Harry Hole 02 - Cockroaches (26 page)

The waiter came over to the table and beckoned to them.

‘Come on. It’s already started,’ Jens said.

‘What’s already started?’

The waiter led them to the back of the restaurant, through the kitchen and up a narrow staircase. Washtubs stood stacked up on top of one another in the corridor and an old woman in a chair grinned at them with black teeth.

‘Betel nuts,’ Jens said. ‘Dreadful habit. They chew them until the brain rots and their teeth fall out.’

Behind a door Harry heard voices yelling. The waiter opened it, and then they were in a large windowless loft. Twenty to thirty men stood in a cramped circle. Hands were gesticulating and pointing while dog-eared banknotes were counted and passed between them at dizzying speeds. Most of the men were white, some of them in light-coloured linen suits.

‘Cockfighting,’ Jens explained. ‘Private arrangement.’

‘Why’s that?’ Harry had to shout to be heard. ‘I mean, I’ve read that cockfighting is still legal in Thailand.’

‘To a certain extent. The authorities have allowed a modified form of cockfighting in which the claw is tied to the back of the foot so that they can’t kill each other. And the time is restricted. It’s not a fight to the death. This one is run on old rules, so there’s no limit to the stakes. Shall we go closer?’

Harry towered over the men in front of them and could easily see into the ring. Two cocks, both brownish-red and orange, strutted around with their heads wagging, apparently uninterested in each other.

‘How are they going to make them fight?’ Harry asked.

‘Don’t worry. Those two cocks hate each other more than you and I ever could.’

‘Why?’

Jens looked at him. ‘They’re in the same ring. They’re cocks.’

Then, as if at a signal, they went for each other. All Harry could see was fluttering wings and flying straw. Men were screaming in a frenzy, and some of them were jumping up and down. A strange bitter-sweet smell of adrenalin and sweat spread through the room.

‘Can you see the one with the comb cut in the middle?’ Jens said.

Harry couldn’t.

‘It’s the winner.’

‘How can you see that?’

‘I can’t. I know. I knew before the fight.’

‘How . . .?’

‘Don’t ask.’ Jens grinned.

The screams died. One cock was left in the ring. Some men groaned, one man in a grey linen suit had thrown his hat to the ground in frustration. Harry watched the cock dying. A muscle twitched beneath the feathers; then it was motionless. It was absurd; it had looked like a sort of romp, a mass of wings, legs and screaming.

A bloodstained feather sailed past his face. The cock was lifted out of the ring by a man in baggy trousers. He looked as if he was going to burst into tears. The other cock had resumed its strutting. Harry could see the split comb now.

The waiter came over to Jens with a wad of banknotes. Some of the men glanced towards him, some nodded, but no one said anything.

‘Don’t you ever lose?’ Harry asked when they were back in the restaurant again. Jens had lit up a cigar and ordered a cognac, an aged Richard Hennessy 40%. The waiter had to ask for the name twice. It was hard to grasp that this Jens was the same man Harry had comforted on the phone the night before.

‘Do you know why gambling is an illness and not a profession, Harry? It’s because the gambler loves risk. He lives and breathes for that quivering uncertainty.’

He puffed out the smoke in broad rings.

‘With me it’s the other way round. I can go to extremes to eliminate risk. What you saw me win today covers my costs and all my effort, and that’s no small amount, believe you me.’

‘But you never lose?’

‘It gives a reasonable return.’

‘A reasonable return? You mean enough for gamblers sooner or later to be forced to hock everything they have.’

‘Something like that.’

‘But isn’t some of the charm of gambling lost if you know the result?’

‘Charm?’ Jens held up the wad of money. ‘I think this has enough charm. It can provide me with this.’ He spread an open palm around him.

‘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 USA 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 19 January

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 travelled 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 burnt 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 favourite 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 paedophile, 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 avoid 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.’