Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

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.