“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.