Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

‘And you came yourself?’

‘Well, I was worried about him. After what you had said. And it was clearly no good sending anyone else!’

‘He is disobeying instructions?’

‘Yes. I had made it perfectly clear. I had him in yesterday and told him I was transferring him temporarily to the Hilmiya. He didn’t like it. In fact, he begged me to let him stay, just for another day or two. Well, I remembered what you had said, and that a day or two would probably make no difference, but then I thought, no, if the boy is in danger, then he is in danger now, and what will his father think if I delay? So I told him firmly that he must transfer at once, that very day. He pleaded for just one more day, he said that he was on the brink of solving a problem that had been troubling us for months, that if I gave him just twenty-four hours-

‘But I said no, if he had information he could give us, then he would receive the credit for it but that he himself must start at once in the Citadel.’

‘And yet today, you said, someone saw him here?’

‘Yes.’ The manager mopped his face with a large silk handkerchief. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I am very angry,’ he said. ‘He has been foolish, very foolish. And even though I am a friend of his father’s-’

Owen interrupted him.

‘This problem that you say he thought he was on the brink of solving: can you tell me what it was?’

‘Yes. We have been concerned for some time that we have been losing water over here in the Rosetti. Now you always lose water, there is always a leaking pipe somewhere. But this was big and continuing. We were sure that someone was tapping the pipe. But what we could not understand was that it was the unfiltered water. Now if it had been the other pipe, the filtered water, that I could have understood, for the water there costs a lot more. But the unfiltered…It comes straight from the river. We don’t do anything to it and so it is dirt cheap. It would hardly be worth anyone’s while-’

‘Just a minute,’ said Owen; you say you think someone was tapping it? And that Suleiman was on the brink of finding out who it was?’

‘So he said.’

‘And it was here in the Gamaliya?’

‘Somewhere over here. In the Rosetti, more likely. We haven’t really gone into the Gamaliya yet.’

‘Then I think,’ said Owen, ‘that I am beginning to understand. And I think we should try to find him quickly!’

‹? CKS’t?›

The workman had reported seeing Suleiman near the Khan-el-Khalil. The manager had gone there first and luckily found someone who remembered seeing Suleiman that morning. From there he had followed his trail along the Sikkel-el-Gedida to the Place-el-Kanto. In the souk there he had talked to an onion seller who had pointed him on towards the Khalig Canal. There he had hesitated for a while but then, remembering that the Water Board’s pipes ran along the bank of the canal at one point, had nobly set off along the bed.

‘Right,’ said Owen. ‘Now, you go to the police station, as fast as you can, and tell them that the Mamur Zapt needs men. At once!’

The manager set off. Georgiades, meanwhile, had run along the canal bank to where a donkey was cropping the greenery that stretched down into the canal bed. Not far away, as he had suspected, its owner was stretched out in the shade. He came hurrying back.

‘The boy came along here less than an hour ago. He was looking around him. At the banks, the man says. He says he climbed out of the canal about here and went in among the houses.’

They began to walk along the Sharia Ben-es-Suren, Georgiades taking the streets on the left, Owen the little alleyways leading down to the Canal on the right. In one of them he saw some women chatting at a fountain with pitchers balanced on their heads.

‘I am looking for a boy,’ he said urgently. ‘Leila’s friend. Have you seen him?’

‘Suleiman?’

The word passed round. People began to join them in the search. Two of them brought a match seller along who claimed to have seen him.

‘Which way?’

The man pointed towards the canal. Owen plunged in that direction. This part of the city, one of the oldest, was like a warren. Streets gave onto streets, alleyway into alleyway. They became narrower and narrower, mere tunnels beneath the walls. They turned in on themselves, back on themselves.

Emerging, to his surprise, on to a street he had already canvassed, he saw with relief the manager returning with policemen from the local station; with Mahmoud, too.

‘I was at the station when he came,’ he said. ‘I wanted a constable. But your need seems greater than mine.’

He disappeared with the constables into the alleyways.

Owen went back towards the canal. That at least was a thread of direction. He tried to keep going alongside it but some of the streets ended before they quite reached it and blocks of houses, tiny and ramshackle, were forever intervening. In this labyrinth a man could easily disappear: for ever.

In the distance he thought he heard a shriek.

Another block. He descended into the canal in order to get round it. As he climbed up the other side he saw a man waving urgently.

‘Effendi! Effendi!’

At the end of the street he saw Georgiades. There was a woman beside him, collapsed on the ground, rocking herself to and fro in the posture of grief. He ran towards them.

The woman looked up at him. The tear-stained face was that of Um Fatima.

‘They went out to look for him!’ she moaned.

‘Ali Khedri?’

‘And Uthman!’

‘Which way?’

‘I do not know. He seized his knife and ran out. I tried to hold him back. “Have you not done enough?” I said. But he thrust me aside. “Out of the way, woman!” he said. “This touches us all!”’

She began to rock more violently. Women rushed up to her and tried to comfort her. Some began to keen in sympathy.

Owen looked frantically around him. Minute alleyways ran away on every side.

The Water Board manager was standing there bewildered.

‘The pipes!’ said Georgiades. ‘Where are they?’

The manager looked at him mutely. Georgiades took him by the lapels and shook him. ‘The pipes! Where do they come out?’

‘Further up!’ whispered the manager. ‘In the canal. Further up!’

Georgiades jumped down into the canal bed and began running.

‘You can get there more quickly through the houses,’ said the manager, recovering.

‘Show me!’

He gave the man a push and he started running. Confidently at first, doubling through the houses, plunging unhesitatingly through the alleyways, but then, after one double too many, more slowly. Owen raced after him.

‘This one!’ he said, making for a narrow snick, almost invisible in the shadow.

They ran down it and emerged high up on the bank of the canal. To their left was a mass of crumbling fretwork, the remains of some old meshrebiya windows, covered now with creeper and weed, the heavy corbels that had once supported them still jutting out from the wall; to their right, the canal bent round a corner and just out of sight Owen could hear urgent, scrambling footsteps. Georgiades came into sight, panting.

‘It must be further up,’ said the manager doubtfully.

Owen cursed and dropped down into the bed in a shower of stones. Georgiades ran past without speaking. Owen caught up with him where a fall had spread rubble along the bed for perhaps twenty yards and where they had to pick their way over crumbling bricks and huge, rotting baulks of timber.

He knew now where they were. Ahead of him were the old Mameluke houses, with their picturesque balconies and great, protruding, box-like windows, built to look down on a canal which had been the glory of the Old City, now frail and crumbling, hanging on to the houses by a thread.