Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  A big Volvo wagon drove by on the ice, making a crunch ing sound. Its yellow headlights lit up three thuggish-looking young men farther up the street. Their footsteps made no sound.

  A taxi arrived, delivering Ragnhild, who wore a shiny sealskin coat and high heels on which she negotiated the ice pack like a goat, walking Jane across to the restaurant.

  “Watch for the ice,” she said, confusing Jane by pointing up, not down. Jane saw that she was walking directly beneath a row of jagged icicles, some as big as an arm, suspended from the overhanging gables above the sidewalk. Overcome with the idea that those pretty little houses in soft colors could hurl a deadly weapon at her head, Jane stepped sideways and promptly slipped on the ice.

  She landed stretched fully out on her back on the sidewalk, her head reverberating from the impact on the hard ice. She opened her eyes woozily and realized that she was staring up at the icicles and that the back of her head was very cold.

  Ragnhild let out a little cry. She grabbed Jane and, with surprising strength, yanked her to her feet. Jane clung gratefully to the sealskin coat, remembering from the touch of the coarse fur that her grandmother had had a similar coat.

  She assured Ragnhild that she was all right, and they continued down the street. “I think you have to spend a lifetime learning to walk on ice,” said Jane. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Some little old ladies are wearing shoes with things like nails in them, in case they break a bone in the hip like old ladies do,” said Ragnhild in a way that was meant to be kindly but succeeded in making Jane feel like a helpless old crock. She imagined herself careening off the ice-covered deck of a boat on her ghastly high seas outings as outlined in the itinerary and plunging to her death in the icy seas. As soon as she met Knutsen, she’d pretend she had to go home to America for some fake emergency. She began to think of one now. Nothing short of the death of a loved one, she felt, would do.

  Once in the restaurant, however, she began to feel better. It was in an old house with a creaky winding staircase and lots of woodwork painted a creamy white. She looked into the inviting room at the top of the stairs as they stood at the entrance waiting for someone to take their coats. There were some heavy pewter plates and brass candlesticks sitting on the ledge along the wainscoting and a few reasonably good impressionistic landscapes in oil in tarnished gilt frames around the room. A big one above the fireplace showed a smudge of red fox darting across snow under inky green tree branches in a clearing beneath a blue-gray sky.

  Ragnhild handed over her coat. She was wearing a soft black dress underneath, with some big silver jewelry. Her fine hair was gray and primly arranged, and she had very white, fine-grained skin and pale eyes that gave her a strangely bloodless look. “Are you quite all right?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Jane. “Silly of me.” She waved her hand to show she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. To change the subject, she added: “What a nice coat! My grandmother had one like that.”

  Ragnhild smiled gratefully. “My husband was telling me not to wear this because you are American,” she said. “You do not want us to hunt the seals.”

  Jane handed over her own raincoat. It looked skimpy and cold next to Ragnhild’s fur. “Why? Are they endangered?”

  “No,” said Ragnhild, curling her lip. “They are cute. That is why we are supposed to stop hunting them after centuries. Because they have little cute faces.” She pinched her own ethereal face into an approximation of wrinkled-nose Disney winsomeness. The effect was a little alarming.

  They were taken to their table. Ragnhild sat down, flapped her napkin and said with a knowing look, “But of course, with your knowledge of fisheries, you know what will happen if we stop hunting of the seals.”

  Jane made a noncommittal “mmm” sound and grabbed the menu, hoping she wasn’t expected to provide the answer.

  “They would have the seals and whales eating all our cod.” Ragnhild shook her head sadly. “Not just the Americans, of course. But we thought you were our friends, and then you talk about all these boycotts.”

  “It must be irritating having other people telling you what to do,” said Jane. “I’m afraid Americans tend to think the world would be a happier place if everyone did everything just as we do.”

  Ragnhild let out an extravagant, relieved sigh and said, “I see I can be honest with you. But when we are trying to explain it to other Americans, they don’t seem to understand. I think we are too polite about it. It is not our nature to make a big fuss.”

  “No,” said Jane. “Of course not.” There were plenty of Norwegians in Seattle. They weren’t known for raising their voices or waving their arms around.

  Ragnhild stuck out her jaw stubbornly. “We could be telling you not to eat deer. It’s like eating Bambi. And what is the difference between a whale or a cow? It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference from whale beef and real beef. Do you let the Hindus come and tell you to close all your hamburger restaurants because you’re eating sacred cows?”

  Jane smiled and tried to look sympathetic. “I suppose people are afraid the world is running out of whales.”

  “We have eighty-five thousand minke whales off our coast,” Ragnhild said heatedly. “And we want to harvest a few for our own use.”

  Jane nodded and pretended again to read the Norwegian menu. She wondered if whale was on it.

  Ragnhild shook her head sadly. “We Norwegians have never had much, so we’ve always been careful. How many buffaloes are left in America?”

  Jane felt on firm ground here. She wasn’t supposed to know anything about hoofed animals. “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Tell them!” said Ragnhild, getting shrill. “Tell them in America that we’re fed up. When we had the Olympics we were told the Americans wouldn’t like us to eat reindeer, either. They think of this one with the red nose. What is he called?”

  “Rudolph,” said Jane.

  “These fanatics have already ruined our fur business.”

  “What should we eat?” said Jane, handing over the menu.

  “The moose should be good,” said Ragnhild.

  “I had moose last night,” said Jane, who felt very much like a nice piece of broiled chicken.

  She ended up with a first course of reindeer, which was remarkably tasty, not gamey but nutty in flavor, served with a piquant brown sauce; then came cod with melted butter, tasty except for the disconcerting fact that the cod’s decapitated head, its eye removed, lay in slack-jawed profile on the side of the plate. Jane assumed this was for visual interest and made no attempt to eat it, but when her companion looked down at her plate with a little frown, she was afraid she was going to be scolded for leaving it untouched.

  Instead Ragnhild said, “It is a pity the tongue isn’t there, but we sell those to the Japanese.”

  Jane recklessly drank quite a bit of good French wine, telling herself she deserved its analgesic effects after all she’d been through. She also wondered if she was thereby increasing her chance of another painful and humiliating fall on the way back.

  “You must also see Tromsø in the summer,” said Ragnhild. “Our gardens are full of huge roses because the sun is up all day. It is called the Paris of the North, you know.”

  “Really?” said Jane, tempted to ask sarcastically if Paris were also called the Tromsø of France. “I like the one in France, so I’m sure I’d like it,” she added more tactfully, but with just a hint of teasing.

  “So do I,” said Ragnhild. “I go to the big food show there every other year. We always have a large display.”

  “So you travel a lot?” said Jane.

  “Yes,” said Ragnhild. “All over the world. I like this very much.”

  “Were you at the seafood show in Seattle?” asked Jane, hoping Ragnhild hadn’t seen her belting out a few torchy numbers in the Fountain Room now that she was supposed to be a fish journalist.

  “No, we had just a small delegation. Some of our salmon people were there becaus
e the salmon exporters were having a meeting.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, trying to look as if she were searching for a name. “It seems I met a Trygve Knutsen.”

  Ragnhild laughed merrily. “Ah, yes, Trygve,” she said.

  “I was hoping to interview him in Bergen.”

  “I am sure this is possible,” said Ragnhild, dropping her voice to a more intimate tone. “And how was Trygve? Did he behave himself?”

  “I suppose so,” said Jane. “Although I guess people tend to let down their hair on the road.”

  Ragnhild nodded thoughtfully. “You say this, too? About letting your hair down? We have this also in Norwegian.”

  “Doesn’t Trygve always behave himself?” Jane asked.

  Ragnhild leaned over confidentially. “You know how this is. Traveling can lead to all kinds of things. But I am very happy with my husband, so I take it easy.”

  “Of course,” said Jane, wondering if Ragnhild were assuming she was a slut on the road. She looked guiltily at her own wineglass. “I suppose the key is not to drink too much.”

  “Oh, my colleagues and I get drunk together, of course,” Ragnhild said matter-of-factly. She held up a finger like a schoolmistress. “But that’s all. A woman has to watch her reputation.”

  Jane poured herself another glass of wine. Apparently the cultural drinking norms were a little different here.

  “Trygve, though, he thinks he is a big ladies’ man. Do not get in an elevator alone with that one,” she said with a little smirk. “But then, I think men like that are usually harmless, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The next day Jane struggled through the plant tour in Tromsø, putting on gum boots, a lab coat and a thing like a shower cap and walking over wet concrete floors, looking at glassy-eyed cod (unattractive fish with spiky, whiskerlike appendages on their faces) run through heading and gutting machines. Using news footage of British royals visiting factories as a model, she admired everything with polite courtesy and feigned interest in the water-jet, computer-activated filleting machine; the device that scanned for parasites; the perfectly calibrated weighing devices; the sluice that took away fish guts to be made into fish meal somewhere. She made meaningless notes in her reporter’s notebook and nodded sagely at a blur of statistics about the plant’s capacity, its remarkable quality control system, its state-of-the-art packaging system, and its fabulous spiral freezing system.

  She nodded again when informed of the different standards for the European Community, the Japanese market, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. and some UN agency or other. The key to quality control, she learned, was temperature control, and computers made sure the cod never got warm. The workers, she noted, wore thick sweaters underneath their white uniforms.

  A visit to the lab to squint at bacteria through microscopes gave her a brief respite from the bone-chilling cold and the wet—people seemed to be hosing off everything constantly. But the visit to the freezer, where the lonely freezing manager kept chatting to her for twenty minutes behind the cloud of frost crystals that floated in the air in front of him, practically killed her. The inside of her nose froze first, a strange, dry asthmatic sensation.

  The freezer guy went on about which boxes were going to Japan and which to Germany and which to Denmark and France, and Jane tried to breathe through her mouth. She thought it would give her sinuses a break. But then the inside of her mouth flash-froze, a dry, sharp, panic-inducing sensation that made her realize how comforting it was to feel one’s tongue and the roof of one’s mouth, warm and wet, almost like kissing oneself, and how she had never realized it before now.

  Finally she was taken to the factory’s elegant dining room and fed a well-prepared meal of more cod with some good local beer, potatoes, carrots and coffee and pastry. She left carrying her notebook with its meaningless squiggles, a clutch of business cards (Carla could call all these people to “verify” a few facts, they had decided) and pounds of glossy brochures about fish that she figured Carla could use to cobble together the article.

  Ragnhild, who was some kind of fish bureaucrat (Jane couldn’t keep the various governmental and quasi-governmental agencies straight), plied her with more brochures back at the hotel, along with a silk scarf covered with stylized salmon, a sterling silver pin shaped like a fish, a key chain with the logo of her agency, a calendar, and a cookbook.

  Deploying these items in her luggage proved difficult. Jane had decided that since shopping was out, she didn’t need to leave the usual space for expansion in her luggage and had crammed everything into a small suitcase, not counting on the fact that she’d be inundated with fish stuff. She thought with a sinking heart that she would start sprouting the extra hand luggage—plastic bags and cheap tote bags from airports—that transformed her look from that of the sophisticated traveler to that of the demented bag lady.

  She did feel pretty slick, however, in that she had arranged for Ragnhild to fax Trygve Knutsen’s office in Bergen and more or less demand an interview with him. It was all set for two days from now.

  There were still, however, the Lofoten Islands to get through. She found this leg of the trip the most alarming. It involved venturing out into icy seas on a cod boat. Some of the pamphlets she'd received in Tromsø had given her pause.

  Apparently the citizens of Lofoten had been selling cod to the rest of the world for over a thousand years. The most disturbing detail from the brochures, however, was the quaint fact that the old-time fishermen, to prevent the arctic wind going through their woolen mittens, would dip their hands into the sea and form a glaze of ice to keep out the elements. Presumably they had some high-tech space age Scandinavian gloves today, and she wouldn’t have to wear igloos on her hands. But her stint in the freezer at the processing plant and the casual aplomb with which her hosts had lounged around in the polar atmosphere, conversing as if they were at a cafe, didn’t augur well for conditions on the fishing boat.

  From the air, the Lofoten Islands looked otherworldly: a collection of steep, jagged crags jutting out of the dense, gray water in a belligerent, Wagnerian way, all cast in an eerie light. Jane wouldn’t have been the least surprised to see a flock of Valkyries winging their way over these peaks, braids streaking behind them, their bellicose soprano cries floating through the clear air.

  A young man with sandy hair and an engaging, open sort of face met her at the small airport. His name was Per-Olav, and he seemed to work for some sort of fisherman’s cooperative. He kept apologizing in excellent English that his boss was at a meeting in Oslo, so he’d be escorting her around.

  “I hope I’m showing you what you want to see,” he said fretfully. “We’ll go see the dried cod this morning, but I’m still working hard getting a fishing boat for you to go out with tomorrow. I’m afraid it is difficult. The weather is very bad and dangerous.” He looked awfully sorry to be letting her down. Jane tried not to appear overjoyed.

  He rolled a cigarette nervously and added with an eager smile, as if he were now giving her the good news, “But we were able to arrange for you to spend the night in a traditional fisherman’s hut out at the end of a dock.”

  Jane had visions of wet plank floors shiny with centuries of fish scales, arctic winds whistling through the chinks and a thin blanket smelling of cod-liver oil. Per-Olav seemed to notice her anxiety.

  “The Italians and the Germans rent them in the summer for vacation cottages,” he told her. “They are really very nice. They pay nine hundred kroner a night to stay there in summer.”

  “I’m sure they’re lovely, but I’m devastated I can’t go out on the cod boat,” she said, managing two outrageous lies in one sentence.

  Per-Olav looked a little nervous. “It would be dangerous, and you would get very sick. But if you think—”

  “Thank you very much,” she said, doing her best to sound like a dowager empress, “but I will fly back to Bergen. This would be a better use of my time.” Her appointment with Knutsen wasn’t for
two days. She remembered how close Shetland was on the map. She’d zip over there and find out just what Magnus Anderson was talking about when he’d said Trygve had been up to something kinky.

  Some hours later, after a short, bumpy flight down to Bergen, she got herself on a U.K. Air flight to Aberdeen over a choppy gray North Sea interspersed with desolate-looking oil derricks and, finally, a run up to Shetland on British Airways. By the third flight she was a wreck.

  She had called Magnus from Aberdeen and left what she hoped was a perky, casual message on his machine. “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met in Seattle, and I sang a Patsy Cline number for you. The salmon was terrific.”

  God, she felt like a fool. He was so affable, he probably gave his card to everyone he ever met, secure in the knowledge that the chances of their coming to somewhere as remote as the Shetland Isles was minimal. Besides, for all she knew, he was on the road.

  Then she remembered that her alternative was a cod boat in bad weather. All in all, she supposed she’d rather hunker down in a hotel in Shetland for the night than take her chances on open, storm-tossed arctic seas.

  She was getting tired of airplane seats, but at least this time she had an aisle. She was still wearing the jeans, long woolen underwear and down jacket in which she’d arrived that morning in Lofoten and felt overheated, incredibly unattractive and grimy. She closed her eyes after takeoff, and when she opened them just a crack at the clinking sound that signaled the approach of the drinks cart, she was startled to see a tall, elegantly groomed man with a gaunt, serious face staring at her from across the aisle with apparent interest.

  I don’t look as bad as I feel, she thought, opening her eyes a little more and smiling.

  He didn’t smile back but looked away. She chided herself for thinking he’d been checking her out. She thought she had seen him before, him or someone who looked a lot like him. Maybe it had been in the Bergen airport.