Cockroaches

by Jo Nesbo

  “I’m a simple man.” He studied the glow of his cigar. “OK, let’s call a spade a spade. I’m a bit short on charm.”

  He burst into a braying laugh. Harry had to smile along with him.

  Jens glanced at his watch and jumped up.

  “Lots to do before the U.S.A. opens. Things are going mad. See you. Give my sister some thought.”

  He was out of the door, and Harry was left sitting and smoking a cigarette and giving the sister some thought. Then he took a taxi to Patpong. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he went into a go-go bar, almost ordered a beer and quickly went out again. He ate frogs’ legs at Le Boucheron and the owner came over and explained in very poor English that he was longing to return to la Normandie. Harry told him that his father had been there during D-Day. It wasn’t exactly true, but at least it cheered the Frenchman up.

  Harry paid and found another bar. A girl in ridiculously high heels perched down beside him, stared at him with her large brown eyes and asked if he wanted a blow job. Of course I bloody do, he thought, and shook his head. He registered that they were showing highlights from a Manchester United match on the TV hanging over the glass shelves in the bar. In the mirror he could see the girls dancing on the small, intimate stage directly behind him. They had stuck tiny gold stars on their breasts to cover the nipples so that the bar wasn’t breaking the law against nudity. And each of the girls wore a number on their skimpy panties. The police didn’t ask what it was for, but everyone knew it was to avoid misunderstandings when customers wanted to hire girls from the bar. Harry had already seen her. Number 20. Dim was at the back of four girls dancing, and her tired eyes swept over the row of men at the bar like radar. Now and then a fleeting smile crossed her lips, but it didn’t rouse any life in her eyes. She appeared to have made contact with a man wearing a kind of tropical uniform. German, Harry guessed, without knowing why. He watched her hips grind lazily from side to side, her shiny black hair flick off her back as she turned, and her smooth, glowing skin that seemed to be illuminated from inside. Had it not been for her eyes, she would have been beautiful, Harry thought.

  For a fraction of a second their eyes met in the mirror, and Harry immediately felt uneasy. She showed no signs of recognition, but he shifted his gaze to the TV screen, which showed the back of a player being substituted. Same number. “Solskjær” it said at the top of the shirt. Harry woke as if from a dream.

  “Bloody hell!” he shouted, knocking over his glass and sending Coke into the lap of his devoted courtesan. Harry forced his way out to the sound of indignant shouts behind him: You not my friend!

  36

  Sunday, January 19

  Two men in green charged through the bushes, one bent low with a wounded comrade over his shoulders. They laid him down under cover, behind a fallen tree trunk, as they raised their rifles, took aim and fired into the undergrowth. A dry voice announced that this was East Timor’s hopeless struggle against President Suharto and his brutal regime.

  On the podium a man nervously rustled his papers. He had traveled far and wide to talk about his country, and this evening was important. There might not have been many people in the assembly room at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Thailand, only forty to fifty in the audience, but they were vital, together they could carry the message on to millions of readers. He had seen the film that was being shown a hundred times, and he knew that in two minutes he would have to step into the firing line.

  Ivar Løken started involuntarily when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a voice whispered: “We have to talk. Now.”

  In the semi-gloom he made out Hole’s face. He got up and they left the room together, while a guerrilla with half of his face burned into a stiff mask explained why he had spent the last eight years of his life in the Indonesian jungle.

  “How did you find me?” he asked once they were outside.

  “I spoke to Tonje Wiig. Do you come here often?”

  “Not sure how often often is, but I like to keep up-to-date. And I meet useful people here.”

  “Like people from the Swedish and Danish embassies?”

  The gold tooth glinted. “As I said, I like to keep up-to-date. What’s up?”

  “Everything.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “I know who you’re after. And I know the two cases are connected.”

  Løken’s smile vanished.

  “The funny thing is, when I first got here I found myself a stone’s throw from the place you had under surveillance.”

  “You don’t say.” It was hard to decide if there was any sarcasm in Løken’s voice.

  “Inspector Crumley took me on a sightseeing trip up the river. She showed me a house belonging to a Norwegian who’d moved a whole temple from Burma to Bangkok. He had a conversation with the ambassador the day he died, but we haven’t been able to get hold of him. I met his friend, Bork, at the funeral, and he said he was away on business. But you know Ove Klipra, don’t you?”

  Løken didn’t answer.

  “Well, the connection didn’t strike me until I was watching a football match earlier on.”

  “A football match?”

  “The world’s most famous Norwegian happens to play for Klipra’s favorite club.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know what Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s number is?”

  “No, why on earth should I?”

  “Well, boys all over the world do, and you can buy his shirt in sports shops from Cape Town to Vancouver. Sometimes adults buy the shirt as well.”

  Løken nodded as he stared intently at Harry. “Number 20,” he said.

  “As in the picture. A couple of other things struck me as well. The shaft of the knife we found in Molnes’s back had a special glass mosaic and a professor of art history has told us it was a very old knife from northern Thailand, probably made by the Shan people. I spoke to him earlier this evening. He told me the Shan people had also spread to parts of Burma, where among other things they built temples. A characteristic feature of these temples was that the windows and doors were often decorated with the same type of glass mosaic as on the knife. I looked in on the professor on the way here and showed him one of your photos. He had absolutely no doubt that this was a window in a Shan temple, Løken.”

  They could hear that the speaker had started. The voice sounded metallic and shrill in the loudspeakers.

  “Job well done, Hole. What now?”

  “Now you tell me what’s going on behind the scenes and I’ll take over the rest of the investigation.”

  Løken roared with laughter. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  Harry wasn’t.

  “An interesting suggestion, Hole, but I don’t think that will wash. My bosses—”

  “I don’t think suggestion is the right word, Løken. Try ultimatum.”

  Løken laughed even louder. “You’ve got cojones, I’ll give you that, Hole. Just what makes you think you’re in a position to impose an ultimatum?”

  “That you will have an immense problem when I explain to the Bangkok Police Chief what’s going on.”

  “They’ll boot you out, Hole.”

  “For what? First of all, my mandate here is to investigate a murder, not to save the arses of some bureaucrats in Oslo. I personally don’t have an objection to you trying to haul in a pedophile, but it’s not my responsibility. And when parliament gets to hear that they’ve been kept in the dark about an illegal investigation, my guess is that a few others are in far more danger of being given the sack than me. Way I see it, the chances of unemployment are greater if I become an accessory and keep this to myself. Cigarette?”

  Harry held out a newly opened packet of twenty Camel. Løken shook his head, then changed his mind. Harry lit up for both of them, and they sat in two chairs beside the wall. From the hall came the sound of loud applause.

  “Why didn’t you just let it go, Hole? You’ve known for a long time that your job here was to tie things up neatly and avo
id a fuss, so why couldn’t you have bent with the wind and saved yourself and us a whole lot of trouble?”

  Harry inhaled deeply and blew out in one long exhalation. Most of the smoke stayed inside.

  “I started smoking Camel again this autumn,” Harry said, patting his pocket. “I had a girlfriend once who smoked Camel. I wasn’t allowed to smoke hers; she thought it could become a bad habit. We went InterRailing and on the train between Pamplona and Cannes I ran out of cigarettes. She said that would teach me a lesson. The journey was almost ten hours, and in the end I had to go and bum a cigarette off someone in another compartment while she puffed away on her Camels. Weird, eh?”

  He held up the cigarette and blew on the glow.

  “Well, I continued bumming smokes off strangers when we arrived in Cannes. To start with, she thought it was funny. When I started to flit from table to table at restaurants in Paris, she thought it was less funny and said I could have one of hers, but I refused. When she met Norwegian friends in Amsterdam and I began to bum fags off them while her packet was on the table, she thought I was being childish. She bought me a packet, and said begging for cigarettes wasn’t on, but I left it in the hotel room. When we were back in Oslo and I continued there she said I was sick in the head.”

  “Has this story got a point?”

  “Yes, she stopped smoking.”

  Løken chuckled. “So there’s a happy ending.”

  “At about the same time she met a musician from London.”

  Løken spluttered. “You must have gone a bit too far then.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you didn’t learn much from it?”

  “No.”

  They smoked in silence.

  “I see,” Løken said, stubbing out his cigarette. People had started coming out of the room. “Let’s go somewhere and have a beer and I’ll give you the whole story.”

  “Ove Klipra builds roads. Apart from that, we know very little about him. We know he left for Thailand as a twenty-five-year-old with his engineering degree unfinished and a bad reputation, and that he changed his name from Pedersen to Klipra, which is the name of the area in Ålesund where he grew up.”

  They were sitting on a deep leather sofa, and in front of them were a stereo, a TV and a table with one beer, a bottle of water, two microphones and a song book. Harry had at first assumed Løken was joking when he said they were going to a karaoke bar, until he had the reason explained to him. They could hire a soundproof room on an hourly basis, no names, order what they wanted to drink, and beyond that they would be left in peace. Also, there would be the right number of people for them to come and go unnoticed. It was simply the ultimate place for secret meetings, and it appeared it wasn’t the first time Løken had been there.

  “What kind of bad reputation?”

  “When we started to delve deeper into this case it turned out there had been a couple of episodes with underage boys in Ålesund. Nothing was reported, but rumors spread and he found it an opportune moment to move. When he came here he registered an engineering company, had some business cards made, on which he called himself Doctor, and started knocking on doors saying he could build roads. At that time, twenty years ago, there were only two ways to get your hands on road-building projects: either by being related to someone in government or by being rich enough to bribe the same. Klipra was neither and of course the odds were against him. But he learned two things you can be sure formed the basis of the fortune he has today: Thai and flattery. I haven’t made up the bit about flattery; he has boasted of it to Norwegians living here. He claims he became so skilled at grinning that even the Thais thought it was too much. In addition, he shared his interest in young boys with a few of the politicians with whom he began to associate. It was perhaps no disadvantage to share vices with them when the contracts for building the so-called Hopewell Bangkok Elevated Road and Train System, BERTS, were handed out.”

  “Road and train?”

  “Yes. You’ve probably noticed the big steel pillars they’re driving into the ground everywhere in town.”

  Harry nodded.

  “For the moment there are six thousand pillars, but there will be more. And not just for the motorway because the new train will be above that. We’re talking fifty kilometers of ultramodern motorway and sixty kilometers of rails worth twenty-five billion kroner in order to save this town from suffocating itself. Do you understand? This project must be the grandest road-building project in any city ever, the Messiah of tarmac and sleepers.”

  “And Klipra’s in on it?”

  “No one seems to know who’s in or out. What’s clear is that the original principal player from Hong Kong has withdrawn and the budget and the schedule are likely to go tits up.”

  “A budget overspend? I’m shocked,” Harry commented drily.

  “But that means there will definitely be more for the other players, and my guess is Klipra is already well ensconced in the project. If some drop out, the politicians will have to accept that the others adjust their bids. If Klipra has the financial capacity to take a bite of the cake he’s been offered, he can soon become one of the region’s most powerful entrepreneurs.”

  “Yes, but what does this have to do with child abuse?”

  “Just that powerful men have a tendency to bend laws in their favor. I have no reason to doubt the present government’s integrity, but it hardly increases the chances of an extradition if the man has political influence and an arrest would further delay the whole building program.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Things are moving. We’re waiting for the new extradition agreement to come into effect. Once it’s in place, we wait a little, arrest Klipra and explain to the Thai authorities that the photos were taken after the agreement was signed.”

  “And convict him for having sex with minors?”

  “Plus a murder perhaps.”

  Harry recoiled in his chair.

  “Did you imagine you were the only person to link the knife with Klipra, Detective?” Løken said, trying to light his pipe.

  “What do you know about the knife?” Harry asked.

  “I escorted Tonje Wiig to the motel when she identified the ambassador. I took a couple of photos.”

  “While there was a crowd of police officers standing around watching?”

  “Well, it’s a very little camera. It can fit in a wristwatch, like this one.” Løken smiled. “You can’t buy them in shops.”

  “And then you connected the glass mosaic with Klipra’s house?”

  “I’ve been in contact with one of the people involved in the sale of the temple to Klipra, a pongyi at the Mahasi Center in Rangoon. The knife was part of the decorations in the temple and bought by Klipra. According to the monk, these are made in pairs. There should be another knife which is identical.”

  “Wait a minute,” Harry said. “If you contacted this monk you must have had an inkling that the knife was in some way connected to Burmese temples.”

  Løken shrugged.

  “Come on,” Harry said, “you’re not an art historian as well. We had to use a professor just to establish there was a link with a Shan something or other. You suspected Klipra even before you asked.”

  Løken burned his fingers and threw the match away, annoyed.

  “I had reason to believe the murder could have had something to do with Klipra. You see, I was sitting in the flat opposite Klipra’s place the day the ambassador was murdered.”

  “And?”

  “Atle Molnes drove around at about seven. At eight he and Klipra left in the ambassador’s car.”

  “Are you sure it was them? I’ve seen the car and as with most embassy cars the windows are tinted, almost impenetrable.”

  “I saw Klipra through the camera lens when the car arrived. It parked in the garage and there’s a door leading from it into the house, so at first I only saw Klipra getting up and walking to the door. Then I didn’t see anyone for a while until I caught si
ght of the ambassador walking around the sitting room. Then the car left again, and Klipra had gone.”

  “You can’t be sure it was the ambassador.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because from where you were sitting you would only have seen the bottom half of him, the rest was hidden by the mosaic.”

  Løken laughed. “Well, that was more than enough,” he said and finally managed to get the pipe lit. He puffed contentedly. “Because there was only one person who walked around in a bright yellow suit like his.”

  In other circumstances Harry might have obliged with a grin, but right now there were too many other things churning around in his head.

  “Why haven’t Torhus and the Police Commissioner been informed about this?”

  “Who says they haven’t?”

  Harry could feel some pressure behind his eyes. The politicians had kept him completely in the dark. He looked around for something to smash.

  37

  Sunday, January 19

  It was getting on for eleven when he got home.

  “You have a visitor,” the guard at the gate said.

  Harry took the lift up, lay on his back by the pool and listened to the tiny, rhythmical splashes as Runa swam.

  “You have to go home,” he said after some time. She didn’t answer, and he got up and walked the whole way down to his flat.

  Bjarne Møller stood by the window looking out. It was early evening but already pitch-black. The cold wasn’t going to relinquish its grip in the near future, it seemed. The boys thought it was great fun and came to the table with their fingers frozen and cheeks red while arguing about who had jumped the furthest.

  Time went so fast; it wasn’t very long since he held them between his skis and plowed down the hills from Grefsenkollen Ridge. Yesterday he had gone into their bedroom and asked if he should read to them and they just gave him a funny look.

  Trine had said he looked tired. Was he? Maybe. There was a lot to think about, more than he had imagined perhaps when he accepted the job as PAS. If it wasn’t reports, meetings and budgets, then one of his officers was banging on the door with a problem Bjarne was unable to solve—a wife who wanted a separation, a mortgage that had grown out of control or nerves that were fraying.