He searched her face for a lie. Ava tried to smile, but it was difficult to make it natural when she was still breathing through her mouth.
“Okay, I guess it can’t hurt,” he said. He wrote the number on a yellow Post-it pad, tore off the sheet, and passed it to her.
She read, “Jan Sorensen, Tjorn, Faeroe Islands.”
“The village has fewer than a thousand people. You can’t fart without everyone knowing. I write to him, I send him things, and I know the letters always get through because he always replies.”
“He still has a bank account in Skagen,” she said.
“How would you know that?”
“When we were trying to trace him, my client still had that information from their last transaction.”
“The statements come here. I bundle them and send them every six months or so.”
Ava saw a tiny opening. “I may actually go to the Faeroes to see him. Would you like me to deliver his mail for you?”
“No,” he said.
So much for that, Ava thought. “If I were going to the Faeroes, Mr. Sorensen, what would be the best way to do it?”
“There is a ferry from Hanstholm.”
“And how long a journey is that?”
“Close to two days.”
“Ah, how about flying?”
“You can fly.”
“From?”
“I’m not a travel agent,” he said.
“That’s true,” Ava said, standing up.
“Tell me,” he said, looking up at her. “Those shark fins, what do they do with them?”
“They make soup.”
“I know that, but what kind of soup?”
“What do you mean?”
“I hear that it is a special kind.”
“Well, it’s traditionally served on special occasions: weddings, birthdays, honouring someone.”
“So it’s expensive, huh?”
She wondered what he was selling the fins for — maybe a couple of dollars a kilo. How would he react if he knew that a bowl of shark fin soup with only a few shreds of meat in it could cost anywhere from ten to fifty dollars? “I don’t know. I’m not in the fish business.”
Ava left the plant as quickly as she could, breathing through her nose every ten paces or so to test the air, but this time the odour didn’t abate even when she had reached her car. She climbed inside and the smell came with her. She had no doubt that it had penetrated her hair. It was starting to rain again, a cool, steady drizzle. She rolled down the driver’s-side window and drove away.
It was eleven thirty, still early morning in Toronto, and her travel agent wouldn’t be up yet. She found an Internet cafe on the outskirts of the town. The place was empty. She went online to search for flights to the Faeroe Islands. There was a direct flight from a place called Billund at two thirty. She checked a map; it looked like a two-hour drive. She couldn’t make it. The only other option was to fly from Aalborg to Copenhagen and catch an evening flight from there.
Ava drove from Hirtshals to Aalborg with the window still down. She was getting wet, but it was preferable to the stench. The flight from Aalborg left at three, and that gave her just over two hours to kill. She checked back in to the Hvide Hus, only too happy to pay the full day’s rate for a chance to shower.
The first thing she did in the room was strip off all her clothes. She found two plastic laundry bags in the closet, packed her clothing and running shoes into one, and then double wrapped it in the second bag.
Then she stepped into the shower and scrubbed and rescrubbed every pore of her body. She washed her hair three times. She stepped out of the shower and towelled herself off, then put on her blue-and-white pinstriped shirt and her cotton Brooks Brothers slacks. She finished off the look with her new cufflinks and her gold crucifix and applied a generous spray of Annick Goutal perfume. The laundry bag sat on the bed. She sniffed. No urine smell. She packed it into her carry-on.
The same woman who had rented her the car that morning was at the booth when Ava took it back. She took the keys, noted the mileage, and passed Ava her credit card slip to sign, all without saying a word.
The flight from Aalborg was supposed to take just less than an hour, but it left late and she had to run to catch the Atlantic Airways flight in Copenhagen. That flight was scheduled to last two and a half hours, and because the fare difference between business class and economy was so large, Ava had booked economy. About ten minutes after takeoff she realized she had made a mistake. For the next two hours the liquor trolley made steady trips up and down the aisle. Passengers were buying doubles of everything. Ava had never seen anything like it.
“This is their last chance,” the man in the seat next to her said. “The islands are dry. Liquor can’t be bought anywhere there, not even in hotels. And Customs is very strict about people bringing in alcohol. So this is their last chance to load up.”
“Thank God it isn’t a longer flight,” Ava said.
“Oh, it could be.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Vagar Airport gets a lot of mist and quite often the plane can’t land. They usually divert us to Reykjavik.”
“Iceland?”
“It isn’t so bad, though the people there are more depressed than ever since the country went bankrupt.”
“How are the Faeroe Islands?”
“People there are always depressed, or maybe I should say morose, regardless of what’s going on. It’s definitely a place where the glass is permanently half empty.”
“You are Faeroese?”
“No,” he said, extending a hand. “My name is Lars. I work for the Danish government. We still heavily subsidize the islands, and I fly there every month or so to make sure the money is being spent as it should be.”
“I’m Ava.”
“What on earth is taking you there?”
“A painter, an artist.”
“In the past you would see the occasional Japanese person there; they came to buy fish. There isn’t much fish left, so no more Japanese. You will be an exotic sight. You can expect to be stared at.”
“I’m Chinese, not Japanese.”
“Still, a very unusual sight in the Faeroes. The population is about ninety-four percent Faeroese — old Viking — and the rest a mixture of Danes, Norwegians, and Icelanders. There are only about forty thousand people. They’re outnumbered by sheep more than two to one.”
“I don’t have a hotel yet. Will that be a problem?”
“It shouldn’t be. Torshavn has lots of them, and at this time of year there aren’t many tourists.”
“The artist lives in a village near there, Tjorn.”
“I know the place. Quite picturesque. The Russian trawlers use it as a base. There’s a hotel there, actually, sort of a fisherman’s hotel. It’s not bad.”
“How about the weather? I didn’t bring a jacket — none that I can wear anyway.”
“It will be cool and most probably wet. It rains about 260 days a year. You can buy a locally handmade sweater at the airport; that should do you.”
“No snow?”
“Surprisingly, very rarely. The North Atlantic Current flows right around the Faeroes and gives it moderate temperatures. Nothing warm, mind you, but you know, ten degrees in the summer, two degrees in the winter, that type of thing.”
It was pitch black outside as they banked and started their descent into Vagar Airport. When Ava finally saw lights, they shone through a window that was streaked with rain.
For an airport so small there was a large contingent of customs officers standing behind a long wooden table. She soon saw why. They went through nearly every carry-on bag and patted down many of the passengers. Bottles of alcohol of all sizes began to cover the table. By the time she got to an officer there was enough to start a small liquor store.
Behind her was a row of wheelchairs occupied solely by men who looked too drunk to walk. As the chair behind her rolled, she could hear the clinking of bottles.
Lars walked with her into the terminal. He pointed out the sweater shop and a tourist information booth. “It’s about a one-hour ride by car into Torshavn since they built the tunnel under the sea from Vagar to Streymoy. Before that it was a couple of hours by ferry. We can share a cab if you want,” he said.