Polar Star (42 page)

He was still on a bearing of 300 degrees, though the compass needle swung from side to side. This close to
the magnetic pole the vertical pull was so strong that the needle’s tip seemed to be jerked left and right by strings. There was nothing else to get a fix on—no feature on the horizon, no horizon at all, no seam between ice and fog. Every direction was the same, including up and down. Total whiteout.

First he wanted to check the wardrobes in the
Eagle
’s cabins, then storage lockers and engine room. Zina had been stowed somewhere.

Marchuk was right about illusions. Ahead Arkady saw an old-fashioned black vinyl 78 record spinning by itself and without a sound in the middle of the ice. It was as if his mind had decided to fill in the white void with the first object it could grab from his memory. He checked the compass. Perhaps he had been going in a circle. That happened in fog. Some scientists said travelers wandered because one leg was stronger than the other; others even cited the Coriolis effect of the rotation of the earth, assuming that men had no more control over their direction than wind or water.

The record spun faster as he approached, then wobbled out of control; with his last steps, it trembled and dissolved into a rough circle of tar-black water edged by broken ice soaked red with blood.

Polar bears sometimes crashed through a seal’s breathing hole just as the seal was coming up for air. The bears hunted two hundred or three hundred kilometers out on the sea ice. The sound of an icebreaker usually chased them away, but the
Polar Star
was at dead stop. Arkady hadn’t heard the attack, so it couldn’t have just happened. On the other hand, no blood or tracks led away from the hole. The bear had taken its kill straight down into the water and either hadn’t come back up yet or else had headed underwater for another hole. The ice looked as if it had exploded. From the amount of blood ringing the hole, perhaps the seal had exploded too. Only a piece or
two of ice bobbed in the water, evidence of the currents still moving under the sheet.

Now, that would be an unexpected conclusion to an investigation, Arkady thought: being eaten by a bear. A first? Not in Russia. How surprised that seal must have been. He knew the feeling. He took another reading from the compass and set off again.

Ahead he heard the sharp sound of a crack. At first he thought it might be the bear erupting through the ice; then it occurred to him that perhaps the ice sheet was splitting. On open water, pulled by tides and currents, the sheet shifted, broke and realigned. He didn’t feel in any particular danger. Water carried sound faster and farther than dry air. Fog didn’t muffle sound; it amplified it. If there was a fissure, it was probably far in the distance.

He wished the needle of the compass would stop jumping. How many minutes had he been walking? Twenty by the watch. How was Japanese quality control? There was no sign of the
Eagle
, but looking back he could see, on the outer ring of visibility, something following him, a figure so gauzy it seemed an apparition.

A gray streak of ice started to sag under his feet. He moved laterally to whiter ice and picked up the bearing again. Ice tended to break on a southwest-northeast axis, the wrong way for his path. It kept him alert. The object behind him moved at a steady lope, like a bear, but it was upright and black.

By now Arkady knew he was lost. Either he had gone off at an angle, or else he had underestimated the distance to the
Eagle
. As the fog stirred it flowed from left to right. For the first time he noticed the sideways movement of what he’d thought was a stationary bank, which might have been leading him astray the entire time. The cloud also flowed forward, enveloping him. Behind him, within a hundred meters now, his pursuer had developed legs, arms, head and beard. Marchuk. Skiba and Slezko
would have run directly from the stern to the captain, and it was perfectly characteristic of a Siberian like Marchuk to follow by himself. In a matter of steps Arkady was into the fog and Marchuk faded away.

The captain hadn’t called out. What Arkady wanted now was to reach the
Eagle
before Marchuk caught up and ordered him back to the
Polar Star
. They could go on board the trawler together, as long as Arkady got to look around. Actually, it would be safer with Marchuk along, since Ridley and Coletti were working with Karp. Morgan probably was not, though no captain could be entirely unaware of what happened on his own boat.

Although he was walking blindly in the fog, in his mind’s eye Arkady saw his footprints leading straighter than an arrow across the ice to the
Eagle
. It had a rightness, a sense of the magnetic—unless, of course, he’d already missed the trawler and was heading for the Arctic Circle.

The cracking sound came again, more distinctly this time. Not ice splitting: ice being hammered, impact followed by an echo like splintering glass. Arkady found himself turning his head in a searching motion as if he could trace the source of the noise. Sound could mislead in fog by seeming too close, and he resisted the temptation to run because it would be easy to veer in the wrong direction. By now the fog itself rushed over him like surf trying to bear him away. Imagine, he thought, how much courage it took to swim even a few meters in water almost this cold. He had seen men fall off a trawler and almost instantly go into shock before they were rescued.

Suddenly the hammering was loud. The
Eagle
emerged no more than ten meters away, thrust up and tilted by ice. Yet the fog whipping over it made it appear as if it were speeding through heavy seas.

Breaking the way, the
Polar Star
had iced up from clean snow. On the fairway, the
Eagle
had iced up from salt
spray, which froze in a gray ice that had accreted grotesquely like stalactites, then glazed as the temperature dropped. Ice seemed to cascade down the wheelhouse stairs and flood from the scuppers. Icicles hanging off the gunwales were rooted in the ice sheet. Coletti was outside the wheelhouse using a blowtorch to melt ice into sockets around the windows; the flame of the torch lit his sallow face. The light inside the bridge was as dim as a candle, but Arkady could see a figure sitting in the captain’s chair. Ridley was hammering ice off the rungs of the radio mast. At the top of the mast the dipoles had disappeared and the whip antennas were bent at ninety degrees. Ice hung from them like torn rigging; the best Morgan would hear from them was static. The fog shifted, obscuring the
Eagle
again. They hadn’t seen him. He began circling toward the stern.

How far ahead of Marchuk was he? Ten steps? Twenty? Sound would draw the captain, too. Arkady almost stepped onto the stern ramp before he saw it. A net was reeled onto the gantry overhead, strips of black and orange plastic turned into a dull shroud of ice. Fog was driving so hard over the boat that it left a ghostly wake, a dark tunnel at the end of which Marchuk was already visible. No matter, the captain couldn’t send him back now. It was all working out.

As the trailing figure separated more clearly from fog, Arkady saw that its beard was actually a sweater drawn up over the man’s mouth. Karp pulled the sweater down as he neared. Better prepared than Arkady, he had dark glasses and Siberian felt boots. In one hand he held an ax.

For a moment Arkady considered his options. A dash right to the North Pole? The long run left to Hawaii?

The
Eagle
’s ramp was low but slick and he pulled himself up on his stomach. On deck, fish and crabs were cemented in ice. Icicles fringed the shelter deck. Riding the fog high on the radio mast, Ridley had reached the radar
bar, which was frozen solid in a white cowl. The fisherman’s long hair and beard were frosted from his breath. With the care of a jeweler, he started to tap the bar free. Arkady estimated the distance from ramp to wheelhouse at fifteen meters, but the most exposed were the first five meters to the shelter deck that ran along the side.

Karp was closing in. Carrying the ax like a spare wing, he seemed to glide across the ice.

30
Arkady ran the few steps to the shadow of the shelter deck. He could no longer see the bridge, but the bridge could no longer see him. Behind, Karp came up the ramp with the sure foot of a deckhand.

Arkady slipped into the wheelhouse through a wet room that opened into the galley of the
Eagle
. He removed his glasses to see in the dim light that filtered through two portholes crusted with ice; it was like visiting the murk of an underwater ship. A banquette curved around a table with antiskid mats. Pots leaned on the sea rails of the stove top. Forward were two cabin doors and stairs up to the bridge and down to the engine room.

The port-side cabin had two bunks, though only the lower one looked used. Immediately, Arkady saw that there was no Soviet-style wardrobe where a body could have been stowed. On the bulkhead was an empty rifle rack. He felt under the mattress for a handgun, a knife, anything. Under the soiled pillow was a magazine with nudes. Under the bunk was a drawer with dirty clothes, more magazines of nudes, of firearms and of survival tactics; a sock with a roll of $100 bills; a well-carved whetstone; a carton of cigarettes; an empty box of shotgun shells.

“Coletti’s,” Karp said as he came in. He looked like a woodsman who had set off into the taiga for a vigorous morning of felling trees. No jacket or life vest, just an extra sweater, heavy gloves, boots, cap and dark glasses resting against his brow. Not even out of breath.

“You make it so easy,” Karp said. “Getting rid of you on the ship was a little difficult. Out here you just disappear, and no one will know I was ever gone.”

The ax was probably from the wide selection of fire-fighting equipment on the boat deck of the
Polar Star
, and Arkady suspected that Karp had brought it for a practical reason—to break through the ice and dispose of a body. As usual, the trawlmaster’s plan had the virtue of simplicity. From outside came sounds of the ongoing war on ice, more the hammer blows of a foundry than of a boat. The Americans still didn’t know anyone else was on board.

“Why did you come?” Karp asked.

“I was looking for signs of Zina.”

There was a flare gun in Arkady’s jacket pocket; that would be a dazzling sight in a small cabin. As Arkady moved his hand, Karp flicked it aside with the ax.

“Another investigation?”

“No, just me. No one else knows. No one besides me even cares.” His wrist where the ax had hit it was numb. This is what it would be like to be cornered by a wolf, he thought.

Karp said, “Whenever someone is dead, you usually accuse me.”

“You were surprised when she came up in the net. You could have poured her with the fish into a bunker and dumped her later. Instead you cut her out. You didn’t know. Last night on the ramp you still didn’t know.”

Casually the ax nudged Arkady’s hand from the pocket again. It wasn’t fair to die feeling quite so helpless, yet panic was shutting the brain down.

“You’re stalling,” Karp said.

Arkady had been too scared to stall. “Don’t you want to know who killed her?” he asked.
Now
he was stalling.

“Why should I?”

“You brought her,” Arkady said. “I must have been smarter back in Moscow. For a long time I couldn’t even understand how Zina got herself assigned to the
Polar Star
. It was Slava, of course. But who pointed him out to Zina when he was sailing on the bay? Who’d shipped with Slava before?”

“A whole crew.”

“But only three coming on the
Polar Star:
Marchuk, Pavel and you. You saw him from the dock.”

“Daddy’s boy on his toy boat. His father was the only way he’d get on a real ship.”

“With Slava she acted the innocent. That’s why she never took him to your apartment.”

Karp peeled off his sunglasses. “You knew that was me?”

“Someone with money, rifles, the nerve to run drugs.” Arkady spoke quickly; it was wonderful what adrenaline could do for the ability to add two and two. “The only man on the
Polar Star
who fits that description is you. Since she was making money at the Golden Horn, she would have come only for something better than rubles. You kept away from each other on board, but not as much as you claimed. You said you never saw her except in the mess, but every time the
Eagle
brought in a net you saw
her on the stern deck. Before she knew any men from any boat, she was at the rail waiting for the
Eagle
. She was yours.”

“That’s right,” Karp said proudly. “You’re not so dumb.”

Arkady imagined the Americans overhead, surrounded by the abrasive static of the radio, the anvil-hammering on ice. He and Karp were conversing as quietly as conspirators; no one knew they were on board.

“Volovoi’s fear,” Arkady said. “The theme of his life was smuggling. He had to inspect every package, even one thrown from one Soviet boat to another. The watchword is what?”

“Vigilance.” Karp smiled in spite of himself. He lifted the ax and shouldered it. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”