"Miss Lübing."

I would never dream of using her first name. "The director of finance. Who is he?"

"He's going to retire next year. He runs his own law office. His name is David Ving. The firm is Hammer & Ving. It's located somewhere on Qester Street."

I thank her.

"God be with you," she says.

No one has ever said that to me before, outside of church. Maybe I've never had such a need for it before, either.

"I had a c-colleague who worked on the cleaning staff at the phone company's switching station on N¢rre Street." We're sitting in the mechanic's living room.

"He told me that they just call in and say that now they liave a court order. Then some clips are put on a relay and via the telephone network they can sit at police headcparters and tap all incoming and outgoing calls on a certain number."

"I've never liked telephones."

He has a big roll of wide red insulation tape and a little pair of scissors on the table. He cuts a long strip and attaches it to the telephone receiver.

"Do the same thing in your apartment. From now on, every time you make a call and every time someone calls you, you'll have to remove the t-tape first. That will make you remember that there might be an audience listening somewhere in the city. People always forget that telephones might not be private. The tape will remind you to he careful. If, for instance, you happen to make a declaration of love."

If I were going to declare my love to someone, I cerminly wouldn't do it over the phone. But I don't say anything.

I know nothing about him. Over the last ten days I've seen little drops of his past. They don't jibe. Like now, this knowledge of the procedure for tapping phones.

The tea he makes for us is another one of those little c1 rops that surprise me but that I don't want to ask about. He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste.

I tell him about my visit to Elsa Lübing. He now knows everything that I know. Except for a few details, such as Isaiah's cigar box and its contents, including a tape on which a man is laughing.

"Who, other than the Carlsberg Foundation, financed the expedition in '91? Did she know? Who arranged for the ship?"

I kick myself for not asking that precise question. I reach for the telephone. The receiver is taped on. "That's why the t-tape is there," he says. "After five minutes you'd forget all about it otherwise."

Together we walk over to the phone booth on the square. His stride is one and a half times as long as mine. And yet it still feels comfortable walking next to each other. He walks just as slowly as I do.

When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left.

You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

She picks up the phone at once. It strikes me how self confident her voice is.

"Yes?"

I don't give my name. "The 450,000 kroner. Who paid it?"

She doesn't ask me about anything. Maybe it has also been revealed to her that someone might be on the line. She thinks for a moment in silence.

"Geoinfarm," she says then. "That was the name of the company. They had two representatives on the Scientific Commission. They owned a block of shares. Five percent, as far as I can recall. Enough so that it had to be registered with the Trade Commission. The company is owned by a woman."

The mechanic has stepped into the booth with me. It makes me think of three things. The first is that he fills it up. If he stood up straight he could push the bottom out of it, and walk away with me and the booth.

The second thing is that his hands against the glass in front of me are smooth and clean. Used to hard work but smooth and clean. Occasionally he gets a job at a garage on Toftegard Square. How, I ask myself, can he mess around all day long with grease and socket wrenches and keep his fingers so smooth?

The third thing is that I'm honest enough to admit that there's a certain pleasure in standing next to him this way. I have to stop myself from prolonging the conversation solely for that reason.

"I've been thinking about something you asked me. About Berlin after the war. There was one other colleague. At that time he was not employed by us. But he was later on. Not at the quarry, but here in Copenhagen. As a medical consultant. Dr. Loyen. Johannes Loyen. He did some work for the Americans. I think he was a forensics expert."

"How does someone become a professor, Smilla?"

On a piece of paper we've made a list of names. There is attorney and CPA David Ving. Someone who knows something about ships. How to cover up the expenses of chartering one, for example, and send them as a Christnras present to little children in Greenland.

There is Benedicte Clahn. The mechanic found her in the phone book. If it's the same one, that is. It turns out that she lives two hundred yards from where we are now sitting. In one of the renovated warehouses on Strand Street. Which contain Denmark's most expensive condominiums. Three million kroner for nine hundred square feet. But then there's also a brick wall five feet thick to beat your head against when you figure out the price per square foot. And beams of Pomeranian pine to hang yourself from if the wall doesn't do the trick. He has written down her phone number next to her name.

And there are the two professors, Johannes Loyen and Andreas Fine Licht. Two men about whom we don't know an awful lot, except that their names are associated with both expeditions to Gela Alta. Two expeditions, about which we really don't know anything either.

"My father," I say, "was once a professor. Now that he isn't one anymore, he says that in most cases the people who become professors are clever without being too clever."

"So what happens to the ones who are too clever?"

I hate quoting Moritz. What can you do about people you don't want to quote but who are still the ones who have said it most succinctly?

"He says that they either rise up to the stars or they go to the dogs."

"Which of the two happened to your father?"

I have to think about that for a moment before I come up with an answer. "It's more like he's split in half," I say.

Silently we listen to the sounds of the city. The cars on the bridge. The sound of pneumatic tools from the night shift at one of Holmen's dry docks. The chimes of Our Saviour's Church. They say that anyone can get permission to play the bells in the tower: That's also the impression you have from listening. Sometimes it sounds like Horowitz, sometimes as if they picked up some obscure drunk at Cafe Hovlen.

"The Trade Commission," I say. "Lübing said that if you want to find out who controls a company or who sits on a board, you can look it up at the Trade Commission. Supposedly they have the balance sheets for all companies in Denmark listed on the stock exchange."

"It's on K-Kampmanns Street."

"How do you know that?" I ask.

He gazes out the window. "I paid attention in school."