"I'm used to being able to move freely aboard ship." I can't see his face; I can barely make out his profile.

"What ship? You only gave the captain your passport. I faxed the Marine Transport Commission. They've never issued a discharge book in your name."

For a moment the temptation to give up is overwhelming.

"I sailed on smaller ships. They never ask for papers outside the merchant fleet."

"So you heard someone mention this job and contacted Lukas."

It's not a question, so I don't reply. He's studying me. He probably can't see any better than I can.

"This voyage wasn't mentioned anywhere. It was kept secret. You didn't contact Lukas. You got Lander, the owner of a casino, to set up a meeting."

His voice is low, interested. "You sought out Andreas Licht and Ving. You're looking for something."

The ice seems to be slowly wandering toward us, across the sea.

"Who are you working for?"

It's the realization that he knew who I was from the very beginning that is so excruciating. Not since my childhood have I felt so strongly in someone else's power.

He didn't tell the mechanic that I would be on board. He wanted to observe our encounter. In order to see what there was between us. That was his primary objective in gathering us all together in the mess. It's impossible to guess what he has decided.

"Verlaine thinks it's the Danish National Police. I was leaning toward that opinion myself for a while. I had a look at your apartment in Copenhagen. And at your cabin here on board. You sem so alone. So unorganized. But maybe it's some corporation? A private client?"

For a moment I was about to sink back to await sleep, unconsciousness, and then oblivion. But the repetition of his question brings me out of my trance. He wants an answer. This, too, is an interrogation. He can't be a hundred percent sure who I am. Whom I have contacted. Or how much I know. I'm still alive.

"A child in my building fell off a roof. I found Ving's address in his mother's apartment. She gets a pension from the Cryolite Corporation as the result of her husband's death. This led me to the company archives and to what information was available on the expeditions to Gela Alta. Everything else stemmed from that."

"With whose help?"

All along there's been a sense of both urgency and indifference in his voice. As if we were discussing mutual friends or circumstances that had no real impact on us.

I never believed that people could be truly cold. Strained perhaps, but not cold. The essence of life is warmth. Even hatred is warm when unleashed on its natural target. Now I realize that I've been mistaken. A cold, overwhelming current of energy, physically real, emanates from this man next to me.

I try to picture him as a boy, try to hold on to something human, something understandable: a malnourished, fatherless boy in a shed in Brønshøj. Tormented, thin as a bird, and alone.

I have to give up; the image falters, shatters, and dissolves. The man beside me is rock solid, and yet fluid and running. A man who has risen above his past so there is no longer any trace of it.

"With whose help?"

This last question is the key one. What I know is not important. The important thing is who I've shared the information with. So he can figure out what's in store for him. Maybe this is where his humanity lies, in the traces of growing up with a sense of unfathomable insecurity: the need to plan, to make his world predictable.

I remove all emotion from my voice. "I've always been able to handle things myself."

He pauses for a moment. "Why are you doing this?"

"I want to understand why he died."

An extraordinary feeling of confidence can come over you when you're standing at the end of the plank with a blindfold over your eyes. I'm positive that I've said the right thing.

He takes in my answer. "Do you know why I'm going to Gela Alta?"

The "I" in his question reveals great candor. Gone is the ship, the crew, me, and his colleagues. The whole extraneous machinery is moving for his sake alone. The question holds no arrogance. It is simply an expression of fact. We are all here, for one reason or another, because he wanted us here and was able to make it happen.

I'm walking a tightrope. He knows that I've lied, that I didn't get here without someone's help. The fact that I was allowed on board at all tells him as much. But he still doesn't know whether he's sitting next to an individual or an organization. His doubt is my opportunity. I remember the faces of the hunters when they returned home; the more they had on their sled, the more remote their expression would be. I remember my mother's false modesty after fishing trips. It was her charade, but it was Moritz who pinned it down during one of his fits of rage: "It's best to underplay by 20 percent; 40 percent is even better."

"We're going to pick up something," I say. "Something so heavy that it requires a ship the size of the Kronos." It's impossible to tell what he's thinking. In the darkness, I sense only the presence of a force that registers and analyzes, manifested in extreme alertness. And again the image of a polar bear comes to mind: the way the beast realistically evaluates its own hunger, the defensive capability of its prey, and the situation in general.

"Why did you call my apartment?" I hear myself ask him.

"I found out a lot from that phone call. No normal woman, no normal human being would have picked up that phone."

Together we step out onto the platform, which now has a light coating of ice. Every time a wave rams the hull, we can feel the strain of the engines as the pressure on the propeller increases.

I let him go first. A person's power is usually diminished when he steps outdoors. But not Tork's. He fills the space and the watery gray light around us with his own radiance. I've never been so afraid of anyone.

Out on the platform I suddenly know that he was up on the roof with Isaiah. That he saw him jump. This certainty comes to me like a vision, still without details, but absolutely unshakable. At that moment, across time and space, I share Isaiah's terror; at that moment I'm up on the roof, too.

Standing with his hands on the railing, Tørk looks into my eyes.

"Step back, please," he says.

Our mutual understanding is complete; words are hardly necessary. He had imagined a possibility-that he would take a step down the ladder and I would come forward, tear his hands away, and kick him in the face, letting him fall backward, plunging the sixty-five feet to the deck below, which looks so small from here, as if he might not even hit it.

I step back until I'm up against the railing. I'm almost grateful to him for taking this precaution. The temptation would have been too great.

Twice I've made trips to Greenland when I didn't look in a mirror for six months. On the trip home I would carefully avoid mirrors on the plane and in the airports. When I finally stood in front of a mirror in my apartment I clearly saw the physical manifestations of the passage of time. The first gray hairs, the network of wrinkles, the ever deepening and sharpening shadows of the bones beneath my skin.

Nothing was more reassuring to me than the knowledge that I would die. In these moments of clarity-and you see yourself clearly only when you see yourself as a stranger-all despair, all gaiety, all depression vanish and are replaced by calm. For me death was not something scary or a state of being or an event that would happen to me. It was a focusing on the now, an aid, an ally in the effort to be mentally present.

Sometimes on summer nights Isaiah would fall asleep cm my sofa. I don't remember, exactly what I would be doing; I probably sat there watching him. At some point I would touch his neck and feel that he was too hot. Then I would cautiously unbutton his shirt and pull it away from his chest. I would get up and open the window to the harbor, and at that moment we would be somewhere else. We were at Iita, in the summer tent. Light is seeping through the canvas, as if from a full moon. But it's the fabric of the tent that colors the light blue, because when I open the tent flap it's the dull red light of the midnight sun that falls over him. He doesn't wake up; he hasn't slept for twenty-four hours. We haven't been able to sleep in the endless light, but now he has collapsed. Maybe he's my child; that's how it feels. And I look at his chest and his throat, and watch his breathing and his rapid pulse beneath the brown flawless skin.