Smilla escapes Copenhagen aboard the Kronos

Smilla escapes Copenhagen aboard the Kronos by turning an apparent police trap at Moritz’s house into a carefully staged departure. With Moritz’s unexpected help, she evades the officers waiting outside, leaves Benja unable to alert them, and reaches the ship by boat with Birgo Lander. The escape ends not in safety but at the threshold of a new confinement: Smilla boards in the rain, leaving her box behind temporarily and entering the dark cargo passage alone.

The trap at Moritz’s house

Moritz is alone in the living room while Benja waits in the pantry with a glass of cold milk. Outside, the snow has obscured the garden; inside, Smilla can see the box delivered to her old room. The Toenail is at the house, and the garage offers a route for the police to reach her. From the parlor, Benja watches toward Øresund and expects the officers to catch Smilla, whom she regards as a fake Greenlander. The house that Smilla has spent years trying to escape has become the setting of another forced confrontation.

Confession and reversal

Smilla steps into the parlor and calls Benja by name. Benja turns sharply, then freezes; Smilla says nothing more, but gestures for her to go into the living room. Moritz sees his daughter in the doorway, and his face grows more careworn. Benja stands beside him and admits that she made the call. Her confession identifies her as the source of the threat that brought Smilla back into the house, but Moritz’s response changes the balance: when Benja asks whether he will go out to the officers or send her, he tells her to stay and asks Smilla what he can do.

The reversal is quiet, not reconciliatory. Smilla and Moritz measure one another, and she gives him a practical plan rather than an appeal for affection. He is to bring his car close to the back door, load the box unseen, and let Smilla lie on the floor in the rear. Benja stays behind as Moritz carries the box out; he returns in rubber boots, an oilskin coat, and cap, then leaves without explanation. The familiar house becomes a passageway, its exits and sightlines arranged to conceal the person it had seemed poised to surrender.

The escape from the house

After Moritz leaves, Smilla understands that Benja still intends to send the officers after her. She steps close, grabs Benja through her leotard, and cuts off her windpipe with her other hand. Smilla holds her until Benja’s eyes widen and she drops to her knees; then she releases her, warning her to leave her alone. The threat is interrupted, not answered with a lasting assault: Benja remains silent, her face emptied by fear, while Smilla moves to the waiting car.

The car is positioned just outside the open foyer door. Smilla crawls onto the floor in the back, with her box on the seat and a blanket covering her; Moritz drives. At the garage, the Toenail thanks him for his help, unaware that Smilla is hidden behind him. The exchange lets the car pass the waiting police without exposing its passenger, converting Moritz’s house and vehicle from a place of capture into the first stages of her escape.

The crossing to the Kronos

At Skovshoved Water Ski Club, a broad wooden ramp descends from the high dock into the water. Birgo Lander is waiting there in a black waterproof sailing suit tucked into his boots. His vehicle is a high-bodied Land Rover, not the Jaguar, and beneath its black tarpaulin is a Zodiac made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom. Moritz tries to help, but Lander swiftly lifts the boat from the car, catches it on his head, and shoves it down the ramp. The escape now depends not on concealment inside a car but on crossing open water in winter weather.

Moritz stays by the railing rather than accompanying Smilla and Lander down the ramp. He asks whether there is anything he can do; Lander answers that he can get away fast. The small boat pulls from the land as if an invisible hand has taken hold of it beneath the water. Snow falls heavily, and within seconds Moritz disappears from view, turning back toward the car. Lander has a compass strapped to his left wrist. A break in the snowfall briefly reveals Sweden and two ships anchored northwest of Flakfort, between the shore and the central navigation channel. Lander identifies the starboard vessel as the Kronos.

At the ship, Smilla slings her box onto the platform herself. Lander stands for a moment in the rubber boat, rising and sinking with its movement, then turns away and pushes off. The gesture makes their separation immediate: he has brought her to the ship, but she must make the next passage alone. In the rain, with no one in sight, she tries to lift the box to the ladder and cannot manage it. She leaves it behind and climbs into the darkness beyond the single light. The escape thus delivers her to the Kronos without restoring her possessions or offering reassurance; it carries her from one dangerous enclosure toward an unknown one.

Boarding and the next confinement

The ladder ends at an open cargo door. A dim bulb lights a green corridor on the level of the second deck, where a boy sits smoking with his feet propped on a cable end box. His black steel-toed shoes, blue work pants, and blue wool sweater mark him as a worker, though he looks too young and too gaunt to be a sailor. Smilla enters this shadowed passage after leaving her box outside, and the first human presence she encounters aboard is the boy in the corridor. The chapter’s movement from the watched house to the ship therefore does not conclude in uncomplicated freedom: the crossing succeeds, but the darkness and the abandoned box announce the costs of beginning again aboard the Kronos.