The Last Cut. Michael Pearce

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СКАЧАТЬ say.’

      ‘But, Effendi, they are for the most part worthless fellows, mere villagers, who come up here for the Inundation, work for a few weeks and then return to the dreadful place from where they came!’

      ‘They are the ones I am particularly interested in. First, I’d like disciplinary cases –’

      ‘But, Effendi, they are all unruly, mere savages –’

      ‘Then injuries.’

      ‘But, Effendi, what does it signify if a few are injured? When we think of the general good? If a few fall by the wayside or into the river?’

      ‘And the dismissals.’

      ‘Effendi, at the end of the Inundation they are all dismissed, and a good thing too –’

      ‘The ones who are dismissed before the end.’

      ‘But, Effendi, why bother about the few whom Macrae Effendi and Ferguson Effendi have shrewdly seen have got it coming and wisely advanced the hour?’

      ‘Just see I get the names tomorrow,’ said Owen.

      When Owen went into his office the next day, Nikos, his official clerk, had the list in front of him. Owen was taken aback by the remarkable burst of productivity. Then he saw the reason. The list had only five names.

      ‘No dismissals, two injuries, minor, the rest, wages docked for being late,’ said Nikos. ‘That what you wanted?’

      Owen frowned.

      ‘I want to know first if it is true,’ he said.

      Nikos nodded.

      ‘I’ll check,’ he said.

      ‘And while you’re doing that, can you look a bit more widely?’

      ‘What for?’

      ‘Possible reasons for a grudge. I’m after motive.’

      Nikos was looking through the list.

      ‘They’re all Corvée men,’ he said. ‘You can tell by the payroll numbers.’

      ‘They will be at this time of year. It’s the height of the Inundation.’

      ‘I was just wondering if that could be anything to do with it.’

      The Corvée was the name given to the system by which the Government had traditionally summoned up labour each year to maintain the river banks and watch the dams when the Nile rose. In the past the system had been full of abuses. Virtually every able-bodied man between fifteen and fifty had been called up and obliged to work unpaid for a substantial part of the year away from his own land. Worse, the great Pashas, or noblemen, had frequently contrived to divert them to work on their own estates, flogging them if they refused. Anyone then might well have had a grudge against the system.

      But not now. When the British had come they had abolished the Corvée, at least in its old form. Now the work was voluntary, paid, and for a shorter period. And the Pashas’ abuses were twenty years in the past. Surely, thought Owen, no one could harbour a grudge for so long? Even in Egypt, where grudges were sometimes nourished for generations.

      When Owen entered the Gardens he experienced a mild shock. They were covered with water. For a moment he thought that something must have gone wrong at the regulator and the canal overflowed. But then he realized. This was Thursday and watering day throughout the city.

      Every Thursday water was pumped up out of the river and distributed through the city in pipelines to parks and public gardens, where it was drawn off locally into systems of raised earth ditches, called gadwals.

      That was what had happened here. The Gardens looked like a vast shallow lake out of which the trees and shrubs jutted incongruously. In the water between them hundreds of birds were playing. Palm doves crouched and crooned. Hoopoes hesitated inhibitedly like bathers on an English beach. Bulbuls and sparrows, not at all inhibited, splashed water over their backs in a furious spray. Brightly-coloured bee-eaters, never still, swerved and dived. Buff-backed herons stalked and stabbed. There were even some green parakeets, released deliberately from Giza Zoo to see if they would breed wild.

      Owen hesitated a moment, wondering how to cross the Gardens and get to the regulator dry. Across the water he saw the gardener, up to his ankles and bent over a gadwal, and made a gesture of inquiry. The gardener pointed to a path leading up into the trees. It ran along the slight crest beside the valley he’d walked through previously and took him nearly to the regulator.

      At the regulator things were quieter. A solitary cart had been backed up to the breach and from its rear men were lowering sandbags precisely into position with a rope and pulley. Ferguson was lying on his front peering down into the breach and directing proceedings. He stood up when he saw Owen coming.

      ‘We’ve got something for you,’ he said.

      He called down to Macrae, who came up and joined them. They walked down the canal to where what looked like a piece of broken pipe had evidently been heaved up out of the water.

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘It’s part of the culvert. From just beside the regulator gates. It was blown out by the explosion and carried here by the water. The thing is, though: see those? They’re bum marks. That means, that’s where the stuff was put. Just shoved up inside, I’d say.’

      ‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘That would have been enough. It’s the position, you see. It would have cracked the concrete that held the frame just by the hinge. The weight of the water would have done the rest. Whoever did it knew just what they were doing.’

      ‘And you still say,’ said Owen, ‘that it wasn’t one of your workmen?’

       3

      The gardener came running.

      ‘Effendi! Oh, Effendi!’

      He arrived panting.

      ‘Oh, Effendi! Another one!’

      ‘Another what?’

      ‘A bomb! Oh, Effendi, come quickly!’

      ‘Another! Jesus! Where?’

      The gardener pointed across the Gardens.

      ‘The Rosetta? Jesus!’

      They ran straight across the Gardens, splashing through the water. Birds scattered. Herons rose with a clap of wings like a gunshot. The palm doves rose in a flock. Hoopoes hesitated no longer and made for the trees.

      The gardener ran ahead of them, his bare feet kicking up the water. He led them across the lawns and then up on to the crest along which Owen had passed previously. Down into the bamboo clumps of the valley and then left along the stream, almost to the spot where the ghaffir had been taking his repose. There, virtually beneath the baobab trees, the gardener halted.

      ‘But СКАЧАТЬ