The Cockroaches

by Jo Nesbo

“Khun Sa? CIA?”

  The telephone line from Oslo crackled, and the echo meant that Harry heard himself talking across Torhus from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  “Excuse me, Hole, but are you suffering from heatstroke? A man has been found with a knife in his back, a knife which could have been bought anywhere in northern Thailand. We tell you to tread carefully and you’re telling me you’re thinking of trying to crack organized crime in Southeast Asia?”

  “No.” Harry put his feet on the desk. “I’m not thinking of doing anything about it, Torhus. I’m just saying that an expert from some museum or other says it’s a rare knife that’s very hard to get hold of. The police here say it could be a warning from an opium mafia to keep away, but I don’t think so. If the mafia wanted to tell us something there are more direct methods than sacrificing an antique knife.”

  “So what are you going on about?”

  “I’m saying that’s the way the clues are pointing right now. But the Chief of Police here totally freaked out when I mentioned opium. It turns out this area is in utter chaos. The Chief had no intention of opening a can of worms, as it were. So I thought, to start with, I would rule out some possible theories. Such as the ambassador being involved in criminality. In child pornography, for example.”

  The line went quiet at the other end.

  “There is no reason to believe …” Torhus started, but the rest was drowned in interference.

  “Repeat that please.”

  “There’s no reason to believe that Molnes was a pedophile, if that’s what you’re referring to.”

  “Eh? There’s no reason to believe? You’re not talking to the press now, Torhus. I have to know these things in order to make any progress.”

  There was another pause, and for a moment Harry thought the connection had gone. Then Torhus’s voice was back, and even on a bad line from the other side of the globe Harry could feel the cold.

  “I’ll tell you all you need to know, Hole. All you need to know, Hole, is you have to tie things up. I don’t give a shit what the ambassador has been involved in—as far as I’m concerned he could be a heroin smuggler and a pederast, so long as neither the press nor anyone else gets a sniff of it. If there is any further scandal, regardless of what it is, you will be held personally responsible. Have I made myself clear, Hole, or do you need to know more?”

  Torhus hadn’t even paused to draw breath.

  Harry kicked the desk, making the phone and his colleagues beside him jump.

  “I hear you loud and clear,” Harry said between clenched teeth. “But you listen to me now.” Harry paused to take a deep breath. A beer, just one beer. He put a cigarette between his lips and tried to dispel the thought. “If Molnes is mixed up in anything he is hardly likely to be the only Norwegian who is. I very much doubt he’d have had key contacts in the Thai underworld in the short time he’d been here. Did you read about the Norwegian they caught with boys in a hotel room in Pattaya? The police down here like that sort of thing. They get good coverage and pedophiles are easier to catch than the heroin gangs. Suppose the Thai police can already smell an easy catch, but they wait until this case is formally closed and I’ve gone home. Norwegian newspapers will send a pack of reporters and before you know it the ambassador’s name has cropped up. If we can catch these men now while we have an agreement with the Thai police that this is all hush-hush, perhaps we can avoid a scandal of that nature.”

  Harry could hear the Director was getting the picture.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve been here for just over twenty-four hours and I can tell this case is going nowhere, and that’s because there’s a cover-up. I want to know what you’re not telling me. What you’ve got on Molnes and what he was involved in.”

  “You know what you need to know. There’s no more. Is that so hard to grasp?” Torhus groaned. “What are you actually trying to achieve, Hole? I thought you would be just as keen as we are to get this wrapped up quickly.”

  “I’m a police officer, and I’m trying to do my job, Torhus.”

  Torhus laughed. “Very moving, Hole. But remember I know a couple of things about you, so I don’t buy your I’m-only-an-honest-cop spiel.”

  Harry coughed down the receiver and heard the echoes return like muffled gunshots. He mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said this is a bad line. Give it some thought, Torhus, and ring me when you have something to tell me.”

  Harry woke up with a start, jumped out of bed and just reached the bathroom before vomiting. He sat on the toilet; it was coming out of both ends now. The sweat was pouring off him, even though he felt cold in the room.

  Coming off the booze was worse last time, he told himself. It’ll get better. A lot better, he hoped.

  He had injected himself in the buttock with vitamin B before going to bed, and it had stung like hell. He was reminded of Vera, a prostitute in Oslo, who had been on heroin for fifteen years. Once she had told him she still fainted when she inserted the needle.

  He saw something move in the gloom, on the sink, a couple of antennae swinging to and fro. A cockroach. It was the size of a thumb and had an orange stripe on its back. He had never seen one like this before, but that was perhaps not so peculiar—he had read there were more than three thousand different types of cockroach. He had also read that they hide when they hear the vibrations of someone approaching and that for every cockroach you can see there are at least ten hiding. That meant they were everywhere. How much does a cockroach weigh? Ten grams? If there were more than a hundred of them in cracks and behind tables that would mean there was at least a kilo of cockroaches in the room. He shivered. It was cold comfort knowing they were more frightened than he was. Sometimes he had the feeling alcohol had done him more good than harm. He closed his eyes and tried not to think.

  12

  Sunday, January 12

  In the end they had parked and begun to search for the address on foot. Nho had tried to explain the ingenious system of addresses in Bangkok, with main streets and numbered side streets known as sois. The problem was that houses didn’t follow in numerical order as new houses were given the next free number wherever they were in the street.

  They walked through narrow alleyways where pavements served as extensions of living rooms with people reading newspapers, sewing on treadle machines, cooking or taking an afternoon nap. Some girls in school uniforms shouted after them and giggled, and Nho pointed to Harry and answered something or other. The girls howled with laughter and held their hands to their mouths.

  Nho talked to a woman sitting behind a sewing machine and she pointed to a door. They knocked and after a while it was opened by a man wearing khaki shorts and an open shirt. Harry put him at about sixty, but only his eyes and wrinkles revealed his age. There were wisps of gray in his smooth, black combed-back hair and the lean, sinewy body could have belonged to a thirty-year-old.

  Nho said a few words, and the man nodded while looking at Harry. Then the man apologized and was gone again. After a minute he returned, now wearing an ironed, white short-sleeved shirt and long trousers.

  He had brought two chairs with him, which he placed on the pavement. In surprisingly good English he offered one to Harry while sitting down on the other. Nho remained standing beside them and rejected Harry’s signal that he could sit on the step with a faint shake of the head.

  “Harry Hole, Mr. Sanphet. I’m from the Norwegian police. I’d like to ask you some questions about Molnes.”

  “You mean Ambassador Molnes.”

  Harry looked at the man. He was sitting as straight as a poker with his brown, freckled hands in his lap.

  “Of course. Ambassador Molnes. You’ve been a chauffeur at the Norwegian Embassy for almost thirty years, I understand.”

  Sanphet closed his eyes by way of confirmation.

  “And you respected the ambassador?”

  “Ambassador Molnes was a great man. A great man with a big heart. A
nd brain.”

  He tapped his forehead with one finger and gave Harry an admonitory look.

  Harry shivered as a bead of sweat rolled down his spine and inside his trousers. He looked around for some shade where they could move their chairs, but the sun was high and the houses in this street were low.

  “We’ve come to you because you knew the ambassador’s habits best, you knew where he went and who he met. And because you clearly got on well with him on a personal level. What happened on the day he died?”

  Sitting quite calmly, Sanphet told them how the ambassador had left without saying where he was going, just that he wanted to drive himself, which was very unusual during working hours as the chauffeur had no other duties. He had waited in the embassy until five and then he had gone home.

  “You live alone?”

  “My wife died in a traffic accident fourteen years ago.”

  Something told Harry he could give him the exact number of months and days as well. They had no children.

  “Where did you drive the ambassador?”

  “To other embassies. To meetings. To Norwegians’ houses.”

  “Which Norwegians?”

  “All sorts. People from Statoil, Hydro, Jotun and Statskonsult.”

  He pronounced the Norwegian names perfectly.

  “Do you know any of these?” Harry asked, passing him a list. “These are people the ambassador was in touch with on his mobile phone on the day he died. We got this from the telephone company.”

  Sanphet took out a pair of glasses, but still had to hold the piece of paper at arm’s length as he read aloud: “11:10. Bangkok Betting Service.”

  He peered over his glasses.

  “The ambassador liked a flutter on the horses.” And added with a smile: “Sometimes he won.”

  Nho shifted his feet.

  “What’s Worachak Road?”

  “A call from a public phone box. Please carry on.”

  “11:55. The Norwegian Embassy.”

  “The odd thing is we rang the embassy this morning and no one can recall speaking to him on the phone that day, not even the receptionist.”

  Sanphet shrugged, and Harry waved him on.

  “12:50. Ove Klipra. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?”

  “May have.”

  “He’s one of Bangkok’s richest men. I read in the paper he’s just sold a hydroelectric power station in Laos. He lives in a temple,” Sanphet muttered. “He and the ambassador knew each other from before. They were from the same part of the country. Have you heard of Ålesund? The ambassador invited …”

  He raised his arms in resignation. Not a subject worth talking about now. He went back to the list.

  “13:15. Jens Brekke.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Currency broker. He came to Barclays Thailand from Den norske Bank a few years ago.”

  “OK.”

  “17:55. Mangkon Road?”

  “Another call from a public phone box.”

  There were no more names on the list. Harry cursed to himself. He didn’t quite know what he had expected, but the chauffeur hadn’t told him anything at all he didn’t already know from talking to Tonje Wiig on the phone an hour earlier.

  “Do you suffer from asthma, Mr. Sanphet?”

  “Asthma? No. Why?”

  “We found a capsule in the car. We asked the lab to check it out. Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Sanphet. It’s purely routine. It turned out to be for asthma. But no one in the Molnes family suffers from asthma. Do you know who it could belong to?”

  Sanphet shook his head.

  Harry pulled his chair closer to the chauffeur. He wasn’t used to carrying out interviews in the street, and he had a sense everyone sitting in the narrow alleyway was eavesdropping. He lowered his voice.

  “With all due respect, you’re lying. I saw the receptionist at the embassy taking asthma medication with my own eyes, Mr. Sanphet. You sit in the embassy half the day, you’ve been there for thirty years and I imagine no one can change a toilet roll without your knowing. Are you claiming you didn’t know she had asthma?”

  Sanphet looked at him with cold, calm eyes.

  “I’m saying I don’t know who might have left asthma medication in the car, sir. Lots of people in Bangkok have asthma, and some of them must have been in the ambassador’s car. Miss Ao is, as far as I know, not one of them.”

  Harry watched him. How could he sit there without a drop of sweat on his brow while the sun shimmered in the sky like a brass cymbal? Harry glanced down at his notepad as if his next question were written there.

  “Did he ever drive children in the car?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you pick up children sometimes, drive him to schools, nurseries or anything similar? Do you understand?”

  Sanphet didn’t bat an eyelid, but his back straightened.

  “I do understand. The ambassador was not one of them,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  A man looked up from his newspaper, and Harry became aware he had raised his voice. Sanphet bowed.

  Harry felt stupid. Stupid, wretched and sweaty. In that order.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  The old chauffeur looked past him, pretending he hadn’t heard.

  “We have to go now.” Harry got up. “I heard you like Grieg, so I brought you this.” He held up a cassette. “It’s Grieg’s symphony in C minor. It was first performed in 1981, so I thought you may not have it. Everyone who loves Grieg should have it. Please take it.”

  Sanphet got up, accepted it with surprise and stood looking at it.

  “Goodbye,” Harry said, making a clumsy but well-meant wai greeting and motioning to Nho that they were going.

  “Wait,” the chauffeur said. His eyes were still fixed on the cassette. “The ambassador was a good man. But he wasn’t a happy man. He had one weakness. I don’t want to sully his memory, but he lost more than he won on horses.”

  “Most do,” Harry said.

  “Not five million baht.”

  Harry tried to calculate in his head. Nho came to his rescue.

  “A hundred thousand dollars.”

  Harry whistled. “Well, well, if he could afford that then—”

  “He couldn’t afford it,” Sanphet said. “He borrowed money from some loan sharks in Bangkok. They rang him several times over the last few weeks.” He looked at Harry. It was difficult to interpret his expression. “Personally, I believe a man has to settle gambling debts, but if someone killed him for the money I think they should be punished.”

  “So the ambassador wasn’t a happy man?”

  “He didn’t have an easy life.”

  Harry remembered something. “Does Man U mean anything to you?”

  The chauffeur’s expression clouded over.

  “It was on the ambassador’s calendar for the day of the murder. I checked the TV guide and no one was showing Manchester United that day.”

  “Oh, Manchester United,” Sanphet smiled. “That’s Klipra. The ambassador called him Mr. Man U. He flies to England to see games and has bought loads of shares in the club. A very peculiar person.”

  “We’ll see. I’ll have a chat with him later.”

  “If you can get hold of him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t get hold of Klipra. He gets hold of you.”

  That’s all we need, Harry thought. A caricature.

  “The gambling debts radically change the picture,” Nho said, back in the car.

  “Maybe,” Harry said. “A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of cash, but is it enough?”

  “People are murdered in Bangkok for less than that,” Nho said. “Much less. Believe me.”

  “It’s not the loan sharks I’m thinking about, it’s Atle Molnes. The guy comes from a very wealthy family. He should be able to pay, at least if it was a matter of life and death. There’s something not right here. What do you think
about Mr. Sanphet?”

  “He was lying when he talked about Miss Ao.”

  “Oh? What makes you say that?”

  Nho didn’t answer, just smiled secretively and tapped his temple.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Nho? That you know when people are lying?”

  “I learned it from my mother. During the Vietnam War she lived as a poker player on Soi Cowboy.”

  “Rubbish. I know police officers who have questioned people all their lives, and they all say the same: you can’t learn to see through a good liar.”

  “It’s a matter of having eyes in your head. You can see it in small things. Such as when you didn’t open your mouth properly when you said everyone who loves Grieg should have a copy of the cassette.”

  Harry could feel the heat rising in his cheeks. “The cassette happened to be in my Walkman. An Australian policeman told me about Grieg’s symphony in C minor. I bought the cassette in memory of him.”

  “It worked anyway.”

  Nho swerved from the path of a lorry bearing down on them.

  “Bloody hell!” Harry didn’t even have time to be afraid. “He was in the wrong lane!”

  Nho shrugged. “He was bigger than me.”

  Harry looked at his watch. “We have to pop into the station, and I’ve got a funeral to go to.” He thought with dread of the hot jacket hanging in the cupboard outside the “office.”

  “I hope there’s air-conditioning in the church. By the way, how come we had to sit in the street in the baking sun? Why didn’t the old boy invite us into the shade?”

  “Pride,” Nho said.

  “Pride?”

  “He lives in a small room which has precious little to do with the car he drives and the place he works. He didn’t want to invite us in because it would have been unpleasant, not just for him but also for us.”

  “Strange man.”

  “This is Thailand,” Nho said. “I wouldn’t invite you into my place, either. I would serve you tea on the steps.”

  He made a sudden right turn and a couple of the three-wheeled tuk-tuks swerved in horror. Harry instinctively put out his hands in front of him.

  “I’m—”

  “—bigger than they are. Thanks, Nho, I think I’ve got the principle.”