Polar Star (32 page)

“Relax. If you’re honest, you have nothing to worry about.”

Nikolai shrank in his chair. “It was one time, that’s all. She recognized me from Vladivostok. I thought she was a waitress; how did I know she was going to be on board? Maybe I should have told someone, but she begged me not to because she would have been sent back home on an off-loader. I had mercy on her, and then one thing led to another.”

“It led her to your cot.”

“I didn’t plan it that way. There’s no privacy on a ship. That was the only time.”

“No.”

“It was!”

“Vladivostok,” Arkady prompted him. “The Golden Horn.”

“You were watching her then?”

“Tell me about it.”

Nikolai’s story wasn’t much different from Marchuk’s. He’d gone to the Golden Horn with friends from the base and they’d all noticed Zina, but she seemed to be most attracted to him. When she got off work, the two went to her place, listened to music, danced, made love, and then he left and never saw her again until the
Polar Star
. “I thought the investigation about Zina was over,” he said. “I heard you were back in the factory.”

“She was a good waitress?”

“The worst.”

“What did you talk about?”

Arkady could feel the radioman’s mind freeze like a rabbit wondering which way to run next. Not only was he implicated in the betrayal of his service on the ship, but the interrogation had dangerously expanded into the past, implicating him again, if only through coincidence. The worst construction was that Zina had infiltrated the Pacific Fleet not once but twice, both times through him. Not necessarily as a foreign agent, to be sure; the KGB was always and obsessively trying to worm into the military, and naval intelligence was always and paranoically testing the vigilance of its own officers to see if it could breach its own security.

Like other men in similar dilemmas, Nikolai decided to plead guilty to a smaller crime as evidence of his honesty. “I have the best receivers in the world in Vladivostok. I can get American Armed Forces Radio, Manila, Nome. Sometimes I have to monitor them anyway, so I tape—just music and just for myself, never for profit. I
offered one to Zina as a friend and said we ought to go someplace where we could play it. Okay, it was a come-on, but we never talked about anything but music. She wanted me to duplicate the tapes and sell the copies through her. Zina was Georgian through and through. I told her no. We went to her place and listened to the tapes, but that was all.”

“Not quite all. You got what you wanted; you slept with her.”

Arkady asked what Zina’s apartment was like, and again Nikolai’s description resembled Marchuk’s. A private flat in a relatively new building, maybe a co-op. Television, VCR, stereo. Japanese prints and samurai swords on the wall. Doors and bar upholstered in red plastic. A rifle collection in a locked case. Though there were no photographs, clearly a man lived there too, and Nikolai had assumed that Zina’s friend was powerful and wealthy, either a black-market millionaire or someone high up in the Party.

“You’re a Party member?” Arkady asked.

“Young Communist.”

“Tell me about the radios here.”

Nikolai was happy to leave the subject of Zina Patiashvili and expound on more technical matters. The
Polar Star
’s radio cabin had a VHF radio with a range of about fifty kilometers for communicating with the catcher boats, and two larger, single sideband radios for longer range. One single sideband was usually tuned to the fleet radio. The second single sideband was for radio conferences with other Soviet ships spread across the Bering Sea, or for contact with fleet headquarters in Vladivostok and the company office in Seattle. In between, the radio monitored an emergency channel that all ships kept open.

The cabin also had a shortwave for Radio Moscow or the BBC. “I’ll show you something else.” Nikolai brought from under the desk a receiver no larger than a historical novel. “A CB radio. Very short range, but this
is how the catcher boats talk to each other when they don’t want us to listen in. All the more reason for us to have it.” He turned it on to the voice of Thorwald, the captain of the
Merry Jane
, droning in a Norwegian accent, “… fucking Russians pounded the fucking Georges Bank to death and pounding the fucking African coast until there’s no fucking fish there. At least we’ll get some fucking money—”

Arkady turned the CB off. “Tell me more about Zina.”

“She wasn’t a real blonde. She was pretty wild, though.”

“Not sex. What you talked about.”

“Tapes. I told you.” Nikolai had the confused expression of a student who was trying to cooperate but didn’t know what his new teacher wanted.

“The weather?” Arkady prompted.

“For her, anywhere but Georgia was too cold.”

“Georgia?”

“She said Georgian men would screw anything that bent over.”

“Work?”

“She expressed an un-Soviet philosophy about labor.”

“Fun?”

“Dancing.”

“Men?”

“Money.” Nikolai laughed. “I don’t know why I say that because she didn’t ask me for any. But she had a way of looking at you one moment as if you were the most handsome, desirable man on earth, which is a very erotic sensation, and then a minute later dismissing you with her eyes as if you couldn’t possibly meet her expectations. I’d say, ‘Why are you looking at me so coldly?’ and she’d say, ‘I’m imagining you’re not a little sailor boy, that you’re an
Afghantsi
, a soldier sent off to fight against Allah and his madmen, and you’ve just come home in a zinc-lined coffin and it makes me sad.’ Cruel things like that—and right in the middle of love, too.”

“What about the guns in the apartment? Did she talk about them?”

“No. I had the feeling I’d be some sort of softie in her eyes if I asked. She did say that the guy, whoever he was, slept with a gun under his pillow. I thought, Well, that’s typically Siberian.”

“Did she ask you questions?”

“Just about my family, my home, did I write often like a good son and send proper packages of coffee and tea?”

“Doesn’t the navy have its own system so that parcels don’t arrive ripped apart months after they’re sent?”

“The navy takes care of its own.”

“And she asked you to send a parcel for her?”

There was something increasingly calflike about the radioman in the widening of his eyes. “Yes.”

“Tea?”

“Yes.”

“Already wrapped for you to take?”

“Yes. But at the last minute she changed her mind and I left without it. That was another time when she gave me one of those looks as if I couldn’t measure up.”

“When you met on the
Polar Star
, did she tell you how she came to be on board?”

“She just said she’d got bored back at the restaurant, bored with Vladivostok, bored with Siberia. When I asked how she got a seaman’s union card, she laughed in my face and said she’d bought it, what else? The rules about that are well known, but they didn’t seem to apply to Zina.”

“She was different?”

Nikolai struggled with words, then admitted failure. “You had to know her.”

Arkady changed the subject. “Our single sideband radios, what’s their range?”

“It varies with the atmospherics. The captain can tell you; one day we can get Mexico and the next day nothing. But members of the ship’s crew often call home all
the way to Moscow through a radio-telephone link. It’s a morale builder.”

Arkady asked, “Can other ships listen to those conversations?”

“If they happen to be monitoring the right channel they can hear the incoming part of the conversation, but not what we say.”

“Good. Place a call for me to Odessa militia headquarters.”

“No problem.” Nikolai was eager to please. “Of course, all calls have to be cleared with the captain.”

“You don’t want to clear this call; you don’t even want to log it. Let’s review the situation,” Arkady said, because the radio technician was a young man who needed careful instruction. “As a naval officer, simply for admitting Patiashvili into your station on the
Polar Star
you can be charged with betraying your sacred trust. Since this was an ongoing relationship the question of conspiracy to commit the state crime of treason comes up. Even if you were merely innocently attempting to seduce a citizen, you can still be charged with activities detrimental to the high standing of Soviet womanhood, failure to report illegal firearms, theft of state property—the tapes—and dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda—the music. In any case, your life as a naval officer is at an end.”

Listening, Nikolai looked like a man swallowing a fish whole. “No problem. It may take an hour or so to get through to Odessa, but I’ll do it.”

“Incidentally, since you are a music lover, where were you during the ship’s dance?”

“My other duties.” Nikolai lowered his eyes to indicate, belowdecks, the intelligence station Arkady had yet to find. “It’s funny you mention music. The tapes that Zina had in the apartment in Vladivostok? Some was rock, but most were magnatizdat. You know, thieves’ songs.”

“ ‘You can cut my throat, but don’t cut my guitar strings’?”

“Exactly! You did know her.”

“I do now.”

On the way out, Arkady had to admit to himself that he’d been harder on the radioman than he’d really needed to be. It was the dig “old-timer” that had been Nikolai’s mistake. He found himself running his hand over his face. Did he look old? He didn’t feel old.

23
Under Gury’s bunk was a new nylon bag stuffed with plastic booty: Sony Walkmen, Swatch watches, Aiwa speakers, WaterPiks, Marlboros and a Mickey Mouse telephone. Taped on the wardrobe were Polaroid snapshots of Obidin, his beard cleaned and combed, standing before the wooden church in Unalaska like a man modestly posing on a cloud beside his Lord. Inside, the wardrobe was redolent with the exhalation of rows of jars of home brew flavored with fresh and canned fruit from the Dutch Harbor store. Anyone reaching for his jacket was assaulted by the sugary fumes of peaches, cherries and exotic mandarin oranges.
The most botanical corner of the cabin, however, was Kolya’s shelves of specimens gathered on the island and brought back in cardboard pots: furry moss clinging to a rock bedded on a moist page from
Pravda;
a miniature bush with minute purple berries; the sickle-shaped, papery leaves of a dwarf iris; a paintbrush that still claimed one fire-red petal.

Kolya was giving Natasha the tour; with the porthole laced by frost, his corner of the cabin resembled a greenhouse. It was the first time he’d ever impressed her. “Any scientific voyage returned like this,” he explained. “Cook and Darwin filled their small ships with botanical specimens in the holds, bulbs in the chain lockers, breadfruit trees on deck. Because life is everywhere. The underside of the ice sheet around us is covered with algae. That’s what brings the tiny creatures that, in turn, attract the fish. Naturally, predators follow: seals, whales, polar bears. We’re surrounded by life.”

Arkady’s mind was on botany of a different sort. He sat at the narrow table, enjoying one of Gury’s cigarettes and thinking of wild hemp, thousands of square hectares of luxuriant wild Manchurian hemp heavy with narcotic pollen, flowers and leaves growing like free rubles across the rugged Asian landscape. Every autumn what Siberians called “grass fever” broke out as people flocked like Party volunteers—better than Party volunteers—to the countryside for the harvest. Often no travel was necessary because the weed grew everywhere—along the road, in the potato field, in the tomato patch. Called
anasha
, it was trucked in bags west toward Moscow, where it could be smoked loose like cigarettes or tamped into pipes.

There was also
plan
. Hashish.
Plan
came in kilo bricks from Afghanistan and Pakistan, then traveled by different routes, some on army lorries, some on ferries over the Black and Caspian seas across Georgia, then north to Moscow.

“Polar bears wander for hundreds of kilometers out on
the ice sheet,” Kolya was telling Natasha. “No one knows how they find their way. They hunt two ways, by waiting at the holes where seals come up to breathe and by swimming under the ice and watching for a seal shadow above.”

Or poppies, Arkady thought. How many Georgian collectives overfulfilled their quota for the magic flower? How much was swept from the threshing floor, how much dried, how much baled, how much processed into morphine, then seemingly blown by the wind to Moscow?

From an investigator’s point of view, Moscow appeared to be an innocent Eve, surrounded by dangerous gardens, constantly seduced by oily Georgian, Afghan and Siberian snakes. The “tea” that Zina had asked Nikolai to send was undoubtedly a block of hemp,
anasha
. She’d changed her mind, probably because it was such small change, but it meant that there was at least part of a network in place.

“You found all these flowers just around the road and the store?” Natasha asked.

“Well, you have to know where to look,” Kolya said.

“The seed of beauty is everywhere.” Natasha wore her hair back to show off the crystal earrings she’d bought in Dutch Harbor. “Wouldn’t you agree, Arkady?”