Michael Pearce - The Last Cut

A stone landed at his feet. He looked up and saw the stone-throwing small boy of the other day. The stone, though, this time, was thrown less in hostility than as a declaration of identity.

‘Where are they?’ he called urgently.

The boy pointed up beyond the houses.

‘Is he there?’

‘They have him.’

He tried to find a burst of speed but they had come now to a place where the rubble had given way to mud in which their feet sank and kept sticking.

‘You are faster than I,’ he called to the boy. ‘Run on and shout that the Mamur Zapt is coming!’

It might lose them the men; but it might save Suleiman.

The boy hesitated.

‘They will kill me,’ he said.

‘They will reward you. And I will reward you too!’

The boy set off, scrabbling along the bank, his bare feet finding a purchase where their shoes could not.

They heard him shout.

Owen hurled himself on, his feet sticking now on slime-cov-ered slabs of stone that had fallen out of the steps leading down from the old, decaying houses.

There was a bend in the canal and now, emerging from the bank and leading along the side of it, he could see pipes.

He came fully round the bend and then there, ahead of him, he saw them: four figures, Suleiman, high up on a terrace, hammering desperately on a door, and three men, Ali Khedri, Ahmed Uthman and the cart driver, advancing up the steps towards him.

Owen and Georgiades ran forward. The cart driver, knife in hand, dropped back to meet them.

‘Help me, Ali!’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Leave it to Ahmed!’

Ali Khedri took no notice.

‘Ali!’

‘I want to do it,’ said Ali Khedri; and began to move up the steps.

The cart driver cursed and fell back to the bottom of the steps.

‘Come down here, you fool!’ he called. ‘This needs two of us. One will do for him!’

Ali Khedri wavered, dropped down a step and then stood there undecided.

Ahmed Uthman took a length of cord out from under his galabeeyah and ran up on to the terrace.

Suleiman left the door and ran to the end of the terrace. Above him was a huge box-like meshrebiya window, so huge even by Mameluke standards that at some time in the past it had been found necessary to support it by putting two posts beneath it.

Suleiman looked around desperately and then began to climb up one of the posts.

Ahmed Uthman ran forward and tried to catch him by the leg. Suleiman kicked his hand away and climbed further, up to where he could reach the window. There, though, he came to a stop. Every time he reached for a new hand-hold, the worm-eaten fretwork crumbled away.

Ahmed Uthman began to climb up the post towards him.

Back along the terrace the door suddenly burst open and Mahmoud came through, followed by a group of constables.

‘Enough!’ he shouted, running along the terrace. ‘Enough!’

The cart driver, distracted, looked towards the shout. Georgiades hit him hard behind the ear. He fell back on to the steps and the knife dropped from his hand.

Owen had reached Ali Khedri. He caught him by the galabeeyah and swung him round. He came down the steps to Georgiades, who hit him as he came.

Up on the terrace, though, Ahmed Uthman had nearly reached Suleiman.

Suleiman made another despairing grab. A large piece of fretwork came away in his hand. The whole structure began to totter. Up above, there was a tearing sound as the woodwork detached itself from the wall.

‘Get hold of the supports!’ shouted Mahmoud. ‘Get hold of the supports!’

The window collapsed in a great cloud of dust. For a moment or two they could not see anything; and then there was Suleiman still above them, somehow clinging to one of the massive corbels that had once supported the huge, protruding window.

(Tsesai)

Suleiman was able to show them the place. It was a little further along the canal, where the fine old Mameluke mansions gave way to lower, humbler ones, some of them derelict, others occupied, rather than rented out, as workshops. Omar Fayoum had taken over one of them as a place, he said, to store gear for his horses and the water-cart. It had the added advantage of a cellar right next to the bank of the canal.

The pipes of the Water Board disappeared at this point, not so much underground as into a mass of debris. Most of it came from adjoining houses which had collapsed into the bed long ago but some of it was new and it was this that had drawn Suleimans attention to the place. Clambering over the wreckage, he had seen signs of recent working about the pipes which had aroused his suspicions. He had attached flow measuring gauges on either side of the spot and been able to establish that on occasion substantial quantities of water were illicitly drawn off.

He had guessed that the pipe was some how being tapped from the premises above but it had taken him some time to work out, first, that the house must have a cellar, through which the pipes could be reached, and then that it belonged to Omar Fayoum.

Once, though, he had made the connection with the water-seller, things began to fall into place. He had observed that the water-cart called regularly at the house to an extent hardly likely to be justified by the pretext that it was picking up gear. He had found that it was clearly picking up water and had followed it afterwards to the various points at which it disbursed it to the local water-carriers.

Still, though, there were things that he could not understand. The greatest of these was the economics of it. The water that was being stolen was unfiltered water. True, it was then being sold as filtered water, fit for drinking, but even so the mark up must be minute. It was only gradually that he realized that to men like these the margin, however small, was significant. Where a man’s dreams of wealth turned on the difference between being a water-carrier and a man on a cart, milliemes mattered.

In Omar Fayoum’s case the profit margin was greater anyway because the bulk of the water was sold as drinking water to businesses-cafes, for instance-in the Gamaliya which the pipes had not yet reached.

Suleiman had not known this, had not known any of it, in the days when he had hung around the Gamaliya desperate for a sight of Leila. But Omar Fayoum, and the men about him, knowing his business in the Gamaliya, and forever seeing him there, ‘creeping around’, as they put it, had suspected that he did.

When, therefore, his connection with Leila had become known, it was like a thunderbolt. Surely he would be able to worm the secret out of her; and if by then she was married to Omar Fayoum, it would be even worse.

The marriage was called off at once; and to the collapse of Ali Khedri’s hopes in that respect was added the fear that the whole scheme was on the verge of being discovered.

And by the son of his old enemy! This was the bit that Ali Khedri could not bear. Nor could he believe that it had come about by accident. To his diseased mind it was clear that his old adversary was pursuing him further, even here in the city, even here in the depths of his poverty.

He had to hit back. And he had to hit back before time ran out, before they came and took him to a place where he might be able to think about revenge but would never be able to take it. He had to hit back; and to a man whose life was water, whose life, as he saw it, had been ruined by water, water was the obvious means by which to take his revenge. He would use the river, as Babikr had said, to avenge what was done by the river.

Babikr had come to him as a gift from God; or, possibly, — and by this time he did not care-from Shaitun. He had called on Ali Khedri when he had come up to do his annual duty with the corvee. He knew the barrage and, even more to the point, was bound, as he had reminded Ali Khedri, to him by oath.