Brilliant (2 page)

“Please, please,” said Big Ali, nearly bowing. The brothers looked at each other. Nizar cocked his head and the two sat.

“How is business?” asked Nizar, taking out his BlackBerry. “In your estimation, that is.”

“Good, good!” said Big Ali. “Orders, big orders every day. Crown Prince is our most devoted customer. If we keep him happy, we must be doing something right, yes?” And Big Ali grinned so hard, the space where he'd lost a tooth showed.

“How much more did we sell this quarter than last?” asked Nizar, eyes on his keypad.

“This quarter?” asked Big Ali, and already he looked smaller. “I will check, sir. It's in the computer, sir.”

“You don't know the numbers off the top of your head?” asked Nizar, still not looking at him. Rashid was also studying his BlackBerry, though some sort of game seemed to be on the screen. “You should know the numbers like that.” And Nizar snapped his fingers like that.

“I will check, sir. I know we did good, sir.”

“Good is a useless word unless it is attached to a number,” said Nizar, and Big Ali, who'd continued to smile, finally stopped.

 

“What's wrong with you guys?”Annabelle asked when she came in at ten. “You get food poisoning or something? You look sick.”

Big Ali took her aside. “They want to cut staff,” he told her.

“So I go, right?” said Annabelle, picking up her denim shoulder bag from where she'd dropped it on the floor, pulling the strap over her head and crossing it over her sequined T-shirt so the els in “Jewels” was covered.

Big Ali would never tell her the reasons. Someone — one of The Three As? A rival bakery? — had texted Nizar Al Zaabi that he'd better check things out at the Hamdan Street outlet. Annabelle was cooking pork in the pastry kitchen, they said. Annabelle was “giving sex” to Big Ali. She was also “lazy,” “taking cash,” and crossing herself when the call to prayer sounded. Any of these could lead to deportation, Nizar told Big Ali. “But we are good locals, not like some. You fire her today. Understood?”

There was more: Karim would not be hired. Bashir had to work seven days, not six, at the same salary. Big Ali had to email a daily earnings and output report, and from now on Little Ali would be in charge. “You're old,” Rashid told Big Ali, the only thing he actually said during the ten-minute meeting.

It made no sense. Of course, it made no sense. “He's my daughter's son and so I love him, but he work like shit!” Big Ali said to Bashir after the brothers left. Little Ali, when told of his promotion, put on the tallest paper toque and went outside to text the glad news to his cousin. Annabelle hugged each of them, Karim weeping when she put her arms around him. But, of course, he was leaving too.

The kitchen was deadly quiet by eleven. Kitchens should never, ever be quiet, Bashir thought as he prepped. He gave all the doughs — phyllo, croissant,
khnafeh
— a rough time, thinking of Nizar and Rashid as he pounded, rolled and cut. He couldn't imagine this place without Annabelle, her flirty warmth, her funny heart. But it was when his thoughts slid over Karim that the pain came. He was an unholy man, a man who needed to keep his eyes down where they belonged. But what if Karim had stayed? All those nights together in the kitchen with no one else about and Bashir in charge? He could have asked for any shameful, wondrous thing. And Allah would have forgiven. Allah always forgave bad humans. That's why He was Allah, and Bashir only a pastry chef who, peace be upon him, liked boys.

 

It was a terrible week. Overnight Big Ali seemed to drop a stone. “Eat!” Bashir said after a few days. “You need your strength.” Big Ali hardly seemed to hear him. He now spent most of his days in the windowless, flour-coated office, doubled over a calculator. “I don't know computers,” he confessed to Bashir. Little Ali had never taken off his toque from the first day, and now swanned around the kitchen, tasting things and shaking his head. He left early every day. An idiot, Big Ali and Bashir agreed, but now the boss. Even The Three As actually looked at Little Ali when they spoke to him now. “Maybe they're next,” said Big Ali.

But it was a bad time to have a bad attitude because National Day was coming at them and orders were flying in from hotels, restaurants and smaller bakeries that passed Al Zaabi's pastries off as their own. The palaces were quadrupling their orders for everything. The Three As looked grim, smelling disaster a week away. “We tried to get Karim to come back for a few days. We even offered to pay him,” Bashir overheard Aziz tell Little Ali. But Karim had already landed a job with Mister Cake making 100 dirhams a day. “No thank you very much,” he'd said.

“Who does he think he is?” said Little Ali.

Time blurred into a migraine of flour and ghee. Nights fell on top of days. Bashir slept standing up; he rolled lying down. Still, he preserved a few hours each night for the portrait. It was truly becoming — Bashir blushed to admit it — a Work of Art. As he glued the last rice grains in place, he let himself imagine Sheikh Mohammed's face on opening it. In that moment when the wrapping fell away, when the sheikh beheld his image in a hundred shades of rice, he would know how deeply his people loved him, none more than Bashir el-Masri of Alexandria.

The layer of varnish was tricky, at first lifting some of the paint from Sheikh Mohammed's cheek. When Bashir saw the pinky-brown coming off on the small brush, his heart nearly failed. It took until the next day to figure out how much to dilute the coating so it would protect and shine, not destroy. He was a pastry chef, a man to solve problems. If he could figure out how to nearly double their production for the week — simple: no sleep — he could solve this too.

When he applied the last coat of varnish at 4:00 a.m., the dawn of National Day, Bashir knew he had captured something none of the photos had. It was the way the supreme commander held his head. All the photos — from Abu Dhabi to Ras al Khaimah — showed the Crown Prince looking straight on. Bashir had tilted his head just slightly to the right; amazing, the softening effect of a centimetre or two. Sheikh Mohammed radiated, if not outright compassion, receptivity. Come to me.

 

It was crowded in the back of the refrigerated van and the Pakistani driver hadn't completely understood why Bashir had to accompany the six dozen trays of pastries to the palace. He looked as sleepless as Bashir, shrugging irritably in the end. “No ride back,” he said.

A light rain was falling as they went out into what was not quite day. Bashir had wrapped the rice portrait — smaller in his arms than a tray of
maamoul
— in layers and layers of bubble wrap, sealing off every joint with tape so it was safe as a baby.

They wouldn't let him past the gate.

“National Day,” one of the dozen Indian guards told him.

“I know it is National Day,” said Bashir. “That is why I am here.” He smiled largely, gestured to the package. “For Sheikh Mohammed.”

Now three other guards joined the first. One poked the package with his stick. Some of the plastic bubbles popped, he jabbed it so hard.

Bashir pulled the package to his chest, tried to protect it with his arms. “Call the kitchen,” he said. “They know me.”

“They know me,” one of the guards mimicked. “And why would His Highness know you?”

“I make his pastries,” said Bashir.

This made several of the guards laugh. “Doughnut man,” said one. “Big doughnut man.”

Annabelle was gone and Karim, too, and Little Ali was in charge now and he was so very, very tired. “Fucking Paki,” said Bashir and then all twelve were around him. One yanked the package so hard, Bashir fell back, nearly losing his grip.

“Let me see it,” said the one who'd called him doughnut man. He tore at the plastic, the bubble wrap falling in wads to the ground as it began to rain more heavily. It never rained on National Day. The other guards ran back to the kiosk, shouting in Hindi.

When the last layer was ripped away, the guard looked up at Bashir, then back at the portrait. “What is this?” he said. “Who is this?”

Bashir watched as the guard poked at the portrait with a fingernail, dislodging a few rice grains, then a few more, and the rice — black, white, flesh — fell like rain on the pavement.

 

See, there's this guy, Mathieu says. “Are you listening?
Voyons
, Angie, don't fall asleep yet.”

They're in his villa this time, Maribeth, her maid, having asked for Saturday, not her usual Friday, off. Maribeth's cousin, Daisy, is taking the bus down from Dubai. They'll go to mass Saturday morning at St. Mary's, then to supper at Chow King. Maribeth smiled when she told Angie of her weekend plans, as if looking into the horizon of a beautiful future.

“Okay, Madame?” she said.

“Okay,” Angie agreed, only later thinking: Damn. She won't be able to have Mathieu at her place with Maribeth there. She much prefers meeting him in her flat.

She wants to sleep. She always wants to sleep after coming, and coming in the heat is so intense. It was 46 degrees Celsius when she pushed open the iron gate of Mathieu's Al Raha villa an hour ago. They never waste time, shedding clothes in the entryway, Mathieu already hard, Angie already sweating, even with the
AC
pumping.

“Maybe it's an urban legend,” says Mathieu, pressing closer. He's forty-two, French, educated in the
UK
(city planning) and good-looking in a Gérard Depardieu, large-man sort of way. His wife and twin daughters have gone to the family's château in Languedoc for the summer. He and Angie have been taking advantage of this for the past week, silly with their new freedom. They're four months into what Mathieu calls their
petite aventure
. A long time for him, she senses.

“So there's a guy,” he says.

“There's always a guy,” says Angie. In their haste, they've forgotten to roll down the Roman blind. The sun beats at the master-bedroom window.

“True,” says Mathieu. “And this story I'm trying to tell you,
c'est vrai aussi
.” He likes slipping into French with her, though she's told him many times that her French is of the most rudimentary, high-school kind.
Moi, je suis américaine
.

“Kabir swears it's true,” he continues, and gives her exposed nipple a slow lick. Kabir is Mathieu's driver. He's from Peshawar, like most of the cab drivers in the city. Maribeth doesn't like him. She claims he tried to goose her once, though that wasn't the word she'd used. “He
pince
me,” she said. “
Pincer
?” said Mathieu, when Angie reported the incident. “Very French.”

“This guy, he's a local,” Mathieu continues.

A sheikh? she wants to know. So many of these stories, the ones batted from one expat party to another, are about royals. Or near-royals. In this frypan of a city, you're a royal, a near-royal, or a cab driver. Or colonials like us, Mathieu would add.

“Stop interrupting,” he says, slapping her thigh. “So he has this house, see? Well, it's more of a palace. It's as large as —
écoute ça
— the Abu Dhabi Mall.” Mathieu reaches for a cigarette from the glass nightstand. He's held off for nearly ten minutes since their grand bilateral climax, but can't wait longer.

Angie was drifting, but now she struggles to sit up. She's trying to picture a house as big as the Abu Dhabi Mall. The mall — her least favourite in the city — is three city blocks long at least. She conjures a man in a starched, white
khandoura
strolling down the vaulted halls, the hem of his robe gliding over dark marble. It would all be halls, she imagines. Maybe he uses Rollerblades or a golf cart.

Where did Mathieu say he'd heard this story? She
had
been falling asleep. Of course: Kabir, compulsive gossip, who drops his prayer rug whenever, wherever the call to prayer sounds and who likes her maid's ass. “I don't believe it,” she says.

“But this is the good part,
mon ange
,” says Mathieu, exhaling. Mathieu's way with a cigarette — the continental cool of it — is nearly enough to make her say,
I will love you forever
.

“Light?” he'd asked four months before, as both waited for their cars to be brought outside the Emirates Palace Hotel. It was the night of the first Abu Dhabi Classics concert. If you cared about the arts or just wanted to be seen, you were there. “Light?” He'd turned to her and in his eyes, amused, certain, she saw how things could play out. For a while, anyway.

“I'm listening,” says Angie.

The guy jets all over, every week somewhere new, says Mathieu. Moscow, Mosul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. The whole world is his playground. And wherever he flies, his falcon is there in first class with him.

“Drugs? Arms? Mercenary?” she asks, and Mathieu looks at her like she might be on drugs herself.

“What do any of these guys do?” he says. “What do any of these guys
have
to do?”

Angie has just met a lovely Emirati man over lunch at the Noodle House, a chance meeting at one of the restaurant's long wood tables, where it takes more effort not to speak to the stranger next to you than to ask and answer the usual “where are you from how long have you been here what do you do?” He was twenty-seven, he told her, and must have seen her as an attractive “auntie,” a woman old enough to be safe to chat with. He had just returned from the States where he'd studied naturopathic medicine. “I have been privileged to go abroad and learn,” he said. “We have far to go in the
UAE
. We do not know yet how to unify all parts of our being, our bodies and souls and minds.” He'd been so earnest, so diffident, this young man with his manicured goatee and perfectly pressed
khandoura
, that she felt inclined to believe him. This was more than the usual my-country-needs-me speech. “I think you mean that,” she said to him. And he'd given her a quizzical, slightly bruised smile.

“Go on,
mon beau
,” she says.

Wherever the man with the mansion travels each week, he finds a woman and brings her back to Abu Dhabi. “He does whatever he wants with her all weekend and then” — Mathieu shifts her from his chest as he rights himself against the pillow — “on Sunday morning he sends her back to wherever she came from.”

“A playboy,” she says. “
UAE
style.”

“But here's the
UAE
twist. The car that takes her back to the airport? The Hummer or limo or whatever it is? The man orders the woman to fill it with money. However much cash she can stuff into that car she takes with her.” Mathieu looks flushed, almost triumphant. “
Incroyable, non
?” he says, and stubs out his smoke.

She imagines a late-model silver Mercedes, then a black Maserati, which becomes a massive, white Land Rover. A leg, like one belonging to a Vegas showgirl, spike heel dangling from high-arched foot, dangles out the half-open back window. The girl of the week has been toppled backward from the weight of the money, only her perfect nose and perfect mouth visible between layers of 100-dollar bills, bushels of bills that remind Angie of the leaves she and her brother used to rake every fall in Massachusetts. It would be American money, she supposes. As the car drives off, a few loose hundreds fly from the window.

“Does he see her off?” she asks. And Mathieu looks at her again with something like annoyance, and gets out of bed. “What would that mean?” he asks. “That he cares? Don't be romantic.”

“It would show there are manners behind his money.” She hasn't planned to say this, didn't know what she would say. But the man, the one who takes lonely walks through his home, would want to be seen as a gentleman by the women. She feels absolutely certain of this.

“But don't you find it so Abu Dhabi?” he asks. “Isn't it outrageous? Why aren't you reacting?” Mathieu faces her as he pushes his arms into a robe. He's trimmed down since he started biking again this summer. She likes to think it has something to do with her.

“I thought I
was
reacting,” she says.

In its fiscal and sexual excess, the story resembles others she's heard. But this one brings a downward pull. She imagines the man again, pacing his endless halls, trying to figure out where to fly off to next, the woman being escorted away, bills stuffed into her cleavage and too-tight heels. There is so much paper she can barely breathe.

“So what do you want for lunch?” he asks, tying the belt of his white terry robe. “I've got cold chicken. Leftover mutton biryani. Your choice.”

 

Maribeth is in the kitchen when she gets home, busily hunched at the far counter, as if chopping vegetables. But when Angie comes closer, she sees that her maid is fixing herself a cup of tea. “Madame!” she says, turning quickly. “I did not.”

Most of Maribeth's sentences are missing something, a verb, a noun, sometimes any context at all. But after five years together — longer than Angie's been with anyone since Firaj left four years ago — she doesn't often need clarification. Besides, Maribeth is as certain of her command of English as she is in the existence of the Blessed Virgin Mother and All the Angels and Saints. When corrected, she closes her eyes, breathes in a prayer for patience with these picky people and their picky language and blunders gamely on. Lately Angie finds herself sounding scarily like her maid.

“Madame!” Maribeth raises both hands to her cheeks and Angie feels herself already weary. It will be bad news about one of the Filipinas in Maribeth's vast circle. Angie has tried to help a few, going over their work contracts, pointing them in the direction of the labour board. The law is actually on your side, she tells them, and they look at her doubtfully.

“One of your friends is in trouble,” says Angie.

“No friend, cousin,” says Maribeth. “Daisy.”

“Before you get into the story,
MB
, can you fix me a cup of tea too?” says Angie. It's Maribeth's theory that on the hottest days you don't drink iced tea or lemonade or cold mango juice. You drink hot tea. Putting something hot inside when it's hot outside, “cool you out,” says Maribeth. When Angie told Mathieu this last week, he laughed. “
Elle a raison
,” he said and rolled her on her side.

Maribeth turns back to the stove, places the kettle on a burner. She does this so slowly Angie knows she's annoyed at having her story interrupted. Maribeth relishes a good soap opera, especially when it's happening to real people.

“I take it Daisy won't be coming down from Dubai tomorrow,” says Angie. “Her boss is being a pain again, right?” She hopes this is all the drama in store.

“Worse,” says Maribeth. “Boss fire Daisy.”

Daisy is the opposite of Maribeth. She's tall for a Filipina, easily five-seven or five-eight, with a long ponytail and bushy bangs. She's terribly thin. Maribeth is short and thick with a wash-and-wear haircut. Angie has never seen her in a skirt, even for church. Daisy exudes sweetness and compliance. Maribeth, a bristling, watchful efficiency.

“But I thought she was with a new family,” says Angie. Daisy's last employer, a Syrian, kept her locked inside the family's villa, not allowing her out to wire her salary home to an extended family of six. A network of Filipinas took turns passing at arranged times to intercept an envelope stuffed with creased dirhams, which the locked-up Daisy would drop from a third-floor window when the family was out. Several times neighbourhood kids got there first. The employer before that, a French couple with triplets, docked half of Daisy's monthly salary when she came home half an hour late from Friday mass.

“Bad man,” says Maribeth, pouring Angie's hot water, splashing some on the counter. “Man bad.”

“Which man?” asks Angie. The only good man in Maribeth's book is her husband, the long-suffering Eduardo, back home in the Philippines. Privately, Angie thinks he's a wimp, a mooch and possibly an alcoholic. When Maribeth goes home every July for two weeks, Eduardo seems to resent the time she spends with their three children. “Sex, all time sex,” Maribeth once confessed, shrugging.

“New boss!” says Maribeth, looking peeved. “Who you think, Madame?”

“Cut me some slack,
MB
. I can't remember the horrors of all your friends' work lives. I have my own, remember?” And Maribeth shoots Angie a look that lands where she knows it will, right in Angie's uneasy Western sense of justice and entitlement: I have nothing to complain about/I have everything to complain about. Since the global financial downturn, or
GFD
as Angie calls it (great fucking debacle), Berlitz has cut her teaching load by half. Every month she worries the school will lay her off. She's not Arab, after all. Firaj, now doing a tour of duty in Islamabad, sends money when he thinks of it.

“Okay, I know it's different,” says Angie.

“You bet,” says Maribeth, taking Angie's cup and steering her out of the kitchen into the dining room. She puts Angie's cup on the long, polished table, sits in the adjacent chair.

The long and the short of it — though none of these sagas are ever short, thinks Angie, trying not to look at her watch — is that Daisy's difficult Egyptian family has turned into two difficult Egyptian families.

“Sixteen person,” says Maribeth. “Poor Daisy. She sleep three hour.”

“But that's illegal,” says Angie, feeling, in spite of herself, the quick fury these stories still churns up. “Jesus, Maribeth.”

“I tell her no good people. I tell her back when,” says Maribeth.

“But now they've fired her?”

“They say,” says Maribeth, shrugging. “But still make her work. Maybe just…” and she struggles with a word.

“Threaten,” supplies Angie.

Her mobile is ringing from somewhere in the apartment. Angie feels Maribeth willing her not to answer it. “Sorry,
MB
,” she says, dashing first into the kitchen, then into the entryway, trying to remember where she dropped her purse. Mathieu has programmed her phone to play an old Donna Summer song,
Hot Stuff
. It's cheesy, but she loves it.