Cockroaches(53)

Suddenly she got up and shouted: “Ørstagutt hei, Ørstagutt hei, Ørstagutt hei, hei, hei!” She slumped back down on her chair. The room had gone quiet.

“That was how we cheered. We shouted for Ørsta boys because the word for girls doesn’t work, does it. The rhythm’s all out. Well, who knows, perhaps we just liked showing off.”

Harry took her by the arm and helped her down the stairs. He gave the taxi driver her address, a five-dollar bill and told him to make sure she got home. He probably didn’t understand much of what Harry said, but he seemed to grasp what he meant.

He went into a bar in Soi 2, at the end, toward Silom district. The counter was almost empty and on the stage there were a couple of go-go girls who hadn’t been bought for the evening and clearly didn’t have much hope of that happening. They might as well have been doing the washing-up as they dutifully shook their legs and their breasts bounced up and down to “When Susannah Cries.” Harry wasn’t sure which he thought was sadder.

Someone put a beer in front of him that he hadn’t ordered. He left it untouched, paid and rang the police station from a pay phone by the men’s toilet. He couldn’t see a door for the ladies’.





23


Tuesday, January 14


A light breeze blew through his cropped hair. Harry was standing on a brick overhang at the edge of the roof surveying the city. When he pinched his eyes it was like a carpet of glittering, twinkling lights.

“Get down from there,” a voice said behind him. “You’re making me nervous.”

Liz was sitting in a deck-chair with a can of beer in her hand. Harry had gone to the station and found her snowed under piles of reports that had to be read. It was almost midnight, and she had agreed it was time to call it a day. She had locked the office, they had taken the lift up to the eleventh floor, discovered the door to the roof was closed for the night, climbed out of a window, pulled down a fire escape and clambered up.

The blast from a foghorn sounded through the woollen blanket of car traffic.

“Did you hear that?” Liz asked. “When I was little my father used to say that in Bangkok you could hear elephants calling to each other when they were being freighted by ship. They came from Malaysia because the forests in Borneo had been cut down, and the elephants were chained to the deck on their way to the forests in northern Thailand. For ages after I got here I thought it was the elephants blowing through their trunks.”

The echo died.

“Fru Molnes has a motive, but is it good enough?” Harry said and jumped down. “Would you kill someone to have the right of disposal over fifty million kroner for six years?”

“Depends on who I had to kill,” Liz said. “I know a couple of people I would murder for less.”

“I mean: is fifty million kroner for six years the same as five million for sixty years?”

“Negative.”

“Exactly. Shit!”

“Do you wish it was her? Mrs. Molnes?”

“I’ll tell you what I wish. I wish we could find the bloody murderer so that I could go home.”

Liz belched loudly; it was impressive. She nodded in acknowledgement and put the beer down.

“Poor daughter. Runa’s her name, right?”

“She’s a tough girl.”

“Are you sure?”

He shrugged and raised an arm to the sky.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Thinking.”

“I mean with your hand. What’s that?”

“Energy. I’m gathering energy from all the people down there. It’s supposed to give eternal life. Do you believe in that kind of thing?”

“I stopped believing in eternal life when I was sixteen, Harry.”

Harry turned, but couldn’t see her face in the night.

“Your father?”

He could see the sharp outline of her head nodding.

“Yup. He carried the world on his shoulders, my dad did. Shame it was too heavy.”

“How …?” He fell silent.

There was a crunch as she crushed the beer can.

“It’s just another sad story about a Vietnam vet, Harry. We found him in the garage, in full dress uniform with his service rifle beside him. He had written a long letter, not to us, but to the U.S. Army. It said he couldn’t bear the thought that he’d fled his responsibilities. He’d realized that when he was standing in the doorway of the helicopter taking off from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1973 and watching the desperate south Vietnamese storming the place to take refuge from the approaching forces. He wrote that he was as responsible as the police who used the butts of their rifles to keep them out, all of them who had promised they would win the war, who had promised democracy. As an officer he saw himself as equally responsible for the U.S. Army’s decision to prioritize evacuation at the expense of the Vietnamese who had fought side by side with them. Dad dedicated his military efforts to them and regretted that he had not lived up to his responsibility. Finally, he said goodbye to me and Mom and said we should try to forget him as quickly as possible.”