Polar Star (19 page)

He lit a match. The deck was more planking over a grid of pipes above a cement base. He saw orange peels, a piece of planking, empty paint cans and a blanket; someone had been using the hold to sniff fumes. There were comblike bones that explained what had happened to the ship’s cat. What he did not see was a lieutenant of naval intelligence, a cot, a television or a computer terminal. Beneath the base was a double hull with tanks for fuel and water, enough space to smuggle contraband,
maybe, but hardly to hide an entire furnished room. He inserted the broken board between wall planks. No secret door swung open. When subtlety didn’t succeed he swung the board against the planks. Through the booming echoes came high-pitched protests from the gallery of rats overhead, but no officers of naval intelligence emerged.

Climbing back up the ladder, Arkady felt like a man returning to the surface of the water, as if he were holding his breath and swimming up to the bulb. Zina’s tape made no sense anymore. Perhaps he’d misunderstood the conversation. Perhaps he could find some vodka in Vainu’s office. A little vodka in a bright room would be nice. Back at the bulb, he pulled the door open and swung himself through to the deck. By now the barrel staves and heat pump had a homey, welcoming appearance. He slipped the broken padlock onto the wheel; Gury, the
biznessman
, would help him find another.

As Arkady started toward the factory the light over the cofferdam went out, then the one over the heat pump. A figure stepped out of the dark and hit him in the stomach. While he bent and gagged a ball of wet rags was stuffed in his mouth. Another rag was tied tightly over his mouth. A sack was pulled over his head and shoulders, all the way down to his feet. Something like a belt was pulled tight over the sack and around his arms and chest. He reacted the right way, breathing deeply and flexing his arms, and at once choked because the rags in his mouth had been soaked in gasoline. The cloths had pressed his tongue back into the soft palate, and he was close to swallowing his tongue. So he blew out, trying to clear his tongue, and as he did so the belt was pulled tighter like a cinch.

He was carried—by three men, he thought. There would also be one man up ahead to clear the way or stall anyone coming, and possibly another man following to do the same. They were strong; they toted him as easily as a broomstick. He tried not to choke on the gasoline
fumes. On long voyages, seamen got together to share fumes and get a little dizzy. A coil of acrid vapor teased its way down his throat.

They could have just thrown him down the fishhold; his body wouldn’t have been found for days. So perhaps being hit, gagged and sacked was a good sign. He’d never been kidnapped before, not in all his years with the prosecutor’s office, and he wasn’t sure of the nuances of being beaten and seized, but it was clear they didn’t want to kill him right away. Probably they were crew members irate about the possibility of losing their port call. Even if they kept him in the sack, he might recognize a voice if they whispered.

It was a short promenade. They stopped and a door wheel turned. Arkady was unaware of the men making any rights or lefts; had they returned to the fishhold? The only watertight entrances at this level were to the holds. The door opened with the clap of splitting ice. A furnace emits a fiery blast; a cold store, with a temperature of minus forty degrees centigrade, emits a more languid, frozen draft, but even within his sack Arkady could feel it, and he began kicking and twisting. Too late. They threw him in.

The impact of landing snapped the belt. Arkady rose, but before he could pull off the sack he heard the door shut and the wheel lock turn. He found himself standing on a wooden case. When he untied his gag and unwound the rags from his mouth, the first breath burned the lungs. It was a joke; it had to be a joke. White, almost liquid steam seeped from the planking and rolled down the walls of the fishhold; within the planking he could see the cooling grid, the pipes cased in skeletal ice. Each of his feet stood in a separate pool of milky vapor. As he watched, the hairs on the back of his hands stood and turned white with frost. As it left his lips, his breath crystallized, glittered and snowed.

He stopped himself as he reached for the wheel of the
door, because bare skin would adhere to the metal. He covered the wheel with the sack and then put his weight into it, but it wouldn’t budge. The men outside must be holding it shut, and there was no chance he was going to overpower three or more of them. He shouted. Around the cold store were ten centimeters of fiberglass wool insulation; even the inside of the door was padded. No one was going to hear him unless he walked right by. For the last week, fish from the flash freezers had been stowed in the aft hold to balance the ship’s trim. If this was the midship hold, there was no reason for anyone to hear. Overhead and out of reach was an insulated, watertight hatch. No one was going to hear him through that, either. Two cases below was the false deck and access to a lower level and another door. There was no way he could think of to lift two cases, each weighing a quarter of a ton. On one case was a rumpled tarp stiff with ice. The stamp on the cases said, “Frozen Sole—Product of USSR.” Not a joke, but there was something comical about it.

Veterans of the north knew the stages of exposure. He was shivering; shivering was good. The body could actually maintain its temperature for a while by shaking to death. Still, he lost a degree every three minutes. When he lost two degrees he would stop shivering and his heart would start slowing and shutting off the flow to skin and limbs to maintain core heat; that was the cause of frostbite. When he lost eleven degrees his heart would stop. Coma came midway. He had fifteen minutes.

There was another problem. He had the classic first signs of poisoning he’d seen in sailors who had imbibed vapors: blinking, dizziness, intoxication. Sometimes they howled like hyenas; sometimes they danced off the walls. He couldn’t help laughing. He’d gone to sea to die in this ice? That was funny.

His arms jerked spasmodically as if a maniac were bending his bones. He’d worked in this kind of cold before—granted in quilted coveralls, felt boots and fur-lined
hood. Frost made its own white fur over his shoes and cuffs. He swayed, trying to keep his balance and not step into the narrow space between the cases; he was sure if he slipped he wouldn’t get his leg out again.

At his chest level was a perforated plate that covered the thermostat. He couldn’t get the plate loose with his fingernails; it was another good example of the sort of emergency for which a fisherman should carry his knife at all times.

He jiggled the matches out of his pocket and dropped them. Since he was trying not to tip over, he picked up the book painfully with the sort of graceful bow a French dandy might execute as he swept up a lady’s handkerchief from the ground. Again he dropped the matches and this time went down on all fours to retrieve them. The flame was a tiny yellow ball overwhelmed by the cold, but a precious dew formed on the thermostat plate as it warmed. The problem was that his hands were jerking so badly he couldn’t keep the flame to the plate for more than a second at a time.

There was a certain cunning to killing him this way. Freezing him and, he assumed in thinking it through, moving his body one place to thaw, then taking it to another site to be found. It was now well established that Vainu was not the most expert of pathologists, and the most obvious evidence he would find would be signs of sniffing fumes, the tragic vice of petroleum-age man. With official approval, they’d slap his body back in the same cold store until they reached Vladivostok. He saw himself riding a block of ice back home.

These were excellent matches, wood tipped with phosphorus and wax especially for the foul weather that seamen encountered. On the box cover was the design of a ship’s prow splitting a curling wave. On the ship’s stack was a hammer and sickle. His whole body was shaking so badly that it was hard to even aim the flame at the plate. For no reason he suddenly remembered an even
better case of suicide than the ones he’d cited to Marchuk and Volovoi. A sailor had hanged himself in Sakhalin. There was no investigation because the boy had secured the rope to the hammer and sickle on the smokestack. He was put in paper slippers and buried in a day because no one even wanted to ask questions.

At least he’d stopped shivering and could hold the match steady. Looking down, he saw that both his pants legs were covered in fleecy frost. A big fish like a halibut could be frozen rock-solid to the core in an hour and a half. The box squirted from his fingers. They were turning from white to blue and moved so slowly. When he knelt to pick up the box, his hands fumbled like a pair of hooks. As he struck another match the box dropped, bounced off the crate and fell between it and the wall. He heard it ticking off crates on its way down to the deck.

With all his concentration he brought the cool little glow again to the thermostat, marveling at how the dim heat spread visibly like dew upon the metal plate. It was his last match now. He held on while flames burned on his fingernails. There was still some gasoline left on his hands from taking the rags from his mouth. Secondary flames lit like candles on his palms. They didn’t hurt. He stared because they were so remarkable, like a religious experience. Slowly his eyes moved to the rags. Was this how slowly fish thought? he wondered. As the match flame sank to a nub, he thrust it and his hands into the rags, which burst into a beautiful flowerlike fire. He kicked the burning rags closer to the planks beneath the plate.

The rags unfolded in hues of violet and blue that turned to rich black smoke. Around the fire, on the planks and on the crate, grew a ring of wet glaze, of ice melting, refreezing and melting again. Arkady sat at the edge of the flames, arms out to cup the heat. He remembered a picnic he’d once had in Siberia of frozen fish whittled into shavings, frozen reindeer sliced into strips, frozen
berries formed into patties and Siberian vodka that had to be constantly turned, first this side and then that, toward the fire. The year before, an Intourist guide had taken a group of Americans into the taiga and laid out an even more splendid lunch but had forgotten to turn the bottle. After many toasts with warm tea to international friendship, mutual respect and closer understanding, the guide poured glasses of nearly frozen, almost congealed vodka and showed his guests how to drink it in one go. “Like this,” he said. He tipped the glass, drank it and fell over dead. What the guide had forgotten was that Siberian vodka was nearly two hundred proof, almost pure alcohol, and would still flow at a temperature that would freeze the gullet and stop the heart like a sword. Just the shock was enough to kill him. It was sad, of course, but it was also hilarious. Imagine the poor Americans sitting around their campfire, looking at their Russian guide and saying, “This
is
a Siberian picnic.”

It was an unequal battle between a mere rag fire and the glacial cave of a fishhold. The flames subsided to eyes of light, to a nest of wrestling glowworms, then to a last black gasp of smoke above a shell of ashes. The crate and planks were smudged, not even charred.

Gasoline was a bit like Siberian vodka. Moment by moment he felt more Siberian. Finally, sailing off the coast of America, he had achieved that blissful distinction. Frost advanced up his pants and sleeves again. He blinked to keep his eyes from icing shut and watched his breath explode into crystals that rose up, then eddied down in fine drifts. How else would a Siberian breathe? Wouldn’t he have made a good guide? But who for?

Time to lie down. He tugged the tarp off the crate to use as a blanket. It slid off stiff with ice, revealing Zina Patiashvili in a clear plastic bag. Clear but covered within by wonderful patterns of crystalline frost like a coat of diamonds. She was white as snow and her hair was dusted
with ice. One eye was open, as if she wondered who was joining her.

Arkady curled up in the corner farthest from Zina. He didn’t believe the wheel really was turning until the door cracked open. Natasha Chaikovskaya filled the doorway, eyes and mouth agape at the remains of the fire and at Zina and then at him. She rushed into the hold and lifted Arkady, gently at first so his skin on the ice wouldn’t tear, then like a weight lifter starting a press. He’d never been lifted by a woman before. Probably Natasha wouldn’t take that as a compliment.

“I made a fire,” he told her. Apparently it had actually worked. He had dropped the temperature at the thermostat and finely tuned monitors had sounded. “You heard an alarm?”

“No, no. There aren’t any alarms. I was just walking by when I heard you inside.”

“Shouting?” Arkady didn’t remember.

“Laughing.” Natasha shifted, getting a better grip to angle him out the door. She was frightened, but also disgusted, as anyone is with a drunk. “You were laughing your head off.”

14
While Izrail Izrailevich gently massaged Arkady’s fingers and Natasha ministered to his bare toes, their patient responded with hypothermic spasms. The factory manager looked with scorn and disappointment at Arkady’s eyes, which were a brilliant pulpy red from gasoline fumes.