Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

  We go over to the table. A man who looks like a butcher is sitting next to Captain Lukas. We stand there for maybe ten minutes. In that time he loses 120,000 kroner.

  A new dealer comes up behind the woman with the red nails and taps her lightly on the shoulder of her black coatdress. Without turning around she finishes the game. Sigmund Lukas wins—as far as I can tell, about 30,000 kroner. The butcher loses the last of the chips in front of him. He gets up, his face expressionless.

  Red Nails introduces her successor. A young man with the same superficial charm and politeness that she possesses. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is a new dealer. Thank you.”

  “Would you like to play, honey?”

  He’s holding a stack of chips between his thumb and forefinger.

  I think about the 120,000 that the butcher lost. The annual net salary for one of us ordinary Danes. Five times the annual salary of one of us ordinary Inuits. Never in my life have I seen such disrespect for money.

  “You can flush them down the toilet,” I say. “At least there you have the pleasure of hearing the flush.”

  He shrugs. For the first time Captain Lukas lifts his cat eyes from the felt and looks at us. He scrapes up his chips, stands up, and leaves.

  We slowly follow him.

  “Are you doing this for my sake?” I ask Lander.

  He takes my arm, and now his expression turns serious. “I like you, honey, but I love my wife. I’m doing this for Føjl’s sake.”

  He thinks for a moment. “You can’t say much good about me. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I work too much. I neglect my family. Yesterday, as I was lying in the bathtub, my oldest came in and stared at me and said, ‘Dad, where do you live?’ My life isn’t worth much. But whatever it’s worth, I owe to that little Føjl.”

  Captain Lukas is waiting in a small glass veranda that juts out over the water. I sink down onto the bench on the other side of the table; the mechanic materializes out of the blue and slips in next to me. Lander remains standing, leaning against the table. Behind him a female waiter closes a sliding door. We’re alone in a little glass box that seems to be floating on the Sound. Lukas has turned away from us. In front of him there is a cup with a black fluid that smells strongly of coffee. He’s chain-smoking. Not once does he look at us. The words drip bitterly and reluctantly from his lips, like the juice from an unripe lime. He has a slight accent. I guess that he’s Polish.

  “One night in the winter they come to me here, maybe at the end of November. A man and a woman. They ask me how I feel about the sea north of Godthåb in March. ‘Just like everybody,’ I say. ‘I think it’s hell.’ Then we part. Last week they came back. Now my situation has changed. They ask me again. I try to tell them about the pack ice. About the ‘Iceberg Cemetery.’ About the waters along the coast that are so full of drift ice and calving icebergs and ice avalanches that go straight from the glaciers into the sea that even the Americans’ nuclear-powered icebreaker Northwind from the Thule base ventures through only every third or fourth winter. They pay no attention. They already know all about it. ‘How good are you?’ they ask. ‘How good is your checkbook?’ I say.”

  “Any name? Any company?”

  “Only the ship. A coaster. Four thousand tons. Kronos. Docked in South Harbor. They bought it and had it revamped. It’s just come from the shipyard.”

  “Crew?”

  “Ten men, I hire them.”

  “Cargo?”

  He looks at Lander. The ship broker doesn’t move. The situation is unclear. Up until now I thought he was telling me this because Lander had pressured him. Now that I see him close up, I drop that idea. Lukas doesn’t take orders from anyone. Except maybe that bug inside.

  “I don’t know what the cargo is.”

  Bitterness bordering on self-hatred makes him rock back and forth for a moment.

  “Equipment?” It’s the mechanic who has spoken all of a sudden.

  He holds off answering for a long time.

  “An LMC,” he says. “I’ve bought one of the navy’s discards for them.”

  He puts out his cigarette in the coffee.

  “The shipyard has equipped her with large booms. A crane. Special reinforcement in the forward cargo hold.”

  He stands up. I follow him. I want to get him out of earshot, but the glass cage is so small that we’ve reached the wall almost at once. We stand so close to the glass that our breath forms fleeting white circles.

  “Can I come aboard?”

  He thinks for a moment. When he answers I realize that he misunderstood the question.

  “I still need a stewardess.”

  The door slides open. In the opening stands a man with broad gray shoulders in a coat that a guest with less authority would have been forced to leave in the cloakroom.

  It’s Ravn.

  “Miss Smilla. May I have a few words with you?”

  Everyone stares at him, and he bears their glances the way he presumably bears everything else, with rock-hard equanimity.

  I walk several paces behind him. No one could tell that we know each other. He leads me down a wide corridor with plants and clusters of leather sofas. At the end is a hall full of slot machines. They’re all in use.

  A young man gives up his machine for us. He takes up a position some distance away and stands there.

  Ravn takes a roll of 20-krone coins out of his coat pocket. “It would please me to have my wallet back.”

  He’s standing with his back to me, playing the machine.

  “I have a regular shift here one day a week,” he says. I can just barely hear his voice over the hum of the machine.

  “Were we followed out here?”

  At first he doesn’t answer. “They’re looking for you. The word went out fifteen minutes ago.”

  Now it’s my turn to say nothing.

  “There are always a dozen plainclothes officers on duty at this place. Plus our own representatives. If you stay here, you only have a few minutes of freedom. If you leave right now, I might be able to delay things a little.”

  I slip his wallet in front of him, along with a photograph and a newspaper clipping. He takes them without moving his eyes from the machine. His wallet disappears into one pocket and he glances at the photo and clipping. When he reaches back to hand me the clipping, the photo is gone. He shakes his head.

  “I’ve done what I could,” he says. “And what you haven’t been given, you’ve taken yourself. Now it has to stop.”

  “I want to know,” I say. “I’ll do anything. Including selling you to the Toenail.”

  “The Toenail?”

  “That flat, hard detective who keeps turning up.”

  He laughs for the first time. Then his smile is gone, as if it had never existed. His image in the glass in front of him is a lifeless reflection against the machine’s multicolored, wildly spinning cylinders. But when he speaks I know that I’ve hit home somehow.

  “Chiang Rai, on the border between Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. The region is dominated by feudal princes. The most powerful is Khum Na. A standing army of 6,000 men. Offices all over the Far East and in major Western cities. Regulates the entire world trade in heroin. Tørk Hviid worked in Chiang Rai.”

  “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 Hörbinger’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 Øresund. 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.