"You look unusually delicious tonight, sweetie."

"You don't look so bad yourself. Is that your Sea Scout uniform?"

He stiffens for a second. Only twelve hours have passed since we last met. But he has already forgotten the sensation.

Then he smiles at the mechanic. "She has a blank check to my heart."

They shake hands, and once again I note the almost imperceptible change in the shipowner. For a moment, while he's holding the mechanic's hand, his drunkenness and his self-styled, meticulously cultivated vulgarity give way to a gratitude bordering on adoration. Then he shows us inside.

I will never learn to be comfortable in ritzy places. With every step I take, I have the feeling that someone might appear at any moment to tell me that I have no right to be here. The mechanic isn't coping much better. He is slinking along several yards behind us, trying to pull his head down between his shoulders. Birgo Lander saunters along as if he owns the place.

"Did you know that I own a piece of the pie, sweetie? Don't you read the papers? Together with Unibank, which financed Marienlyst, and Casino Austria, which runs the casino at the Hotel Scandinavia and the ones in Arhus and Odense. I did it to keep myself from gambling. The owners are never allowed to play in their own casinos. The same is true for the croupiers and the dealers. Austria puts out a book with their photographs, and none of them can gamble at any of the company's other casinos, either."

He leads us through the restaurant. It's a large round room with a dance floor in the middle. In the background there's a long, dimly lit bar. On a raised platform a jazz quartet is playing, soft and anonymous. The tablecloths are pale yellow, the walls cream-colored, the bar stainless steel. All the walls are decorated with rivets, and the door Frames are three feet thick and furnished with bolts. The whole thing is designed to resemble a safe, and it's solid, expensive, and as oppressively cold and alienating as an end-of-the-season dance in a bank vault. Part of one wall lias windows facing the water. You can see the lights of Sweden and the other wing of'the casino with the gamWing rooms, illuminated like glass cages; jutting out into the water. Beneath the windows you can make out the gray ice floes along the frozen shore.

The mechanic falls behind. Lander takes my arm. Past us glide women in decollete gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos, gentlemen in lavender shirts and white dinner jackets, gentlemen in chamois T-shirts with gold Rolex watches and sun-bleached hair.

The room is an oval with a wall of glass, like a black barrier, facing the water. The only light comes from the dim lamps over the gaming tables. There are four curved blackjack tables and two big roulette wheels. A velvet rope hangs between the tables creating an enclosure. Behind it sit three chief croupiers, one at the card games, the others each in a tall chair, one at the end of the French roulette table and one at the American. There is an inspector for every two tables, a croupier at each table.

There is such a crowd of people that you can't see the playing surfaces. The only sound is the soft clicking of the chips being stacked up and the voices of the croupiers.

The gamblers are all men. A few Asian women are sitting at the tables. A few European women are watching without playing. The room is tense with deep concentration. The players' faces are pale in the light, absorbed, enraptured.

Occasionally a figure tears himself away from the table and disappears past us. Several with bowed heads, others with shining eyes, but most of them neutral, preoccupied. Several say hello to Lander; no one notices me.

"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."