Tremor (29 page)

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!'

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.

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 Gaston 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.'

Laura and Vicky continued to see each other once a year, but after her marriage to the doctor Vicky always insisted on coming to Paris to meet her old friend. Laura understood the reason and raised no objection: after all, it was Vicky who had laid the golden egg.

The new Mme Badoit never showed any further interest in camels.

In late April 1960 three men meet in a spacious Georgian house near the top of Hampstead village.

Mr Artemis is in his usual discreet charcoal grey, a gold watch-chain dangles in old-fashioned elegance across an expanse of stomach. The big man sitting opposite him is in a blue suit shiny with wear. He has come in on two sticks. The third man is also big, though less big; he is in a thick red jumper caught at the waist by a black belt. He is wearing corduroy trousers and tennis shoes.

‘We know Johnny's dead,' Big Smith says. ‘That's for certain. I seen his corpse. I was lying there waiting for the ambulance to take me away and they brought him out – him and another bloke.'

‘You told us this,' Mr Artemis says. ‘Did he have nothing with him? A bag or a case or even a mackintosh?'

‘It's not likely they'd bring anything out with him, is it? They was just bringing out the dead and the wounded. Anyway I couldn't see nothing. I wasn't feeling in the best of health myself. Did you ever have two legs broke?'

‘Did you know the man they brought out with him?' Rooney asks.

‘Nah. Except that he was an A-rab.'

Mr Artemis licks his blood blister. ‘I found out about him. My friend Digby Ephraim, who lives in Tangier. He went down for me last month, asked around. The Arab was a man called Ardrossi, Benjamin Ardrossi, worked in the casino. Maybe he was Johnny's contact. Anyway, Ardrossi's dead, so's his family. My friend Digby says all records have been destroyed. Makes life difficult.'

‘I reckon. Not surprised,' says Smith.

‘We don't know if Johnny parted with the slush to someone before the quake,' says Joe Rooney, ‘whether this Andross – whatever it is – was negotiating or what.'

‘Johnny'd been in Agadir for two days and a half. But I reckon he wouldn't let go of the stuff easy. That case could still be buried among the ruins.'

‘I reckon.'

There is a pause.

Mr Artemis shifts his stomach. ‘ We have to keep looking. Keep asking. You never know.'

‘One thing,' Big Smith says. ‘I'm not going back to that fricking city, no, not for all the tea in China. D'ye ever see a man crushed, the way Greg was crushed? He was like a pancake – blood spurted everywhere – and jelly and entrails – you'd never believe what's inside a man. Why—'

‘Enough,' says Mr Artemis. ‘That's quite enough. I realize you've been through a very unpleasant ordeal. But it's necessary still to try to keep track of things.'

‘Ask Rooney,' Big Smith says. ‘Let Joe have a go!'

Joe grunts. ‘How much we got, boss? I mean here. All the stuff Johnny left behind. It must be worth a tidy bit. And we've two less to share it with.'

Mr Artemis looks cautious. ‘Oh, fair. Oh, fair. It is taking time and expense to negotiate. Johnny took the easy stuff. But it's in process …'

‘How much?' demands Rooney.

‘Er – can't say yet. It's still in process. A few thousand pounds each. Poor reward for all the effort, but some nevertheless.'

‘Hm,' says Joe. ‘So we got to think of something else soon.'

Letty married Lee on the 19th of October, 1960.

The two divorces had gone through without complications, but he had taken much longer than she did to recover from the entombment. Indeed for a while he seemed to be suffering from a poison of the blood not dissimilar from that slowly killing Estrella Thibault. But towards the end of the summer he regained his health, and psychologically the prospect of his remarriage was a powerful boost.

Letty's hair grew quickly over the ugly scar left by the amateur stitchings, but for the rest of her life she would not be able to part her hair on the right side. Perhaps the tragedy of Agadir had been a crucible in which her reservations about marrying Lee had finally melted. Or conceivably it had happened on the Saturday night they had spent together before the earthquake. He strongly chose to believe that. When he came out of hospital for the second time in September, feeling recovered, it was not so much that she submitted to him as that she welcomed him with a degree of warmth she had not begun to show before.

On the 28th of October of that year Letty wrote to Ann.

Dearest Ann,

Well, it has happened, just as you suggested it might, and schemed it might, all those many, many months ago! I must refuse to believe it! Do you know, I held nothing but scorn for your idea, because, after Carl, I never wanted another man ever to
touch
me again. Ever. Nor was I in the least attracted to Lee – not in that way, though I thought him a worthy man you did ill to desert.

Well, we are married last week. Once or twice during this ceremony my blood turns to water as I think: What if Ann comes back right now and walks into this ceremony and says, ‘I have changed my mind, I am tired of New Zealand and I wish to come back, and I want
him
back!' What would I have said? I will have collapsed, and my pride with me, like a pricked balloon!

We did not go away, for Lee was only just out of hospital after our ordeal in Morocco. But he
seems
well now, and I am grown ever more fond of him. I shall never take your place in his heart, but at present he seems quite fixated on me and seems to rely on me for his social life. How long will it last? He takes his bridge very seriously – much more than you ever did – and although he is not a very good player he is awfully good-mannered and appreciates everything I do right.

I do not find him dull – as I am
sure
you did not in most of your life together, isn't it so? – and dear Ann, dear wicked scheming Ann – I do not find him so unsympathetic in bed! Perhaps he has changed. Perhaps I expected too little. Certainly he has some ideas that I would not have thought of! Anyway I have found something in him that I have not known before, and it gradually obliterates the memory in me of Carl's coarseness and brutality. I can tell you it took an effort even to go near Lee in those first weeks after you had left.

Well now; well. What of the future? We plan to stay on here. I would dearly love to come out to see you, and it is in my thoughts that perhaps Lee would like to come – but I do not think he ever will because of the way the break occurred – and perhaps it is well that we should not meet. At least, not yet. After such a long interval – for he was in hospital three times – he has taken up his work again with zest and is already deep in two cases – which he brings home to me, as he used to carry them home to you; but I am much less clever than you and I can really only help by listening. He is very busy at the moment advocating the proposal of a bill in Congress which would no longer forbid a lawyer to conduct a case outside his own state. Apparently it is not a popular idea with some members of his profession.

What you tell me of your adventures in Canton – bicycle and all – fills me with no wish ever to do the same! I would have hated it and probably have fallen off my bicycle in terror! When are you returning to New Zealand? Soon, I hope. This letter will await you. Naturally you must not reply to it, for I could not dare that he should see your writing on an envelope and ask to see the contents!

Ever devoted,

Letty