Smilla's Sense of Snow (29 page)

"Doing what?"

"He's a microbiologist, specializing in radiation mutations. All the processing of opium poppies is located up in that area. They're said to have the most modern laboratories of their kind in the world. In the middle of the jungle. Hviid worked on the irradiation of the poppy seed in an attempt to improve yield. There were rumors that he had created a new type, mayam, which-in its raw, boiled-down, but not yet crystallized state-was twice as strong as any heroin known."

"How does this concern you Ravn? Is the fraud division interested in narcotics?" He doesn't answer.

"Katja Claussen?"

"Originally an antiques dealer. Sometime in 1990 or '91 it was discovered that throughout the eighties most of the heroin coming into the U.S. and Europe had been smuggled inside antiques."

"Seidenfaden?"

"Transport. An engineer specializing in transport assignments. Arranged for the transport of antiques from the Far East for various companies. For a while he was in charge of a veritable airlift from Singapore via Japan to Switzerland, Germany, and Copenhagen. In order to avoid the risky air space over the Middle East."

"Why aren't they in prison?"

"The powerful and the talented are seldom punished. Now you have to go, Miss Smilla."

I stay put.

"What was Freia Film?"

His hand freezes on the chrome handle. Then he nods wearily.

"A film company that was a cover for German intelligence activities both before and during the occupation of Denmark. Under the pretext of filming footage to support Horbinger's Thule theory, they organized two expeditions to Greenland. Their real purpose was to investigate the feasibility of occupying Greenland, especially the two cryolite quarries, to secure for Germany the production of aluminum, which was so crucial to the aircraft industry. They also did surveys with the intention of establishing air bases that could serve as supply links for a possible invasion of the U.S."

"Was Loyen a Nazi?"

"Loyen was and is obsessed with fame. Not politics."

"What did he discover in Greenland, Ravn?"

He shakes his head. "Nobody knows. Put it out of your mind."

Now he looks at me. "Go visit a girl friend. Think up a plausible explanation for why you were on board that boat. Then turn yourself in to the police. Get a good lawyer. You'll be free in two days. Forget about the rest."

He sticks his hand out behind him. In his palm there is a cassette tape. "I took this from your apartment. To protect you in case of a search."

I reach for it, but he hides it away. "Why are you doing this, Ravn?"

He gazes at the machine's spinning wheels. "Let's just say that I don't care for the insufficiently explained deaths of little children."

I wait, but nothing more comes from him. Then I turn around and leave. At that moment he wins. Like a metallic vomiting, the robot emits a stream of coins with a spitting clink that goes on and on behind me.

I pick up my coat from the cloakroom. My temples are pounding. Now everyone seems to be staring at me. I look around for the mechanic. I hope he has a plan. Most men know everything about sneaking around, making excuses, taking off. But the foyer is empty. Except for me and the cloakroom woman, who looks more serious than she ought to, considering that she takes 50 kroner for hanging people's coats on a hanger.

At that moment I hear the laughter. Loud, harrowing, sonorous. It segues right into the trumpet, a wild, bleating attack that drops at once to a lower pitch, more suitable to the setting. But by then I've recognized the sound.

I don't have much time. I make my way through the tables and cross the empty dance floor. The three white musicians behind him are wearing pale yellow tux jackets and have faces like white dumplings. He's wearing tails. He is tremendously fat, his face a black orb of sweat, his big eyes bloodshot and protruding, as if they were trying to escape the lethal percentage of alcohol in his skull. He looks like what he is: a colossus on a pedestal that has already dissolved and disappeared.

But the music is undiminished. Even now, as he plays with a mute, it has an overwhelmingly dense, golden, warm tone, and even in the midst of the polyphony they're playing, its sound is searching, profound, teasing. I stand right in front of the low circus ring.

When they finish, I step up onto the stage. He smiles at me. But it's a smile without warmth; it's merely a drunken pose for the world around him which he probably retains even in his sleep. If he ever sleeps. I grab his microphone and turn it away from us. Behind us people stop eating. The waiters freeze in mid-stride.

"Roy Louber," I say.

His smile grows broader. He takes a drink from a big glass standing next to him.

"Thule. You once played in Thule."

"Thule . . ."

He pronounces it tentatively, searching his memory as if hearing it for the first time.

"In Greenland."

"Thule," he repeats.

"On the American base. At the Northern Star. What year was it?"

He smiles at me, mechanically shaking his trumpet. I have so little time to spare. I grab hold of his lapels and pull the big face down toward me.

" `Mr. PC.' You played `Mr. PC.' "

"They're dead, darling." His Danish is so thick that it's almost American English. "A long time ago. Dead and gone. Mr. P.C.-Paul Chambers."

"What year? What year was it?"

His gaze filters through glassy eyes, drunken and uncommunicative.

"Dead and gone. Me too, darling. Any time. Any time now."

He smiles. I let him go. He straightens up and pours spit out of the trumpet. Then I feel myself gently lifted down to the floor. The mechanic is standing behind me. "Start walking, Smilla."

I start walking. He vanishes again. I keep going straight ahead. In front of me is the door to the foyer.

"Smilla Jaspersen!"

We remember people by their clothes and by the places where we've seen them, so at first I don't recognize him. The dark blue suit and the silk tie don't go with his face. Then I realize that it's the Toenail. There's nothing shrill about him; his voice is low and commanding. Equally discreet and inescapable, they will follow me out to the car in a few minutes. I start walking faster. I've turned off my brain. On either side a man like him is now approaching, a self-confident and insistent figure.

I reach the foyer. Behind me the door slams shut. It's a large door, also made to resemble a bank vault door, so tall and heavy that it looks as if it serves merely a decorative purpose. Now it slams like the lid of a cigar box. The mechanic leans casually against it. It shuts out all noise. There is only a faint thud when someone sets his shoulder against it.

"Run, Smilla," he says. "Run. Lander's waiting out on the road."

I take a look around. There are no guests in the foyer. Behind the kiosk's magazine and cigarette displays a clerk yawns widely. Behind the information counter a girl is about to fall asleep over her PC. In back of me a man is nonchalantly leaning his six foot six frame against a steel door being jolted by small thuds. Everything is calm and quiet at Casino QSresund. A place with class. With style and cultured excitement and diversion at the green felt tables. The place where you make new friends and meet old ones.

Then I take off. I'm out of breath by the time I get to the parking lot.

"Your car, madam."

It's the same attendant as when we arrived.

"I've decided to have it scrapped. After the look you gave it."

There is no path for pedestrians. They hadn't planned on the eventuality that the casino might have guests who arrived on foot. So I run along the roadway, duck under the two white crossing gates, and come out on Sund Lane. A hundred yards ahead waits a red Jaguar with its taillights on.

Lander doesn't look at me as I get in. His face is tense and pale.

It's night and freezing cold. I don't remember ever seeing a big city gripped by frost like this. There is something defenseless and powerless about Copenhagen, as if a new ice age were on its way.

"What's an LMC?"

He drives stiffly and slowly, unused to the white, crystalline membrane that the cold has spread on the asphalt.

"Landing Mobile Craft. A flat-bottomed landing vessel. The kind used during the invasion of Normandy." I make him drive me to Harbor Street. He parks between the hydrofoil jetty and the old dock for the Bornholm boat. I ask him for his shoes and his cap. He gives them to me with no questions asked.

"Wait an hour," I say. "But no longer."

The ice is dark bottle-green in the night, with a thin membrane of snow that must have just fallen. I make my way down a vertical wooden ladder built into the wharf. It's very cold on the mirror of ice. My Burberry seems oddly stiff, Lander's shoes feel as thin as eggshells. But they're white. Along with my coat and the cap, they make me one with the ice. Just in case someone might be posted at the White Palace.

Along the bulwark small packs of ice have formed. I estimate the thickness to be over four inches. Thick enough for the harbor authorities to open an ice rink. The problem is the dark, coagulated slush in the channel itself.

People live so close together in Northern Greenland. Sleeping many to a room. Hearing and seeing everyone else at all times. The community is so small. There were 600 people spread among twelve settlements the last time I was home.

In contrast to this is nature. Every hunter, every child is gripped by a wild delirium whenever he walks or rides away from the settlement. First there's the feeling of a rising energy bordering on madness. Then comes a peculiar sense of clarity.

I know it's funny. But here in Copenhagen Harbor, at two in the morning, this feeling of clarity comes over me. As if it somehow came from the ice and the night sky and the relatively open space:

I think about what has happened to me since Isaiah's death.

I see Denmark before me like a spit of ice. It's drifting, but it holds us frozen solid in the ice floes, in a fixed position in relation to everyone else.

Isaiah's death is an irregularity, an eruption that produced a fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can't explain how, I have been set in motion, I have become a foreign body skating on top of the ice.

The way I am now skating across Copenhagen Harbor, dressed in a clown hat and borrowed shoes.

From this angle a new Denmark comes into view. A Denmark that consists of those who have partially wrested themselves free of the ice.

Loyen and Andreas Licht, driven by different forms of greed.

Elsa Lübing, Lagermann, Ravn, bureaucrats whose strength and dilemma is their faith in a corporation, in the medical profession, in a government apparatus. But who, out of sympathy, eccentricity, or for some incomprehensible reason, have circumvented their loyalty to help me.

Lander, the rich businessman, driven by a desire for excitement and a mysterious sense of gratitude.

That is the beginning of a social cross section of Denmark. The mechanic is the skilled worker, the laborer. Juliane is the dregs. And I-who am I? Am I the scientist, the observer? Am I the one who has been given the chance to get a glimpse of life from the outside? From a point of view made up of equal parts of loneliness and objectivity?

Or am I only pathetic?

In the channel the grease ice is held together with a thin, dark, disintegrating crust of ice, what's called "rotten ice," dissolving and crumbling from below. I walk along the dark edge, down toward the White Palace, until I find a floe that's big enough. I step onto it and then onto the next. There's a slight movement with the current, down through the harbor, of maybe half a knot, rocking, lethal. I leap the last part of the way from floe to floe. I don't even get my feet wet.

The windows of the White Palace are dark. The entire complex seems to be in a sleep that also encompasses the walls, the playground, the stairways, the naked trunks of the trees. From the canal I come up behind the bicycle sheds, slowly and cautiously. I stop there.

I look at the parked cars. At the dark entryways. There is no movement. Then I look at the snow. The thin, fine layer of newly fallen snow.

There is no moon, so it takes time before I notice them. A single row of footprints. He came across the bridge and went behind the building. On this side of the playground the footprints are visible. A Vibram sole under a large person. They lead in under the shed roof in front of me, and they don't come back out.

Then I can feel him. There's no sound, no smell, nothing to see. But the tracks have made me resonant to his presence, to the certainty of a looming threat.

We wait for twenty minutes. When the cold makes me start shaking I pull away from the wall so I won't make any noise. Maybe I should give up and go back the way I came. But I stay. I detest fear. I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It's the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

For twenty minutes there is only soundless waiting. At 9" Fahrenheit. My mother could handle that. Most Greenlandic hunters can manage it any time. I can pull it off on rare occasions. For most Europeans it would be tmthinkable. They would shift their weight, clear their throat, cough, rustle their overcoat.

The man whose presence I sense less than a yard away must be convinced that he's alone, that no one can hear or see him. And yet he is as soundless as if he never existed.

But not for one second am I tempted to move, to give in to the cold. Like one long, internal shriek my senses tell me that someone is waiting there. That he's waiting for me.

I don't even hear him leave. I close my eyes for a moment because the cold has made them run. When I open them, a shadow has torn away from the shed roof and is moving off. A tall figure with a quick, fluid gait. And above his head, like a halo or a crown, something white, maybe a hat.

There are two ways to tag polar bears. The usual way is to stun them from a helicopter. The machine drops down directly over the bear, you lean out of the cockpit, and the instant that the air pressure from the rotor strikes the animal, it falls to the ground and you shoot.