The Cockroaches

by Jo Nesbo

  “Sorry we couldn’t collect you from the airport, but the traffic in Bangkok …” He indicated the window behind him. “It’s not far on the map, but …”

  “I know what you mean, sir,” Harry said. “The embassy said the same thing.”

  They faced each other in the ensuing silence. The Chief smiled. There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in!”

  A shaven head poked around the door.

  “Come in, Crumley. The Norwegian detective has arrived.”

  “Ah, the detective.”

  The head acquired a body, and Harry had to blink twice to assure himself that he wasn’t seeing things. Crumley was broad-shouldered and almost as tall as Harry; the hairless skull had pronounced jaw muscles and two intensely blue eyes above a thin, straight mouth. The uniform was a pale blue shirt, a large pair of Nike trainers and a skirt.

  “Liz Crumley, an inspector in Homicide,” the Chief said.

  “They say you’re one hell of a homicide investigator, Harry,” she said in a broad American accent. She stood opposite him with her hands on her hips.

  “Well, I don’t know about that exactly …”

  “No? You must be pretty good if they sent you halfway around the globe, don’t you think?”

  “Suppose so.”

  Harry half closed his eyes. What he needed least of all now was an overassertive woman.

  “I’m here to help. If I can help.” He forced a smile.

  “Then it might be time to sober up, huh, Harry?”

  The Chief burst into loud, reedy laughter behind her.

  “They’re like that,” she said, loud and clear, as though the Chief wasn’t present. “They’ll do whatever they can to make sure no one loses face. Right now he’s trying to save your face. By pretending I’m joking. But I’m not joking. I’m in charge of Homicide here, and if I don’t like something I say so. It’s considered bad manners in this country, but I’ve been doing it for ten years.”

  Harry closed his eyes fully.

  “I can see from the color of your face that you think this is embarrassing, Harry, but I have no use for drunken investigators, as I’m sure you know. Come back tomorrow. I’ll find someone to take you to your apartment.”

  Harry shook his head and cleared his throat. “Fear of flying.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m frightened of flying. G&Ts help. And my face is red because the booze is beginning to evaporate through the pores of my skin.”

  Liz Crumley regarded him at length. Then she scratched her shiny head.

  “Sorry to hear that, Detective. How’s the jet lag?”

  “Wide awake.”

  “Good. You’re just in time for a quick update from Forensics, and then we’ll drop by your apartment on the way to the crime scene.”

  “This is your office,” Crumley pointed on the way past.

  “Someone’s sitting there,” Harry said.

  “Not there. There.”

  “There?”

  He identified the chair pressed into a long table with people sitting side by side. On the table in front of the chair there was just enough room for a notepad and a phone.

  “I’ll see if I can sort something else out if your stay turns into a long one.”

  “I really hope it doesn’t,” Harry mumbled.

  The inspector summoned her troops to the meeting room. The “troops” were, to be more precise: Nho; Sunthorn, a baby-faced, serious-looking young man; and Rangsan, the oldest detective in the department.

  Rangsan sat apparently immersed in his newspaper, but interjected with occasional comments in Thai, which Crumley jotted down carefully in her little black book.

  “OK,” Crumley said, closing the book. “The five of us will try to crack this case. Since we have a Norwegian colleague with us all communication from now on will take place in English. Rangsan’s our contact with Forensics. Go ahead.”

  Rangsan painstakingly folded the newspaper and cleared his throat. He had thinning hair, a pair of glasses, which were attached to a cord, perched on the end of his nose, and he reminded Harry of a jaded teacher regarding his surroundings with a slightly condescending, sarcastic gaze.

  “I spoke to Supawadee at Forensics. Not surprisingly, they found a whole load of fingerprints in the hotel room, but none that belonged to the dead man.”

  The other prints had not been identified.

  “And this won’t be easy,” Rangsan added. “Even if the motel doesn’t have much of a clientele there must be prints from at least a hundred people in there.”

  “Did they find any prints on the door handle?” Harry asked.

  “Too many, I’m afraid. And no complete ones.”

  Crumley put her Nike-clad feet on the table.

  “Molnes probably went straight to bed; there was no reason for him to waltz around leaving prints everywhere. There are at least two people who touched the door handle after the murderer: Dim, the prostitute, and Wang, the motel owner.”

  She nodded to Rangsan, who picked up the newspaper again.

  “The autopsy reveals what we assumed, that the ambassador was killed by the knife. It punctured the left lung before piercing the heart and filling the pericardium with blood.”

  “Cardiac tamponade,” Harry said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “That’s what it’s called. It’s like putting cotton wool in a bell. The heart can’t beat and it suffocates in its own blood.”

  Crumley grimaced.

  “OK, let’s leave the forensic report for the time being and go see the real thing. Harry, we’ll let you settle in and then we’ll pick you up on the way to the motel.”

  In the crowded lift down he heard a voice he recognized.

  “I’ve got it now, I’ve got it now! Solskjær! Solskjær!”

  Harry craned his head and smiled in affirmation.

  So he was the world’s most famous Norwegian. A football player who was a second-choice striker in an English industrial town beat all the explorers, painters and writers. On reflection, Harry concluded that the man was probably right.

  The flat he had been given by the embassy was in a fashionable complex opposite the Shangri-La Hotel. It was tiny and spartan, but it had a bathroom, a fan by the bed and a view of the Chao Phraya River, which flowed past, broad and brown. Harry stood by the window. Long, narrow wooden boats crisscrossed the river and whipped up filthy water behind the propellers mounted on long poles. On the far bank, new hotels and department stores towered over an indefinable mass of white-brick houses. It was hard to get any impression of the size of the city because it disappeared in a golden-brown haze when you tried to delve beyond a few blocks, but Harry presumed it was big. Very big. He pushed up a window and a roar rose to meet him. He had lost the airline earplugs in the lift, and only now did he hear how deafening the noise of this city was. He could see Crumley’s patrol car like a little matchbox toy next to the pavement far below. He opened a can of hot beer he had taken with him off the plane and confirmed to his pleasure that Singha was not as bad as Norwegian beer. Now the rest of the day seemed more bearable.

  6

  Friday, January 10

  The inspector leaned on the horn. Literally. She pressed her bosom against the wheel of the big Toyota Jeep and the horn sounded.

  “That’s not the Thai way of doing it,” she laughed. “Anyway, it doesn’t work. If you honk your horn they don’t let you pass. It has something to do with Buddhism. But I can’t resist. What the hell, I’m from the States.”

  She leaned against the wheel again as motorists around them made a show of looking away.

  “So he’s still in the hotel room?” Harry asked, stifling a yawn.

  “Orders from highest level. As a rule we do an autopsy as fast as possible and cremate them the day after. But they wanted you to see first. Don’t ask me why.”

  “I’m one hell of an investigator, or have you forgotten all that?”

  She squinted at him fr
om the corner of her eye, then swerved out into a gap and put her foot down.

  “Don’t get too cute. It’s not how you might think, that everyone here will reckon you’re a hell of a guy because you’re a farang, it’s more the opposite.”

  “Farang?”

  “Honky. Gringo. Half derogatory, half neutral, all depending how you play it. Just remember, there’s nothing wrong with the Thais’ self-esteem even if they treat you politely. Fortunately for you, Sunthorn and Nho are on duty today, and I’m sure you’ll manage to impress them. I hope so for your sake. If you make a fool of yourself you could have big problems working with the department.”

  “I had the impression you were in charge of that department.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  They had joined the motorway and, ignoring the engine’s protests, she pressed the accelerator to the floor. It had already begun to get dark, and in the west a cherry-red sun was going down between the skyscrapers.

  “At least pollution creates beautiful sunsets,” Crumley said in answer to his thoughts.

  “Tell me about the prostitution here,” Harry said.

  “It’s about as bad as the traffic.”

  “I’ve seen. But what counts here, how does it work? Is it traditional street prostitution with pimps, regular brothels with a madam, or are the prostitutes freelancers? Do they go to bars, do they strip, do they advertise in the paper, or do they pick up clients in the shopping malls?”

  “All of that and then some. If it hasn’t been tried in Bangkok it hasn’t been tried. But most of them work in go-go bars where they dance and try to persuade clients to buy drinks. And of course they get a percentage. The bar owner has no responsibility for the girls beyond giving them a place to market themselves, and in return the girls agree to stay in the bar until it closes. If a client wants to take one of the girls, he has to buy her freedom for the rest of the evening. The bar owner gets the money, but most of the time the girl is happy to avoid spending the evening writhing around onstage.”

  “Sounds like a great deal for the bar owner.”

  “Whatever the girl earns after her time has been bought goes right into her own pocket.”

  “Did the girl who found the ambassador work in a bar like that?”

  “Yup. She works in one of the King Crown bars in Patpong. We also know the motel owner runs a kind of call-girl ring for foreigners with special proclivities. But getting her to talk is pretty tough because in Thailand prostitution is actually illegal. So far all she’s said is that she was staying at the motel and went in the wrong door.”

  Liz explained that Atle Molnes had probably rung the woman when he arrived at the motel, but the receptionist, who was synonymous with the owner, denied point-blank having anything to do with the matter over and above renting a room.

  “Here we are.”

  She pulled up in front of a low, white-brick building.

  “The best brothels in Bangkok seem to have a weakness for Greek names,” she commented acidly and got out. Harry looked up at a large neon sign proclaiming that the motel was called Olympussy. The “m” flashed sporadically while the “l” had given up for good and lent the place a tristesse that reminded Harry of suburban Norwegian grill bars.

  The motel was identical to the American variety with a series of double rooms around a courtyard and a parking space outside each room. There was a veranda alongside the wall where guests could sit in gray, water-damaged cane chairs.

  “Nice place.”

  “You may not believe it, but when it appeared during the Vietnam War it was one of the liveliest places in town. Built for horny U.S. soldiers on R&R.”

  “R&R?”

  “Rest and recuperation. Popularly known as I&I: intercourse and intoxication. They flew them in from Saigon on a two-day furlough. The sex industry in this country wouldn’t be what it is today without the U.S. military. One of the streets here is even officially called Soi Cowboy.”

  “So why didn’t they stay there? This is almost rural.”

  “The soldiers who were most homesick preferred to fuck in the all-American way—that is, in an automobile or a motel room. That’s why they built this. They could rent American cars from the parking lot. They even had American beer in the minibars.”

  “Wow, how do you know all this?”

  “My mother told me.”

  Harry turned to her, but even though the functioning letters in Olympussy cast a bluish neon light over her skull it was too dark to discern her expression. She pulled a cap over her head before going into the reception area.

  The motel room was furnished simply, but the filthy gray carpet hinted at better days. Harry shivered. Not because of the yellow suit that made any further identification of the corpse superfluous—only members of the Christian Democratic Party and the Progress Party would voluntarily wear such suits. Nor because of the knife with the oriental ornamentation that had pinned the suit to the ambassador’s back and caused the unflattering bulge to the shoulders of the jacket. The reason was quite simply that the room was freezing cold. Crumley had explained that as the shelf life for bodies in this climate was very short and they had been told they would have to wait at least forty-eight hours for the Norwegian detective, they had put the air-conditioning on full, to ten degrees, and set the fan on max.

  Nevertheless, the flies were persistent, and a swarm of them rose as Nho and Sunthorn carefully rolled the body onto its back. Atle Molnes’s glazed eyes stared down his nose as though trying to see the tips of his Ecco shoes. The boyish fringe made the ambassador appear younger than his fifty-two years. It flopped down, sun-bleached, as though there were still life in it.

  “Wife and teenage daughter,” Harry said. “Has either of them been here to see him?”

  “No. We informed the Norwegian Embassy, and they said they would pass on the message to the family. So far we’ve only been told not to let anyone in.”

  “Anyone from the embassy?”

  “The chargé d’affaires. Can’t remember her name.”

  “Tonje Wiig?”

  “That’s it. She was hard-faced right up to the moment we turned over the body to have him identified.”

  Harry studied the ambassador. Had he been a good-looking man? A man who, apart from the dreadful suit and a couple of rolls of fat around his stomach, could make the heart of a young, female chargé d’affaires beat faster? The sun-tanned skin had taken on a sallow hue and the blue tongue seemed to be trying to force its way between the teeth.

  Harry sat down on a chair and had a look around. When a person dies their appearance changes quickly, and he had seen more than enough corpses to know that he didn’t get much from staring at them. Atle Molnes had taken with him any secrets his personality might have revealed and all that remained was an empty, abandoned husk.

  Harry pushed the chair closer to the bed. The two young officers leaned over him.

  “What can you see?” Crumley asked.

  “I see a Norwegian lech who happened to be the ambassador and therefore has to have his reputation protected for king and country.”

  She glanced up in surprise, and examined Harry more closely.

  “No matter how good the a/c you can’t cover the stench,” he said. “But that’s my problem. As for this guy here …” Harry grasped the ambassador’s jaw. “Rigor mortis. He’s rigid, but the rigidity has begun to give, which is normal after three days. His tongue’s blue, but the knife would suggest not from suffocation. Has to be checked.”

  “Has been,” Crumley said. “The ambassador had been drinking red wine.”

  Harry mumbled something.

  “Molnes left his office at lunchtime,” she continued, “and when the woman found him it was nearly eleven p.m. Our doctor says he died somewhere between four and ten p.m., so that narrows it down a bit.”

  “Between four and ten? That’s six hours.”

  “Correct, Detective.” Crumley crossed her arms.

  “Well.” Harry
looked up at her. “In Oslo we usually determine the time of death with a margin of twenty minutes either way for bodies that have been found after a few hours.”

  “That’s because you live at the North Pole. Here, at thirty-five degrees, a body’s temperature doesn’t fall much. The time is worked out according to rigor mortis, and so it’s fairly approximate.”

  “What about livor mortis? There should be discoloration after around three hours.”

  “Sorry. As you can see, the ambassador liked sunbathing, so we can’t tell.”

  Harry ran his index finger up the suit material where the knife had entered. A gray, Vaseline-like deposit gathered on his nail.

  “What’s this?”

  “The weapon was obviously greased. Samples have been sent for analysis.”

  Harry rifled through the pockets and pulled out a worn, brown wallet. It contained a 500-baht note, a Ministry ID card and a photo of a smiling girl in what appeared to be a hospital bed.

  “Did you find anything else on him?”

  “Zip.” Crumley had removed her cap to waft away the flies. “We checked what he had and left it alone.”

  Harry loosened the belt, pulled down the trousers and turned him on his stomach again. Then he pulled up the jacket and shirt. “Look. Some of the blood ran down his back.” He lifted the elastic of the Dovre underpants. “And down between his buttocks. Which means he wasn’t stabbed while lying in bed. He was standing. By measuring how far the blade went in and determining the angle we can work out the murderer’s height.”

  “Assuming the murderer was standing on the same level as the victim when he or she struck,” Crumley added. “The victim could also have been stabbed while he was on the floor and the blood ran down when he was moved to the bed.”

  “Then there would have been blood on the carpet,” Harry said, pulling up the trousers, fastening the belt, turning and looking Liz in the eye. “And you wouldn’t have needed to speculate, you would have known for certain. Your forensics people would have found fibers from the carpet all over his suit, wouldn’t they.”