Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

2

If you reach the age of thirty-seven in a country like Denmark, and have regular intervals free of pharmaceuticals, haven't committed suicide, and haven't completely sold out the tender ideals of your childhood, then you've learned a little about facing adversity in life.

In Thule in the seventies we sent equipment up in meteorological balloons to measure supercooled drops of water. They survive for a short time in very high clouds. The area surrounding them is cold but completely still. In a pocket of motionlessness their temperature will drop to -40°F. They ought to freeze, but they don't; they remain stationary and stable and fluid.

That's the way I try to face adversity.

The Kronos hasn't yet settled down. There's a sense of invisible life and movement. But I can't wait any longer. I could have gone through the engine room and across the between decks, if those places hadn't been associated with so many claustrophobic memories for me. At least I want to be able to see them when they appear.

The quarterdeck is bathed in light. I take a deep breath and walk across the stage. Out of the corner of my eye I see the warping lines go by, and the railing around the base of the mast. Then I reach the aft superstructure and unlock the door. Inside, I stand at the window and look out at the deck.

This is Verlaine's domain. Even now, when there's not a soul in sight, his presence is palpable.

I lock the door behind me. My weapons have always been the small details that no one knows about. My identity, my intentions, Jakkelsen's passkey. They can't possibly know that I have it. They must think it was an accident, an oversight on their part, that I got into the quarterdeck last time. They were afraid that I was on to something. But they couldn't know anything about the key.

In the first room I let the beam of my flashlight play over tightly packed arid battened-down cans of red lead, primer paint, ship's lacquer, joint filler, special thinner, crates of face masks, epoxy tar, paintbrushes, and rollers. Everything is stacked up and clean and orderly. Verlaine's meticulousness.

The second door is the back entrance to a toilet-the one opposite the double shower room. The next leads to the metal shop, where Hansen polishes his knives with Viennese chalk.

The last room is the electrical shop. You could hide a small elephant in the labyrinth of cupboards, shelves, and crates, and it would take me an hour to find it. I don't have an hour. So I close the door and head below.

The door to the between decks is locked now. And bolted shut. Someone wanted to make sure that no one could get in this way. I turn on my light for only brief moments. I'm probably being overly cautious, since I'm in a windowless darkness, but my nerves can't take much more.

I stand still and listen. I have to force myself not to panic. I've never liked the dark. I've never understood the Danish penchant for wandering around at night. Taking a stroll in pitch darkness. Nightingale walks in the woods. Insisting on gazing at the stars. Nighttime orienteering.

You have to respect the dark. Night is the time when space simmers with evil and peril. You can call it superstition. You can call it fear of the dark. But it's ridiculous to pretend that the night is just like the day, simply without light. Night is the time to huddle together indoors. If you don't happen to be alone and have other obligations, that is.

Sounds are more tangible than objects in the dark. The sound of water around the propeller somewhere beneath my feet. The muted trilling of the ship's wake. The engine noise. The ventilation system. The rotation of the propeller shaft on its bearings. A little electric compressor, its location almost impossible to pinpoint. Like trying to figure out which neighbor has the noisy refrigerator in your apartment building.

There's a refrigerator here, too. I don't find it by the sound. I find it because the darkness makes me visualize my own sketch. I pace off the corridor. But I already know the results. Sheer nervousness prevented me from noticing it earlier. The corridor is six feet too short. According to Jakkelsen, somewhere behind the wall at the end of the room is the hydraulic rudder system. But that doesn't explain the missing six feet.

I shine my light on the wall. It has the same veneer as the other walls. That's why I didn't see it before. But it's been recently applied. The veneer has been nailed down. It's a rather makeshift hiding place, hastily rigged up. But I wouldn't be able to open it on my own. Even if I had the proper tools.

I open the nearest door.

The black cases are standing against the wall. They're labeled GRIMLOT MUSICAL INSTRUMENT FLIGHT CASES. I open the first one. It's rectangular and looks as if it might hold a medium-sized tweeter.

The manufacturer's guarantee under the two shiny blue tanks of enameled steel says: "Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." They're covered with a rubberized net to protect the paint from impacts.

I open another, smaller case. It contains what look like valves to screw onto the tanks. Bright and shiny. Nestled in custom-shaped foam. An oxygen gauge. But a type I've never seen before, which is supposed to be attached to the tanks instead of sitting directly on the mouthpiece.

In the next case there are pressure gauges and wrist compasses. A large suitcase with a handle contains goggles, three pairs of flippers, stainless-steel daggers in rubber sheaths, and two inflatable float collars to attach to the tanks.

In a duffel bag there are two hooded rubber suits with zippers at the wrists and ankles. Wetsuits made of neoprene. At least half an inch thick. Underneath are two Poseidon dry suits. And under them are gloves, socks, two thermal suits, safety lines, and six different kinds of battery-powered lamps, two of which are attached to a helmet.

There's a case that looks as if it might contain an electric bass, but it's somewhat longer and deeper. It's leaning against the bulkhead. Inside it is Jakkelsen.

It wasn't quite big enough for him, so they had to press his head down against his right shoulder and bend his legs up behind his thighs so that he's kneeling. His eyes are open. He still has my jacket over him.

I touch his face. He's still moist and warm. The body temperature of a large animal drops a few degrees per hour after it's been shot, if it's lying outdoors in the summer. The numbers are probably about the same for human beings. Jakkelsen is approaching room temperature.

I put my hand in his breast pocket. The syringe is gone. But there's something else in the pocket. I should have wondered about that before. Metal doesn't clink all by itself. It clinks against another piece of metal. Very cautiously, with my hand inside his pocket, I grab hold of a little triangle. It's growing out of his chest.

Rigor mortis spreads from the jaw muscles downward. The same way nervous tension does. He's stiff all the way to his navel. I can't turn him over, so I run my hand down along the inside of the case and up behind his back, inside his jacket. Sticking out between his shoulder blades there's a piece of metal, less than an inch long, flat and no thicker than a nail file. Or the blade of a cold chisel.

The blade was driven in between two ribs and then straight up. It looks as if it went through his heart. Then the handle was removed, but the blade was left in. To prevent bleeding.

On any other person the blade would not have exited through the chest. But Jakkelsen is fashionably slim.

It must have happened right before I reached him. Maybe even while I was on my way across the square.

In Greenland I never had any cavities; now I have twelve fillings. Every year I need another one. I refuse to have novocaine. I've developed a strategy for handling the pain. I breathe deeply from my abdomen, and right before the drill pierces the enamel into the dentine of the tooth, I think to myself that now something is happening to me that I have to accept. That's how I become an involved but not overwhelmed spectator to the pain.

I was present in the parliament, the Landsting, when the Siumut Party proposed that the planned withdrawal of American and Danish forces from Greenland should be preceded by the establishment of a Greenlandic military. But of course that's not what they called it. A decentralized coast guard, they said, initially manned by those Greenlanders who had served as constables in the navy during the past three years. And led by A-level officers who would be trained in Denmark.

I thought it was impossible; they'd never agree to it. It was voted down. "We are surprised by the results of the vote," said Julius Høeg, Siumut's foreign-policy spokesman, "considering that this parliament's committee on national security has recommended a coast guard and established a preliminary work group made up of representatives from the Danish Navy, the Greenland police, the Sirius Patrol, the Ice Service, and other professionals."

Other professionals. The most important information always comes at the end. As if in passing. In a side letter. In the margin.

The security personnel on the Greenland Star were Greenlanders. Only now that it's behind us do I remember this fact. We no longer notice things that have become commonplace. It has become common to see armed Greenlanders in uniform. Common for us to wage war.

For me, too. The only other thing I have left is my ability to distance myself.

This is happening to me; the pain is mine, but it doesn't completely absorb me. Part of me remains a spectator. I crawl into the dumbwaiter. It hasn't gotten any easier since yesterday. I'm not getting any younger, after all.

Now I'm glad that there's no safety device. This dangerous system allows me to press the Up button myself. The rush of fear during the ascent up the shaft is still the same. As is the silence at the top. And the empty kitchen.

The moon is shining through the skylight. On my way to the door I have a vision of myself as I must look from outside. Clad in black, but as pale as a white-faced clown.

There are the same sounds in the corridor. The engines, the toilets, a woman's breathing. It's as if time has stopped.

The moonlight streaming into the salon is blue and palpably cold, like a liquid against my skin. The rolling of the ship on the waves makes the silhouettes of the window ledges stretch out like living shadows across the walls.

I head for the books first.

The Greenlandic Pilot, the Geodetic Institute's mapbook of Greenland, the admiralty's sea charts of Davis Strait, reduced 4:1 and collected in a single volume. Colbeck's Dynamics of Snow and Ice Masses, on the movements of ice. Buchwald's Meteorites in three volumes. Issues of Naturens Uerden and Varv. The Review of Medical Microbiology by Jawetz and Melnick. Rintek Madsen's Parasitology-A Handbook. Dion R. Bell's Lecture Notes on Tropical Medicine.

I put the latter two volumes on the floor and leaf through them with my right hand, holding, my flashlight in my left. Under the heading Dracunculus so many passages are highlighted in yellow that it looks as if the paper has changed color. I put the books back in place.

Out in the hallway I listen intently at each door. By sheer accident I locate Tørk's cabin on the first try. I open the door a crack. Moonlight is shining through the porthole and across the bunk. It's cold in the room, but he has pushed the comforter aside. His torso looks like bluetinged marble. He's sleeping heavily. I step inside and close the door behind me. What complicates life is having to make choices. The person who is pushed forward lives simply.

Everything takes care of itself. He had been working at the desk. The writing implements were put away, since on a ship everything that might roll around has to be stowed. But his papers are still lying there. A stack of them, but not too big for me to carry.

I stand there for a moment, looking at him. Like so many times before, ever since my childhood, I marvel at the chaste vulnerability of human beings in sleep. I could bend over him. I could kiss him. I could feel his heartbeat. I could slit his throat.

I suddenly realize that in my life I am often awake while other people sleep. I've been through many late nights and many early mornings. I didn't plan it that way. But that's how it turned out.

I take the stack of papers out to the salon. There won't be time to take them along when I leave.

I sit there for a moment without turning on the light. A sense of solemnity has come over the room. As if the moonlight had encapsulated everything in bluish-gray glass.

Everyone dreams of finding the key to oneself and one's future. The religious classes at Sunday school in Qaanaaq were taught by a catechist from the Moravian mission, an introverted and brutal Belgian mathematician who didn't know one word of the Thule dialect. The lessons were given in a grotesque hodgepodge of English, West Greenlandic, and Danish. He scared us but also fascinated us. We were brought up to respect the profundity that is sometimes found in madness. Sunday after Sunday he would dwell on two things: the newly discovered Nag Hammadi canon's commandment to know thyself and the idea that our days are numbered, that there is a divine arithmetic in the universe. We were all between five and nine years old. We didn't understand a word. Yet I still remembered various things later on. I especially thought that I'd like to see the cosmic calculation for my own life.

Every once in a while it feels as if that moment has arrived. Just like now. As if this stack of papers in front of me has something vital to tell me about my future.

My mother's forefathers would have been astounded that the key to the universe for one of their descendants would turn out to be in written form.

On top there is a copy of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark's report on the 1991 expedition to Gela Alta. The last six pages are not copies. They are the original, slightly blurry, and technically flawed aerial photos of the Barren Glacier. It lives up to its reputation: arid, cold, white, worn, windblown, and abandoned even by the birds.

Then there are a couple of dozen handwritten pages with figures and small pencil sketches that are incomprehensible.

Twelve photographs are reprints of X-rays. They might be the same people I once looked at on the light box in Moritz's consultation room. They might be anything at all.

There are more photos. These might have been taken by X-ray, too. But the images are not of the human body.

Straight black and gray lines have been drawn across the pictures, as if made with a ruler.

The last pages are numbered from 1 to 50 and are all part of a single report.

The text is sparse, the numerous pen-and-ink drawings are sketchy; calculations have been added by hand in several places when the typewriter couldn't supply the proper symbols.

It's a compilation of data pertaining to the transport of large objects across ice. With sketches of the procedures and brief, illustrative equations regarding the mechanical specifications.

There's a summary about the use of heavy sleds on expeditions to the North Pole. A series of drawings demonstrate the way ships were pulled across the ice to avoid being frozen solid in it.

Several sections of the report have short titles such as: "Ahnighito, Dog, Savik 1, Agpalilik." They concern the transport of the largest-known fragments of meteorites from the Cape York site, Peary's difficult salvage operations and voyage on the schooner Kite, Knud Rasmussen's logbook, and Buchwald's legendary transport of the 30-ton Ahnighito in 1965.

This last section contains copies of Buchwald's own photographs. I've seen them many times before; they've been included in every article on the subject for the past twenty years. And yet it still seems as if I'm seeing them for the first time. The chutes made from railroad ties. The winches. The crudely welded sleds made of train tracks. The photocopies make the contrast too extreme and blur the details. And yet it's all so obvious. The Kronos is carrying a duplicate of Buchwald's equipment in the aft cargo hold. The meteorite that he transported to Denmark weighed 30.88 tons.

The last part of the report deals with the joint Danish, American, and Soviet plan for a drilling platform on the ice. The Pylot Report on the bearing capacity of ice is mentioned in the list of references. My name is in the list of authors.

At the bottom of the stack of papers there are six color photos. They were taken with a flash in some kind of stalactite cave. Every student of geology has seen similar pictures. The salt mines in Austria, the blue grottoes on Sardinia, the lava caves on the Canary Islands.

But these are different. The light of the flash has been thrown back toward the lens in blinding reflections. As if it were a picture of a thousand small explosions. The photograph was taken in an ice cave.

The ice caves that I've seen have all had an extremely short lifetime, lasting only until the break in the glacier or the crevasse closed, or they were filled up by underground rivers of thawing ice. This one is not like anything I've ever seen before. Long, glittering stalactites hang from the ceiling everywhere, a colossal system of icicles that must have been formed over a long period of time.

In the middle of the cave is what looks like a lake. There's something in the lake. It could be anything. It's impossible to tell from the photo.

The only reason it's possible to imagine the scale of things is that a man is sitting in the foreground. He's sitting on one of the mounds that the dripping water and the cold have made rise up from the floor of the cave. He's laughing triumphantly at the camera. This time he's wearing down pants. But he still has kamiks on. It's Isaiah's father.

When I lift up the stack of paper, the last sheet stays on the table because it's thinner than the photographs. It's a sheet of writing paper with the rough draft of a letter. Only a few lines, written in pencil and crossed out in several places, then placed at the bottom of the stack. Like when you've written a diary, or a will, and you don't really want to acknowledge it. You don't feel that it should lie around, shouting your confessions to the wind. But you still want to have it close at hand. Maybe because it still needs some work.

I read it, then fold it up and put it in my pocket.

My throat is dry. My hands are shaking. What I need now is a smooth exit.

I've just put out my hand to open the door to Tork's cabin when there's a click inside and a strip of light falls into the corridor. I step back. The door starts to open. It opens toward me, giving me time to choose a door to my right, open it, and step inside. I pull the door behind me but don't dare shut it all the way.

It's dark. The tiles under my feet tell me that I'm in the bathroom. The light is turned on from the outside. I retreat behind a curtain into the shower stall. The door opens. There's no sound, but a pair of hands float into view in the vertical slit where the curtain isn't quite closed. They are Tørk's hands.

His face appears in the mirror. He's so groggy with sleep that he doesn't even see himself. He bends down, turns on the faucet, lets it get cold, and drinks from it. Then he straightens up, turns around, and leaves. He moves mechanically, like a sleepwalker.

The instant the door to his cabin closes, I'm out in the corridor. In a second he'll notice that the papers are missing. I want to get out before the search starts.

The light goes out. His bunk creaks. He has gone back to sleep in the blue moonlight.

A chance like this, such magnificent luck, only occurs once in a lifetime. I could dance all the way to the exit. A woman calls out in a low, commanding voice farther along the hallway in the dark up ahead. I turn around and head in the other direction. A man snickers in front of me. At the same moment he passes the patch of light from the open doorway to the salon. He's naked. He has an erection. They don't see me. I'm caught between them.

I step back into the bathroom again, back into the shower stall. The light goes on. They come inside. He goes over to the sink. He waits for his erection to subside. Then he stands on his toes and urinates into the sink. It's Seidenfaden. The author of the report about transporting massive weights across sea ice that I was just looking at. The report in which he refers to an article that I wrote. And now we're this close to each other. We live in a world of compressed juxtapositions.

The woman is standing behind him. She has an intent expression on her face. For a moment I think that she has seen me in the mirror. Then she lifts her hands above her head. She's holding a belt with the buckle down. When she strikes, she does it with such precision that only the buckle hits him, leaving a long white stripe across one buttock. The stripe changes from white to flaming red. He takes hold of the sink, bends over, and presses his backside toward her. She strikes again; the buckle hits his other buttock. Romeo and Juliet come to mind. Europe has a long tradition of elegant rendezvous. Then the light goes out. The door closes, and they're gone.

I step out into the corridor. My knees are shaking. I don't know what to do about the papers. I take two steps toward Tørk's cabin. Can't make up my mind. Take one step back. Decide to leave them in the salon. There's nothing else to do. I feel as if I'm imprisoned in a switching yard.

A door opens in the dark. This time there's no warning, the light isn't turned on, and it's only because I've become familiar with my surroundings that I manage to step into the bathroom and hide in the shower stall in time.

This time the light doesn't go on. But the door is opened and then closed and locked. I take out my screwdriver. They've come to get me. I'm holding the papers behind my back. I'm going to throw them as I jab with the screwdriver. Once from below, up toward the abdomen. And then I'll run.

The curtain is pushed aside. I get ready to push off from the wall.

The water is turned on. The cold water. Then the hot. The temperature is adjusted. The shower has been directed toward the wall. Within three seconds I'm soaking wet.

The spray is diverted away from the wall. He gets in under the water. I'm four inches away. Except for the splashing of the water, there's not a sound. And there's no light. But at this distance I don't need it to recognize the mechanic.

In the White Palace he never turned on the light on his way up the stairs. He always waited until the last minute to flip the switch in the basement. He likes peace and solitude in the dark.

His hand brushes mine when he fumbles for the soapdish. He finds it, steps back a little from the water, and soaps up. Puts the soap back and massages his skin. Searches for the soap again. His fingers brush mine and move on. Then they slowly come back. Touch my hand.

He ought to gasp at least. A scream wouldn't be out of place. But he doesn't utter a sound. His fingers register the screwdriver, carefully take it out of my hand, and move up my arm to my elbow.

The water is turned off. The curtain is shoved aside; he steps out into the room. After a moment the light goes on. He's put a big orange towel around his waist. His face is expressionless. All of his movements have been calm, deliberate, subdued.

He looks at me. And then he recognizes me.

His handle on the present dissolves. He doesn't move, his face hardly changes expression. But he's paralyzed. I now know that he didn't realize I was on board.

He looks at my wet hair, the clinging dress, the soaked papers that I'm holding in front of me. My sloshing rubber boots and the screwdriver that he's holding. He doesn't understand a thing.

Then he hands me his towel, with an awkward and perplexed gesture. Without thinking that he is exposing himself. I take it and hand him the papers. He holds them in front of his genitals while I dry my hair. His eyes never leave my face.

We're sitting on the bunk in his cabin. Close together, with a chasm between us. We're whispering, even though it's not necessary.

"Do you know what's going on?" I ask.

"M-most of it."

"Can you tell me?" He shakes his head.

We've ended up just about where we started. In a morass of secrets. I feel a wild urge to throw myself at him and beg him to anesthetize me and wake me up only after it's all over.

I've never gotten to know him. Up until a few hours ago I thought that we had shared certain moments of silent solidarity. When I saw him walking across the landing platform of the Greenland Star, I realized that we've always been strangers. When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

"I want to show you something."

I put the papers in a pile on his desk. He hands me a T-shirt, underpants, thermal pants, wool socks, and a sweater. We get dressed with our backs turned, like two strangers. I have to roll his pants up above the knees and the sleeves of his sweater to the elbow. I ask him for a wool cap as well, and he gives it to me. From a drawer he takes out a flat, dark bottle and stuffs it into an inside pocket. I take the wool blanket off his bed and fold it up. Then we leave.

He opens the case. Jakkelsen stares at us disconsolately. His nose is blue-tinged and sharp, as if it were frozen. "Who's this?"

"Bernard Jakkelsen. Lukas's little brother."

I go over to him and unbutton his shirt and pull it away from the triangular steel. The mechanic doesn't move. I turn off the light. We stand quietly in the darkness. Then we go upstairs. I lock the door behind us. When we reach the deck, the mechanic stops.

"Who did it?"

"Verlaine," I say. "The bosun."

There are steps welded onto the external bulkhead. I crawl up first. He follows me slowly. We reach a small half-deck clothed in darkness. A motorboat is perched on two wooden trestles, and behind it there's a large rubber raft. We sit down between the two. From here we have a view of the quarterdeck but we're shielded from the light.

"It happened on the Greenland Star. Just as you arrived."

He doesn't believe me.

"Verlaine could have heaved him over the side. But he was afraid the body would float up near the platform the next day. Or be sucked up into a propeller."

I think about my mother. Whatever is thrown into the Arctic Ocean never comes up again. But Verlaine wouldn't know that.

The mechanic still doesn't say a word.

"Jakkelsen followed Verlaine onto the docks. He got caught. The best solution was to make room in the cases and put him inside one of them. Load him on board and wait until we were free of the platform. And then let him slip overboard."

I try to keep my sense of desperation out of my voice. He has to believe me.

"We're far out at sea now. Every second he's on board is a risk for them. They'll come in a few minutes. They'll have to bring him up on deck. There's no other way than over the side. That's why we're sitting here. I thought you should see for yourself."

There's a soft sigh in the dark. It's the cork coming out of the bottle, which he hands to me. I take a swallow. It's dark, sweet, strong rum.

I put the woolen blanket over us. It's about 14°F, but I'm burning hot inside. Alcohol makes your capillaries expand and the surface of your skin ache slightly. It's this pain that you have to avoid at all costs if you don't want to freeze to death. I take off the woolen cap to feel the cold against my forehead.

"Tørk would n-never have permitted it."

I hand him the letter. He glances up toward the dark windows of the bridge, leans behind the hull of the motorboat, and reads the letter in the beam of my flashlight. "It was with Tørk's papers," I say.

We take another drink. The moonlight is so bright that it's possible to distinguish different colors. The green deck, my blue thermal pants, the gold and red of the label on the bottle. It's like sunlight, falling with a tactile warmth across the deck. I kiss him. The temperature is no longer important. At some point I straddle him. We are no longer two bodies, just patches of heat in the night.

Later we sit leaning against each other. He's the one who pulls the blanket over us. I'm not cold. We drink from the bottle. It tastes strong and fiery.

"Are you from the police, Smilla?"

"No."

"Are you from some other corporation?"

"No."

"Have you known all along?"

"No."

"Do you know now?"

"I have an idea."

We take another drink and he puts his arms around me. The deck must be cold under the blanket, but we don't notice it.

No one comes past us. The Kronos seems lifeless. As if the ship had wrenched itself off its course and were now carrying us away, just the two of us.

At some point the bottle is empty. Then I stand up, because I realize that something is wrong. "Aren't there any other openings in the hull?" I ask. "Some other way to get rid of him?"

"Why are you talking about death?" What should I say?

"How is the anchor dropped?" he asks me.

We climb down to the between decks. The case is now full of life vests. Jakkelsen is gone. We go down the stairs, through the tunnel, the engine room, another tunnel, up the spiral stairs. He throws two bolts and opens a door that's three feet square. The chain of the anchor is stretched taut in the middle of the room. Up near the ceiling it passes through a pipe; on either side the moonlight and the silhouette of the anchor windlass are visible. Then the chain disappears downward through a hawser hole the size of a sewer cover. The anchor is pulled up just below the hawser hole. That doesn't leave much room. He stares at the opening.

"A grown man wouldn't fit through there."

I touch the steel. We both know that this is where Jakkelsen was shoved out during the night.

"He was fashionably slim," I say.

Captain Lukas is unshaven, he hasn't combed his hair, and he looks as if he has slept in his clothes.

"What do you know about electrical currents, Jaspersen?"

We're alone on the bridge. It's 6:30 in the morning, an hour and a half before his watch begins. His face is sallow and covered with a thin film of sweat.

"I can change a light bulb," I say. "But I usually burn my fingers."

"Yesterday, when we were docked, we lost power on the Kronos. And a section of the harbor area did, too." He has a piece of paper in his hand. His hand is making the paper shake.

"On ships all the wiring goes through circuit breakers. As a result, all power outlets are directly connected to a fuse. Do you know what that means? It means that it's damned hard to create electrical havoc on a ship. Unless you're too smart for your own good and go straight for the main feeder. That's what someone did yesterday. During the brief periods when Kutzow is sober, he has his clever moments. He tracked down the source of the accident. It was a darning needle. Yesterday someone stuck a darning needle into the supply cable. Presumably with an insulated pair of pliers. And then broke off the needle afterward-an especially clever touch. The insulation would contract over the needle, making it impossible to pinpoint the problem unless you know a few tricks like Kutzow does, with a magnet and a voltage sensor. And if you have some idea what you're looking for."

I think about Jakkelsen's excitement and the tone of his voice. "I'll take care of this for us, Smilla," he said. "Tomorrow everything will be different." I feel a new respect for his resourcefulness.

"During the blackout one of the sailors-Bernard Jakkelsen-apparently disobeyed orders not to go ashore and left the Kronos. This morning we received this telegram from him. It's his resignation."

He hands me the paper. It's a telex sent from the Greenland Star. It's quite brief, even for a resignation.

To Captain Sigmund Lukas:

Effective immediately, I hereby resign my post on the Kronos due to personal reasons. Go to hell.

B. Jakkelsen.

I look up at Lukas.

"I have a strong suspicion," he says, "that you were also on shore during the blackout."

His demeanor cracks. Gone is the officer, gone is the sarcasm. The only thing left is anxiety bordering on desperation.

"Tell me whether you know anything about him." Everything that Jakkelsen didn't tell me is now apparent. Lukas's panicked concern, his desire to protect and rescue his brother and keep him sailing, out of jail and away from bad influences in the cities. No matter what the cost. Even if it meant taking him along on a voyage like this one.

For a moment I'm tempted to tell him everything. For a moment I see a reflection of myself in his torment. Our irrational, blind, and vain attempts to protect other people from something that we don't understand but that keeps reappearing no matter what we do.

Then I let my momentary weakness fade away and die out. There's nothing I can do for Lukas now. No one can do anything for Jakkelsen anymore.

"I stood on the dock. That's all."

He lights a new cigarette. The ashtray is already full. "I called the telex office. But the whole situation is impossible. It's strictly forbidden to put a man ashore in this way. And their internal system makes things even more difficult. You write a telegram and hand it in at a window. From there it's taken over to the mail room. A third person takes it over to the teletype office. I talked to a fourth person. They don't even know whether it was delivered in person or called in. It's impossible to find out anything."

He takes hold of my arm. "Do you have the faintest idea why he would go ashore?"

I shake my head.

He waves the telegram. "This is so typical of him." He has tears in his eyes.

It's exactly like something Jakkelsen would write. Brief, arrogant, secretive, and yet with an enthusiasm for the cliches of formal speech. But it wasn't Jakkelsen who wrote it. It's the same text that was on the piece of paper I took from Tørk's cabin last night.

Lukas gazes out across the water without seeing anything, absorbed in the first of many painful speculations that will start building from this moment on. He has forgotten that I'm there.

At that moment the fire alarm goes off.

There are sixteen of us gathered in the galley. Everyone on board except Sonne and Maria, who are up on the bridge.

By the clock it's daytime, but outside it's dark. The wind has picked up and the temperature has risen, a combination that makes the rain sweep across the windows like the boughs of a tree. The waves strike the sides of the ship like the irregular blows of a heavy mallet.

The mechanic is leaning against the bulkhead next to Urs. Verlaine sits a little apart; Hansen and Maurice are with the rest of the crew. In the company of others, they always seem so inconspicuous. An air of discretion that is part of Verlaine's meticulousness.

Lukas is sitting at the head of the table. It's been an hour since I saw him on the bridge. He's practically unrecognizable. He's wearing a newly ironed shirt and shiny black leather shoes. He's clean-shaven, and his hair has been slicked down with water. He's alert and gets right to the point.

Just inside the door stands Tork. In front of him sit Seidenfaden and Katja Claussen. It takes a while before I can bring myself to look at them. They pay no attention to me.

Lukas introduces the mechanic. Then he reports that the fire alarm system is still malfunctioning. It was a false alarm this morning.

He briefly tells us that Jakkelsen has deserted. He says everything in English.

I glance over at Verlaine. He's leaning against the wall. His eyes bore into mine, attentive and searching. I can't lower my gaze. Someone else-a demon-is staring out of my eyes, promising Verlaine revenge.

Lukas reports that we're approaching the final destination of our voyage. He doesn't say any more than that. In a day or two we'll be there. No one will be allowed ashore.

His lack of more precise details is absurd. In the age of SATNAV, you can determine the exact time of sighting land with a margin of error of only a few minutes.

No one reacts. They all know that there's something wrong with this trip. Besides, they're used to the conditions on board the big tankers. Most of them have been at sea for up to seven months without putting in to port.

Lukas looks at Tørk. This meeting was arranged for Tørk's benefit. At his request. Maybe so that he could see all of us in one place. To gauge our reactions. While Lukas talked, Tørk's eyes wandered from face to face, resting on each for a moment. Now he turns around and leaves. Seidenfaden and Claussen follow him.

Lukas adjourns the meeting. Verlaine exits. The mechanic pauses for a moment to talk to Urs, who is explaining in broken English about the croissants we just ate. I catch something about the importance of moisture. Both in the rising stage and in the oven.

Fernanda makes her departure, avoiding my eyes. The mechanic leaves. He hasn't looked at me once. I'm going to see him this afternoon. But until then we have to pretend we don't exist for each other.

I think about what I have to work on in the meantime. Not some kind of glorious planning for the future, merely a dull, bare-bones strategy for survival.

I drift down the corridor. I have to talk to Lukas.

I have one foot up on the stairs as Hansen comes down toward me. I withdraw to the open deck area below the upper level.

This is where I first realize how bad the weather is. The rain is close to freezing, heavy and torrential. The gusts of wind whip up the rain as it falls. There are white stripes across the sea where the wind is chopping at the tops of the swells, pulling them along as spindrift.

The door opens behind me. I don't turn around; I walk over toward the exit to the quarterdeck. It opens and Verlaine comes out.

This narrow, covered section of open deck now seems different than before. My attention is usually diverted by the permanently lit emergency lights and the two doors, and by the windows of the crew cabins facing the deck. Now I realize that this is one of the most isolated spots on board. It can't be seen from above, and there are only two entrances. The windows behind me belong to Jakkelsen's cabin and my own. In front of me is the sea rail. Beyond that, it's forty feet down to the sea.

Hansen approaches while Verlaine stays where he is. I weigh 110 pounds. With a quick lift I'll be in the water. What was it Lagermann said? You hold your breath until you think your lungs are going to burst. That's when you feel pain. Then you exhale and take a deep breath. After that there's only peace.

This is the only place they could do it without being seen from the bridge. They must have been waiting for this opportunity.

I go up to the railing and lean over. Hansen comes closer. We both move calmly and deliberately. On my right the drop to the sea is interrupted by the freeboard extending down to the railing. On the outside of the ship a row of rectangular iron rungs has been welded into recesses, vanishing up into the darkness.

I perch on top of the railing. Hansen and Verlaine freeze. The way people always freeze when faced with someone who's going to jump. But I don't jump. I grab hold of the iron rungs and pull myself out over the side.

Hansen can't figure out what I'm up to. But Verlaine rushes to the railing and grabs for my ankles.

The Kronos is struck by a heavy swell. The hull shudders and lists to starboard.

Verlaine has hold of my foot. But the movement of the ship presses him against the railing, threatening to fling him into the sea. He has to let me go. My feet slip on the rungs, which are as slippery as soap from the rain and salt water. While the ship rolls back, I hang by my hands. Somewhere far below me the waterline shines white. I close my eyes and clamber up.

After what seems like an eternity, I open my eyes again. Below, Hansen is staring up at me. I've climbed only a few yards.

I'm outside the windows of the promenade deck. On my left there are lights behind the blue curtains. I pound on the glass with the palm of my hand. When I give up and start climbing again, someone cautiously pushes the curtains aside. Kutzow peers out at me. I have been pounding on the window of the engineer's office. He shields his face with his hands to block out the reflection, pressing his face against the window. His nose becomes a flattened, dull green spot. Our faces are only inches away from each other.

"Help," I scream. "Help, goddamn it!"

He looks at me. Then he pulls the curtains shut.

I keep on climbing. The rungs stop and I collapse on the boat deck next to the davits holding the aft lifeboat. The door is immediately to my right. It's locked. An outside ladder like the one I've just climbed leads up along the funnel to the platform outside the bridge.

Under different circumstances I would have had reason to admire Verlaine's foresight. At the top of the ladder, a few yards above, Maurice is standing, with his arm still in a sling. He's there to ensure that there are no witnesses on the upper decks.

I head for the stairs leading down. From the deck below Verlaine is coming up toward me.

I turn around. I think that I might be able to get the lifeboat lowered into the water. That it must have some kind of quick release to make it drop. That I could jump into the water after it.

But standing in front of the winches for lowering the boat, I have to give up. The system of carabiners and cables is too complicated. I rip the tarp off the boat, looking for something to defend myself with. A boat hook or a flare.

The tarp is made of heavy green nylon with elastic along the edge that fits around the gunwale of the boat. When I lift it up, the wind pulls it free and it flaps out over the side of the ship. It catches on an eyelet on the bow of the lifeboat.

Verlaine is up an deck. Hansen is right behind him. I grab the tarp and step over the side. The Kronos rolls and I'm lifted free; wrapping my thighs around the tarp, I lower myself down. At the end of the tarp my feet dangle in midair. Then I fall. They've cut the tarp loose. I fling out my arms and the sea rail catches me in the armpits. My knees strike the side of the ship. But I keep hanging there, momentarily paralyzed because the breath was knocked out of me. Then I slide headfirst onto the upper deck.

An absurd fragment of memory brings up images of the first time I ever played tag, right after I arrived in Denmark-my unfamiliarity with the game, which quickly eliminated the weak, and then, through a natural hierarchy, everyone else.

The door to the stairway opens and Hansen appears. I head across the quarterdeck, making it over to the stairs leading up to the boat deck. At eye level a pair of blue shoes is coming down the steps. I stick my hands under the railing and shove the shoes outward. It's a continuation of their own movement, so it doesn't take much force. The feet sail out into the air in a small arc, and Verlaine's head strikes the step next to my shoulders. Then he plummets down the last few yards and hits the deck without being able to break his fall.

I run up the stairs. On the boat deck I cross over to starboard and then climb up the ladder. Maurice must have heard me. As I climb he comes over to the ladder. Behind him the door to the bridge opens and Kutzow appears. He's wearing a bathrobe and is barefoot. He and Maurice stare at each other. I walk past them into the I bridge.

I fumble for the flashlight in my pocket. The beam catches Sonne's face. Maria is standing at the tiller. "Let me into the sick bay," I say. "I've had an accident."

Sonne leads the way. Outside the chart room he turns around and stops dead. I look down at myself. The knees of my jogging pants are gone; instead, there are two bloody holes. The palms of both hands are lacerated.

"I fell," I tell him.

He unlocks the sick bay. He avoids looking at me directly.

When I sit down and the skin tightens across my knees, I almost faint. A flood of tiny, painful memories washes over me: the first stairs in boarding school and falling on rough ice-flashes of light, numbness, heat, sharp pain, cold, and finally a dull throbbing.

"Could you clean it for me?"

He looks away. "I can't stand the sight of blood."

I clean it myself. My hands shake, the liquid runs down over my wounds. I put on sterile compresses and wrap gauze around them.

"Give me some Cliradon," I say.

"That's against regulations."

I stare up at him. He takes out a bottle. "And amphetamines."

Every ship's pharmacy and every expedition has a supply of medicine to stimulate the central nervous system and relieve the feeling of exhaustion.

He hands me some. I crush five tablets into a paper cup with water. They taste bitter.

I'm having a hard time using my hands. He takes out a pair of white, tight-fitting cotton gloves, the kind worn by people with allergies.

As I go out the door he tries to smile bravely. "Feeling better now?"

He is the quintessential Dane, with his fear, his iron resolve to repress what's happening around him. And his indomitable optimism.

The rain hasn't let up. It looks like ropes of water slanting across the windows of the bridge. The dim gray of faint daylight is appearing.

"Where's Lukas?"

"In his cabin."

A man who hasn't slept for forty-eight hours is useless. "He goes on watch in an hour," says Sonne. "In the crow's nest. He wants to see the ice for himself."

One of the radar screens is fixed on a radius of fifty sea miles. A short distance from the edge it shows a crosshatched green continent. The beginning of the field ice. "Tell him that I'll be up to see him," I say.

The deck of the Kronos is deserted. It no longer resembles anything on board a ship. The faint daylight forms deep shadows, but they're not just shadows anymore. In every patch of darkness an inferno is raging. When I was a child, this atmosphere accompanied every death. Somewhere women would start shrieking, and then we knew that someone had died; this awareness would transform the area. Even if it was May in Siorapaluk, with a bluishgreen light flooding down, penetrating everything and making people crazy with the spring, even this kind of light would be transformed to the cold reflection of a realm of the dead that had moved up aboveground.

A ladder goes up along the front of the mast. The crow's nest is a flat aluminum box furnished with windows both fore and aft. Mandatory on any ship that sails in ice.

It's sixty-five feet to the top. It doesn't look like much on my sketch of the Kronos. But the climb up is terrifying. The ship pitches through the sea and rolls sideways; all the movements at the hull's fulcrum become magnified the higher I go, and the oscillation of the mast is more extreme.

The rungs come to an end at a platform, above which the block of the derrick is attached. From there you step up onto a smaller platform and then through a little door into the metal shed.

It's just high enough to stand up. In the darkness I can make out an old-fashioned engine room telegraph, a tilt gauge, a log, a large compass, a tiller, and the intercom to the bridge. When we enter the field ice, Lukas will steer the Kronos from up here. Only from here will there be sufficient visibility.

There's a seat along the back wall. When I come in, he moves aside and makes room for me. I see him as a denser shape in the darkness. I want to tell him about Jakkelsen. On every ship the captain has some type of weapon. And he still has his position of authority. It must be possible to hold Verlaine at bay, to turn the ship around. We should be able to reach Sisimiut within seven hours.

I slide onto the seat. He puts his feet up on the telegraph. It's not Lukas, it's Tørk.

"The ice," he says. "We're getting close to the ice." It's barely visible, like a grayish-white light on the horizon. The sky is low and dark like coal smoke, with a few lighter patches.

The little cabin that we're in jolts from side to side. I roll toward him and then back over to the wall. He doesn't move. With his boots up on the telegraph and his hand on.his chair, he seems to be wedged tight.

"You went ashore on the Greenland Star. You were in the forward part of the ship when the first fire alarm went off. Kutzow has seen you walking around at night several times. Why?"

"I'm used to being able to move freely aboard ship." I can't see his face; I can barely make out his profile.

"What ship? You only gave the captain your passport. I faxed the Marine Transport Commission. They've never issued a discharge book in your name."

For a moment the temptation to give up is overwhelming.

"I sailed on smaller ships. They never ask for papers outside the merchant fleet."

"So you heard someone mention this job and contacted Lukas."

It's not a question, so I don't reply. He's studying me. He probably can't see any better than I can.

"This voyage wasn't mentioned anywhere. It was kept secret. You didn't contact Lukas. You got Lander, the owner of a casino, to set up a meeting."

His voice is low, interested. "You sought out Andreas Licht and Ving. You're looking for something."

The ice seems to be slowly wandering toward us, across the sea.

"Who are you working for?"

It's the realization that he knew who I was from the very beginning that is so excruciating. Not since my childhood have I felt so strongly in someone else's power.

He didn't tell the mechanic that I would be on board. He wanted to observe our encounter. In order to see what there was between us. That was his primary objective in gathering us all together in the mess. It's impossible to guess what he has decided.

"Verlaine thinks it's the Danish National Police. I was leaning toward that opinion myself for a while. I had a look at your apartment in Copenhagen. And at your cabin here on board. You sem so alone. So unorganized. But maybe it's some corporation? A private client?"

For a moment I was about to sink back to await sleep, unconsciousness, and then oblivion. But the repetition of his question brings me out of my trance. He wants an answer. This, too, is an interrogation. He can't be a hundred percent sure who I am. Whom I have contacted. Or how much I know. I'm still alive.

"A child in my building fell off a roof. I found Ving's address in his mother's apartment. She gets a pension from the Cryolite Corporation as the result of her husband's death. This led me to the company archives and to what information was available on the expeditions to Gela Alta. Everything else stemmed from that."

"With whose help?"

All along there's been a sense of both urgency and indifference in his voice. As if we were discussing mutual friends or circumstances that had no real impact on us.

I never believed that people could be truly cold. Strained perhaps, but not cold. The essence of life is warmth. Even hatred is warm when unleashed on its natural target. Now I realize that I've been mistaken. A cold, overwhelming current of energy, physically real, emanates from this man next to me.

I try to picture him as a boy, try to hold on to something human, something understandable: a malnourished, fatherless boy in a shed in Brønshøj. Tormented, thin as a bird, and alone.

I have to give up; the image falters, shatters, and dissolves. The man beside me is rock solid, and yet fluid and running. A man who has risen above his past so there is no longer any trace of it.

"With whose help?"

This last question is the key one. What I know is not important. The important thing is who I've shared the information with. So he can figure out what's in store for him. Maybe this is where his humanity lies, in the traces of growing up with a sense of unfathomable insecurity: the need to plan, to make his world predictable.

I remove all emotion from my voice. "I've always been able to handle things myself."

He pauses for a moment. "Why are you doing this?"

"I want to understand why he died."

An extraordinary feeling of confidence can come over you when you're standing at the end of the plank with a blindfold over your eyes. I'm positive that I've said the right thing.

He takes in my answer. "Do you know why I'm going to Gela Alta?"

The "I" in his question reveals great candor. Gone is the ship, the crew, me, and his colleagues. The whole extraneous machinery is moving for his sake alone. The question holds no arrogance. It is simply an expression of fact. We are all here, for one reason or another, because he wanted us here and was able to make it happen.

I'm walking a tightrope. He knows that I've lied, that I didn't get here without someone's help. The fact that I was allowed on board at all tells him as much. But he still doesn't know whether he's sitting next to an individual or an organization. His doubt is my opportunity. I remember the faces of the hunters when they returned home; the more they had on their sled, the more remote their expression would be. I remember my mother's false modesty after fishing trips. It was her charade, but it was Moritz who pinned it down during one of his fits of rage: "It's best to underplay by 20 percent; 40 percent is even better."

"We're going to pick up something," I say. "Something so heavy that it requires a ship the size of the Kronos." It's impossible to tell what he's thinking. In the darkness, I sense only the presence of a force that registers and analyzes, manifested in extreme alertness. And again the image of a polar bear comes to mind: the way the beast realistically evaluates its own hunger, the defensive capability of its prey, and the situation in general.

"Why did you call my apartment?" I hear myself ask him.

"I found out a lot from that phone call. No normal woman, no normal human being would have picked up that phone."

Together we step out onto the platform, which now has a light coating of ice. Every time a wave rams the hull, we can feel the strain of the engines as the pressure on the propeller increases.

I let him go first. A person's power is usually diminished when he steps outdoors. But not Tork's. He fills the space and the watery gray light around us with his own radiance. I've never been so afraid of anyone.

Out on the platform I suddenly know that he was up on the roof with Isaiah. That he saw him jump. This certainty comes to me like a vision, still without details, but absolutely unshakable. At that moment, across time and space, I share Isaiah's terror; at that moment I'm up on the roof, too.

Standing with his hands on the railing, Tørk looks into my eyes.

"Step back, please," he says.

Our mutual understanding is complete; words are hardly necessary. He had imagined a possibility-that he would take a step down the ladder and I would come forward, tear his hands away, and kick him in the face, letting him fall backward, plunging the sixty-five feet to the deck below, which looks so small from here, as if he might not even hit it.

I step back until I'm up against the railing. I'm almost grateful to him for taking this precaution. The temptation would have been too great.

Twice I've made trips to Greenland when I didn't look in a mirror for six months. On the trip home I would carefully avoid mirrors on the plane and in the airports. When I finally stood in front of a mirror in my apartment I clearly saw the physical manifestations of the passage of time. The first gray hairs, the network of wrinkles, the ever deepening and sharpening shadows of the bones beneath my skin.

Nothing was more reassuring to me than the knowledge that I would die. In these moments of clarity-and you see yourself clearly only when you see yourself as a stranger-all despair, all gaiety, all depression vanish and are replaced by calm. For me death was not something scary or a state of being or an event that would happen to me. It was a focusing on the now, an aid, an ally in the effort to be mentally present.

Sometimes on summer nights Isaiah would fall asleep cm my sofa. I don't remember, exactly what I would be doing; I probably sat there watching him. At some point I would touch his neck and feel that he was too hot. Then I would cautiously unbutton his shirt and pull it away from his chest. I would get up and open the window to the harbor, and at that moment we would be somewhere else. We were at Iita, in the summer tent. Light is seeping through the canvas, as if from a full moon. But it's the fabric of the tent that colors the light blue, because when I open the tent flap it's the dull red light of the midnight sun that falls over him. He doesn't wake up; he hasn't slept for twenty-four hours. We haven't been able to sleep in the endless light, but now he has collapsed. Maybe he's my child; that's how it feels. And I look at his chest and his throat, and watch his breathing and his rapid pulse beneath the brown flawless skin.

Then I would step in front of the mirror and take off my shirt and look at my own chest and throat and realize that someday it would all be over, even my feelings for him would someday die with me. But he would still be here, and after him would come his children or other children, a wheel of children, a chain, a spiral winding into eternity.

This experience of the mortality and continuity of all things always made me happy.

I feel somewhat the same way now. I've taken off my clothes and am standing in front of the mirror.

Anyone interested in death would benefit from looking at me. I've taken off my bandages. There's no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch of blood that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen's marline spike struck me. The palms of both hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull's egg, and a spot where the skin is broken and contracted. I've been modest enough to keep on my white socks so you can't see my swollen ankle; and I won't even mention all the black-and-blue marks, or my scalp, which still throbs now and then from the burn.

I've lost weight, going from gaunt to emaciated. Lack of sleep has made my eyes sink into their sockets. And yet I smile at the stranger in the mirror. There's no simple arithmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share. One of the few people who make life worth living is on board the Kronos.

He calls me at exactly five o'clock. This is the first time I feel affection for the intercom system.

"S-Smilla, meet you in the sick bay in fifteen minutes."

He feels the same way about telephones as I do. He barely manages to state his message before he's gone. "Føjl," I say. His name tastes sweet in my mouth. "Thanks for yesterday."

The system clicks off, the light goes out.

I put on blue work clothes. It's not a haphazard decision. T'here's nothing haphazard about the clothes I choose to wear. I could dress up, of course. Even here I could dress tip. But the blue clothes are the uniform of the Kronos, symbolizing the fact that we are now meeting under different circumstances, that the world is against us more than ever before.

I listen at the door for a long time before I venture out into the, corridor.

I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

If there are clandestine meetings between lovers in the realm of the dead, the prelude would be something like this. I move from doorway to doorway. I no longer see the Kronos as merely a ship, but rather as a field of dangers. I try to figure out in advance whether a specific danger might solidify into something life-threatening.

When someone comes out of the exercise room, I dash into the bathroom before the door has closed behind them. From the crack in the doorway I watch Maria go past. Swift and stony-faced. I'm not the only one who knows that the Kronos is the underworld.

I meet no one on my way up the stairs. The door to the bridge is shut, the chart room empty.

In front of the sick bay I stop. I straighten my clothes. My face feels naked without makeup.

The room is dark, the curtains drawn. I close the door behind me and lean against it. I feel my lips. I want him to come out of the dark and kiss me.

A cool, delicate floral fragrance reaches me. I wait. It's not the ceiling light that someone turns on but the lamp above the examination table, a kind of operating light. It makes yellow patches of light on the black leather, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

Tørk is sitting on a chair, with his feet propped up on the bunk. Near the wall, in semi-darkness, stands Verlaine. Katja Claussen is sitting on the end of the table with her feet dangling. There's no one else in the room.

I watch myself from a distance. Maybe because it's too painful to be inside my own body. I don't care about the three in front of me; I don't care about myself. It was the mechanic that I talked to a moment ago. He was the one who summoned me here.

We all have our limits. A certain limit to our perseverance, to how many overtures we can make in our lives. And to how many rejections we can stand.

"Empty your pockets."

Verlaine does the talking. This is my first opportunity to observe the division of labor between the two men. I can guess that Verlaine takes care of the rough stuff.

I step toward the light and put my flashlight and keys down on the bunk. I wonder what the woman is doing in the room. In the next moment I have my answer. Verlaine nods to her, and she comes over to me. The men look away as she searches me. She's much taller than I am, but still agile. She starts below my knees, feeling my ankles and then working her way up. She finds the screwdriver and Jakkelsen's hypodermic case. Then she takes my belt away from me.

Tørk does not look at what she's found. But Verlaine weighs the objects in his hand.

How will it come? Will I see it coming?

Tørk stands up. "Formally, you are under arrest." He doesn't look at me. We both know that any reference to formalities is part of the same illusion as our mutual courtesy. They are the only pretexts left.

He looks down. Then he slowly shakes his head, and something like amazement passes over his face.

"You're a spectacular bluffer," he says. "I'd much rather sit up in the crow's nest listening to your lies than walk around among all these mediocre truths."

All three of them stand there for a moment. Then they leave.

Verlaine is the one who locks the door. He stops in the doorway. He looks tired. There's something honest about his silence. It tells me that this isn't a cell and I haven't been arrested. This is the beginning of the conclusion, which will happen sometime soon.