“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.