By morning it's all over town: The Mezzeineh will keep the land in the courtyard, but the police get an equal-size piece of a parking lot just down the street. The whole thing has been settled by wastas on cell phones in a few hours. Down in Sharm, Rotondi protests to the Egyptian government and the U.S. Embassy that the national police should be restoring Club Red to him, as the court rulings require, but the national police solve that one by simply denying they ever set foot in the place.

By summer—high season in Dahab—the dispute has settled into a kind of routine. Every week or two, Rotondi gets fresh reason for hope. There is a steady stream of favorable court rulings, based largely on his record of successful rent payments, but none is enforced. The U.S. Embassy slowly rallies to his cause, and at one point a consular official flies to the Sinai and convoys to Dahab with Rotondi and a troop of police officers, who chicken out after a few hours of bureaucratic chess with the Mezzeineh. The whole drama is repeated a few weeks later, with the same non-result. Eventually, after a dozen feverish e-mails announcing imminent victory for "the conquering heroes," Rotondi, his Egyptian lawyer, and his staff are finally, triumphantly reinstated in the resort with the help of almost a hundred policemen dressed in riot gear, who shut down much of Dahab for an entire day and preemptively arrest nine "troublemakers" from the Mezzeineh clan. Rotondi spends a single night in possession of the resort. The very next day, after the police have gone, the Hameids and a group of Mezzeineh chase him right out of the resort again, and his exile is renewed.