically appear in bold print at the foot of my messages and trounce the fuckers once and for all.

There remains another, I fear incurable, problem. My contract provides that the Family Officer

shall comply with the reasonable instructions of the Family Members in relation to […] other Family Office matters.

Innocuous, mechanically necessary stuff, I must have thought when I wrote this provision. But I had not reckoned on Sandro Batros. Sandro seems to be under the impression that I’m his majordomo. I cannot count the number of out-and-out inappropriate and frivolous demands on my time that he’s made.

For example, he wants Bryan Ferry to play a private gig at his fiftieth birthday party. OK, whatever. Sandro gets to do that, and it costs me nothing to tell him, ‘I’ll call Fabulosity.’