The Cockroaches

by Jo Nesbo

  She couldn’t help him with the name of anyone who might have had a motive for wishing the ambassador dead.

  He drummed his pencil on the pad.

  “Did your husband like children?”

  “Oh yes, a lot!” Hilde Molnes burst out, and for the first time he could hear a quiver in her voice. “You know, Atle was the world’s kindest father.”

  Harry had to look down at the pad again. There had been something in her eyes that revealed she had sussed the double-edged nature of his question. He was nearly sure she didn’t know anything, but he also knew it was his unfortunate task to have to take the next step and ask her straight out if she knew the ambassador had child pornography in his possession.

  He ran a hand across his face. He felt like a surgeon with a scalpel in his hand, unable to perform the first incision. He could never get over his sensitivity when it came to matters unpleasant, when innocent people had to put up with having their nearest and dearest thrust into the limelight, having details they hadn’t wanted to know hurled in their faces.

  Hilde Molnes spoke first.

  “He loved children so much we considered adopting a little girl.” She had tears in her eyes now. “A poor little refugee from Burma. Yes, at the embassy they are so careful to say Myanmar not to offend anyone, but I’m so old I say Burma.”

  She forced a dry chuckle through the tears and composed herself. Harry looked away. A red hummingbird hovered quietly in front of the orchids, like a little model helicopter.

  That was it, he decided. She knows nothing. If it had any relevance to the case he would take it up later. And if it didn’t he would spare her.

  Harry asked how long they had known each other, and she told him how they had met when Atle Molnes was a newly qualified political science graduate, a bachelor home for Christmas in Ørsta. The Molnes family was very wealthy, owned two furniture factories, and the young heir would have been a good catch for any young girl in the region, so there was no shortage of competition.

  “I was just Hilde Melle from Melle Farm, but I was the most attractive,” she said with the same dry chuckle. A pained expression crossed her face and she put the glass to her lips.

  Harry had no problem visualizing the widow as a pure, young beauty.

  Especially as that very image had just materialized at the open patio door.

  “Runa, my love, there you are! This young man is Harry Hole. He’s a Norwegian police officer and is going to help us find out what happened to Dad.”

  The daughter barely dignified them with a glance and headed for the opposite side of the pool without answering. She had her mother’s dark complexion and hair, and Harry estimated the long-limbed, slim body in the bathing costume to be about seventeen years old. He should have known her age; it had been in the report he was given before leaving.

  She would have been a perfect beauty, like her mother, had it not been for one detail the report had not included. By the time she had rounded the pool and taken three slow, elegant steps along the diving board, bringing her legs together and soaring into the air, Harry already had a lump in his stomach. From her right shoulder protruded a thin stump of an arm that lent her body a strangely asymmetrical form, like a plane with a wing shot off, as it whirled around in a somersault with a twist. A splash was all that was heard as she broke the green surface and was lost from view.

  “Runa’s a diver,” Hilde Molnes said quite unnecessarily.

  He still had his gaze fixed on where she had disappeared when a figure appeared by the pool ladder on the other side. She climbed up the rungs and he saw her rippling back, the sun glittering in the droplets on her skin and making her wet black hair gleam. The withered arm hung down like a chicken wing. Her exit was as soundless as her entrance and dive; she vanished through the patio door without a word.

  “She probably didn’t know you were here,” Hilde Molnes said apologetically. “She doesn’t like strangers seeing her without her prosthesis, you see.”

  “I understand. How has she taken the news?”

  “Who knows.” Hilde Molnes looked pensively toward where Runa had gone. “She’s at that age where she tells me nothing. Nor anyone else for that matter.” She raised her glass. “I’m afraid Runa is a bit of a special girl.”

  Harry got up, thanked her for the information and said she would be hearing from him. Hilde Molnes pointed out that he hadn’t drunk any water; he bowed and asked her to keep it for him until the next time. It struck him that this was perhaps a little inappropriate, but she laughed anyway and drained her glass as he left.

  As he walked toward the gate, a red open-top Porsche rolled up the drive. He just caught a blond fringe above a pair of Ray-Bans and a gray Armani suit before the car passed him and parked in the shade by the house.

  10

  Saturday, January 11

  Inspector Crumley was out when Harry returned to the police station, but Nho gave him a thumbs-up and said “Roger” when Harry politely asked him to contact the telecommunications company and check all the conversations to and from the ambassador’s mobile phone on the day of the murder.

  It was almost five o’clock when Harry finally got hold of the inspector. As it was late she suggested they head to a riverboat to see the canals, “so as to get the sightseeing over and done with.”

  At the River Pier they were offered one of the long boats for six hundred baht, but the price soon fell to three hundred after Crumley had tongue-lashed the boatman in Thai.

  They headed down the Chao Phraya before turning into one of the narrow canals. Wooden shacks looking as if they might collapse at any moment clung to poles in the river, and the smell of food, sewage and petrol drifted past in waves. Harry had a sense they were passing through the sitting rooms of the people who lived there. Only lines of green potted plants prevented them from looking straight in, but no one seemed particularly bothered; on the contrary, they waved and smiled.

  Three boys in shorts sitting on a pier, wet after emerging from the brown water, called after them. Crumley shook a good-natured fist at them and the boatman laughed.

  “What did they shout?” Harry asked.

  She pointed to her head. “Mâe chii. It means mother, priest or nun. Nuns in Thailand shave their heads. If I wore a white gown I’d probably be treated with more respect,” she said.

  “Oh yes? It seems as if you have enough respect. Your people—”

  “That’s because I respect them,” she interrupted. “And because I’m good at my job.” She cleared her throat and spat over the railing. “But maybe that surprises you because I’m a woman?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Foreigners are often surprised when they realize women can get ahead in this country. It isn’t as macho as it seems here. In fact, it’s more of a problem that I’m a foreigner.”

  A light breeze created a cooling draft in the humid air; from a clump of trees came the chirping song of grasshoppers and they stared at the same bloodred sun as the evening before.

  “What made you move here?”

  Harry had a sense he might have crossed an invisible red line, but he ignored it.

  “My mother’s Thai,” she said after a pause. “Dad was stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War and met her here in Bangkok in 1967.” She laughed and put a cushion behind her back. “Mom swears she got pregnant the first night they were together.”

  “With you?”

  She nodded. “After the capitulation he took us to the States, to Fort Lauderdale, where he served as a lieutenant colonel. When we came back here my mother found out he’d been married when they met. He’d written home and arranged the divorce when he discovered Mom was pregnant.” She shook her head. “He had every opportunity to run away and leave us in Bangkok if he’d wanted to. Perhaps he did want to, deep down. Who knows.”

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “It’s not the kind of question you necessarily want an honest answer to, is it. I would never have got a real answer f
rom him anyway. He was just like that.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes, he’s dead.” She turned to him. “Does it bother you, me talking about my family?”

  Harry bit into a cigarette filter. “Not at all.”

  “Running away was never really an option for my father. He had a thing about responsibility. When I was eleven I was allowed to take a kitten from some neighbors in Fort Lauderdale. After a lot of fuss Dad said yes on the condition that I looked after it. Two weeks later I’d lost interest and asked if I could give it back. Then Dad took me and the kitten down to the garage. “You can’t run away from responsibility,” he said. “That’s how civilizations crumble.” Then he took his service rifle and fired a bullet through the kitten’s head. Afterward I had to get soap and water and scrub the garage floor. That was how he was. That was why …” She removed her sunglasses, took a corner of her shirt, wiped them and squinted into the setting sun. “That was why he could never accept the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Mom and I moved here when I was eighteen.”

  Harry nodded. “I can imagine it wasn’t so easy for your mother to go to an American military base after the war.”

  “The base wasn’t so bad. Other Americans, however, the ones who hadn’t been there but had lost a son or a sweetheart in Vietnam, they hated us. For them anyone with slanted eyes was Charlie.”

  A man in a suit sat smoking a cigar by a fire-ravaged shack.

  “And then you went to Police College, became a detective and shaved off your hair?”

  “Not in that order. And I didn’t shave off my hair. It fell out one week when I was seventeen. A rare form of alopecia. But practical in this climate.”

  She stroked her head with one hand and gave a weary smile. She had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.

  Another boat came up alongside them. It was loaded to the gunnels with straw hats, and an old woman pointed to their heads and then the hats. Crumley smiled politely and said a few words. Before the woman shoved off she leaned over to Harry and gave him a white flower. She indicated Crumley and laughed.

  “What’s thank you in Thai?”

  “Khop khun khráp,” Crumley said.

  “Right. You tell her that.”

  They glided past a temple, a wat, close to the canal, and could hear the mumbling of the monks coming from the open door. People were sitting on the steps outside praying with folded hands.

  “What are they praying for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Peace. Love. A better life, here or in the sweet hereafter. The same things that people want everywhere.”

  “I don’t think Atle Molnes was waiting for a prostitute. I think he was waiting for someone else.”

  They glided on, and the monks’ mumbling faded behind them.

  “Who?”

  “No idea.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He only had enough money to rent the room, so I wouldn’t mind betting he had no intention of paying for a prostitute’s services. But he had no business being at the motel unless he was going to meet someone, right? The door wasn’t locked when they found him, according to Wang. Isn’t that a bit odd? If you close a hotel door it locks automatically. He must have consciously pressed the button on the handle so that it would remain open. There was no reason for the murderer to press it in. I suppose he or she wasn’t aware they were leaving a door unlocked. So why did Molnes do that? Most people who frequent such establishments would prefer to have the door locked when they were asleep, don’t you think?”

  She wagged her head from side to side. “Maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t hear the person he was waiting for.”

  “Exactly. And there was no reason to leave the door open for Tonya Harding because the agreement with the receptionist was that he would ring first. Right?”

  In his excitement Harry had shifted to one side and the boatman shouted at him to sit in the middle so that they didn’t tip over.

  “I think he wanted to keep the name of the person he was meeting hidden. That was probably why they were getting together in a motel outside town. A suitable place for a secret meeting, a place where there was no official guest book.”

  “Hm. Are you thinking about the photos.”

  “It’s impossible not to, isn’t it.”

  “You can buy that kind of thing anywhere in Bangkok.”

  “He might have gone a step further. We might be talking child prostitution.”

  “Maybe. But apart from those photos, which really are everywhere in this city, we have no leads.”

  They had come a long way up the river. The inspector pointed at a house at the end of a large garden.

  “A Norwegian guy lives there,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a real stink in the papers when he built that house. As you can see, it resembles a temple. The Buddhists were outraged that a ‘heathen’ would live there, they called it a blasphemy. To make matters worse, it turned out he’d built it using materials from a Burmese temple in disputed border territory. The situation was a little tense at the time; there were several shootings, so people moved out. The Norwegian bought the temple for next to nothing and since everything in northern Burmese temples is constructed with teak he dismantled the whole shebang and moved it to Bangkok.”

  “Strange,” Harry said. “What’s his name?”

  “Ove Klipra. He’s one of the biggest building contractors in Bangkok. I guess you’ll hear more about him if you’re here for a while.”

  She ordered the boatman to turn around.

  “Do you like takeout?”

  Harry looked down at the noodle soup in the plastic bowl. The white pieces were like pale, skinny versions of spaghetti and it made him nervous that the soup moved in unexpected places when he wound the noodles onto the chopsticks.

  Rangsan came in to announce that Tonya Harding had reported in for fingerprinting.

  “You can talk to her now if you like. And one more thing: Supawadee said they’re checking the capsule from the car now. The result should be in tomorrow. They’ve given us top priority.”

  “Say hello and cop con crap,” Harry answered.

  “Say what?”

  “Say thank you.”

  Harry smiled sheepishly and Liz spluttered so much she sent rice flying.

  11

  Saturday, January 11

  Harry couldn’t put a figure on the number of prostitutes he had interviewed in a room like this, but it was not small. They seemed to be attracted to murder cases like flies around a cowpat. Not because they were necessarily involved, but because they invariably had a story to tell.

  He had heard them laughing, cursing and crying, he had become friends with them, he had fallen out with them, had struck deals with them, broken promises, been spat at and slapped. Nevertheless, there was something about these women’s fates, the circumstances that had formed them, which he thought he recognized and could understand. What he couldn’t understand was their irrepressible optimism: that despite having seen into the deepest recesses of the human soul they never seemed to lose their faith in the goodness around them. He knew enough police officers who were incapable of the same.

  That was why Harry patted Dim on the shoulder and gave her a cigarette before they started. Not because he thought it would achieve anything, but because she looked as if she needed it.

  She had a flinty stare and a determined jaw that told you she was not easily frightened, but right now she was sitting at a plastic table, fidgeting nervously and looking as if she might burst into tears at any minute.

  “Pen yangai?” he asked. How are you? Liz had taught him these two words in Thai before he entered the interview room.

  Nho translated the answer. She slept badly at night and didn’t want to work at the motel anymore.

  Harry sat down opposite her, rested his arms on the table and tried to catch her eye. Her shoulders lowered a fraction, but she still turned away from him with her arms crossed.
>
  They went through what had happened point by point, but she had nothing new to add. She confirmed that the motel-room door had been closed but not locked. She hadn’t seen a mobile phone. And hadn’t seen anyone who didn’t work at the motel when she arrived or when she left.

  When Harry mentioned the Mercedes and whether she had noticed the diplomatic plates she shook her head. She hadn’t seen a car. They were getting nowhere, and in the end Harry lit a cigarette and asked, almost casually, who she thought could have done it. Nho translated and Harry saw from her face that he had hit the bull’s-eye.

  “What did she say?”

  “She says the knife is from Khun Sa.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Haven’t you heard about Khun Sa?” Nho shot him a skeptical look.

  Harry shook his head.

  “Khun Sa is the most powerful heroin dealer in history. Along with the governments in Indochina and the CIA he has controlled opium trafficking in the golden triangle since the fifties. That was how the Americans got the money for their operations in the region. The guy had his own army in the jungle up there.”

  It slowly dawned on Harry that he had heard about Asia’s Escobar.

  “Khun Sa surrendered to the Burmese authorities two years ago and was placed under house arrest, albeit in one of the most luxurious houses. They say he finances the new hotels in Burma, and some people think he’s still the leader of the opium mafia in the north. Khun Sa means she thinks it’s the mafia. That’s why she’s scared.”

  Harry studied her thoughtfully before nodding to Nho.

  “Let her go,” he said.

  Nho translated and Dim looked surprised. She turned and met Harry’s gaze before putting the palms of her hands together at face height and bowing. Harry realized she had assumed they would arrest her for prostitution.

  Harry smiled back. She leaned over the table.

  “You like ice-skating, mister?”