Tremor (25 page)

Even his own life was still at risk. If he were to climb out upon the great beam which protruded into the air and drop eighteen feet or so onto the flooded garden – or even upon more rubble – he would break his leg or his neck. There seemed no way back. But time was not on his side. The whole ruin might at any moment settle still further, or – worse dread of all – there might come another earthquake.

He peered at the two dead people, then crawled back over the litter and wrecked furniture to the one apparently secure corner of the room. The fire was burning more brightly now; it had reached some fuel and a sharp flaring flame lit up the scene.

The first man, in a skullcap and a long black coat, whom he recognized as a croupier from the Casino, was dead. The other was Johnny Frazier, and he too was dead. A girder had broken his back.

Someone was shouting. It sounded like: ‘Is anyone up there?' But it didn't seem to be directed towards him. The moans and groans had not died down. How many were buried alive?

But if they could be heard they must surely be reachable. If he could help, he must help, and at once.

On the bed he saw the small suitcase. It had been so obvious a part of Johnny Frazier's life and appearance that Matthew had come to speculate on what the case was likely to contain. It was no longer going to be of any use to Johnny Frazier.

Matthew picked it up and flipped the catches, but they were both locked.

On the bed was a wallet with some money in it. A newspaper. An empty brown leather bag. A passport. The light wasn't good enough to see the name, but he could recognize Johnny's photograph. He put it in his pocket, and the other bits and pieces as well. Then he took up the case. Should he try to take it with him? Better leave it for the police.

There was an explosion somewhere behind him, quite distant. Might be a gas main.

Behind the bed a smaller beam had fallen, also slantwise; it made a triangular corner between where its ends rested and what was left of the floor. He pushed Frazier's case into this corner, then stood up, head singing and swirling, wiped more blood from his arm. He set about trying to find a way down into the flooded gardens.

As the Saada collapsed it took with it downwards the bedrooms occupied by Lee Burford and Letty Heinz, down almost two floors, crushing to death the people below them. The two floors above came on top of them but a freak of construction caused them to fall partly outwards, so that the occupants of this part of the third floor were buried but not crushed.

Lee was sitting on the bed pulling at his tie when the world screamed and thundered and gave way under him and he fell with an ear-bursting crash amid a miscellaneous hail of objects of all sizes, fell some eighteen feet, landing still on the bed, not physically injured but stunned with shock and noise. When he came to, clutching at sense and reason as if they were about to leave him, he at once began to push the plaster and the broken glass off his body and to peer over to the right to where Letty's room had been. There was no wall now, only a mountain of refuse and broken furniture.

‘Letty!' he called.

There was no reply. He struggled up, took a cautious step upon the shards of glass.

‘Letty!'

‘Lee …' It was a faint cry, but it was hers.

‘Where are you?'

‘Down here. Half – buried. I cannot – get free.'

He found a match and struck it. Before it burned down it showed he was in a low cave created by the way the rafters from the upper floors had fallen, and beyond the low cave a black crevice, about three feet high.

‘Can you see my light?'

‘Yes.'

‘Wait. Don't move. I'll try to get you.'

The matchbox was more than half full. In darkness he edged towards where he thought the crevice was. Then he struck another match. It was a sideways crevice slanting downwards at about twenty degrees. Before the match went out he caught a glimpse of fair hair.

‘I can see you. I'm coming for you.'

Again in darkness, he edged his way under the overhanging weight of two floors, clawed at the debris, encountered a great lump of masonry that barred his path. He did not dare try to dislodge it lest it should cause a general collapse. Scrape at the rubble.

‘This way!' Letty gasped. ‘ Wait! I think I have a light!'

He lay there prone and exhausted, and then a pencil of light penetrated the devastation. He saw her lying under a pile of debris, half buried, her long fair hair white with plaster dust. Her face was bloodstained, and below the waist she disappeared into a tangle of broken pipes and fallen furniture.

He could now see a way round the boulder and edged himself nearer to her.

There was a narrow space about her, and he touched her; felt enormous relief at the grip of her hand. On hands and knees he pulled at the mountain of stuff that buried her. There was no way for this to fall into any further hole, so it had to be picked away piece by piece, gingerly lest it should dislodge something above, and put to one side where it was near her but no longer pressing on her.

However careful he was, other rubble edged down several times to take the place of what he pulled away, and once a pipe clanged down just missing her arm. But he made progress, and he saw with overwhelming relief that as the weight was taken off her legs, she was able to move them.

‘Take a rest,' she said. ‘ You are injured yourself?'

‘No, nothing.'

She said: ‘I had just picked up my bag when this happened. And the torch was inside.'

‘I have a few matches left. But we must economize. You've hurt your head?'

‘I do not think it is bad.'

He began to dig and scrabble again. Both shoes were still on. As he uncovered them she lifted one knee and then the other.

‘Your back?'

‘No, I think it is OK. Oh, my God, what a thing! How deep are we buried?'

‘Well, I think we've almost come down to ground floor. It seemed further!'

‘The whole hotel has gone?'

‘I guess so.'

A nasty wound on the crown of her head. A flap of skin hung loose; her hair was tangled and crimson. He saw this when, having taken most of the weight off her legs, he crouched behind her and put his hands under her arms to see if she could sit up.

She sat up, retched, shook her head trying to clear it.

‘Can you get onto your knees, follow me back? There's more room and a bit more air where I was. And a bed!'

Inch by inch he began to return, making sure that she was following. Behind them there was a sudden thump and clatter as more of the debris settled, already filling the space where she had been.

Parts of the town were blazing, but not many of the fires lasted the night. The tidal wave, which had followed the earthquakes and submerged parts of the town, began to recede, taking with it the bodies of those who had been drowned and sucking away many who had been killed as the buildings collapsed. A few lights glinted, where hurricane lamps and candle lamps had been found and lit. New pinpoints of light began to show where two companies of French marines, drafted hastily to help and the first to arrive, began to penetrate the town.

Dawn came quite late; but when it came it looked like atomic war. In many of the smaller streets, where buildings had been chiefly of baked clay and compressed stone, the structures had collapsed into piles of white dust, from which a piece of furniture, a rocking horse or a human arm or leg protruded as the only solids left.

The Saada, a luxury hotel, was a different matter. A mountain of rubble and metal, concrete, wood, plaster, beams, pillars, furniture and fittings had become compressed into the earth's crack which had opened below it, so that twenty feet was the highest point of what had been sixty. Over it, sardonically, stood the large sign which had normally been illuminated. The S was gone, but the AADA drunkenly remained.

Scratching among the ruins as light came were the manager, Paul Gaviscon, Basri, the receptionist and only other surviving member of the staff, and a half-dozen of the guests. Another half-dozen sat huddled on stones, clutching some garment round their shoulders against the cool of dawn.

One man working with a spade and doing something to direct operations was Matthew Morris. He was in a jacket and trousers and sandals, no shirt, a bloodstained cloth round his arm, his hands scarred and bruised with pulling pieces of debris away to get to the many dozens of people buried underneath.

They had found twelve dead, but one man had been heard shouting, and they got him out as dawn came. He had a broken arm but was otherwise uninjured. He had been buried for seven hours. He was a German, who said not to bother about him. But he had lost his wife.

Sounds, cries, had been heard very faintly, more in the centre of the hotel, where one could imagine the lift had been, and Matthew and two other men whom he knew by sight were trying to lift off a great piece of cable that twisted and twined among the wreckage. It was too heavy to pull out and too tough to cut through without a blow-torch; but by moving a piece of a mantelpiece and three splintered beams it might be possible to lift a loop of it far enough away to dig below. One of the men – called Jonathan Jones – had been reluctant to deal with the cable lest it should be live, but, in so far as he thought about it at all Matthew assumed that nothing electrically alive could still exist in this town.

Matthew wasn't reasoning much about anything. The loss of Nadine stood across his mind. But somehow that was fuelling his determination to rescue the survivors. The physical shock to himself had not yet filtered through. He did not feel the pain in his hands or his arm. One of his feet was also bleeding where he had caught it climbing over masonry.

He and Jones and Lavalle, a Frenchman, now proceeded to lift a desk, which might have been the reception desk, but it was too heavy even for three of them. So Lavalle and he began with a pick and a hammer to break it up. Once it had been splintered they could lever pieces off it.

When this was done they could reach the rubble below. Jones went down first and began to shovel the stuff away, cautiously lest he should come upon someone buried in it. After a few minutes he stopped and knelt down.

‘I can hear a voice,' he said. ‘A woman. I think she's French.'

Matthew went over into a corner and vomited. He knew it was not
his
Frenchwoman and the thought turned his stomach.

A great red sun was rising over the mountains, lighting up the heavy clouds that still lingered. It was going to be another boiling hot day.

‘
ça va?
' said Lavalle, coming up to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘'Ow are you?'

‘
ça va.
' Matthew returned to his task. Jones had gone another foot down and was pulling at a pile of bigger stones. As he got them away Matthew could hear a faint mewing cry, like a cat. They worked their way along in the direction of the call, and Matthew came on the wooden end of a bed. He reached under it and found a hand.

‘
Sauvez-moi!
' said a frail voice. ‘
Je me suis ensevelie.
'

He pulled gently, but the hand could not come. ‘Wait!' he called. ‘Lie still. We'll help you.' He turned round. ‘Have to get all this stuff off first.'

A few more people were about now: some ragged children, a group of native women.

Matthew stared up at some overhanging girders. ‘ Take care. This lot mustn't fall. Is there another spade?'

A man whose name he didn't know and who had been sitting with his arm round his wife got up and went over to the shattered pool, came back with a large children's spade for use on the beach. Jones was about to reject it, but Matthew seized it. ‘It will do.'

They returned to the ruins. While Lavalle used the heavy shovel and Jones pulled at the masonry, Matthew used the small shovel to scrape and scratch at the loose stuff around the hand. Then on his knees he began to pull and scrape. A dark frizzy head. It was Vicky Reynard.

Lee and Letty lay together in the dark on the same bed. Two legs of the bed were broken, and the mattress was aslant, so that they lay with their feet against the bottom board of the bed to stop the tendency to slip down. Four feet above their heads the great girder had jammed itself, protecting them from a massive accumulation of floorboards, furniture, coping stones, carpets, washbasins and other things waiting to fall. They had some space around them, narrow but just enough to move a foot here and there. The air was full of dust and no light came.

They had found the stump of a candle in one of the crushed drawers of the dressing table. All the hotel bedrooms were so provided in case of a normal electrical failure. But so far they had economized, for it would not burn more than two hours. They had tried knocking and whistling and shouting, but without result. Once they heard an explosion, and then a vessel hooting out at sea.

As they lay there Lee could feel the warm blood dripping on to his hand.

‘We've got to do something about that,' he said, sitting up.

‘This is nothing. I am using a pad to stop it … What time is it?'

He flicked on Letty's torch. ‘Just after three o'clock.'

While the torch was on he looked around for some level place where if necessary one could put the candle. There was a piece of the dressing table, just a projection. He slithered a foot or so, took the candle out of his pocket and lit it with one of his precious matches. The flame flickered and lost hope and then gained it again and lit up their prison. Letty was half lying, half standing on the mattress, holding a folded nightdress to her head. The nightdress was already heavy with blood.

‘Let me see.'

As the flame steadied he eased the nightdress away and stared at the wound. A big flap of hair and skin, about five inches long, had been part removed by a glancing blow which had left the skin loose and the wound raw. Blood was oozing.