"You're a relative?" he suggests. "A sister?"

He's no taller than me, but broad and with a stance like a ram about to butt someone.

"Doctor," he says. He points to the breast pocket of his lab coat and discovers that there is no name tag to identify him. "Damn it to hell."

I continue down the hallway. He's right behind me. "I have children myself," he says. "Do you know whether it was a doctor who found him?"

"A mechanic," I say.

He takes the elevator up with us. I suddenly feel a need to know who has touched Isaiah.

"Did you examine him?"

He doesn't answer. Maybe he didn't hear me. He strides on ahead of us. At the glass door he suddenly whips out a card, the way a flasher tears aside his coat.

"My card. Jean Pierre, like the flute player. Lagermann, like the licorice."

Juliane and I haven't said a word to each other. But as she gets into the taxi and I'm just about to close the door, she grabs hold of my hand.

"That Smilla is a damn great lady," she says, as if she were talking about someone who's not there. "One hundred percent."

The cab drives off, and I straighten up. It's almost noon. I have an appointment.

It says "State Autopsy Center for Greenland" on the glass door I come to after I walk back along Frederik V's Street, past the Teilum building and the institute of Forensic Medicine over to the new annex of the University Hospital; I take the elevator up past floors marked on the button panel as the Greenland Medical Association, the Arctic Center, and the Institute for Arctic Medicine, on up to the sixth floor, which is a penthouse suite.

That morning I had called police headquarters and they transferred me to Division A, who put the Toenail on the line.

"You can see him in the morgue," he says. "I also want to talk to the doctor." "Loyen," he says. "You can talk to Loyen."

Beyond the glass door there is a short passageway leading to a sign on which it says PROFESSOR and, in smaller letters, J. LOYEN. Below the sign there is a doorway, and beyond the door a cloakroom, and beyond that a chilly office with two secretaries sitting under photostats of icebergs on blue water in brilliant sunlight, and beyond that the real office begins.

They haven't put in a tennis court here. But not for lack of space. It's probably because Loyen has a couple of them in his back yard in Hellerup, and two more at his summer home on Dune Road in Skagen. And because tennis courts would have ruined the weighty solemnity of the room.

There's a thick carpet on the floor, two walls covered with books, picture windows looking out over the city and Fælled Park, a safe built into the wall, paintings in gold frames, a microscope on a light table, a glass case with a gilded mask that appears to be from an Egyptian sarcophagus, two sofa groups, two monitors on pedestals that have been turned off, and there's still enough floor space to go for a jog should you get tired of sitting behind a desk.

The desk is a vast mahogany ellipse from which he rises and comes forward to greet me. He is six foot seven and about seventy years old, straight-backed, and tan as a desert sheik in his white lab coat. He has a kind expression on his face, like someone who sits up on a camel benevolently gazing down on the rest of the world crawling past in the sand.

"Loyen."

Even though he omits his title, it's still understood. Along with the fact that we must not forget that the rest of the world's population is at least a head shorter than him, and here, under his feet, he has legions of other doctors who have not succeeded in becoming professors, and above him is only the white ceiling, the blue sky, and Our Lord-and maybe not even that.

"Please sit down, my dear."

He radiates courtesy and dominance, and I ought to be happy. Other women before me have been happy, and there will be many more. What could be better at life's difficult moments than having six feet seven inches of polished medical self-confidence to lean on? And in such reassuring surroundings as these?

On his desk are framed photographs of the doctor's wife and the Airedale and Daddy's three big boys, who are bound to study medicine and get top grades in all their exams, including clinical sexology.

I've never claimed that I was perfect. Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.

But I don't show it. I sit down on the very edge of the chair, and I place my dark gloves and the hat with the dark veil on the very edge of the mahogany surface. Facing Professor Loyen, like so many times before, there is a black-clad, grieving, inquiring, uncertain woman.

"You're a Greenlander?"

It's because of his professional experience that he can see it.

"My mother was from Thule. You were the one who… examined Isaiah?"

He gestures affirmatively.

"What I'd like to know is: what did he die of?" The question catches him a little off guard. "From the fall."

"But what does that mean, physiologically?"

He thinks it over for a moment, not used to having to explain the obvious.

"He fell from a height of seven stories. The organism as a whole quite simply collapses."

"But somehow he looked so unscathed."

"That's normal with accidental falls, my dear. But…"

I know what he's going to say: Until we open them up, that is. Then it's nothing but splinters of bone and internal bleeding.

"But he wasn't," he finishes his sentence.

He straightens up. He has other things to do. The conversation is drawing to a close without ever getting started. Like so many conversations before and after this one.

"Was there any trace of violence?"

This doesn't surprise him. At his age and in his business he is not easily surprised.

"None at all," he says.

I sit there in total silence. It's always interesting to leave Europeans in silence. For them it's a vacuum in which the tension grows and converges toward the intolerable. "What gave you that idea?"

He has now dropped the "my dear." I ignore his question.

"Why is it that this office and this department are not located in Greenland?" I ask.

"The institute is only three years old. Previously there was no autopsy center for Greenland. The district attorney in.Godthab would send word to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen whenever it was necessary. This department is new and temporary. The whole thing is going to be moved to Godthab sometime next year."

"And you?" I ask.

He's not used to being interrogated, and any moment now he's going to stop answering. "I'm head of the Institute for Arctic Medicine. But originally I was a forensic pathologist. During this initial phase I am the acting director of the autopsy center."

"Do you perform all of the forensic autopsies on Greenlanders?"

It's a shot in the dark. But it must have been a hard, flat shot all the same, because it makes him blink:

"No," he says, speaking slowly now, "but I sometimes assist the Danish autopsy center. They have thousands of cases every year, from all over the country."

I think about Jean Pierre Lagermann. "Did you perform the autopsy alone?"

"We have a set routine that is followed except in extraordinary cases. There is one doctor, with a lab technician or sometimes a nurse to assist him."

"Is it possible to see the autopsy report?"

"You wouldn't be able to understand it, anyway. And you wouldn't like what you did understand!"

For a brief moment he has lost his self-control. But it's instantly restored. "These reports are the property of the police, who formally request the autopsies. And who decide, by the way, when the burial can take place after they sign the death certificate. Public access to administrative details applies to civil matters, not criminal ones."