“Dude, we’ve never been friends,” Ben answered.

Ben watched Ahmed. His posture didn’t change, but he had lost that air of frictionless unconcern. After Seated one Tuesday, Ben saw him run his finger over a name on one of the wooden plaques in the High Dining Room. Ben waited and then walked over to see the name: HENRY STANHOPE UNDERHILL.

That night Ben half turned around in his desk chair and asked, “Who is that?” Ahmed was on the couch. Ben didn’t turn all the way around, as though Hutch could see him.

“Who?”

“Henry Underhill. I saw you find his name in the Dish.”

“I thought I already told you about him.”

“No.”

“I hardly know where to start,” said Ahmed. “Without him I would not be here.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, how did your parents send you here?”

“How?”

“How.”

“Um, well, my dad went here, and my uncle. Our family actually…my great-great-grandfather was in the first class.”

“Yes. When my father was a young man, he was a small trader, one of the first to bring cigarettes to Dubai.”

Ahmed paused. He went on, describing how his father got to know the officials who ran the small port at the mouth of the town’s river. The Emir of Dubai, Sheik Rashid bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, began planning a bigger port at the time, in the late 1970s, farther west at Jebel Ali.

Critics thought that the new port would be too big, a waste of money, but Ahmed’s father disagreed, as he had become expert in the needs of Dubai’s merchants.

Dubai hired Western architects and engineers, and among them had been a man named Henry Underhill. He was an executive for one of the engineering companies and negotiated with all of the interested parties.

As Ahmed told the story, he imagined his mother holding her hands together in her lap, patiently hearing it again.

His father said that Underhill was easy, in control of himself. He always had a joke, could understand what each side needed and what difficulties each person faced. He negotiated without weakness but did not tell lies. Ahmed told Ben that in Dubai, among Emirati people, discussions and agreements tended to change often and could make Western people frustrated, and so his father was impressed by Mr. Underhill’s simple, sustained calm.

Underhill knew about the world. He spoke French and German, not very good Arabic but far better than that of the other Americans in Dubai. His suits had been made for him in England. When the first grand piano came into the country he could play it, and he was able to obtain records, and ice, and books, and liquor, which Ahmed’s father didn’t drink but still admired.