by Jo Nesbo
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2014
Translation copyright © 2013 by Don Bartlett
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Norway as Kakerlakkene by H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard), Oslo, in 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Jo Nesbø. This translation was originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2013.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at Library of Congress
Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-345-80715-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-80716-8
Cover photographs: skyline in Bangkok © plainpicture/Peter Nitsch
www.weeklylizard.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Four
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Part Five
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Among Norwegians living in Thailand there is a rumor circulating that one of their ambassadors, who died as a result of a car accident in Bangkok, was actually murdered under extremely mysterious circumstances. There is no evidence to support this, but it makes for a good story.
No persons or events mentioned in this book should be confused with real persons or events. Reality is far too strange for that.
Bangkok, February 23, 1998
1
Tuesday, January 7
The traffic lights changed to green, and the roar from lorries, cars, motorbikes and tuk-tuks rose higher and higher until Dim could see the glass in Robinson’s department store vibrating. Then the queues started moving and the shop window displaying the long, red silk dress was lost behind them in the darkness.
She took a taxi. Not a packed bus or a tuk-tuk riddled with rust but a taxi with air-conditioning and a driver who kept his mouth shut. She leaned back against the headrest and tried to enjoy the ride. No problem. A moped shot past and a girl on the pillion clinging to a red T-shirt with a visor helmet gave them a vacant look. Hold on tight, Dim thought.
On Rama IV Road the driver pulled in behind a lorry spewing exhaust fumes so thick and black she couldn’t see the number plate. After passing through the air-conditioning system the exhaust was chilled and almost odorless. Almost. She wafted her hand discreetly to show her reaction, and the driver glanced in his mirror and moved into the outside lane. No problem.
This was how her life had always been. On the farm where she had grown up she had been one of six girls. Six too many, according to her father. She had been seven years old when they stood coughing in the yellow dust and waving as the cart carrying her eldest sister trundled down the country road alongside the brown canal water. Her sister had been given clean clothes, a train ticket to Bangkok and an address in Patpong written on the back of a business card, and she had cried like a waterfall, even though Dim had waved so hard it felt as if her hand would fall off. Her mother had patted her on the head and said it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad, either. At least her sister wouldn’t have to wander from farm to farm as a kwai, as her mother had done before she got married. Besides, Miss Wong had promised she would take good care of her. Her father had nodded, spat betel juice from between black teeth and added that the farangs in the bars would pay well for fresh girls.
Dim hadn’t understood what her mother meant by kwai, but she wasn’t going to ask. She knew, of course, that a kwai was a bull. Like most people on the farms around them, they couldn’t afford a bull, so they hired one of the ones that circulated the district when the rice paddy had to be plowed. It was only later she found out that the girl who accompanied the bull was also called a kwai as her services formed part of the deal. That was the tradition. She hoped she would meet a farmer who would have her before she got too old.
When Dim was fifteen her father had called her name as he waded across the paddy field with the sun behind him and his hat in hand. She hadn’t answered at once; she had straightened up and looked hard at the green ridges around the small farm, closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the trumpeter bird in the leaves and inhaled the smell of eucalyptus and rubber trees. She had realized it was her turn.
For the first year they had lived four girls to a room and shared everything: bed, food and clothes. The last of these was especially important, for without nice clothes you wouldn’t get the best customers. She had taught herself to dance, taught herself to smile, taught herself to see which men only wanted to buy drinks and which wanted to buy sex. Her father had already agreed with Miss Wong that the money was to be sent home, so she didn’t see much of it during the first few years, but Miss Wong was content and as time went by she kept more back for Dim.
Miss Wong had reason to be content. Dim worked hard, and the customers bought drinks. Miss Wong should be pleased she was still there because a couple of times it had been a close-run thing. A Japanese man had wanted to marry Dim, but withdrew his offer when she demanded money for the plane ticket. An American had taken her along to Phuket, postponed his journey home and bought her a diamond ring. She had pawned it the day after he left.
Some paid badly and told her to get lost if she complained; others reported her to Miss Wong if she didn’t comply with everything they wanted her to do. They didn’t understand that once they had bought her time from the bar Miss Wong had her money and Dim was her own boss. Her own boss. She thought about the red dress in the shop window. Her mother had been right: it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad, either.
And she had managed to retain her innocent smile and happy laughter. They liked that. Perhaps that was why she had been offered the job Wang Lee had advertised in Thai Rath under the heading of GRO, or Guest Relation Officer. Wang Lee was a small, dark-skinned Chinese man, who ran a motel some way out on Sukhumvit Road, and the customers were
mainly foreigners with special requests but not so special that she couldn’t meet them. To tell the truth, she liked what she did better than dancing for hours in the bar. Besides, Wang Lee paid well. The sole disadvantage was that it took such a long time to get there from her apartment in Banglamphu.
The damn traffic! It had come to a standstill again, and she told the driver she would get out, even though it meant crossing six lanes of cars to reach the motel on the far side of the road. The air wrapped itself around her like a hot, wet towel as she left the taxi. She searched for a gap, holding her hand in front of her mouth, aware that it made no difference, that there was no other air to breathe in Bangkok, but at least she was spared the smell.
She slipped between vehicles, had to sidestep a pickup with the flatbed full of boys whistling, and she almost had her heel straps taken off by a kamikaze Toyota. Then she was across.
Wang Lee looked up as she entered the deserted reception area.
“Quiet evening?” she said.
He nodded his displeasure. There had been a few of them over the last year.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” she lied. He meant well, but she was not in the mood for the watery noodles he boiled up in the back room.
“You’ll have to wait,” he said. “The farang wanted to have a sleep first. He’ll ring when he’s ready.”
She groaned. “You know I have to be back in the bar before midnight, Lee.”
He looked at his watch. “Give him an hour.”
She shrugged and sat down. If it had been a year ago he would probably have thrown her out for speaking like that, but now he needed all the income he could get. Of course, she could go, but then the long journey would have been wasted. Also, she owed Lee a favor; she had worked for worse pimps.
* * *
After stubbing out the third cigarette she rinsed her mouth with Lee’s bitter Chinese tea and rose for a final check of her makeup in the mirror over the counter.
“I’ll go and wake him,” she said.
“Mm. Have you got the skates?”
She lifted her bag.
Her heels crunched on the gravel of the empty drive between the low motel rooms. Room 120 was right at the back, she couldn’t see a car outside, but there was a light in the window. So perhaps he had woken up. A little breeze lifted her short skirt, but failed to cool her. She longed for a monsoon, for rain. Just as after a few weeks of flooding, muddy streets and mildew on her washing she would long for the dry, windless months.
She tapped the door lightly with her knuckles and put on her bashful smile with the question “What’s your name?” already on her lips. No one answered. She tapped again and looked at her watch. She could probably haggle a few hundred baht off the price of the dress, even if it was Robinson’s. She turned the door handle and discovered to her surprise that the door was unlocked.
He was lying prone on the bed, and her first impression was that he was asleep. Then she saw the glint of the knife’s blue glass handle sticking out of the loud yellow jacket. It’s hard to say which of all the thoughts racing through her brain appeared first, but one of them was definitely that the trip to Banglamphu had been wasted anyway. Then she finally gained control of her vocal cords. The scream, however, was drowned out by a resounding blast on a lorry’s horn as it avoided an inattentive tuk-tuk on Sukhumvit Road.
2
Wednesday, January 8
“National Theater,” a sleepy, nasal voice announced over the speakers before the tram doors flipped open and Dagfinn Torhus stepped out into the cold, damp darkness. The air stung his freshly shaved cheeks, and in the glow from Oslo’s frugal neon lighting he could see frozen breath streaming from his mouth.
It was early January, and he knew it would be better later in the winter when the fjord was frozen over and the air became drier. He started to walk up Drammensveien toward the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A couple of solitary taxis passed him; otherwise the streets were as good as deserted. The Gjensidig clock shone red against the black winter sky above the building opposite, informing him it was only six.
Outside the door he took out his entrance card. “Post: Director” it said above a photo of a ten-years-younger Dagfinn Torhus staring into the camera, chin jutting, gaze determined, from behind steel-rimmed glasses. He swiped the card, tapped in the code and pushed open the heavy glass door in Victoria Terrasse.
Not all doors had opened as easily since he came here as a twenty-five-year-old almost thirty years ago. At the Diplomatic School, the Foreign Office institute for aspiring officials, he had not exactly melted into his surroundings with his broad Østerdal accent and rural ways, as one of the posh Bærum boys in his year’s intake had pointed out. The other aspirants had been students of politics, economics and law with parents who were academics, politicians or themselves members of the FO aristocracy to which they were seeking admission. He was a farmer’s son with qualifications from the Agricultural High School in Ås. Not that it bothered him much, but he knew that real friends were important for his career. As Dagfinn was trying to learn the social codes, he compensated by grafting even harder. Whatever the differences, they all shared the fact that they had only vague notions of where they wanted to go in life and the knowledge that only one direction counted: up.
Torhus sighed and nodded to the security guard, who pushed his newspapers and an envelope under the glass window.
“Any other …?”
The guard shook his head.
“First to arrive as always, Torhus. The envelope’s from Communications. It was delivered last night.”
Torhus watched the floor numbers flash by as the lift raised him higher in the building. He had this idea that every floor represented a certain period in his career, and so it was subject to review every morning.
The first floor was the first two years on the diplomatic course, the long, noncommittal discussions about politics and history and the French lessons he had hauled himself through by the bootstraps.
The second floor was the placement. He had been stationed in Canberra for two years, then Mexico City for three. Wonderful cities, for that matter, no, he couldn’t complain. True, he had put London and New York as his first two choices, but these were prestigious postings that everyone else had also applied for, so he had made up his mind not to regard them as a defeat.
On the third floor he was back in Norway without the generous foreign benefits and housing supplements which had allowed him to live a life of insouciance and plenty. He had met Berit, she had become pregnant, and when it had been time to apply for a new foreign posting number two was already on the way. Berit was from the same region as he was and chatted to her mother every day. He had decided to wait a little and opted to work like a Trojan, writing kilometer-long reports on bilateral trade with developing countries, composing speeches for the Minister of Foreign Affairs and reaping acknowledgement as he made his way up the building. Nowhere else in the state system is competition as fierce as at the Foreign Office, where the hierarchy is so obvious. Dagfinn Torhus had gone to the office like a soldier to the Front, kept his head down, back covered and fired whenever he had someone in his sights. A few pats on the shoulder came his way, he knew he had been “noticed” and had tried to explain to Berit that he could probably get Paris or London, but for the first time in their hitherto humdrum marriage she had put her foot down. He had given in.
His upwardly mobile trend had vanished almost without a trace, and suddenly one morning in the bathroom mirror he saw a director shunted into the sidings, a moderately influential bureaucrat who would never manage the leap to the fifth floor, not with him being ten years or so from retirement age. Unless he pulled off a sensational coup, of course. But while that kind of stunt could lead to promotion, it could just as easily lead to the boot.
Nevertheless, he continued as before, trying to keep his nose in front of the others’. He was first in the office every morning so that he could read the newspapers and faxes in peace
and quiet, and already had his conclusions to hand at morning meetings by the time the others sat rubbing sleep out of their eyes. It was as though striving had entered his bloodstream.
He unlocked his office door and hesitated for a moment before switching on the light. That, too, had a history. Unfortunately it had leaked out, and he knew it had attained legendary status in Ministry circles. Many years ago the then American ambassador in Oslo had rung Torhus early one morning and asked what he thought about President Carter’s remarks the previous night. Torhus had just come in the office door; he hadn’t read the newspapers or the faxes and was lost for an answer. Needless to say, that had ruined his day. And it was to get worse. The next morning the ambassador had rung as he was opening the newspaper and asked how the events of the night would affect the situation in the Middle East. The following morning the same thing happened. Torhus, undermined by doubts and lack of information, had stuttered an incoherent response.
He had started to arrive at the office even earlier, but the ambassador appeared to have a sixth sense, for every morning the telephone rang just as he was settling into his chair.
It was only when he discovered that the ambassador was staying at the small Aker Hotel, directly opposite the Foreign Office, that he worked out the connection. The ambassador, who everyone knew liked to get up early, had of course noticed that the light in Torhus’s office came on before the others and wanted to tease the zealous diplomat. Torhus had gone out and bought a head lamp, and the next morning he had read all the newspapers and faxes before switching on the office light. He did this for almost three weeks before the ambassador gave up.
At this moment, however, Dagfinn Torhus couldn’t give a damn about the fun-loving ambassador. He had opened the envelope from Communications, and on the decoded paper copy of the cryptofax stamped TOP SECRET there was a message that caused him to spill coffee over the notes strewn around his desk. The short text left a lot to the imagination, but the essence was basically this: Norway’s ambassador in Thailand, Atle Molnes, had been found with a knife in his back in a Bangkok brothel.