The Levanter

Chapter 2

Michael Howell

May 15 to 16

On the fourteenth of May I was in Italy, and I wish to God I had stayed there.

Even an airport strike — if it had delayed me for twenty-four hours or so — would have helped. At least my ignorance would have been preserved a little longer. With luck I might even have escaped direct involvement. But no. I went back on the fifteenth and walked straight into trouble.

The fact that the poison had already been in the system then for over five months — ever since the man calling himself Yassin had come to work for me — was something I did not know. I have been accused of having turned a blind eye until circumstances forced me to do otherwise. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unfortunately, those who know me best, business friends, for example, have found the fact that I was both ignorant and innocent hard to accept. My admission that never once during those months had I had the slightest inkling of what was going on seems to them no more than a highly unconvincing, but in the circumstances necessary, claim to incompetence. Well, I can scarcely blame them, but I am sorry. That admission, which I certainly did not enjoy making and of which I am anything but proud, happens to be true.

One thing I would like to be clearly understood. I am not trying to justify myself or my conduct; I am only attempting to repair some of the damage that has been done. It is not my personal reputation that matters now, but that of our company.

The week prior to the fifteenth of May I had spent in Milan on company business. Having completed that business, I flew to Rome, where I picked up two new suits which had been waiting for me at my tailor’s. The following day, the fifteenth, I took a Middle East Airlines flight to Damascus.

As usual I had cabled the flight number and expected time of arrival and so, as usual, I received the VIP treatment. At Damascus this meant that I was met at the foot of the stairway from the plane by a Syrian army corporal in a paratroop jump suit, with a Czech automatic rifle, loaded and at the ready, slung across his stomach. Escorted by him, I then went through passport control and customs to the waiting air-conditioned Ministry car.

My feelings about being met this way were, as always, mixed. It was convenient, of course, to be spared the interrogations and searching to which most of my fellow passengers would be subjected. It was also reassuring to know on landing that one was still considered of value to the state, and that no long knives had been out during one’s absence: modern Syria must still be considered one of the 'off-with-his-head' countries.

On the other hand, while there was no denying that Damascus airport was at times a dangerous place, I could never quite rid myself of the conviction that should any of the potential dangers — a bomb outrage, say, or a guerrilla shoot-out — suddenly become immediate, I as a foreigner, a civilian, and an infidel, would be among the first to perish in the crossfire. The corporal, whom I had encountered before, was a friendly oaf who smelled of sweat and gun oil and was very proud of the fact that his firstborn was now attending a village primary school; but to me, his uniform and his loaded rifle seemed as much a threat as a protection. I was always relieved when we reached the car, and the porter arrived with the luggage.

My appointment with the Minister was not until four thirty so I drove first to the villa our company owned in the city — and to Teresa.

The villa was in the old style with a walled courtyard and was part office, part pied-à-terre. Teresa was in charge of both parts of the establishment. With the help of a Syrian clerk she ran the office for me; with that of two servants she took care of our private household.

Teresa’s father had been the Italian consul in Aleppo. He had also been an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. With Teresa’s mother and members of the Aleppo Museum staff he was away on an archaeological expedition in the north when the party was attacked by a gang of bandits, believed to be Kurds. Supposedly the Kurds mistook the party for a Syrian border patrol. Teresa’s parents had been among those killed.

She had been nineteen then, convent-educated in Lebanon, and a good linguist. For a time she worked as secretary-translator in the local office of an American oil company. Then she came to me. Having spent most of her life in the Middle East, she knows the form. She has been and is, in every way, invaluable to me.

I have always had to do a lot of travelling around for our company, and whenever I returned to Damascus from a trip there was a set office routine. Teresa would have ready for me a brief summary report on the state of our local enterprises. This report usually consisted chiefly of figures. She would supplement the report verbally with comment and any interesting items of information that she thought I should have.

On this occasion she told me about the manoeuvring of a competitor who was bidding against us on a job in Teheran, That story amused me.

What came next did not amuse me at all.

“I’ve noticed that the laboratory costs seem to be getting higher and higher,” she said, “so while you were away I looked into them. The accounts come here for payment, but the invoices showing the details of items purchased go to the factory with the goods. There most of them seem to get lost. So I wrote to the suppliers in Beirut for a duplicate set of last month’s invoices.”

“And?”

“I found one recent item that was really very expensive. We also had to pay a lot of duty on it. It was an order for ten rottols of absolute alcohol.’’

A rottol, I should explain, is one of those antediluvian weights and measures which are still used in some parts of the Middle East. One rottol equals two okes, one oke weighs just over a kilo and a quarter. So ten rottols would be about twenty-five kilos.

“Issa ordered that?”

“Apparently. I didn’t know we used that much alcohol in the laboratory.”

“We shouldn’t use any. Did you ask him about it?”

She smiled. “I thought you might prefer to do that, Michael.”

“Quite right I’ll look forward to it. The little bastard!” I glanced at my watch; the Minister was a stickler for punctuality. “We’ll talk about it later,” I said.

“Did you get what you wanted in Milan?”

“I think so.” I picked up my briefcase. “Let’s hope 'His Nibs' likes the look of it, too.”

“Good luck,” she said.

I went down and got back into the Ministry car. The sound of the first warning note was already becoming faint in my mind. I imagined, with reason, that I had more important business to attend to that afternoon.

In view of the libelous and highly damaging statements which have been made about our company and its operations, particularly in certain French and West German 'news' magazines, I feel it necessary at this point to give the essential facts. Slander, the verbalized bile of jealous competitors and other commercial opponents, may be contemptuously ignored, but printed vilification cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. True, these published libels are actionable at law and, of course, the necessary steps have been taken to bring those responsible before courts of justice. Unfortunately, since different countries have different laws on the subject of libel, and what is clearly actionable in one place may be only marginally so in another, the paths to justice are long and tortuous. Time passes, the lies prosper like weeds, and the truth is stifled. That I will not permit. The weed-killer must be applied now.

One of the news magazine reporters to whom I granted an interview described my defence of our company’s position as “a garrulous smokescreen of misinformation”. Mixed metaphors seem to be a characteristic of heavily slanted reporting, but as this sort of charge was fairly typical, I will answer it.

Garrulous? Maybe. In trying to break down his very obvious preconceptions and prejudices I probably did talk too much. Smokescreen? Misinformation? He came with a closed mind and that was its condition when he left. The truth wasn’t newsy enough for him. His quality — and that of his editor — was well displayed elsewhere in the piece where it was stated that I wore “expensive gold cuff links”. What was that supposed to prove, for God’s sake? Would my credibility have been enhanced if I had secured my shirt cuffs with inexpensive gold links, should such things exist, or plastic buttons?

No. I am not saying that all newspaper men are corrupt — Mr. Lewis Prescott and Mr. Frank Edwards, for instance, have at least tried to tell the truth — but simply that the only way you can win with those who are corrupt is to fight them on their own ground, and discredit them publicly in print.

That is what I am doing now, and if any of those spry paladins of the gutter press feels that anything that I have said about him is libelous and actionable, his legal advisers will tell him where to apply. Our company retains excellent lawyers in all the capitals from which we operate.

Agence Commerciale et Maritime Howell, along with its associated trading companies, has always been very much a family concern. The original société à responsabilité limité was registered by my grandfather, Robert Howell, in the early 1920’s. Before that, since the turn of the century in fact, he had grown licorice and tobacco on big stretches of land held under a firman of the Turkish Sultan, Abdul, in what used to be called the Levant.

The land, in the vilayet of Latakia, was granted to him as a reward for political services rendered to the Ottoman court. The exact nature of the services rendered I have never been able to determine. My father once told me, vaguely, that “they had something to do with a government bond issue”, but he was unable, or unwilling, to amplify that statement. The original land grant described Grandfather’s occupation as that of “entrepreneur-negotiator”, which in Imperial Turkey could have meant many different things. I do know that he was always very well in, in Constantinople, and that even during World War I, when as an Englishman he was interned by the Turks, his internment amounted to little more than house arrest. Moreover, the land remained in his name, as, too, did the businesses there — a tannery and a flour mill — which he had acquired before the war. “Johnny Turk is a gentleman”, he used to say.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French Mandate over the areas now known as Syria and Lebanon, some changes had to be made. Although his tenure of the lands he had previously held was eventually confirmed by the new regime, his experience under the French colonial administrators — less gentlemanly than Johnny Turk by all accounts — had taught him a sharp lesson. Personal ownership of a business made one vulnerable. He made arrangements to acquire a corporate identity in Syria and to transfer gradually most of his subsidiary businesses, chiefly those which did not depend directly on landholding, to Cyprus.

Grandfather died in 1933, and my father, John Howell took control. He had been in charge of the Cyprus office in Famagusta, which had been established originally to find cargoes for the fleet of coasters which the parent company owned and operated out of Latakia.

As his Cyprus office had grown in importance my father’s interest in the mainland of Asia Minor had waned. He had married in Cyprus. My sisters and I were born in Famagusta and baptized in the Greek Orthodox faith. My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon but, with a Lebanese-Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English. There are lots of families like ours, rich and poor, in the Middle East. Ethnically, I suppose, my sisters and I could reasonably be described as “Eastern Mediterranean”. Personally I prefer the simpler though usually pejorative term, “Levantine mongrel”. Mongrels are sometimes more intelligent than their respectable cousins; they also tend to adapt more readily to strange environments; and in conditions of extreme adversity, they are among those most likely to survive.

The World War II years were difficult ones for our Syrian interests. Those in Cyprus gave little trouble. The coasters, prudently reregistered in Famagusta before the war, were all on charter to the British. They lost three of them off Crete, but their government war-risk insurance covered us nicely; I think we even made money on the deal. In Syria, though, it was a different story. The fighting between the Allies and the Vichy French brought business virtually to a standstill. The demand for liquorice root and Latakia tobacco at that time was, to put it mildly, minimal. In 1942, when the Allies started driving the enemy out of North Africa, father moved our head office to Alexandria and registered a new holding company, Howell General Trading Ltd. The Syrian and Cypriot businesses became subsidiaries. In that year, too, I was sent around the Cape to purgatory in England. Had I been consulted I would have chosen to stay at the English school in Alex, or, failing that, go to the one in Istanbul where there were family friends; but my mother wouldn’t have Istanbul — unlike Grandfather Howell she is very anti-Turk — and anyway my father’s mind was made up. War or no war, I had to go through the same prep and public school mills as he and his father had.

Not all my father’s ideas were so fixed, however. After the move to Alexandria the whole character and direction of our business began to change. This was father’s doing and he was quite deliberate about it. He had sensed the future. Some things remained — the coasters and the bigger ships that later replaced them had nearly always been profitable — but from 1945 on, when the war in Europe ended, the whole emphasis on the trading side of our business shifted from bulk commodities to manufactured goods. During those postwar years we became selling agents throughout the Middle East (after 1948, Israel always excepted) for a number of European and, later, some American manufacturers.

This change had a direct effect on my life. The first of these agencies of ours was that of a firm in Glasgow which made a range of rotary pumps. It was my father’s realization that it is difficult to sell engineering products effectively when the buyer knows more than you do about them that made him decide on a technical education for me. So, instead of going from school in England to Cairo University, a transition to which I had been looking forward, I found myself committed to a red-brick polytechnic in one of the grimier parts of London.

At the time, I am afraid, my acceptance of this change of plan was more sullen than dutiful. Born in Cyprus when it was a British colonial possession, I held a British colonial passport. By the simple process of threatening me — quite baselessly, I later discovered — with the prospect of National Service conscription into the British army unless I enrolled as a student in London, my father had his way. It wasn’t, I know, a nice trick for a loving father to play on a son; but I can admit now that, as a businessman, I have had no reason to regret that he played it.

One way and another, then, I learned a lot from my father. He died in 1962, of a heart ailment, eighteen months after we moved our head office to Beirut in Lebanon and registered our second holding company in Vaduz.

The testing time for me, as the new head of our business, came the following year, when I had to make my first major policy decision.

It was that decision, made almost nine years ago, that started me on the road which has proved in the end to be so very dangerous.

Our Syrian troubles had started in the early fifties when Soviet penetration of the Middle East began. In Syria it was particularly successful. Friendship with the Soviet Union grew with the rise to power of the Syrian Arab Socialist Renaissance movement, later to be known as the Ba’ath Party. They were not communists — as Sunnite Muslims they could not be; they were, however, Arab nationalists committed to socialism and strongly anti-West. The Ba’ath program called for union with Egypt and other Arab states, and rapid socialization of the Syrian economy.

In 1958 they got both union with Egypt and, at the same time, the first of their socialization measures, “agrarian reform.” In that year an expropriation law was passed which stripped the Agence Howell of all but eighty hectares of its irrigated land. We had held over a thousand hectares. As a foreign-owned company we received “compensation”, but since the compensation was paid into a blocked account in the state-owned Central Bank, it didn’t do us much good. We were not permitted to transfer the money out of the country, we could not buy foreign currency or valuta, and we were not even allowed to reinvest or spend the money inside the country without permission from the Central Bank. It was in limbo.

They let us keep the tannery and the flour mill for the time being. Nationalization of industry was to come later.

In 1959 my father formally applied for the release of the blocked funds for reinvestment purposes. He planned to buy a 2,000-ton cargo vessel that was up for sale in Latakia and base it in the Aegean. It was a way of exporting some of the capital that he thought he might just get away with. But that was a bad year in Syria. There was a prolonged drought and the harvests were so poor that Syria had to import cereals instead of exporting as usual. The Central Bank, which clearly saw through the ship-purchase idea, regretted that, owing to the current shortage of foreign exchange resulting from the adverse trade situation, the application for release must be refused.

In 1960, when he applied again, the bank did not even reply to his letters.

In 1961 there was a military coup d’état aimed at dissolving the union with Egypt, restoring Syria’s position as a sovereign state, and setting up a new constitutional regime. It succeeded, and for a while things looked better for us. Property rights were to be guaranteed. Free enterprise was to be encouraged. The Central Bank was giving our latest request its sympathetic consideration. If the squabbling politicians could have agreed to compose their differences, even temporarily, and allowed the situation to become stable, all might have been well; but they couldn’t. Within six months, the army, tired of the “self-seeking” civilians, had moved in again with yet another coup.

Then, in 1963, there was a revolution.

I have used the word “revolution” because the Ba’athist coup of that year, though once again mainly the work of army officers, was more than a mere transfer of power from one nationalist faction to another; it brought about basic political changes. Syria became a one-party state and, while rejoining the UAR, managed to do so without re-surrendering its sovereign independence. The program of socialization was resumed. In May of ‘63 all the banks were nationalized.

It was at that time that I came to my decision.

I knew a good deal about the Ba’ath people. Many of them were naive reformers, doomed to eventual disillusionment, and they had their windbags who could do no more than parrot ritual calls for social justice; but among the party leaders there were able and determined men. When they said that they meant to nationalize all industry, I believed them. Later, no doubt, there would be some pragmatic compromises, and gray areas of collaboration between public and private sectors would appear; but in the main, I thought, they meant what they said. What was more, I believed that they were there to stay.

How best, then, to safeguard the interests of the Agence Howell?

I had, I considered, three options open to me. I could side with the resisters. I could temporize. Or I could explore the gray areas of future compromise and see what sort of a deal I could make.

Siding with the resisters meant, in effect, taking to the political woods and conspiring with those who would attempt to overthrow the new government. For a foreigner contemplating suicide this course might have had its attractions. For this foreigner it had none.

The temporizers, of whom there were many among my business acquaintances, seemed to me to have misjudged the new situation. Having observed with mounting weariness the political antics of the past decade, they tended to dismiss the nationalization of industry threat, with smiles and shrugs, as mere post-coup rhetoric. The banks? Well, the British and French banks had been sequestrated for years, hadn’t they? Nationalizing what was left had been an easy gesture to make. No, Michael, the thing to do now is sit tight and wait for the next counter-coup. Meanwhile, of course, we’ll have to keep our eyes open. When all this dust begins to settle a bit some of your new men will be coming out of it with their palms beginning to itch. They’ll be the ones to talk to about nationalization of industry. How can we pay them if they nationalize us, eh? Watch and wait, my boy, watch and wait. It’s the only way.

The temporizers, I thought, might be in for some surprises. I went my own way, exploring.

Obviously, yet another application to the Central Bank for the release of our blocked funds would fail unless I could apply some sort of leverage. Just as obviously, the only kind of lever that would work with the Central Bank would be one operated by its masters in the government. What I needed, then, was an endorsement of my application by a government department. It would have to be a high-level endorsement, too, preferably ministerial. What did I have to offer in exchange for such a thing?

At that point, the catch phrase, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join em,” came to mind. After that, once I had accepted the fact that I might do better working with the government people than by attempting artfully to outwit them, I made progress. The problem was then simplified. How could I join them in a way which would ultimately benefit us both?

I did a lot of thinking, some intensive market research, and formulated the plan.

In ‘63 I was not as used to negotiating with government officials as I am now. If I had been, I would not have given the proposition I was out to sell them even a fifty-fifty chance of success. Perhaps the fact that I was only thirty-two at the time, and consumed by the need to prove myself, helped. I was very aggressive in those days, too, and, I am afraid, given to finger-wagging exhortation when opposed.

My first encounter with the decision-making machinery in Damascus was a meeting with two bureaucrats, one from the Ministry of Finance, where the meeting took place, and one from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Commerce. They listened to me in silence, accepted copies of an aide-mémoire which summarized my proposals in veiled, but what I believed to be intriguing, terms, and indicated politely that they had other appointments.

A month went by before I was summoned by letter to a meeting at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Commerce. This meeting was in the office of a senior official to whom I had once been introduced at a Greek Embassy picnic. Also present were the two bureaucrats who had interviewed me before, and a younger man who was introduced as representing the recently created Department of Industrial Development. After the usual preliminary politenesses had been exchanged the senior officials invited this younger man to question me on the subject of my proposals.

His name was Hawa — Dr. Hawa.

My subsequent dealings with Dr. Hawa have been the subject of much misrepresentation. He himself has lately seen fit to assume the role of innocent betrayed, and to accuse me publicly of every crime from malfeasance to murder on the high seas. Under the circumstances it may be thought that no account I give of our relationship can be wholly objective.

I disagree. I have every intention of remaining objective. As far as I am concerned the only effect of his diatribes has been to relieve me of any lingering disposition to pull my punches.

Dr. Hawa is a thin, hard-faced man with tight lips and dark, angry eyes; obviously a tough customer, and particularly formidable when met for the first time. I remember that it was something of a relief to find that he was a chain-smoker; I knew then that he wasn’t as formidable as he appeared. Though we later became better acquainted I never discovered the academic discipline to which his doctorate belonged. I do know that he had a degree in law from the University of Damascus and that he later spent a year or two in the United States under a post-graduate student-exchange arrangement. There, I gather, he managed to pick up a Ph.D. from some easygoing academic institution in the Midwest. His English is fluent, with North American intonations. However, that first conversation was conducted mainly in Arabic with only occasional lapses into French and English.

“Mr. Howell, tell me about your company,” he began.

The tone was patronizing. I had noticed that he had a copy of my aide-mémoire on the table in front of him, so I nodded toward it “It is all there, Dr. Hawa.”

“No, Mr. Howell, it is not all there.” He flicked the papers disdainfully. “What is described there is a gambit, an opening move in which a small piece is sacrificed to secure a later advantage. We would like to know what game it is that we are being invited to play.”

I knew then that I would have to be careful with him. Chain-smoker he might be, but he was certainly no fool. If he had been English he would probably have described my aide-mémoire as a sprat to catch a mackerel, but gambit was also a pretty accurate description — too accurate for my liking. I looked at the senior official.

“What I had hoped for here, sir,” I said sternly, “was a serious discussion of serious proposals. I have no intention of playing any sort of game.”

“Dr. Hawa was speaking figuratively, of course.”

Hawa had a thin smile. “As Mr. Howell appears to be so sensitive I will put the matter another way.” He looked at me again. “You ask, Mr. Howell, for ministerial endorsement of an application for the release of blocked funds in order that they may be reinvested here. In return you undertake to confer on the state a number of economic blessings, the nature of which you hint at, but the value of which you leave to the imagination. More specifically, however, you offer to relinquish control of your remaining enterprises here, including a tannery and a flour mill, so that they may become cooperatives working under government auspices. Naturally we are curious about the spirit and temper of this strange gift horse, and about the business philosophy of the giver, the man who is seeking funds for reinvestment. So, I ask you to satisfy our curiosity.”

I shrugged. “As you probably know our company here has hitherto been a family affair. My grandfather and my father before me have done business in this country for many years. I think it fair to say that it has been useful business.”

“Useful? Don’t you mean profitable?”

“For me that is a distinction without a difference, Dr. Hawa. Useful and profitable, of course. Is there any other kind of business worth doing?” I thought I had his measure now. In a moment he was going to start talking about ownership of the means of production. I was wrong.

“But useful to whom, profitable to whom?”

“Useful to all those of your people to whom our company pays good wages and salaries — here, I may remind you, we employ only Syrian nationals. Profitable certainly to our company’s shareholders, but profitable also to the successive governments, Turkish, French, and Syrian, which have taxed us. Dividends have not always been certain, but wages and taxes have always been promptly paid.” And, I might have added, so had the bribes, petty and not so petty, which were part of any Levantine overhead; but I was still trying to handle him tactfully.

“Then why, Mr. Howell, are you so eager to relinquish control of these useful and profitable businesses?”

“Eager?” I gave him a blank stare. “I assure you, Dr. Hawa, that I am not in the least eager. My impression is that ultimately I will have no choice in the matter.”

“Ultimately, perhaps, but why this premature generosity? Understandably, I think, we find it puzzling, and a little suspect.”

“Only because you are not looking at my proposals as a whole. I think I am being realistic.”

“Realistic? How?”

I might have replied that had I not puzzled them by offering to hand over the Syrian assets of the Agence Howell, we would not have been sitting there discussing what was to become of its blocked funds. Instead I gave my prepared answer.

“At present the government lacks the administrative machinery to implement its socialist program for industry. But only at present. I am looking to the future. I might retain control for a year or so, but sooner or later I will certainly lose it. I prefer to lose it sooner and devote my time and energies to retrieving the situation. Does that seem foolish, or even generous, Dr. Hawa?”

“If we knew better what you meant by ‘retrieving the situation’ we might be able to judge.”

“Very well. Then let us begin with two assumptions. First, that the government takes over the operation of our remaining business in Syria for its own account and profit. Second, that the government compensates us in the usual way, with paper.”

He was lighting yet another cigarette. “There is no harm in our speaking hypothetically. Let us, for the purposes of your explanation, accept both acquisition and compensation. What then?”

“The Agence Howell is left without businesses here but with substantial assets. Some of these assets are intangible — management skills, knowledge of world markets and access to them, trading experience — but they are real enough nonetheless. However, without the capital to exploit them they are useless. The capital is there, but it is blocked. So, since the capital is not allowed to work, nothing else can. The loss is only partly ours. Your economy loses, too. The remedy I propose would work to our mutual advantage and would be in line with announced government policies for industry.”

“If you could be more specific.”

“Certainly. I propose a series of cooperative ventures, under government auspices and control, in the light industry field. Their primary object would be the manufacture of goods suitable for the export markets.”

“What sort of goods, Mr. Howell?” He had now the intent look of a cat who has suddenly seen a plump and rather somnolent field mouse.

“Ceramics to begin with,” I said. “Then I would go over to furniture and metalwork.”

The cat’s tail twitched. “In case you are unaware of the fact, Mr. Howell, I must tell you that we already have a considerable ceramics industry.”

“I am well aware of it, Dr. Hawa, but as far as I am concerned it is making the wrong things.”

“And as far as I am concerned, Mr. Howell, I begin to suspect that you are barking up the wrong tree.”

He was beginning to annoy me. “Of course, Dr. Hawa, if you find it too painful to listen to new ideas on old subjects, there is nothing more to be said.”

He decided that it was time to pounce. “New ideas, Mr. Howell? Decorated junk in quantity — pots, plates, and vases — for export to the trashy tourist shops of the Western world? Is that the way you would like to get your money out?” He laughed shortly at the others and they smiled back dutifully.

I nearly lost my temper, but not quite.

“I realize, Doctor, that you must be a very busy man,” I said, “and that before this meeting you were unable to make the usual departmental inquiries about my qualifications and reputation.”

He shrugged indifferently. “You were trained as an engineer. That could mean anything.”

“Then you cannot have heard that it is not a business habit of mine to talk nonsense. At the mention of ceramics your mind goes to pots and plates and vases. And why not? That is all you know about in the context. When I say ceramics I have something different in mind, because I have done some market research. I am talking, for one thing, about mass produced tiling.”

He frowned. ‘Tiles? You mean the tiles we use on our floors?”

“Not of the kind you mean. I mean ceramic tile sold by the square meter and made up of two centimetre mosaics glazed on one surface in plain colours, and not sold in any tourist shops, trashy or otherwise. I will give you an example. There is at the moment a modern two-hundred bedroom hotel going up in Benghazi. Each bedroom has a bathroom tiled in this material — floors and walls, plain colours — pink, blue, green, black, white. Approximately fifty square meters of tiling go into each bathroom. There is the same kind of tiling in the kitchens and on the verandas. About twelve thousand square meters were involved in the contract which went to an Italian manufacturer. It was worth forty-five thousand American.”

“Dollars?”

“Dollars. There is a big demand for this material. All over the Mediterranean hotels and big apartment blocks are being built, all over Europe for that matter. Marble is expensive. Tiling is comparatively cheap. Tiling is now the preferred material. Could Syria have had this order for Benghazi? If it had been equipped to produce the right article in the quantities needed and on time, the answer must be yes. True, Libya still has commercial ties with Italy, but what of her religious, ethnic, and political ties with the UAR? Besides, Syria’s price could well have been lower.”

“Where else is this special tiling made?”

“You mean is it an Italian monopoly? By no means. The French and the Swiss are already in the business. There is a tile factory near Zurich employing over two hundred persons.”

He made a face. “So a tiling factory, and when the building business slumps. .”

“We shall be much older men. In any case the tiling is only one example of the kind of thing I mean, Egypt is now building an electric power grid. It will take years to complete, and overhead high voltage power lines need glazed ceramic insulators, massive things, six or eight to a pylon. Tens of thousands will be needed. Of course, they could all come from the Soviet Union or Poland, but would the Russians care if these insulators were made in Syria? They might even be glad to subcontract the work to a friendly neighbour. It would be interesting to find out. I am sure that a request passed through their commercial attaché for drawings and specifications would be sympathetically received.”

‘’Yes, yes, of course.” He had risen nicely to that bait, as I had hoped he would.

The senior official leaned forward. “I take it that your proposals for furniture manufacture are equally unconventional, Mr. Howell?”

“I believe so, sir. No camel-saddle chairs, no ornamental coffee tables, but modern office and hotel furniture of Western design and, again, mass-produced. Some relatively inexpensive machine tools would have to be imported, as would the plastics we would need for surfacing, but the metal fittings could be made here.”

Dr. Hawa returned to the attack. “But in the metal-working field you would surely be thinking in terms of such things as Western-style cutlery.”

“No, Dr. Hawa.”

A sly smile. “Because your Lebanese and Egyptian companies already sell expensive cutlery imported from the United Kingdom?”

So he had done some homework after all.

“No,” I answered, “because the Japanese already dominate the market for mass-produced cutlery. We could never compete. I am thinking in terms of door fastenings, catches, bolts, hinges — building hardware that can be made in quantity using jigs and dies and some inexpensive machine tools such as drill and stamping presses. There must also be modern finishing processes. Handicraft standards would not be adequate.”

The senior official intervened once more. “You again emphasize the use of inexpensive machines, Mr. Howell, but isn’t it the expensive machines which make the inexpensive and competitively priced goods?”

I replied carefully. “Where labour costs are-high that is certainly true. We should endeavour to strike a balance. Labour intensive projects, I agree, are of no value to Syria. But in the refugee camps we have a source, still largely untapped, of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. Under Syrian foremen it could be trained and made useful. I have no doubt that as we progressed we would need, and could use, machine tools that were less simple and more expensive. Our ability to buy them would certainly be one measure of our success. Our inability to do so in the beginning, however, should not foredoom us to failure. In properly guided hands even simple machines can do a lot.”

“It is a relief,” said Dr. Hawa nastily, “to know that Mr. Howell has at least considered the possibility of failure.”

“I have tried to consider all the possibilities, Doctor. I have proposed that the government uses our company and its assets to advance the public interest. Whether you use us or not, or how you use us, are questions which will not, I imagine, be answered today. But if we are to be used, and used successfully, I submit that we can serve you best in the ways I have suggested, employing our limited resources to reach limited but realistic objectives in the foreseeable future.”

The senior official was nodding encouragingly, so I went on quickly before Hawa could interrupt “The projects I most favour, the ones we have been discussing in general terms, are those which can be most easily tried and tested by means of pilot operations. I believe such operations to be essential. When we make mistakes, as we will, they should be on a small scale and rectifiable. On the other hand, all pilot operations, to be of real value, must be big enough for us to make accurate forecasts, projections of our full-scale needs — for raw materials, for example. Simple arithmetic can sometimes be misleading.”

“It can indeed!” Dr. Hawa blew smoke across the table; he had taken charge again. “Having been treated to some entertaining flights of fancy, perhaps we may now return to more prosaic matters. Mr. Howell, are you in fact proposing that the Agence Howell’s blocked funds should be employed entirely to finance these splendid schemes of yours?”

“No,” I said bluntly, “I most certainly am not proposing that.”

Then I fail to see…”

“Allow me to finish, please. Firstly, the amount of company capital available, if it can be made available, would be quite inadequate for the projects we have been discussing. What I am proposing is that company funds are employed to finance and manage the pilot operation in each case. When, and only when, a pilot project has proved itself does it go forward into full-scale production. At that point the government takes over the financing and the company becomes a minority shareholder in a government owned cooperative.’’

Dr. Hawa rolled his eyes in theatrical amazement.

“You would expect me to believe, Mr. Howell, that you and your company would be prepared to work for nothing?”

“No, I don’t. We would expect something in the way of management fees for our work in organizing and developing the projects. They could be nominal, enough to cover normal overhead expenses, let us say. Naturally, all such arrangements would be covered in the formal agreements made between the department of the government concerned and the company.” I paused slightly before I added: “It would, of course, be one of the conditions of our entering into such agreements that our company is granted exclusive agencies for the sale abroad of the products of these joint ventures. I think that sole and exclusive agencies for a period of, say, twenty-five years would be fair and reasonable.”

There was a silence, and then the senior official began making a throat-clearing sound which developed after a moment or two into words of protest.

“But. . but. .” He did not seem quite able to go on. Finally, he threw up his hands. “You could make a fortune!” he cried.

I shook my head. “With respect, sir, I think we are more likely to lose one. However, since our fortune here is now at risk anyway, I would like to reduce the odds against it if I can.”

“The government would never agree.”

“Again with respect, sir, why not? They will be running no risks. By the time they are asked to fund a project, all the risks will have been run for them. It can only be for the good of the economy then, and for the people. Why should they not agree?”

Dr. Hawa said nothing; he was lighting yet another cigarette; but he seemed to be amused.

A month later the first of the draft agreements was initialled; by me on behalf of the company and by Dr. Hawa on behalf of the newly formed People’s Industrial Progress Cooperative.

The news had a mixed reception in Beirut, and I had to preside over an unusually prolonged board meeting. My sisters, Euridice and Amalia, both had husbands who, with one qualifying share apiece, attended these meetings as voting directors.

This lamentable arrangement had been initiated by my father in the last months of his life; mainly, I think, because it made him uneasy to see more women than men seated around a boardroom table — even when the women in question were his own wife and daughters. Having dealt so much with Muslims over the years, he had become inclined in some ways to think like them. By the time he had learned to regret the arrangement, however, he was too ill and tired to do anything about rescinding it. That task he had bequeathed to me, and, since I was unwilling to precipitate a major family quarrel during my first year in command, I had postponed taking the necessary action.

I don’t dislike my brothers-in-law; they are both worthy men, but one is a dentist and the other an associate professor of physics. Neither of them knows anything about business. Yet, while both would be understandably affronted if I offered to advise them in their professional capacities, neither has ever hesitated for a moment to tender detailed criticisms of, and advice about, the management of our company. They regard business, somewhat indulgently, as a sort of game which anyone with a little common sense can always join in and play perfectly. With the dreadful persistence of those who argue off the tops of their heads from positions of total ignorance, they would make their irrelevant points and formulate their senseless proposals while my sisters took it in turn to nod their idiotic heads in approval. Having to listen to these blithe fatuities was almost as exhausting as having later to dispose of them without being unforgivably offensive. No, I don’t dislike my brothers-in-law; but there have been times when I have wished them dead.

Their immediate and enthusiastic approval of my Syrian agreement was, therefore, both disconcerting and disquieting.

Giulio the dentist, who is Italian, became quite eloquent on the subject. “It is my considered opinion,” he said, “that Michael has been both statesmanlike and farsighted. Dealing with idealists, ideologues perhaps in this case, is no easy matter. In their minds all compromise is weakness, and negotiation a mere path to treason. The radical extremist of whatever stripe is consistently paranoid. Yet there are chinks even in their black armour of suspicion, and Michael has found the most vulnerable self-interest and greed. We have no need of gunboats to help us do our business. This agreement is the modern way of doing things.”

“Nonsense!” said my mother loudly. “It is the weak and shortsighted way.” She stared Giulio into silence before she turned again to me. “Why,” she continued sombrely, “was this confrontation necessary? Why, in God’s name, did we ourselves invite it? And why, having merely discussed an agreement, did we fall into the trap of signing it? Oh, if your father had been alive!”

“The agreement is not signed, Mama. I have only initialled a draft.”

“Draft? Hah!” She struck her forehead sharply with the heel of her hand, a method of demonstrating extreme emotion that did not disturb the careful setting of her hair. “And could you now disavow that initialling?” she demanded. “Could you now let our name become a byword in the marketplace for vacillation and bad faith?”

“Yes, Mama, and no.”

“What do you say?”

“Yes to the first question, no to the second. A draft agreement initialled is a declaration of intent. It is not absolutely binding. There are ways of pulling out if we wish to. I don’t think we should, but not for the reasons you give. There would be no question of bad faith, but it might well be thought that we had been bluffing. In that case we could not expect them to deal generously with us in the future.”

“But it was you, Michael, who took the initiative. Why? Why did you not wait passively until the time was ripe to employ those tactics which your father knew so well?” She had leaned forward across the table and was rubbing the thumb and third finger of her right hand together. Her second diamond ring glittered accusingly.

“I have explained, Mama. We are dealing with a new situation and a different type of man.”

“Different? They are Syrians, aren’t they? What can be new there?”

“A distrust of the past, a real wish for reform and determination to bring about change. I agree that a lot of their ideas are half-baked, but they will learn, and the will is there. I may add that if I had attempted to bribe Dr. Hawa, or even hinted at the possibility, I would certainly have been in jail within the hour. That much at least is new.”

They are still Syrians, and new men quickly become old. Besides, how do you know that the parties to your agreement will still be there in six months’ time? You see a changed situation, yes. But remember, such situations can change more than once, and in more than one direction.’’

I removed my glasses and polished them with my handkerchief. My wife, Anastasia, has told me that this habit of mine of polishing my glasses when I want to think carefully is bad. According to her it produces an effect of weakness and confusion on my part. She may be right; I can always count on Anastasia to observe my shortcomings and to keep the list of them well up to date.

“Let me be clear about this, Mama.” I replaced the glasses and put the handkerchief away. “There are many in Damascus, persons of experience, who think as you do. I believe that if Father were alive he would be among them. I also believe that he would be wrong. I don’t deny the value of patience. But just waiting to see which way the cat is going to jump and wondering which palms will have to be greased may simply be a way of doing nothing when you don’t think it safe to trust your own judgment. By going to these people rather than waiting for them to decide our fate in committee, we have secured solid advantages. With luck, our capital there can be made to go on working for us.”

She shook her head sadly. “You have so much English blood in you, Michael. More, I sometimes think, than your father had, though how such a thing could be I do not know.” Coming from my mother these were very harsh words indeed. I awaited the rest of the indictment. “I well remember,” she went on steadily, “something that your father said in 1929. That was before you were born, when I was” — she patted her stomach — “when I was carrying you here. A British army officer had been staying in our house. An amateur yachtsman he was, and the yard had been doing some repairs to his boat. When he left he forgot to take with him a little red book he had been reading. It was a manual of infantry training, or some such thing, issued by the War Office. Your father read this book and one thing in it amused him so much that he read it aloud to me. ‘To do nothing,’ the War Office said, ‘is to do something definitely wrong’.” How your father laughed! ‘No wonder,’ he said, ‘that the British army has such difficulty in winning its wars!’.”

Only my brothers-in-law, who had not heard the story so many times before, laughed; but my mother had not finished yet.

“You, Michael,” she said, “have done things for which you claim what you call solid advantages. First advantage, compensation for loss of our Syrian businesses which we will not receive and which is therefore stolen from us. Second advantage, a license to subsidize with the stolen money, and much too much of your valuable time, some nonexistent industry producing nonexistent goods. Yes, we have the sole agency for these goods, if those peasants and refugees there can ever be made to produce them. But when will that be? If I know those people, not in my lifetime.”

She had, of course, put her finger unerringly on the basic weakness of the whole arrangement. I was to be reminded of that phrase about “nonexistent industry producing nonexistent goods” all too often during the months that followed. At the time all I could do was sit there and pretend to an unshaken calm that I certainly did not feel.

“Are there any questions?”

“Yes.” It was my sister Euridice. “What is the alternative to this agreement?”

“The alternative that Mama proposes. We do nothing. In my opinion this means that eventually we will have to cut our losses in Syria, write them off. The best we could hope for, I imagine, would be a counter-revolution there which would restore the status quo. I don’t see it happening myself, but …” I shrugged.

“But you could be wrong!” Giulio the dentist was back in action, with bulging eyes and one forefinger tapping the side of his forehead — presumably to inform me that the question came from his brain and not his stomach.

“Yes, I could be wrong, Giulio. What I meant was that the sort of counterrevolution in which the radical right overthrows the radical left doesn’t usually restore a former status quo.”

“But surely action and reaction are always equal and opposite.” This was René the physicist. He had a maddening habit of quoting scientific laws in non-scientific contexts. Entanglement in one of his false analogies was a thing to be avoided at all costs.

“In the laboratory, yes.”

“And in life, Michael, and in life.”

“I am sure you’re right, René. However, the political future of Syria is not something that we can divine in this board room. I think that there has been enough discussion and that we should put the motion to a vote. You first, Giulio.”

At that point, I think, I had pretty well made up my mind to go against the agreement myself. The instant enthusiasm expressed by Giulio and René had engendered misgivings which my mother’s shrewd disparagement had deepened considerably. By abstaining from voting on the ground that, as the author of the agreement I was parti pris, I could have backed away from the issue without too much loss of face. If Giulio had chosen to repeat his idiotic dithyramb in praise of my sagacity, that, I think, is what I would have done.

Unfortunately, he decided to change his mind. ‘’My considered opinion is,” he said weightily, “that time is on our side. No agreement, however ably negotiated, can in the end serve our interests if the regime with which the agreement is made is essentially unstable. If time is on our side, and we may hope it is, then I say let time work for us.”

“You are against the motion, Giulio?”

“With deep regret, Michael, yes.”

René had a few words to say about game theory mathematics and the possibility of applying them to the solution of meta-political problems. Then he, too, voted against.

I looked at my mother. She would now decide the matter, whatever I wanted; my sisters would follow her lead.

I said: “I think, Mama, that even the silliest generalization, even one made in a little red book by the British War Office, may once in a while have its moment of truth. I believe that this is just such a moment and that to do now what you and Giulio and René want to do — that is, nothing — would be to do something definitely wrong.”

For a moment her lips twitched and she almost smiled, but not quite. Instead, she threw up her hands. “Very well,” she said. “Have your agreement. But I warn you. You are making a lot of trouble for yourself — trouble of all kinds.”

In that, of course, she was absolutely right.

The trouble was of all kinds, and I had no one to blame for it but myself.

For almost two years the only party to the Syrian agreement who profited from it in any substantial way was Dr. Hawa. Our company lost, and not only in terms of its unblocked assets. As my mother had predicted, the Syrian cooperatives took up far too much of my time. Inevitably, some managerial responsibility in the profitable areas of the company’s operations had to be delegated to senior employees. They, naturally, took advantage of the situation and had to be given salary increases.

In the early days, I must admit, the work itself was fairly rewarding. Pulling rabbits out of a hat can be fun when the magic works. The ceramics pilot, for instance, which I started up in a disused soap factory, went well from the beginning. That was partly luck. I found a man to put in as foreman, and later manager, who had worked for three years in a French pottery and knew something about coloured glazes. He also knew where to recruit the semiskilled labour we needed and how to handle it. Within four months we had a range of samples, realistic cost accountings, and a complete plan for volume production which I could submit to Dr. Hawa under the terms of the agreement. Within weeks, and after an incredibly brief period of haggling, the government funding had been authorized and the project went ahead. By the end of the year we had received our first export orders.

With the furniture and metalworking projects it was a different story. In the case of the furniture some of the difficulties arose from the fact that, under pilot plant conditions, a lot of work which should have been done by machines had to be done by hand. That made much of our costing little better than guesswork. However, the biggest headache with that pilot was its dependence on the metalworking shop. The trouble there was shortage of skilled labour.

It was understandable. Why should a metalworker who had been his own master for years, and earned enough to support himself in the style that his father and grandfather before him had found acceptable, go to work in a government factory? Why should this craftsman be compelled to use unfamiliar tools; tools that didn’t even belong to him, to produce unfamiliar objects of, for him, questionable virtue? You could argue, and I did until I was purple in the face, that in the government factory he would work only a fifty hour week instead of the sixty-hour one he had been working on his own, and make more money in the bargain. You could talk about job security. You could promise him overtime and bonus rates for bringing in apprentices. You could plead, you could cajole. The answer in most cases was still a slow, ruminative, maddening shake of the head.

In the end I had to take the problem to Dr. Hawa. He solved it by putting through a regulation controlling the sale of nonferrous metals such as copper and brass. Each buyer was given a quota based on his previous year’s purchases. However, if he had kept no written records, no receipts, for instance, to prove his case, he was in difficulty. He was entitled to appeal, of course; but, even if he was literate, he would find that part of the regulation hard to understand. He would need a lawyer. As the hazards, uncertainties, and frustrations of self-employment thus became more evident, many of those who had previously shaken their heads eventually decided to reconsider.

That Dr. Hawa should have been in a position to legalize this Byzantine method of recruiting labour by coercion is not as remarkable as it may appear. I have said that he found our agreement profitable from the first. Perhaps “advantageous” would have been a better word. From the day we signed the final papers scarcely a week went by without some manifestation of what he called “our public relations and information program”. In practice this meant personal publicity for Dr. Hawa. I don’t know how he learned to perform his image-building tricks. Clearly, most of them had been collected during those postgraduate years in the United States, but he performed them all with impressive ease. Teresa believes that he has a natural talent for self-advertisement of which he is only dimly aware, and that he works almost entirely by instinct. She may be right.

It was quite fascinating to watch him in action. On the day we took possession of the disused soap factory, a decrepit and rat-infested structure then, Dr. Hawa suddenly appeared flourishing a large rolled-up blueprint — of what I never discovered — and, attended by photographers and journalists, proceeded to tour the premises. The photographs, which later appeared in the newspapers, of Dr. Hawa pointing dramatically at the blueprint, and the accompanying stories extolling the dynamic yet modest personality of the Director of Industrial Development were most effective. He could make an occasion out of the most trivial happening. The arrival of a new piece of machinery, the rigging of a power line, the pouring of concrete for a workshop floor — if there was anything at all going on that could be photographed, Dr. Hawa was there; and, when the photographs appeared, not only was he always in the foreground, but also quite obviously in direct charge of the operations. He had a way of pointing at something whenever he asked a question, and of keeping his head well back as he did so, that made it look all the time as if he were issuing orders. And, of course, before long ours were not the only such fish he had to fry. All the extravagant publicity given to our pilot projects had led several of the former temporizers to conclude, mistakenly, that I had been coining money while they had slept, and to leap hastily onto the cooperative bandwagon. Some of these ventures, notably a glass works, a galvanized-wire mill, and a bottling plant producing an odd-tasting local imitation of Pepsi-Cola, were successful, and, of course, Dr. Hawa got the credit.

In 1968, when all industry in Syria was nationalized, occasions for self-advertisement became even easier for him to contrive. His official position as development expert enabled him to poke his nose into practically anything, and be photographed doing so. The only opposition to his methods came from the Russians, who had their own ideas about the way the publicity for Soviet aid projects should be handled. Deference, not direction, was what they expected from Dr. Hawa; they flourished their own blueprints. He conceded these defeats gracefully; he was as adaptable as he was ingenious. On the radio, and, later, on television he was astonishingly effective; very simple and very direct, an apolitical public servant, dedicated to the new, but respectful of the old, whose only thought was for the betterment of the people.

Nobody, then, was surprised when, with the announcement that the Department of Industrial Development was to be upgraded and to become a Ministry, came the news that the newly created ministerial portfolio had been offered to and accepted by Dr. Hawa. That he succeeded in retaining it for so long, even through the turmoils and upheavals of the late sixties, was due to a combination of circumstances.

As an appendage of the more potent ministries of Finance and Commerce and with little political or financial muscle of its own, Dr. Hawa’s Ministry could never provide the kind of operational base camp sought after by senior dissidents and would be coup-makers. It controlled no deployable forces, armed or unarmed, and was outside the inner power sector of government. Its function had been defined by Hawa himself as essentially catalytic — a phrase of which he became increasingly fond as time went by — and the image which he projected of himself was that of the super-efficient specialist quietly doing his own job as only he knew how, and with eyes for nobody else’s.

Never once did he attempt to display himself as a potential leader. He must have been tempted at times. Men with his vanity, ambition, and peculiar abilities are rarely able to set limits to their aspirations, but he was one of the exceptions. A threat to no one with the power to destroy him, he had accordingly survived.

Although I would have preferred someone lazier and less alert to deal with, I could have had worse taskmasters than Dr. Hawa. It was clear, from the moment of his promotion, that ministerial office agreed with him. He seemed to smoke fewer cigarettes and was often quite relaxed and amiable. On occasion, over a game of backgammon and with a glass or two of my best brandy inside him, he would even make jokes that were not also gibes. Of course, he could still be unpleasant. When, for the first time, it became evident that the Howell companies abroad were beginning to make worthwhile profits out of the exclusive agencies granted to us under the agreement, I had to listen to bitter sarcasms and veiled threats. Naturally, I had figures to prove that on balance we were still well in the red, but he was invariably difficult about figures. His were always unassailably accurate and complete; everyone else’s were either irrelevant or cooked.

He had other quirks that made him hard to handle. For instance, you had to be careful with ideas for new projects. It was most dangerous to discuss a possible development with him unless you had already made up your mind that it was something you really wanted. If he liked a new idea he would seize upon it, and after that there was no escape. Almost before you were back in your office there would be a Ministry press release going out announcing the new wonder. From then on, whether you liked it or not, you were committed.

That, in fact, was how this whole miserable business over the dry batteries started. Dr. Hawa forced me into it.

It was the same with the electronics project. Under an arrangement made by Dr. Hawa’s Ministry with a trade mission from the GDR, we had to set up a plant to assemble electronic components manufactured in East Germany. We produced telecommunications equipment of various kinds, including highly specialized stuff for the army, as well as small radio and television sets. They gave me an Iraqi manager who had received special training in East Germany to run the plant, but the whole setup was wrong from our point of view. Being labour intensive it was economically unsound anyway, and the military contracts, on which I had thought we might possibly have made money, were dished out to us on a cost-plus basis which was ruinous. With the electronics it was all we could do to break even.

But the dry-battery project was much worse. That cost me more than money; that became a nightmare.

Don’t misunderstand, please. I am not blaming Dr. Hawa for everything that happened; I should have been quicker on my feet. What I am saying is that, far from having cunningly planned the battery operation, as some of those scavengers who call themselves reporters have hinted, I tried hard to stop it going forward, not only before it began but afterwards, too.

The thing started purely by accident. It was the year after the Six-Day War with Israel.

All government ministries everywhere have to send out lots of pieces of paper; it is in the nature of the beasts. One of the pieces regularly sent out by the Ministry of Industrial Development was a list of bulk commodities held in government warehouses and available for purchase. Normally, the list was of no immediate business interest to me, but I used to glance at it sometimes, for old times’ sake, to see what they were asking for tobacco. That was how I came to see this rather unusual item. In one of the Latakia warehouses there were sixty metric tons of manganese dioxide.

It gave me an idea. Although the ceramics factory was doing extremely well, with production and sales both going up nicely, our stocks, particularly of tile, were building up a trifle faster than we could move them. I had been looking for other lines to manufacture so as to diversify a bit. This stuff in the warehouse suggested a possibility. I inquired about it.

Originally, I learned, it had been part of the mixed cargo of a Panamanian freighter out of Iskenderun in Turkey. South of Baniyas she had engine trouble and a southwest gale had blown her aground on a bank near the Arab-el-Meulk light-buoy. Tugs from Latakia had pulled her off eventually, but only after some of the cargo, including the manganese dioxide, had been transshipped to lighten her. Later there had been a dispute over the tug-masters’ salvage claims, and she had sailed, leaving the transshipped cargo impounded. The manganese dioxide wasn’t all that valuable anyway, except possibly to me. I requested samples.

Hawa’s spies were everywhere. Within hours of my making that request, his Chef de Bureau was on to me, wanting to know what my interest in the material was. I said that it was hard to explain on the telephone and that, in any case, there was no point in trying to explain until I had received the samples and run tests. He said that he would await the results of the tests. A week later I was summoned to see the Minister. That didn’t surprise me. I had long ago learned that, once his curiosity was aroused, Dr. Hawa was quite incapable of delegating its satisfaction to an underling. However, the summons came while I was away in Alexandria straightening out some of our Egyptian problems. Teresa told the Chef de Bureau where I was, of course, and then made an appointment for me to see Hawa on the day of my return; but I was quite unprepared for the VIP treatment at the airport that Hawa had laid on.

That was the first time I had had it, and it scared me stiff. Nobody could tell me what was going on, so naturally I assumed that I was under arrest. It wasn’t until I was in the air-conditioned car and on the way to the Ministry that I began to get angry. I thought that this was Hawa’s way of getting back at me for not being on instant call when he wanted to see me, and also of reminding me, in case I had forgotten, that he could control my comings and goings if he wished.

He was very affable when I was shown into his office.

“Ah, Michael, there you are. All quite safe and sound.” He waved me to a chair.

“Thank you, Minister.” I sat down. “I am most grateful to you for the airport reception. It was unexpected but welcome.”

“We try to protect our friends.” He lit a cigarette. “Doubtless you heard in Alexandria of our latest troubles. No? Ah well, it only happened last night. A civil airliner, European, destroyed by bombs at the airport. Israeli saboteurs, of course.”

“Of course.”

This was the ritual way of accounting for the bombings and other terrorist acts then being carried out by local Palestinian guerrillas. These were splinter groups mostly, with Marxist and Maoist leanings, who, when they weren’t plaguing the insufficiently cooperative Jordanian and Lebanese authorities across the frontier, busied themselves with provocations which could be blamed on the Israelis. Such activities also served notice on any of their Syrian “brothers” who might be hankering after peace that they had better think again.

“Were they caught?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, no. Time bombs were used. Our security forces don’t yet seem to have learned the right lessons.”

And they never would learn, of course. According to Mao, guerrillas should move like fish in a friendly sea of people. If, in Syria, the sea was not all friendly, hostile currents were few. Those of the security services who did not actively assist the guerrillas adopted an averted-eyes policy. The magic labels “Palestine” and “Palestinian” could transform the most brutish killer into a gallant young fighter for freedom, and, providing that he did not go too far too openly, he would be safe. Dr. Hawa knew this as well as I did. Besides, no guerrilla was going to blow up a Middle East Airlines plane, even as a provocation. I still thought that he was using the bomb scares to get at me.

The coffee came in. “However,” Dr. Hawa went on, “it is easy to be critical when one has not the responsibility. We must be patient. Meanwhile, as I say, we take precautions to protect our friends — especially those friends who are helping us to build for the future.” He gave me a whimsical smile. “Would you like to take over the management of a tire re-treading plant, Michael?”

“Thank you, Minister, no.” I smiled, too. He had been getting at me.

This tire thing was a rather bad standing joke. The retreading cooperative had been the brainchild of an Armenian who had made his money out of crystallized fruit, and it had been a disaster. At least fifty percent of the retreads produced had proved defective, in some cases dangerously so. An accident involving a long-distance bus, in which three people had been killed, was known to have been caused by a blowout of one of these tires. Hawa had had difficulty in hushing the story up, and was still looking for a face-saving way out of the mess. Although he well knew by now that I had no intention of providing it, he continued to ask the question. It was a way of letting me know that, while my refusal to do him that particular favour would not necessarily be held against me, it had by no means been forgotten.

“Then let us talk about this manganese dioxide.” He chuckled. “I must say that when I heard of your interest I was puzzled. I know that you order strange chemicals to make your coloured glazes, but this was obviously exceptional. Sixty tons?”

This is not for a glaze, Minister. The idea was to use it to make Leclanché cells.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

The Leclanché is a primary cell, a rather primitive source of electrical energy. It has been largely superseded by the dry battery, though they both work on the same principle. The Leclanché is a wet battery and a bit cumbersome, but it has its uses.”

“Such as what?”

“Many things that a dry battery can do — ring door bells, or buzzers; work concierge locks; power internal telephone circuits, and so on. They have the advantages of long life and low initial cost.”

He was nodding thoughtfully, a faraway look in his eyes. “A primary source of electrical energy,” he said slowly.

He made it sound like the Aswan High Dam. His ability instantly to scramble a sober statement of fact into a misleading PR fiction was extraordinary.

“The point is,” I said, “that it is a very simple thing. The cathode consists of a porous ceramic pot, which we could easily make, packed with manganese dioxide and carbon around a carbon plate. The anode is a zinc rod. The two of them stand in a jar, usually glass, but we could make it of glazed earthenware. The electrolyte is a solution of ammonium chloride, a very cheap material, in ordinary tap water. The zinc we would have to buy abroad, but the rest of it we could manage ourselves — that is, if this manganese dioxide is all right.”

“What could be wrong with it?”

“For one thing it could have been contaminated with seawater. That is why I asked for samples to test.”

He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a small jar. “In your absence,” he said, “I also asked for samples and had tests made. I am told that it is the standard pulverized ore, probably from the Caucasus, with only the usual minor impurities. With sixty tons how many of these batteries could you make?”

“More than I could sell probably, tens of thousands.”

“But here we could create the demand?”

“By cutting down on the imports of certain sizes of dry battery, yes.”

“You said that the principle of this battery is the same as that of the dry battery. Why could we not make dry batteries ourselves?”

“I would have to have notice of that question, Minister. Dry batteries are mass-produced by the billions nowadays in Japan, America, and Europe. I can investigate, of course. But the battery I am talking about can be made in the ceramics factory. We would need an extra shed or two and a few men under a charge hand to do the work, but that is all No big capital expenditure, and something useful produced with our own resources.”

“Dry batteries are labelled. Could we label these batteries?”

“Yes, we could.” I did not add that labels stuck on glazed jars very quickly come unstuck, because I knew what was bothering him. Few of the products we made carried any sort of advertisement. For a man with his taste for publicity it must have been very frustrating.

“The labels should be highly coloured,” he said. “And we should have a brand name. I will think about it.”

The brand name he eventually decided upon was “Green Circle.”

During the next two years we made over twenty thousand Leclanché cells bearing the Green Circle label, and managed to dispose of most of them at a decent profit. In Yemen and Somalia we did particularly well with them. As a sideline for the ceramics factory they had been useful.

If I had been able to leave it at that all would have been well. Unfortunately, Dr. Hawa was by then no longer interested in sidelines, however useful. Now he wanted the more ambitious kind of project which could be used to dress up the monthly reports which his Ministry issued; reports designed to show that the pace of development was continually accelerating and to confound his critics, who were becoming vocal, with evidence of fresh miracles to come. The truth was that too much had been promised too publicly, and now he was having to pay the penalty. Dr. Hawa was beginning to slip.

He never even consulted me about the feasibility of the dry battery project. He had one of his minions do some hasty research on the manufacturing processes involved. The minion, who cannot have done much more than browse through an out-of-date textbook, reported back that the processes were simple, the necessary materials in good supply, and that, with good management and some unskilled female labour, the thing could be done.

That was enough for Hawa. He announced the new project the following morning and handed it over to me in the afternoon. He didn’t ask me if I would accept it; those days were over. I was assigned the project, and if I didn’t like it — well, a private company under contract to a government agency was always vulnerable unless protected by its friends. For example, the Ministry of Finance had often pressed for the cancellation of those exclusive selling agencies granted to the company so long ago. So far these pressures had been resisted and the company’s interests protected, but such protection must be earned.

I could not even argue that the information on which he had based his decision was false. Manufacturing dry batteries can be a simple business, but only if you are prepared to use the manufacturing methods employed fifty years ago, and to accept along with them the kind of battery they produced and the cost of its production. I tried to explain this to him, but he would not listen.

“The difficulties,” he said idiotically, “are for you to overcome. Knowing you, Michael, I am sure they will be overcome.”

It is easy to say now that I would have done better to have refused him there and then and taken the financial consequences. As my mother pointed out, our net profits from the Syrian export operation at that stage amounted to over seventy percent of the original blocked funds. That, in her opinion, was better than anyone had thought possible. None of the shareholders would have thought ill of me if I had chosen to cut our losses at that point and get out; they were only too grateful for what had been accomplished to date.

She had some less pleasant things to say, too, of course. She even went as far as to suggest that the real reason for my going ahead with the dry battery project was not my reluctance to abandon some profitable lines of business, but my unwillingness to give up what she called “that cinq-á-sept affair of yours” with Teresa.

That was utterly absurd, and only the acid-tongued mother of my children could have put such an idea into my own mother’s head. The truth is, and Teresa herself can vouch for this because I discussed the whole problem with her that same night — not between cinq and sept, by the way, as those are office hours with me — the truth is that I did seriously consider pulling out at the time. I didn’t do so, firstly because it was the obvious and easy thing to do, and secondly because I thought there might be a way around the situation. That way, the only one that I could see, was to go through the motions of setting up a dry battery pilot and give Hawa a practical demonstration of the total impracticability of what he had proposed. Then, when the time came for him to accept defeat, I would have already planned for him a face-saving alternative project. I still say I did the right thing. How was I to know about Issa and his friends?

When I said that we would go through the motions of setting up the pilot project, I didn’t mean that we weren’t going to try to do our best. After all, on the pilot projects it was always Howell money that was being spent. I expected failure, yes; but the kind of failure I expected was the commercial kind you normally associate with attempts to sell a technologically obsolete product at an uncompetitive price in a highly competitive market. What I had not bargained for, and was not prepared to submit to, was the humiliation of being responsible for the manufacture of a product which was not only antiquated but also hopelessly inferior in quality by any standards, old or new. Even the tire-retreading bunglers at their worst had managed to get their product right fifty percent of the time. With the first lot of batteries we turned out, our percentage of success hovered around the twenty mark. While we didn’t actually kill anybody with our product, as the retread people had, we certainly did a lot of damage.

The trouble with a dry battery is that, except on the outside, it isn’t really dry. Inside it is moist, and this moisture, the electrolyte, is highly corrosive. For a variety of reasons, foremost among which were my carelessness and inexperience, our batteries tended to leak as soon as you started to use them and very soon went dead. The leaking was the worst defect. Just one leaking battery, even a little penlight cell, can ruin a transistor radio. With the local radio dealers the Green Circle label and the product it enclosed soon became anathema. It was the subject of much angry laughter and the cause of many shrill disputes.

Something had to be done quickly. The Howell reputation was at stake, and my own self-confidence had taken a beating. After an exceedingly unpleasant session with Hawa, I secured his agreement to my withdrawing all unsold stocks from the dealers. I also stopped production and did the quality-control research that I had neglected to do before we started. Most of this work concerned the zinc containers. These were formed on jigs and had soldered seams. Obviously, faulty soldering would cause leaks, but the chief problem was with chemical impurities. For example, zinc sheeting of a quality that could be used for covering a roof would not necessarily do for bakery production. Certain impurities, even in very small amounts, would, in contact with the electrolyte, start up a chemical reaction. The result was that the zinc became porous. The same was true of the solder used on the seams. In the future, all materials used would have to be checked out chemically before we accepted them from the suppliers.

I worked out a series of standard tests for each material. Then I had to find someone to carry out the tests. As usual, trained and even semi-trained manpower was in short supply. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hire a qualified chemist; in fact, I didn’t need one. I had already done the necessary elementary chemistry, and the actual testing would be routine work; but I did need someone with sufficient laboratory experience to carry out the routine procedures faithfully and without botching them.

That was how I came to employ Issa.

He was a Jordanian, a refugee from the West Bank territory who had come north with his family after the war, first to the UNWRA camp at Der’a, then to live with relatives in Quatana. He was in his mid-twenties, a dropout from the Muslim Educational College in Amman where he had received some schooling in inorganic chemistry. More important for me, he had worked part-time as a lab assistant during his second year at the college.

I found him through a department in the Ministry which had started, or was trying to start, a technical training program. Representing himself as a science graduate, Issa had applied to them for a job as an instructor. In the absence of any papers to support his claim to graduate qualifications — he told them that they had been lost when the family fled from the Israelis — the Ministry took the precaution of writing to Amman for confirmation. When the truth had been established they referred him to me.

On first acquaintance he seemed a rather intense young man who took himself very seriously and had a lot of personal dignity. Later, I found him quick to learn, intelligent, and hard-working. The fact that he had previously lied about his qualifications should, I suppose, have prejudiced me against him, or at least made me wary. It did neither. He was, after all, a refugee; one had to make allowances. If, in his eagerness to better himself and make the most of his intelligence, he had gone too far, well, he could be excused. The lie had done no one any harm.

When we started production again I gave him a small wage increase and made him responsible for ordering the battery-project raw material supplies as well as checking them. It seemed a reasonable thing to do at that time.

Until that afternoon in May the idea that the punctilious, hard-working Issa might have other, less desirable qualities of mind and character had never once crossed my mind. And, as I have said, even that first warning signal — Teresa’s news about the alcohol orders — didn’t really register.

Naturally, the conclusion I immediately jumped to — that Issa had been carrying on a private bootlegging business at my expense — wasn’t exactly welcome; but until I had questioned him on the subject there was nothing to be done. He might have a perfectly innocent explanation to offer. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but the matter could, and would have to, wait.

As I drove to the Ministry that afternoon I had pleasanter things to think about, for this was a moment I had been looking forward to for months. This was showdown time for Dr. Hawa. If I played my hand properly the dry battery project would soon be no more than a disagreeable memory.

Before leaving for Italy I had prepared the ground carefully by sending him a statement of the financial position of the dry battery project Along with this profoundly depressing document, however, I had sent a cheerful little covering letter saying that I hoped, on my return, to be able to submit proposals for saving the entire situation.

As the situation was patently catastrophic, this promise of good news to come would, I thought, soften him up a little. The drowning man offered a line does not much care, when it arrives, whether the hempen rope he had been expecting turns out to be made of nylon. Although it would have been a gross exaggeration to describe Dr. Hawa’s political difficulties at the time as those of a drowning man, he was certainly floundering a little and in need of additional buoyancy.

His first words to me after the coffee had been brought in suggested that I had overdone the softening-up process.

“Michael, you have failed me,” he said mournfully.

This would not do. In his pity-me mood, which I had encountered once or twice before, he wouldn’t have bought IBM at par. I wanted him braced in his embattled PM-warrior stance, beady-eyed and looking for openings. I took the necessary steps.

“Minister, we have made some rectifiable errors, that is all”

“But these figures you sent me!” He had them there on his desk, sprinkled with cigarette ash.

“The obituary notice of an unsuccessful experiment which may now be forgotten.”

“Forgotten!” That stung him all right. “Forgotten by whom, may I ask? The public? The press?”

“Only by you and me, Minister. For the public and the press there will be nothing to forget. The battery project will go forward.”

“On the basis of these figures? You expect the Ministry of Finance to fund the project when all we have to show them is this miserable record?”

“Of course not. But if you will recall our original conversation on the subject of dry batteries, the feasibility of the project was always in question. What I have in mind now is the rectification of an original error.”

“Which error? There have been so many.”

“The error of making primary batteries. We should have made secondary batteries.”

“What are you talking about? Batteries are batteries. Please come to the point, Michael.”

“With respect, Minister, that is the point. Secondary batteries are rechargeable storage batteries, the kind you have in cars and buses.”

“But…”

“Please, Minister, allow me to explain. I propose that the battery project should go ahead, but that we phase out the dry battery operation and change over to the manufacture of storage batteries.”

“But the two things are totally different!”

“They are indeed, but they are both called batteries. That is the essential point We should not be abandoning the announced battery project, only redirecting it along a more profitable path. As for the changeover, I have had exploratory talks in Milan with a firm of car accessory manufacturers. They are willing to send us experienced technicians to train our own people and help us to set up an efficient plant for making storage batteries here.”

“But that means another pilot project.”

“No, Minister, not this time. You cannot make these things on a pilot scale. That is one reason for our present failure. This would have to be a full-scale operation from the start. That means a joint-venture arrangement between the Italian company and your agency.”

“But why should they be willing to do this? Why should they help us? What do they get out of it?”

I knew then that I had him.

They have no outlet for their products in the Middle East at present. The West Germans and the British have most of the market. They were looking for a way in and came to me.” That was not quite true; I had approached them; but it sounded better the other way. “I advised them to manufacture here and take advantage of low labour costs and the favourable UAR tariffs.”

“But it would be their product they would be making and selling.”

They are willing to put it out here under our Green Circle trademark.”

That clinched it; but, of course, he did not give way immediately. There were doubts to be assuaged about the plant’s value to the economy. The standard complaint was made that all the raw materials would have to be imported and that, as usual, money and cheap labour were all that was being asked of poor Syria. I countered with a question.

“Minister, when will the new plastics factory which has been promised be going into production?”

This factory was to be a present from Russia via East Germany and I wasn’t supposed to know about it. My indiscretion threw him for a moment.

“Why do you ask?”

The battery cases could be made there.”

“Have you a plan on paper yet for this project? Figures, estimates?"

I opened my briefcase and handed over the bound presentation that I had worked up with the people in Milan. It was quite a tome, and I could see that the size and weight of it impressed him. He leafed through it for a moment or two before looking up at me.

“In the matter of phasing out the present operation,” he said thoughtfully, “if that is finally decided upon, there would have to be continuity, Michael. If we were to go ahead with this revised Green Circle plan there could be no sudden changes, no loss of employment. The two would have to overlap.”

“I understand, Minister.” What he meant was that he didn’t want the press or radio picking up the story until we had papered over the cracks.

“Then I will study these proposals and we will have a further meeting. Meanwhile, this will be treated as confidential. There must be no premature disclosure.”

“No, of course not.” It was all right to browbeat the Agence Howell into squandering its money on a half-baked experiment after sounding off about it to the press; but to release the news of a sizable joint-venture deal involving an Italian company and his agency before clearing it with the ministries of Finance and Commerce would be asking for trouble. I was fairly sure that he would get the clearance, however. All I could do now was hope that he would get it quickly. The sooner I could start “phasing out” the dry battery fiasco the better.

Still, I was pleased with the way things had gone. Back at the house I told Teresa all about the meeting and we had some champagne to celebrate.

It wasn’t until after dinner when we were in bed that I thought again about Issa. We had taken a bottle of brandy with us, and as I poured some into her glass the fact that it was alcohol reminded me.

“I was trying to work it out earlier,” I said. “Ten rottols of alcohol would be how many litres?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know how much alcohol weighs. Over fifty litres I suppose. Can you drink that stuff?”

“Absolute alcohol? Heavens no, it would kill you. What you could do, though, if you had fifty litres of it, would be to dilute it with a hundred and twenty-five litres of water and add a little burnt sugar flavouring. You would then have over two hundred bottles of eighty-proof whiskey. Whiskey of a sort anyway.”

I did not have to tell her what that would be worth on the black market; we bought our own drink supplies there.

She was thoughtful for a moment “You know, Michael,” she said then, “alcohol isn’t the only expensive stuff that Issa has been ordering. I told you about that because of the duty we had to pay on it”

“What else? Gold dust?”

“Mercury. There have been orders for mercury.”

“Mercury?”

“Four orders, each for one oke. I did ask him about those because two were marked urgent and we had to pay extra delivery charges.”

“What did he say?”

“That he was experimenting with mercury cells. He said that the Americans make a lot of them. They have am extra-long life.” She gave me a sidelong look

“I gathered that you knew all about it.”

“Did he say that I knew?”

“Not in so many words, but he conveyed that impression.”

“Well, I didn’t know.” The idiocy of it hit me. “Mercury cells, for God’s sake! It’s almost more than we can do to make the ordinary kind. What sort of mercury did he order, mercuric oxide or the chloride?”

“Just mercury, I think, the kind you have in thermometers. He said that it was a very heavy metal and that one oke wasn’t much.”

I swallowed my brandy and put on my glasses. “Teresa, have you still got those invoices here?”

“They’re in the office, yes.”

I got out of bed. She followed me through to the office and found the invoices for me in the files.

It took me about twenty minutes to go through them all and mark the items which should not have been there. By the end of that twenty minutes I wasn’t concerned any more about bootlegging. I was, though, both angry and alarmed.

I glanced across at Teresa. Even with no clothes on she managed, sitting at her desk in front of the ship models in their glass cases, to look businesslike.

“Have we a spare set of keys to the battery works stores?” I asked.

“Yes, Michael.”

“Would you get it for me, please?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Is it something very bad?”

“Yes. I think it may be very bad indeed,” I said, “but I’m not spending a sleepless night waiting to find out. I’m going to the battery works to do a little stock taking.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“There’s no need.”

“I’ll drive if you like.” She knows that I dislike driving at night

“All right.”

We got dressed in silence. It was after ten, so the servants were off duty and in their own quarters. I opened the gates in the courtyard and closed them again after Teresa had driven out. Then I got in beside her and we set off.

‘Teresa is in the habit of crossing herself in the Catholic manner before she starts to drive a car. The gesture is made briskly, almost casually — she is fastening a spiritual seat belt — and it seems to work very well. She has never had a traffic accident or even scratched a fender. On Syrian roads and with Syrian drivers all about you, that is a considerable achievement.

However, on that occasion — perhaps because I was opening and shutting the gates instead of the houseman — I think that she must have neglected to take her routine precaution. I don’t know which saint she counts upon for this security arrangement, but I am quite sure that he, or she, was not alerted. We made the journey not only safely but also in record time.

A divine agency with any concern at all for our welfare that night would have guided us gently but firmly to a soft landing in the nearest ditch.

The battery works was on the Der’a road ten kilometres south of the city. During the French Mandate it had been a district gendarmerie. When I took the place over it had been empty for several years and stripped of everything removable, including the roof and the plumbing fixtures. All that remained had been the reinforced concrete structures — a latrine, the shell of the old HQ building, and the high wall which enclosed the compound.

In a country where pilfering is a way of life, walls which cannot easily be scaled are extremely useful. I chose the site partly because the government would lease it to me cheaply, but partly because of the walls. Inside the compound I had built three work sheds. When refurbished, the old HQ building housed the offices and the laboratory. Two rooms in it had been set aside for safe storage, under lock and key, of the more marketable of our raw materials, such as the zinc sheet.

At the entrance to the compound there was an iron-bar main gate with a chain-link postern on one side. Both were secured by padlock. Just inside the postern was a hut which, during working hours, was occupied by the timekeeper, and at night by the watchman. Beyond the hut was the loading platform of number-three work shed, where the finished batteries emerged.

There was some moon that night and I could see the shapes of all this from outside. What I could not see was any sign of the watchman, and there was no light in the hut. I assumed that he was on his rounds. As he was supposed to carry a heavy club and I had no wish to be mistaken for an intruder, I kept my flashlight switched on after I had unlocked the postern.

“What about the car?” Teresa asked.

“Leave it. We won’t be long.”

Further evidence of divine indifference! The sound of the car would have made our presence inside the compound known sooner and given those already inside time to avoid a decisive confrontation. It was my fault. The main gate was very heavy and hinged so as to stay closed. I would have had to drag it open and hold it there while Teresa drove in. That meant getting my hands dirty and probably scuffing my shoes as well. I couldn’t be bothered.

We went in. I re-locked the postern and we walked toward the loading platform and the path leading to the office building.

The battery works was not the tidiest of places, and in that particular area empty containers and loops of discarded baling wire were hazards to be watched for. So I had the flashlight pointing down and my eyes on the ground in front of me. It was Teresa who first saw that there was something wrong.

“Michael”

I glanced back. She had stopped and was looking toward the office building. I looked that way, too.

There was light on in the laboratory.

For a moment I thought that it might be the watchman’s lantern, though he wasn’t supposed to enter the office building except in a case of an emergency such as fire. Then, as I moved along the path and my view became unobstructed, I saw that all the lights in the laboratory were on. And I could hear voices.

I had stopped, staring; as I started to go on, Teresa put a hand on my arm.

“Michael,” she said softly, “I think it might be better to leave now and come back in the morning, don’t you?”

“And lose a chance of catching him at it red-handed?”

I was too incensed to realize that, as I had not told her what I now suspected, she could not know what I was talking about. Her mind was still on bootleggers, eighty-proof whiskey, and black-marketeering. She thought that what we had stumbled on was either a drinking party or an illicit bottling session, neither of which it would be useful or wise to interrupt.

“Michael, there is no point…” she began, but I was already going on and she followed without completing her protest.

The place had been built on high concrete footings with an open space between the ground floor and the bare earth. Concrete steps led up to a roofed terrace which ran the length of the building. The offices were to the right of the entrance, the laboratory to the left.

The window openings were barred with no shutters or glass in them, only wire mesh screens of the old meat-safe type to keep out the larger insects. You could see through them fairly well and hear through them easily. Issa’s voice was distinctly audible as we went quietly up the steps.

“For the process of nitrosis,” he was saying, “the nitric acid must be pure and have a specific gravity of one-point-four-two. I have shown you how we use the hydrometer. Always use it conscientiously. There must be no slovenly work. Everything must be exactly right. For the reactive process, which you see going on, the alcohol must be not less than ninety-five percent pure. Again we use the hydrometer. What is the specific gravity of ninety-five percent ethyl alcohol?”

A young man’s voice answered him. By then I had moved along the terrace and could see into the room.

Issa was standing behind one of the lab tables wearing his denim lab coat and looking every inch the young professor. His “class,” squatting or sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, consisted of five youths, Arabs, with dog-eared notebooks and ballpoint pens. Lounging in Issa’s desk chair, looking very neat and clean in a khaki bush shirt and well-pressed trousers, was the watchman. He had an open book in his lap, but his eyes were on the class.

“Very good,” said Issa. He was speaking mostly Jordanian Arabic but using English technical terms. “Now observe.” He pointed to an earthenware jar on the table in front of him from which fumes were rising. “The reaction is almost complete and precipitation has begun.”

From where I stood I could smell the fumes. It was not hard to guess what was about to be precipitated.

“What will be the next procedure?” asked Issa.

One of the young men said, “Filtration, sir?”

“Filiation, exactly.” Issa was obviously a natural pedagogue who enjoyed the teaching role. As he droned on I found myself remembering his application to the Ministry people for a post as an instructor, and wishing that they had been less punctilious about checking up on his qualifications. Why did it have to be me who had to deal with this little menace?

I was wondering how to handle the immediate situation, whether to clear my throat before entering or just fling the door open and make them jump, when the two men moved in.

I smelled them before I heard them, and so did Teresa. We both turned at once and she clutched at my arm. Then we saw the carbines in their hands and froze.

The carbines were very clean; but, in their filthy work clothes and faded blue kaffiyehs, the men who held them looked like labourers from a road gang. They were middle-aged, leathery, and tough; they were also tense and, quite clearly, trigger-happy.

They stopped well clear of us, the carbines pointing at our stomachs. The older man motioned with his carbine to the flashlight in my hand.

“Drop it. Quick!” He had a loud, harsh voice and broken teeth.

I obeyed. The glass of the flashlight shattered as it hit the concrete.

“Back! Back!”

We backed against the wall.

By this time Issa, followed by his class, was coming out to see what was going on.

Issa’s face when he saw me was a study in confusion, but before he could say anything the man with the broken teeth started to make his report.

“We saw them come stealthily. We have been watching them for minutes. They were listening, spying. The man had a light. Look, there it is.”

He made the flashlight sound highly incriminating.

I said: “Good evening, Issa.”

He tried to smile. “Good evening, sir. Good evening, Miss Malandra.”

“They were listening, spying,” said Broken Teeth doggedly.

“That’s right, we were,” I said. “And now we'll go inside.”

I had started to move toward the entrance when the man hit me hard in the kidneys with the butt of his carbine. It was agonizing for a moment and I fell to my knees.

When I got up, Teresa was protesting angrily and Issa was muttering under his breath to the two men. I leaned against the wall waiting for the pain to subside. Finally, Issa told the class to wait there on the terrace and the rest of us went into the laboratory. Issa led the way, Teresa and I followed, the armed men brought up the rear.

The watchman had not moved from Issa’s desk chair. As we came in he gave me a vague nod, as if he had been expecting me but could not quite think why. It struck me that he was behaving very oddly; I wondered if he were drank. Then I decided to ignore the watchman; I would deal with him later.

“All right, Issa,” I said briskly, “let’s have your explanation. I take it you have one?”

But he had had time to recover and was ready now to try to bluff his way out “An explanation for what, sir?” He was all injured innocence. “If, as you say, you have been listening, you will know that I was instructing a class of students in the techniques of chemistry. Having had the advantages of higher education, I consider that I also have a duty to pass some of those advantages on, when I can do so, to those less fortunate. I would only do so in my own time, of course. If you think that I should have asked your permission before using the laboratory out of working hours as a classroom, I apologize. It did not occur to me that a man of your character could conceivably refuse.”

He was really quite convincing. If I had not been through those invoices and if my back had not been hurting as it was, I might almost have believed him.

“And these two men behind me?” I asked. “Have you been instructing them also in the techniques of chemistry?”

He tried a deprecating smile. “They are uneducated men, sir, older men from the village where my students live. They come to see that the young men behave themselves.”

“They need guns to do that? No, Issa, don’t bother to answer. You have given your explanation. It is not acceptable.”

There was a flash of anger. “Simply because I wish to teach. .”

I cut him off sharply. “No. Simply because you are lying. You aren’t instructing anyone in the techniques of chemistry, as you so elegantly put it. What you are giving is a do-it-yourself kitchen course in the manufacture of explosives. What is more, you are giving it at my expense.”

“I assure you, sir. .” He tried hard.

“You can’t assure me of anything, Issa. I know what I’m talking about.” I pointed to the jar on the table. “That precipitate you were so lovingly anticipating is fulminate of mercury. How many detonators would that have filled? A hundred? A hundred and fifty? You’re not passing on any advantages, Issa, you’re passing on recipes for amateur bomb-making.”

“My work is not amateur,” he protested hotly.

I had a sudden feeling that I wasn’t handling the situation very well. Now that the truth was out he should have been on the defensive and trying to make excuses, not arguing. I concluded that it was the armed men who were giving him confidence.

“I’m not interested in the quality of your work,” I snapped. “The point is that you’re not doing any more of it here — any work of any kind. As of this moment you are dismissed. You can consider yourself lucky, and so can your bomb-making friends, if I don’t inform the police as well.”

For the first time the watchman spoke. “But why will you not inform the police, Mr. Howell? If this man has stolen from you and is also making explosives illegally, is it not your duty to inform them?”

He had a high, rather thin voice, but it was the voice of an educated man. I suddenly realized that I knew very little about the watchman, and that, except when I had given him his original instructions, I had never spoken with him. There had been no occasion to do so. I looked at him coldly.

I said if I don’t inform the police. If I do decide to inform them, your name will certainly be in the complaint as an accomplice, so don’t tempt me by telling me my duty.”

He rose very slowly to his feet. He was a tall man of about my own age with a long nose, a moustache, and deeply lined cheeks. “Perhaps then,” he said, “I should introduce myself.”

His self-assurance irritated me. “Your name is Salah Yassin,” I told him, “and I engaged you six months ago as a night watchman. I was told that you were an ex-army man with a wound disability and of good character. Obviously, I was misinformed. You, too, are now dismissed. I want the lot of you off these premises within five minutes. After that you will be trespassing on government property and I shall certainly call the police. Now, leave your keys on the table there and get out.”

The watchman looked pained. “It is ill-mannered, Mr. Howell, to refuse to hear a man when he offers politely to introduce himself. Ill-mannered and foolish.” His eyes hardened as he stared into mine. “My name is Salah, yes. But it is Ghaled, not Yassin. Salah Ghaled. I am sure you have heard of it.”

Teresa drew in her breath sharply.

With me shock and disbelief fought a brief battle. Shock won. I daresay I gaped at him stupidly. Anyway our consternation was obvious enough to please him.

He gave us a satisfied nod.