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

He opens the case. Jakkelsen stares at us disconsolately. His nose is blue-tinged and sharp, as if it were frozen. "Who's this?"

"Bernard Jakkelsen. Lukas's little brother."

I go over to him and unbutton his shirt and pull it away from the triangular steel. The mechanic doesn't move. I turn off the light. We stand quietly in the darkness. Then we go upstairs. I lock the door behind us. When we reach the deck, the mechanic stops.

"Who did it?"

"Verlaine," I say. "The bosun."

There are steps welded onto the external bulkhead. I crawl up first. He follows me slowly. We reach a small half-deck clothed in darkness. A motorboat is perched on two wooden trestles, and behind it there's a large rubber raft. We sit down between the two. From here we have a view of the quarterdeck but we're shielded from the light.

"It happened on the Greenland Star. Just as you arrived."

He doesn't believe me.

"Verlaine could have heaved him over the side. But he was afraid the body would float up near the platform the next day. Or be sucked up into a propeller."

I think about my mother. Whatever is thrown into the Arctic Ocean never comes up again. But Verlaine wouldn't know that.

The mechanic still doesn't say a word.

"Jakkelsen followed Verlaine onto the docks. He got caught. The best solution was to make room in the cases and put him inside one of them. Load him on board and wait until we were free of the platform. And then let him slip overboard."

I try to keep my sense of desperation out of my voice. He has to believe me.

"We're far out at sea now. Every second he's on board is a risk for them. They'll come in a few minutes. They'll have to bring him up on deck. There's no other way than over the side. That's why we're sitting here. I thought you should see for yourself."

There's a soft sigh in the dark. It's the cork coming out of the bottle, which he hands to me. I take a swallow. It's dark, sweet, strong rum.

I put the woolen blanket over us. It's about 14°F, but I'm burning hot inside. Alcohol makes your capillaries expand and the surface of your skin ache slightly. It's this pain that you have to avoid at all costs if you don't want to freeze to death. I take off the woolen cap to feel the cold against my forehead.

"Tørk would n-never have permitted it."

I hand him the letter. He glances up toward the dark windows of the bridge, leans behind the hull of the motorboat, and reads the letter in the beam of my flashlight. "It was with Tørk's papers," I say.

We take another drink. The moonlight is so bright that it's possible to distinguish different colors. The green deck, my blue thermal pants, the gold and red of the label on the bottle. It's like sunlight, falling with a tactile warmth across the deck. I kiss him. The temperature is no longer important. At some point I straddle him. We are no longer two bodies, just patches of heat in the night.

Later we sit leaning against each other. He's the one who pulls the blanket over us. I'm not cold. We drink from the bottle. It tastes strong and fiery.

"Are you from the police, Smilla?"

"No."

"Are you from some other corporation?"

"No."

"Have you known all along?"

"No."

"Do you know now?"

"I have an idea."

We take another drink and he puts his arms around me. The deck must be cold under the blanket, but we don't notice it.

No one comes past us. The Kronos seems lifeless. As if the ship had wrenched itself off its course and were now carrying us away, just the two of us.

At some point the bottle is empty. Then I stand up, because I realize that something is wrong. "Aren't there any other openings in the hull?" I ask. "Some other way to get rid of him?"

"Why are you talking about death?" What should I say?

"How is the anchor dropped?" he asks me.

We climb down to the between decks. The case is now full of life vests. Jakkelsen is gone. We go down the stairs, through the tunnel, the engine room, another tunnel, up the spiral stairs. He throws two bolts and opens a door that's three feet square. The chain of the anchor is stretched taut in the middle of the room. Up near the ceiling it passes through a pipe; on either side the moonlight and the silhouette of the anchor windlass are visible. Then the chain disappears downward through a hawser hole the size of a sewer cover. The anchor is pulled up just below the hawser hole. That doesn't leave much room. He stares at the opening.

"A grown man wouldn't fit through there."

I touch the steel. We both know that this is where Jakkelsen was shoved out during the night.

"He was fashionably slim," I say.

Captain Lukas is unshaven, he hasn't combed his hair, and he looks as if he has slept in his clothes.

"What do you know about electrical currents, Jaspersen?"

We're alone on the bridge. It's 6:30 in the morning, an hour and a half before his watch begins. His face is sallow and covered with a thin film of sweat.

"I can change a light bulb," I say. "But I usually burn my fingers."

"Yesterday, when we were docked, we lost power on the Kronos. And a section of the harbor area did, too." He has a piece of paper in his hand. His hand is making the paper shake.

"On ships all the wiring goes through circuit breakers. As a result, all power outlets are directly connected to a fuse. Do you know what that means? It means that it's damned hard to create electrical havoc on a ship. Unless you're too smart for your own good and go straight for the main feeder. That's what someone did yesterday. During the brief periods when Kutzow is sober, he has his clever moments. He tracked down the source of the accident. It was a darning needle. Yesterday someone stuck a darning needle into the supply cable. Presumably with an insulated pair of pliers. And then broke off the needle afterward-an especially clever touch. The insulation would contract over the needle, making it impossible to pinpoint the problem unless you know a few tricks like Kutzow does, with a magnet and a voltage sensor. And if you have some idea what you're looking for."

I think about Jakkelsen's excitement and the tone of his voice. "I'll take care of this for us, Smilla," he said. "Tomorrow everything will be different." I feel a new respect for his resourcefulness.

"During the blackout one of the sailors-Bernard Jakkelsen-apparently disobeyed orders not to go ashore and left the Kronos. This morning we received this telegram from him. It's his resignation."

He hands me the paper. It's a telex sent from the Greenland Star. It's quite brief, even for a resignation.

To Captain Sigmund Lukas:

Effective immediately, I hereby resign my post on the Kronos due to personal reasons. Go to hell.

B. Jakkelsen.

I look up at Lukas.

"I have a strong suspicion," he says, "that you were also on shore during the blackout."

His demeanor cracks. Gone is the officer, gone is the sarcasm. The only thing left is anxiety bordering on desperation.

"Tell me whether you know anything about him." Everything that Jakkelsen didn't tell me is now apparent. Lukas's panicked concern, his desire to protect and rescue his brother and keep him sailing, out of jail and away from bad influences in the cities. No matter what the cost. Even if it meant taking him along on a voyage like this one.

For a moment I'm tempted to tell him everything. For a moment I see a reflection of myself in his torment. Our irrational, blind, and vain attempts to protect other people from something that we don't understand but that keeps reappearing no matter what we do.

Then I let my momentary weakness fade away and die out. There's nothing I can do for Lukas now. No one can do anything for Jakkelsen anymore.

"I stood on the dock. That's all."

He lights a new cigarette. The ashtray is already full. "I called the telex office. But the whole situation is impossible. It's strictly forbidden to put a man ashore in this way. And their internal system makes things even more difficult. You write a telegram and hand it in at a window. From there it's taken over to the mail room. A third person takes it over to the teletype office. I talked to a fourth person. They don't even know whether it was delivered in person or called in. It's impossible to find out anything."