Elsa Lübing—David Ving

Elsa Lübing’s relationship with David Ving is a twenty-year working partnership whose decisive turn comes when his authority overrides her insistence on honest, verifiable accounts. As finance director, Ving held extraordinary influence over a corporation with opaque lines of accountability; as chief accountant, Lübing was made to record a suspicious payment without being told what it meant. Her later examination of the 1991 Gela Alta expedition’s books reveals a 450,000-kroner payment for a ship charter, linking their history of compromised bookkeeping to the concealed voyage at the center of the investigation.

Positions and imbalance of power

The relationship takes shape inside a corporation that was partly state-supported, with the government holding 33.33 percent of its shares and represented on its board. Its accounts were open in some respects: copies were made by photostat, and parts were reviewed by the Audit Department. Yet cooperation with private-sector organizations and a company hierarchy also produced complex arrangements and sections of the books that even Lübing could not see. Alongside the main bound ledgers, she says, there had to be a smaller confidential ledger. The formal record was therefore extensive without being complete, and Ving’s position gave him room to act within that gap.

The division of corporate responsibility made that imbalance unusually consequential. Management was accountable to the board and ultimately to stockholders, but Ving was the finance director and executive chairman of the board. The quarry director and sales director were often away; Lübing says that for many years Ving made the corporation’s important decisions. Although she describes him as an attorney and accountant with political and civic credentials, the same concentration of expertise and authority that made him appear trustworthy also left few effective checks on his decisions.

Share ownership further weakened oversight. Apart from shares held by Ving and the government, the stock was divided among the heirs of the eight partners who had acquired the original mineral rights. They could not all be assembled for a general stockholders’ meeting, where auditors were chosen. An auditor who opposed Ving also risked losing a major corporate client, and professional connections overlapped: the corporation’s auditor through the 1960s later became Ving’s colleague in his law practice. Lübing’s account thus places her personal obedience within a structure in which formal scrutiny existed but was difficult to mobilize against the finance director.

The unexplained entry

On January 7, 1967, while balancing the semiannual accounts, Lübing found an unitemized entry for 115,000 kroner, a substantial sum at the time. The amount might have escaped notice in a sales volume of 50 million kroner, but her daily work with the books made the absence significant. She searched for the corresponding file card. The cards were numbered, and the one that should have documented the transaction was missing.

Lübing took the discrepancy to Ving. After listening and looking down at his papers, he told her that he had authorized the entry, that itemizing it had been too difficult for technical bookkeeping reasons, and that the auditor considered the listing acceptable accounting practice. He then declared the matter outside her sphere of expertise. The answer did not resolve the missing documentation; it used professional authority and the language of accepted procedure to close off her inquiry.

She returned to her desk and entered the figures as instructed. Lübing later describes this act as making herself an accomplice to something she did not understand and had never understood. Her account distinguishes the injury from a mere insult to her professional competence: the deeper violation was that she had allowed the ideals of honesty she worked by to be compromised. Ving’s instruction therefore creates the central moral fact of their relationship. He does not need to persuade her that the entry is properly explained; his authority is enough to make her record it.

The second reckoning

The question of the books returns near the end of Lübing’s career. The corporation was computerized in 1977, but she never understood the system and asked to keep manual accounts. When she retired in 1992, the finance director proposed that she leave the final balancing to the office manager. She insisted on completing it herself, preserving her role as the person who checked the figures rather than simply handing on the task.

Three weeks before her last workday, on January 7—exactly twenty-five years after she found the unitemized payment—Lübing was working with the accounts for the previous summer’s Gela Alta expedition. She took out the old books and compared them item by item with the new ones. Although the 1991 expedition had been financed through the Scientific Commission, a practice that had become common, she found that comparison possible. The largest entry in the newer accounts was 450,000 kroner, so she called the commission and asked for an itemization.

A later letter reprimanded her for going over her immediate superiors with that request. But, she explains, the answer had already come by telephone: the 450,000 kroner had been used to charter a ship. The echo of the earlier episode is exact in its essential features—a large entry, a question about its documentation, and institutional pressure on the person asking. This time, however, Lübing pursues the question instead of simply entering the figure and leaving it there.

Disclosure and significance

When Smilla asks who the finance director is, Lübing identifies him as David Ving and says that he is due to retire the following year and runs the law firm Hammer & Ving. The information turns her account from a recollection of compromised bookkeeping into a practical lead in Smilla’s inquiry. Her testimony gives a name and a professional address to the official whose past authority shaped the disputed records.

The relation also clarifies how the novel’s hidden arrangements can survive inside respectable institutions. The books are not simply absent: they are bound, copied, audited in part, and governed by practices that can be described as acceptable. Yet missing cards, confidential accounts, concentrated decision-making, and the threat of losing business make the appearance of procedure a weak guarantee of accountability. Lübing’s two January examinations expose the human cost of that system: first, her obedience turns her into an unwilling accomplice; later, her insistence on checking the books helps disclose the ship charter. The bond between her and Ving is therefore less a personal alliance than a durable conflict between the authority to authorize a transaction and the responsibility to make it legible.