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

I loosen the tape and pick up the receiver. "Smilla…"

The voice is languid, almost distracted. But at the same t ime golden and resonant, like in a TV commercial. I have iirvcr heard it before. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know that it belongs to the person who was standing less than a yard away from me only monents ago. I'm absolutely sure of it.

"Smilla… I know you're there."

I hear his breathing. Deep, calm. "Smilla…"

I put down the receiver, not on the phone, but on the table. I have to use both hands so I won't drop it. I sling my bag over my shoulder. No time to change shoes. I race out the door and down the dark stairway, out the front door and along Strand Street, across the bridge, and up Havne Street. We can't control ourselves every second of our lives. There comes a time, for each of us, when panic takes the upper hand.

Lander is waiting with the engine running. I throw myself into the passenger seat and cling to him.

"This is a good start," he says.

Slowly I get my breathing down to a tolerable level. "It was purely a one-time acknowledgment of sympathy," I tell him. "Don't let it go to your head."

I let him drive me all the way up to the house. For tonight, anyway, I've lost all desire to be alone in the dark. And I don't know where else to go. Moritz opens the door himself. Wearing a white terrycloth robe, white silk shorts, his hair rumpled, his eyes sleepy.

He looks at me. He looks at Lander, who is carrying my bag. He looks at the Jaguar. Amazement, jealousy, old rage, temper, curiosity, and unctuous indignation roam and struggle through his half-asleep brain. Then he rubs the stubble on his face.

"Are you coming in?" he says. "Or should I just hand the money through the mail slot?"

The rib bones are the closed ellipses of the planets, with their focus in the sternum, the breastbone, the white center of the photograph. The lungs are the gray shadows of the Milky Way against the black leaden shield of space. The heart's dark contour is the cloud of ashes from the burned-out sun. The intestines' hazy hyperboles are the disconnected asteroids, the vagabonds of space, the scattered cosmic dust.

We're standing in Moritz's consultation room at the light box, on which three X-rays have been clipped. In the clinical reduction of photon photography it's more apparent than ever that the human being is a universe; a solar system seen from another galaxy. And yet this person is dead. With a jackhammer someone dug him a grave in the permafrost of Holsteinsborg, put stones on it, and poured cement over it to keep the Arctic foxes away.

"Marius Høeg, dead on the Barren Glacier, Gela Alta, July 1966."

I am standing with Moritz and forensics expert Dr. Lagermann in front of the light box. Benja is sitting in a wicker chair sucking her thumb.

The floor is yellow marble, the walls are covered with light brown fabric. There is wicker furniture and an examination table painted avocado green and covered with natural-colored leather. There is an original Dali on the wall. Even the X-ray machine looks as if it feels comfortable with this attempt to make advanced technology seem homey.

This is where Moritz earns a portion of the money which helps to make his later years golden, but at the moment he is working for free. He is examining the X-rays which Lagermann, in defiance of six paragraphs of the law, has taken from the archives of the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

"The report from the expedition in '66 is missing. It has simply been removed. Damn."

I told Moritz that they are looking for me and that I have no intention of turning myself in to the police. He detests illegalities but he acquiesces because, with or without permission from the police, it's better for me to be here than not.

I told him that I'm going to have a visitor and that we will need the light box in his clinic. His clinic is his inner sanctum, as private as his investments and his bank accounts in Switzerland, but he agrees.

I said that I wouldn't tell him what it was all about. He acquiesces. He's trying to pay back some of his debt to me. It's thirty years old and fathomless.

Now that Lagermann has arrived and unpacked and hung up the pictures with little clips, the door opens, and Moritz slouches in.

Standing there in front of us he is three people in one. He is my father, who still loves my mother and maybe me as well, and is now sick with anxiety that he can't control.

He is the great doctor, M.D., and international injection star who has never been excluded, always the one who knew things before anyone else did.

And he is the little boy who has been shut out of the room in which something is happening that he's dying to take part in.

It's the latter person that I, on sudden impulse, allow into the room and whom I introduce to Lagermann. Of course he knows my father; he shakes his hand and smiles broadly at him; he has met him two or three times before. I should have realized what would happen now: that Lagermann would pull him over to the light box.

"Just have a look at this," he says. "Because there's something here that'll surprise the hell out of you." The door opens and Benja pads in. With her woolen socks and her turned-out prima-donna feet and her demand for undivided attention.

The two men are glued to the transparent star chart on the box. They are explaining it to me. But their words are directed at each other.

"There are few dangerous bacteria in Greenland." Lagermann doesn't know that Moritz and I have forgotten more about Greenland than he will ever learn. But we don't interrupt him.

"It's too cold. And too dry. That's why poisoning from spoiled food is extremely rare. With the exception of one kind: botulism, anaerobic bacteria that produce a very dangerous form of meat poisoning."

"I'm a lactovegetarian," says Benja.

"The report is in Godthab, with a copy in Copenhagen. It says that they found five people on the same day, August 7, 1991. Healthy young people. Botulism, Clostridium botulinum, is anaerobic, just like the tetanus bacteria. And not dangerous in and of itself. But its waste products are exceedingly toxic. They attack the peripheril nervous system where the nerves innervate the muscle fibers. Paralyze the lungs. Just before death, it's spectucular, of course. Hypoventilation, acidosis like crazy. The person turns blue in the face. But when it's over, there's not a trace. Naturally the livores are slightly darker, but hell, they are with a heart attack, too."

"So there is nothing externally visible?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Nothing. Botulism is determined by a process of elimination. Something you come to suspect because you can't find any other cause of death. Then you take a blood sample. And samples of the food under suspicion. You send them to the Serum Institute. Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Godthab has a medical laboratory, of course. But no facilities to trace the less common toxins. So blood samples were sent to Copenhagen. In the samples they found the toxin from botulinum."

He takes out one of his big cigar matches. Moritz's eyebrows shoot up on his brow. It's forbidden, under penalty of death, to smoke in the clinic. Smokers are shown to the smoking salon, which means a walk in the garden. Even there he doesn't like it much. He thinks that the sight of someone smoking, even from a distance, might affect his golf swing. It was one of his few, great, miraculous triumphs over my mother that he got her to go outside to smoke in Qaanaaq. It was one of his many defeats that she smoked indoors in the summer tent at Siorapaluk.

With the unsulfured end of the match Lagermann points at a row of tiny numbers on the bottom edge of the X-ray. "X-rays cost a damn fortune. We only use them to search for hardware that has been stuck into people. No pictures were taken in '91. It wasn't thought necessary."