Polar Star (24 page)

“A short career. Well, Pushkin died young.”

Karp brushed away a wisp of steam. His slate-blue eyes lay in a crease that ran across the bridge of his nose. He combed his damp hair with his fingers. Now his hair was full at the top and short on the sides, Soviet style, while
the body had become Neanderthal. An inked Neanderthal.

“I ought to thank you,” Karp said. “I learned a trade at Sosnovka.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank the people you robbed and beat; they’re the ones who identified you.”

“They taught us how to make television cabinets. Did you ever have a Melodya set? I might have made it. Of course, that was long ago, before my social rehabilitation. See how strange life is? Now I’m a seaman first class and you’re a seaman second class, so I’m on top of you.”

“The sea is a strange place.”

“You’re the last person I ever expected to meet on the
Polar Star
. What happened to the high and mighty investigator?”

“The land is a strange place.”

“Everything’s strange to you now. That’s what happens when you lose your desk and your Party card. Tell me what you’re doing for this so-called fleet electrical engineer.”

“I’m doing something for the captain.”

“Fuck the captain. Where do you think you are, the middle of Moscow? There are about ten officers on the
Polar Star;
the rest is crew. We have our own system; we sort things out between ourselves. Why are you asking about Zina Patiashvili?”

“She had an accident.”

“I know that, I found her. If it’s just an accident, why bring you in?”

“My experience. You know my experience. What do you know about Zina?”

“She was an honest toiler. The ship is poorer for her loss.” Karp broke into a smile, showing gold molars. “See, I learned how to say all that shit.”

Arkady stood. Their eyes were on a level, though Karp
outweighed him. He said, “I was stupid not to recognize you. You’re twice as stupid to tell me who you are.”

Karp looked hurt. “I thought you’d be pleased to see how I’d reformed and become a model worker. I hoped we could be friends, but I see you haven’t changed at all.” Forgiving, he leaned closer to offer advice. “We had a guy in one camp who reminded me of you. He was political. He was an army officer who wouldn’t take his tanks into Czechoslovakia against the counterrevolutionaries—something like that. I was his section leader and he couldn’t follow orders; he thought he was still in charge. You know, they’d take us out on a railroad spur and we’d drop trees and load them. A timber collective. Healthy reconstructive labor at about thirty degrees below. The dangerous part is when you’ve got the trees on the flatbed; you don’t want them rolling off. It’s funny that the one guy with the education, this officer, is the one who had the accident, and he didn’t even get his accident straight. What he said was he was held down on the track and somebody busted his bones with an ax handle. I mean upper arms, lower arms, hands, fingers—the works. Imagine. You’ve seen stiffs; the body has a lot of bones. But I was there and I didn’t see anything like that. It’s what happens when you make a mistake and a whole flatbed of logs rolls on you. He went crazy. He finally died of a ruptured spleen. I bet he wanted to at that point, or spend the rest of his life like a broken egg. The only reason I mention him is because you remind me of him, and because a ship way out at sea is such a dangerous place. That’s what I wanted to tell you. You should be careful,” Karp said as he left. “Learn how to swim.”

Arkady’s shakes came back twice as bad. Did he ever get so scared when he was an investigator? Maybe it was fitting that he’d come all the way from Moscow to sail with Karp Korobetz. Why hadn’t he recognized him? The name wasn’t that common. On the other hand, would Karp’s own mother recognize him now?

The trawlmaster was the one who had thrown him into the fishhold; that was what his shakes were telling him. Three men had carried him and probably one had gone ahead and one had followed; that would be Karp and his deck team, the well-organized winners of the socialist competition.

Sweat poured off Arkady, giving him a sheen of fear. Karp was crazy; no mere case of “sluggish schizophrenia” here. Not dumb, though, so why would he draw attention to himself while Arkady had some temporary authority?

What had Karp said and what had he omitted? He hadn’t mentioned the fishhold; why would he? But he hadn’t mentioned Dutch Harbor, either. Everyone else was worried about the port call, but not Karp; he wanted to know about Hess. Most of all he’d wanted to spread some terror, which he’d done.

Again the sauna door opened. Arkady saw a dark foot and immediately reached behind him for his knife. As cool air from the open door lifted the mist, however, he saw that the foot was a shoe, a blue Reebok. “Slava?”

The third mate was irritably sweeping steam aside. “Renko, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I found it! I found the note!”

Arkady still couldn’t get Karp out of his head. “What? What are you talking about?”

“While you’ve been sleeping and taking saunas, I found the note from Zina Patiashvili. She wrote one.” Slava’s face poked through a wreath of mist. “A suicide note. It’s perfect. We’re going into port.”

17
Dutch Harbor was surrounded by a green ring of cliffs covered by thick subarctic grasses. There were no trees, nothing bigger than a bush, but as the wind moved over the grass the effect was magical, as if the hills were a wave.

The island was actually called Unalaska, and on one side of the bay there was an Aleut village by that name, a beachside line of cottages that led to a white wooden Russian Orthodox church. The town of Dutch Harbor, however, was out of Arkady’s sight, past a tank farm and beyond the breakwater that protected a loading dock with slag heaps of rusting trawl doors and rotting snow, and gas pumps and rows of the half-ton cages called crab pots. Beyond lay a pier of catcher boats and one large ship that had become a dockbound cannery with a fence of pilings around its hull. Behind all this, the hills of Unalaska rose rapidly to volcanic peaks edged in black stone and snow.

It was odd, Arkady thought, how the eye became starved for color. The clouds were broken, so that sun-spots moved around the bay. Off the lower cliffs, puffins
dropped like rocks to the water. Eagles lifted from the higher cliffs and soared to inspect the
Polar Star;
they were enormous birds, bear-brown with imperious white heads. It was like being at the top of the world.

The Americans had already gone ashore in the pilot boat. Soo-san was going home in a gift fishing jacket decorated with souvenir pins. On her way off the ship she’d distributed farewell kisses with the generosity of someone leaving jail. On the pilot boat as it came out had been a new head rep carrying a suitcase with one hundred thousand dollars in it, the
Polar Star
’s port-call foreign currency. The entire crew had waited while the bills were counted and re-counted in the captain’s cabin.

Now, after four months’ fishing, Arkady’s co-workers were lined along the starboard rail and moving down the steps of the gangway to a lifeboat that would bear them and their allotted American dollars to the port they had dreamed of all this time. Not that they showed it. A Soviet seaman dressed for special occasions did not necessarily shave. He did shine his shoes, slick his hair back and wear his sports jacket even if the sleeves were too short. He also wore his most unimpressed face, not only for Volovoi’s sake but for his own, so that his anticipation showed only as a wary narrowing of the eyes.

With exceptions. Under the brim of a squat peasant’s cap, Obidin’s gaze was fixed on the church across the water. Kolya Mer had stuffed his coat with cardboard pots; he eyed the hills like Darwin approaching the Galapagoan shore. Women wore their nicest cotton dresses under the usual layers of sweaters and rabbit-fur coats. They had their grim tourist faces too, until they looked at one another and broke into nervous giggles, then waved up at Natasha, who stood on the boat deck with Arkady.

Natasha’s cheeks were almost as red as her lipstick and she wore not one but two combs, as if she would need extra ammunition ashore. “It’s my first time in the United
States,” she told Arkady. “It doesn’t seem so different from the Soviet Union. You’ve been before. Where?”

“New York.”

“That’s different.”

Arkady paused. “Yes.”

“Well, so you came to see me off?”

Natasha looked ready to fly from sheer excitement over the water to the waiting shops. In fact Arkady had come to see whether Karp was going ashore. So far the trawlmaster hadn’t. “To thank you and see you off,” he said.

“It will just be for a few hours.”

“Even so.”

Her voice and eyes dropped. “It was a stimulating experience for me to work with you, Arkady Kirilovich. You don’t mind that I call you Arkady Kirilovich?”

“Whatever you like.”

“You’re not the fool I thought you were.”

“Thank you.”

“We came to a successful conclusion,” Natasha said.

“Yes, the captain has declared the inquiry officially over. There may not even be an investigation in Vladivostok.”

“It was good of Third Mate Bukovsky to find that note.”

“Better than good, unbelievable,” Arkady said, considering he had looked under Zina’s mattress well before Slava had found her note there.

“Natasha!” As her friends moved along the rail they waved frantically at her to claim her place in line.

Natasha was ready to run, to sail, to fly, but there was a line on her brow because she had witnessed Arkady’s earlier search of the bed.

“At the dance she didn’t seem so down in the mouth.”

“No,” Arkady had to agree. Dancing and flirting were not the usual symptoms of depression.

Natasha’s last question was the hardest one for her.
“You really think she killed herself? She could have done something that rash?”

Arkady gave his answer thought because he knew Natasha had lived months for this one day’s excursion, yet would stay loyally on board with him if he gave her any reason to. “I think it’s rash to write a suicide note. I refuse to, myself.” He pointed to the lifeboat. “Hurry, you’re going to miss your ride.”

“What can I get you?” Natasha’s brow was clear again.

“A complete set of Shakespeare, a video camera, a car.”

“I can’t get those.” She was already on the steps leading down to the deck.

“A piece of fruit will do.”

Natasha elbowed her way to her friends just as they were going down the gangway. They were like children, Arkady thought, the kind of Moscow children you see stamping their feet outside school on dark December mornings, bundled up to their hard little faces until the warm door is opened and their eyes light up. He wished he were going with them.

The lifeboat looked like a surfaced submarine; it could seal up forty passengers fleeing a sinking ship and was colored that crayon hue called “international orange.” For this holiday jaunt, the hatches were open so that the helmsman and passengers could stand in the fresh air. Natasha waved again before assuming a pose of resolute Soviet sobriety. They cast off, and the entire party appeared in their drab clothes on their orange boat to be headed for either a funeral or a picnic.

The
Merry Jane
was approaching to take more people ashore, and a whole new line had formed along the rail. Among those waiting was Pavel from Karp’s deck team. Looking at Arkady, he drew a finger across his throat.

Land did smell, Arkady thought. Unalaska smelled like a garden and he wanted to walk on dry land and leave
the scow on which he’d lived for ten months, if only for an hour.

So far, he hadn’t told anyone about the attack. What could he say? He hadn’t seen Karp or the other men. It would be his word against six politically reliable and socially responsible seamen first class. The only provable fact was that he had been inhaling fumes and inducing hallucinations, not to mention attempting to set fire to the fishhold.

Smoke smudged the air above where Dutch Harbor must be. How large was the town? Cleaner wisps hung from the sides of the mountains. That’s what they were, mountains that rose directly from the ocean floor. He imagined soaring over them and descending into a green valley, close enough to see those precious bog orchids of Kolya Mer’s, close enough to pick up earth in his hand.