Polar Star (38 page)

“He’s here.” Natasha stiffened.

Karp was moving slowly along the benches at the rear of the cafeteria, perfectly at ease, simply sorting out figures in the dark. Arkady steered Natasha toward the stage. “Kolya would like to dance with you,” he said.

“He would?”

“If you see him, you should give him a chance. He’s a bright man, a scientist, a botanist who needs to come down to earth.”

“I’d rather help you,” Natasha said.

“Then, half a minute after I’m gone, turn out the stage lights for just a few seconds.”

“This is still all about Zina, isn’t it?” Natasha’s voice sank. “Why are you so involved?”

Arkady was startled into an answer. “I hate suicide.”

There was something newly liberated about Slava, as if the saxophone were a divining rod that had located his soul. While the third mate wailed, Arkady and Natasha reached the galley door.

“She didn’t kill herself?” Natasha asked.

“No.”

“Karp killed her?”

“Now, that’s the strange part. I don’t think he did.”

* * *

The galley was a narrow gamut of steel sinks, stacked trays as dented as war shields, towers of white soup bowls, industrial ranges under hanging pans of washtub size. The realm of Olimpiada Bovina. Cabbage bathed in simmering water, either being prepared for breakfast or being reduced to glue. A paddle stood upright in a mixing bowl of hardening batter. Arkady was aware he was following the same path Zina had taken during the previous dance seven nights before. According to Slava, she had removed a plastic bag from a pot. What was in the bag? Why plastic? Then the next witnesses placed her on deck.

Arkady opened the door to the corridor just enough to see Pavel anxiously sucking on a cigarette and watching for anyone leaving the dance. A moment later “Dark Eyes” ended amid shouts of “Lights!” and “Off my foot, you bloody bastard!” At once Pavel stuck his head inside the cafeteria while Arkady slipped out of the galley and down the corridor.

Who else but Kolya Mer would be at the rail taking in all the pleasures of rain turning to a wet, stinging snow that angled under a lowering fog? He grabbed Arkady as he ran past.

“I wanted to tell you about the flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Where I picked them.” Bare fingers peeked out of Kolya’s cut gloves.

“The irises?”

“I told Natasha I got them along the road outside the store in Dutch Harbor. Actually, irises grow higher up. I saw you check in my notebook, so you know I found them on the hill. I saw you going up after the American.” Kolya took a deep breath for courage. “Volovoi asked.”

“Volovoi ran into you on the hill?”

“He was looking for you. He even said he was going
to take my samples away unless I told him. I didn’t, though.”

“I didn’t think you did. Was he alone?”

Say no, Arkady thought. Say that First Mate Volovoi was with Karp Korobetz and we’ll go together to Marchuk right now.

“I couldn’t tell in the fog,” Kolya said.

Karp would be coming on deck any second, Arkady thought, unless he was already on his way belowdecks to block him from the forward part of the ship.

Kolya was staring straight up. “Like tonight. The snow will stop and then it will really get thick. I miss the sextant.”

“It’s not very useful without stars,” Arkady said. “Go inside. Get warm. Dance.”

Only because he was away from the dance, Arkady heard the change in pitch. The reverberation of the screws was deeper, which meant the
Polar Star
was slowing down. But the stream of glittering flakes created the illusion that the factory ship was rushing forward like a sleigh. Underfoot, he felt the tremor of the engines and the cracking of ice under the plate of the prow. Overhead, snow swayed on the booms and gantries, coating the antennas, directional rings and radar bars so that they shone in a lamplight intensified by the plane of fog directly above. If the senses were anything to go by, the
Polar Star
was flying between two seas, one above and one below.

The sound of boots scurried across the deck behind him. Ahead, someone else descended the stairs from the bow. Arkady slipped through the fishing net that surrounded the volleyball court. Snow on the mesh had turned it into a gauzy tent of ice that trembled in the wind. The deck lamp was a blur. Through this screen he watched the two figures converge and talk. He should have picked up a knife in the kitchen. The volleyball
apparatus had been taken down. He couldn’t defend himself with a pole; there wasn’t even a ball.

First one figure and then the other entered the court after Arkady. He expected them to spread out, but they stayed together as they crept forward. The bottom of the net was tied to cleats, tied and frozen; no exit there. Maybe he could climb the net like a monkey? Not likely. The deck was icy. If he knocked one down, perhaps both would fall.

“Renko? Is it you?”

The other silhouette lit a match. In a darting flame Arkady could see two faces with gnomish brows and anxious smiles with gold teeth. Skiba and Slezko, Volovoi’s two slugs.

“What do you want?” Arkady asked.

“We’re on your side,” Slezko said.

“They’re going to get you tonight,” Skiba said. “They don’t want you to see morning.”

Arkady asked, “Who is ‘they’?”

“You know,” Slezko said in time-honored Soviet fashion. Why say more?

“We still know how to do our jobs,” said Skiba. “There just hasn’t been anyone to report to.”

The match went out. In the wind the net billowed like sails of ice.

“There’s no discipline, no vigilance, no line of communication anymore,” Slezko said. “To speak frankly, we’re at a loss.”

Skiba said, “You must have done something that set them off because they’re searching the entire ship for you. They’ll cut your throat in your cabin if they have to. Or on deck.”

“Why are you telling me?” Arkady asked.

“Reporting, not telling,” Slezko said. “We’re just doing our duty.”

“Reporting to
me
?”

Skiba said, “We’ve thought about this a lot. We have
to report to someone, and you’re the only one with the experience to take his place.”

“Whose place?”

“Volovoi’s, who else?” Slezko said.

Skiba said, “We think that you might come from the appropriate organ anyway, the way you act lately.”

“What organ would that be?”

Slezko said, “You know.”

I know, Arkady thought. The KGB. It was insane. Skiba and Slezko had been happy to inform on him as an enemy of the people while Volovoi was alive. Once he was dead, however, they were like guard dogs thrown into confusion. Allegiance wasn’t what they craved so much as a new fist on the leash. Well, a farmer sowed corn, a shoemaker made shoes, informers needed a new Volovoi. They had simply changed Arkady from victim to master.

“Thank you,” Arkady said. “I’ll keep your advice in mind.”

“I don’t understand why you don’t just hold them in custody,” Skiba said. “They’re only workers.”

Slezko said, “You won’t be safe until you do.”

“My advice,” Arkady said, “is to watch out for your own necks.”

In the dark Skiba mournfully agreed. “In times like these nothing is safe.”

On the bridge the oncoming snow was lit by bow and wheelhouse lamps so that the eye could follow flakes individually, one or two out of the millions flowing out of the dark and over and around a windshield that had been hosed down with steam and wore its own frozen sheen. Wipers rhythmically brushed snow aside, but ice was already encroaching again from the corners. What was there to see anyway, Arkady thought, except fog and ice on a line that extended over the Pole to the Atlantic?

Inside, the overhead lamp was dim. The radar and echo sounder scopes cast green halos. The gyrocompass
floated in a ball of light. Marchuk was at the wheel; Hess stood at the windshield. Neither man seemed surprised to see Arkady on the bridge.

“Comrade Jonah,” the captain said softly.

There was no helmsman and no one was in the navigation room. The engine telegraph was set between “Dead Slow” and “Dead Stop.”

“Why are we slowing?” Arkady asked.

The captain had a pained smile. As he tapped out a cigarette he looked like a man contemplating life from the last step of a guillotine. Hess, caught in the moving shadow of a wiper, looked as if he were only one step behind.

“I should have left you where you were,” Marchuk told Arkady. “You’d disappeared on the slime line, in the belly of the whale. We must have been insane to pluck you out.”

“Are we stopping?” Arkady asked.

“We have a slight problem,” Hess conceded. “There
are
problems besides you.”

The light from outside was pale and cold, but the fleet electrical engineer appeared to Arkady to be especially white, as if all the sun lamps on earth were wasted on him.

“Your cable?” Arkady suggested.

“I told you,” Hess reminded Marchuk. “He found my station today.”

“Well, your station is a pearl in an oyster, so a man of Renko’s abilities was bound to find it. One more reason why I should have left him where he was.” To Arkady the captain said, “I told him the bottom we were going over was too grabby and too shallow, but he put the cable out anyway.”

“A hydrophone cable is designed not to snag,” Hess said. “It’s deployed from submarines all the time.”

“And now something’s tangled in the cable,” Marchuk said. “Maybe part of a crab pot, maybe a walrus
head. Tusks dragging on the ocean floor. We can’t reel the cable in and the tension on it is too great for us to go any faster.”

“Whatever it is will come loose eventually,” said Hess.

“In the meantime,” Marchuk said, “we must proceed ahead delicately even while we’re making way through ice and a Force Seven wind. The captains in the navy must be magicians.” When he inhaled, his eyes reflected the ember. “Excuse me, I forgot: in the navy the cables are deployed from submarines, not from factory ships in the ice.”

The
Polar Star
trembled and heaved a little in the swell hidden below the sheet. Arkady was no engineer, but he knew that in order to break ice a ship, no matter how big, needed a certain amount of momentum. Too slow at too low a gear and sooner or later the diesels would burn out. “How good a captain is Morgan?” he asked.

Marchuk said, “We’ll find out. A boat like the
Eagle
should be in view of a coconut palm and looking for shrimp, nowhere near ice. Now the waves are picking up in the fairway, and his bow and deck aren’t high enough. He shouldn’t head into the wind, but he has to stay behind us or get iced in. He’s already iced up and getting top-heavy.”

Something occurred to Arkady. The quiet. A bridge always had one radio tuned to the distress frequency. Marchuk followed Arkady’s eyes to the single sideband. The captain left the wheel to turn up the sound, like pins dropping, of heavy static.

“Morgan hasn’t sent an emergency call yet,” said Hess.

“He hasn’t sent any call,” Marchuk said.

Arkady asked, “Why don’t you raise him?” Off Sakhalin, boats always talked to each other through heavy weather.

“He doesn’t respond,” Marchuk said. “One of his antennas might be down.”

Hess said, “Morgan can tell by our speed that something is wrong, and he probably knows that the cable is played out. A piece of the cable is what he’s after. We’re the ones in trouble, not him. This weather is perfect for him.”

On the radar screen the fairway carved by the
Polar Star
was a narrow lane of green dots, sea returning the radar’s signal. In the middle of the lane, about five hundred meters back, was the blip that was the
Eagle;
the rest of the screen was a blank. Arkady punched in a 50-k scale. Still there was nothing but the
Eagle
. Boats were supposed to be coming from Seattle, but the weather would be delaying them.

“Morgan has radar, too,” Hess said. “And a directional echo sounder. If something is caught on the cable he’ll detect it. This is probably the opportunity he’s been waiting for.”

Marchuk said, “If he’s lost a radio mast, then he’s lost his radar, too.”

The autopilot turned the wheel a notch, minding its job.

“Captain,” Hess said, “I can understand your sympathy for another fisherman. Would that Morgan was, but he’s not. We are his fish. He will be silent and he will stay close to see if we make a mistake, such as picking up speed. Whatever is caught on the cable could lift it to the surface right beside the
Eagle
.”

“What if the cable breaks?” Arkady asked.

“It won’t break if we stay at this speed,” said Hess.

“What if it does?” Marchuk asked.

“It won’t,” Hess said.

What was Hess’s musical instrument? The cello. The fleet electrical engineer reminded Arkady of a cellist trying to play as his strings popped one by one.

Hess repeated, “It won’t, but even if it did break, the cable has negative buoyancy; it would sink. The only problem would be returning to Vladivostok and the Pacific
Fleet after losing a hydrophone cable. Our voyage has been disastrous enough, Captain. We don’t need any more disgraces.”

“Why doesn’t Morgan answer our calls?” Marchuk demanded.

“I’ve told you why. Except for the radio, the
Eagle
is proceeding normally. Everything else is in your imagination.” Hess lost patience. “I’m going below; perhaps I can wind in the cable a little.” He paused in front of Arkady. “Explain to the captain that Zina Patiashvili didn’t go to the stern rail every time the
Eagle
was close in order to throw kisses. It turns out that she got plenty of them from my own radioman. If Zina were here now, I’d kill her myself.”

The fleet electrical engineer left by the flying bridge. Before the door slammed shut, snow entered, spun in the dark, then died.

“It
is
humorous,” Marchuk said. “After all that time in dry dock putting in the cable and it’s the only thing that breaks down.”

The captain leaned against the counter. He laid his hand affectionately on a compass repeater, opened its hood, closed it.

“I keep thinking things will change, Renko, that life can be honest and direct, that there’s good and dignity in anyone who’s willing to work hard. Not that people are perfect, not that I’m perfect. But good. Am I an idiot? Tell me, when we reach Vladivostok will you tell them about me and Zina?”