Dan Fesperman: Layover in Dubai

“Not here, at least. I’m not saying he’s a fool, just a profane opportunist.”

“Says the Muslim who loves bacon and spareribs.”

The pork story again. A mistake to have told her. It had slipped out the week before, while he was sharing fond memories of a boyhood tutor: Gregor, half bear and half man, a roaring Muscovite who had served bountiful lunches with his verb conjugations and Euclidean geometry. The best part of those meals was the most succulent goat meat Sharaf had ever eaten. Deliciously fatty, redolent of smoke. Gregor had explained that it was an exotic breed, imported from the motherland. The feasts continued until the day Sharaf described the pleasures of this “imported goat” to his skeptical father, who quickly got to the bottom of things. The boy got a beating for his gullibility, not to mention a skinny new tutor who served only bread, olives, and hummus. But his memories of the flavor were still so vivid that he sometimes slipped into the forbidden pork sections of the local Spinneys supermarket, justifying his unauthorized presence among the foreigners with a furtive wave of police credentials, as if he might be checking for narcotics among the slab-cut bacon and inch-thick chops. He never bought any. A glance was sufficient. Even now his mouth was watering, so he conceded the point and moved on.

“Okay, let him fly first class. But where’s he staying, and for how long?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Some five-star hotel, no doubt. Four hundred euros a night if it’s a franc.”

“They don’t use francs anymore.”

“I know, dear. It’s a figure of speech. I just wonder if our son knows, since he never pays the bill, even though he’s twenty-five.”

“Twenty-six. And he’s a student.”

“Now and forevermore. What he ought to be is someone’s employee.”

“See? Next you’ll start in on Hassan.”

He wouldn’t actually, even though at age twenty-three Hassan also ought to have a job but instead was studying overseas. Nor would he mention their third son, Rahim, who was living in the house next door, scandalously single at the age of twenty-nine. Or even Salim, the eldest, who also made his home within the high stucco walls of the Sharaf family compound. Salim inhabited the largest of the family’s houses, yet he was constantly agitating for a bigger one. Salim needed more room because during the previous year he had symbolically joined forces with Sharaf’s dead father by taking a second wife. You could now hear the family arguments from the street. Salim’s growing brood had become as noisy and chaotic as a clan of Bedouins and all their goats.

Only on the subject of their daughter, Laleh, were Amina and Sharaf generally in agreement, mostly because she still lived under their roof. Right down the hall, in fact, where she was probably eavesdropping at this very moment.

Even when Amina was inclined to take her daughter’s side, she generally didn’t need to, because Laleh could hold her own. Father-daughter arguments almost always concerned issues of personal freedom, such as Laleh’s scandalous wardrobe-business casual, she was now calling it, even though she supposedly covered everything with a black abaya-or her longest-running grievance, that as a single woman of twenty-four who ran her own business, she was somehow entitled to live in her own apartment. Fat chance of that, even if she did operate a small marketing firm in the shimmer and sprawl of Media City, one of Dubai’s newest office parks.

“Please, Amina,” Sharaf said, bidding to de-escalate. “You know our schedule. We argue about Hassan on Tuesdays, Rahim on Thursdays.”

He smiled to make it seem more like a concession. Fortunately Amina smiled back. The creases on her forehead eased. With any luck he’d be reading in five minutes.

“What about Wednesdays?” she replied. “Don’t tell me that’s an off night.”

“That slot is reserved for Laleh. She’s been asking again about traveling by herself to New York.”

Amina rolled her eyes. “Out of the question.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then you can fight that one on my behalf. Single combat, weapon of your choice.”

She pinched his belly, which she had been doing since the days when he didn’t have one. He reciprocated with a quick kiss, and then retreated behind the kitchen table for the final swallow of milk. Rich stuff, camel’s milk. Too rich for bedtime. But repetition had trained his stomach to handle it.

“What will we ever do if she marries?” Amina said, following him to the bedroom. “She’s our last frontier.”

“I fear we’ll never have to worry about that.”

“Don’t say that! She’ll hear you. Besides, I don’t want to think about it.”

He knew now he was in the clear. Amina never wanted to probe too deeply into the subject of Laleh’s marriage prospects. It had been that way since their daughter had turned eighteen and they had bowed to her wishes by not arranging a match. Their break with tradition hadn’t seemed momentous at the time-plenty of families were doing it-but six years later it was beginning to feel like a miscalculation. A husband would have kept her in line far better than they could.

Sharaf switched on the bedside lamp, puffed his pillows, and settled in, propping himself against the headboard in a comforting pool of light. He opened the book, enjoying the pulpy smell of the new pages. He flipped past the scholarly introduction, which would have told him all the things he wanted to figure out for himself, and began acquainting himself with the tormented young Raskolnikov. A real piece of work. Not at all like the Russians he had come across here. Sharaf could have spotted Raskolnikov’s brand of guilt from a block away. Remorse was wonderful that way, although in Dubai it was in short supply. Criminals of the new breed didn’t have an ounce of it. Nor were they poor, like the threadbare Raskolnikov. Wrong place, wrong century, he supposed.

Sharaf turned the page and sighed, resigning himself to the prospect that the book might not hold any lessons for him, after all. Literary enjoyment would have to be its own reward. But twenty minutes later a paragraph jumped from the page that made him reconsider. It was a cryptic flash of insight from Raskolnikov at the end of chapter 2: What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be .

This was more like it. Disturbing. Baffling, too. Was he saying that man was his own God, setting his own rules, and therefore even our crimes and self-made disasters were according to plan, if only because we were making up the plan as we went along?

It was an intriguing concept, because this was how Sharaf was beginning to feel about his latest assignment, a puzzle in its own right. He had been commissioned to quietly look into the activities of a few of his fellow officers and their possible relations with certain Russians about town. Scoundrels, indeed.

One of the job’s most daunting aspects was the lofty rank of the assigning officer. Not Brigadier Razzaq, who ran their department, nor even the brigadier’s boss, who ran the entire police force and had a seaside villa the size of a castle. It was one of the ministers in the royal cabinet, who technically wasn’t supposed to be in touch with a mere detective inspector. Yet, Sharaf and the person he called “the Minister” now conversed regularly, although never on a landline and never when Sharaf was in his office or the Minister was in his.

This meant Sharaf had to work on his own time and his own dime, while still meeting his official obligations. It was new ground, and it already felt alien and unsafe. No rules other than the ones he made up along the way.