The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  The later plane was still heavily laden with industrialists and other highly suspect individuals, or so Ackermann would have said. It was not the Pedophile Express but almost all the passengers were German middle-aged men. They wore dark suits, not Thailand tropical wear, and their assignations in Berlin or Bonn would, with very few exceptions, have been for business, not pleasures illicit or legal.

  Bonn does not have an airport of its own. Bonn-Cologne airport serves two cities, so Delaney faced a one-hour flight and then a one-hour train ride to get where he needed to go. Ackermann said that Hans Schneller would meet him at lunch hour not far from the state prosecutors’ office where he worked.

  “He will be very nervous, Francis, be patient with him,” Ackermann had said. “He is doing this under protest. I don’t know him and he owes me no favours directly. He is the son of a friend of a very close friend and he has been persuaded with great difficulty to do this and he is afraid he will lose his job and his pension and maybe even his nice wife.”

  Ackermann had refused to take time off work to go with Delaney to Bonn to look at the Heinrich autopsy report.

  “Schneller speaks English,” Ackermann said.

  “You will be there for fifteen minutes maximum.

  There will be nothing of interest in the report. He will tell you what it says and he will explain how these things work in Germany and you will get back on a plane and come back to Berlin. Why should I go down there with you?”

  The Bonn prosecutors’ offices were in Konigswinterer Strasse, not far from the polizepraesidium building. Delaney very much doubted the nervous Schneller would have agreed to meet him at all if he had actually been a junior clerk trying to take a file out of the police headquarters building. But taking a confidential file out of storage in the nearby prosecutors’ building was, apparently, less of a risk.

  Schneller had insisted the meeting be in the Hofgarten, a sprawling open area of green lawns behind the Bonn Palace. Of course it was raining and cold when Delaney arrived at the park in a taxi. Serious Germans with serious umbrellas made their way along tidy walkways. Only a small group of university students playing energetic soccer despite the rain lifted the scene somewhat.

  Schneller was a very tall, very nervous lad of about 21. Acne still plagued him, despite his having exited the teenage years. He was using a red tartan umbrella when standard German issue in this park was normally, it seemed, basic black. One of the spines of his umbrella had broken, and stuck out at an angle from the soaked red and yellow fabric.

  It was all very Cold War, Delaney told Ackermann afterward—all very cloak and dagger.

  Schneller had a leather shoulder bag. After he gravely shook Delaney’s hand he looked furtively around and then reached inside for a tan government-issue envelope with a string tie securing the flap. They did not sit Cold War–style on a park bench because these were all soaking wet. They stood together under their two umbrellas, fumbling with bags and papers as they simultaneously held up their protection against the rain.

  “You cannot take this away,” Schneller said.

  “I’m very sorry. It must stay here.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine,” Delaney said. “I just need to look at it for a few minutes.”

  Even that seemed too long for Schneller. He handed Delaney the envelope.

  “You don’t speak German at all?” he said.

  “I’m afraid not. I’m told you’ll help me with translation.”

  “Yes,” Schneller said, unhappier by the moment.

  The file contained surprisingly few papers. What was there was densely typed German text, with a variety of stamps and seals and signatures. There were also photos of a very badly charred corpse, in various shades of black and grey. The remains barely looked human at all. A disaster victim.

  Delaney scanned the first sheet of paper in the file. It was dated 27 October 2001.

  “That is the pathologist’s summary. That is probably all you will need,” Schneller said. “Can you tell me what it says?” Schneller took the paper back.

  “Basically it says the victim died in a house fire in the Bonn area on or about 8 October 2001. The pathologist sees no bullet wounds or, how do you say, head smashes or body smashes. It says the body of this victim shows no elevated levels of alcohol or other drugs except for acetylsalicylic acid, the analgesic, in perhaps unusual quantities. It is aspirin in English, yes?”

  “Yes, aspirin,” Delaney said. Perhaps Heinrich had suffered from arthritis or headache or gout.

  “This document says the victim died of smoke inhalation. The pathologist gives the exact concentration of smoke particles detected in the man’s lungs and gullet. He includes a scale and the concentration is shown to be very high. The pathologist says the cause of death was, in English you say, what, acute, very high smoke inhalation.”

  “How did they identify the body?” Delaney asked.

  Schneller looked through some other papers in the file, balancing umbrella on shoulder. Rain dripped dangerously near the confidential papers he would have to bring back to his office archives in a few minutes.

  “It says here that the man had no living relatives apparently, or none that could be found. It said that colleagues from the man’s professional life identified the body visually.”

  “That would be hard, judging from the photos,” Delaney said.

  “That is what it says here. Visual identification was arranged with colleagues. Also, he was found in a cabin belonging to Klaus Heinrich and a logical deduction was made this must be the victim.”

  “Ah, logic,” Delaney said.

  “Say again?” Schneller said.

  “Nothing.”

  “It also says here that fingerprint identification was carried out. Positive matching to Klaus Heinrich. Fourteen points of similarity in the compared prints,” Schneller said.

  That would have satisfied even Jonah Smith, Delaney thought.

  Schneller said: “Who anyway was this man you so badly need to know about?”

  “You’re too young to know this story, Hans,” Delaney said. “It’s a long story.”

  Schneller looked relieved that no answer was actually given to his question. He clearly regretted having asked.

  “Would this autopsy have been carried out by a police pathologist, Hans?” Delaney asked.

  “No, we do not have police pathologists here,” Schneller said, apparently happy to share such general information in detail. It sounded like he had memorized a lot of material for examinations he had taken or was about to take.

  “A coroner system like in the Anglo-Saxon legal zones does not actually exist here. Autopsies are not mandatory in Germany. The police generally request an autopsy if the case officer comes to the conclusion that the cause of a death is suspicious or the result of an accident. The state attorney, so to say, initiates an autopsy which is then executed by a pathologist at a hospital in the vicinity perhaps or at a medical university. It is not a police pathologist, just a doctor who is specialized in autopsies.”

  “Always the same people?” Delaney asked.

  “Normally in large districts like Bonn you have three or four who regularly do this for the police, next to their normal jobs,” Schneller said.

  Delaney took the file back from Schneller and flipped through it again despite the German words being unintelligible. He looked closely at names and signatures on various pages. One name immediately stood out: Horst Becker.

  It was the kind of break in a story that every journalist dreams of. When a missing link falls into place like this on a big story, journalists reach for the champagne. Delaney reached instead into his shoulder bag for Horst Becker’s security pass from Thailand. He left nothing important behind in hotel rooms on such assignments. Schneller watched in amazement as Delaney then clumsily balanced his umbrella on his shoulder and held the card up agains
t the signature on the pathologist’s summary report. The signatures were a perfect match.

  Becker’s bulldog face stared stonily out at them from the plastic Thai Tsunami Victim Identification badge. The card on a bright blue cord inscribed with the white letters TTVI belonged to the pathologist who had worked on Klaus Heinrich’s body in Phuket, Thailand, and also, supposedly, in Bonn, Germany, more than three years previously. This, as the Germans would undoubtedly say, was not logical.

  Schneller looked more closely at the ID card and the name and signature on the file document.

  “This is amazing,” Schneller said. “What is the meaning?”

  “It means we’re looking at something that is not logical,” Delaney said. “Who is this Horst Becker?”

  “A German pathologist I’ve met,” Delaney said. “He’s in Thailand at the moment. Usually he works at the military hospital in Frankfurt.”

  “That is two hundred kilometres away from here. Normally, this would not happen. A pathologist would not travel so far to do work for police in Bonn in such matters. That would be unusual.”

  “Not logical.”

  “Not at all logical.”

  “Thank you very much,” Delaney said.

  PART 3

  Saint Lager Bressac, France — March 2005

  Chapter 13

  Delaney liked it when a story started to break very fast. At Lyon airport’s curvaceous ultramodern terminal after his early-morning flight from Berlin via Frankfurt, he rented a car, a sports model Peugeot 307 to suit his upbeat mood and to help speed him through southern France to Saint Lager Bressac, where Ulrich Mueller lived in disgrace and isolation.

  Delaney had told only Ackermann what he and young Schneller discovered in the autopsy documents in Bonn. He did not tell Mareike Fischer, he did not tell Jonah Smith and he did not tell Jonathan Rawson. When a story starts to break, Delaney knew from experience that for a time the fewer people who were aware, the better.

  Mareike, of course, was aware he would travel to France. She had arranged the meeting with her uncle as promised. Actually finding Mueller’s Chateau de Bressac deep in the Ardeche hills would be Delaney’s immediate problem.

  It was a fine early spring day in a splendid part of France. Light streamed through the sunroof of the car as Delaney headed away from Lyon, negotiating his way carefully among the dozens of oversized Dutchand German-registered holiday trailers thundering southward on the highway along with him. Even at this early stage of the warm season, the annual invasion of the French countryside by sunstarved northern Europeans had begun.

  As he neared Montelimar on the Autoroute de Soleil, his phone rang. He had been ignoring the cell as much as possible through much of his tsunami assignment in Thailand and again now in Europe. This time, however, the little Nokia screen indicated a call from a German number. He answered it, with difficulty behind the wheel at 140 kilometres per hour, and heard Mareike’s voice.

  “I was expecting you last night, Frank Delaney,” she said. “As you are still relatively interesting to me.”

  Delaney felt a too-familiar tug of unease in his guts, as he realized he had perhaps started something with a highly unpredictable woman that could now go somewhere he did not at all want to go. Ackermann had questioned him closely about his encounter with Mareike, and then given him a variety of dire warnings and cautionary tales about her.

  “Tied up, Mareike, sorry,” Delaney said. “I was getting ready for the France trip.”

  “I called you,” she said.

  “I had my phone turned off.”

  “On the hotel line.”

  “Missed it. Sorry.”

  “You will come to see me when you get back, however,” she said.

  “Of course,” Delaney said. “I’ll have to head straight back out to Thailand, though. Finish up my assignment.”

  There was a too-long pause at the Berlin end of the call.

  “You know where I am,” she said. “If you can spare a moment.”

  Ackermann had been most impressed when Delaney told him what he and Schneller had discovered.

  “Fuck me dead, Francis, please pardon my French,” Ackermann had said. He came to the InterContinental for drinks with Delaney the night he got back to Berlin from Bonn. “This is starting to look very interesting, even for an old drunken hack like myself.”

  “I told you, Gunter,” Delaney said.

  “Don’t gloat, please,” Ackermann said.

  “I told you this was going to get big,” Delaney said again.

  “Big? Yes, yes, it’s big. A respected pathologist from Frankfurt’s big army hospital is either falsifying an autopsy report in Bonn or he is falsifying things in Thailand. With signatures that match nicely and all. That is big enough. But it also involves Klaus Heinrich, only the biggest fucking spy West Germany ever ran in the East. This is much more than just big, Francis. You amaze me, sometimes, my friend. The things you get yourself into. You will need my expert guidance on how to handle this matter from here.”

  Ackermann now also had more time for Delaney’s intuitions and theories about disgraced former chiefs of the BKA.

  “Of course, of course, yes, go to France, my friend, go,” he said. “Find out all you can about Herr Mueller. This also is a good story, possibly. If he gives you something fresh about why he left the BKA, well and good. But if you can also link him somehow to the Heinrich story and now to this Horst Becker angle, well Francis, Francis, you can be a German media superstar.”

  “If that’s what I decide to do,” Delaney said.

  “For the sake of Jesus, Francis, what else would you do? Publish, publish, publish.”

  “Maybe. Let’s see what I turn up.”

  “Please, Francis, do not punish me like this. I’m sorry I mocked your theories. I’m sorry. I will buy you another drink. Please don’t be coy. Of course you must publish all of this. It is an election year in Germany. The people of Germany have a right to know about these fools and charlatans and thieves who run this country or who ran the country back then. Or the actions of their police lackeys. If we are very, very fortunate, we will bring down the whole stinking capitalist edifice together, yes, in Germany first and then we start on the ordained path to world socialism. The workers’ paradise.”

  “Does Die Welt know they have a rabid revolutionary editing their political section, Gunter?” Delaney asked.

  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Ackermann shouted. “We’re on to something very big, Francis. It is the beginning of something very big.”

  He raised his beer glass and began to sing the “Internationale” at top volume. Ackermann was getting overexcited. Drink and seditious talk always had that effect on him. The waiter looked distinctly uneasy about these two suspicious characters sitting at his bar in extremely heated conversation.

  “Gunter, calm yourself,” Delaney said. “First I need to gather all the information, and then I need to decide what to do with it. First I’ll go visit Mueller. Then we’ll see.”

  “Always, always the same thing with you, Francis,” Ackermann said. “Don’t be coy. You find information, you report it. It’s simple. That is who you are.”

  Mareike’s instructions on how to reach Mueller’s house had been precise, obsessively detailed. Nonetheless, somewhere south of Valence and west of the Rhone River, Delaney got hopelessly turned around. He missed the tiny turnoff on a small road that led to the village of Saint Lager Bressac and ended up climbing a switchback to the little hillside town of Privas, well past where he wanted to be.

  By the time he had asked various locals in his Quebecois French for directions and had circled back to find the turnoff and then the village and then the truly obscure track through lavender fields and hayfields that led up to other hills and onward to the chateau itself, it was almost 1 p.m. Finally, with the Peugeot bou
ncing and sliding on gravel ruts and the fallen branches of trees, Delaney saw a high stone wall and a stout wooden carriage gate looming in the distance.

  A tiny sign said: Chateau de Bressac. U.Mueller/ P. R o ch e m a u re. An aging Renault van was parked by the wall, beside a big silver BMW with Paris-area licence plates. Delaney pulled his car off the track and under some trees. He got out looking for a bell or a knocker to announce that he had arrived.

  Mareike had told him only a little about Pierre Rochemaure, the Parisian architect who had helped Mueller renovate the wrecked chateau and who now spent much of his time there, finishing up the last of the renovation project and, apparently, helping to look after the ailing policeman. Mareike had not told him much else about Rochemaure, but Delaney was surprised to see the architect’s name inscribed alongside Mueller’s on the proprietor’s sign.

  “My uncle has agreed to see you, that is the principal thing,” Mareike had said. “You’re the reporter man, so you will go, you will see what you will see, and you will make your conclusions. Yes? You will make up your own mind about what you find there.”

  Somewhere far on the other side of the stone wall, a bell clanged when Delaney pressed an old brass button. Eventually, he heard the crunch of gravel. The heavy door opened. A very tall, fit, handsome man of about 45 stood on the other side. He did not offer Delaney his hand.

  “Monsieur Delaney?” he said in English.

  “Yes,” Delaney said. “I’m here to see Ulrich Mueller. His niece in Berlin arranged a meeting for me.”

  “I know. I am Rochemaure, Pierre. Come inside.”

  The Chateau de Bressac was one of those old, elegant, absolutely inviting French places that people dream of finding, renovating and living in happily ever after. On the other side of the wall there was a small courtyard of gravel and some formal garden squares and hedges. A few round metal tables and some park chairs were set out, stylishly rustic. The house itself, two imposing stories with an old black slate roof, was covered in vines and other signs of graceful aging.