And then even though Ahmed had never met Underhill, he described to Ben how he stood. Underhill had held himself leaning slightly forward, listening, and made it seem that you were the only one worth hearing. When he didn’t know something he just said so, and he seemed at ease while he learned about that thing.

Ahmed felt a new turn of embarrassment. He was glad that Ben couldn’t see his father’s face as he talked so admiringly about this other man. Ahmed wondered for the first time how Underhill had seen his father.

Eventually Al-Khaled asked Underhill how he had become the way he was, whether it was his family, the military, his religious training, or perhaps contending with some illness or disaster. Underhill at first denied that there was anything special about him, but after being pressed, he responded that, as much as anything else, he had been formed by his boarding school. Like Ben’s, Underhill’s family had come to St. James since the early classes.

At this time, Emirati children who went to study abroad almost always went to English universities, but this school was in America. Al-Khaled couldn’t afford tutors for his older sons, but by the time Ahmed was born, he had made money from the cigarette imports and his portion of the shipping business. Cigarettes were very discouraged in Islam, so he sold off the tobacco importing and bought several mines, a construction business, and part of an oil refinery. Now he could afford what he wanted.

Underhill had left Dubai by this time, but Al-Khaled corresponded with him and with his help hired a tutor. Ahmed remembered his father looking into the room as he was studying for the foreign-school entrance exam with the tutor, Mr. Greenspan. Ahmed began to close his book to come for evening prayer, but his father, standing slightly angled away and with a look half proud, held up his hand and said in English, “Keep working. Tomorrow is exam.” And the school for foreign students didn’t have a call to prayer.

Even though few people in the Emirates sent their children abroad before university, Ahmed’s father wasn’t interested in what other people did. He wanted to be great, and he wanted his son to be great, to become a magnificent Emirati Leader.

Ahmed’s father put it just like that, and so Ahmed relayed those words now to Ben. Ahmed wanted Ben to believe in this greatness the way his father believed in it.

Ahmed described how, because foreigners couldn’t own property in Dubai, many Emiratis made their income by collecting rent and nothing else. They desired Rolexes and expensive cars, and this disgusted his father, who saw himself and his family as a way for the Emirates to be more, to achieve more, to take its place among great nations. Learning what Underhill knew could make this so.