Free The Levanter by Eric Ambler

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