Polar Star (10 page)

“Women!” Slava was disgusted. “To reduce a subject of such importance as restructuring to so trivial a level. And I’m sick of you asking questions and going off in different directions. I have my own ideas and I don’t need assistance from you.”

Olimpiada looked over her shoulder to see Slava storm
out of the cafeteria. Natasha half turned from the television and fixed her black gaze on Arkady.

When he was a boy Arkady had little lead soldiers, the heroic General Davydov’s saber-wielding cavalrymen, the sly General Kutuzov’s artillerymen and the scowling grenadiers of Napoleon’s Grand Army, all kept in a box beneath his bed, where they rolled together in a melee as he took the box out, played with the pieces and then slid them back home. Like casualties, they soon lost their original coats and faces of paint and he daubed them afresh, less carefully each time.

Skiba and Slezko looked like a pair of those grenadiers toward the end of their careers: fierce, with mottled pink-and-gray chins, spots of gold in their teeth, identical except that Skiba had black hair and Slezko gray. They were on the midship deck, the same place they had been during the dance when their duty had been to watch the transport cage that carried the American fishermen from and to their boats.

“The
Merry Jane
was tied up to the
Eagle
, which was tied up to our starboard side?” Arkady asked.

“We prefer answering the third mate,” Skiba said.

“I can tell the captain that you refused to answer questions.”

Skiba and Slezko looked around the deck and then at each other until a telepathic decision was made.

“More private,” Slezko said. He led the way inside, downstairs, around a machine shop and through a door into a dank, badly lit room with sinks and stalls. The sinks were brown from the ship’s water; the stalls had concrete benches with holes. In Moscow, informers always wanted to meet in public toilets; in a desert, an informer would unearth a toilet to talk in.

Skiba folded his arms and leaned against the door as if he were temporarily in the hands of the enemy. “We will answer a question or two.”

“The arrangement of boats was as I described?” Arkady asked.

“Yes.” Slezko closed the porthole.

“Chronologically, by our time, when did the Americans leave?” Arkady opened the porthole.

Skiba consulted a notebook. “The captain and crew of the
Alaska Miss
returned to their boat at 2300 and immediately cast off. One crewman of the
Eagle
returned to his boat at 2329; then two others and the captain returned at 2354. The
Eagle
cast off at 0010.”

“When the trawlers cast off, how far did they go?” Arkady asked. “A hundred meters? Out of sight?”

“It was too foggy to tell,” Slezko said after much consideration.

“When the Americans left, did any Soviets see them off?” Arkady asked.

While Skiba referred to his notebook Arkady’s eye fell on the newspapers stuffed in baskets by the stalls; crumpled headlines on top announced,
BOLD REFOR
—and
NEW AGE O
—. Skiba cleared his throat. “The head rep Susan came out on deck with them. Captain Marchuk shook hands with Captain Morgan and wished him good fishing.”

“No undue fraternization,” Arkady said. “There was no one else?”

“Correct,” Skiba said.

“From 2230 on, who else did you see on deck?”

“Oh.” Skiba thumbed through his notebook, flustered but also angry, as if he’d known there would be a surprise question. “The captain I said already. At 2240, the Americans Lantz and Day headed aft.” He pivoted to be sure. “At 2315, Comrade Taratuta.” She was in charge of the captain’s quarters and galley.

“Which direction?”

As Slezko held up his left hand and then his right, Skiba faced the door and then away.

“From aft—” Slezko began.

“To forward,” Skiba finished.

“Thinking in new ways. What does this mean?” Gury asked. “The old ways meant Brezhnev—”

“No,” Arkady corrected him. “They may mean Brezhnev, but you don’t say his name. Brezhnev no longer exists, only the problems of old ways, obstructionism and foot-dragging.”

“It’s confusing.”

“All the better. A good leader mystifies people at least half the time.”

Gury had spent a month reading two American books,
In Pursuit of Excellence
and
The One-Minute Manager
, a feat of concentration that was religious considering how little English he understood. Arkady had translated much of these chronicles of business greed, and the collaboration had, at least in Gury’s mind, made them fast friends.

Now Arkady watched Gury test condoms in a tub. Users called them “galoshes,” and they came rolled in talc, two to a paper envelope. Powder exploded as he inflated each condom, tied it and plunged it under water. A film of talc covered his leather jacket.

The site Gury had chosen for this consumer review was an empty fuel bunker. Although the bunker had supposedly been flushed, there was an acrid edge to the air and the promise of a petroleum-based headache. In the absence of vodka, a lot of sailors sniffed fumes; they would be found laughing or crying uncontrollably or dancing off the walls. Or Thinking in New Ways, Arkady guessed.

As champagne-sized bubbles worked their way to the surface of the tub and broke through a scum of talc, Gury fumed. “Lack of quality control. Basic lack of management commitment and product integrity.”

He tossed the condom onto a growing pile of tested and rejected ones, unwrapped another one, blew it up
and held it underwater. His plan was not only to buy radios and cassette players in Dutch Harbor, but also to smuggle aboard as many batteries as possible in elastic, watertight containers that could be secreted in an oil drum.

Getting condoms was no problem; Gury ran the ship’s store. The problem was that the KGB had informers that not even Volovoi knew about. Someone always seemed to know about the book in the sand bucket or the nylon stockings in the anchor well. Unless, of course, Gury was himself one of those extra ears of the Committee for State Security. Everywhere Arkady had gone a different informer had appeared—in Irkutsk, at the slaughterhouse, even in Sakhalin. Setting out from Vladivostok on the
Polar Star
, he had simply assumed that one of his cabin mates was an informer, but whether it was Gury, Kolya or Obidin, paranoia could fight friendship just so long. Now they all seemed comrades.

“How will you get the batteries on board?” Arkady asked. “They’re going to search everyone coming back to the ship. Some they’ll strip-search.”

“I’ll come up with an idea.”

Gury was always coming up with ideas. The latest was a book that would teach anyone to Think in New Ways in a minute. “The crazy thing,” he went on, “is that I was convicted of Restructuring. I was doing away with state planning, offering initiatives—”

“You were convicted of illegally buying a state-owned coffee roaster, selling coffee privately, and doctoring the beans with fifty percent grain.”

“I was just a premature entrepreneur.”

Bubbles trailed to the surface and popped. “You sold condoms to Zina,” Arkady said.

“Zina was not a girl to take chances.” Gury threw the latest failure on the pile, picked up another and sneezed. “At least not that kind.”

“She bought them regularly?”

“She was an active girl.”

“Who with?”

“Who not? She wasn’t a slut necessarily; she didn’t take money; she didn’t like to be obligated.
She
did the choosing. A modern woman. Aha!” He tossed a condom on the good pile. “Quality is on the upswing.”

“Is this really where the country is headed?” Arkady asked. “A nation of entrepreneurs happily sorting out condoms, cars, designer furniture?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Gogol’s great vision of Russia was of a troika madly dashing through the snow, sparks flying, the other nations of the earth watching in awe. Yours is of a car trunk stuffed with stereo equipment.”

Gury sniffed. “I’m thinking in new ways. Clearly you’re not.”

“Who were Zina’s friends?” Arkady asked.

“Men. She slept with you; then she wouldn’t sleep with you again, but she didn’t hurt your feelings.”

“Women?”

“She got along with Susan. You’ve talked to her?”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic, isn’t she?”

“Okay.”

“She’s beautiful. You know how sometimes after a ship passes the wake will glow with a bioluminescence? Sometimes when I’ve just missed seeing her on the ship there will be that glow.”

“ ‘Bioluminescence’? Maybe you could bottle it and sell it.”

“You know,” Gury said, “there’s a hardness in you I worry about. Finding out you were an investigator has made me see you with new eyes. Like there’s someone else inside you. Look, I just want to make money. The Soviet Union is about to leave the nineteenth century, and there are going to be—” He found he was waving a condom as he spoke, laid it down and sighed. “Everything’s
going to be different. You were such a help to me with those books. If we could combine them with the inspirational words of the Party …”

In spite of himself, Arkady knew the clichés. They had poured from the Party like a rain of stones, rising to the ankles, to the knees. “Like, working class, vanguard of restructuring, both broadening and deepening ideological and moral victory?”

“Exactly. But not the
way
you say it. I believe in restructuring.” Gury found he was waving a condom again. “Anyway, don’t you think we should leave stagnation and corruption behind?” He caught Arkady’s glance at the tub. “Well, I wouldn’t call this corruption—not real corruption. Brezhnev’s daughter was smuggling diamonds, having orgies, fucking a gypsy.
That’s
corruption.”

“Zina had no special man?”

“You’re starting to sound like an investigator, that’s the scary part.” Gury tested another condom. “I told you, she was very democratic. She was different from other women. Let me give you some advice. Find out what they want to hear and then give it to them. If you get serious, Arkady, they’ll nail you like Obidin’s Christ on a cross. Lighten up.”

Gury seemed sincerely concerned. They were cabin mates and comrades, both with troubled pasts. Now that Arkady thought about it, who was he to sneer at another man’s aspirations, given the lack of any of his own except to lie low and survive? Where did this righteousness come from? He thought he’d killed it long ago. “Okay, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll think in new ways.”

“Good.” Relieved, Gury dunked another condom. “New and profitable ways, if possible.”

As an experiment, Arkady gave it a try. “Say you don’t just mask the smell from the Border Guard. Take another approach. When we get back to Vladivostok, misdirect
the dogs by getting them to sniff something else. Collect some dog or cat urine and smear it on some crates.”

“I like that,” Gury said. “The new Arkady. There’s still hope for you.”

8
It was evening when Arkady returned to the captain’s cabin. The sea-green walls gave the room a proper underwater aspect. Around the desk’s glittering collection of glasses and bottles of mineral water sat Marchuk, First Mate Volovoi and a third man, who was not much larger than a child. He had eyelids dark from lack of sleep, hair wild as straw and an unlit navigator’s pipe drooping from his mouth. What made him remarkable was that Arkady had never seen him before.

Slava had already begun. At his feet was a canvas sack. “After my visit to the
Eagle
, I conferred with First Mate Volovoi. We agreed that with the aid of the ship’s Party activists and volunteers, we would be able to canvass the crew of the
Polar Star
and determine the location of every crew member on the night of Zina Patiashvili’s disappearance. This enormous task was completed in two hours. We learned that no one saw Seaman Patiashvili
after the dance, and that no one was with her when she fell overboard. We made special inquiries among the co-workers of Comrade Patiashvili, as much to lay rumor to rest as to find answers. There are those whose first instinct is to turn accident into scandal.”

“Also,” said Volovoi, “we had to take into account our unusual situation, working with foreign nationals in foreign waters. Was undue fraternization with these nationals a factor in the tragic death of this citizen? Facts had to be faced. Hard questions had to be asked.”

This was good, Arkady thought. Here he’d been running around the ship while Slava and the Invalid were polishing a speech.

“Again and again,” Slava said, “these suspicions were put to rest. Comrades, there is no testimony with more weight in any socialist court than the thoughts of those workers who toiled side by side with the deceased. In the galley I heard it time after time. ‘Patiashvili was an unstinting cook’s assistant,’ ‘Patiashvili never missed a day,’ and”—Slava lowered his voice out of respect—“ ‘Zina was a good girl.’ Similar sentiments were echoed by her cabin mates; I quote, ‘She was an honest Soviet worker who will be badly missed.’ That from Natasha Chaikovskaya, a Party member and herself a decorated worker.”

“They will all be commended for their forthright statements,” Volovoi said.