by Peter Høeg
“Is that someone’s name?”
I pick up his coat and help him into it. He’s a little shorter than me. I brush off a speck of dust from his shoulder. He looks at me.
“My home number is in the book. Think about calling me, Miss Smilla. But from a phone booth, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Thanks,” I say.
But he’s already gone.
The chimes of Our Saviour’s Church are ringing. I look at the mechanic. I have my hands behind my back. The room is full of what Ravn brought with him and left behind: candor, bitterness, insinuations, some kind of human warmth. And something else.
“He was lying,” I say. “He lied at the end. He knows who Tørk Hviid is.”
We look into each other’s eyes. Something is wrong.
“I hate lies,” I say. “If any lying has to be done, I’ll do it myself.”
“Then you should have told him that. Instead of coming right out and hugging him.”
I can’t believe my ears, but I see that I’ve heard correctly. In his eyes there is the gleam of pure, unadulterated, idiotic jealousy.
“I didn’t hug him,” I say. “I helped him into his coat. For three reasons. First, because it’s a courtesy you ought to show toward a fragile, elderly man. Second, because he presumably risked his position and pension to come here.”
“And the third?”
“Third,” I say, “because it gave me the chance to steal his wallet.”
I put it on the table, under the light, where Isaiah’s cigar box once stood, a wallet made of heavy brown leather.
The mechanic stares at me.
“Petty theft,” I say. “Considered a minor offense under the law.”
I empty its contents onto the table. Credit cards, krone notes. A plastic case with a white card which states, under a black embossed crown, that Ravn has the right to park in the Ministry’s parking lots at Slotsholm. A bill from Andersen Brothers tailor shop. To the tune of 8,000 kroner. A small fabric sample of gray wool attached to the bill with a paper clip. “Man’s overcoat, Lewis tweed, delivered October 27, 1993.” Until now I thought his coats were a mistake. Something he had bought used. Now I see that they’re intended to be that way. On the income of an ordinary bureaucrat he spends a fortune for the fragile illusion of an extra foot and a half across his shoulders. For some reason this puts him in a conciliatory light.
There’s a pouch for coins. I shake them out. Among them I find a tooth. The mechanic bends over me. I lean back against him and close my eyes.
“A baby tooth,” he says.
In the back there is a bundle of photographs. I lay them out like playing cards in a game of solitaire. On a mahogany buffet there is a samovar. Next to the buffet a shelf full of books. The word “cultivated” is one of those Danish words that I’ve never been able to regard as anything but a linguistic truncheon to hit people over the head with. But maybe it could be used to describe the woman in the foreground. She has white hair, rimless glasses, a white wool suit. She must be in her mid-sixties. In the other photos she sits surrounded by children. Grandchildren. That explains the baby tooth. She pushes a child on a swing, cuts a cake at a table out in the yard, takes a baby being handed to her by a younger woman who has her jaw but Ravn’s gauntness.
These pictures are in color. The next one is black-and-white. It looks as if it’s been overexposed.
“These are Isaiah’s footprints in the snow,” I say.
“Why does it look like that?”
“Because the police don’t know how to photograph snow. If you use a flash or lights at more than a 45° angle everything disappears in the glare. It has to be done with Polaroid filters and lights down at the level of the snow.”
The next photo shows a woman on a sidewalk. The woman is me, the sidewalk is in front of Elsa Lübing’s building. The picture is blurry, taken from a car window—part of the car door blocked the lens.
They were luckier with the mechanic. His hair seems too short, but otherwise it looks like him. There is both a profile and a full-face photo.
“From the service,” he says. “They got out the old pictures from when I was in the service.”
The last picture is another color photo; it looks like a vacation shot, with sunshine and green palm trees.
“Why t-take pictures of us?”
Ravn doesn’t take notes and wouldn’t need photographs to prod his memory.
“To show around” I say, “to other people”
I put the papers and the tooth and the coins back. I put everything back. Except the last photo. Palm trees beneath an undoubtedly intolerable sun. Humidity guaranteed close to 100 percent. But the man in the photograph is still wearing a shirt and tie under his lab coat. He looks cool and comfortable. The man is Tørk Hviid.
4
I’ve chosen a tuxedo jacket with wide lapels of green silk. Black pants that go to just below my knees, green stockings, and small green Daisy Duck shoes, and a little velvet fez over my bald spot.
The problem with a woman wearing a tuxedo is always what to wear over it. I have a thin white Burberry raincoat over my shoulders. But I’ve also told the mechanic that I want to be driven right inside the building.
We drive along Østerbro Street and then along Strand Drive. He’s wearing a tux, too. In a different mood I might have noticed that it’s the largest size you can buy off the rack, and thus five sizes too small, and it also looks like something from the Salvation Army and does more harm than good. But we’ve gotten too close to each other. Even now, squeezed into his tux, he reminds me of a butterfly on his way out of a black cocoon.
He doesn’t look in my direction. He looks in the rearview mirror. His driving is still fluid and relaxed. But his eyes are memorizing the cars behind and in front of us.
We turn down Sund Lane, one of the little side roads off Strand Drive, toward the Sound. At one time the road ended at a garden gate leading out to the beach. Now it ends at a high yellow-brick wall and a white crossing gate with a glass booth. A man in uniform takes our passes and pulls up our names on a screen and opens the gate and lets us drive to the next gate, where a woman in a similar uniform accepts 250 kroner apiece and admits us into a parking lot, where we pay an attendant 75 kroner for him to sneer shamelessly at the Morris, which he now takes care of so that we can walk through a revolving door in a marble façade, up to a cloakroom where we sacrifice another 50 kroner apiece so that a blonde, who carries herself so that we can look right up her nose, will take our coats.
In front of a mirror that covers an entire wall, I repair a little damage with a lipstick, grateful that I used the bathroom at home. At least I won’t have to find out how much it costs to pee.
The mechanic stands next to me, gazing at his own reflection as if it belonged to some stranger. We’re in the foyer of Casino Øresund, Denmark’s twelfth, newest, and most prestigious casino. A place that I’ve heard about but never expected to set foot in.
This is where Birgo Lander has summoned us, and now he appears. Dressed in white shoes, white trousers with a light blue stripe down the leg, dark blue blazer, gray turtleneck sweater, silk scarf with little embroidered anchors, and a little, white yachting cap. His eyes are glassy, his walk slightly unsteady, and he’s as radiant as the sun. With both hands he carefully straightens my white bow tie.
“You look unusually delicious tonight, sweetie.”
“You don’t look so bad yourself. Is that your Sea Scout uniform?”
He stiffens for a second. Only twelve hours have passed since we last met. But he has already forgotten the sensation.
Then he smiles at the mechanic. “She has a blank check to my heart.”
They shake hands, and once again I note the almost imperceptible change in the shipowner. For a moment, while he’s holding the mechanic’s hand, his drunkenness and his self-styled, meticulously cultivated vulgarity give way to a gratitude bordering on adoration. Then he shows us inside.
I will never learn to be c
omfortable in ritzy places. With every step I take, I have the feeling that someone might appear at any moment to tell me that I have no right to be here. The mechanic isn’t coping much better. He is slinking along several yards behind us, trying to pull his head down between his shoulders. Birgo Lander saunters along as if he owns the place.
“Did you know that I own a piece of the pie, sweetie? Don’t you read the papers? Together with Unibank, which financed Marienlyst, and Casino Austria, which runs the casino at the Hotel Scandinavia and the ones in Århus and Odense. I did it to keep myself from gambling. The owners are never allowed to play in their own casinos. The same is true for the croupiers and the dealers. Austria puts out a book with their photographs, and none of them can gamble at any of the company’s other casinos, either.”
He leads us through the restaurant. It’s a large round room with a dance floor in the middle. In the background there’s a long, dimly lit bar. On a raised platform a jazz quartet is playing, soft and anonymous. The tablecloths are pale yellow, the walls cream-colored, the bar stainless steel. All the walls are decorated with rivets, and the door frames are three feet thick and furnished with bolts. The whole thing is designed to resemble a safe, and it’s solid, expensive, and as oppressively cold and alienating as an end-of-the-season dance in a bank vault. Part of one wall has windows facing the water. You can see the lights of Sweden and the other wing of the casino with the gambling rooms, illuminated like glass cages, jutting out into the water. Beneath the windows you can make out the gray ice floes along the frozen shore.
The mechanic falls behind. Lander takes my arm. Past us glide women in décolleté gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos, gentlemen in lavender shirts and white dinner jackets, gentlemen in chamois T-shirts with gold Rolex watches and sun-bleached hair.
The room is an oval with a wall of glass, like a black barrier, facing the water. The only light comes from the dim lamps over the gaming tables. There are four curved blackjack tables and two big roulette wheels. A velvet rope hangs between the tables creating an enclosure. Behind it sit three chief croupiers, one at the card games, the others each in a tall chair, one at the end of the French roulette table and one at the American. There is an inspector for every two tables, a croupier at each table.
There is such a crowd of people that you can’t see the playing surfaces. The only sound is the soft clicking of the chips being stacked up and the voices of the croupiers.
The gamblers are all men. A few Asian women are sitting at the tables. A few European women are watching without playing. The room is tense with deep concentration. The players’ faces are pale in the light, absorbed, enraptured.
Occasionally a figure tears himself away from the table and disappears past us. Several with bowed heads, others with shining eyes, but most of them neutral, preoccupied. Several say hello to Lander; no one notices me.
“They don’t see me,” I say.
He squeezes my arm. “You’ve been to school, honey, you remember what men look like inside. Heart, brain, liver, kidneys, stomach, testicles. When they come in here, a change takes place. The moment you buy your chips, a little animal takes up residence inside you, a little parasite. Finally there’s nothing left but the attempt to remember what cards have been dealt, the attempt to feel where the ball will fall, the probability of certain card combinations, and the memory of how much you have lost.”
We look at the faces around the table he has led me to. They’re like empty shells. At that moment it’s practically impossible to imagine that they have any life outside of this room. Maybe they don’t.
“That parasite, it’s the gambling bug, honey. One of the most voracious creatures in the world. And I know what I’m talking about. I’ve lost everything several times over. But I got back on my feet again. That’s why I had to buy into it. It’s different now that I’m an owner, now that I’ve looked behind the scenes.”
The crowd opens up a bit, and the green felt comes into view. The croupier is a young blond woman with long red nails who speaks perfect, slightly nasal English.
“Buying in? Forty-five thousand goes down. One, two, three …”
A few of the guests have mineral water in front of them. No one is drinking alcohol.
“That bug comes in various sizes, honey. It’s different for each person. That guy over there …”
He’s been speaking in a low whisper and he doesn’t point, but I know he’s talking about the man sitting to one side of us. He has a perfect Slavic face, like one of the ballet dancers who defected in the seventies. High cheekbones, straight black hair. His hands are resting on stacks of colored chips. He doesn’t move a muscle. His attention is directed toward the card shoe next to the dealer, as if he is now focusing all his energy to influence the outcome of the game.
“Possible blackjack. Insurance, gentlemen? Sixteen. Would you like a hit? Seventeen, nineteen, too many …”
“A parasite that has eaten him up from the inside and now takes up more room than he does. He comes here every night until he has lost everything. Then he works for six months. Then he comes back and loses it all.”
He presses his mouth to my ear. “Captain Sigmund Lukas. Last week he lost the last of it. Had to borrow money from me for a pack of cigarettes and a cab home.”
His age is indeterminate. He might be in his mid-thirties to mid-forties. Maybe he’s fifty. As I watch him, he wins and rakes a tall stack of chips toward him.
“Each chip is worth 5,000 kroner. We had them made last month. Each table has a different limit. This is the high-roller table. Minimum bet 1,000 kroner, maximum 20,000. With the right to double down, and with an average playing time of a minute and a half per deal, it means that you can win or lose 100,000 kroner in five minutes.”
“If he’s broke, whose money is he playing with today?”
“Today he’s playing with Uncle Lander’s money, honey.”
He pulls me along with him. We stand with our backs to the bar. A tall, frosted glass is placed next to him. It has been in the freezer and is covered with a thin layer of ice, which now melts and starts to slide off. It’s full of a clear, amber-colored liquid.
“Bullshot, honey. Eight parts vodka, eight parts beef bouillon.”
He ponders something.
“Take a look at our customers. There are all kinds of people. A lot of lawyers come here. Quite a few contractors. Several boys who have a fat allowance from home. The heavy artillery of the Danish underworld. They can walk right up and exchange whatever they want for chips. And we haven’t given in to the vice squad’s demands to record the serial numbers on the bills. That’s why this shop is one of the most important money-laundering centers for drug money. And then there’s the little yellow-skinned ladies who run the organized prostitution with Thai and Burmese girls. There are quite a few businessmen and several doctors. There are some who travel around the world gambling. Last week a Norwegian shipowner was here. Today he might be in Travemünde. Next week Monte Carlo. In one day he won four and a half million. It was in the newspapers.”
He empties his glass and pushes it aside. It’s replaced with a full one.
“Such different people. But they have one thing in common. They’re losers, Smilla. In the long run they all lose. This shop has two winners, the owners and the state. We have eight bureaucrats from the tax authorities here at all times. They change—like our croupiers—from the day to the evening shift, and finally to a ‘count’ shift when the accounts are reconciled from three in the morning onward. There are also plainclothes police and plainclothes inspectors from the Internal Revenue Service who, like our own security people, make sure that the croupiers don’t cheat, don’t mark the cards, and don’t make side bets with the guests. We’re taxed according to our turnover by one of the world’s toughest tax regulations on gambling. And yet in the casino’s gambling rooms alone we have 290 employees: managers, dealers, head croupiers, security people, technical staff, and inspectors. In the restaurant and the nightclub there ar
e an additional 250: cooks, waiters, bartenders, hostesses, bouncers, cloakroom attendants, show managers, inspectors, and the full-time hookers we also control. Do you know why we can afford to pay salaries to so many people? Just between you and me, it’s because we make such a huge amount of dough off the people who gamble. For the government this sewer is the biggest sucker game since they put a toll on all ships passing through the Sound in the Middle Ages. On the following day the Norwegian shipowner lost what he had won. But we didn’t leak that to the newspapers. There was a Thai bordello madam who dropped 500,000 kroner three times last week. She comes here every night. Every time she sees me she begs me to have the place closed down. As long as it exists, she won’t have any peace. She has to come here. Before us there were illegal joints, of course. But that wasn’t the same thing. It was mostly poker, which is slower and requires some knowledge of odds. Legalization has changed that. It’s like an infectious disease that was once under control but has now been let loose. Here comes a young man who has built up a painting company. He never gambled until someone brought him in here. Now he’s losing everything. It cost 100 million kroner to build and furnish this place. But it’s a gilded piece of shit.”
“But you’ve got money in it,” I say.
“Maybe I’m a rotten apple myself.”
I’ve always been fascinated by the melancholy shamelessness with which Danes accept the enormous gap between their common sense and their actions.
“It’s a business like this one that creates a case like Lukas. A very, very skillful seaman. Sailed his own little coaster in Greenland for years. After that he was responsible for building up a fishing fleet near Mbengano in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania, as part of the biggest Scandinavian project to aid developing countries. Never drinks. Knows the North Atlantic like no one else. Some people say he’s even fond of it. But he gambles. That little bug has emptied him out. He no longer has a family or a home. And now he’s reached the point where he’s for sale. If the amount is big enough.”