‘How did they come to alight on me?’ whispered the gardener. ‘They asked themselves who might wish to do a thing like that? And they remembered your concern for the Gardens. They asked who had the occasion to do it? And they thought of you and of Ibrahim. And they looked again at the place where the bank was breached and they saw not the marks of paws but the marks of a trowel.’
‘What shall I do?’ moaned the gardener.
‘Well,’ said Georgiades, ‘if I were you, I would find some way of worming myself into the Mamur Zapt’s graces.’
‘How might I do that?’
Georgiades considered.
‘You could start,’ he considered, ‘by telling him the name of the person to whom Babikr took the flowers.’
Chapter 12
‘Well, Babikr,’ said Owen, ‘now we know to whom it was you made your oath.’
‘It was a bad oath,’ said Babikr, looking at the ground. When he had been brought into Owen’s office he had blinked at the light after more than a week in the cells.
‘It was,’ said Owen, ‘and it was wrong of you to swear it.’
‘I owed it to him. His family had helped mine when my wife was sick.’
‘It is right to help neighbours. It is wrong to ask them to repay in wrong-doing.’
‘I did not know that I would be asked to repay in that way. He and his family had left the village. Before they went, he came to me and said: “I know that you cannot repay me now what you owe me, and therefore I shall not ask it; but lest the debt you owe me be forgotten when you pay off your other debts I shall ask you to swear me an oath before the fiki.”
‘And I said:
“‘It is true that I cannot repay you now, for all that I have earned has gone on my wife and child; but one day I shall repay it.” ’And he said:
“I know you will. But still let us swear the oath.”
‘So we went to the fiki and when he heard what the oath was to be, he said: “That is not a good oath, for who knows its meaning?”
‘And I said:
“Never mind if it is a good oath or not, that is the one he wants me to swear.”
‘Still the fiki demurred. But I was firm. “For,” said I, “the man has helped my family when it was in need, and shall I now not repay him?”
“‘Repay him, by all means,” said the fiki, “but in money. For was not that what he lent you?”
‘Well, I will not say that my heart was not troubled. But still I said: “I will swear as he wants, for am not I his debtor? And, besides, he says that a man may never be able to repay in money, but still he may repay in service. Even the poorest can repay in service.”
“‘Well, that is true,” said the fiki, and so I swore the oath as he had asked.’
‘What was the oath?’
‘That when the time came for me to repay him, if he asked for service and not for money then I would be bound to offer him service; and that I would do whatsoever he demanded.’
‘That was foolish!’
Babikr shrugged.
‘So I see,’ he said, ‘now.’
‘But did you not say so when you heard what he demanded?’
‘I did. But he said: “I, too, am bound by an oath. An oath of revenge. I have sworn I will be revenged on him for what he has done to me. And now are you saying that I should break my oath as well as you break yours?” And I was troubled, for he had helped me freely when I was in need, and I had sworn freely. However I said to him: “You lent me money when I needed it-let me now give it back to you when you need it.” For I could see that he had need. But he said: “The need I have is inside, and that is where you must repay me.” But still, Effendi, I would not, and I left his house.
‘But then I said to myself: “Babikr, have you not sworn? Did he not help you? And are you now saying that you will not help him?” So I went back to him and tried to reason with him. I said:
“I came to you with joy in my heart that at last I could repay what I owed you. I came with flowers in my hand, wishing well to you and yours. But now that joy has turned to bitterness.” ‘“Well, then,” he said, “it matches mine.”
‘I said: “This thing you wish to do is foolish as well as wrong. For it will hurt not Al-Sayyid Hannam alone but everyone else.”
‘But he said:
“‘I will revenge by water what was done by water. I will use the river to avenge what was done by the river.’”
‘Yes,’ said the fiki. ‘I remember the oath.’
‘You did not remember it the other day,’ said Owen.
‘I hear many oaths.’
‘From Babikr?’
The fiki was silent.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘perhaps not from Babikr.’
‘Did you not think? Knowing that the man was in prison?’
‘I thought,’ said the fiki, ‘but I could not believe what I thought.’
So Owen went to the house of Ali Khedri; but he was not at home. That at first did not surprise him, for he supposed that the water-carrier would be out on his rounds. Then he saw, however, the water-skins thrown down in a corner and felt puzzled. He went to the neighbours and asked if they knew where Ali Khedri had gone, but they did not. He wondered if the water-carrier was over at Omar Fayoum’s stable, helping the cart driver ‘unharness the horses’. He and Georgiades began to make their way in that direction.
‹5’ts»?
The building where Omar Fayoum kept his water-cart was empty. Of people, that was. The cart itself was there and there in a shed nearby which served as a stable were the horses. Which again was puzzling, for Omar was not a man to let his assets stand idle.
They walked round the building and came out at the back, where it crumbled away into the canal. A man, tarbooshed, dark-suited and perspiring, was picking his way gingerly along the bed. It was the manager from the Water Board; and this, too, was puzzling for in Cairo managers usually preferred the cool of their offices to the heat of the streets. He waved when he saw Owen and Georgiades and climbed up to meet them. He looked hot and bothered.
‘You have not seen Suleiman?’ he asked exasperatedly. ‘I have been looking for him for the past hour. He is not supposed to be here at all. I did as you advised and ordered him out. He is supposed to be working in another district today and they are expecting him. But one of my people said that they had seen him over here!’
‘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-’