The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  The Henry volume sat even now in pride of place on a shelf in Smith’s living room at the Bay Hotel, alongside the Galton and the Faulds. Even if he did not consult Henry often, the book was always there as a silent testimony to the shining history of fingerprint science and of the service it had rendered to humanity in general and to Smith and his professional life in particular.

  Smith empathized entirely with the Victorian suspicion of anonymity and of uncertainty. He would happily read and re-read the various textbooks and histories of fingerprinting, and he embraced, as the British had done in colonial outposts and in England itself, the need for a swift and sure method of identifying individuals as waves of international migration and domestic movement and social change intensified in what had too rapidly become a society of strangers.

  But in the tropical society of strangers—living and dead—that was Phuket after the tsunami and the other affected countries throughout the region, and to which Smith and the other forensic experts had gravitated each for their own personal or professional reasons, there was, Smith thought as he pedalled his bike through the heat and humidity, not just tragedy but challenge, stimulation, inspiration, pleasure and, yes, sometimes even joy.

  Jonah Smith was not normally a very gregarious man, but among the transformations he had undergone in Phuket, among the changes to his previous identity, was a newfound or possibly long-forgotten pleasure in the company of friends.

  He liked now, for example, to meet his new Dutch friend, Stefan Zalm, at the Whale Bar in Phuket Town for ice cold Thai beers after both of their workdays had ended. He liked to compare notes on identifications made, technical troubles encountered, rumours heard, scandals and diplomatic machinations underway, and the various misdemeanours and misadventures of the police who had gathered in such large numbers in Phuket after the disaster.

  Zalm was at his usual place at the end of the long dark bar on that March evening, sipping Singha beer from a small sweating bottle and looking every bit the earnest young Dutchman, the earnest young Dutch dentist, that he was. His skin was still like a boy’s, his hair blond and wispy, though already receding noticeably at the sides despite his being only 35 years of age. Though finished work for the day, he still wore his white team shirt, with the flag of his country emblazoned on both shoulders.

  Zalm waved to Smith and called out to the Thai barman. “Another Singha here, Prasan, please.

  Thank you.”

  The barman, impossibly slender, implausibly feminine, came immediately with the beer, placing it before Smith as he sat down, then putting his hands together and bowing his head slightly in the wai, Thailand’s elegant sign of greeting and respect.

  “Khun Jonah, welcome once again to the Whale Bar, welcome,” the barman said in the broad tonal drawl of Thais speaking English.

  Smith raised the beer bottle in a toast. “My pleasure, Prasan. Cheers.”

  Prasan glided back down the bar to serve a group of Belgian DVI officers already shouting and red-faced despite the pre-dinner hour. Zalm, too, raised his bottle in a toast.

  “Our heroic efforts have ceased for another day,” Zalm said, taking a short sip of his beer. “You have made dozens of identifications today, Jonah, of course.”

  “Of course,” Smith said.

  “You will soon begin to tell me the entire history of the development of fingerprint technology by your Englishmen predecessors. I will grow bored by this. We will drink much more beer before I am able to stop you.”

  “Maybe not tonight, Stefan. I’ll spare you that ordeal tonight,” Smith said.

  “Perhaps, for once, it will be my turn to tell you the entire history of the development of forensic dentistry?”

  “The Case of the Matching Molars,” Smith said. “Coming to a cinema near you. Starring Dutch dentist and international film star Stefan Zalm?”

  “Not yet, my friend. Not yet.”

  “No IDs today?”

  “Today one only,” Zalm said. “We are slowing down. One elderly woman from Italy. Very badly decomposed.”

  “But not the teeth, of course. Intact as always.

  Miraculous.”

  “Exactly. Yes. Teeth intact. Always. Not like fingers. But the Italians have taken all this time to locate her dentist over there. Almost three months, if you can imagine. The dental X-rays were sitting in Milan all this time. A perfect match, it was obvious to me immediately. Two big fillings side by side right rear, she had, and some nice caps. Very nice work. Milan has good dentists.”

  “And bad systems for storing X-rays, it seems,” Smith said.

  “Exactly. Yes,” Zalm said.

  The Belgians at the end of the bar hooted and shouted and jeered. There was the sound of breaking glass. More hoots and jeers.

  “A bit early for that, even for the Belgian police,” Smith said.

  “They are only a few bodies away,” Zalm said.

  “Only a few missing Belgians left to identify and then they can go home. They are happy tonight.”

  “Bastards,” Smith said.

  “International solidarity,” Zalm said. “Fuck you, our missing countrymen have all been identified, and so we go home.”

  “Bastards,” Smith said. “If all of us did it like that . . .” “Exactly.”

  They drank in silence for a moment. “And you?” Zalm asked eventually.

  “Three today,” Smith said. “One particularly difficult one. Very bad antemortem marks from Denmark. Taken from a CD cover back there. CDs are usually good for this, as you know, and the Danish technician did his best back there but the marks were smudged badly in this instance, very badly smudged, and he only got three fingers off the cover, two of them partials. I was able to make the match, but it almost made me blind.”

  “The heroic fingerprint man,” Zalm said.

  “I suppose.”

  “The Identification Board will ask for corroboration for that one,” Zalm said. “If there is any doubt. They cannot afford any more false IDs.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Smith said quickly. “It was a perfectly good match. Fourteen points of similarity. Ridge minutiae even a police cadet could spot without a magnifying glass. There’s no doubt.”

  “Smudged AM marks, three fingers only. They will want more, the Board.”

  “Teeth,” Smith said. “Of course.”

  “Of course. Then she can go home for a nice burial.”

  “He. He, in this case.”

  “Let me look at his X-rays tomorrow,” Zalm said.

  “If there are any.”

  “Then you will have to wait until they come from Denmark.”

  “If they come.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bastard,” Smith said. “And when they come you’ll claim the identification for yourself.”

  “Of course,” Zalm said. “And for the glory of Dutch forensic dentistry.”

  The other friend Smith had made in Phuket was Concepción. Much more than a friend, in fact. For the first time in his married life, Smith had acquired a lover.

  She was Spanish, from Madrid, from a family of doctors—a civilian expert in victim identification from bones. She had spent years, literally, in Bosnia after the Yugoslav civil war left thousands of buried corpses with no names. Her work with the United Nations Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina had established her reputation in certain international circles. When the tsunami struck, she was immediately on a plane from Sarajevo.

  Smith, and all the other police gathered in Phuket, called her Conchi. She was young, 34, much younger than Smith. She was single, and beautiful in the heartstoppingly dark, glowing, smouldering way that only certain types of Spanish or Italian women can be. Smith knew a lot of the other, younger police in Phuket fancied her and he knew they wondered why she would go with a too-tall, too-thin, bespectacled British fingerprint man clearly past his pr
ime. He wondered about that sometimes, too.

  She loved him “for now” she said. “For now, for now, Jonah, that is enough, no?” she would always say, laughing, when he inquired as to her feelings for him. She seemed unperturbed that he was married, even less perturbed after he told her a little, not too much, of how it was with he and his wife.

  “And she will not come with you to lovely Lyon?” Conchi would say. “She is crazy, crazy, no?”

  On workdays, Conchi still liked to wear her sky blue UNMIBH shirt, with United Nations flags festooned, even though officially she was part of the Spanish police team in Phuket. Her years with the UN mission in Bosnia had been intense, requiring that she and other determined investigators wallow around in rubber boots in muddy farm fields or forests or barns, excavating graves and searching, like Smith in his way, for history, identities, the endings of sad life stories. But she had loved it, was proud of it, wanted people to know if it. She loved her work very much, as he did his.

  For the first time in his life, Smith could enthuse as long as he wanted to about the job he did. She would not sneer at his enthusiasms, as Fiona had learned to do. Conchi carefully examined the fingerprint books in his little apartment at the Bay Hotel, looked closely, many times at the fingerprint diagrams in the Henry text, at the many varieties of prints, at the arcane coding system with its trailings of numbers and letters, and she would sip at her beer and smile.

  “He was smart, this Henry, no?” she would say. Conchi understood the feeling one got when an identity was confirmed. They would talk about it sometimes, in his giant hotel bed after making love or sitting as they liked to do on his balcony at sunset overlooking the hilly island silhouettes in Chalong Bay.

  Smith would watch her drinking beer on his balcony. He would marvel at her lovely olive skin, far darker than his now was, even though she carefully protected herself from the sun. He would watch closely as she sipped her beer or her coffee, marvel at the ruby red lipstick stains she left on his glasses and cups, marvel at the urgency of his feelings for this young woman who loved him for now. He loved her for now, too, and, he would think ruefully, most probably for longer than that as well. But he was a man without illusions, neither about the disaster area of his own marriage nor about the possibility that Conchi could one day pull him from the debris.

  She let him take her fingerprints, late one humid night as they both sat at the dining table, inches from a revolving floor fan, sweating and suffering in the tropical heat. Smith thought Conchi looked grand in her sarong in the tropical heat, with small beads of sweat poised on her forehead, her small shoulders, her chest.

  “Fingertips slightly moist. Perfect, perfect for this work,” Smith said as he inked them on a stamp pad.

  “Oi, oi, oi, Jonah you are too rough,” she cried out as he rolled her fingertips one after another onto Bay Hotel stationery. “I am not under arrest, this is not London in a stinking police cell—you cannot abuse me in this way.”

  “Perfect, perfect,” Smith said when he examined the set of prints as they dried. “I’m the best in the business, especially with uncooperative prisoners such as yourself.”

  They peered together at her prints under a magnifying glass, on the dining table under a light abuzz with insects. Her fingertips were tiny, but full of graceful arches. Her prints were quite unlike his own.

  She peered through the examiner’s glass at his prints on their aging Scotland Yard cards, then back at her own. Back and forth, back and forth, quickly, as a good fingerprint technician would. “Not a match,” she said finally.

  “Yes,” he said. “A perfect match.”

  “No, Jonah,” she said. “Even I, a bone expert girl, can see this. Not a match.” “We shall see,” he said. “There are some definite points of similarity. Ridge minutiae. Worth further examination.”

  “The Board would not accept this identification.”

  “Corroboration required?”

  “Yes. Bones. DNA perhaps. From my marrow. Get me my little saw.”

  “No,” Smith said. “DNA no. Teeth maybe.”

  “Yes,” she said, flashing her wonderful smile full of wonderful teeth. “See, see mine now,” she said, laughing.

  Her small shoulders shook as she laughed, at his dining table in his hotel room in her sarong in the heat of a Thailand night in the aftermath of disaster. Smith’s heart pounded like a schoolboy’s. “Perfect,” he said. “Perfect.”

  Into this situation came the problem.

  Smith at first dismissed it as a simple error, an oversight, a minor clerical lapse. It was natural, he reasoned, that such errors would occur in this place, with hundreds of strangers working under difficult conditions, under intense pressure from their home countries to make identifications and repatriate citizens for burial, using different standards of police work, or of filing and classification, with the chronic lack of proper equipment and the heavy workload and the sheer number of unidentified bodies.

  It was a fact, not widely known, that in the early days after the tsunami, when grieving families and harried diplomats from all over Europe swarmed throughout the disaster zone and bodies were still lying in rows in temple courtyards or hospital parking lots in the sun, before refrigerated shipping containers had been procured to store bodies and before any semblance of a rigorous forensic system had been established and before filing systems of any coherence had been put into place, that some foreigners’ bodies had been wrongly identified and sent to the wrong countries and the wrong families and the wrong grave sites for burial.

  In these few sad cases, after the actual body of a loved one had subsequently been identified and it was clear that another body previously airlifted out of the disaster zone was in fact someone else, police and diplomats would have the heavy task of informing a family somewhere far from Phuket that the body they had buried after a tragic Christmas holiday in Thailand was not who they thought it was at all.

  Mistaken identification like this was not the problem that began, slowly at first and then with ever more intensity, to preoccupy Jonah Smith as he worked alongside his international forensic colleagues in Phuket.

  On any given day, Smith arranged his work into a series of small piles on his desk in the Information Management Centre. The cases in some of these folders he considered current, routine, not terribly difficult. These were cases in which the antemortem and postmortem data were good, clear, straightforward.

  This would usually involve a clear and complete set of AM fingerprints, possibly from government or police records in the missing person’s home country, if a particular country took fingerprints of citizens applying for certain types of employment or for certain licences and permits. Or, if certain individuals had police records or court convictions and had subsequently been reported missing in the tsunami, AM prints would also be easy to obtain.

  Then, if a body found after the tsunami yielded up good clear postmortem prints, if the effects of sun and heat and other factors had not caused bloating or skin slippage or decay before PM prints could be taken by the teams of pathologists that descended on Phuket, and if good postmortem prints could be obtained, then Smith’s job was relatively easy.

  Enter scanned images of the AM prints into the AFIS computer system, enter the scanned PM prints, run a search for possible matches, peer more closely at the various possibles the system put forward, peer even more closely at ridge minutiae and various other details and, presto, a match. Some of the easiest of such early matches of routine AM and PM fingerprints, in fact, were of convicted European pedophiles who had left their home countries to prowl Phuket for prey. The police DVI teams at the disaster scene were all too happy, when court documents and AM fingerprints for known pedophiles arrived in Phuket, to close cases for such unlamented missing persons.

  In a pile of other folders on his desk, Smith kept cases not quite so straightforward. For these, the sweating forensic pathologist
s from Sweden or Denmark or Spain or Australia working at the mortuary compound near the airport could not obtain good-quality fingerprints, even when they thrust a dead hand into boiling water to try to raise dehydrated ridges for inking, even when they entirely removed from a corpse the conical skin of decaying fingertip and slipped it onto one of their own gloved fingers to try to roll the macabre remnant onto an ink pad and obtain a usable print that way. Or perhaps police in Copenhagen or Brussels or New York or any number of other cities where ill-fated tourists had lived were not able to obtain good AM finger marks from a missing person’s criminal record, or from a CD collection back home or a photograph album or a collection of Bavarian beer mugs or animal figurines or off a neglected corner of a bathroom mirror. Perhaps the AM marks they could lift were badly smudged or only partial. Perhaps there were no such AM marks to be had at all.

  In such cases, people like Smith would have to cooperate more fully with those experts of competing forensic persuasions. With the Stefan Zalms of the world, for example. Perhaps bits of dental evidence about crowns, or fillings or missing incisors could be combined with bits of evidence from finger marks on a prized Bavarian beer mug and a poorquality mark from a finger or two on a corpse in a numbered body bag in a shipping container in a fenced compound in Phuket, Thailand. Perhaps these bits of information might yield a match that would persuade the Identification Board to officially declare a person dead, located and dead, and cleared for repatriation by air.

  Perhaps. But perhaps none of this was enough. Perhaps the pathologists would also have to saw into the femurs of the dead, perhaps they would have placed a section of thigh bone in a sealed plastic container and shipped it off to a laboratory in Sarajevo or Vienna or Tokyo for DNA profiling. Perhaps, after many weeks—for DNA profiling is tricky and expensive and often takes many weeks if it is to be done from bones—that particular profile would match a profile obtained by police at great effort and expense from sweat on a victim’s clothing in Munich or in Paris or Dublin. Or from stray hairs on a victim’s comb or dried saliva on the once-licked flap of an envelope, a letter he or she had sent while alive to a relative now desperately anxious for word that the departed had been identified.