Tremor (28 page)

Suddenly he felt the rope behind him go slack, and he could not see his wife.

‘Ann!' he called, peering into the still water of the lake. ‘Ann! Where are you? Ann!'

A hand was stroking his forehead and he woke.

‘Not Ann,' Letty said. ‘Not Ann. Only Letty.'

‘Oh, Christ,' he muttered through parched lips. ‘I was dreaming …'

‘Never mind, Lee. Go back to dreaming. Perhaps this is what is left for us.'

He struggled fitfully to stir himself. ‘How are you?'

‘It is not good now, is it. We must face what we have to face.'

‘I have been digging.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘Digging before dreaming. Equally futile.'

He was lapsing into sleep again, a sort of sleep which was not far from loss of consciousness. Suddenly, though unhurt, because of his age he was becoming the weaker of the two.

Letty held his hand, looked at the broken fingernails, and dried blood.

She said: ‘Sometimes I have not much wanted to live. When my brother died. And then again later once or twice … But now I do not think I want to die.'

Matthew looked at the passport. It was Johnny Frazier's photograph, but an entirely different name. Henri Delaware. Born in Canada. Aged thirty-six. The photograph stared guilelessly out of the passport. How could the doctor have made such a mistake?
Were
they all that different to look at, Matthew Morris and Johnny Frazier? They were both tall, dark, Frazier was thinner and older, but in the half-light the mistake could have been made. Anyway, finding the passport in Matthew's pocket, the doctor no doubt had jumped to the inevitable conclusion.

Matthew felt in his pocket for the few other bits of paper he had picked up from beside Frazier's body. There were provisional reservations for a berth on two ships: the
Merrimac
, leaving on Tuesday the 1st of March and the
Vesteraaven
on Friday the 4th, both in the name of Henri Delaware. M. Delaware, alas, would not be confirming either. What
had
been Frazier's game? No doubt the answer lay in the case he had carried around with him so zealously.

One ship was bound for Rio, the other was some sort of Scandinavian cruise ship. How could he have intended taking two ships?
Was
there such a person as Henri Delaware after all and did Frazier himself intend to take the other vessel? Then how explain the puzzle of Frazier's face in Delaware's passport? The document looked genuine enough.

The other thing he had picked up off the bed was a small pocket wallet. It contained money: 500 French francs, 1000 Moroccan dirhams, £40 in English fivers, a driving licence in the name of John Tournelle Frazier.

And a cutting from an English newspaper, the paper being of the flimsy quality used for air editions.

T
he 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.

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.

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.