I page through the phone book. I can't find his car repair shop. I take a taxi out to Toftegards Square and walk along Vigerslev Avenue. There is no garage. From a phone booth I call the mechanics' association. The man I talk to is friendly and patient. But there has never been a car repair shop registered on Vigerslev Avenue.

I've never noticed until now how exposed phone booths are. Making a call is like putting yourself on display for instant recognition.

The phone book lists two addresses for the Center for Developmental Research, one at the August Krogh Institute and one at Denmark's Technical High School on Lundtofte Slope. At the latter address there's apparently a library and office.

I take a cab to Kampmanns Street, to the office of the Trade Commission. The boy's smile and tie and naivete are unchanged.

"I'm glad you came back," he says.

I show him the newspaper clipping. "You read foreign papers. Do you remember this one?"

"The suicide," he says. "Everybody remembers that. The consular secretary jumped off a roof. The man they arrested had tried to talk her out of it. The case raised a fundamental question about the legal rights of Danes abroad."

"You don't happen to remember the secretary's name, do you?"

He has tears in his eyes. "We studied international law at the university together. A wonderful girl. Ravn was her name. Nathalie Ravn. She applied for a job with the Ministry of Justice. They said-in local circles-that she might become the first female police commissioner."

"There's nothing 'local' left anymore," I say. "If something happens in Greenland, it's connected to something else in Singapore."

He gazes at me, uncomprehending and mournful. "You didn't come here to see me," he says. "You came about this."

"I'm not worth getting to know," I say, meaning it.

"You remind me of her. Secretive. And not someone you would picture behind a desk. I couldn't understand why she suddenly became a secretary in Singapore. That's a different Ministry."

I take the train to Lyngby Station and then catch a bus. In a way, it feels like when I was seventeen. You think that the despair will stop you cold, but it doesn't; it wraps itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside and forces the rest of your system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not be important but which keep you going, which guarantee that you are still, somehow, alive.

Between the buildings the snow is three feet high; only narrow corridors have been cleared.

They haven't finished remodeling the Center for Developmental Research yet. In the lobby they've put in a counter, but it's covered up because they're in the process of painting the ceiling. I tell them what I'm looking for. A woman asks me whether I have computer time reserved. I say no. She shakes her head, the library isn't open yet, the center's archives are kept on LTNIC at Denmark's Data Processing Center for Research and Training, the computer system for institutes of higher learning, which is not accessible to the general public.

I walk around among the buildings for a while. I was here many times in my student days. Our classes on surveying were held here. Time has changed the area, made it harsher and more alien than I remember it. Or maybe it's the cold. Or just me.

I walk past the computer building. It's locked, but when a group of students comes out, I go in. In the central room there are maybe fifty terminals. I wait for a while. When an elderly man comes in, I follow him. When he sits down, I stand behind him and pay attention. He doesn't notice me. He sits there for an hour. Then he leaves. I sit down at a free terminal and press a key. The machine writes: Log on user ID? I type LTH3-just as the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome to the Laboratory for Technical Hygiene. Your password? I type JPB. The way the elderly gentleman did. The machine replies: Welcome Mr. Jens Peter Bramslev.

When I type Center for Developmental Research the machine replies with a menu. One of the topics is Library. I type in Tørk Hviid. There is only one title. "A Hypothesis on the Eradication of Submarine Life in the Arctic Sea in Conjunction with the Alvarez Incident."

It's a hundred pages long. I scroll through them. There are timelines. Pictures of fossils. Neither the pictures nor the captions are legible in the poor resolution of the screen. There are various charts. Some diagrammatic, geological maps of the present-day Davis Strait in various stages of its creation. The whole thing seems consistently incomprehensible. I press on to the end.

After a long list of references there is a brief abstract of the article.

This article is based on the theory of physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Luis Alvarez from the 1970s. He proposed that the iridium content in a layer of clay between the chalk and tertiary sediments at Gubbio in the northern Apennines and at Stevn's Klint in Denmark is too big to be anything but the result of an extremely large meteor impact.

Alvarez theorizes that the impact occurred 65 million years ago, that the meteor was between four and nine miles in diameter, and that it exploded on impact, releasing energy comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT. The resultant ash cloud totally blocked out the sun for a period of at least several days. During this period several food chains collapsed. The result was that a large portion of the marine and submarine microorganisms were annihilated, which in turn prompted further consequences for the large carnivores and herbivores. On the basis of discoveries made by the author in the Barents Sea and Davis Strait, the article discusses the possibility that the radiation resulting from the explosion on impact might explain a series of mutations among marine-based parasites in the early Paleocene periods. The article also discusses whether such mutations might be the reason for massive extinctions of the larger sea animals.

I scroll through it again. The language is clear, the style clean, almost transparent. But 65 million years still seems like a very long time ago.

It's dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anesthetic.

In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favor of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone's face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.

With this way of seeing, a person's breath in the coldthat veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under 46°F-is not merely a phenomenon twenty inches from his mouth. It's something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal displacement. I've seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of 270 yards by aiming at the fog around them.

I am not a hunter. And I'm asleep inside. Maybe I'm close to giving up. But I sense him when I'm fifty yards away, before he hears me. He's standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strand Drive to the stairs.

In the city, in the Norrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn't mean anything. But on Strand Drive it is significant. And besides, I've grown hypersensitive. So I shake off my resignation, take several steps backward, and go into the neighboring yard.

I find the hole in the hedge that I used so often as a child, squeeze my way through it, and wait. After several minutes I see the other one. He's positioned himself at the corner of the porter's lodge, where the driveway curves up toward the house.