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

I thought he was exaggerating. The cynical, ironic, distanced exaggeration of a professional. Heroin is suicide. I don't think it's any better because you drag it out over twenty-five years; no matter what, it's a form of contempt for your own life.

"You get it out for me," he says.

I pull myself into a squatting position. When I try to stand, my right leg buckles and I fall to my knees. I make the fall look a little worse than it is and use the sink to pull myself up. I take the white towel from the row of pegs and wipe the blood off my face. Then I turn around and hobble a step toward the desk and the drawers, with the towel still in my hand. I turn to face the closet.

"The key's in there."

As I turn, I start my swing. An arc that starts toward the porthole, climbs toward the ceiling, and accelerates downward toward the bridge of his nose.

He sees it coming and takes a step back. But he's prepared only for the swat of a piece of fabric. The ball wrapped in the terry cloth strikes him right over the heart. He falls to his knees. Then I take another swing. He manages to put up his arm; the blow lands beneath his shoulder and throws him backward onto the bunk. Now he has murder in his eyes. I swing as hard as I can, aiming for his temple. He does the right thing: moves toward the blow, puts up his arm so that the towel wraps around it, and jerks it toward him. I fly forward three feet. Then he slashes with the marline spike, low and sweeping, and it strikes me in the abdomen. I seem to be watching myself from the outside as my body is lifted and flung backward across the cabin, and I realize that it's the desk slamming into my back. He moves toward me across the bunk. I feel as if I have no body, so I look down. At first I think that a white fluid is running out of me. Then I see that it's the towel, which I pulled along with me when I fell. He moves over the edge of the bunk. I raise the ball off the floor; shorten the length of the towel by half, put my right hand over my left, and yank my outstretched arms upward.

It hits him right under the chin. His head snaps back, followed more slowly by his body, as he's thrown up against the door. His hands fumble behind him briefly, trying to hang on to the door handle; he gives up and sinks to the floor.

I stay where I am for a moment. Then I scuttle across the ten feet of floor space, leaning first on the bunk, next the closet and the edge of the sink, numb from my navel down. I pick up the marline spike. I take the little vial out of his pocket.

It takes him a long time to come around. I wait, clutching the spike. He touches his mouth and spits blood into his hands, along with a few pieces of something more solid and a lighter color.

"You've ruined my face."

Half of one of his front teeth has been knocked out. You can see it when he talks. The anger has ebbed out of him. He looks like a child.

"Give me that vial, Smilla."

I take it out and balance it on my thigh.

"I want to see the forward cargo hold," I say.

The tunnel starts in the engine room. A narrow stairway leads from the floor down between the steel beams of the engine platform. At the bottom a watertight fire door opens onto a narrow corridor less than a yard wide and just high enough to stand up in.

It's locked, but Jakkelsen opens it.

"Over there, on the other side of the engine, a tunnel like this one goes under the middle and lower rooms of ` the quarterdeck and down to the wing tanks."

In my cabin he poured a short, fat line of powder onto my pocket mirror and snorted it straight into one nostril. It transformed him into a brilliant, self-confident guide. But he lisps because of the broken front tooth.

I can barely put any weight on my right foot. It has swollen up as if from a bad sprain. I stay behind him. I've stuck the point of the little Phillips screwdriver into a cork and put it inside the waistband of my pants.

He turns on the lights. Every fifteen feet there's a bare light bulb inside a wire cage.

"It's eighty feet long. Runs along the whole length of the ship, up to where the foredeck starts. Up above is a cargo hold that's 34,500 cubic feet, and above that another one of 23,000 cubic feet."

Along the sides of the tunnel the ribs of the ship form a tight gridwork. He puts his hand on it.

"Twenty inches. Between the ribs. Half the normal distance on a 4,000-tonner. One-and-a-half-inch plates in the nose. That gives a localized strength that's twenty times greater than what the insurance companies and the ship inspectors require to approve sailing in ice, you know. That's how I knew we were on our way up to the ice.

"How do you know so much about ships, Jakkelsen?" He draws himself up. All charm and effusiveness. "You know the novel about the sailor Peder Most, don't you? I am Peder Most. I was born in Svendborg just like he was. I have red hair. And I belong to a bygone era. To the days when ships were made of wood and sailors were made of iron. Now it's the other way around."

He runs a hand through his red curls, fluffing them in the salt air. "I'm just as fashionably slim as he was, too. I've had several offers to be a male model. In Hong Kong there were two guys who signed a contract with me. They were in the fashion business. They had noticed my looks from far away. I was supposed to be at the first photo session the next day. That was when I had signed on board ship as a galley boy. I didn't have time to do the dishes. So I threw all the cutlery and plates out the porthole. When I got to their hotel, they had left, unfortunately. The skipper deducted 5,000 kroner from my pay check to pay the diver who retrieved the dishes."

"It's an unfair world."

"It sure is, man. That's why I'm only a sailor. I've been sailing for seven years. I was supposed to go to navigation school lots of times. Something just always came up. But I know everything about ships."

"But that container we dropped into the water yesterday-you couldn't figure that out, could you?"

His eyes narrowed. "So it's true, what Verlaine's been saying."

I wait.

He gestures with his hand. "I could be a valuable man to the police. They could put me on the narc squad. I know all about that world, you know."

There's a water pipe running above our heads. Every thirty feet there are nozzles for the sprinkler system. Every nozzle is equipped with a dull red light. Jakkelsen takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wraps it around the nozzle with a practiced motion. Then he lights a cigarette.

"Each of them has a smoke detector. If you sit down in a corner to have a smoke, the alarm will go off if you don't take precautions."

He fills his lungs with pleasure, squinting his eyes at the pain from his tooth. "In Denmark it's hell getting rid of illegal cargo. The whole country is regulated; as soon as you approach a harbor you've got the police and the harbor authorities and the customs officials on your back. And they want to know where you're coming from and where you're going and who the shipowner is. And you can't find anyone who will take a bribe in Denmark -they're all bureaucrats and won't accept so much as a glass of mineral water. So you come up with the idea that one of your friends could come alongside in a smaller boat and take the crate and put it ashore on a dark beach somewhere. But that won't work, either. Because everybody knows that in Denmark the coast guard and the customs authorities work together. At the two big military stations on Anholt Island and in Frederikshavn the naval police assign a number to all the inbound and outbound ships in Danish waters and track them by computer. They would spot your friend with the boat right away. That's why you decide just to throw the crate overboard. With a buoy attached, or a couple of floats and a little battery-powered transmitter emitting a signal that could be located by whoever comes to pick it up."