Читать книгу City of Sins - Daniel Blake - Страница 6

The sea ran back down the beach.

Franco Patrese felt the warm sand between his toes and smiled. There might be better places to be in the world right now, but none sprang to mind. It was sunny and hot, he’d spent the last six nights with an English girl who had the dirtiest laugh and nicest smell of anyone he’d ever met, and the most strenuous task he faced today was sorting out the precise sequence of swimming, sunbathing, lunch, beer and sex.

Exactly two weeks ago, Patrese had sat in a Pittsburgh hospital room and listened to a murderer’s confession. It had been the culmination of a case which had consumed him for months and taken with it much of his faith in human nature. Exhausted and traumatized, he’d searched online for last-minute holidays, and ended up among the palm trees here in Khao Lak.

The first week had been an open-water diving course – a refresher course, in Patrese’s case, as he’d done a lot of diving in his youth but hadn’t been for a few years now. It was there that he’d met Katie, the English girl currently asleep in his beachfront hotel room. They’d dived to reefs and wrecks, swum with Technicolor rainbows of marine life: cube boxfish dotted in yellow and black, nudibranches of solar orange, shrimp banded in Old Glory red and white.

Now Patrese had another week in which to do the square root of nothing. For the first time in months, perhaps longer, he felt – well, not exactly happy, given everything which had happened back in Pittsburgh, but certainly carefree. Tension was leaching like toxins from his body with every day that passed.

He kept walking toward the sea, waiting for the next wave to roll up the sand and lap round his ankles like the licking of an eager puppy.

The water continued to retreat, almost as though it were playing a game with him. Through one wave cycle, then another, and still it receded.

Patrese’s brain was so firmly in neutral that it took him a few moments to realize how unusual this was.

In the shallows, swimmers laughed in amazement as the water drained around them. Tourist canoes were left stranded on ropes suddenly slack; beach vendors picked up fish writhing on the sand. Patrese heard questioning voices, saw shoulders shrugged. No one had ever seen such a thing, it seemed.

He had.

A Discovery Channel program, he thought, or maybe National Geographic. They’d reconstructed a historic earthquake – Lisbon, that was it, sometime in the eighteenth century – with CGI effects, talking heads, and a narrator whose voice had been set firmly to ‘doom’. The program had shown many of Lisbon’s residents fleeing to the waterfront to escape fires and falling debris in the city center. From the docks, they’d seen the sea recede so far and fast that it had exposed all the cargo lost and wrecks forgotten over the centuries.

And after that …

‘Tsunami!’ Patrese shouted. ‘Tsunami!’

A couple of people looked curiously at him. Perhaps they thought he was calling for a lost dog. A lobster-colored Englishman in a black-and-white soccer shirt clapped and began to sing, ‘Toon Army! Toon Army!’

A posse of Germans were twenty yards away. Patrese ran over to them.

‘Move! You’ve got to move!’

‘Hey!’ One of the Germans clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Chill out, man.’

‘There’s a tsunami coming!’

‘Tsunami?’

‘Tidal wave.’

The Germans looked out at the ocean. The water was a carpet of azure as far as they could see.

‘I don’t see no tidal wave,’ said the shoulder clapper.

They all looked at Patrese with a sort of benevolent wariness, clearly bracketing him as slightly demented but probably harmless.

‘It’s coming, I tell you,’ Patrese insisted.

‘Whatever you’re on, man, can you give me some?’

‘Please leave us alone now,’ said one of the German women.

Patrese opened his mouth to say something else, but the Germans were already turning away from him. He kept moving, telling everyone he could find: leave the beach, go inland, get somewhere high. Some people packed up their stuff without a word and did what he said. Some ignored him or feigned incomprehension. Some, the smart ones, took off to other parts of the beach and began to spread the word.

A white crescent on the horizon now, awesome in its grace and beauty. For a moment even Patrese stood spellbound, watching as the crescent began to grow.

Then he ran.

Behind him, the tsunami reared up, an angry cobra of seawater. It flipped a fishing boat over and swallowed it whole. Urgent voices round Patrese, a dozen different languages and all saying the same thing: Move, run, keep going.

Katie was standing at the entrance to the hotel, wearing one of Patrese’s T-shirts over her bikini. Her hair was tousled, and her eyes were still bleary with sleep.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said.

Patrese grabbed her without breaking stride. ‘Move. Come with me.’

‘Franco, what the fuck …?’

‘Just do it!’ He had to shout to be heard above the roaring.

The tsunami smashed through the swimmers who hadn’t managed to get ashore in time and raced up the beach with murderous intent. It was every monster from every nightmare bundled together and made real; surging into the hotel, devouring whole rooms in seconds, tearing husbands from wives and children from parents.

Water all around Patrese and in him, holding him up and dragging him down. Water does not strive. It flows in the places men reject. Chest and spine pressed vice tight and harder still, a balloon expanding from within. Bubbles around his head and ringing beyond heart thumps in his ears; air, life itself, scurrying away into mocking oblivion. The camera’s aperture of consciousness closing in, light shrinking from the edges, dim through flashes of jagged crystals. Thoughts slowing, panic receding, resignation, acceptance, dulled contentment, blue gray flowing around, sounds gone, and this is how it ends, this is it, just let go and slide away, like falling about in a green field in early summer.

Then suddenly the water went out and the air came in; coughing, spluttering, frenzied inhaling, man’s reflex to survive. Patrese opened his eyes and saw that the tsunami was gone, pulling itself back out of the hotel and down the beach. Bodies span like sticks in the surge. Patrese felt a wall at each shoulder, and realized he’d been pinned in a corner, facing away from the beach. Blind chance. Anywhere else in the room, he’d have been swept straight back out to sea.

From the dining room upstairs came voices, giddy and shrill with relief. Patrese climbed slime-slippery steps and looked around the room. Two dozen people, he reckoned: the quick ones, the lucky ones.

Katie wasn’t among them.