Smilla's Sense of Snow (28 page)

"They don't see me," I say.

He squeezes my arm. "You've been to school, honey, you remember what men look like inside. Heart, brain, liver, kidneys, stomach, testicles. When they come in here, a change takes place. The moment you buy your chips, a little animal takes up residence inside you, a little parasite. Finally there's nothing left but the attempt to remember what cards have been dealt, the attempt to feel where the ball will fall, the probability of certain card combinations, and the memory of how much you have lost."

We look at the faces around the table he has led me to. They're like empty shells. At that moment it's practically impossible to imagine that they have any life outside of this room. Maybe they don't.

"That parasite, it's the gambling bug, honey. One of the most voracious creatures in the world. And I know what I'm talking about. I've lost everything several times over. But I got back on my feet again. That's why I had to buy into it. It's different now that I'm an owner, now that I've looked behind the scenes."

The crowd opens up a bit, and the green felt comes into view. The croupier is a young blond woman with long red nails who speaks perfect, slightly nasal English.

"Buying in? Forty-five thousand goes down. One, two, three . . ."

A few of the guests have mineral water in front of them. No one is drinking alcohol.

"That bug comes in various sizes, honey. It's different for each person. That guy over there . . ."

He's been speaking in a low whisper and he doesn't point, but I know he's talking about the man sitting to one side of us. He has a perfect Slavic face, like one of the ballet dancers who defected in the seventies. High cheekhones, straight black hair. His hands are resting on stacks of colored chips. He doesn't move a muscle. His attention is directed toward the card shoe next to the dealer, as if he is now focusing all his energy to influence the outcome of the game.

"Possible blackjack. Insurance, gentlemen? Sixteen. Would you like a hit? Seventeen, nineteen, too many . . . "

"A parasite that has eaten him up from the inside and now takes up more room than he does. He comes here cvery night until he has lost everything. Then he works for six months. Then he comes back and loses it all."

He presses his mouth to my ear. "Captain Sigmund Lukas. Last week he lost the last of it. Had to borrow money from me for a pack of cigarettes and a cab home."

His age is indeterminate. He might be in his mid-thirties to mid-forties. Maybe he's fifty. As I watch him, he wins and rakes a tall stack of chips toward him.

"Each chip is worth 5,000 kroner. We had them made last month. Each table has a different limit. This is the high-roller table. Minimum bet 1,000 kroner, maximum 20,000. With the right to double down, and with an average playing time of a minute and a half per deal, it means that you can win or lose 100,000 kroner in five minutes."

"If he's broke, whose money is he playing with today?"

"Today he's playing with Uncle Lander's money, honey."

He pulls me along with him. We stand with our backs to the bar. A tall, frosted glass is placed next to him. It has been in the freezer and is covered with a thin layer of ice, which now melts and starts to slide off. It's full of a clear, amber-colored liquid.

"Bullshot, honey. Eight parts vodka, eight parts beef bouillon."

He ponders something.

"Take a look at our customers. There are all kinds of people. A lot of lawyers come here. Quite a few contractors. Several boys who have a fat allowance from home. The heavy artillery of the Danish underworld. They can walk right up and exchange whatever they want for chips. And we haven't given in to the vice squad's demands to record the serial numbers on the bills. That's why this shop is one of the most important money-laundering centers for drug money. And then there's the little yellow-skinned ladies who run the organized prostitution with Thai and Burmese girls. There are quite a few businessmen and several doctors. There are some who travel around the world gambling. Last week a Norwegian shipowner was here. Today he might be in Travemunde. Next week Monte Carlo. In one day he won four and a half million. It was in the newspapers."

He empties his glass and pushes it aside. It's replaced with a full one.

"Such different people. But they have one thing in common. They're losers, Smilla. In the long run they all lose. This shop has two winners, the owners and the state. We have eight bureaucrats from the tax authorities here at all times. They change-like our croupiers-from the day to the evening shift, and finally to a `count' shift when the accounts are reconciled from three in the morning onward. There are also plainclothes police and plainclothes inspectors from the Internal Revenue Service who, like our own security people, make sure that the croupiers don't cheat, don't mark the cards, and don't make side bets with the guests. We're taxed according to our turnover by one of the world's toughest tax regulations on gambling. And yet in the casino's gambling rooms alone we have 290 employees: managers, dealers, head croupiers, security people, technical staff, and inspectors. In the restaurant and the nightclub there are an additional 250: cooks, waiters, bartenders, hostesses, bouncers, cloakroom attendants, show managers, inspectors, and the full-time hookers we also control. Do you know why we can afford to pay salaries to so many people? Just between you and me, it's because we make such a huge amount of dough off the people who gamble. For the government this sewer is the biggest sucker game since they put a toll on all ships passing through the Sound in the Middle Ages. On the following day the Norwegian shipowner lost what he had won. But we didn't leak that to the newspapers. There was a Thai bordello madam who dropped 500,000 kroner three times last week. She comes here every night. Every time she sees me she begs me to have the place closed down. As long as it exists, she won't have any peace: She has to come here. Before us there were illegal joints, of course. But that wasn't the same thing. It was mostly poker, which is slower and requires some knowledge of odds. Legalization has changed that. It's like an infectious disease that was once under control but has now been let loose. Here comes a young man who has built up a painting company. He never gambled until someone brought him in here. Now lie's losing everything. It cost 100 million kroner to build and furnish this place. But it's a gilded piece of shit."

"But you've got money in it," I say.

"Maybe I'm a rotten apple myself."

I've always been fascinated by the melancholy shamelessness with which Danes accept the enormous gap between their common sense and fheir actions.

"It's a business like this one that creates a case like Lukas. A very, very skillful seaman. Sailed his own little coaster in Greenland for years. After that he was responsible for building up a fishing fleet near Mbengano in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania, as part of the biggest Scandinavian project to aid developing countries. Never drinks. Knows the North Atlantic like no one else. Some people say he's even fond of it. But he gambles. That little bug has emptied him out. He no longer has a family or a home. And now he's reached the point where he's for sale. If the amount is big enough."

We go over to the table. A man who looks like a butcher is sitting next to Captain Lukas. We stand there for maybe ten minutes. In that time he loses 120,000 kroner.

A new dealer comes up behind the woman with the red nails and taps her lightly on the shoulder of her black coatdress. Without turning around she finishes the game. Sigmund Lukas wins-as far as I can tell, about 30,000 kroner. The butcher loses the last of the chips in front of him. He gets up, his face expressionless.

Red Nails introduces her successor. A young man with the same superficial charm and politeness that she possesses. "Ladies and gentlemen, here is a new dealer. Thank you."

"Would you like to play, honey?"

He's holding a stack of chips between his thumb and forefinger.

I think about the 120,000 that the butcher lost. The annual net salary for one of us ordinary Danes. Five times the annual salary of one of us ordinary Inuits. Never in my life have I seen such disrespect for money.

"You can flush them down the toilet," I say. "At least there you have the pleasure of hearing the flush."

He shrugs. For the first time Captain Lukas lifts his cat eyes from the felt and looks at us. He scrapes up his chips, stands up, and leaves.

We slowly follow him.

"Are you doing this for my sake?" I ask Lander.

He takes my arm, and now his expression turns serious. "I like you, honey, but I love my wife. I'm doing this for Føjl's sake."

He thinks for a moment. "You can't say much good about me. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I work too much. I neglect my family. Yesterday, as I was lying in the bathtub, my oldest came in and stared at me and said, `Dad, where do you live?' My life isn't worth much. But whatever it's worth, I owe to that little Føjl."

Captain Lukas is waiting in a small glass veranda that juts out over the water. I sink down onto the bench on the other side of the table; the mechanic materializes out of the blue and slips in next to me. Lander remains standing, leaning against the table. Behind him a female waiter closes a sliding door. We're alone in a little glass box that seems to be floating on the Sound. Lukas has turned away from us. In front of him there is a cup with a black fluid that smells strongly of coffee. He's chain-smoking. Not once does he look at us. The words drip bitterly and reluctantly from his lips, like the juice from an unripe lime. He has a slight accent. I guess that he's Polish.

"One night in the winter they come to me here, maybe at the end of November. A man and a woman: They ask me how I feel about the sea north of Godthab in March. `Just like everybody,' I say. `I think it's hell.' Then we part. Last week they came back. Now my situation has changed. They ask me again. I try to tell them about the pack ice. About the `Iceberg Cemetery.' About the waters along the coast that are so full of drift ice and calving icebergs and ice avalanches.that go straight from the glaciers into the sea that even the Americans' nuclear-powcred icebreaker Northwind from the Thule base ventures through only every third or fourth winter. They pay no attention. They already know all about it. `How good are you?' they ask. `How good is your checkbook?' I say." "Any name? Any company?"

"Only the ship. A coaster. Four thousand tons. Kronos. Docked in South Harbor. They bought it and had it revamped. It's just come from the shipyard."

"Crew?"

"Ten men, I hire them."

"Cargo?"

He looks at Lander. The ship broker doesn't move. The situation is unclear. Up until now I thought he was telling me this because Lander had pressured him. Now that I see him close up, I drop that idea. Lukas doesn't take orders from anyone. Except maybe that bug inside.

"I don't know what the cargo is."

Bitterness bordering on self-hatred makes him rock back and forth for a moment.

"Equipment?" It's the mechanic who has spoken all of a sudden.

He holds off answering for a long time.

"An LMC," he says. "I've bought one of the navy's discards for them."

He puts out his cigarette in the coffee.

"The shipyard has equipped her with large booms. A crane. Special reinforcement in the forward cargo hold." He stands up. I follow him. I want to get him out of earshot, but the glass cage is so small that we've reached the wall almost at once. We stand so close to the glass that our breath forms fleeting white circles.

"Can I come aboard?"

He thinks for a moment. When he answers I realize that he misunderstood the question.

"I still need a stewardess."

The door slides open. In the opening stands a man with broad gray shoulders in a coat that a guest with less authority would have been forced to leave in the cloakroom.

It's Ravn.

"Miss Smilla. May I have a few words with you?" Everyone stares at him, and he bears their glances the way he presumably bears everything else, with rock-hard equanimity.

I walk several paces behind him. No one could tell that we know each other. He leads me down a wide corridor with plants and clusters of leather sofas. At the end is a hall full of slot machines. They're all in use.

A young man gives up his machine for us. He takes up a position some distance away and stands there.

Ravn takes a roll of 20-krone coins out of his coat pocket. "It would please me to have my wallet back." He's standing with his back to me, playing the machine.

"I have a regular shift here one day a week," he says. I can just barely hear his voice over the hum of the machine.

"Were we followed out here?"

At first he doesn't answer. "They're looking for you. The word went out fifteen minutes ago."

Now it's my turn to say nothing.

"There are always a dozen plainclothes officers on duty at this place. Plus our own representatives. If you stay here, you only have a few minutes of freedom. If you leave right now, I might be able to delay things a little."

I slip his wallet in front of him, along with a photograph and a newspaper clipping. He takes them without moving his eyes from the machine. His wallet disappears into one pocket and he glances at the photo and clipping. When he reaches back to hand me the clipping, the photo is gone. He shakes his head.

"I've done what I could," he says. "And what you haven't been given, you've taken yourself. Now it has to stop."

"I want to know," I say. "I'll do anything. Including selling you to the Toenail."

"The Toenail?"

"That flat, hard detective who keeps turning up."

He laughs for the first time. Then his smile is gone, as if it had never existed. His image in the glass in front of him is a lifeless reflection against the machine's multicolored, wildly spinning cylinders. But when he speaks I know that I've hit home somehow.

"Chiang Rai, on the border between Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. The region is dominated by feudal princes. The most powerful is Khum Na. A standing army of 6,000 men. Offices all over the Far East and in major Western cities. Regulates the entire world trade in heroin. Tørk Hviid worked in Chiang Rai."