Eric Ambler - The Levanter

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.

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.