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“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 mybriefcase. “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