Polar Star (23 page)

“Was Lidia with you the night of the dance?”

“The entire time.”

Arkady didn’t like the idea of the ice sheet. The sky was already covered with fog. Covering the sea with ice, paving the water white, would remove what little dimension was left. Also, he hated the cold. “How far is it from the wardroom to the stern?” he asked.

“About a hundred meters. You should know that by now.”

“It’s just that I don’t understand something. Lidia says she stepped out of the wardroom here in the wheelhouse and happened to see Zina on the stern deck. But you can’t see the stern deck from here, not even with her keen eyes. You have to walk there. That’s two hundred meters altogether, back and forth the length of the ship, that Lidia traveled in the cold to have a cigarette and happen to see a young rival who dies that same night. Why would Lidia do that?”

“Maybe she’s stupid.”

“No, I think she loves you.”

Marchuk was silent. The snow impacted on the windshield into wet craters, so it wasn’t freezing outside. The heavy snow settled the water too, and the
Polar Star
seemed to be easing through the night.

“She followed me,” Marchuk said. “I got a note under my door that Zina wanted to talk to me. ‘Meet me at the stern at eleven’ was all it said.”

“It was from Zina?”

“I recognized the handwriting.”

“So you’d received other notes.”

“Yes, once or twice. Lidia caught on. Women sense
these things; they just know. Lidia is more jealous than my own wife. Anyway, all that Zina wanted to know was who she was going into Dutch Harbor with. She didn’t want to be stuck with any old women. I told her that Volovoi drew up the list, not me.”

“In Vladivostok, the night you were with Zina, you went to her place?”

“I certainly wasn’t going to take her to mine.”

“Describe it.”

“An apartment on Russkaya Street. Pretty nice, actually: African figures, Japanese prints, a lot of guns. She shared it with some guy who was away. I’d have turned him in for the guns, but how could I explain how I’d seen them? It wouldn’t sound good at fleet headquarters, a leading captain informing on a man whose woman he’d shared. I don’t know why I’m telling you.”

“Because you can deny everything later. That’s why you chose me in the first place, so you can dismiss everything I discover if you don’t like it. What I don’t understand is why you wanted any investigation at all, knowing the stories that could come to the surface. Were you crazy, or just stupid?”

Marchuk was silent for so long that Arkady thought he might not have heard the question. In any case, the captain wasn’t the first man with a sexual appetite.

When Marchuk finally spoke, his voice choked with self-disgust. “I’ll tell you why. Two years ago I had a trawler in the Sea of Japan. It was night, bad weather, a Force Nine wind. I was trying to fill the quota because I’d just been named a leading captain. Anyway, I put my men on deck. A wave hit us broadside. It happens. When it’s past, you count heads. We were missing one man. His boots were on deck, but he was gone. The wave took him over the side? Down the ramp? I don’t know. Naturally, we stopped fishing and looked. At night, in waves like that, in water that cold, he must have died of hypothermia in a matter of minutes. Or else he took a mouthfui
and went right to the bottom. We never saw him. I radioed Fleet Command in Vladivostok and reported the death. They ordered me to continue searching, and also to check the ship to be sure no life vests or anything floatable was missing. We steamed back and forth for half a day searching the water, tearing the ship apart and counting vests, buoys, barrels. Only when we could declare nothing missing did Fleet Command say that we could go back to fishing. Fleet Command never said it directly, but everyone knew why; it was because Japan was only twenty nautical miles away. To the minds at Command, it was possible that this fisherman had conceived the idea of defection and had set out to cross near-freezing heavy seas in the dark. How grotesque. I had to make this dead man’s friends search for him not in order to find him, not to return his body to his family, but as if he were a prisoner escaping, as if we were all prisoners. I did it, but I told myself that I would never again leave my crew to the mercy of Vladivostok. So Zina wasn’t perfect? Neither am I.
You
find out what happened.”

“For your crew’s sake?”

“Yes.”

There was something both comforting and suffocating about the snow. The radar had buttons for brightness, color, range. On the screen nothing lay ahead but the scattered green dots of wave return.

“How long to Dutch Harbor?”

“Ten hours.”

“If you want to do something for your crew, give them their port call. I’m not going to learn anything in ten hours.”

“You were my compromise with Volovoi. He’s the first mate. You heard what he said.”

“You’re the captain. If you want your crew to go ashore, do it.”

Marchuk fell silent again. The cigarette burned down
to a coal between his lips. “Keep looking,” he said finally. “Maybe you’ll find something.”

Arkady left by the outer bridge. From outside, Marchuk looked like a man chained to the wheel.

16
By the time Arkady reached his cabin he was shaking so hard he decided to confront the spasms and kill them. From his room he took a towel and descended one deck to a small shower room with pegs and a sign that said
A GOOD CITIZEN RESPECTS THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS
. A handwritten sign advised
TAKE YOUR VALUABLES WITH YOU
.

With his knife tucked into the back of his towel, he entered the greatest luxury on the
Polar Star
, the sauna. It had been built by the crew, and though not much larger than a stall, it was all of red cedar. A cedar box held smooth river stones heated by pipes that carried live steam from the laundry. A cedar bucket held water and a cedar ladle. A satisfactory mist already hung in the air. Two pairs of legs dangled from the upper bench, but they looked too spindly to be the legs of killers.

Whether at a palatial spa in Moscow or a cabin in Siberia, it was a Russian credo that nothing cured more ills than a sauna. Chills, arthritis, nervous and respiratory diseases, and especially hangovers were helped by the balm of steam, and since the
Polar Star
’s little sauna was
in constant use, it was always hot. The pores of Arkady’s skin opened wide and he felt prickly sweat on his scalp and chest. Though his hands and feet stung, they hadn’t turned white, the first warning sign of frostbite. Once he’d driven the shakes out, he’d be able to think straight. As he ladled more water onto the stones they turned a glossy black and then as quickly dried to gray. The superheated mist became more dense. There was a birch lash in the corner for driving out the poisons of a bad drunk, but he had never believed in whipping himself, even under the guise of medical attention.

“You going to pick up any stuff?” a voice asked in English from the cloud. It was the American fisheries observer, Lantz. “Dust or shit, Dutch is on the route. A lot of those fishing boats make funny runs all the way to Baja, even to Colombia.”

“I’ll stick with beer.” The other voice was the rep called Day.

“Ever try rocks? Smoke it in a pipe. Very intense. That’ll unwind you fast.”

“No, thanks.”

“Worried? I’ll get you a cocktail; it looks like a regular cigarette.”

“I don’t even smoke. After this, I’m going back to school. I’m not going to do crack in the Yukon. Lay off.”

“What a wimp,” Lantz said as Day stepped down from the mist and out the door. There was a sound of Lantz blowing his nose on his towel; then he slowly slid off the bench. He was skin and bones, like a pale, long-limbed salamander. His eyes finally took in who was sitting on the lower bench. “Well, look who’s sneaking around and listening to other people. How about you, Renko? Are you going to get your American dollars and run into Dutch Harbor?”

“I don’t think I’ll be going in,” Arkady said.

“No one will. They say you fucked it up for everyone.”

“That could be.”

“And I hear that even if everyone else does, you won’t. So what are you, Renko, a policeman or a prisoner?”

“This is coveted employment, to work on an oceangoing ship.”

“If you can make port calls, not if you’re trapped on board. Poor Comrade Renko.”

“It sounds like I’m missing a lot.”

“It looks like you need a lot. So you’re just going to be walking up and down the deck hoping someone’s going to bring you back a pack of smokes. Pathetic.”

“It is.”

“I’ll bring you back a candy bar. It’ll be the fucking highlight of your trip.”

The door sucked steam out as Lantz left. Arkady threw more water in on the box and collapsed on the bench again. He was scared when even an American saw how much trouble he was in.

He was also scared by how little he understood. It didn’t make sense that Zina would leave the dance just to ask Marchuk who her shopping companions in Dutch Harbor would be. But then she stayed on the stern deck. According to the notes kept by Skiba and Slezko, Lidia crossed the midship deck at 11:15, at which point Zina was still alive at the stern rail. That was fourteen minutes before Ridley returned to the
Eagle
and fifty-five minutes before the trawler cast off. Zina was too smart to try defecting when an American boat was tied up to the factory ship. Vladivostok would demand and the company, half Soviet-owned, would agree that the
Eagle
and the
Merry Jane
be searched. The two conditions for a successful disappearance, from what Marchuk had said, were that the Americans be beyond conceivable swimming distance and that not a single item of lifesaving gear be missing from the
Polar Star
. If defection was impossible, what
did
Zina want?

The suggestion of a beer stuck in his throat. Sakhalin
trawlers had made extra money by picking up cases of Japanese beer tied to crab pots and leaving in exchange sacks of salmon roe. He could use one of those beers, as cold as the sea, not the warm, liquid headache that Obidin brewed.

The sauna door opened, and in the thick steam the new arrival seemed to be wearing shoes. He was a large man, naked except for a towel tied at the waist, and he was not wearing shoes; his feet were dark blue, almost purple. They were tattooed in a design of florid curls, each toe standing out as a green claw. This leonine design, like a griffin, reached up his legs to his knees. He was what a scientist would call a mesomorph, muscular and nearly as deep through the chest as he was broad. Some of the older tattoos had smudged and blurred, but Arkady could make out chained buxom women climbing each thigh to the red flames that spread around the edge of the towel. The stomach was scalloped with blue clouds. On the right side of the rib cage was a bleeding wound with the name of Christ; on the left side a vulture held a heart. The man’s breast was smeared with scar tissue. Administrators did that in labor camps; if a prisoner tattooed something they didn’t like, they burned it off with permanganate of potash. The man’s arms were green sleeves, the right covered in fading dragons, the left with the names of prisons, labor camps, transit camps: Vladimir, Tashkent, Potma, Sosnovka, Kolyma, Magadan and more, a roster of wide personal experience. The tattoos stopped at the wrists and neck; the total effect was of a man wearing a tight dark suit, or of a pale head and hands levitating. Another effect was that a person knew just what this tribesman was: an urka—in Russia a professional criminal.

It was the trawlmaster, Karp Korobetz. He smiled at Arkady broadly and said, “You look like shit.”

“I know you.” Arkady realized and said it at the same time.

Karp said, “It was a dozen years ago. In the hall when you started asking questions, I said to myself, ‘Renko, Renko, I know that name.’ ”

“Article 146, armed robbery.”

“You tried to hang me for murder,” Karp reminded him.

Now Arkady’s memory worked fine. Twelve years before, Korobetz had been a big, soft kid who worked whores twice his age out of the tough Maria’s Grove section of Moscow. Usually an arrangement was maintained between pimps and the militia, especially at that time, when prostitution was not supposed to exist, but the boy took to robbing victims when their pants were down. One old man, a veteran with a chest of medals, resisted, and Karp shut him up with a hammer. His hair had been lighter and longer then, with fanciful plaits around the ears. Arkady had appeared at the trial only to testify as the senior investigator for homicide. But there was another reason he hadn’t recognized Korobetz. Karp’s face had changed; his hairline actually was lower than before. If prisoners tattooed something on their brow like “Slave of USSR,” camps had the skin surgically removed, so that the whole scalp shifted forward.

“What did you write there?” Arkady pointed to the trawlmaster’s forehead.

“ ‘Communists Drink the Blood of the People.’ ”

“All that on your forehead?” Arkady was impressed. He looked at Karp’s chest. “And there?”

“ ‘The Party Equals Death.’ They took that off with acid in Sosnovka. Then I wrote, ‘The Party Is a Whore.’ After they burned that off, the skin was too rough to use anymore.”