Eric Ambler: The Levanter

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.