The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  Smith hesitated again. He ran his hand over his sunburned forehead and his thinning curls. He stared at his fingertips.

  “Look, Delaney,” he said eventually. “Can we go off the record for a bit? Or whatever you lot like to call it.” “Fine with me.”

  When a police officer proposed confidentiality, Delaney knew from experience, something important was coming.

  “Off the record,” Smith repeated with a small smile. “Rather dramatic, isn’t it. Melodramatic.”

  “Not always,” Delaney said. “Not always. Necessary sometimes. Depending on the story.

  What’s up?”

  “Well, look,” Smith said finally. “The fact of the matter is that I’m upset about the way certain things have been handled around here. The fact is, I’m not happy and I’ve had a word with the senior people out here and they have, quite frankly, done nothing to solve what I see as a serious problem.”

  Delaney knew when to wait and listen, when not to interrupt an interview subject who is about to share a secret.

  “Look, I know your work a little,” Smith said.

  “I saw that article you did a few years ago about Aung San Suu Kyi and that crazy plot to kidnap her, or whatever it was. Quite a story. You were working for Asia Weekly.”

  For the Canadian spy service actually, Delaney thought.

  “I wrote it for Asia Weekly, that’s right,” he said to Smith. “But I was actually a staffer at the Montreal Tribune at the time. My editors there weren’t too happy with that little freelance effort of mine and we parted ways right afterward. To put it politely.”

  CSIS not too happy either, Delaney thought. To put it politely.

  “Well, I’ve run into something out here that may interest you, given the sort of investigative reporting things you do,” Smith said. “I’ve come across something odd and I think it’s an indication of a larger problem that may, to be really frank about it, get in the way of some of us doing our jobs properly, which as you know is to get all the bodies out here identified and back to their families as quickly as we can. The fact of the matter is I’m upset because the senior people here, some senior people anyway, are ignoring what I’ve told them and I’m upset about that. Not happy at all.”

  For Delaney, and those like him in the information-gathering trade, there is nothing better than an unhappy official. He did not attempt to fill any of Smith’s silences. Unhappy officials will generally fill those if left uninterrupted.

  “I’ve worked for the police for twenty-one years,” Smith said, continuing what Delaney could see was going to be an extended apologia before allowing himself to betray a secret. “I’ve rarely spoken to the press in all those years and never once felt the need to go off the record or reveal anything confidential about an ongoing investigation or anything else for that matter.” Delaney waited.

  “I’ve thought about this a lot since they told me you’d requested this interview,” Smith said. “I’m still not quite sure this is the right thing to do.”

  “I can see that,” Delaney said.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  Smith laughed bitterly. Delaney could see he was having second thoughts.

  “Here’s what I think we should do,” Delaney said. “We’ll go off the record, completely. You tell me what it is that’s bothering you about the operation and then we can decide together how I use it or whether I use it. If you have any misgivings about things in any way after you’ve told me what’s on your mind, I won’t use what you give me in my article. Not directly. But in situations like this, I tell people that I’ll use what they tell me to try to get the information from another source and if I get it again in that way I can use it in the piece. And, at that stage, I can also use what you have told me directly, but still off the record, if you’re feeling more comfortable. How would it be if we started off like that?”

  The deal clearly worked for Smith. He launched immediately into a detailed tirade about the missing Deutschland file, about the missing elements of the file he had observed before it disappeared completely, about the brush-off he got from various DVI colleagues, and from Adrian Braithwaite. He told Delaney about the late-night visit from a possibly drunken Horst Becker. And eventually he told him about the blackmail note. Once Smith decided to tell Delaney the story of the file, he told it all.

  “What did the note say exactly?” Delaney asked eventually.

  “Well, it basically said if I didn’t stop asking questions about the file, there’d be trouble. I’ve got it back in my room if you want to look at it.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Smith took off his glasses and polished them with the end of his shirt.

  “Ah, now we will have to be well and truly off the record, Delaney,” he said.

  “We’re as far off the record as we can go,”

  Delaney said.

  “It said that they, or he, or whoever wrote it, would tell my wife back in London I was having an affair out here.”

  “Ah,” Delaney said.

  “Exactly,” Smith said. “Ah.”

  “You know what I am going to ask you now, don’t you, Jonah?” Delaney said.

  “You’d make a very good prosecutor, Delaney,” Smith said with a bitter smile.

  “So I’ve been told,” Delaney said.

  “Look, OK, here it is. I have been seeing a woman from another DVI team. We spend a lot of time together. Yes, it’s an affair. But it’s nobody’s business.”

  “A lot of Western men meet Thai women when they come out to places like this,” Delaney said. “No big revelation there.”

  He thought of Nathan Kellner, a lifelong ladies’ man before he was killed in Burma in 2001. He thought of Kellner’s Thai girlfriend solemnly feeding cats and goldfish in their apartment in Bangkok while she waited for word from Delaney whether her man was alive or dead.

  “She’s not Thai,” Smith said. “It’s not like that. She’s not a bar girl. She’s with the police. From Spain.”

  “And if the people you have pissed off tell your wife about that, is that a problem for you?” Delaney asked.

  Smith put his glasses back on.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anymore. Certainly it would be complicated. But maybe not such a bad thing. Not sure.”

  Delaney paused for minute to process that frank evaluation of a marriage and to allow Smith to do the same thing.

  “You think whoever wrote you that note would be police?” Delaney asked.

  “Or civilian,” Smith said quickly. “It could be a civilian. There are lots of civilian staff working out here from all over the place. From Thailand too. It could be anyone.”

  “How many people did you talk to about your worries on this thing?” Delaney said.

  “Quite a few,” Smith said. “Too many, in retrospect.” “I would say.”

  “And the place is a gossip’s heaven. Anybody I asked about the file could have told anybody else. Word flashes around here like wildfire about any little thing,” Smith said. “Who’s sleeping with whom, for example.”

  Delaney drank tea. Smith worked on his bottle of mineral water. They watched each other for a while in silence.

  “What is it you want me to do exactly, Jonah?” Delaney said eventually.

  “Find out what’s happening. Ask senior people the right questions on the record and see what they say. Light a fire under some of these people. And if they don’t fix things up, then damn it, tell the world about it.”

  “And you think the world cares about one lost file, in a situation like this?” Delaney asked.

  “You sound exactly like Braithwaite now,”

  Smith said.

  “You think the world wants to know about this?” Delaney asked again.

  “I think the families of the people who got killed out here on a Chri
stmas holiday would want to know if someone is stealing files. I’m sure the world would want to know if someone is trying to prevent identifications out here.”

  “Who would want to do that, Jonah?”

  “I have been asking myself that question for several weeks now, Delaney,” Smith said.

  “Who do you think would want to do that? Prevent an identification. Seriously.”

  “Pedophiles,” Smith said. “That’s one possibility.”

  “Pedophiles,” Delaney said.

  “Friends of pedophiles. Or family. People with something to lose if a body turns up here and someone like me comes across a fingerprint record and a conviction back in Europe. Maybe one that isn’t too widely known. I don’t know. It’s a possibility. I’ve thought a lot about it.”

  “Pedophiles,” Delaney said again.

  “We’ve already identified a few of these guys out here,” Smith said. “It was easy once we started getting antemortem prints from criminal records back in Germany or Belgium or Sweden or wherever. Any number of countries back in Europe.”

  Delaney pondered this.

  “You know what we call the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok?” Smith said. “What we call it at Interpol?” “No. What?”

  “The Pedophile Express. Service seven days a week.”

  “Police humour,” Delaney said.

  “It’s a well-known fact,” Smith said. “Those flights always full of fat, middle-aged German men heading out here to prey on kids.”

  “Deutschland,” Delaney said.

  Back at the Metropole that night, Delaney did up his notebook after the interview as he had done too many times before, in too many silent hotel rooms all around the world and back again. He drank Jameson’s whisky from the room’s minibar and munched overpriced peanuts as he added details and possible angles to his notes. He sat for a long time and emptied too many tiny bottles pondering angles and scenarios.

  Eventually he closed his notebook and went onto his balcony and into the languid tropical air. Down and to his right, a TV crew on another balcony bantered at top volume in Portuguese and rattled beer bottles and ice buckets as they dissected the day’s journalistic takings. In the parking lot, an aging Thai man in a white uniform with gold braid and epaulettes sat alone on a battered aluminum chair beside a boom gate, listening to a transistor radio. The night man saw Delaney on the balcony and raised a hand in greeting.

  Delaney waved back; suddenly, once again, he felt the raw loneliness that now came too often while working alone in hotel rooms somewhere in the world. He thought of the obsessively neat, antiseptic apartment in a Montreal highrise where he cocooned himself between assignments. He thought of calling Kate in Montreal, alone in her own cocoon, and then quickly thought better of it. She was growing tired of impulsive late-night phone calls from assignment hotels, again. She had told him so. She was growing tired, again, of waiting for Delaney in Montreal and of waiting for him to decide, as she put it, who he wanted to be when he grew up, who they could be together when he grew up.

  One day soon, when he finally decided who he wanted to be, he would quit the game forever, leave the field clear for Tim Bishop and a new wave of information gatherers. He could see that coming, had known it was coming ever since his first disastrous departure from straight information gathering into the not so straight world of spies. Tonight, however, with Jonah Smith’s story developing in his notebook and his curiosity engaged, he was reasonably certain, reasonably hopeful, that this time he could remain in the relative clarity of the journalistic realm.

  Chapter 4

  Delaney was not sure how much more time even the long-suffering editors of International Geographic would give him to finish his tsunami DVI story. He was sure, however, that they would not immediately buy into his now chasing a missing file story and a possible blackmail angle involving one member of one country’s DVI team. The editors would respectfully advise him to tip off newshound colleagues in the daily press or one of the wire services, leave it to them, and get on with the big general feature he had been assigned to produce.

  So he knew he would have to finish up his interviews in Phuket soon and appear to be at the writing stage to keep his editors happy. Ruth Connolly had now confirmed he could interview Adrian Braithwaite on Wednesday, two days hence. Smith had said he would brief Delaney before that encounter, to prime him with the right questions. So, in an email to his editors in Washington Delaney wrote: FYI, tsunami item coming along nicely. Good cooperation from officials, good interviews, good human interest angle/pathos. Bishop’s pix exceptional. Suggest we have cover story material. About to start writing.

  Please stand by for 5,000-word draft ASAP. Regards, FD.

  As in all such situations, Delaney began chasing a new angle, even one his editors would not want, by reading in. It is the time-honoured way in which any good journalist gets the feel for a developing story, gets familiar with background, issues, related events, and ways forward. The process was far easier than when Delaney first started in the game. Then, it would have meant relying almost entirely on librarians at home base to cull stories from the newspaper morgue on his behalf and fax clippings to him in a hotel somewhere in the field. He would also have carried a bulky sheaf of paper clippings along with him as he travelled, a sheaf that would diminish in value as new angles and questions developed while on the road.

  Now, with the Internet and global news databases open to him, he was no longer at the mercy of curmudgeonly newspaper librarians and the world was, literally, at his fingertips. So the day following Smith’s revelations, Delaney spent a few hours after breakfast at the desk in his room, tapping away at his laptop screen and scanning news agency archives, newspaper websites, NGO and government websites—any online sources he found interesting. After that he would call some of his contacts in the media and elsewhere—another time-honoured reporters’ tradition—to see what they might know. His objective: to find anything that would throw light on why someone might want to prevent proper identification of a body at the Phuket DVI site, and why a German body in particular.

  Delaney was making a few assumptions in his initial inquiries. One, that someone was indeed trying to prevent an identification in Phuket. He accepted Jonah Smith’s version of events, at least for the moment, and accepted that the Deutschland file had not simply been lost or mislaid. Two, he bought into the assumption that the body in question was that of a German national. The tattoo on the corpse made that fairly obvious he thought, although that was not certain, and the actions of at least one member of the German DVI team added to his suspicions. Three, he felt it worthwhile to pursue a pedophile connection of some sort.

  It took Delaney some time before he began to find what he was looking for in the news databases. The basic story was easy enough. Yes, Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations, particularly Cambodia these days and increasingly Vietnam, were a magnet for European pedophiles, homosexual or otherwise. Police reaction depended very much on the country in question and the level of official corruption. Thailand certainly made all the right noises about combatting sex tourism, but it was, Delaney found, still rampant there despite some recent high-profile arrests and convictions.

  The Factiva database yielded, eventually, some very useful material. The keywords pedophile, Thailand, Germany and identity had borne fruit. Delaney stumbled across a series of 2002 reports from Reuters and from European newspapers about one Karl-Heinz Stahlman, a prominent industrialist from Hamburg and his taste for travel and for young Asian boys. There had been, apparently, rumours for some time about Stahlman’s predilections. Eventually he had been arrested in Thailand, not in Phuket but in Pattaya farther north, and charged with interfering with schoolkids.

  Stahlman, as befitted a respected member of the German business elite, was married with three children of his own. His arrest led immediately to his downfall. He narrowly escaped a prison sentenc
e in Thailand—rumours circulated at the time, according to the German press, of his having generously bribed senior Thai officials to avoid such a fate. Stahlman’s wife left him within days of his return to Hamburg, deported from Thailand and in disgrace. And of course the board of the giant medical-equipment manufacturing firm he headed showed him the door. Stahlman claimed to have resigned. The company said he had been fired.

  Then the German press reported Stahlman’s suicide. Delaney could not remember anything at all of this story, lurid though it was. Perhaps it had not been widely played in the Canadian media at the time or perhaps he had simply missed it. In 2002 Delaney had been somewhat distracted, trying hard to avoid getting blown up or shot in crossfire in Afghanistan and after that he had become busy again with new assignments for CSIS. His erstwhile CSIS handlers had held their noses, forgiven him for his transgressions in Burma and once again taken an active interest in how a journalist such as himself could be useful to them, post-9/11, postAfghanistan, post-new world order.

  On March 8, 2002, Stahlman, according to media reports at the time, drove his SLK class Mercedes to the Baltic Sea coast near Rostock, parked it legally, left a suicide note in an envelope on the driver’s seat, locked the car, and drowned himself. He was 52 years old. Police dragged the salt marshes near the shore for days, police divers scoured the area for days, police helicopters hovered overhead for days, but Stahlman’s body was never found. The photo of Stahlman’s elegant black car parked near the water’s edge had made the cover of Der Spiegel under the headline: “Pedophile Industrialist Drowns in Despair.”

  It was an angle with very strong possibilities, Delaney decided. It was a dream angle, he decided as he disconnected from the Internet and closed his laptop. But it was one that would require far more investigation than a couple of hours on news databases.