Polar Star (36 page)

“After the disco, we went hiking in the hills. She never let me pick her up or leave her off at her apartment. I assumed she was living in such poor conditions that she was embarrassed. I knew by her accent that she was
Georgian, but I didn’t hold that against her. I was able to tell her anything and she seemed to understand. With hindsight I realize she never talked about herself at all, except to say that she had a seaman’s ticket and wanted to come on the
Polar Star
with me. She played me for a fool, which is exactly what I was. She played everyone for a fool.”

“Who do you think killed her?”

“Anyone, but I was afraid a murder investigation would sooner or later point to me, which makes me a coward as well as a fool. Am I wrong?”

“No.” Arkady couldn’t disagree. “The water in the bay, was it cold?”

“Out where she was? Freezing.” Sitting on the upper bunk, Slava seemed suspended in the dark.

Arkady said, “You told me earlier that this is your second voyage.”

“Yes.”

“Both voyages with Captain Marchuk?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else on the
Polar Star
whom you sailed with before?”

“No.” Slava thought. “No officers, I mean. Otherwise, only Pavel and Karp. Am I in trouble?”

“I’m afraid you are.”

“I’ve never been in real trouble before; I never had the nerve. It’s new, a whole different range of possibilities. What are you going to do now?”

“Go to bed.”

“It’s early.”

“Well, when you’re in trouble, even getting to bed can be exciting.”

On deck, Arkady could feel the ship ride away from the wind, which meant that Marchuk had delivered the
Merry Jane
to the edge of the ice sheet and then turned north into the sheet again. Rain made the ice around the
Polar Star
shimmer like the blue of an electrical field. He hid in shadow until his eyes adjusted.

Slava hadn’t known anything about the Golden Horn or about the apartment Zina had taken Nikolai and Marchuk to, so from the start she had treated Slava differently. No raucous seamen’s restaurant, no apartment cum illegal arsenal to scare off the delicate third mate. She may never have seen Slava before that day she climbed onto his sailboat, but the trawlmaster had.

At any moment Karp could swing from a guy wire or pop out of a hatch. “Relax,” he had said. Why hadn’t Karp killed him yet? Arkady wondered. Not because of his intelligence or luck. Officers occupied the
Polar Star
’s wheelhouse, their realm of ignorance, and the rest of the factory ship’s ill-lit passages and slippery decks were the trawlmaster’s domain. Arkady could vanish whenever Karp wanted. Each day since Dutch Harbor had been a day of grace. He was alive, he realized, only because a third death was more than Vladivostok would be willing to accept. The
Polar Star
would immediately be ordered home. When a ship returned under a cloud, it was surrounded by Border Guard troops and the crew kept on board while the vessel was stripped down and searched. Yet Karp had to get rid of him. For the moment the trawlmaster’s dilemma was the difference between Arkady wearing his head or not. Karp was still thinking, taking his time, since what could Arkady tell Marchuk that wouldn’t point more at himself than at anyone else? Karp had an alibi and witnesses for where he was when the first mate died. Still, despite that “Relax,” Arkady crossed the deck from pool of light to pool of light like a man connecting dots.

The crew was already packed away in their beds, and in Arkady’s cabin only Obidin was awake.

“Some persons say there’s an off-loader coming to get you, Arkady. Some say you’re Cheka.” Cheka was the old, honored name of the KGB. “Some say you don’t
know yourself.” The smell of home brew rose from Obidin’s beard like the scent of pollen from a thistle.

Arkady pulled off his boots and climbed into his bunk. “And what do you think?”

“They’re fools, of course. The mystery of human action cannot be defined in political terms.”

“You don’t like politics.” Arkady yawned.

“The black soul of a politician cannot be plumbed. Soon the Kremlin will join the other devil.”

“Which devil?” Americans, Chinese, Jews?

“The Pope.”

“Shut up,” Gury’s voice said. “We’re trying to sleep.” Thank God, Arkady thought.

“Arkady,” Kolya said a minute later. “You awake?”

“What?”

“Have you noticed Natasha lately? She’s looking nice.”

26
In his sleep Arkady watched Zina Patiashvili swim from the Vladivostok beach, which was exactly as Slava had described it except that the sunbathers were all seals, basking and craning their heads and long-lashed Oriental eyes up to the sky. She was in the same bathing suit she’d paraded in on deck that sunny day. The same dark glasses, and her hair blond, not even with telltale roots. It was a dazzling day. Long buoys were strung like candy sticks around a kiddie section. Timber had floated from the loading yards nearby, and boys rode stray logs like war canoes.

Farther into the bay Zina swam, even past the sailboats skating on the surface of the water so that she could turn on her back and look at the city’s overlapping green trees, office blocks and the Roman arches of the stadium. Dynamo Stadium. Every town had its Dynamos, Spartaks or Torpedoes. Why not names like Torpor or Inertia?

She dived to quieter, cooler water where light penetrated the water at an angle, as if through the blinds of a room, down to a level both translucent and black, pulling herself with sweeping strokes to the soft, silent floor of
the bay. A fish darted in front of her face. Schools of fish flowed by on either side, herring as bright as a shower of coins, blue streams of sablefish, the floating shadow of a ray moving from two beams of light that approached with the sound of an onrushing train. Steel trawl doors plowed the sea floor on either side, sending up plumes of roiled mud. The lights attached to the headrope were blinding, but she could see the bottom exploding with the ground rope’s advance, both geysers of silt and wave after wave of groundfish rising to try to escape the trawl, which roared as it engulfed them. A wall of water first pushed her away from and then sucked her into the maelstrom, into the deep bass chord of straining mesh, clouds of silt and glittering scales.

Awake, Arkady sat up in the dark as wet with sweat as if he’d climbed from the sea. He’d told Natasha it was simply seeing what was before your eyes; no genius was needed. How do you smuggle on open water? What went back and forth twenty times a day? And where would the trawlmaster hide what he’d received? Another obvious answer surfaced: where on the
Polar Star
had he been attacked?

This time Arkady took a flashlight. Rats scurried from beams, slipping between planks, red pinpoints staring down as he descended the ladder in the forward hold. Cooling pipes swarmed with the adept clambering of the rats. At least the trip was shorter with a light.

He stepped gently down onto the bottom of the hold, remembering how last time he had picked up a loose plank and started beating on the walls in an attempt to drive out a lieutenant of naval intelligence, when all the while he had probably been standing on the lid of a treasure chest. The beam of the flashlight found the plank, the same paint cans and blanket, the same cat skeleton as before. Earlier, though, the cat had been in the center of the floor; this time it was curled up in a corner. There
were heel and scuff marks on the floor planks. He touched them. Not scuff marks: water.

The hatch at floor level opened and Pavel, the deckhand on Karp’s team, stepped halfway in. Wearing a helmet and jacket soaked with rain, he tried to squint over his hand through the glare of Arkady’s flashlight. “Still here?” he asked. Then he saw who it was, slammed the hatch and locked it shut.

Arkady climbed the ladder to the next level. Its hatch was locked. He continued up to the top level, the one through which he’d entered the hold, his heart pounding like an extra prisoner willing his hands up the rungs. Kicking the hatch open, he ran to the stairs and down. When he reached the bottom level outside the hold, Pavel was gone, but wet prints on the metal deck pointed like arrows in the direction he’d taken. There was the damp traffic of other boots on the same path.

Arkady ran, trying to catch up. The path led aft, passed the No. 2 fishhold and then took the midship stairs to emerge by the forward crane of the trawl deck. There was no sign of Pavel or anyone else. Rain swept the boards of the deck, wiping them clean, and Arkady pocketed the flashlight and took out his knife. The main winch lamp was off; the gantry lamps were caked with ice. Across the deck the entrance to the stern ramp was black.

At this point he didn’t need arrows. What was surprising was that it was the first time he’d ever been on the ramp. The gantry lights touched the rough hide of its walls and the overlapping folds of ice at the top of the slip. With each step down, though, the light faded and the angle of the ramp became more precipitous. Far forward, the prow of the
Polar Star
hit heavier ice and shuddered. Deep within the stern, in the sound box of the ramp, the shudder swelled into a moan. A following wave rushed up the ramp and subsided with a sigh, the way the audiomechanics of a seashell amplified and exaggerated sound, the way the inner ear gauged the pounding of the heart.

If Arkady slid there was nothing between him and the water but the safety gate. He held on as best he could to the side of the ramp as he felt its surface start to fall away. Overhead, at the well, was a second dim intrusion of light. He could see that the chain of the safety gate was taut on its hook on the wall of the ramp; the gate had been swung up and out of the way. Too late to grab the hook, he began to slide. Just a bit to begin with, the first millimeter that informs a falling man of his situation, then with momentum that grew as the curve of the ramp became steeper. Spread-eagled, face forward, his fingers digging into ice, he saw the white tracery of a wave rising toward him while his knife rattled ahead of him, free. At the lip the ramp opened to the black of the fairway and the sky, the sound of the screws and, to the sides, wings of ice. As the water rushed up, his hand found a rope along the side of the ramp and he twisted his wrist around it. When he came to a stop, he saw below him another man standing in boots at a steep angle like a mountain climber in the waves washing the bottom of the ramp. The lifeline was tied to his waist.

Karp wore a dark sweater and a wool cap pulled down to his heavy brow, and held what looked like a cushion. “Too late,” he told Arkady. He threw the cushion backhanded into the water. From the way it hit and plunged, the package was weighted. “A fortune,” he said. “Everything we had. But you’re right; they’ll tear this ship apart when we get back to Vladivostok.”

Karp leaned back with both hands free and lit a cigarette, a man relieved and at ease. The wake had a luminescence that dissipated in the dark. Arkady pulled himself to his feet.

“You look scared, Renko.”

“I am.”

“Here.” Karp shifted, gave the cigarette to Arkady and lit another for himself. His eyes shone as they searched the ramp above. “You came alone?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll find out.”

Arkady’s attention was fixed on the rain and on a light swaying in the distance like a lamp in a breeze. It was the
Eagle
, maybe two hundred meters back. “What you tossed in, what if the net picks it up?”

“The
Eagle
isn’t towing now, they’re busy enough hosing off ice. Pretty top-heavy in a boat like that. How did you know I’d be here?”

Arkady decided not to mention Pavel. “I wanted to see where Zina had gone into the water.”

“Here?”

“She left her jacket and a bag either here or on the landing while she went to the dance. What did she look like in the net?” Arkady asked.

Karp gave his cigarette a long pull. “Ever see anyone drown?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know.” Karp turned to study the
Eagle
’s light fade in a sweeping gust of rain. He seemed unhurried, as if waiting for a friend. “The sea is dangerous, but I should be grateful to you for getting me out of Moscow. I was making, with pimping and shakedowns, what? Twenty or thirty rubles a day? To the rest of the world, rubles aren’t even money.”

“You’re not in the rest of the world. In the Soviet Union a fisherman makes a lot of rubles.”

“For what? Meat’s rationed, sugar’s rationed. Restructuring is a joke. The only difference now is that vodka is rationed too. Who’s a criminal? Who’s a smuggler? Delegations go to Washington and come back with clothes, toilets, chandeliers. The Secretary General collected fast cars, his daughter collected diamonds. The same in the republics. This Party leader has marble palaces; that one has suitcases so full of gold you can’t lift them from the floor. Another has a fleet of trucks that carry nothing but poppies, and the trucks are protected by the motor patrol.
Renko, you’re the only one I don’t understand. You’re like a doctor in a whorehouse.”

“Well, I’m a romantic. So you wanted something else, but why drugs?”