Ravn

Ravn is an investigator for the district attorney who has survived inside a justice system he no longer trusts. His account of the Ministry of Justice exposes loyalty as the price of advancement and independent judgment as a liability; his conduct in the case of Isaiah's death shows the consequence of that insight. He can use the institution's tools to help Smilla, but he cannot make himself free of the institution or the danger she is pursuing.

Position and Institutional Critique

Ravn enters the investigation as a weary official, seated by a window in a swivel chair, with his coat, hat, and polished shoes arranged conspicuously around him. He greets Smilla and Peter Føjl, but the formality of his manner gives way to a candid account of the Ministry of Justice's internal culture. Advancement, he says, depends not just on exam results and ambition but, ultimately, on loyalty. Common sense, he suggests, may even be a disadvantage.

He divides his former colleagues into those who became judges, trusting in justice and the possibility of repair, and those who became investigators and prosecutors, trained to suspect that statements and incidents conceal what they purport to explain. That professional suspicion is useful only within limits. It must not be turned on one's own work or the Ministry. A bureaucrat must not doubt his own correctness; criticism from the press is referred upward, and even an article with a hint of criticism can be treated as disloyalty. In his account, the institution asks its employees to surrender independent personhood, and many comply because the state relieves them of the burden of deciding for themselves.

Ravn describes the system not as a place from which every skeptic is immediately expelled, but as one that can contain a difficult person by limiting his influence. A stubborn, observant investigator may remain if he becomes too experienced to replace, yet too troublesome to promote. The Ministry can then use his memory and tenacity in work kept out of public view, including intelligence assignments. That arrangement gives Ravn both access and constraints: he knows how the machinery works because he has remained inside it, but his survival depends on being kept within a niche.

The Investigation of Isaiah's Death

The complaint about the death of a little boy reaches Ravn as a special assignment. He says that the Ministry wants the complainant reassured—or, in its own language, pacified—while the case itself is politically awkward: it concerns a child's death and photographs of footprints on a roof. Ravn raises the possibility that the boy's death involved an irregularity, but receives no support from either the police or the Ministry. His suspicion therefore does not become an official investigation backed by the institutions that might pursue it.

The danger grows after a fire connected to Greenland kills a man whose name appears in the same report. Ravn tells Smilla that the morning before their meeting he was removed from the case on the stated ground of its complexity. His account links the boy's death and the fatal fire through a document already in the system, even as his dismissal prevents him from following that link openly. He does not claim to know the whole explanation; instead, he shows Smilla what the official response to a potentially embarrassing connection looks like.

Even after being taken off the case, Ravn makes use of what he learned during the initial investigation. He had borrowed a key from the custodian, made a copy, and used it to go through the basement rooms. He plans to leave by the same route. The copied key is a small but telling counterpoint to his official position: his access comes from the investigation, while his continued movement through the building depends on a private copy and an exit kept beyond ordinary view.

Warning Smilla and Preserving Evidence

Ravn recognizes that the burned ship has not erased every trace. Its telephone survived, and its memory stored the last number called: Smilla's. He warns that she will probably be summoned for questioning. The clue makes the telephone a link between the fire and her, while Ravn's attention to it reveals that he is still assessing the case despite his formal removal.

Later, at the casino, Ravn finds Smilla among people watched by plainclothes officers and representatives of his own side. He tells her she has only a few minutes of freedom if she stays, and that leaving immediately may give him time to delay the response. Their conversation takes place at a slot machine, with Ravn keeping his eyes on it while he receives the wallet, photograph, and newspaper clipping she has brought. He returns the clipping, but the photograph has disappeared into his pocket. The exchange is practical and guarded: he neither stages an open alliance nor denies that he is helping her.

Ravn draws a boundary even as he assists her. He tells Smilla that he has done what he could and that she has taken for herself what she was not given; now, he says, it has to stop. Smilla answers that she wants to know and is willing even to sell him to the Toenail. At the name, Ravn laughs for the first time, then quickly loses the smile. His reaction suggests that her threat has touched a real point of vulnerability, though he does not explain it. He continues with information rather than a confession.

Ravn discloses that Tørk Hviid worked in Chiang Rai, where the powerful Khum Na controlled an extensive heroin trade, and that Hviid was a microbiologist specializing in radiation mutations. In laboratories devoted to processing opium poppies, Hviid worked on irradiating poppy seeds to increase their yield. There were rumors that he had developed Mayam, a raw, boiled-down but uncrystallized substance said to be twice as strong as any known heroin. Ravn also describes a transport engineer's role in arranging the movement of antiques from the Far East, including an airlift from Singapore through Japan to Switzerland, Germany, and Copenhagen to avoid Middle Eastern airspace. He does not resolve every connection Smilla asks about; when she asks what Hviid discovered in Greenland, he says that nobody knows and tells her to put it out of her mind. His account supplies a far-reaching criminal context but stops short of a complete explanation.

The Man Behind the Office

Ravn's institutional position is also visible in the objects he carries. When Smilla examines his wallet, it contains credit cards, Danish kroner, and a plastic card bearing a black embossed crown that grants him parking rights in the Ministry's lots at Slotsholm. A tailor's bill for 8,000 kroner includes a fabric sample and a description of a gray Lewis tweed overcoat delivered on October 27, 1993. Smilla realizes that his broad-shouldered coats are not accidental or secondhand: he spends heavily to create the impression of extra breadth. The discovery alters the image she has formed of him, bringing him into a more conciliatory light without erasing her doubts.

The wallet also contains a baby tooth. Peter Føjl identifies it as such, and the photographs tucked behind it show an older white-haired woman among children and grandchildren, including scenes of her pushing a child on a swing, cutting a cake, and holding a baby. A younger woman in the pictures has the older woman's jaw and Ravn's gauntness. These family photographs and the tooth give his otherwise official, guarded presence a private dimension. They are evidence of attachments, not an explanation of his actions; the narrative leaves the family life they imply largely outside the case.

Help, Limits, and the Unresolved Choice

At the casino, Ravn urges Smilla to visit a friend, invent a plausible explanation for having been aboard the boat, and turn herself in to the police with a good lawyer. He predicts she will be free in two days and tells her to forget the rest. This advice is consistent with his warning that the powerful and talented are seldom punished, but it also reveals the limit he places on his help: he can buy time, pass along information, and try to shield her from a search, yet he cannot promise justice or safety if she continues.

Ravn has also taken a cassette tape from Smilla's apartment, saying he did so to protect her in case of a search. He does not simply hand it over when she reaches for it. His choice to retain the tape keeps the evidence—and its risks—in his control, even as he presents the act as protective. The scene ends with Smilla asking why he is doing this. The question remains unanswered in the supplied account. Ravn therefore occupies no simple role as either ally or adversary: his conduct repeatedly helps her, while his insistence that she stop and his withholding of the tape preserve the distance between them.

As a character, Ravn embodies the contradiction of an insider who understands institutional compromise without having escaped its reach. His critique of loyalty comes from lived proximity, not from an external vantage; his own methods—quiet access, delayed enforcement, selective disclosure, and concealed evidence—mirror the secrecy he condemns. The wallet, the copied key, the surviving telephone record, and the cassette each make his position concrete: he can intervene because he belongs to the system, and every intervention risks exposing how little control he has over what the system finally does.