Tremor

The police have so far made little progress in their efforts to catch the half-dozen armed and stocking-masked men who early yesterday morning broke into the offices of Benson & Benson, merchant bankers of 12 St Mary’s Gate, EC4 and gagged and bound the staff while getting away with money, bonds and valuables estimated to be worth half a million pounds. Two abandoned cars have been found, and a Red Cross worker, Miss Elsie Wardle, has been able to give a description of the men involved.

  All that morning Matthew lay in the shade of the awning and recovered his strength. He ate a little and drank a lot of lemonade, and for a while helped look after a group of children who had lost their mothers and fathers. Then the order came through at noon that in conformity with the decision to abandon the city, this hospital site would be evacuated and a string of trucks and lorries and, for the badly wounded, helicopters, would be made available. The evacuation would begin at two and it was hoped would be completed by dusk.

  With these instructions confusion became chaos, and again Matthew helped to organize the loading of the trucks as they came in. Twice he was offered a helping hand to climb on a lorry and be carried to the airport. Twice he refused. Now that it came to the point he was reluctant to leave. He was certain he would never go back to the Saada, yet its ruins drew him. He knew he should go to the airport and telephone Baron de Blaye, telling him the news of Nadine’s death. He knew he should also telephone his mother, or at least get news to her that he was alive and uninjured. Uninjured except in spirit. But the ruins of the Saada were in the front of his mind.

  By six it became clear that although most of the patients, orphans and refugees who had occupied the site would be gone before dusk, a residue of a few hundred, and much gear, would have to go after dark. Tomorrow morning the city was to be abandoned as a city of the dead. About seven he slipped away unnoticed and began to walk back to the Saada.

  III

  It was a ghost city he walked through, with the stench of death and quicklime overpowering in the hot, heavy air. The streets could be picked out among the hillocks of rubble, with spurs sticking up here and there like skeletal elbows, the streets themselves split up and open, with fallen trees, smashed motor cars and earth and dead animals and dust. Sometimes one side of a street would have maintained its shape in a row of erratic ruins, while the other side had become powdered debris.

  It was not quite dark yet, and a sickle of moon shone out of a clear sky. Here and there floodlights with portable generators were coming on where troops were continuing their bulldozing or their excavations.

  There were a few dark-clad figures about, defying orders to leave and digging among the ruins, no doubt most of them trying to salvage something from their old homes, or even still beating at blocks of masonry in the search for a husband or wife or child who might still be alive under it all. There were scavengers too, but the soldiers had orders to shoot anyone suspicious.

  The city had been out of bounds since the first day, and Matthew kept as much to the shadows as possible, aware that if he were challenged he would be forcibly taken away. Occasionally sub-machine-gun fire could be heard, but he thought this was likely to be to scare away the jackals which had come into the town from the hinterland. Now and then he saw a dog slinking like him in the shadows, but he kept well clear of them, knowing the danger of rabies.

  He had tied a damp handkerchief across his face to try to keep out the stench of putrefaction, but the evening was still so hot that he took it off, and retched at the smell, and tried to hold his nose. An armoured car rattled past, all the men in it wearing gas masks and carrying rifles and spades. It looked as if the armoured car had been sprayed with some white disinfectant.

  The wall he had stopped beside was part of a house, still standing but partly sunk so that everything was leaning towards the back like a ship going down by the stern. From here he could just pick out the dark mound that was the Saada silhouetted in crazy rectangles against the sulky sea.

  He approached it cautiously. Two soldiers were on guard at the gates – otherwise the place was empty and dead, awaiting demolition.

  Everyone was gone. All the hundred and fifty holiday guests, French, English, German, American, Swiss. The very few survivors like himself had been taken away. The rest were either piled one on another in the mortuary shed or remained buried for ever under thousands of tons of masonry. A holiday sepulchre. Icecreams and buckets and spades and swimming-pools and sunbathing and orange vodkas and mint tea and death. All over Europe and America there would be the occasional family who happened to have decided to have a holiday in the sun and would not return.

  Matthew went down a sandy passage that led to the beach, which was empty and desolate and strewed with debris. Cautiously he approached the hotel from the sea side. The moon had not yet set, and the sky was lit by it. So was this side of the hotel.

  In the contour of the ruins very little had changed. The great beam which he had walked out on and jumped to safety from was still there. In the distortion of the tragedy he had thought the distance eighteen feet. In fact it was barely six. Others must have been up this way. They would only need a small ladder. Very unlikely that if he went up there he would find the two corpses, grinning at him in the most noisome stages of decay.

  Nor Nadine. They would be sure to have found her too, for she had not been buried, only crushed to death. Did he even want to see if she was there? If she was, did he want to see what two days of heat and putrefaction had done to her beautiful body and face?

  Yet he knew he must look. He was still not in the most logical state of mind and he knew he must look.

  The great concrete beam was probably nearly seven feet over his head. He stretched up and could just touch it with his fingertips. He cast around, found a table but one of the legs was broken, then a hard bentwood chair. Careful not to make a noise which might attract the guards, he lifted the chair across and stood on it. Better, but it did not lift him high enough – not nearly high enough, for the beam was too thick for him to get his arms round. He climbed down and began to search among the debris by the pool. There was a light breeze, still from the land, and when it gusted he had to hold his nose.

  What he found was the pool ladder. Almost twisted from its fastenings, it dangled above the empty broken concrete. He found an abandoned walking stick and looped the handle round a rung, pulled it up and once it was on ground level he only had to twist it a couple of times for the last bolt to snap.

  A patrol car had stopped at the gates of the hotel, and an American naval officer was talking in bad French to the two guards. Matthew waited until the car had driven away, then carried the ladder to the beam. The ladder was also short, but he was able to prop it against the broken table, the chair and a pile of broken furniture in such a way that he could go up it, balancing on the beam as he scrambled up to it, then expecting the ladder to fall behind him with a crash. It stayed in place.

  He dusted his hands, tied the handkerchief round his face and went into the darkness of the ruin.

  He at once found the half room where Johnny Frazier and the croupier had been lying. It was unchanged, but the two corpses had gone. Surely everyone who could be found up here had been taken away. He pulled off the handkerchief and the air, while bad, was only just touched with corruption.

  He went past the twisted bed into the more secure corner of the room, just to check against the probability that Johnny Frazier’s precious suitcase had been taken away. It was still there.

  IV

  He picked it up, shook it. The locks were unbroken. Whatever had been in it was still in it. He turned to go back with it, along the girder to where the ladder still swung. But this was not what he had come for. He had to go back to see if Nadine …

  He put the case down, picked his way past where the two men had been, pushed open the half-ajar door, looked into the passage and towards where his room had once existed. Of it not a trace remained. But a few feet of still carpeted corridor led back the way he had come on Monday night
. This part was all open to the sky, but the moon was sinking and its shadows stretched everywhere. He had borrowed a pocket torch but did not use it for fear of attracting the attention of the guards.

  A piece of wall crumbled under his hand as he groped his way forward. Any of this, though apparently tightly jammed, might collapse at any time. Tomorrow came the bulldozers, reducing it all finally to dust and disinfectant and quicklime.

  He was peering through a tangle of pipes and wires and broken furniture into what had been Nadine’s bedroom. There was still the part rectangle of the bed but he could not at this distance be sure she was not still lying on it. He had to get nearer.

  He began pulling at one of the pipes: it trickled a drop of water, which somehow had not all evaporated in the heat. Some of this debris must have come down since he escaped this way, for he could hardly have come through such a tangle. Had the army ventured so far? He thought he detected a shape lumped at the end of the bed.

  His hair prickled as he looked at it. He had to go and see.

  The pipe stopped halfway but he could now bend under it. He scraped his knee on the sharp edge of an upturned plank, slid round a wardrobe, pushed his way past a slanting washbasin and stood before the bed.

  It was not Nadine. It was not Nadine. It was a couple of pillows and one of her dresses. It was not Nadine. They had been for her, taken her away. Reverently, decently, he hoped. But what reverence could one hope for from soldiery or ambulance men in a catastrophe such as this? At least she was gone. Thank God, thank God, thank God. He turned away, strangely relieved, as if now he could bear his grief.

  Back now. Back now. Nothing more to do. Nothing more really to hide. He could declare himself to the guards. Maybe they could get a jeep to pick him up, take him to the airport, where – registered no doubt, and very ironically, as Henri Delaware – he could make what provision he chose for his own future. It was bleak. Without Nadine everything was bleak.

  He turned to go and heard a noise. He listened, disbelieving.

  A tapping.

  Obviously some animal or bird using its claws, its beak, to get at some horrible morsel of decay. There could be nothing else after all this time.

  Careful how you went back. The floor was splintered but the carpet held it, made it just safe to step on. He stepped on it and again stopped. Clear but faint. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap. He recognized the rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. What rubbish. Just plain coincidence. But hadn’t that been the agreed secret rhythm of all the Resistances during the war?

  Where the hell was it coming from? Somewhere below. The water pipe was near his head. He took out a coin and rapped on it – the same rhythm.

  The other tapping stopped, then began again, slightly louder, more urgent. He tapped back. As the other tapping ceased he called at the top of his voice. No reply. He shouted. No reply. Now the tapping continued.

  He turned and went back the way to safety – the twelve square feet of corridor, the splintered bed that had been Johnny Frazier’s sepulchre, the beam. As he stepped onto the beam a bright light shone in his eyes. He stopped, silhouetted against the setting moon.

  ‘Halt!’ said a French voice. ‘Or we fire.’

  He put his hands above his head.

  ‘Come up!’ he said. ‘There are people alive up here!’

  A muttered conversation. The light wavered.

  Another voice said: ‘ Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘I was a guest in this hotel!’ Matthew shouted. ‘ I came back from the hospital tonight, to find some of my possessions. Now I hear this tapping.’

  ‘Tapping?’

  ‘Yes. On and on.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said the voice to someone on the ground. ‘It could not be after all this time.’

  ‘Remember the two little girls we found here this morning. But is this man genuine?’

  ‘Of course I’m genuine!’ Matthew shouted. ‘ My name is – is Henri Delaware. I am a French Canadian. Come up here. Or allow me to come down. There is someone here who can be saved!’

  V

  They were located below the surface of the ground – the pipe had carried the sound up. So it was necessary to dig down between the shattered walls of the hotel which were jammed in their present upright position but waiting to fall.

  After two hours they were able to communicate. A woman only spoke – in English – saying there were two of them down there. Matthew heard her name, Letty Heinz. And the man, who was either dead or unconscious, was Lee Burford, her friend.

  By now more searchlights had been brought, and there were more helpers. Six steel props were brought to shore up the walls and to try to prevent another fall which might crush and bury the rescuers as well as the victims. Only two men could work at a time.

  They found the woman first and brought her out. She had a gash on her head, but otherwise seemed unhurt; though terribly weak and dehydrated from fifty hours without food or drink.

  At first she could not drink. They force-lifted her to greater safety and pressed water between her cracked lips.

  The man was still more difficult and did not answer their calls. It looked as if, in spite of their efforts, some extra debris had fallen on him during the last hour. It was a different colour from all the rest and was piled across his chest. Matthew could do no more to help and sat on a fallen slab, watching a doctor and an ambulance man at work. They cautiously cleared away the rest of the rubble and began to pull the man out as gently as possible by his feet. As soon as he could reach, the doctor bent forward and listened at the man’s chest. He shrugged and they slid the man further out. Matthew could hear the woman above him whispering.

  He was brought up, face ashen, no perceptible breathing. The doctor used his stethoscope and then gave the man an injection.

  ‘Well?’ said Matthew.

  Again the doctor shrugged.

  ‘It is touch and go. We shall know in a few minutes. But even then …’

  It seemed a long wait. The moon had set and the stars, though brilliant in the sky, were hardly to be perceived behind the floodlights. After all the digging and the shouting and the revving of engines it was suddenly very quiet. Then a whispering drone could be heard in the sky.

  A lieutenant in the Moroccan Army who was standing near Matthew and apparently took him to be one of the recently rescued said: ‘ We are flying in a helicopter to take you straight to the airport. We wish to save you the jolting in an ambulance.’

  The drone was coming nearer and soon hovered overhead, picking its place to land.

  The doctor said: ‘ He is coming round. Now at least he has a chance!’

  The plane landed on the road outside the hotel. Stretchers were brought, and Lee Burford put on one, Letty, though now sitting up, on another. It was assumed as a matter of course that Matthew should go as well. He raised no objection. Glad now to be out of it all.

  It was only as he was about to climb into the helicopter that he remembered Johnny Frazier’s suitcase, and he insisted on keeping them waiting until he had gone back to fetch it.

  Afterwards

  I

  M. Henri Thibault was one of twenty-six victims in the collapse of the Saada Hotel whose body was never recovered. Estrella returned sorrowing to France, for though more recently he had irritated her beyond endurance she had once been fond of him; and she had borne his children and kept his home and shared his eminence as a banker and a philanthropist.

  She had one unmarried daughter and decided to continue to live in the same style as before. But soon she had something more to sorrow about. Her injured ankle would not heal. A poison had got into her blood, unidentifiable by modern medicine, derived perhaps from some sulphurs in the earth’s explosive breath, which could not be got rid of. In the end French physicians did give it a name – for what good that was – but they could not cure it. Her old father sent her to an extravagantly expensive clinic in Switzerland where, in June 1961, she died.

  Colonel Gast
on Tournelle, evacuated with the other patients of the hospital, made a slow recovery. His house was levelled, but Maria and the two girls had had miraculous escapes. The family eventually moved in to one of the ground-floor apartments in a new block opened in 1961. This did not have the character of the old villa, but it was convenient and easy for him to get around.

  Tournelle was still too ill at the time of the earthquake to have attention to spare for any other than his own health, but as he got better he grieved over Johnny’s death, and it crossed his mind to wonder if there had been any foul play involved in it. The suitcase, which presumably contained money or jewellery or securities, had never been found. Almost his first walk when he returned to Agadir was around the ruins of the old Saada, just to spy out, just in case. But by then the Saada had been bulldozed and was no more than a heap of rubble; and the chance of finding a suitcase, or anything identifiable, was remote.

  It was all very sad, especially as the contents of his secret safe in the bathroom of his old villa had been looted before he was well enough to claim them.

  Laura Legrand returned to Paris. With her share of Vicky’s money she set up in a small luxury apartment, and organized an escort agency of six select girls for whom she picked what she called ‘an exclusive clientele’. She became noticeably fatter and still more interested in gin, but she never lost her business acumen or her eye for an attractive girl.

  Vicky returned to Bordeaux, and, having failed in her early ambition to marry one doctor, now married another, an elderly widower, who doted on her, who had an apartment in the Place des Martyrs, and property as well as medicine to his name. There she became the height of respectability and presently bore him a daughter who delighted him far more than either of the two sons, now long since gone, of his first wife.

  Laura and Vicky got together to discover the whereabouts of Françoise’s son, and once traced, to pay him half of the share in their dealings that Françoise would have had. ‘Half,’ Laura said firmly to Vicky. ‘We can be generous but not too generous. Fair’s fair. He’s only her son. He’s lucky to get so much.’