Smilla's Sense of Snow (38 page)

"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."

I try to make some connection between what he's telling me and what I've seen.

He stubs out his cigarette. "But there's still something that doesn't fit. The ship came from a shipyard in Hamburg. She's been in Danish waters for two weeks. Docked in Copenhagen. It's a little too late to drop off the goods five hundred sea miles out in the Atlantic, isn't it?"

I agree. It seems incomprehensible.

"I don't think what happened yesterday had to do with smuggled goods. I know this business, I'm positive it had nothing to do with goods. You know why? Because I looked inside the container. You know what was in the container? Cement. Hundreds of 100-pound sacks of Portland cement. I took a look inside one night. There was a padlock on it. But the keys to the cargo area are always kept on the bridge. In case the tonnage should shift. So when I was on watch, I borrowed them. I was psyched, man. I opened the top. Nothing but cement. I tell myself it must be a joke. There must be something underneath. So I go all the way back to the galley and get a barbecue skewer. I'm about to shit in my pants at the thought of Verlaine catching me. I spend two hours in that container. Moving the sacks around and sticking the skewer into them, trying to find something. My back's killing me. My hands are all scraped up. Cement dust is the worst. But I don't find a thing. I tell myself it's impossible, this whole trip. Everything is secret. Extra pay because we don't know where we're going, don't know what we're carrying. And then the only thing they take on board is a garbage container full of cement. It's too much. I can't sleep at night. I tell myself that it has to be dope."

"So you've given up."

"I think," he says slowly, "that yesterday was a test. The thing is, it's not that easy to drop a heavy cargo over the side. You want to hit the precise coordinates so you can find the goods later. You want to avoid getting it caught in the propeller. You don't want it to sway too much if there's a wind and a high sea, or you'll risk smashing it up. And you know that even small movements will change your relative speed on the coast guard's radar. It would be, preferable to stop and carefully ease the container into the water. But that won't work. They make a note of all changes in speed. You'd have the customs people on the VHF immediately. So if you really want to put something big and heavy into the water and do it discreetly and without drawing attention, you'd need to do a dry run. To test your flotation balloons and your transmitting equipment, and to give the sailors a chance to rehearse their maneuvers on deck. To set up the boom and the winch and the forward guy wire properly. That container yesterday was a test, a dummy. It was dropped at that point to see whether we were out of radar range. It was really just a preview."

"For what?"

"For the real goods, man. What we're on our way to get. Take my word for it. I know everything about the sea. This is costing them a fortune. The only thing that would pay off would be dope."

At the end of the tunnel a narrow spiral stairway winds around a steel girder no thicker than the base of a flagpole. Jakkelsen places his hand on the white enamel. "This supports the forward mast."

I think about the loading boom and winch. They're both marked for a maximum weight of forty-five tons. "It's so skinny."

"Vertical pressure. The weight on the mast produces a pressure downward. There's no lateral pressure of any significance."

I count fifty-six steps, and estimate that we've ascended to a height comparable to a three-story house. My injured foot just manages to make it.

We come to a landing on the stairs against a bulkhead. There's a circular hatch on the bulkhead, five feet across. There are two compression wheels on it, making it look like the entrance to a bank vault in a cartoon. The hatch doesn't fit in with its surroundings. The Kronos looks as if it was built about the same time as the Lauritzen Shipping Company's Kista Dan, which was my first encounter with a big diesel ship as a child-an overwhelming experience. That was in the early sixties. This hatch looks as if it was made the day before yesterday.

It's loosely closed. Jakkelsen turns both wheels a half revolution and pulls. It must be heavy, but it moves outward without resistance. Inside a heavy, three-ply, black rubber flange acts as a seal.

Behind the door is a platform jutting out over dark nothingness. Somewhere next to the door Jakkelsen finds a big battery lantern. I take it from him and turn it on.

From the sound-the distant echo from the walls far away-I already had a sense of the room's size. Now the beam of light strikes the bottom, which seems dizzyingly far below us. In reality it's about thirty or forty feet down. The hatchway is about fifteen feet above us. I move the light all the way around its perimeter. It has the same kind of rubber flange. I shine the light on the bottom. It's a stainless-steel grating.

"It's lower now," he says. "When the container was in here, it was higher up."

Under the grating the. floor slopes down toward a drainage outlet.

I find a corner and move the light all the way up the wall.

The walls are of polished steel. Partway up, light falls on something jutting out. It looks like a shower head. But it's pointed straight down. A little higher up there's another one. And then another. The same on the opposite wall. A total of eighteen in the room.

I examine the wall. In the middle, at the top, and at the bottom of each wall there's a built-in grating 20 by 20 inches square.

The platform we're standing on sticks out a foot and a half into the room. On the left there's some sort of instrument panel. It has four lights, a power switch, a meter labeled OXYGEN, another labeled nix PRESSURE, a thermostat with a scale from +68°F to -76°F, and a hygrometer.

I hang the lantern back in its place. We go out, and I close the hatch. There's a white door in the wall to the left. I try Jakkelsen's key, but it won't open. That doesn't matter so much. I can guess what's behind it. A panel identical to the one inside the tank. Plus some control buttons.

We walk back, Jakkelsen in front. His energy is dissipating. He's almost burned out.

I make him wait in his cabin while I get his chess pieces for him. There's no one around. My alarm clock says it's 3:30 a.m. I feel as if I've aged.

I take a shower. When I come out of the bathroom, he's standing in the doorway. Full of energy. With a transfigured look on his thin young face.

"Smilla," he whispers, "how about a quick fuck?"

"Jakkelsen," I say, "tell me something. Was that Peder Most a junkie, too?"

6

I stick my head inside the dryer and bury my hands in the dish towels, still burning hot. I can feel the skin on my face and hands start to dry out at once.

If you're homeless, you're always looking for connections, similarities, little smells and colors and sensations that remind you of a place where you felt at home, where you once felt settled. The air inside a clothes dryer is desert air. I once felt at home in a desert.