Polar Star (18 page)

The other officers hadn’t brought their wives, so the general had them dance with his. They were pleased; none of their wives was as slim and tall and beautiful. “Katerina, get in the spirit!” the general would order. From the porch, the young Arkady felt the floor shake under the shuffling of heavy boots. He didn’t hear his mother’s feet at all; it was as if they were spinning her through the air.

When the guests had left was always the worst. Then his father and mother would go to their bed behind a screen at the far end of the porch. First the two sets of whispers, one soft and pleading, one through the teeth of a rage that made the heart shrink. The whole house swayed like a seesaw.

One morning Arkady had a breakfast of raisin cakes and tea outside under the birches. His mother came out still in her nightshift, a gown of silk and lace his father had found in Berlin. She had a shawl over her shoulders against the morning cool. Her hair was black, loose, long.

Did he hear anything during the night? she asked. No, he promised, nothing.

As she turned back toward the house a branch reached out and plucked off the shawl. On her arms were the blue bruise marks of individual fingers. She lightly picked the shawl off the ground, replaced it on her shoulders and tied it tight by its end tassels. Anyway, she added, it was over. Her eyes were so serene that he almost believed her.

He could hear it now. “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

“Seriously, Zina, the chief would have my head and yours if he found out about this. You can’t tell anyone.”

“About what?
This
?”

“Stop it, Zina, I’m trying to be serious.”

“About your little room here?”

“Yes.”

“Who would care? It’s like a little boys’ club in the bottom of the ship.”

“Be serious.”

Each tape was thirty minutes long. As the last narrow band of black unreeled there was no way for Zina to turn the recorder off. Her companion would hear the
click
as the tape stopped.

“One moment it’s all ‘Zinka, I love you’; the next it’s ‘Zina, be serious.’ You’re a confused man.”

“This is secret.”

“On the
Polar Star
? You want to spy on fish? On our Americans? They’re dumber than the fish.”

“That’s what you think!”

“Is that your hand?”

“Keep your eye on Susan.”

“Why?”

“That’s all I’m saying. I’m not trying to impress you; I’m trying to help you. We should help each other. It’s a long voyage. I’d go crazy without someone like you, Zinka.”

“Ah, we’ve stopped being serious.”

“Where are you going? We still have time.”

“You do. I don’t. My shift is on and that bitch Lidia is looking for any reason to get me in trouble.”

“A little minute?”

There was a rasp of canvas over the microphone, the sigh of a cot as a body stood up.

“You go back to your mental work. I have some soup to stir.”

“Shit! At least wait until I look through the hole before you go.”

“Do you have any idea how silly you look right now?”

“Okay, the way is clear. Go.”

“Thank you.”

“Zinka, tell no one.”

“No one.”

“Zinka, tomorrow?”

A door shut reluctantly.
Click
.

The other side of the tape started as a blank. Fast forward. It was all blank.

Arkady studied the spiral notebook. On the first page was pasted a map of the Pacific. Zina had added eyes and lips so that Alaska leaned like a bearded man toward a
shy and feminine Siberia. The Aleutians reached out to Russia like an arm.

The last cassette started as Duran Duran. Fast forward.

On the second page was a photo of the
Eagle
anchored in a bay surrounded by snowy mountains. On the third page the
Eagle
wallowed in choppy water.

“Making a baidarka,” the tape said in English. “It’s like a kayak. You know what a kayak is? Well, this is longer, leaner, with a square stern. The old ones were made with skin and ivory, even with ivory joints so it just flowed through the waves. When Bering came with the first Russian boats, he couldn’t believe how fast the baidarkas were. The best baidarkas have always come from Unalaska. You understand a word of this?”

“I know what a kayak is,” Zina answered in slow and careful English.

“Well, I’ll show you a baidarka and you’ll see for yourself. I’ll paddle it around the
Polar Star
.”

“I should have a camera when you do.”

“I wish we could do more than that. What I’d like to do is show you the world. Go all over—California, Mexico, Hawaii. There are so many great places. That would be a dream.”

“When I listen to him,” Zina said on the second side, “I hear a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold on to the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves. I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.”

The next dozen pages were photos of the same man with straight dark hair. Dark eyes with heavy lids. Broad cheekbones around a fine nose and mouth. The American. The Aleut with a Russian name. Mike. Mikhail. The pictures, all taken from above and at a distance, showed
him on the deck of the
Eagle
working the crane, posing on the bow, mending a net, waving to the photographer.

Arkady smoked the last intoxicating cigarette. He remembered Zina on the autopsy table in this same room, her sodden flesh and bleached hair. The body was as far removed from life as a shell on a beach. This voice, though—this was Zina, someone no one on the ship had known. It was as if she had walked in the door, sat across the desk in the shadow just outside the lamp’s veil of light, lit her own phantom cigarette and, having finally found an understanding ear, confided all.

Naturally Arkady would have preferred to have the technical lab back in Moscow throwing an exciting array of solvents and reagents or mortar-sized German microscopes and gas chromatographs into the fight. He used what he could. In front of the spiral notebook he laid out spoons, pills and the card of fingerprints Vainu had taken from the body. He crushed the pills between the spoons, wrapped his sleeve around the handle of the spoon that held the pulverized iodine, struck a match and held it to the spoon’s bowl. He moved both close to the notebook so that the fumes from the heated iodine would flow up the page opposite the map. The hot-iodine method was supposed to employ iodine crystals over an alcohol burner in a glass box. He reminded himself that in the spirit of the New Way of Thinking announced by the last Party Congress all good Soviets were willing to bend theory to practical application.

Iodine fumes reacted quickly to the oils of perspiration in a latent print. First a ghostly outline appeared of a whole left hand, sepia brown, like an antique photograph. Palm, heel, thumb and four fingers spread out, as they would have been while she held the book flat to paste in a picture. Then the details: whorls, deltas, ridges, radial loops. He concentrated on the first finger and compared it with the card. A double loop, like yin and yang. An island at the loop’s right delta. A cut at the left delta.
Card and page were the same; this was Zina’s book and the imprint of her hand as if she were reaching out to him. There were two other prints, male by the size of them, rough, hurried marks.

As the match burned down, the hand began to fade, and in a minute it had disappeared. He repacked all the effects neatly. He’d found Zina. Now to find the lieutenant who called her Zinushka.

13
Belowdecks everything was built around fish-holds. Noah’s Ark must have had a fishhold. When he called Peter “a fisher of men,” Christ must have appreciated the virtues of a tight fishhold. If cosmonauts ever sail on solar winds and collect specimens of galactic life, they will need a fishhold of sorts.

Yet for ten months the
Polar Star
had sailed with a forward fishhold that was inoperative. Various conjectures were offered to explain why the hold was out of commission: pipes kept cracking; there was an electrical short in the heat pump; the plastic insulation seeped some kind of poison. Whatever, the result was that off-loading ships had to make more frequent rendezvous to take the
fish crammed into the
Polar Star’s
other two holds. Another result was that the area around the unused hold had been abandoned to stacks of barrel staves and steel plates. As the walkway became more crowded the crew tended to take a longer but faster route on deck.

A line of bulbs lit the way between the bulkhead and the hold. Access to it was a watertight door with a ramp to carry carts of frozen fish over the coaming. The wheel on the door was chained with an impressively large padlock. On one side of the door was a heat pump, its hood open to display a convincing tangle of unattached wires. On the other was an oilcan of tall capstan shafts. The bottom of the can stirred with rats. The ship hadn’t been fumigated since Arkady came on board. It was interesting that rats ate bread, cheese, paint, plastic pipes, wiring, mattresses and clothes—everything, in fact, but frozen fish.

There seemed to be two Zinas. There was Zina as the public slut; then there was this private woman who dwelt within a world of hidden photographs and secret tapes. One tape could only be called dangerous. The amorous lieutenant had boasted of the fishhold’s bedroom temperature and forty percent humidity. Arkady had heard someone bother to mention a humidity ratio only once before: in the computer room back in militia headquarters on Petrovka Street in Moscow.

All well and good. Arkady had no argument with naval intelligence. Every Soviet fisherman on the Pacific coast knew that American submarines constantly violated his country’s waters. On dark nights periscopes would pop out of the Tatar Strait. The enemy even followed Soviet warships right into Vladivostok harbor. What he couldn’t understand was how a listening station in a fishhold would be able to hear anything. An echo sounder only told you what was directly below, and no submarine would venture under a trawler. As Arkady understood it, passive sonar like hydrophones could detect sound waves at a
distance, but an old factory ship like the
Polar Star
had plating that was substandard—so thin that, pounding like a drum, it bowed in and out with each wave. It had been welded with the wrong beading, riveted with burned and undersized rivets, seamed with cement that wept, shored with timbers that creaked like bones. All of which made the ship more human, in a way, and even more trustworthy in the sense that a patched-up veteran, for all his complaints, was more to be trusted than a handsome recruit. Still, the
Polar Star
marched through the water like a brass band; its own noise would smother the whisper of any submarine.

Arkady had no interest in espionage. In the army, sitting for hours in a radio shack on the roof of the Adler Hotel in Berlin, he used to hum—Presley, Prokofiev, anything. The others asked why he didn’t want to take a turn on the binoculars, to study the American shack on the roof of the Sheraton in West Berlin. Perhaps he lacked imagination. He needed to see another human to get interested. The fact was that in spite of Zina’s tape, from the outside the fishhold looked like a fishhold.

The lieutenant had mentioned looking through a hole to Zina. There was no peephole that Arkady could see. The door had an ambient, clammy touch, nothing cozy about it. He pondered the shafts in the oilcan, and after a moment’s indecision selected one. It was like lifting a hundred-pound crowbar; once he had it to his shoulders he wouldn’t be able to casually brush off any rat that came with it. Sweat came just at the thought. But no rodent appeared, and when he inserted the shaft into the hasp of the padlock and gave it a twist, the lock popped open like a spring: another black mark for State Quality Control. The wheel lock itself wouldn’t give until he got a foot against the pump. With grudging, metallic cries, it turned and he pushed the door open.

The interior of the hold rose through three decks of the
Polar Star
, a shaft of dark air lit by a dim bulb at Arkady’s
level. Ordinarily each level of a hold had its own deck, open in the middle to raise fish from below. This single precipitous drop was odd, as if there was no intention of using the hold at all. A watertight hatch covered the main deck overhead, sealing in a stale smell of fish and brine. The sides were covered with spaced wooden planks over the grid of pipes that usually circulated coolant. A ladder ran from the hatch down to the bottom deck two levels below. He swung onto the rungs and closed the door behind him.

As Arkady descended his eyes adjusted. Once in a while he caught sight of rats climbing the pipes away from him. Rats never tried to enter an operating cold store, a sign of intelligence. It occurred to him that a flashlight would have been a sign of intelligence on his part. There were so many rats that the sound of their movement was like a wind in the trees.

There should have been decks, block and tackle, crates covered in hoarfrost. The packing of a cold store was a maritime art. Cases of frozen fish not only had to be stacked but separated by planks to allow torpid air colder than merely freezing to circulate. Here there was nothing. At each level he descended was a door, a light socket and a thermostat. Each level was darker, and when he stepped off the last rung onto the wider bottom deck of the hold he was almost blind, though he felt the pupils of his eyes expand to their rims. This is a pit, he thought, the center of the earth.