Cockroaches(46)

“Don’t say that,” Harry said. Her skin burned against his palm. “That’s bad luck.”

“Better bad luck than no luck, Pappa used to say.”

He retracted his hand.

“Don’t you want eternal life?” she whispered.

He blinked and knew that his brain had taken a snap of them there and then, on a footbridge with people hurrying past in both directions and a shimmering sea serpent below. Just like you take snaps of places you visit because you know you won’t be there long. He had done it before, one night in mid-jump at Frogner Lido, another night in Sydney when a red mane of hair blew backward in the wind, and on a cold February afternoon at Fornebu Airport when Sis was waiting for him among the press photographers and the storm of camera flashes. He knew that whatever happened he would always be able to access the snaps, they would never fade; on the contrary, they would have more consistency and substance over the years.

At that moment he felt a drop on his face. And then another. He looked up in amazement.

“I was told there was no rain before May,” he said.

“Mango showers,” Runa said, turning her face to the sky. “We get them sometimes. It means the mangoes are ripe. Soon it’ll pelt down. Come on …”


* * *

Harry was falling asleep. The noise was no longer so obtrusive, and he had started to notice that there was a kind of rhythm to the traffic, a kind of predictability. The first night he would wake up to the sound of horns honking. In a few nights he would probably wake up if he couldn’t hear any horns honking. The racket of a broken silencer didn’t come from nowhere, it had a place in the apparent chaos. It just took a little time to adjust to it, like learning to find your sea legs on a boat.

He had arranged to meet Runa at a cafe by the university the next day to ask some questions about her father. Her hair had still been dripping when she got out of the taxi.

For the first time in a long while he dreamed about Birgitta. The hair sticking to her pale skin. But she smiled and was alive.





20


Tuesday, January 14


It took the lawyer four hours to have Woo released from custody.

“Dr. Ling. He works for Sorensen,” Liz said at the morning meeting and sighed. “Nho only had time to ask Woo where he was on the day of the murder, then it was over.”

“And what did the mobile lie detector get out of the answer?” Harry asked.

“Nothing,” Nho said. “He wasn’t interested in telling us anything.”

“Nothing? Shit, and there was me thinking you Thais were handy with water torture and electric shocks. So now there’s a giant psychopath out there who wishes me dead.”

“Could somebody please give me some good news?” Liz said.

A newspaper crackled.

“I rang the Maradiz Hotel again. The first person I spoke to said there was a farang who used to go there with a woman from the embassy. This guy said the woman was white and they spoke to each other in a language which he thought might have been German or Dutch.”

“Norwegian,” Harry said.

“I tried to get a description of the two, but they weren’t very clear.”

Liz sighed. “Sunthorn, drive over with some photos and see if they can identify the ambassador and his wife.”

Harry wrinkled his nose. “Man and wife have a love nest for two hundred dollars a day a few kilometers from where they live? Isn’t that a bit perverse?”

“According to the man I spoke to today, they stayed there at weekends,” Rangsan said. “I’ve got a few dates.”

“I would bet yesterday’s winnings it wasn’t his wife,” Harry said.

“Maybe not,” Liz said. “Anyway, it probably won’t get us very far.”

She concluded the meeting by telling the rest of the team to spend the day doing neglected paperwork on cases which were dropped when the murder of the Norwegian ambassador was given top priority.

“So we’re back to square one?” Harry asked, after the others had left.

“We’ve been there the whole time,” Liz said. “Perhaps you’ll get what you Norwegians want.”

“What we want?”

“I talked to our Chief of Police this morning. He had spoken to a Mr. Torhus in Norway yesterday, who wanted to know how long this was going to take. The Norwegian authorities asked for some clarification this week if we didn’t have anything concrete. The Chief told him this was a Thai investigation and we didn’t shelve murder cases just like that. But later on he received a call from our Ministry of Justice. Good job we got the sightseeing done while there was time, Harry. Looks like you’ll be going home on Friday. Unless, as they said, something concrete turns up.”