Authors: Michael E. Rose
He went over as well and offered her his hand. “I'm Francis Delaney, Mrs. Smith. A friend of Jonah's.”
She looked him up and down.
“From London?” she asked. “We've not met. One of Jonah's Lyon friends perhaps.”
She said the word
Lyon
as if it denoted some sort of bodily excretion.
“No, I'm from Canada. Jonah and I met here.”
“He's a journalist, Mrs. Smith,” Connolly said.
“A famous one, or so they say.”
“Oh, I see, well, I certainly hope you are not going to make too much of this unfortunate business of Jonah having been robbed out here,” Mrs. Smith said. “One does always run the risk of robbery in countries like this.” “One does,” Delaney said.
He hoped Mrs. Smith's next question would be about her husband's well-being, or, he thought, the marriage was truly over, with no hope of reconciliation whatsoever.
“Jonah is well?” she said.
“Yes, fine now,” Connolly said. “A nasty thing, and he got some cuts and bruises, but he wasn't too badly hurt. They got his wallet . . .”
“I see,” Mrs. Smith said. She placed her sun hat firmly on her perfectly waved hair. “Can we go to the hotel now? I would like to freshen up.”
“Yes, of course,” Connolly said, motioning to the Thai police driver, who took over pushing Mrs. Smith's luggage trolley. “We'll get you to the hotel and then over to the hospital. Jonah is due to be released tomorrow.” “I see,” said Mrs. Smith.
Connolly very wisely sat in front with the driver on the way to the hotel, but turned around often to flash big smiles at Mrs. Smith, who sat beside Delaney in the back. Delaney started to wonder why Smith had asked him to come along to the airport at all, except, possibly, to see very early in the game what his wife was like.
At the Bay Hotel, Delaney stayed discreetly back as Mrs. Smith checked in to her room on the eighth floor. Jonah Smith's room was on six. Connolly bought Delaney lunch and several Singha beers in the hotel restaurant as they killed an hour before Mrs. Smith reappeared, apparently ready at last to shoulder her wifely burden and go to the hospital. She had changed her blouse. The cardigan now rested loosely on her shoulders, as a concession to the local weather.
“Not sure you'll need a sweater out there today,” Delaney said.
“The air conditioning in these places and in all the cars is absolutely freezing, don't you think?” she said.
“True,” Connolly said.
At the hospital, Mrs. Smith dutifully kissed her husband on his cheek.
“Goodness me, you do look a sight,” she said, sitting in the sole visitor's chair, purse positioned in her lap. “And that mustache. I wouldn't have recognized you.”
“I'm all right, Fiona,” Smith said. “On the mend now.”
“They got your wallet, I'm told. Dreadful story,” she said. “Yes,” Smith said.
Delaney could already feel the silence starting to build. It billowed like a thundercloud on a sultry Thai afternoon. He did the right thing, and made his exit. Connolly was not far behind.
Delaney had found over the years that police officers and spies, or those who work closely with police officers and spies, are very good at break-ins and other extralegal activities. Smith had prepared everything, had prepared for every imaginable problem or eventuality. They met in a small street behind the Bay Hotel at precisely 3 a.m. on a hot moonlit night. Smith was driving a car borrowed from Zalm, whose DVI team, apparently, believed that all members should be assigned rental vehicles while in Thailand.
Delaney had taken a taxi from the Metropole. His driver seemed to think nothing of dropping off a foreigner in the middle of the night in a darkened back street, the Phuket brothel scene being what it is. Smith said the watchman in the parking lot of his hotel had been similarly nonchalant as he waved Zalm's car through the gate on the way out.
In the trunk of the car was a small rucksack that Smith had crammed with the tools of the trade. Flashlights for each of them, bolt cutters, a length of nylon rope, a notebook, camera, bottled water, and a smaller bag containing what he said was fingerprinting gear. In the back seat he had stowed a small folding stepladder he had liberated from a cleaner's cupboard at his hotel.
Smith wore an Interpol baseball cap, in navy blue, and darker blue crime-scene overalls, emblazoned on the back, unfortunately, with the words: Interpol Incident Response Team. Delaney also wore a ball cap, an ancient maroon Loyola College number that had outlasted all of his adult relationships put together, including his now long-defunct marriage. He had chosen a black T-shirt and jeans for his freelance break-in work and had tied a grey Montreal Amateur Athletic Association sweatshirt around his waist.
They drove slowly out to the mortuary compound. There was little traffic at that time of night. What there was consisted mainly of taxis ferrying tourists, and presumably visiting international police, back to hotels from the always crowded bars in Phuket Town. Occasionally they saw sleepy-looking Thai hotel workers in uniform, resolutely pedalling homeward or workward on battered bicycles.
Smith had done excellent preparatory work in all other regards as well. He had pulled from the DVI computer system the serial number of the container that held the
Deutschland
body and the approximate place in the compound where that container sat. He also had a printout of the body roster for that particular container. It showed five columns, corresponding to the five wooden racks that would be inside, and nine spaces per column, corresponding to the shelves in each rack that could hold bodies.
Container CRL0912863 would be sitting well toward the back of the compound, luckily for them, not far from the two-metre-high fence in prefabricated concrete sections that had been installed in the weeks after the tsunami disaster. It would hold, Smith's papers showed, 29 numbered bodies, so not all available shelves would be filled. Five bag numbers had been highlighted in pink, indicating that the bodies in those bags had been identified but not yet released for transport home. All the rest were so far unidentified.
The
Deutschland
body, the papers showed, was numbered PM68-TA0386 and would be on the top shelf of Rack 4, one rack from the back. If, as Delaney pointed out on the drive over, the body was actually still in there. Smith looked troubled by this prospect. The body being missing altogether was one of the very few eventualities he had apparently not considered.
They would have crossed over the fence at the back of the compound no matter where the container they sought was located. The narrow dirt road in that area was adjacent to a thick grove of very tall palms. Smith pulled their white Nissan well into the palms, off the road, and they got out immediately. Smith pulled on his rucksack. Delaney carried the ladder.
They walked a little away from the car in the brilliant moonlight. Smith took his length of rope from the rucksack and quickly tied one end to the top step of his ladder. He pulled the ladder's legs apart and placed it at the base of the wall. Delaney watched, impressed, as the fingerprint man climbed quickly up and hoisted himself up on top of the fence, clutching the other end of the rope. He jumped down to the other side and called out to Delaney: “Your turn. Hurry up.”
Delaney climbed up and over, landing lightly in the weeds on the other side. Smith pulled the ladder up and over the fence using the rope, folded it, and stowed it in the weeds. They crouched there together, watching and listening. There was no sound at all except for the night breeze that whispered in the container corridors. No watchman's feet crunched on the compound's gravel pathways.
“You seem to be an expert burglar, Jonah,”
Delaney said.
“I am.” Smith said. “Have to be, in police work.”
“Really?” Delaney said. “There's a story in there somewhere.”
“Many stories, Frank. Not for publication.” They waited and watched and listened some more.
“OK, let's go,” Smith said.
Crouching slightly, they walked quickly along the back row, looking for CRL0912863.
“It'll be a Carlisle container,” Smith said. “A lot of them are. They got a big load of the Carlisle ones when they were setting up.”
Many of the containers did indeed carry the blue Carlisle Shipping logo. The one they sought was not in the back row. They turned up the next corridor and found what they were looking for, three containers into the row. It was battered, like most of the others, and had a plastic document holder taped to the door. Inside that plastic sleeve was the same body roster Smith carried. Smith peered closely at both documents, using his flashlight. “This is it. Our man's in here,” he said.
“Great stuff,” Delaney said.
Smith pulled the bolt cutters from his pack and fitted them to a very flimsy padlock, better suited to garden sheds than to forensic evidence containers full of disaster victims. He pulled and strained with the cutters for a few minutes, and then the hasp of the lock fell away. He picked up the various pieces and stowed them in his pack before turning to Delaney again.
“Perhaps you'd better stand watch while I go in and do the deed,” he said.
“I don't know, Jonah. Better if we both go in and shut the door, I'd say. If a watchman comes around, I don't want to be out here any longer than I have to.”
“Are you squeamish?” Smith asked.
“No,” Delaney said.
“Have you seen dead bodies before?”
“Yes, of course,” Delaney said.
“Decomposed, weeks after death, postautopsy, that sort of thing?”
“Jonah, for Christ's sake. You'll need someone to hold the light anyway, won't you?”
“OK, all right. The smell's not too bad because it's so cold in there. But it smells. It will smell.”
“I'll be fine.”
“It will be really cold in there.”
“Jonah . . .”
“All right.”
Jonah pulled on a white V-neck tennis sweater. Delaney put on his sweatshirt.
“Let's go,” Delaney said.
Smith pulled open the large corrugated steel door of the container. It squeaked loudly. Billows of frozen vapour poured out into the tropical night air. Smith trained his flashlight inside onto the rough wooden racks. Delaney had a sudden memory of the eerily similar wooden bunks he'd seen while visiting a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, horror tourism, to see where exhausted Jews had been crammed in to sleep and await extermination.
Bodies lay silently in Container CRL0912863 in heavy white plastic bags. Delaney followed Smith inside, taking care not to slip on the treacherous flooring of sawdust, ice and steel. Body PM68TA0386 was precisely where Smith's roster said it would be: Rack 4, Top.
Smith wasted no time. He put his pack on an empty rack below the
Deutschland
body and pulled out his smaller bag of fingerprinting gear. Delaney held a light. Smith opened the gear bag and arranged small bottles of ink and black powder on the rack, as well as an assortment of tape, gummed labels, index cards, small brushes, sticks, scalpels, tweezers, scrapers.
“Scotland Yard issue,” Delaney said.
“The original and genuine. Purveyors of the finest fingerprints to Her Majesty the Queen.”
The air inside the container was very cold, Canadian cold. It smelled sharply, as Smith had warned, of putrefaction and chemicals and damp. It was a smell that lingered in nostrils and memory for many hours after being inhaled. Delaney had inhaled such morgue smells before.
Smith put on surgical gloves. He pulled the bag's heavy zipper open to about mid-body level. The face of the
Deutschland
man when it appeared in the flashlight beam was horrifically disfigured by seawater and sun damage and general decay. All that Delaney could really make out of the features in the narrow shaft of light was a balding head and what would have once been a prominent nose. The lips were stretched back over the teeth in the terribly familiar rictus of death. Some grey hairs glistened on the man's chest.
Smith pulled the stiff left arm out of the bag. It, too, had grey hairs still standing. The hand was in bad condition. The skin had tightened on the bones, looking for all the world like shrunken plastic now, in a dreadful blue, green and tan hue.
“Frank, can you give me a bit more light here?” Smith said. He held the corpse's hand up high, crouching slightly to look up at the palm and fingertips from below. The wrists of refrigerated corpses do not cooperate when fingerprint men try to twist them around.
“Fuck,” Smith said. Delaney had very rarely heard him swear.
“What?” Delaney said.
“They're gone,” Smith said.
“What's gone?”
“The prints, Frank. They're gone. Someone's taken them completely off the hand. Have a look.”
Delaney crouched and looked up at the dead man's accusing fingers. He saw, with some difficulty, that each finger pad had been removed. On some fingers, he saw bone where fingerprints should be.