Polar Star (27 page)

Different, Arkady thought. A Soviet bar was quiet, a gathering place for sedated men; this one was explosive with sound. Along the counter was a crowd of big men in plaid shirts and caps, with long hair and beards and a physical ease that seemed to lead naturally to backslap-ping and drinking from the bottle. The crowd and noise was doubled by a long mirror above a gemstone row of bottles. In a corner, Aleuts played pool. There were women at the tables, girls with drawn faces and extravagantly blond hair, but they were mostly ignored, except for a circle of them where Ridley held court. Morgan’s engineer also distinguished himself from the crowd by wearing a velvet shirt and a gold chain; he looked like a Renaissance prince mingling with peasants.

He came over to Arkady. “The ladies want to know if you have a two-headed prick.”

“What is normal here?” Arkady asked.

“Nothing is normal here. Look at it, all these seagoing American entrepreneurs completely dependent on you Communists. It’s true. The banks had the fishermen’s balls in the drawer because they’d all borrowed during the king-crab boom. That’s why even Gulf boats like ours are up here. When the crabs disappeared, everyone was losing boats, gear, cars, homes. We’d be pumping gas if we weren’t fishing. Then the Russians come along in ’78 and buy anything we catch. Thank God for international
cooperation. We’d be on our asses if it were up to the United States. You want strange? That’s it.”

“How much do you make?”

“Ten, twelve thousand a month.”

Arkady figured he himself made about one hundred dollars at a realistic black-market exchange.

“That’s strange,” he had to admit.

In their corner, under a hanging fluorescent light, the Aleuts played pool with somber concentration. They wore caps, parkas and dark glasses, all but Mike, the deckhand off the
Eagle
. He whooped as the cue ball rolled toward a pocket, nudged another ball in and stopped short of a scratch. Three Aleut girls in pastel quilted coats sat along one wall, their heads together, talking. A white girl sat alone by the other wall, her jaw working on gum, her eyes following Mike’s shots, ignoring the others.

“The Aleuts own the whole island,” Ridley said to Arkady. “The navy threw them off during the war, then Carter gave them the whole place back, so they don’t need to fish. Mike, he just loves the sea.”

“And you?” Arkady asked. “You love it too?”

Ridley had not only brushed his hair into a ponytail and tied braids by his ears, but seemed to have supercharged his eyes and sharp smile. “Fucking hate it. It’s an unnatural act to float steel on water. Salt water is our mutual enemy. Life is short enough.”

“Your shipmate Coletti was in the police?”

“A patrolman, not a bilingual investigator like you. Unless you count Italian.”

The scotch came and Morgan poured.

Ridley said, “What I miss at sea is civilization, because civilization is women, and that’s where the
Polar Star
has us beat. Take Christ and Freud and Karl Marx, put them in a boat for six months and they’d be just as foulmouthed and primitive as us.”

“Your engineer is a philosopher,” Hess told Morgan. “In fact, in the fifties, we used to have cannery ships off
Kamchatka that had about seven hundred women and a dozen men. They canned crabs. The process demanded that no metal be in contact with the crab, so we used a special lining produced in America. However, as a moral point, your government ordered no more lining for those Communist cans, so our crab industry collapsed.”

Arkady remembered the stories. There had been riots on board the ships, women raping the men. Not a lot of civilization.

“To joint ventures.” Morgan raised his glass.

Pool wasn’t played in the Soviet Union, but Arkady remembered the GI’s in Germany and their obsession with the game. Mike seemed to be winning, and gathering good-luck kisses from his gum-chewing girlfriend. If the czar hadn’t sold Alaska, would the Aleuts be pushing pawns on a chessboard?

Ridley followed Arkady’s eyes. “Aleuts used to hunt sea otters for Russia. They used to go after sea lions, walrus, whales. Today they’re busy renting docks to Exxon. A bunch of Native American capitalists now. Not like us.”

“You and me?”

“Sure. The truth is, fishermen have more in common with each other than with anyone on land. For example, people on land love sea lions. When I see a sea lion I see a thief. When you go by the Shelikoff Islands they’re lying in wait for you—gangs of them, forty, fifty at a time. They’re not afraid; they come right up to the net. Hell, they weigh six hundred, seven hundred pounds each. They’re like goddamned bears.”

“Sea lions,” Hess explained to Marchuk, who rolled his eyes in understanding.

“They do two things,” Ridley said. “They don’t just grab a single fish from the net and jump. No, they take one bite out of the belly of each fish. If it’s salmon in the net, they’re stealing fifty dollars a bite. Second, when he’s tired of that, the son of a bitch grabs one last fish
and dives in the water. Then he does something real cute. He comes to the surface with the fish in his mouth and waves it at you—like saying, ‘Fuck you, sucker.’ That’s what Magnums were made for. I don’t think anything less than a Magnum will even slow a big male. What do you use?”

Hess carefully translated what Marchuk said. “Officially they are protected.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said too. We have a whole armory for them on the
Eagle
. They should be protected.” Ridley nodded.

Ridley had an ambidextrous quality, it seemed to Arkady, an ability to play both the charmer and the thug, all the while looking like a poet. The engineer had fixed on him as well. “From your expression,” he said, “you think it’s murder.”

“Who?” Arkady asked.

“Not who. What,” Ridley said. “Sea lions.”

Marchuk raised his glass. “The main thing is that whether we’re Soviets or Americans, we’re all fishermen and are doing what we like to do. To happy men.”

“ ‘Happiness is the absence of pain.’ ” Ridley drained his glass and set it down. “Now I’m happy. Tell me,” he asked Arkady, “working down on the slime line all wet and cold and covered with fish guts, are you happy?”

“We use a different adage on the slime line,” Arkady said. “ ‘Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire.’ ”

“Good answer. I’ll drink to that,” Morgan said. “That’s Tolstoy?”

“Stalin,” Arkady said. “Soviet philosophy is full of surprises.”

“From you, yes,” Susan said. How long she’d been standing by the table Arkady didn’t know. Her hair was combed back wet and her cheeks were damp and pale, making her mouth redder and her brown eyes darker, the contrast lending her a new intensity.

* * *

Ridley had gone off with Coletti in search of a card game. Marchuk had returned to the ship to give Volovoi his turn ashore. Once the first mate learned that Arkady was on shore he would fly like a winged hangman. Still, two hours on land was better than none. Even in a bar, every minute on shore was like breathing air again.

Though the noise level continued to rise, Arkady noticed it less and less. Susan sat with her legs tucked underneath her. Her face was in shadow within a ring of golden hair. Her usual veneer of animosity had split, revealing a darker, more interesting plane.

“I detest Volovoi, but I can believe in him easier than I can believe in you.”

“Here I am.”

“Dedicated to truth, justice and the Soviet way?”

“Dedicated to getting off the ship.”

“That’s the joke. We’re both going back and I’m not even Russian.”

“Then quit.”

“I can’t.”

“Who’s forcing you to stay?” Arkady asked.

She lit a cigarette, added scotch to her ice, didn’t answer.

“So we’ll suffer together,” Arkady said.

George Morgan and Hess shared their bottle. “Imagine,” Hess suggested, “if we did everything as a joint venture.”

“If we really cooperated?” Morgan asked.

“Did away with suspicion and stopped trying to pull each other down. What natural partners we would be.”

“We take the Japanese, you take the Chinese?”

“Split the Germans while we can.”

“How would you describe hell?” Susan asked Arkady.

He thought about it. “A Party Congress. A four-hour speech by the Secretary General. No, an eternal speech.
The delegates spread out like flatfish listening to a speech that goes on and on and on.”

“An imaginary evening with Volovoi. Watching him lift weights. Either he’s naked or I’m naked. Whichever, it’s horrible.”

“He calls you ‘Soo-san.’ ”

“So do you. What’s a name you say better?”

“Irina.”

“Describe her.”

“Light brown hair, very dark brown eyes. Tall. Full of life and spirit.”

“She’s not on the ship.”

“No.”

“She’s home?”

Arkady changed the subject. “They like you on the
Polar Star
.”

“I like Russians, but I don’t like having my cabin bugged. If I mention there’s no butter, suddenly I’m served a plate of butter. Bernie has a political discussion with a deckhand and the man is taken off the ship. At first you try not to say anything offensive, but after a while to keep your sanity you start talking about Volovoi and his slugs. The
Polar Star
is hell to me. You?”

“Only limbo.”

“It can all be joint venture,” said Hess. “The shortest sea route between Europe and the Pacific is through the Arctic, and we could provide the icebreakers the same way the
Polar Star
leads the
Eagle
through the ice sheet.”

“And depend on you?” Morgan asked. “I don’t think things have changed
that
much.”

“You liked Zina,” Arkady said. “You gave her your swimsuit, you let her borrow your sunglasses. In return, she gave you—what?”

Susan took a long time to answer; it was like holding a conversation in the dark with a black cat. “Amusement,” she said finally.

“You told her about California, she told you about Vladivostok, an even trade?”

“She was a combination of innocence and guile. A Russian Norma Jean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Norma Jean bleached her hair and became Marilyn Monroe. Zina Patiashvili bleached her hair and remained Zina Patiashvili. Same ambition, different result.”

“You were friends.”

Susan refilled his glass so full that the scotch swelled like oil above the rim, then did the same for herself. “This is a Norwegian drinking game,” she said. “The first one to spill has to drink. Lose twice and you sit in a chair while the other person hits you on the head and tries to knock you over.”

“We’ll do it without the hitting. So you and Zina were friends,” Arkady repeated.

“The
Polar Star
is like a deprivation tank. You know how rare it is to meet someone who actually seems to be alive and unpredictable? The problem is that you Soviets have a peculiar idea of friends. We’re all peace-loving peoples of goodwill, but God forbid that an American and a Soviet get too close. Then the Soviet is next heard of on a ship off New Zealand.”

“Zina wasn’t shipped off.”

“No, so we knew she was informing on us, at least to some degree. I was willing to accept that because she was so alive, so much fun, so much smarter than any of the men knew.”

“Which of your men did she sleep with?”

“How do you know she slept with someone?”

“She always did; it was the way she operated. If there were four American men on board she slept with at least one of them.”

“Lantz.”

Arkady remembered Lantz, the thin, languid observer from the sauna. “After that you warned her off? It
wouldn’t have been Volovoi.” Arkady took a sip. “Good scotch.”

Overfilled, the surface of her drink trembled but didn’t break. Neon light lay on it like a moon.

“Who do you sleep with on the
Polar Star
!” she asked.

“No one.”

“Then the
Polar Star
is a deprivation tank for you too. I drink to you.”

For the first time Morgan raised his head in her direction, then returned to a description by Hess of the latest invasion of Moscow. “The Japanese are everywhere, at least in the best hotels. The best restaurant in Moscow is Japanese, but you can’t get in because it’s full of them.”

Arkady said, “Zina told you about herself and Captain Marchuk, didn’t she? Is that why you didn’t tell me you saw them at the stern rail during the dance, so that you wouldn’t embarrass him?”

“It was dark.”

“He didn’t think she was suicidal. You talked to her; did you think she was depressed?”

“Are you depressed?” Susan asked. “Are you suicidal?”

Arkady was thrown off track again. He was out of practice at interrogation—too slow, too swayed by the counterflow of her questions.

“No, I would describe myself as a carefree reveler in life. I was more carefree when I was a Party member, of course.”

“I bet.”

“It’s harder to get in trouble if you have a card.”

“Really. Like how?”

“Take smuggling. Without a Party card, tragedy. With a Party card, comedy.”

“How is that?”

“A drama. Say the second mate gets caught. He goes before the other officers and sobs, ‘I don’t know what
carne over me, comrades. I have never done anything like it before. Please give me a chance to redeem myself.’ ”

“So?” Susan had been lured into the light.

Hess and Morgan had fallen silent, listening.

“A vote is taken,” Arkady said, “and a decision is reached to place a severe reprimand on his Party record. Two months pass and another meeting is held.”

“Yes?” Susan said.

“The captain says, ‘We were all disappointed in the conduct of our second mate and there were times I felt I could never sail with him again, but now I see a sincere effort to redeem himself.’ ”

“The political officer says—” Susan prompted him.

“The political officer says, ‘He has drunk again from the clear wellsprings of Communist thought. I suggest that, taking into consideration his spiritual rebirth, the severe reprimand be removed from his Party record.’ What could be more comic?”

Susan said, “You’re a funny man, Renko.”