The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  Conchi was not in the Spanish DVI section, so Smith walked out of the management centre alone into the steamy heat of the day. The Norwegian woman, Ingrid Stokke, was there again today, on a crumbling concrete bench under a tree, waiting for an investigator, any investigator, to come out so she could ask for a progress report in the search for her missing daughter. Today Mrs. Stokke looked very bad indeed.

  “Officer Smith, Officer Smith, one moment please,” she said, getting up quickly from her bench.

  She looked worse each time Smith ran into her. She had been waiting in Phuket since the day after Christmas, when her daughter, eight years old, had been washed out to sea among hundreds of other victims from the beach near their hotel. Her eleven-year-old son had been badly injured but found alive. Mrs. Stokke’s husband had flown back to Oslo with the boy for the urgent surgery that was needed in a properly equipped European hospital. She had stayed on, and was slowly going insane with anxiety and grief and regret.

  “Mrs. Stokke, are you all right?” Smith said.

  “What news, Officer Smith? Is there news for me today?” she said.

  “None that I know of today, Mrs. Stokke,” he said. “I can check for you if you like.”

  It is what all the DVI people had learned to say to Mrs. Stokke each day when she accosted them, asking for news. Identification of the children’s bodies, especially the very young, was difficult. Their small hands were often in very bad condition due to bloating and skin slippage, and good fingerprints could not be taken easily. Their teeth contained relatively few fillings and dental X-rays did not help much, if they existed for the missing children at all.

  In any case, Smith and others were now convinced that Charlotte Stokke’s body had been washed far out to sea. The child could have ended up anywhere. There were reports that the bodies of some Phuket victims were now washing up on beaches in the Maldives, thousands of kilometres away.

  “Have any new bodies been located, Officer Smith?” Mrs. Stokke asked.

  “A few, over the past couple of days,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Adults. No children, I’m afraid.”

  Mrs. Stokke began to cry softly, as she usually did. She took off her small wire-rimmed glasses and stood crying in the busy street, her head hanging between her bare sunburned shoulders. Her floral cotton tank top was soiled and creased. Smith knew she needed grief counselling in a bad way. He had gently suggested to her many times that she should speak to some of the European counsellors who had come to Thailand to help. He was never sure she had taken his advice.

  “Perhaps you should go back to your hotel to rest,” Smith said. “Rest is important at times like this.”

  Rest is important. It is what he had said many times to Fiona after she came back from the hospital when their baby had died. Fiona had cried often in those days, too. Like Mrs. Stokke, her eyes had had the same blank, faraway look of the grief-stricken, of those who have faced tragedy and cannot get tragedy out of their minds.

  Fiona carried their dead baby inside her for almost three months. The doctors had insisted on allowing the pregnancy to go to term even though the fetus, their tiny daughter, was dead. Smith never understood why doctors would inflict such torture on a woman. The torture had slowly broken Fiona’s spirit, it had changed her fundamentally. It changed their marriage fundamentally. It changed everything.

  Smith himself, for years afterward, would think endlessly about his dead daughter. He would fantasize about what she might have looked like as she grew up, what sort of person she might have become. He wondered if she would have been pretty and smart and happy. He even wondered about her hands and fingers. He fantasized, or used to, about what sort of fingerprints were developing inside the womb when she died. Even at the early stages of fetal development, unborn babies have faint prints on their tiny fingertips. Smith used to think for hours about his daughter’s tiny fingers.

  For some reason, today, he said to Mrs.

  Stokke: “I lost a daughter once. My wife and I know a little about how you must feel.”

  Mrs. Stokke looked up at him through tearfilled eyes, too sad to share anyone else’s grief. She ignored what he had said.

  “I need to see my Charlotte,” she said. “Even if it is just her body. I can’t just leave her out in the sea. I need to see her body. At least this.”

  Smith had never seen his dead daughter’s body. He was never sure exactly what the hospital did with the fetus after Fiona’s body had at last expelled it. There had been no postmortem identification process required in that particular disaster scene.

  “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Stokke. I’m sure we will find your daughter for you eventually,” Smith said.

  “But she will be dead,” Mrs. Stokke said. Smith paused. “Yes,” he said. “After all these weeks, I’m sorry to say you will have to expect she will be dead.”

  “That is what Sergeant Vollebaek says to me all the time,” she said.

  Magne Vollebaek was a Norwegian missing persons detective who came out to Phuket periodically with antemortem information from Oslo about little Charlotte Stokke, and others. He had made it his mission in life, it seemed, to help the Stokke family as much as he could, to speed the identification of their daughter as much as he could. Smith had spoken to him many times, about various AM finger marks Vollebaek had come up with so far for the missing girl. None had matched any of the children’s bodies at the mortuary site. And now there weren’t many children’s bodies left at the site.

  “Sergeant Vollebaek is a very good policeman,” Smith said. “He’s doing all he can. We’re all trying to help you.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I am grateful for what you all do here.”

  “You should get some rest,” Smith said. “Rest is important at times like this.”

  Smith had eventually stopped saying that to his wife when their daughter went missing in the womb. Fiona could never rest after the baby died. He and Fiona were never at rest as a couple again. She blamed him somehow, Smith came to realize. In her mind, crazed with anxiety and grief and regret, Fiona came to believe that Smith had failed in some way, had failed to protect their baby in some way, had failed to advise her of some necessary precaution. It was as if she thought the wife and the unborn child of a Scotland Yard man should be automatically protected from disaster.

  Every day during the Thailand DVI operation, there was a formal meeting of representatives of all the international teams. This took place in a large meeting room in the management centre, with participants seated at a giant horseshoe of adjoining tables carefully fitted out with bright blue cloths, black microphones, fresh notepads and pens, bottles of mineral water. Behind the tables at the front sat the joint commanders and other senior Thai and international officials, under a banner designed specifically for the operation, emblazoned with the words Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Operation—TTVI and the bizarre image of a stick figure running away from a stylized killer wave.

  These meetings had become routine. They were conducted primarily in English and all went very slowly as Thai translators repeated every word for local police and officials. The spokesman for a country’s DVI team would make a report or raise a problem or an issue that needed to be discussed. The reports usually involved the need for some piece of equipment or more funds to finance the expensive identification and repatriation effort the beleaguered Thai government had been saddled with after the tsunami struck.

  Smith occasionally sat in on these meetings, had in fact acted as spokesman for the Interpol team when Brajkovic or Eberharter were away or hung over or otherwise indisposed. Today, he attended in the hope that Braithwaite or Colonel Pridiyathorn would see him afterward about his concerns.

  As he walked in to the meeting hall and took his place at a row of observers’ chairs at the side, away from the main tables, the Austrian team leader was speaking.

  “We respec
tfully request that new computer servers be obtained for the heavy volume of incoming AM data,” the Austrian representative said, leaning toward his microphone. “We believe that the current servers are without sufficient capacity for this work and that this is leading to inefficiencies. We believe that as more and more DNA profiles begin to arrive . . .”

  Braithwaite cut the Austrian off from the head table. “Noted,” he said. Braithwaite was a tough Detective Chief Superintendent from Scotland Yard, and Smith knew him well. His angular features, tiny teeth and beaklike nose made him look like a bird of prey. He had a formidable reputation in London for tenacity in major crime investigations. He had been sent out to Phuket as part of the frantic efforts by a British government under intense domestic pressure to account for all 121 of the British missing as soon as possible. Braithwaite took his Thailand assignment very seriously indeed, as if his career depended on it. It quite possibly did.

  The Austrian team leader looked aggrieved. “Noted, thank you,” Braithwaite said again. He turned to Colonel Pridiyathorn, a career Thai policeman who had been given the similarly uninviting assignment by Thailand to help coordinate, with Braithwaite, the entire DVI operation. More than four thousand drownings altogether and tourists from 35 countries missing.

  “Colonel, can you approach donor countries to see what can be done?” Braithwaite said.

  “Yes, I will see to it,” Pridiyathorn said gravely, noting the request on a yellow legal pad. His face was heavily lined. Smith doubted the colonel had been getting more than four hours’ sleep a night since December.

  Pridiyathorn wore a green Thai police uniform, complete with holstered sidearm. Braithwaite was in a generic blue policeman’s shirt, not London Metropolitan Police issue, with the added feature of special button-on “TTVI IMC Commander” insignia on the epaulettes. Thai designers had been very busy making up banners and regalia after the disaster.

  “Thank you, Austria,” Braithwaite said.

  “Other issues?”

  Smith thought for a moment of raising his hand to describe the problem of the missing Deutschland file, but did not. A face-to-face session with Braithwaite would be more effective.

  “Transport services could use a new fax machine,” said an American voice. “Ours has packed it in.”

  “Noted,” Braithwaite said, looking over to Pridiyathorn, who entered the request on his pad. “Anything else?”

  No one else in the hall raised their hand. “Good,” Braithwaite said. “Now, confirmed identifications?”

  Smith daydreamed as the various teams droned on about identifications made. After some initial mistakes in January, a proper coronial system and the Identification Board had been introduced in Phuket, with checks and double-checks and crosschecks so that all identifications were solid. As the month of April approached, no foreigner’s body left Phuket before the most senior Thai officials and the DVI commanders themselves were convinced the identification was correct.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Braithwaite of the London Metropolitan Police had one of the very few enclosed offices in the management centre. It had likely belonged to the man who ran the telephone exchange in the building years ago. The fact that it was enclosed meant that the modern air-conditioning system installed in the main working areas did not help out much in Braithwaite’s space. A small Toshiba cooling unit had been installed in the window facing onto the street, and a revolving floor fan near the door. Both hummed steadily, but Braithwaite was still suffering.

  His face was beaded with sweat and he regarded Smith contemptuously across his large red-hued wooden desk, another relic from the previous occupant. Braithwaite’s blue shirt was randomly mottled darker blue with dampness. His large malodorous cigar dribbled ash.

  “You’re not actually a sworn police officer, if I remember correctly, are you Smith? You’re a civilian, if I remember correctly,” Braithwaite said as he tried to unload cigar ash into a souvenir FBI coffee mug he kept on his desk for that purpose.

  Smith knew that if Braithwaite was playing the civilian card, the time spent that afternoon explaining his concerns about the missing file had been wasted.

  “Yes, sir. Twenty-one years this year.”

  “That long,” Braithwaite said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I suppose after all those years, civilian employees of the Met Police could be forgiven for thinking they can somehow acquire investigative skills by osmosis.”

  Braithwaite tapped his cigar, hoping Smith would take offence.

  “I’ve worked alongside police officers on a lot of difficult cases,” Smith said.

  “Have you now,” Braithwaite said, plugging his cigar back between his lips.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, let me tell you about how things are in this particular little case I have been assigned to solve,” Braithwaite said. “There is the matter of a tidal wave killing twenty thousand people all around the Indian Ocean, that big body of water a little way off Brighton Pier. As you have been working alongside sworn police officers on this particularly difficult little case, you will be aware that there are still some fifteen hundred unidentified bodies here in Phuket alone, which makes it one of the biggest forensic disaster scenes in history, along with, let’s see, Bosnia after the unpleasantness over there when Yugoslavia was falling to bits. Or, of course, that other bit of unpleasantness back in Europe, the Holocaust.”

  Smith said nothing, simply waiting for the tsunami of Braithwaite bile to recede.

  “You’re not Jewish are you, Smith? No offence intended,” Braithwaite asked with a tight smile.

  Smith said nothing.

  “I have been given the unfortunate task of overseeing along with my esteemed Thai police colleagues the whole damn identification process, from start to finish. From start to bloody finish,” Braithwaite said, gathering steam now. His cigar ash glowed red.

  “I have problems and cock-ups and catastrophes every bloody day here in this sweltering office in this godforsaken little southeast Asian country,” he said. “Every day of my bloody life now there is some major cock-up. I am not even going to begin to give you details of the problems I have running this operation, Smith, as you are not a sworn police officer. I am just going to tell you that I have no time to waste whatsoever. I have no time to talk to a civilian Scotland Yard fingerprint technician who after mislaying a file, one file out of how many, fifteen hundred or so, comes into my office on the hottest day in history and begins yammering on about some bloody conspiracy theory he has hatched over too many Singha beers at the Whale fucking Bar about how someone has taken the time, as we all have time on our hands here, to remove pages from a pathologist’s report and then to remove fingerprint evidence from that same file and then to tamper with an AFIS computer file and to then steal . . .”

  “I did not say steal, sir,” Smith said.

  “. . . and to then steal a file from under the noses of some of the most experienced police officers from, what, two dozen countries who have been foolish enough to volunteer or to be volunteered for this most thankless investigative task.” Braithwaite’s face had become very red. “I strongly believe something odd is happening with this particular file, sir,” Smith said.

  “Something odd is happening in this goddamn cubbyhole of an office, Smith,” Braithwaite said. “Too many people are coming in here to whine to me about minor problems they face in their work. If you have lost a file, or if some little Thai secretary has lost a file, that is a very, very small problem compared to the ocean of problems I am facing here each and every day, along with Colonel Pridiyathorn and some other very, very senior sworn police officers who are trying to get a big job done.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” Smith said.

  “Every identification is important.”

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean, Smith?”

 
“With respect, sir, I don’t believe we can just say ‘oh well’ when a file goes missing. Any file.”

  Braithwaite looked like he was going to spontaneously combust in the heat and in his rage.

  “Are you accusing me of saying ‘oh well’ about something, Smith?”

  “Not accusing you, sir,” Smith said.

  “Who are you accusing, exactly? And what are you accusing someone else, not me, of, exactly?”

  “I am not accusing anyone for the moment,”

  Smith said.

  “For the moment,” Braithwaite said. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I would like to get to the bottom of this if I can,” Smith said.

  Braithwaite was so incensed he stood up behind his desk and jammed his cigar into the ash mug on his desk.

  “Smith, let me be clear about this. I want you to listen very carefully to this. I want no pathetic amateur sleuthing going on during this operation, no bullshit wild goose chases over a minor clerical error. What on earth can you be thinking of? There is nothing to get to the bottom of in this, Smith. A file has been mislaid or lost. This happens in a place like this. It will turn up or it will not turn up, but I want you to cease and desist immediately with these harebrained conspiracy theories and get on with your work. I know the Secretary-General of Interpol personally. He has been out here on a visit and I know him from the old days anyway and I’m warning you, Smith, that if you persist in wasting my time and your time when you are out here in Phuket I will pick up the phone and have your ass hauled back to Lyon so fast your head will spin. I was never clear how you finagled that cushy little secondment to Interpol anyway and I can see now that it’s gone completely to your head. You’re a fingerprint technician, Smith. You’re not a police officer. You know fuck-all about investigations and I will not have you trying to get to the bottom of anything except the pile of fingerprint IDs sitting on your desk. Are we clear on this, Smith? Because I want you to be very clear on this. And I now want you to get the hell out of my office.” Smith stood up.