The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

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

  “Out,” Braithwaite said.

  Smith stood up. “Sir,” he said.

  “And, Smith,” Braithwaite said. “If I hear of you bothering Colonel Pridiyathorn or the Germans or anybody else with any of this nonsense, after our little attitude meeting here today, I will have your guts for garters. Before I have your body shipped back to France. Or London. Or wherever. Understood?”

  Smith did not intend to immediately ignore Braithwaite’s orders, but he had to pass the German DVI section on the way back to his desk. Three of the team were there, in their identical spotless white golf shirts, two standing, one sitting, and all intently studying what looked like a series of numerical DNA data on a laptop computer screen. Smith knew one of them by name, Peter Hamel, a bearded Landeskriminalamt officer from a small city in some northern German state. The other two, Smith had seen almost every day but had not got to know. Hamel looked up, grinning as Smith walked by. “Professor Smith, Professor Smith,” Hamel called out, nudging one of his colleagues with an elbow. “Have you located by any chance the missing Deutschland file?”

  Smith had approached Hamel when he first started trying to locate the file. Hamel, however, had been interested only insofar as the missing person in question had a tattoo that almost certainly made him a German national.

  “Have you?” Smith said.

  “Not our responsibility, Professor,” Hamel said. His hand wandered as it always did to the bad comb-over he used, ineffectively, to cover his sunburned balding pate. “We are models of German efficiency in this section. We are not prone to, how shall I say, file loss.”

  Hamel’s colleagues chuckled. Smith looked over his shoulder, hoping Braithwaite would not see him with the German team so soon after their meeting. I am becoming paranoid, Smith thought.

  “Or erection loss,” one of the other Germans said. All three of them laughed extravagantly.

  “Did you lose anything else lately with your little Spanish sweetheart, Professor?” Hamel said. “She would be a challenge for someone of your age, I would imagine. Lose anything else lately, Professor?”

  “Send her over to the German section if you feel you need assistance in this regard, Herr Professor,” said a German with the name “Krupp” embroidered on his team shirt. “We can be of assistance in this regard, with a lovely little woman like this.”

  “Krupp,” Smith said. “I would have thought you and your team would be more concerned that a file probably pertaining to an unidentified German body has gone missing.”

  “We are most concerned, Herr Professor,” Krupp said. “It is a most unfortunate matter. We have in fact informed our team leader about this and you will be happy to know that another pathological examination of this body has been deemed appropriate.”

  “Simple,” Hamel said. “A file is lost by Interpol and we Germans will compile a new one.

  Simple.”

  Smith stood silently for a moment, resisting the urge to argue with them or to repeat his concerns. He turned away and walked back toward his section, saying nothing.

  “Lose anything else lately, Herr Professor?” Krupp called out after him. “Any other difficulties of a more intimate nature you wish to discuss with your colleagues?”

  That night, Smith lay awake for a long time after he and Conchi had made love. She was staying overnight at his hotel more frequently now. He wondered where all of this business with Conchi might lead. Nowhere, he thought. Nowhere. He wondered whether Fiona was lying beside someone in their cramped bedroom back in London. She had not called him or emailed him at all during his time in Phuket. He sent her occasional emails with news, for form’s sake.

  Conchi slept soundly, face down, uncovered from the waist up. Her bare back moved up and down rhythmically as she dreamed. Smith lay on his back with a hand behind his head on the pillow. His head was spinning a little from the Mekong whisky they had drunk after dinner. His head was spinning as he analyzed his encounter with Braithwaite and tried to decide what, if any, his next steps should be.

  While they were eating dinner at his small table, Conchi had said again, as Zalm had done many times, as Braithwaite had warned him so forcefully, to simply let it go.

  “Jonah, Jonah, Jonah, relax,” Conchi said.

  “Why do you want to identify this one body so much?”

  “It’s what I do, Conchi. I find out who people are.”

  “You make too much of one thing.”

  “I know. I do. That’s how I am, I suppose,” he said.

  “Yes, Jonah. Good boy. You see this about yourself,” she said.

  “But you love me anyway, correct?” he said.

  “For now.”

  “For now, yes,” Conchi said, smiling at him over her tiny glass of Mekong.

  Sometime after Smith at last fell asleep that night, very late, someone pounded ferociously on the hotel room door. He woke with a start; Conchi woke with a start. He heard shouts from the other side of the door. It sounded like someone shouting in German.

  “Jonah, what is this now?” Conchi said, sitting up and pulling a sheet to her shoulders. She was dazed by sleep and the sudden awakening. “Who is this in the middle of the night?”

  She seemed truly frightened. Smith got up and wrapped himself in a towel. The pounding at the door continued. It was definitely someone speaking German, cursing and grumbling it seemed, in German. He heard his name called out as well. He looked through the peephole of the door. “Who is it, Jonah, at this time of the night?” Conchi called out from the bedroom.

  Smith recognized who it was. It was Becker, a pathologist Smith knew by sight. A civilian who had come out to help the German DVI team with the identification effort. Becker was older by far than most of the other pathologists who had gathered in Phuket—in his late fifties or early sixties. Smith had heard it said that he was one of the most senior and respected pathologists at Frankfurt’s main military hospital.

  Smith opened the door. Becker stood swaying slightly in the corridor, an angry bulldog of a man— small, muscular despite his age and possibly dangerous when aroused. He held in one hand a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky and an unlit pipe. He had food crumbs in his tightly trimmed grey beard. A pair of wire spectacles was perched precariously on his shining bald pate.

  “At last you open your fucking door to me, like a man,” Becker said. “I will come in now.”

  “No, just a minute. No,” Smith said. “What’s all this about?”

  He stood firmly in the door frame, blocking Becker’s way.

  “I will come in to this apartment,” Becker shouted.

  “Who is it, Jonah?” Conchi called from the bedroom.

  “What do you want, Becker?” Smith said.

  “It is what you want, that is what I have come to discuss man to man with you, you British scheissker bastard. It is what you want,” Becker said, swaying slightly.

  “What do you mean, for heaven’s sake,” Smith said.

  “You know exactly well what I mean, scheissker bastard,” Becker said. “I am here to discuss your plot to discredit me and my team and my country. You want to make us all look like imbeciles.”

  “What are you talking about?” Smith said.

  “You know, British bastard, what I am talking about,” Becker shouted. “You know you have spread lies, for what reason I cannot imagine, about me personally and my colleagues, with the commanders. And maybe now the press. Is that next, British bastard?”

  “Becker, be quiet, be quiet. It’s late, people are sleeping.”

  “Too bad, too bad, too bad. I will wake them all up to tell them what you the bastard have done.

  You are spreading lies about me and that file, you will stop this immediately. Immediately you must stop this campaign against me or I swear, Smith bastard, there will be trouble. I am accustome
d to dealing with people like you; I have been a medical doctor for forty years now. Do you think some British bastard can ruin my reputation in a few days? Bastard, bastard.”

  “Becker, you’re drunk. Go home to bed.”

  “You will stop this campaign immediately, do you hear me? We Germans do not lose files, we do not tamper with files, you will stop this campaign against me immediately or there will be trouble.” “You’re drunk,” Smith said. “Go home to bed.” He closed the door firmly and attached the burglar chain. Becker stayed for a while outside the door grumbling in German and hurling accusations. Eventually, Smith heard him moving away from the door and the corridor fell silent.

  Smith and his Spanish girlfriend watched from their balcony on the sixth floor as Becker came out of the hotel. Conchi had wrapped herself in a sheet. They watched as the aging pathologist strode purposefully out from under the driveway awning and straight to a white Toyota in the parking area. Few of the international DVI staff ever drove cars in Phuket. Almost everyone used local minibuses or taxis or they were ferried around in Thai police vehicles or walked or rode bikes.

  Becker did not look up. He strode quickly to the car, no longer swaying, no longer carrying a bottle. He reached into his pocket for car keys, opened the driver’s door and got in without hesitation or difficulty. He started the engine, waited a moment and drove off slowly, signalling a left turn as he exited the hotel grounds.

  “Is that him?” Conchi said.

  “Yes,” Smith said.

  “Are you sure he was drunk?” Smith watched as Becker’s car lights disappeared in the darkness.

  “The good doctor sobers up very quickly indeed,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  Into the belly of this beast came Frank Delaney, information gatherer. This is how he preferred to think of himself nowadays. A simple gatherer of information. How he eventually used the information gathered, and on whose behalf, depended very much on circumstances. He had grown comfortable with such professional and moral ambiguities.

  The last time Delaney had gathered information in Thailand was in early 2001. The ambiguities of that little misadventure almost got him killed by the Burmese military and had almost got Kate Hunter killed, just at the stage in their on-again, offagain relationship when he was finally letting down the last of his defences. He had neither expected nor wanted to be back in Thailand so soon.

  Like most of his journalistic and spying assignments in recent years, the Phuket business came to him by accident, through no particular inclination of his own. Usually these things started because someone had an unanswered question. Sometimes it was an ordinary person, sometimes an editor, sometimes it was a spy, often it was Canada’s national spy service itself asking, more or less officially, for assistance. In all cases, people with questions were attracted to Delaney because it was his special talent to find answers on behalf of others.

  If he was lucky—and Delaney had no illusions anymore about how much his journalistic and other information-gathering successes had to do with luck—he found answers to questions that were far bigger than the players initially realized.

  Delaney was in Phuket for International Geographic magazine, his main outlet for freelance stories and income at this stage of his erratic career. He had burned almost as many media bridges in Canada as there were left to burn. The bridge to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was smouldering, if no longer in full flame. The Thailand and Burma business of 2001 had cost him his columnist’s job at the Montreal Tribune, and his sometime handlers at CSIS had shunned him for almost a year afterward, ostensibly because he had ignored their orders not to publish what he found out about a bizarre, ill-fated plot to kidnap Burma’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

  But International Geographic, based in Washington and therefore comfortably removed from Canadian media and spy service machinations, had a long history of taking on people like himself with a lot of experience in trouble spots around the world and with few family or other ties to prevent them from accepting assignments that required week after week on the road. The magazine paid exceptionally well, did not quibble about expenses, always provided Delaney with the best photographers and gave him a very good spread when he was actually ready with a story. This time, they had told him to take as long as he needed to produce the definitive piece about the international disaster victim identification operation after the tsunami.

  Delaney had been on the story now for almost six weeks. He had travelled to Indonesia to have a look at what was going on there after the waves crashed through Banda Aceh. In that case, once the authorities assured themselves there were few, if any, Western victims, they simply began piling bodies in mass graves and refusing most offers of international DVI assistance. Delaney had subsequently been to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, badly hit, yes, but not like Thailand. Now he was in Phuket to report on the biggest, and most politicized, of all the postdisaster operations in the affected region.

  Delaney first encountered Jonah Smith, appropriately enough, at a brief funeral ceremony near the TTVI mortuary compound, with its long rows of refrigerated shipping containers crammed with bodies. Smith was standing beside him under an awning in the hot breeze, watching a profusely sweating priest in white robes reading prayers in Swedish and leading shell-shocked relatives of the dead in mournful Nordic hymns as they stood before five coffins, each draped with their country’s flag.

  Whenever bodies of foreign nationals were officially identified in Phuket, they were placed in simple wooden coffins, appropriate flags were obtained, religious officials summoned and send-off ceremonies hastily arranged. Casually dressed police officers from the international teams were pressed into service as pallbearers.

  This time, five Toyota station wagons in various colours waited to transport coffins to the airport for the long flight home to Stockholm. The Thai drivers stood to one side under the meagre shade of a palm tree, smoking cigarettes. The tall thin man Delaney would soon come to know as Jonah Smith watched the ceremony solemnly, polishing his spectacles with the end of his Hawaiian-style shirt while family members wept tears of sorrow and relief. Delaney’s photographer, a young pony-tailed American freelancer named Tim Bishop, snapped pictures with a telephoto lens from a discreet distance away.

  “Family?” Delaney asked.

  “Police,” Smith said, putting his glasses back on.

  “DVI?”

  “Yes. I’m a fingerprint man.” They watched together as the pallbearers loaded Toyotas with the dead. A middle-aged couple in immaculate white resort wear clasped each other tightly as the coffin nearest them was lifted into one of the cars. Delaney scribbled a few words in his notebook “Reporter?” Smith asked.

  Delaney felt the familiar pang of ambivalence, and of caution, when someone asked that question now. Yes, he thought. Usually. Whenever I am not renting out my services to spies.

  “Yes,” he said to Smith. “Don’t be alarmed.”

  “I’d be out here, too, if I worked for a newspaper and not for the police,” Smith said.

  “I’m with International Geographic magazine. For this story, anyway. . . . Frank Delaney.” He extended his hand. Smith shook it. “Jonah Smith.”

  “British,” Delaney said. “Right? Scotland Yard?”

  “Yes. But living in France. I’m working for Interpol now.”

  “Ah, Interpol,” Delaney said. “Lots of your guys out here.” “Yes,” Smith said.

  They watched as the hearses headed out in convoy toward the airport. The couple in white did not move. They just stood gazing out wistfully until all the cars had disappeared. They still did not unclasp their arms from around each other’s shoulders. The priest approached them and said something softly in Swedish. Still the couple did not move.

  “There is a lady, from Norway,” Smith said as they watched the grieving Swedes. “She has been waiting here ever since Christmas for a
chance to see her daughter off like this. She hangs around the management centre in town and asks every copper who comes out why they haven’t found her little girl. Every day. Just about every day, for three months.”

  “And will you be able to find the girl?”

  “She may already be found,” Smith said.

  “Charlotte is her name. The hard job is picking her out from among all the bodies in the containers over there behind that fence. The way things are going.”

  Delaney wasn’t sure what Smith meant by that last remark, although it would become all too clear in the days to come. Nor could Delaney at that early stage accurately read everything in the dark expression that suddenly came over Smith’s face. It showed sadness, resignation, weariness; perhaps frustration, perhaps even anger. Delaney had seen a range of emotions displayed in the aftermath of the tsunami, had dutifully scribbled his observations about these in his reporter’s notebook. But this was something different.

  Delaney met Bishop at the end of each day for a debrief and to look at photos and plan the next day’s reporting. Bishop was sitting in the bar of the Metropole Hotel, where most of the international media stayed when they came in for the tsunami story. As Delaney arrived, a BBC TV crew was heading out through the revolving glass doors, fumbling with cameras and microphones and aluminum equipment cases. They were doing up a big documentary report, it was said, with carte blanche access to all areas. The word in the hotel bar was that the UK government, very keen to get the word out that it was doing all it could to find British bodies, had leaned hard on the British DVI commander to play ball with the BBC.

  Bishop was not like most of the photojournalists Delaney had worked with in war zones and disaster zones for more than two decades. Bishop was 31, and of a new breed—healthy, clean-living, welladjusted, compulsive only about the work. He was a vegetarian and neither drank nor smoked. He jogged each morning no matter where he was on assignment, except if someone was likely to shoot at him while he ran. He spent almost all of his time on the road, working for any magazine or newspaper or news agency that wanted pictures. Delaney knew that Bishop kept a small apartment somewhere in a rundown part of Paris but was rarely there. He was looking at photos on his Macintosh laptop when Delaney came into the freezing air conditioning of the hotel bar.