The Dog. Joseph O’Neill

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.’

      ‘No, no, no,’ Sandro says. ‘I want you to call Bryan Ferry. Not Fabulosity – you. This is very important. It isn’t for me, it’s for Mireille.’ Mireille is his wife.

      ‘Sandro, it’s not my –’ I cut myself off. I want to say that it isn’t my job to call Bryan Ferry, but that would be wrong. It is my job, strictly speaking. The organizing of a social event is clearly capable of being described as a Family Office matter, and Sandro is a Family Member whose instructions in this instance (to personally book Bryan Ferry), though maybe unusual, are reasonable. Sandro is of course unconscious of the legal framework, but that does not negate the effect of the service agreement.

      ‘OK,’ I say. I will underhandedly contact Fabulosity and have them make the arrangements. Once everything is agreed, I will make a pro forma call to Bryan Ferry (i.e., to his agent) and tick the box created by my having uttered this ‘OK’ to Sandro.

      There are always more boxes to tick. It never ends. On paper, I am the hawk in the wind. Off paper, I am the mouse in the hole.

      In theory, Eddie should be my ally.

       Eddie – Is something the matter? I have e-mailed and called you many times these last six months and have not got a response. I know you’re very busy, but no one’s so busy that they can’t even acknowledge e-mail. If you’re feeling bad about having dropped me in it, vis-à-vis Sandro, don’t. He’s not your responsibility. And if it’s the case that you can’t stop him from making life difficult for me, so be it. But at least respond. Better still, look me up next time you’re in Dubai and let me buy you a drink.

      I can’t get too mad with Eddie. He and his brother have essentially stopped talking to each other, which from Eddie’s viewpoint I totally get, plus Eddie lives far away, in Monte Carlo, plus there are issues, surely consuming and vexing, arising from his relations with his two ex-wives and their five (combined total) children. Plus he effectively runs the Batros Group. I might be hard to get hold of, too, if I were Eddie.

       Dear Eddie – Sorry about that last, maybe somewhat officious e-mail. All I really meant to say is: Put yourself in my shoes, old friend.

       Eddie – Disregard my last e-mail, about the shoes.

       E – Never mind.

      The hard truth of the matter is that I don’t have to ask Eddie to disregard my e-mails. He’s already disregarding them. I have to respect this. You cannot coerce people into having relations they don’t want to have. It’s my job to give up on the idea that I can ask Eddie to take an interest in how I’m doing and what I’m up to.

      I’ll catch up with him before long. You cannot keep the world at bay. Exhibit A: Mrs Ted Wilson.

      The reason I named her, right from our first encounter, ‘Mrs Ted Wilson’ was not because I find it whimsically gratifying to use a historically oppressive form of address but rather because this designation, while obviously a little old-fashioned, most accurately described the nexus between this person and me: from the outset, I dealt with her as the wife of Ted Wilson. And she set those dealings in motion. That’s right – she came knocking. I answered the door as it were without prejudice (holding it open only by an inch or two, because visitors are always announced by a call from the doorman and it was the first time I’d heard a knocking on this particular door, and it was 9 p.m., and I was in fear, to be honest); and she held herself out as Ted Wilson’s wife and on this basis sought admission to my apartment.

      I had never met Mrs Ted Wilson or heard much about her. My information was merely that she’d remained in the United States after her husband had come to Dubai. In the Gulf, this is not an abnormal bargain. And if the arrangement had lasted for an unusually long time (it is not disputed that Wilson came to Dubai in 2004), who was I to question it?

      Standing barefoot in my doorway in athletic shorts and T-shirt, I said to Mrs Ted Wilson, ‘Can I help you?’

      ‘Why – I don’t know,’ she said, looking at me as if I’d said something hurtful. ‘I’d like to talk about Ted.’ She told me she’d arrived in Dubai three days previously and that he’d failed to meet her at the airport and she had since found no sign of him, either at home or at work. ‘He’s just disappeared,’ she said, not hiding her bewilderment.

      I said, ‘Yes, that must be worrying.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I really have no idea where he might be.’

      While true, this wasn’t a comprehensive statement. Reports of people going AWOL were not extraordinary in 2009, which of course saw the beginning of the emirate’s sudden depopulation and was the year the famous story went around of hundreds of expensive cars being ditched at the airport by fleeing debtor-foreigners – an understandable phenomenon, this being a legal regime in which financial failure, including the failure to make an automatic payment on a car lease, can amount to an imprisonable crime. (There are still such cars to be seen – brown ghosts, as I think of them, on account of the inch of sand in which they’re uncannily coated. There’s an abandoned Toyota Land Cruiser that’s been sitting right here in Privilege Bay for at least a year.)

      Again