Polar Star (45 page)

The hole was more circular than Arkady remembered. It was only two meters across, but it gave definition to the fog. A Pole of Inaccessibility reached. Some of the ice was soaked through with blood, some pinkly tinged. The black water lapped against it with rhythmic slaps. There was a pulse in there, Arkady suspected, that a man watching long enough might detect.

“Life is shit,” Karp said. With a sideways kick, he knocked Arkady’s feet from under him, straddled his back and started to twist his head. Arkady rolled and swung his elbow against Karp’s jaw, turning the trawlmaster over.

“It feels like I’ve been trying to kill you forever,” Karp said.

“Then quit.”

“I can’t now,” Karp said. “Anyway, I’ve seen guys get stuck before. I think you’re hurt worse than you know.” He hit Arkady in the chest, directly on the wound, and it felt as if a lung had collapsed. Arkady couldn’t move. Karp punched him again, and all the air seemed to leave his body.

The trawlmaster rolled him over, sat on him and pressed Arkady’s shoulders back over the edge of the ice. “Sorry,” he said and pushed Arkady’s head under. Air bubbles exploded from his mouth. He saw silvery air in his lashes and hair. The water was incredibly cold, like molten ice, stinging salty but clear, not black, magnifying Karp as he leaned forward, pushing Arkady down. He actually did look sorrowful, like a man performing an unpleasant but necessary christening. Arkady’s hand came out of the water, took Karp’s sweater and pulled him down.

As Karp reared back Arkady came out of the water, holding in his other hand the ice pick Ridley had used on him, and pressed its stained tip against Karp’s neck, twisting the jaw back from the bulging vein. Karp’s eyes rolled as he tried to watch the shaft. Why not stab him? Arkady thought. Put his whole weight behind the steel, prick the vein and press straight through to the backbone? Eye to eye, what better time?

Karp rolled to the side. He was uninjured except for a scratch, yet all his strength seemed to have left him, as if the gravity of a lifetime had suddenly fallen on his chest. “Enough,” he said.

“You’re still going to freeze. It won’t take long,” Karp said. He sat by the water, legs crossed, relaxing with a cigarette like a Siberian at ease. “Your jacket’s soaked. You’re going to be a walking block of ice.”

“Then come on,” Arkady said. It was already hard to choose between the dull pain of the wound and the shakes of the cold.

“I was just thinking.” Karp didn’t stir. “What do you
think life would have been like for Zina if she’d made it? That’s the sort of thing you can spend the rest of your life dreaming about. Ever know anyone who went over?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how she’s doing.”

“At least you can wonder. Karp blew a trail of smoke the same color as the fog; he seemed surrounded by a puffy world of smoke. “I’ve been thinking. Pavel’s already shitting like a rabbit. You’re right, once we get to Vladivostok they’re not going to let up until somebody talks—Pavel or one of the others. It doesn’t matter whether you get back or not; I’m finished.”

“Admit to the smuggling,” Arkady said. “Testify and they’ll give you only fifteen years for Volovoi, and you might get out after ten.”

“With my record?”

“You’ve been a leading trawlmaster.”

“Like you’ve been a worker on the leading slime line? The winners of socialist competition, you and me! No, it will be aggravated murder. I don’t want to lose my teeth in a camp. I don’t want to be buried in a camp. Ever see those little plots right outside the wire? A few daisies for those miserable souls who never left. That’s not for me.”

Ice had formed on Arkady’s hair and brows. His jacket was glazed with ice, and when he moved, his sleeves cracked like glass. “Alaska is a little out of reach. Let’s go; we’ll argue on the way to the ship. It will keep us warm.”

“Here.” Karp got to his feet and pulled off his sweater. “You need something dry.”

“What about you?”

Karp pulled off Arkady’s jacket and helped him on with the sweater. The trawlmaster wore another one underneath.

“Thanks,” Arkady said. Along with the life vests, the sweater might provide enough insulation. “If we walk fast enough, we may both make it.”

Karp brushed ice from Arkady’s hair. “Someone who’s been in Siberia as long as you have should know you lose most of your heat from your head. Your ears are going to be frostbit in another minute. It’s a trade.” He placed his cap on Arkady’s head, pulling it tight over his ears.

“What do you get?” Arkady asked.

“The cigarettes.” Karp fished them out of the jacket before handing it back. “I worry about you sometimes. There’s got to be a dry one here.”

He broke off an unsoaked half and lit it from the fag he was about to toss. Though Arkady felt as if his blood were congealing in ice, Karp didn’t seem cold. “Joy.” He exhaled. “That was one of the signs at the camp. ‘Rejoice in Work!’ and ‘Work Makes You Free!’ We made cameras, actually—New Generation. Look for them.”

“Are you coming?”

“Our last day in Vladivostok, Zina and I went on a picnic outside town, on the cliffs overlooking the water. There’s that lighthouse there at the cape, looks like a gray castle going to sea, with a red-and-white candle stuck on top. Renko, it’s fantastic. Waves crash at the foot of the cliffs. Seals stick their heads out of the water. On top of the cliffs, pines are bent by the wind. I wish I’d had a camera then.”

Holding the cigarette in his lips, Karp peeled off his other sweater. He still seemed clothed because of the urka tattoos that covered his torso and arms to his neck and wrists.

“You’re not coming?” Arkady asked.

“Or you can go into the woods. It’s not the taiga; it’s not what people expect. It’s a mixed forest—fir and maple on the hills, slow rivers with water lilies. You want to sleep in the woods so you can hear a tiger. You’ll never see one, and anyway, they’re protected. But to hear a tiger at night, that’s something you never forget.”

Karp stepped naked from his pants and boots. He pinched the butt of his cigarette in his mouth; he was
smoking an ember. As his skin pinkened from the cold his tattooed decorations stood out.

“Don’t do this,” Arkady said.

“The main thing is, nobody can say I ever hurt Zina. Not once. If you love someone, you don’t hurt them and you don’t run away. She wouldn’t have stayed away.”

The tattoos were freshened by the air. Oriental dragons climbed Karp’s arm, green claws splayed from his feet, ink-blue women wrapped around the columns of his thighs, and with each steamy breath the vulture picked at his heart. More vivid were the whitening scars, dead stripes on his chest, where the accusations had been burned away. Across his narrow brow spread a livid band. The rest of his skin was reddening, the muscles trembling and jumping in reaction to the cold, animating each tattoo. Arkady remembered what agony it had been for him, even when dressed, in the fishhold. Each second it visibly took more effort and concentration for Karp to get out a word, even to think.

“Come back with me,” Arkady said.

“To what? For what? You win.” By now Karp shook so hard that he could barely stay upright, but he took a final, burning drag before dropping a butt that was no more than a spark into the water. He spread his arms triumphantly. “ ‘I smile at the enemy with my wolfish grin, baring my teeth’s rotten stumps. We’re not wolves anymore.’ ” He grinned at Arkady, took a deep breath and dived in.

Arkady could see Karp swimming straight down in powerful strokes as glutinous air bubbles trailed behind. The tattoos looked appropriate, more like scales than skin in the twilight water beneath the ice. About four meters down, he seemed temporarily stalled, until he released a chestful of air and descended to the next, darker layer of water. There a current caught him and he began to drift.

The soles of Karp’s feet were not tattooed. After the
rest of him disappeared, Arkady saw his feet still swimming, two pale fish in black water.

32
Arkady looked down at the patrol boat’s broad radar rig, gray turtleshell guns, torpedo tubes. All night, it seemed, sailors from naval intelligence had clambered on and off the
Polar Star
removing sealed boxes of equipment. Now, before dawn, the time had come for Anton Hess to make his exit; like an actor between costume changes the fleet electrical engineer still wore a fishing jacket over pants with a military crease.

“It’s good of you to come to see me off. I always believed that you would prove yourself useful with the right goad, the right prize. So here we are.”

“In the dark,” Arkady said.

“In the clear.” Hess gathered Arkady from the rail. “You don’t know how toothsome a bone a failure of naval intelligence can be to the KGB. This will not go unappreciated.” He ended his sigh with a laugh. “Did you see Morgan’s face when we freed the
Eagle
from the ice?
Of course he was in some pain. Worse, he knew what you had brought back to us.”

As soon as it was independently free of the ice sheet the
Eagle
had limped toward the Alaska mainland, while the
Polar Star
had canceled the rest of its fishing. The ship had dropped Susan Hightower, the other reps and Lantz off on a pilot boat outside Dutch Harbor.

“The only thing I didn’t understand was Susan, when she left,” Hess said. “Why was she so amused?”

“We shared a joke. I told her how valuable her help had been.” After all, she had told him what to steal, even if he had used her advice on a different boat.

Nikolai was waiting inside the transport cage with a marine. The soldier, moon-faced between black fatigues and a beret, carried an assault rifle. The young radioman did not appear happy; on the other hand, he was not in irons. For a moment Hess seemed reluctant to leave, like any man reflecting at the end of a long and successful trip.

“Renko, you understand that your name can’t come up in connection with the disks. We don’t want to taint them. I wish I could share the credit.”

“Credit for the sounds of submarines that were dismantled years ago? You were listening to submarines that don’t exist,” Arkady said.

“That doesn’t matter. Morgan was compromised, and this time we have the trophy.”

“Disks of nothing.”

“Very well, ghosts and phantoms hissing in the dark. Careers have been made on less.” Hess boarded the cage and hooked the chain across the gate. “Let me tell you something, Renko. It’s round after round and it never stops. I’ll be back.”

“That’s another reason Susan was smiling,” Arkady said. “She won’t be.”

Hess’s good humor could not be defeated. “Nevertheless.” He put out his hand and shook Arkady’s. “We
shouldn’t argue. You served well. You rose early to say good-bye.”

“Not really.”

“Nevertheless,” Hess insisted.

“Good luck.” Arkady shook Nikolai’s hand.

With the patrol boat gone, the
Polar Star
picked up speed again. Coastal trawlers increased by the hour on the night horizon. A kilometer away, they made a dazzling string of fishing lamps, each boat its own constellation, a different scene from the leave-taking at Dutch Harbor; there it had been a wet afternoon, with the kind of damp that was a second skin and the Americans huddled inside the bridge for the ride to the dock—all but Susan, who stood on deck, not waving, but never taking her eyes off the ship she was leaving.

A curious life, Arkady thought; he always cared most for whatever he was losing. He’d felt her gaze across the widening water as strongly as when they’d been in bed. Some flaw in him led to futile connections.

“Comrade Jonah.” Marchuk joined Arkady.

“Captain.” Arkady stirred from his reverie. “I always like night fishing.”

“It will be day in a minute.” Marchuk leaned on the rail. The captain tried for a casual attitude, though for the first time on the voyage he wore dress blues, four gold stripes on the cuffs, gold braid on his cap, bright smudges in the dim light of the deck. “Your cut is better?”

“It proved to be within Vainu’s level of competence,” Arkady said, though he wasn’t taking any deep breaths. “Too bad about your quota.”

“We revised the quota.” Marchuk shrugged. “That’s the beauty of a quota. But it was good fishing. We should have just fished.”

With the start of dawn, the trawler lamps began to fade into traceries of ordinary gantries and booms against a background of retreating shadow. Chains rang across the
surface of the water as the fleet dipped its nets. In the twilight, claques of gulls shifted from boat to boat. On the
Polar Star
, more crew came up on deck all the time. Arkady could see them by their cigarettes up on the boat deck and along the rail.

“You weren’t the Jonah,” Marchuk added. “You know, on the radio they’re starting to refer to you as
Investigator
Renko, whatever that suggests.”

Below, a line of angular shadows flew by, their bills tucked, skimming the trough behind the bow wave, pelicans at work.

“It could mean anything,” Arkady said.

“True.”

The trawlers shimmered in a gray haze, not fog but the normal exhalation of the sea. This was the in-between moment when the eye had to complete each ship, connect a bow here or a stack there, paint them, people them, give them life. Arkady looked up at the boat deck, where Natasha had turned her face toward the breaking sun, her eyes shining, her black hair momentarily edged with gold. Beside her Kolya checked his watch, and Dynka rose on tiptoes as she looked east. Along the rail he saw Izrail in a sweater so clean of fish scales that he looked like a burly lamb; Lidia, her face wet with tears; Gury unfolding his dark glasses.