Her equanimity does not waver even for a second. The last few days I've been meeting people who view with the greatest calm the things that surprise me the most.

"The Devil assumes many forms."

"It's one of those forms that I'm searching for."

"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."

"That kind of justice is too long-term for me."

"It was my understanding that for the short term we have the police."

"They've closed the case." She stares at me.

"Tea," she says. "I haven't even offered you anything to drink."

On her way out to the kitchen she turns around in the doorway.

"Do you know the parable of the talents? It's about loyalty. There is a loyalty toward the worldly as well as the heavenly. I was an official of the Cryolite Corporation for forty-five years. Do you understand?"

"Every second or third year the corporation outfitted a geological expedition to Greenland."

We're drinking tea. Out of Trankebar royal porcelain, from a Georg Jensen silver teapot. Elsa Lübing's taste is, upon closer observation, more elegant than it is modest.

"The expedition in the summer of '94 to Gela Alta on the west coast cost 1,870,747 kroner and 50 øre, half of which was paid in Danish kroner, half in 'Cape York dollars,' the corporation's own monetary unit, named after Knud Rasmussen's trading post in Thule in 1910. That's all I can tell you."

I am sitting there rather gingerly. I had Rohrmann on Ordrup Road sew a silk lining into my kidskin pants. She didn't want to do it. She says that it makes the seams shred. But I insisted. My life depends on small pleasures. I wanted the combination of coolness and warmth from the silk against my thighs. But the price I pay is having to sit down cautiously. It's the back-and-forth movement against the chair that strains the seams. That's my minor problem during this conversation. Miss Lübing has a bigger problem. It is written, I think, that you should not make your heart a den of thieves, and she knows that there is some pressure on her right now.

"I joined the Cryolite Corporation in '47. When manufacturer Virl said to me on August 17, `You will receive 240 kroner per month, free lunch, and three weeks' vacation,' I didn't say a word. But inside I was thinking that it's true, after all. Look at the birds of the air-they neither sow nor reap. So will He not look out for you? At Grøn & Witzke on the King's New Square, where I came from, I had been getting 187 kroner a month."

The telephone is next to the front door. There are two things worth noting about it. The jack is pulled out, and there is no notepad, address book, or pencil. I noticed that when I came in. Now I begin to understand what she does with the stray telephone numbers that the rest of us write on the wall, on the back of our hands, or drop into oblivion. She deposits them in her tremendous memory for numbers.

"Since then, as far as I know, no one has ever had reason to complain about the corporation's generosity or openness. And whatever complaints there were have been satisfied. When I started, there were six cafeterias. A cafeteria for the workers, a lunchroom for office personnel, one for the skilled technicians, one for office supervisors and the chief accountant and the bookkeepers, one for the scientific staff over in the laboratory buildings, and one for the director and the board. But that was changed."

"Perhaps you made your influence felt?" I suggest.

"We had several politicians on the board. At that time Strineke, the minister of social welfare, was one of them. Since what I saw went against my conscience, I went to see him-on May 17, 1957, at four o'clock in the afternoon, on the very day I was named Chief Accountant. I said, `I don't know anything about socialism, Mr. Steincke, but I do know that it has certain things in common with the conduct of the first Christian congregation. They gave what they had to the poor and lived together as brothers and sisters. How can these ideas be reconciled with six cafeterias, Mr. Steincke?' He answered with a quote from the Bible. He said that you should render unto God what is God's, but also render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. But after a few years, there was only one cafeteria left."

When she pours the tea, she uses a sieve to prevent any leaves from getting into the cup. There is a piece of cotton under the teapot spout so it won't drip on the table. Something similar is taking place inside her. What's bothering her is the unaccustomed effort of filtering out what must not reach me.

"We are-were-partially state-supported. Not 50 percent like Øresund Cryolite Corporation. But the government was represented on the board and owned 33.33 percent of the shares. There was also a great openness about the accounts: Copies were made of everything on old-fashioned photostats. Portions of the accounts were examined by the Audit Department, the institution which, as of January 1, 1976, became the National Bureau of Auditing. The problem was cooperation with the private sector. With the Swedish Diamond Drilling Corporation, Greenex, and, later, with Greenland's Geological Survey. The half-time and quarter-time employees. This created complex situations. There was also the hierarchy. Every company has one. There were sections of the account books that even I didn't have access to. I had my account ledgers bound in gray moleskin stamped in red. We keep them in a safe in the archives. But there was also a smaller, confidential ledger. There must have been. It had to be that way in a large corporation."

" 'Keep them in the archives.' That's present tense."

"I retired last year. Since then I've been associated with the corporation as an accounting consultant."

I try one last time. "The accounts for the expedition in the summer of '91-was there anything special about them?"

For a moment I imagine that I'm on the verge of getting through to her. Then the filter slides back into place. "I'm not certain I remember."

I try one last time. Which is tactless and doomed in advance. "Could I see the archive?"

She merely shakes her head.

My mother smoked a pipe made of an old shell casing. She never told a lie. But if there was some truth she wanted to conceal, she would scrape out the pipe, put the scrapings in her mouth, say Mamartog, "Lovely," and then pretend to be unable to speak. Keeping silent is also an art.

"Wasn't it difficult," I say as I put on my shoes, "for a woman to be financially responsible for a large corporation in the fifties?"

"The Lord has been merciful."

I think to myself that in Elsa Lübing the Lord has had an effective instrument for manifesting His mercy.

"What makes you think the boy was being chased?"

"There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow."

She gazes wearily straight ahead. Suddenly her frailty is apparent.

"Snow is the symbol of inconstancy," she says. "As in the book of job."

I have put on my cape. I'm not very familiar with the Bible. But odd fragments from my childhood lessons occasionally get stuck on the flypaper of my brain.

"Yes," I say. "And a symbol of the light of truth. As in Revelation. `His head and his hair were white as snow.' "

She looks at me anxiously as she closes the door behind me. Smilla Jaspersen. The dear guest. Spreader of light. When she leaves there is a blue sky and good spirits. The moment I step out onto Hejre Road, the building intercom buzzes.

"Would you please come back up for a moment?" Her voice is hoarse. But that might be the fault of the underwater intercom.

So I ride up in the elevator again. And she receives me again in the doorway.

But nothing is as before, as Jesus says somewhere.

"I have a ritual," she says. "I open the Bible at random when I am in doubt. To get a sign. A little game between God and me, if you like."