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

"One minute, two hundred yards."

"Hoist it up."

The voice comes from the intercom on the wall. I release my grip on the tabletop behind me. My palms are sweaty. I've heard that voice before. On the phone in my apartment. The last time I was there.

The red light goes off. Out of the night a gray shape rises up, emerging from the forward cargo hold, and swings, swaying slowly, over the side of the ship.

"Ten seconds."

"Lower it, Verlaine."

He must be sitting in the enclosed crow's nest at the top of the forward mast. We're listening to his orders to the crew.

"Pull it tight. Slack off now."

"Five seconds. Four, three, two, one, zero."

A ray of light behind us bores a tunnel through the night. The container is lying in the water, fifteen feet from the stern. It's apparently riding a bow wave. From one of its corners, a blue hawser runs forward along the side of the ship. Maria and Fernanda, Hansen, and the deckhands are standing at the railing. They're keeping it away from the hull with what looks like a very long boathook. In the light I can see that there are two narrow, inflatable white rubber strips along its sides.

"Release it, Verlaine."

I move over to the bridge wing. The light is coming from one of the spotlights mounted on the sea rail. Sonne is manning it. He searches with the spotlight across the water. The container is free of the hawser now, already forty yards astern, and is starting to sink.

There's a muted bang. The five fiberglass shells on the surface of the water are cast off, and like five enormous lily pads, five self-inflating gray flotation balloons spread out above the big metal container. Then the spotlight goes out.

"One yard, five hundred gallons." It's the woman's voice.

"Three thousand, four thousand. Two yards, thirteen hundred gallons. Two yards. Two and a half. Two point three. Thirteen hundred gallons, and two point three."

I stand next to the serving tray. In my place. On the instrument in front of her, several displays are now lit up red.

"I'm letting it out. Twelve hundred and two and a half. Three, three-twenty, four, four and a half, five. Fifteen hundred gallons and five yards. The list is zero. Temperature 31°F."

She turns a dial and a sound fills the room, as if they had brought in my alarm clock.

"Directional signal, ten-four."

She switches off the intercom. The man in front straightens up from the log. The tension has been released. Sonne enters the room and shuts the door. Lukas is standing right next to me.

"You can go back to bed."

I gesture toward the coffee. He shakes his head. They don't even want me to pour it. I've been summoned up here to carry a tray twenty feet from the kitchen dumbwaiter to the bridge. It doesn't make sense. Unless he wanted me to see what I've just witnessed.

I gather up the tray. The woman in front of me puts out her hand to caress the man. She doesn't look at him. Her hand rests for a moment on the back of his neck. Then she twists a little strand of his hair around her fingers and pulls it out. They haven't noticed me at all. I wait for him to react to the pain. But he stands there, motionless, his back erect.

Urs's face is shiny with sweat. He tries to gesture with his hand and balance the big three-gallon pot at the same time.

"Feodora, the only one mit 60 prozent cacao. Und the whipped cream must be ein bisschen frozen. Ten minutes in icebox," he says to me.

All eleven of them are here. There are no questions hovering in the air. As if I'm the only one who doesn't understand what's been going on. Or as if they have no need to understand.

I slurp up the scalding chocolate through the lightly frozen whipped cream. The effect is instant intoxication, starting in my stomach and rising up, hot and pulsating, to the top of my skull. I wonder what a wizard like Urs is doing on board the Kronos.

Verlaine stares at me thoughtfully. But I avoid his eyes. I'm the next to the last to leave. In a corner Jakkelsen is brooding over a cup of black coffee.

Maria is in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror. At first I think they're some kind of prosthesis, then I see that they're little hollow aluminum cones. She has one on each fingertip, and now she cautiously removes them. Underneath her nails are red, an inch and a half long, and perfect.

"I support my family," she says. "In Phuket. On my salary. I came to Denmark as a whore. In Thailand you're either a virgin or a whore."

Her Danish is darker than Verlaine's, less distinct. "Sometimes I had thirty customers a day. I've worked my way out of that."

She stretches out her forefinger, puts her nail on my cheek, and rests it against my skin.

"I once scratched out the eyes of a policeman."

I stand there, leaning against her fingernail. She gives me a searching look. Then she lowers her hand.

I'm waiting inside my cabin with the door slightly ajar. Jakkelsen shows up a moment later. His cabin is a little farther down the corridor. He locks his door behind him. I walk over to his door barefoot. He's working on something. There's a faint scraping noise, the door handle is pulled upward. He's wedging his desk chair under the door handle.

He's barricading himself inside. Maybe he's scared of the door being forced open by some of the women who are chasing him.

I tiptoe back to my cabin. I get undressed, take my pink terrycloth bathrobe and my hemp mitt out of my box, and noisily walk to the bathroom, whistling. I scrub myself with the mitt, dry myself off, rub my skin with lotion, and go back down the corridor, my bath slippers slapping. Then I creep back to Jakkelsen's door.

It's quiet inside. Maybe he's manicuring his nails or tending to his delicate hands in some other manner. But I doubt it.

I knock on the door. There's no reply. I knock harder. Total silence. I have my own key in my bathrobe pocket. I unlock his door. But I still can't open it. I start wiggling the door handle up and down. After a minute the chair falls to the floor. I wait for the panic to subside. Then I push open the door, after glancing down the hall in both directions. The situation might be misunderstood.

I stand there in the dark. Not a sound. I decide that the cabin must be empty. Then I turn on the light. Jakkelsen is sleeping in Thai silk pajamas in delicate pastel colors. His skin looks waxen. There are bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth that move with every faint, labored breath. One arm protrudes over the edge of the bed. His wrist sticking out of the pajama sleeve is frighteningly skinny. He looks like a sick child-and in a way, that's what he is.

I give him a shake. His eyelids open slightly. His eyeballs roll upward so the whites of his eyes give me a blind, dead look. He doesn't utter a sound.

The ashtray next to his bunk is empty. There's nothing on the table. Everything is neat and tidy.

I roll up his pajama sleeve. Along the inside of his arm there are between forty and sixty little yellowish-blue pricks with a black center, a fine pattern along his swollen veins. I pull out the drawer for the bed linen. He had dropped everything in there. Foil, matches, an old-fashioned glass hypodermic, fast-drying glue, a syringe, an open pocketknife, a plastic container for sewing machine needles, and a piece of black rubber packing cord.

He's not planning to wake up for a while. He's sleeping a powder sleep, completely relaxed, worry-free.

Before Home Rule, there were no customs officers in Greenland. The police and the harbor authorities were in charge of customs matters. I met Jorgensen the year I was posted at the meteorological station in Upernavik.

He was the harbormaster. But he was rarely at work. He was constantly being taken to Thule by the Americans or he was on board one of the navy's inspection ships. He held the Greenland record for helicopter rides.