Polar Star (35 page)

“We’re down to the
Eagle
?”

“The company has already dispatched three more catcher boats to join us. They’re not going to leave a factory ship like us depending on only one trawler.”

“Did Zina tell you that she swam?”

Nikolai cleared his throat. “She just said she could.”

“Back in the Golden Horn, the restaurant, was there anyone else you recognized, someone from the ship?”

“No. Look, I have to ask about your report. What are you going to say about me? Now you know everything.”

“If I knew everything I wouldn’t be asking questions.”

“Yes, yes, but are you naming me in your report?” Nikolai hunched closer; he was the kind of boy, Arkady thought, who would try to read his marks upside down on his teacher’s desk. “I have no right to ask, but I beg you to consider what will happen to me if there are adverse comments in your report. It’s not for myself. My mother works in a cannery. I always send one bolt of navy cloth home, and she sews skirts and pants that she can sell to friends, that’s how she gets by. She lives for me, and something bad like this would kill her.”

“Are you suggesting that I’d be responsible if your betrayal of your duty caused your mother’s death?”

“Of course not, nothing like that.”

Vladivostok would listen to Zina’s tapes no matter what happened to Arkady. On the basis of her trip to the chain locker alone the lieutenant faced the brig. “Before we reach home port you’d better talk to Hess,” he said. He wanted to get out of the radio shack quickly. “We’ll see what happens.”

“I remember one other thing, on the subject of money,” Nikolai said. “Zina never asked for any. What she wanted me to bring was a playing card, a queen of hearts. Not a payment, a …”

“A souvenir?”

“I went to the recreation officer and asked for a pack. Can you believe we have only one pack for the entire ship? And it didn’t have a queen of hearts. The way he was smiling, he knew.”

“Who was the recreation officer?” Arkady asked, though since the position was the lowest function an officer could have, only one name was likely.

“Slava Bukovsky.”

Who else?

25
Arkady found Slava sitting in shadow on an upper bunk, wearing the headphones of a Walkman and playing the mouthpiece of a saxophone, his bare feet swinging with the beat. Arkady sat quietly at the cabin’s table as if he’d arrived in the middle of a concert. Only the hooded light over the desk was on, but he could see the appointments that graced an officer’s cabin: the desk itself, bookshelves, a waist-high refrigerator and a clock inside a waterproof case, as if Slava’s were the cabin most likely to be flooded. He reminded himself not to be too disparaging; Slava had concealed successfully until now any involvement with Zina. The bookshelf held an entertainment officer’s usual books on popular games and recommended songs, as well as forbidding tomes on Lenin’s thought and on diesel propulsion; the second mate, Slava’s cabin mate, was studying for his first mate’s ticket.

As Slava’s cheeks swelled, his eyes closed, his body swayed and soulful bleats emerged from the mouthpiece. There was a calendar on a pennant, a photo of a group of boys around a motorcycle, with Slava in the sidecar,
and a taped list of the year’s May Day slogans; No. 14,
Toilers in the agro-industrial complex! Your patriotic duty is to fully provide the country with food in a short time!
was underlined.

The third mate pulled off his headphones, squeezed a last mournful note from the mouthpiece, let it drop and finally looked at Arkady. “ ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.,’ ” he said. “Beatles.”

“I recognized it.”

“I can play any instrument. Name an instrument.”

“Zither.”

“A regular instrument.”

“Lute, lyre, steel drum, sitar, panpipes, Formosan chong chai?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Accordion?”

“I can play that. Synthesizer, drums, guitar.” Slava looked at Arkady suspiciously. “What do you want?”

“Remember that box of personal effects you took from Zina’s cabin? Did you have a chance to go through her spiral notebook?”

“No, I didn’t have time because I had to interview a hundred people that same day.”

“The box is still in the infirmary. I just came from going over the notebook for fingerprints more completely than I did the first time. There are Zina’s and yours. I compared them with the prints on the suicide note you found.”

“So I looked in her dumb book. Too bad; you should have asked me in front of someone. Anyway, what are you doing running around the ship, not even bothering to show up in the factory?”

“We don’t have that many fish to clean. The team isn’t going to miss me.”

“Why isn’t the captain stopping you?”

Arkady had thought about this. “It’s a little like the
Inspector General.
Remember that story about how a fool comes to town and is thought to be an official of the czar?
Also, murder changes everything. Nobody knows quite what to do, especially with Volovoi out of the way. As long as I don’t argue with orders, I can ignore them for a while. As long as people don’t know how much I know—that’s what scares them.”

“So it’s just a matter of calling your bluff?”

“Pretty much.”

Slava sat up. “I could march right up to the bridge and tell the captain that a certain seaman second-class has been shirking work in order to pester the crew with questions he was ordered not to ask?”

“You can march better with your shoes on.”

“Done.”

Slava tucked the mouthpiece into his shirt pocket and hopped lightly from the bunk down to the deck. Arkady reached across the desk for an ashtray while the third mate pulled on his boots. “You’re going to wait here?” he asked Arkady.

“Right here.”

Slava threw on his running jacket. “Anything else I should tell him?”

“Tell him about you and Zina.”

The door slammed and Slava was gone.

Arkady took a cigarette from his pants and found a book of matches in the desk’s mug of pencils. He studied the design on the face of the book: the word “Prodintorg” was emblazoned on a ribbon. As he remembered, Prodintorg was in charge of foreign trade in animal goods: fish, crab, caviar, racehorses and animals for zoos, a wholesale approach to the wonders of nature. He had barely lit up when Slava returned, shutting the door with his back. “What about Zina?”

“Zina and you.”

“You’re guessing again.”

“No.”

A lifetime of bowing to authority shaped people. Slava
sat on the lower bunk and put his face in his hands. “Oh, God. When my father hears about this.”

“He may not, but you do have to tell me.”

Slava raised his head, blinked and took the sharp breaths of a man hyperventilating. “He’ll kill me.”

Arkady prompted him. “I think you tried to tell me once or twice and I wasn’t smart enough to hear you. What I couldn’t solve, for example, was how Zina was assigned to this ship. To have that much influence in fleet headquarters is highly unusual.”

“Oh, he tried to please, in his way.”

“Your father?” Arkady held up the matchbook.

“Deputy minister.” Slava was silent for a moment. “Zina insisted she had to be on this ship to be near me. What a joke! As soon as we left port, everything was over, as if we’d never known each other.”

“He made the call that put you on the
Polar Star
, and then at your request ordered to have Zina assigned too?”

“He never orders; he just calls the head of the port and asks if there’s any good reason someone can’t be placed somewhere or something can’t be done. All he says is that the Ministry is interested, and everybody understands. Anything: the right school, the right teacher, a Ministry car to bring me home. You know, the first sign of restructuring was when he couldn’t get me into the Baltic Fleet, only the Pacific. That’s why Marchuk detests me.” Slava stared into the dark as if there were a ghost there at a desk with a battery of phones. “You never had a father like that.”

“I did, but I disappointed him early and completely.” Arkady reassured him. “We all make mistakes. You couldn’t know that I’d already looked under the bed where you found the suicide note. Or, I should say, where you
put
the note, which came from her notebook that you took away from her cabin. I was slow not to figure that out right away. Was there anything else in the notebook that I didn’t see?”

A nervous giggle overcame Slava. “More suicide notes—two or three on a page. I threw the rest away. How many times could she kill herself?”

“So there you were, leading the ship’s band and watching a woman you’d helped get on board dancing with American fishermen and ignoring you.”

“No one knew.”

“You knew.”

“I hated it. During the break I had a smoke in the galley just so I wouldn’t see her. Zina came in and out and didn’t give me a second glance. Because she couldn’t use me anymore I didn’t exist.”

“That wasn’t in your report.”

“Nobody saw us. Once I tried to talk to her, one day in the wardroom, and she said she’d tell the captain if I ever bothered her again. That’s when I saw what was going on between the two of them, the leading captain and Zina. What if he knew about me? I wasn’t dumb enough to say that I might have been the last one to see her alive.”

“Were you?”

Slava unscrewed the mouthpiece band and examined the reed. “Cracked. It’s hard enough to find a sax to buy, and when you do own one it’s impossible to find reeds. They control you either way.” Gingerly he slipped the reed back on, like a man putting a ruby into a ring. “I don’t know. She took a plastic bag from a soup pot. The bag was all taped up. She put it under her jacket and went out on deck. I’ve tried to figure it out over and over. I thought those people on deck saw her after I did, but they didn’t say anything about a jacket or a bag. I’m not a good detective.”

“How big was the bag? What color?”

“One of the big ones. Black.”

“See, you remembered that. How is your report on Volovoi going?”

“I was just working on it when you came in.”

“In the dark?”

“Does it matter? What can I say that anyone will believe? They have a way of checking the lungs, don’t they, to tell whether he really died in a fire?” Slava laughed bitterly. “Marchuk says if I do a good job he’ll second my move to a Party school, which is another way of his saying I’ll never make captain.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. What about the Ministry?”

“Working under my father?” The question answered Arkady’s.

“Music?”

After a silence Slava said, “Before we moved to Moscow we lived in Leningrad. You know Leningrad?”

It hadn’t struck Arkady so forcibly before how lonely Slava was. This soft young man sitting in the shadows was meant for a carpeted office with a view of the Neva, not a bridge in the North Pacific.

“Yes.”

“The basketball courts near the Nevsky? No? Well, when I was five I was at the courts and there were some black Americans playing basketball. I’d never seen anything like them; they could have been from another planet. Everything they did was different—the way they shot, which was so easy, and the way they laughed, so loud that I put my hands over my ears. Actually they weren’t even a team. They were musicians who had been scheduled to play at the House of Culture, but the performance had been canceled because they played jazz. So they were playing basketball instead, but I could imagine how they made music, like black angels.”

“What kind of music did you make?”

“Rock. We had a high school band. We wrote our own songs, but we were censored by the House of Creativity.”

“You must have been popular,” Arkady said.

“It was pretty antiestablishment. I’ve always been a liberal. The idiots on this ship don’t understand that.”

“Is that how you met Zina, at a dance? Or at the restaurant?”

“No. Do you know Vladivostok?”

“About as well as I know Leningrad.”

“I hate Vladivostok. There’s a beach by the stadium where everybody swarms in the summertime. You know the scene: a pier covered with towels, air mattresses, chessboards, gobs of suntan lotion and all the anatomy you’d just as soon not see.”

“That’s not for you?”

“Thank you, no. I borrowed a sailboat, a six-meter, and sailed the bay. Because of the naval channel you have to stay fairly near the beach. Of course, most of the people don’t go in the water any deeper than their waist, or any farther than the buoy lines, certainly not past the lifeguards in the rowboats. Just the sound drives you crazy, the yakking and splashing and lifeguards’ whistles. Sailing was like escaping all of them. There was one swimmer, though, who swam so far out that I couldn’t help noticing her. She must have swum underwater some distance just to get past the lifeguards. I was so distracted that I spilled the wind out of the sail and luffed. There was a rope trailing over the side and she grabbed it and pulled herself on board, just as if we’d planned it. Then she stretched out on deck for a rest and pulled her cap off. Her hair was dark then, almost black. You know how water beads in the sun, so she looked like she was covered in little diamonds. She laughed as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to leap out of the water onto the boat of someone she’d never met. We sailed all afternoon. She said she wanted me to take her to a disco, but that she’d have to meet me there; she didn’t want me to pick her up. Then she dived in the water and was gone.