There's something honest about an industrial harbor. There are no royal yacht clubs here, no promenades, no energy wasted on façades. There are silos for raw materials, warehouses, container cranes.

Inside an open doorway there is a steel hull. We go up a wooden ladder and reach the deck. We sit on the bridge and look out across the white deck. I lay my head on his shoulder. We're sailing. It's summer. We're sailing north. Maybe north along the coast of Norway. Not very far from shore, because I'm afraid of the open sea. Past the mouths of the great fjords. The sun is shining. The sea is blue and clear and deep; as if we had a huge mass of fluid crystal beneath the keel. There's a midnight sun, a reddish, almost leaping disk of light. A faint song of the wind in the guy wires.

We walk out to the marina. Men in smocks ride past on bicycles, turning around to stare at us, and we laugh at them, knowing that we are radiant.

We wander along the quiet docks until we're frozen stiff. We eat in a little cafe that's built onto a smokehouse. Outside, the clouds bow for a brief moment to an extraordinary red sunset that makes the colors on the hulls of the fishing vessels shift from blue-white to rose to purple.

He tells me about his parents. About his father, who never says anything, who is a carpenter and one of the last people in Denmark who knows how to make a winding staircase that twists up toward the sky in a perfect wooden spiral. About his mother, who test bakes cakes for the food pages of women's magazines, cakes that she can't even taste because she's diabetic.

When I ask him how he came to know Birgo Lander, he shakes his head and falls silent. Across the table I caress the side of his jaw, marveling at the way life can suddenly allow us to experience happiness and ecstasy with someone who is a complete stranger.

Outside, night has fallen.

Even in the dark, even in the winter, the wealthy suburb of Hellerup belongs to another dimension than Copenhagen. We've parked the car on a quiet, hushed road. The snow gleams white along the curb and along the high walls surrounding the villas. In the gardens evergreen trees and shrubs form dense black surfaces, like the edge of a forest or the side of a mountain, above a white carpet of snow.

There are no streetlights. And yet we can see the house. A tall white villa standing where the road on which we've parked dwindles down to a lane.

There is no hedge or fence around the house. From the sidewalk you can step directly onto the lawn. Upstairs, on the third floor, there's a light in a window. Everything seems well kept, newly painted, expensive, and discreet.

A few steps from the sidewalk there's a sign on the lawn lit by a lamp. The sign says GEOINFORM.

We were just going to drive by to look at the building. We've been here for an hour now.

It has nothing to do with the house. We could have parked anywhere. And for any length of time.

A police car stops alongside us. It has passed us twice before. Now they've gotten curious.

The officer addresses the mechanic across me. "What's going on here, buddy?"

I stick my head out the window toward the patrol car. "We live in a one-room apartment, Mr. Commissioner. A basement apartment on Jøgersborg Street. We have three children and a dog. Sometimes we just need a little private life. And it can't cost anything. So we drive out here."

"All right, ma'am," he says. "But drive somewhere else for your private life. This is the embassy district." They're gone. The mechanic starts the car and puts it into gear.

Then the light goes out in the house in front of us. He slows down. We creep down toward the lane with our headlights off. Three figures come out onto the stairway. Two of them are merely dark spots in the night. But the third instinctively seeks out the light. A fur coat and a white face catch the light. It's the woman I saw talking to Andreas Licht at Isaiah's funeral. She tosses her head, and the dark hair flows into the night. Now that I see this gesture repeated, I realize that it's an expression not of vanity but of self-confidence. A garage door goes up. The car comes out in a flood of light. Its headlights sweep over us and then it's gone. Behind it the door slowly closes.

We're following the car. Not close, because the lane is deserted, but not far behind either.

If you drive through Copenhagen in the dark and allow the surroundings to slip out of focus and blur, a new pattern appears that is not visible to the focused eye. The city as a moving field of light, as a spiderweb of red and white pulled over your retina.

The mechanic is relaxed when he drives, almost introspective, as if he were about to fall asleep. He makes no sudden movements, and there is no sudden braking, no real acceleration; we simply float through the streets and the traffic. And the whole time, somewhere ahead, like a wide, low silhouette, is the car that is leading us.

The traffic grows more sporadic and finally vanishes altogether. We're on our way out toward Kalvebod Wharf.

We drive out to the wharf very slowly, our headlights off. Several hundred yards ahead, on the dock itself, a pair of red taillights wink off. The mechanic parks along a dark wooden fence.

The relative warmth of the sea has created a mist that swallows up the light. Visibility is about a hundred yards. The opposite side of the harbor has vanished in the darkness. The waves are languidly slapping against the wharf.

And something is moving. No sound, but a black crystallization of a point in the night. A field of blackness systematically moving between the parked cars. Twenty-five yards away from us the movement stops. A person is standing next to a light-colored refrigerated trailer. Above the figure there is a lighter spot, as if from a white hat or a halo. He doesn't move for a long time. The mist grows a little thicker. When it disperses, the figure is gone.

"He was feeling the c-car hoods. To see if they were warm."

He's whispering, as if his voice could be heard in the night.

"A c-cautious man."

We sit quietly, letting time pass through us. In spite of this place, in spite of the unknown we're waiting for, it feels like a flood of happiness to me.

By his watch about half an hour passes.

We don't hear the car. It appears out of the fog, its headlights turned off, and passes us with an engine sound that is merely a whistle. Its windows are dark.

We get out of the car and walk along the dock. The two dark contours that we could barely make out are ships. The closest one is a sailing ship. The gangway has been removed, and the ship is dark. A white plaque on the superstructure says; in German, that it's a Polish training ship.

The next one is a tall black hull. An aluminum stairway leads upward amidships, but it all seems empty and deserted. The ship's name is Kronos. It's about four hundred feet long.

We walk back to the car.

"Maybe we should go on board," he says.

I'm the one who has to make the decision. For a moment I'm tempted. Then comes the fear and the memory of the burning profile of the Northern Light against Iceland Wharf. I shake my head. Right now, at this moment, life seems too precious to me.

We call Lander from a phone booth. He's still at work. "What if the name of the ship was Kronos?" I say. He goes away and then returns. A few minutes pass as he turns the pages.

"Lloyd's Register of Ships lists five: a chemical tanker based in Frederiksstad, a sand dredger in Odense, a tugboat in Gdansk, and two `general cargo' ships, one in Piraeus and one in Panama."

"The last two."

"The Greek one is a 1,200-ton ship, the other 4,000 tons." I hand the ballpoint pen to the mechanic. He shakes his head.

"I'm no good at numbers, either."

"Any picture?"

"Not in Lloyd's. But quite a few statistics. Four hundred and fifteen feet long, built in Hamburg in '57. Reinforced for ice."