The Levanter (9 page)

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
im
practicability 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.