The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  “Do you have a good story to tell, Herr Mueller?’

  “Of course. Every policeman does.”

  “Your story seems better than most, as far as I can gather,” Delaney said.

  “It has drama. This I can say.”

  “Yes, apparently. At the end of your career.”

  “And before, Mr. Delaney.”

  “I’d love to hear about it.”

  “It has, what do the playwrights call it? Pathos. Perhaps it has pathos too.”

  “Does it?”

  Mueller paused. Suddenly he was looking extremely tired. His eyes displayed what soldiers and journalists call the thousand-mile-stare, the gaze of those who see the end of their lives on the horizon. Delaney looked at his watch. It was 11:20 p.m.

  “Ulrich should rest now,” Rochemaure said, getting up from his place at the end of the table. “Enough talk.”

  “Pierre looks after me,” Mueller said. “But he likes to order me around. It is I who used to give the orders, to hundreds of police officers, before everything changed for me. Now I am ordered around by my architect and my housekeeper and my niece in Berlin.”

  “Enough,” Rochemaure said.

  “We shall speak again tomorrow of these matters, Mr. Delaney,” Mueller said. “Allow me to sleep and to consider, and we will sit together again tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine,” Delaney said. “I’d appreciate that.”

  Rochemaure, however, showed no appreciation for the prospect. He turned Mueller around in his wheelchair and then pushed it quickly out of the room. Delaney did not see either of them again that night. Madame Chagny had long since gone home. He sat alone, drinking excellent Armagnac until very late, listening to silences and ticking clocks.

  As Delaney lay hours later in bed in his picture postcard room in a chateau in deepest rural France, he heard through his open window the muffled sounds of an argument. Voices he could not quite distinguish shouted hard words in French. He thought it could only be Mueller and Rochemaure, somewhere deep in the old house down in the back ground-floor wing, having some sort of lovers’ quarrel. There were no other occupants in the Chateau de Bressac that Delaney knew of.

  The arguing went on intermittently for some minutes. Then Delaney heard a series of thumps and then the sound of breaking glass. More muffled argument followed. Eventually the big old house went silent again.

  Perhaps it was the absolute silence that followed, or perhaps the utter isolation of the place— far from all things urban, far from any neighbours, where no telephones rang, where all was far out of range of the familiar—that plunged Delaney into a heavy, introspective mood. Perhaps it was the wine. For what seemed like hours he lay in his little bed, evaluating information gathered and scenarios possible, pondering lives lived, pondering disaster victims alive and dead.

  Eventually, his quest for clarity still not complete, he slept.

  He dreams he is with Jonah Smith on an urgent quest to find Smith’s missing daughter. They are stumbling around in the moonlight of deepest rural France, trying their best to find the missing girl. They hold flaming torches above their heads to light the way. Delaney is searching for something or someone precious of his own as well, but he isn’t sure who or what that might turn out to be. Suddenly he is alone; Smith has disappeared. Suddenly Delaney is alone in the container compound in Phuket, Thailand, in moonlight, knowing that hundreds of disaster victims await him in body bags inside. He opens a container door, then unzips bag after bag, looking for someone and everyone at the same time. The bags contain the lifeless bodies of everyone he has ever known or worked with or loved. Former teachers and colleagues and editors he has not thought of for 20 years or more lie silently on the stark wooden racks. Friends and former lovers lie there, and his sister and his ex-wife, and Natalia, Kate Hunter, Mareike, everyone. Brian O’Keefe is there, and Jonathan Rawson, Tim Bishop, Ackermann, Rochemaure, Mueller. All lie lifeless in the disaster victims’ compound in Phuket. Then Delaney slowly opens a last container, this one sitting well off to one side away from all the others. In the cold and dark of this last container, inside every body bag, he finds the lifeless body of Francis Delaney, disaster victim. Frantically he unzips each and every bag. He is lying lifeless inside each one. He cries out to himself, over and over: Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

  Chapter 14

  Mueller and Rochemaure were still arguing the next morning when Delaney came down to the kitchen. They stopped immediately when he came in. Rochemaure was stony-faced, as usual. Mueller, in his wheelchair, looked flushed, unwell, tired already, even though it was still early in the day.

  “I’ll come back,” Delaney said. “I’m disturbing you.”

  “No, no. No need,” Mueller said. “Come in. You will eat breakfast. We have no secrets here in our little French hideaway.”

  Mueller clearly still had enough energy left to try to rattle Rochemaure’s cage. It worked very well. Rochemaure’s face darkened. He glared at the intruding houseguest with such intensity that Delaney thought he must be drunk or on drugs of some kind. It was a face full of anger and hatred.

  “Pierre is not happy when things upset our little routine here, Mr. Delaney,” Mueller said, still trying, it seemed, to provoke Rochemaure. “I must constantly remind him to mind his manners. He is getting badly on my nerves, these days. And vice versa, it seems.”

  That was enough for Rochemaure. He flung his cigarette at Mueller. It hit the old man in the chest, with a tiny shower of sparks. He rushed out of the kitchen past Delaney and they heard the rhythmic crunches of his footsteps in the courtyard gravel. The heavy carriageway door slammed shut and a car engine was brutally fired up. There was a fainter crunch and scramble of gravel outside the chateau walls and then Rochemaure was gone.

  “He will now drive far too fast all around the Ardeche countryside in his very powerful automobile,” Mueller said. “He will then go to the Café des Marchands in Privas and drink bad wine with our lazy local tradesmen far too early in the day. He is a creature of habit, my Pierre. My apologies for this little scene, Mr. Delaney.”

  “No need to apologize,” Delaney said.

  “He is always afraid someone like you will disrupt our little situation.” “Someone like me?”

  “A questioner.”

  “So he knows your story?”

  “A bit of it, yes he does. Not all of it. But enough, I would say, for him to worry about people who might one day want to ask me questions.”

  Madame Chagny appeared from the direction of the living room, as if she had been waiting for the domestic drama to be over before seeing to her appointed duties. She, too, was stony-faced this morning. She nodded briefly at Delaney and headed through the kitchen and out a side door to a small exterior area where she started, or perhaps resumed, hanging sheets from a wicker washing basket.

  “She does not approve of men having sex together in this house, or anywhere else for that matter,” Mueller said. “And she like all the French peasants in the Ardeche is petrified of AIDS. They think it is something like the black plague. But she needs the work we provide for her here, so she accepts to share this space with two homosexuals. She washes our sheets as if they come from beds in a leper colony. Not that there would have been much forensic evidence of sexual activity to disgust her, these past months.”

  Mueller’s frankness surprised Delaney. The old man had clearly decided to confide some, but not necessarily all, aspects of his private life.

  Mueller studied Delaney for a moment, and then said: “I spoke last night to Mareike in Berlin.”

  Delaney said nothing.

  “She is my confidante, in a way,” Mueller said.

  “My only one, now. And she worries about me here. She calls it ‘nowhere.’ And she worries about me with Pierre because she knows what he is like. She calls him my bit of rough trade, Mr. Delaney. You are famil
iar with the expression perhaps? In Berlin they have bars where angry violent gays like Pierre would go. If he were a German gay. In Paris too, they have them. He knows those Paris bars, my Pierre. I used to know them a little as well, when we would visit Paris, just after we began to disgust Madame Chagny. But I’m too ill now for any rough trade.”

  Delaney let Mueller go on. It would be a day of confessions, or so he hoped.

  “Does homosexuality disgust you as it does Madame Chagny, Mr. Delaney?” Mueller asked. “No,” Delaney said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Mareike told me that in your case there would in general be no hasty, narrow-minded judgments,” Mueller said.

  Mareike, it seemed, was still very much on Delaney’s side in his quest for answers about Mueller, and other matters.

  “That’s not my style, Herr Mueller. I’m a reporter, not a judge.” Mueller studied him again.

  “Mareike thinks the time is right for me to talk to someone like you, Mr. Delaney,” he said. “Do you think so too?” Delaney asked. Mueller paused.

  “Yes, I now think so, too. Yes, perhaps.”

  “Excellent,” Delaney said.

  “But first breakfast, yes?” Mueller surprised Delaney by getting slowly up out of his wheelchair and going over to the stove to light a flame under the kettle. Apparently he did not think it the right moment to ask the housekeeper for much. He saw Delaney watching him.

  “I’m not a complete invalid yet. That wheelchair helps me when I am tired but I can still get around without it when necessary.” He watched Delaney watching him. “They can’t tell me when I will die, Mr.

  Delaney. I take pharmacy loads of tablets and they prolong life very effectively these days for old homosexuals who have AIDS. Not very long ago, before all these new drugs, I would probably have died already. But the prognosis for me is still not good. Does this answer the question you have so far been polite enough not to ask?”

  They ate at one of the outside tables in the courtyard. There was some sort of unspoken agreement between Mueller and Madame Chagny that morning and she did not offer to help. Delaney carried a tray of bread and butter and coffee outside, and then helped Mueller outside too, as he had by then lowered himself back into the wheelchair. Making coffee was enough for him for one morning it seemed.

  They enjoyed the sunshine and the birdsong and the small breakfast. The questions came only afterward, and they came first from Mueller. “What is your theory, Mr. Delaney?”

  “About what exactly?”

  “About all of this. About me and my little story and about whatever connection it might have to what you are really trying to find out. I like to hear people’s theories in an investigation. It is a habit I developed as a policeman. Then I do not waste time with a lot of facts that are not actually needed.”

  Delaney decided to hold nothing back. He told Mueller what he had found out in Thailand, about the tsunami file and the attempts to hide a dead man’s true identity. He told him about containers of disaster victims and about surgically removed fingerprints. He told them about Jonah Smith’s beating and about having almost been run over in the parking lot of the Metropole Hotel.

  “And so at first you thought pedophiles,”

  Mueller said at last.

  “At first.”

  “That was a good theory. Any policeman who knows that part of the world, especially a German or a Dutch policeman, would have thought pedophiles too. Thailand is a good place for such people to find children and a good place for them to disappear once they are not welcome in Europe.”

  “So we thought. And the police over there were apparently closing a few good pedophile cases when they started matching bodies with fingerprints. People who had disappeared.” Mueller laughed bitterly.

  “Thank God for the tsunami,” he said. “That is what my police friends would have been saying. We can close some good pedophile cases with no real investigative effort at all, thanks to the big wave.”

  He laughed again, genuinely delighted with the thought.

  “But with Heinrich, that wasn’t what was going on,” Delaney said. “So? Your theory?”

  “That’s where it began to get tough,” Delaney said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “What is it you really need to know from me, Mr. Delaney?”

  “I need to know about the connection between Klaus Heinrich disappearing and your resignation. If there is a connection.”

  Mueller studied Delaney closely, as he had been doing all morning.

  “A very good investigative question,” he said.

  “And your theories?”

  “I have none, really. It’s a dead end, possibly. I know a fair bit about the Heinrich story and I know a bit about your story, but I need to know how your stories come together. If they do.”

  “Whether the road to Saint Lager Bressac is a dead end,” Mueller said.

  “Yes.”

  “And if you make this connection, Mr. Delaney, you think you will be able to really understand why Klaus Heinrich disappeared.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are convinced the body in that burnedout little house in the Seibengebirge hills was not Heinrich.”

  “Very convinced.”

  “It must be wonderful to be sure of things in this world, Mr. Delaney, and of who people really are.”

  “It can happen sometimes.”

  “Fingerprints, DNA, forensic dentistry, expert testimony, police testimony, visual identification, blood type, distinguishing marks. This tells you who people really are?”

  “You’re moving into the philosophical realm, Herr Mueller.”

  “And so? I’m dying. This is allowed.” Delaney waited.

  “The body in Phuket,” Mueller said. “It had distinguishing marks?”

  “Yes. A tattoo. On the right forearm.”

  “Appearance? What did it look like? What did it say?”

  “Deutschland,” Delaney said.

  Mueller began to laugh. He laughed and ran both of his aging hands through what was left of his hair. He stared down at the gravel of the courtyard, hands still on his head.

  “Oh, my dear, dear Klaus,” he said eventually, looking up. He smiled at Delaney, and shook his head. “I always told him it made him look like a common thief, that stupid tattoo. My dear old Klaus . . .”

  Madame Chagny was staying well away from them for the remainder of the morning, it seemed. And Rochemaure had still not reappeared. There was coffee and sunshine and comfortable chairs. Mueller began to talk; words flooded out of him. Delaney simply allowed himself to be submerged.

  “You have to try to imagine the very worst thing that could happen when you are running a spy somewhere,” Mueller said. “Not that the spy you are running gets killed or even gets thrown in jail by your enemies. That is too easy and simple. That used to happen all the time when the Cold War was on.

  No, not that. You have to imagine something worse than that.”

  Mueller sipped at his coffee.

  “You have to imagine Klaus Heinrich working for years, perhaps fifteen years—I can’t remember the exact number—over on the eastern side. He was our star. He had duped the East Germans into thinking he wanted to come home after his big life mistake in the West and that he would tell them everything he had learned and help them with their analysis and anything else they needed. But he was, remember this, our man was a West German spy, one of very, very few we ever managed to set up on the other side of the Wall. So, fine, it’s fine. He works; he sends apparently very good information, interesting information, over to us in the West for many years. Then, boom, the Wall comes down. Suddenly, the Cold War is over. People are streaming across the border again, Heinrich’s services are no longer needed, he comes home to the West, gets his nice reward and his little apartment in Bonn and his job and the cabin in Seibengebirge. OK. It’s n
ice. His picture is in the magazines, he is a hero, no one from Stasi tries to kill him, everything excellent.”

  Coffee. Birdsong.

  “Then, there are the files. The ones Stasi did not destroy are being evaluated, steadily, year after year, by the Germans and the Americans. There are also the shredded files. These too are being examined and put back together by patient people in little offices somewhere. Eventually, they also start to use computers to try to put the shredded and torn pieces of paper back together again. This is in the 1990s, after reunification. The new Germany. More information begins to be available every year about Stasi and its methods and its network which, Mr. Delaney, was everywhere, everywhere. On the East side and on the West side, in every department and university and on both sides of the Wall, Stasi had agents. So you imagine, one day, that someone notices a name in a Stasi file that is being examined or that has been put back together by a nice little German clerk somewhere in an office where she is doing good work all day for the new Germany. So try now to imagine what is the worst thing that could happen, for the German side that is running a spy. Let us say a spy like Klaus Heinrich. You have a theory now about the worst thing that could happen?”

  Delaney could see, a little now, where this was going.

  “He’s a double agent.”

  “Very good,” Mueller said. “Very, very good. For years, for let us say fifteen years, he works in East Berlin and the West side is happy. They think he is doing good work for them, he sends information back, but suddenly it now appears that this, some of it or all of it, could have been bad information, information the East side wanted us to have. Or, maybe, probably, Stasi found it useful for fifteen years to just know what things interested us on the West side. Which people interested us, which questions we wanted answered. You know, Mr. Delaney, in a war, a cold one or a hot one, it is very useful to simply know what your enemy would like to know. And my friend Klaus Heinrich did an excellent job for his masters in the East in this way for many years. He had come over to the West in, I don’t remember, 1959 or 1960. He is a young man of about nineteen, twenty, he goes to university, he fools everyone, and then, suddenly, he defects back to the East. He is fed up with the West he says. It was all a big mistake. But, he is a BND spy, correct? No, not correct. In fact, he was always an East German spy, a mole first in the West and then a double agent in the East. The Stasi were smart people, very smart. And they were patient. They were willing to wait for years to set up a scenario like that. Let someone go to university, take his time, make friends, win trust. Wait, wait, you wait. Then, eventually, someone becomes useful. Maybe five, maybe six, maybe seven years into the game, he becomes useful. That is how the Stasi used to operate. That is why they beat us so badly at the spying game for so many years. They were patient people. And dedicated. They had a cause. World democratic socialism. Worth waiting for, yes?”