The Tsunami File (21 page)

J
onah Smith was a fingerprint man. But he hardly knew himself in Thailand. He knew full well he had been transformed. However the transformation had now gone far beyond an unaccustomed suntan and a new mustache or his growing collection of floral shirts and the Chinesemade bicycle he rode to work.

He sat, alone, fully dressed, on his bed at the Bay Hotel, pondering who he had become. The identification was proving difficult.

Delaney was in Berlin. Conchi was at her own hotel, sleeping alone tonight. Zalm was likely drinking far too much in a bar somewhere in Phuket Town, doing penance for his sins over the
Deutschland
file. Mrs. Jonah Smith was in England where she belonged, surely untroubled by questions of who she was or how to do the right thing.

Jonah Smith, for his part, was alone at the Bay Hotel, pondering who he had become.

Frank Delaney, Smith thought as he sat propped up on his immaculate hotel bed, did not appear to have any trouble knowing who he was or what needed to be done. Delaney had simply decided he would go to Berlin to pursue the story wherever it might lead, had bought a plane ticket and gone.

The new Jonah Smith, on the other hand, enjoyed no such certainty. Doing the right thing was no longer easy, the way no longer clear. He could no longer distinguish good guys from bad.

In the past it had been easy. He would work alone at his small desk at Scotland Yard or at Interpol, matching fingerprints, following crime scene stories wherever they might lead. In the past, like any good fingerprint man, he simply made the match, informed his police superiors, and went on to the next case, the next match, the next story, wherever it might lead.

This time it was different. The rules of the game had been breached; victims and villains were no longer easy to tell apart. His Phuket police colleagues and superiors were either angry, or not to be trusted, or both. He no longer had anyone he could trust on this, except perhaps a Canadian journalist he had known for just days, and a Spanish woman he had loved for just weeks.

Smith was a man who had always sought—in his professional as well as his personal life—certainty, confirmation, clarity. He had found none of these things in Thailand, nor, he thought ruefully, could he find them any longer in London or Lyon, either professionally or personally.

He got up from the bed and went to examine himself in the bathroom mirror. The new Jonah Smith looked tired tonight, a little bit worse for the wear. The scrapes from his beating had faded but not disappeared. A deep shadow remained under his left eye socket but the bruise was no longer quite so black. A thin linear scab had formed at the corner of his mouth where the stitches had been. His hair, though now sun-bleached, looked thinner than ever. It was the hair of a tired middle-aged man; at least that much of the identification was certain.

Before leaving Lyon for Thailand, Smith had consulted the classic fingerprint literature for certainty, guidance, inspiration, as he always did before any important forensic assignment. He carried with him to Phuket, as always, a few of his favourite texts. Smith went over to the shelf where he kept his books and consulted them again for assistance.

In Phuket, Thailand, in the Bay Hotel, in late March 2005, a passage by Sir Francis Galton once again provided him with wise counsel, despite the words having been written in 1892. Smith smiled as he imagined the father of fingerprint science writing quietly, with Victorian-era certainty, at his old desk at the Royal Society in London all those years ago:

Whenever honest persons travel to distant countries, the need for a means of recognition is more keenly felt
, Galton wrote.
The risk of death through accident or crime is increased and the probability of subsequent identification diminished
. . .

Frank Delaney was clearly not a man who would spend his time reading classic texts by Sir Francis Galton. Smith understood that perfectly well. But Delaney did know a lot about the risk of death through accident or crime in distant countries. Before leaving for Berlin, he had told Smith, and Conchi, about his near-death experience in the parking lot of the Metropole Hotel.

Smith thought Delaney was remarkably sanguine about someone having tried to kill him with a car. Conchi, on the other hand, thought Delaney was remarkably foolish, and she told him so, angrily, as the three of them sat around an outdoor table at the Whale Bar on the very humid Phuket afternoon before Delaney left. She was angry because Delaney had approached Horst Becker about the
Deutschland
file, she was angry that someone had subsequently tried to kill him, and she was angry that someone might now try to do the same thing to Smith.

“You are stupid, Frank Delaney,” she said.

“Stupid, stupid. Do you think now that this German will leave us all alone?”

“We're not absolutely sure it has anything to do with Becker,” Delaney had said. “Oh really?” Smith said.

“Of course it is Becker,” Conchi said. Smith could see that Delaney almost certainly thought so too.

“Well, our only choice now is to find out what's really going on and sort these people out,” Delaney said. “That's why I'm going to Berlin.”

“Someone will try to kill you there, you watch,” Conchi said. “And someone will try to kill Jonah here too. And me too now, no? In Spain we know how Germans are when they get mad.”

“You'll be all right, Conchi,” Smith had said. He touched her arm. She looked over at him and touched his arm. He could see Delaney filing this little scene away in his journalist's memory.

“This is all stupid,” Conchi said. “Men, you're all stupid. You get mad, you get so violent, you make me mad, all of you stupid men. Jonah gets a beating, his face gets scratched up. Stupid Frank almost gets killed by a car. For what?”

“We want to know who that dead man really is,” Smith said. “You don't really have any trouble understanding that, Conchi. I know you don't.”

“Yes, I do, yes I do have trouble understanding that.”

“It's not worth it if they kill you.”

“Why do you work so hard in Bosnia to identify bodies in those mass graves, Conchi. Hmm?” Smith said.

“That's different, Jonah. There are families over there who need to know. No one tries to kill me for it.”

“This
Deutschland
guy may have a family who wonders about him too,” Delaney said, somewhat lamely, Smith thought. Delaney had not told Conchi about who he, and others, now thought the
Deutschland
man had actually been. He had asked Smith not to tell her either.

“Bullshit, Frank, bullshit,” Conchi said. “You want to know who the guy is and what happened to the file because you get a big story maybe for your bullshit newspaper.”

Delaney suddenly looked very uneasy. Smith thought that Conchi had struck some sort of chord that Delaney clearly preferred to leave alone.

“Conchi . . .” Smith said.

“And you, Jonah, you want to know because you are stupid too, just stupid for fingerprints,” Conchi said.

“You sound a little like Fiona now, Conchi,” Smith said with a thin smile.

Conchi had flounced away from the table in high Spanish displeasure. She had to get back to the management centre to identify dead people for her own set of reasons—better reasons, or so she would have them believe, than theirs. Smith still had a couple of days left before he was to return to work after his hospital stay. He sat with Delaney for a while longer.

“This is all getting more dangerous by the day, Frank,” Smith said after Conchi had gone.

“It is,” Delaney said.

“You think they will go after Conchi now too?”

“It's possible, Jonah,” Delaney said. “You'll both have to watch yourselves while I'm away.”

“I'm not sure it was a wise idea to confront Becker so directly on this, Frank. I don't,” Smith said.

“Maybe not. I'm not so sure. But he didn't seem at all surprised by it. It's too late now anyway.

But there's no doubt he's angry. I'm just not sure if he's angry because he's worried he'll take the blame for this missing file or if he's the guy who's actually responsible for it going missing in the first place. I'm not sure if it's actually just because he doesn't like the idea of his team being accused of things if this all blows up.”

“It's all blowing up already, Frank.”

“You got that right,” Delaney said. “He got you beaten up and maybe he's got someone to try to run me down. He got someone to tell your wife about Conchi.”

“You think it's Becker who did all those things, Frank? Really?” “Who else could it be?” Delaney said. Smith had pondered this for a while. He drank some tea. He noticed that Delaney ordered beer now, or something even stronger, no matter what time of the day they met to ponder situations together.

“I feel we should have a clearer plan of some sort,” Smith said.

“The plan is, I go to Berlin, and try to find out what's really going on. If that body really is Klaus Heinrich, we're onto something big. As in big enough for a guy like Becker to play hardball with us.”

Delaney had told him what he found out from what he called “good sources” in Germany and Canada. Smith had no choice but to assume that Delaney's information was solid, that his sources were as good as he claimed.

“Why would an ex-Army man like Becker, if that's who he actually is, and a pathologist, why would he be over here trying to prevent people like me from identifying a man like Klaus Heinrich?” Smith said. “All right, maybe it will turn out that Heinrich was a spy who didn't die when people said he died or maybe he faked his own death, or whatever. People do that sort of thing sometimes. We thought Stahlman did that. Fine, all right. But what's in it for a man like Becker? Heinrich's already dead, one way or the other. So what are people trying to hide in this thing?”

“Jonah, congratulations, you are now asking exactly the right questions,” Delaney said. “That's what I'm going to Berlin to find out. When I find out, you'll be the first to know.”

For reasons he could not quite understand, the new Jonah Smith had some doubts about whether this was how things would actually work.

Smith went back to work at the IMC on a Wednesday, after the period of rest ordered by Thai doctors, by Braithwaite, and by Interpol team leader Janko Brajkovic. Delaney had already been gone for two days when Smith returned to work.

Brajkovic took the fingerprint man aside on the day Smith returned for what the Croatian policeman called “some friendly career advice.”

“You have done badly, my friend,” Brajkovic said. “Everyone is pissed off. I myself am pissed off.”

“About what, Janko?” Smith asked.

Brajkovic was seated in his usual place, with his usual flask of coffee on hand to fight the morning-after effects of alcohol and other excesses. Smith waited beside Brajkovic's extremely untidy desk to hear how the Croatian would describe the present situation.

“Your ridiculous search for that missing file has made everybody mad here, Smith. Braithwaite, Colonel P, I can never pronounce those damn Thai names, the entire German DVI team, me. You make it seem like everybody's either a criminal or a fool around here, Smith. No wonder you get yourself beaten up.”

“I got robbed, Janko,” Smith said.

“You are too smart to really think that, aren't you, Smith?”

“Why would someone beat me up just because I am trying to locate a lost file?”

“Because, fool, I told you, because you make everybody look like fucking criminals around here.”

“No, I do not,” Smith said.

“Braithwaite is so close to sending you back to Lyon you better have your bag packed and ready. I hear he has been talking to our illustrious SecretaryGeneral. I hear the Secretary-General is not a happy man.”

“I'm not interested in police gossip, Janko,”

Smith said.

“You better be,” Brajkovic said. “If they ship you back to Lyon like a bad boy, our illustrious Secretary-General may very well then ship you back to London like a very bad boy. Your wife won't like that much will she, Smith? Or the lovely Concepción.”

Brajkovic had a remarkably irritating grin. His bared his nicotine-stained teeth to leer at what he assumed would be Smith's extreme discomfort.

Smith, in fact, had considered the possibility that he could be sent back to London for his actions over the
Deutschland
file. The prospect of exchanging the Thailand disaster zone for the disaster zone of his marriage did in fact fill him with discomfort, if not quite dread. He did not want Brajkovic to see this, however, if only to prevent more fuel being tossed on management centre gossip fires that were now burning bright.

“Braithwaite wants to see you,” Brajkovic said, baring his yellow teeth once again. “He said you should report to him the moment you came back to work.”

“What on earth for?” Smith said.