Hammer & Ving

Hammer & Ving is the law office run by David Ving, the longtime finance director of the Cryolite Corporation. It connects the corporation’s opaque accounting and Greenland expedition funding to the discreet chartering practices through which ships could be sent on secret voyages. Its elegant offices present a respectable public face; Ving’s explanation of side contracts reveals the concealed machinery behind it.

Identity and Corporate Connections

The firm’s name appears in an address cut from a cardboard box and placed before Smilla: Hammer & Ving, at an address on Oster Street near the King’s New Square. The name matters because Ving, who is approaching retirement, also holds the corporation’s senior financial role. Elsa Lübing identifies him as the finance director and confirms that Hammer & Ving is his law firm.

His corporate authority rests on more than title. The government owned 33.33 percent of the Cryolite Corporation’s shares and had representation on its board, while private shares were dispersed among the heirs of eight original mineral-rights partners. Because those heirs could not all be assembled for a shareholders’ meeting, Ving gained unusually broad influence over decisions concerning Greenland’s economically important mineral rights. The same people also occupied overlapping roles: the corporation’s auditor in the 1960s later became Ving’s colleague in legal practice.

The Office and Its Public Face

Smilla and the mechanic enter the firm through a third-floor door bearing an engraved brass plate above an unusually wide mail slot, ample enough for the largest checks. Inside, a foyer opens onto adjoining offices furnished with shiny parquet, gilt-framed paintings, photographs of the Queen and Prince, and expensive furniture. The scene’s opulence is rendered as an atmosphere of money, a physical counterpart to the firm’s connection with corporate power.

The office is not merely a name on a letterhead. Smilla and the mechanic find it unoccupied and move through its rooms while cleaning. The polished setting and the workaday intrusion of a mop and wet rag place the firm’s prestige beside the practical labor of investigating it. Smilla uses the surroundings to draw Ving toward talk of ships and Greenland expeditions, turning the respectable reception rooms into the setting for questions about the business conducted behind their appearance.

Accounting, Oversight, and Concealment

Lübing’s account of the corporation makes clear why Ving’s dual position matters. The company kept extensive records, and portions of its accounts were examined by public auditors; nevertheless, some ledgers were inaccessible even to its chief accountant. She describes the ordinary ledgers as gray moleskin volumes stamped in red and kept in the archives, alongside a smaller confidential ledger that she believed must also exist. The contrast between visible accounting and restricted records gives corporate secrecy a material form.

On January 7, 1967, while balancing the semiannual accounts, Lübing found an unitemized entry for 115,000 kroner and could not locate its numbered file card. Ving told her that he had authorized the entry for technical bookkeeping reasons and that the auditor accepted it as good accounting practice, while insisting that further inquiry lay outside her expertise. Years later, as she compared the 1991 Gela Alta expedition books with the older accounts, she found a 450,000-kroner entry and learned by telephone that the money had chartered a ship. Her later letter rebuked her for bypassing her superiors, but the information had already disclosed the expenditure’s purpose.

Shipping Contracts and Narrative Significance

Ving explains that a ship is chartered, not simply rented, and that the contract can separate an acceptable public account from a concealed arrangement. The formal contract might name the destination as the entire world and the cargo as unspecified; a side letter could set out the actual destination and freight, while promising additional payment for discretion. He describes such agreements as common in Danish shipping and gives examples of unlawful cargoes, including coal from South Africa and ammunition for the Middle East. The explanation makes secrecy a contractual practice, not an isolated accounting irregularity.

That distinction illuminates the 450,000-kroner charge for the Gela Alta expedition: the books disclose that a ship was chartered, while the fuller purpose of a voyage may lie outside the ordinary paperwork. The firm therefore stands at the intersection of law, shipping, and corporate administration. Its imposing rooms signal legitimacy, but its partner’s account of side contracts shows how legal instruments can also structure concealment. The investigation’s discovery that the report from the 1966 expedition has been removed from the archives deepens the same pattern: records exist, are controlled, and can be missing precisely where they might clarify the past.