The Tsunami File (10 page)

“I'm not interviewing anyone today,” Delaney said.

“Thank you very much,” Brajkovic said. “I will be the source of comment on this incident, in any case. On behalf of Interpol.”

“I'm not writing a story about this,” Delaney said.

“That is good news,” Brajkovic said. “I will therefore leave you nice friends all together.”

He turned to Smith.

“We have told your wife in England about this, of course,” he said. “You have been injured on assignment. She says she will come immediately to your side. As wives do.”

Brajkovic looked from Jonah to Conchi and back again, flashing beige teeth, clearly enjoying his minor role in a major domestic drama. “Thank you very much,” Smith said.

After Brajkovic had gone, coffee flask in hand, Delaney tried to get more information from Smith, though it was hard for the battered fingerprint man to speak clearly through his swollen lips.

“They just came at me out of nowhere,” Smith said slowly.

“Thai?” Delaney asked.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“You see their faces? Anyone you'd recognize?”

“No. It was really dark, I was drunk, they came at me really fast and then it was all a blur of sticks and kicks. I went into a ball and tried to protect myself.”

“They say anything?”

“They were sort of yelling at me or at each other in Thai, mostly.”

“Nothing you could understand.”

“I think one of them was saying in English, “Watch out, watch out.” But he could have been talking to his mates for all I know. I hardly heard what they were saying in any language.”

“How were they dressed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Not police?”

“No. Civilians,” Smith said. “They wouldn't beat me up in police gear, Frank.” “I've seen it done, Jonah. In a lot of countries.” Conchi said: “Police wear civilian clothes too, Jonah.”

“These were Thais, Conchi,” he said.

“Not Germans,” Delaney said.

“Definitely those men were not Germans,”

Smith said.

“And they robbed you,” Delaney said.

“My wallet's gone. But whether they took it, or it fell out of my pocket, I don't know.”

“It could be lying in the karaoke bar, Frank,”

Conchi said.

“Maybe. Or maybe they took the wallet to make it look like it was a robbery,” Delaney said.

“Or maybe it was a just a robbery,” Smith said.

“Maybe,” Delaney said.

“There's the letter,” Conchi said.

“They gave you another blackmail letter?”

Delaney said, looking over at Smith. “No, no, I just got the one.”

“But that letter said you should back away,” Conchi said. “They beat you up as warning number two, no? Frank?”

“We don't know that, Conchi,” Smith said.

“I know that, Jonah,” Conchi said. “In my heart I know they are warning you again about that file business you won't let go.”

Smith put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

“You sore?” Delaney said.

“Yes. The headache's a bit bad now.”

“They said he should rest a lot and take care of himself, Frank,” Conchi said. “Let's go now.”

As if on cue, the Thai nurse came in and said quietly: “This patient must sleep now.”

“We're leaving,” Delaney said. “But Jonah, we'll need to talk about this some more.”

“Tomorrow,” Smith said wearily. “OK?”

“When does your wife come,” Delaney asked.

“No idea. Whenever she wants. I've not spoken to her,” Smith said. “Good,” Conchi said.

In the corridor Conchi looked worried. “He's OK, no?” she said.

“Sure,” Delaney said. “He's just been knocked around a bit. No permanent damage.”

“Mister no problem journalist man. Now a medical man. You see people beaten every day, correct?”

“Every day, correct,” Delaney said.

“He is crazy, that Jonah, about this file,” Conchi said, lighting a cigarette as they exited the hospital into the brilliant midday sunlight. Delaney had never seen her smoke before. She stood flicking ash compulsively onto the shimmering parking lot asphalt.

“Someone is very angry with him now,” she said.

“It could have been a robbery, Conchi.”

“You do not believe that, Frank. Do you?”

“No, not really. No.”

“There. So who? And what do we do?”

“We try to find out where the file went and why it went.”

“And Jonah gets beaten up again, maybe worse next time.”

“He'll be more careful now, Conchi.”

“Who cares about a lost file, Frank? There are hundreds of people dead around here. Families with no kids anymore. Kids with no parents. From all over the world. Who cares about just one file here after the tsunami anyway.”

“Jonah.”

“He's crazy. He always wants to identify people. He even took my fingerprints too.”

“He's a professional. He wants to do the right thing.”

“He's crazy.”

“We're all crazy sometimes, Conchi. Me too.”

“Journalists and police, crazy, crazy,” she said.

“You always get into trouble.”

“You're in trouble maybe now too,” Delaney said.

“Me, no,” she said.

“You're his girl, people know that.”

“And now his wife will know, right? So maybe I am in trouble a little bit,” she said, with a giant Mediterranean siren's smile. Coy, shy, experienced, sensual, all at the same time.

“That note they wrote him, have you seen it?” Delaney said. “Jonah never actually showed it to me.”

“I have it right here,” Conchi said. “Jonah wanted it out of his hotel room and I don't want it in mine.” She rummaged in her leather knapsack. “Here.”

It was on a single sheet of plain white paper, photocopier paper apparently, folded once. Inside, in neat printed script in black ballpoint pen, a very short message: “Mind your business, Smith. Mind your business or your wife will know your Spanish business.”

Delaney wondered if a linguist would be able to tell him whether the writer was a native English speaker. The message was too short for such analysis, probably, even if he had access to the expertise required.

“Short and to the point,” he said.

“His Spanish business,” Conchi said. “Funny.”

“Jonah's wife is coming quite soon,” Delaney said. “Someone may tell her.” “I know that, Frank, I know that,” she said. “I will be a good little mistress girl and stay back.”

“That part's not really any of my business, Conchi,” Delaney said.

“Oh? Good. You are the only one not interested in that, in this big gossip place,” she said ruefully.

“The faster we find out what's going on with that file, the faster we can find out who's interested, who wrote the note, who gave Jonah the beating.”

“And so, we find out, big deal. What do we do when we find out?”

“We'll decide that when the time comes,”

Delaney said.

“And until then?”

“We take care.”

“And I stay away from British ladies for a while.”

“Probably a good idea, in this case,” Delaney said.

“The case of the British wife,” Conchi said.

“The big bad British wife.”

They got a taxi from the rank outside the hotel. A good car this time, a gleaming Corolla with air conditioning and a properly functioning transmission and suspension, unlike so many of the Phuket cabs. The driver wore an oversized dress shirt with epaulettes, baggy shorts and rubber flip-flop thongs.

“So sorry you have illness in your family,” he said before they set off, making a wai.

“Thank you,” Conchi said, getting into the back seat beside Delaney. “I'm going to the International Management Centre. Frank, where do you go?”

“Me too, I suppose, the management centre,” he said. “I'll check in with the press officer.”

“Reporters?” the driver said as they pulled away from the hospital. “TV? Big-time TV?”

“Yes,” Delaney said. “But not TV, not big time.”

“Not me,” Conchi said. “Police.”

“Ah, police,” the driver said, growing quiet. Then he said: “Too many dead now. Who is who, even all you police, nobody knows.” “We're trying,” Conchi said.

“Too many bodies, everywhere. I saw right after the wave. On the beach, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, too many bodies.”

“Did you lose family?' Delaney asked.

“Yes, yes, my aunt, some of my cousins, some of my driver friends. Everyone loses someone in Phuket in the wave.” He drove very slowly, looking often at them in his rearview mirror. “Too many.”

“The bodies were found? The people you knew?” Conchi asked.

“Some,” the driver said. “Some still in the sea. The spirits are still in the sea.”

Their route took them past the airport. In the distance, Delaney could see activity in the place from where identified foreign bodies were sent home. It was where he had first met Jonah Smith. Today, three coffins with Australian flags on them were ranged under the canopy and a small crowd stood beside them while an official spoke.

“Can we stop here for a minute, please?”

Delaney said.

Conchi did not look surprised. The driver pulled over onto the scorched grass near the airport perimeter fence and they watched through the wire links as the little send-off ceremony for the bodies proceeded. Like the one Delaney and Smith had watched together some days earlier, this ceremony did not last long before the coffins were unloaded from cars and carried to the waiting aircraft. Grieving relatives embraced. Consular officials in summer suits hovered. A uniformed Thai police guard saluted.

“Three more going home, hundreds and hundreds still to go,” Conchi said.

“Important, important,” the driver said.

“Families want this very much, I know. Thank you for coming from your countries to help us in Thailand.”

“In Bosnia,” Conchi said to Delaney slowly, “after the war, families used to come down to the sites, the mass graves, and watch us as we worked. We had a sort of rope line around the sites and the families would stand there for hours, just watching us dig in the mud and brush dirt off things and put corpses and bones and clothing and wallets and eyeglasses into bags. The women would cry for hours. The men would just stare.”

Delaney had seen his share of mass graves and knew the scene she was describing all too well.

“Everyone wanted to know what happened to the ones they loved,” she said. “Take them home.”

“Everybody, everybody wants this,” the driver said.

Delaney wondered who might possibly have loved the man, the
Deutschland
man, now proving so hard to identify. He wondered also who might have hated him or feared him enough to now be trying to prevent his identification. Family? Almost certainly not. For families, identification is the goal. A little ceremony, some tears, a grieving process, and the file is closed. For the enemies of this particular man, however, or for those who feared him and what identifying him could mean, the goal, clearly now, was something far different.

At the management centre after their driver dropped them off, Delaney and Conchi were almost bowled over on the steps by a phalanx of BBC people—a sun-burnished reporter, various producers, a cameraman, sound man, script assistant, other hangers on. Braithwaite, in his Metropolitan Police uniform today, was with them. So too were a couple of British embassy types in expensive tropical-weight pastel suits.

The BBC wave poured down the steps toward a small convoy of waiting silver vans. Still getting carte blanche access for their documentary on the heroic efforts of the British DVI teams, and, presumably, the efforts of one Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Braithwaite, to identify and repatriate all of the British dead.

Braithwaite spotted Delaney and pulled away from the TV crew briefly.

“I'll need to speak to you, Delaney,” he said.

“When I get a moment.”

“Anytime, Inspector,” Delaney said.

“Chief Superintendent,” Braithwaite said.

“Sorry,” Delaney said.

“Your man Smith has run into some trouble,”