The Tsunami File Read Free Page B

that only certain types of Spanish or Italian women can be. Smith knew a lot of the other, younger police in Phuket fancied her and he knew they wondered why she would go with a too-tall, too-thin, bespectacled British fingerprint man clearly past his prime. He wondered about that sometimes, too.
    She loved him “for now” she said. “For now, for now, Jonah, that is enough, no?” she would always say, laughing, when he inquired as to her feelings for him. She seemed unperturbed that he was married, even less perturbed after he told her a little, not too much, of how it was with he and his wife.
    â€œAnd she will not come with you to lovely Lyon?” Conchi would say. “She is crazy, crazy, no?”
    On workdays, Conchi still liked to wear her sky blue UNMIBH shirt, with United Nations flags festooned, even though officially she was part of the Spanish police team in Phuket. Her years with the UN mission in Bosnia had been intense, requiring that she and other determined investigators wallow around in rubber boots in muddy farm fields or forests or barns, excavating graves and searching, like Smith in his way, for history, identities, the endings of sad life stories. But she had loved it, was proud of it, wanted people to know if it. She loved her work very much, as he did his.
    For the first time in his life, Smith could enthuse as long as he wanted to about the job he did. She would not sneer at his enthusiasms, as Fiona had learned to do. Conchi carefully examined the fingerprint books in his little apartment at the Bay Hotel, looked closely, many times at the fingerprint diagrams in the Henry text, at the many varieties of prints, at the arcane coding system with its trailings of numbers and letters, and she would sip at her beer and smile.
    â€œHe was smart, this Henry, no?” she would say. Conchi understood the feeling one got when an identity was confirmed. They would talk about it sometimes, in his giant hotel bed after making love or sitting as they liked to do on his balcony at sunset overlooking the hilly island silhouettes in Chalong Bay.
    Smith would watch her drinking beer on his balcony. He would marvel at her lovely olive skin, far darker than his now was, even though she carefully protected herself from the sun. He would watch closely as she sipped her beer or her coffee, marvel at the ruby red lipstick stains she left on his glasses and cups, marvel at the urgency of his feelings for this young woman who loved him for now. He loved her for now, too, and, he would think ruefully, most probably for longer than that as well. But he was a man without illusions, neither about the disaster area of his own marriage nor about the possibility that Conchi could one day pull him from the debris.
    She let him take her fingerprints, late one humid night as they both sat at the dining table, inches from a revolving floor fan, sweating and suffering in the tropical heat. Smith thought Conchi looked grand in her sarong in the tropical heat, with small beads of sweat poised on her forehead, her small shoulders, her chest.
    â€œFingertips slightly moist. Perfect, perfect for this work,” Smith said as he inked them on a stamp pad.
    â€œOi, oi, oi, Jonah you are too rough,” she cried out as he rolled her fingertips one after another onto Bay Hotel stationery. “I am not under arrest, this is not London in a stinking police cell—you cannot abuse me in this way.”
    â€œPerfect, perfect,” Smith said when he examined the set of prints as they dried. “I’m the best in the business, especially with uncooperative prisoners such as yourself.”
    They peered together at her prints under a magnifying glass, on the dining table under a light abuzz with insects. Her fingertips were tiny, but full of graceful arches. Her prints were quite unlike his own.
    She peered through the examiner’s glass at his prints on their aging Scotland Yard cards, then back at her