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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 lucklessfellow 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 generatedby the activities of (1) through (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