Once the bodies were recovered and brought to the Netherlands for identification, the Dutch government arranged a convoy of hearses in a 100km burial procession.
"Haven't you got any other identification?" the clerk asked.
"At each identification, the victim's family will be notified, I promise that," he said.
The effect is a bodily identification: the saint and you, both strenuously upright on earth.
But his identity had remained a mystery because the body carried no identification, the police said.
Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers used fraudulent New Jersey driver's licenses as identification, the authorities say.
In part, it is a form of personal identification: the saddest of diplomas, the most mysterious of passports.
To help in the search and identification, the policeman remarked, investigators had asked family members to list some personal effects.
The brilliance of the amnesiac spy trope is that it makes that identification the quietly meta center of the story.
The double-checking has already paid dividends in identification, the coin of the medical examiner's isolated realm.
Without a specific reason to ask for each person's identification, the court said, the demand is illegal.
