Polar Star (46 page)

Arkady hadn’t risen to see Hess off; what he’d waited all night for was only now emerging.

Gulls burst over the
Polar Star
as if blown by light that roiled like a wind over the factory ship. Clouds lit. The windows of the trawlers flashed, and at last, out of the dark rose the low green shore of home.

THE END

I
NSPIRATION
C
AN
C
OME FROM
A
NY
D
IRECTION

An excerpt from Don Swaim’s 1989 interview with Martin Cruz Smith …

 … in which the author explains how the idea for
Polar Star
floated into his life, how it pulled his famous detective Arkady Renko back to the surface of his imagination, and how it landed the hero detective in the slime line
.

Martin Cruz Smith:
This was a nice book in that, ah, I’ve tried a bunch of things here. I find some things particularly—in terms of the writerly structure of doing a book, an entire book, on sea, at sea, it’s a, ah, a very interesting thing to do. It’s very claustrophobic and it either crushes you and crushes the story
or
it makes it very intense. Another thing that was interesting, too, was to do a boat with this crew of 300, 50 of them women, created this, you had to create this sort of a village, a village cast off and afloat at sea. And I particularly like the characters in this book. I like the, ah, the way some of these Soviet characters just came alive in a way I didn’t anticipate when I began the book.

Don Swaim:
When you did
Gorky Park
, did you envision having your hero appear in a subsequent book?

MCS:
No. Never. And not when I ended it. Not when I finished
Gorky Park
. It ended so perfectly for me. You
didn’t know what was going to become of Arkady Renko at that point, as he stands in the snow on Staten Island. And there certainly was no impulse to run out and, ah, deliver an answer. The answer came, the answer, when I was thinking again of the Soviet Union,
knew
I couldn’t get back in the country because of their antagonism towards me and towards
Gorky Park
, and saw this article about this boat, and there was something very intriguing about a Soviet factory ship in American waters working with American trawlers. And then to find out about the boat and to find out what was the lowest,
lowest
possible position on a Soviet factory ship and there the answer finally presented itself.

DS:
How did you realize a boat like this existed?

MCS:
I
(Laughs)
I saw an article in, ah, my college alumni magazine, someone who had worked on a ship like this. And I’m not proud—I’ll get my information
absolutely
anywhere. Inspiration can come from any direction. So I looked into, ah, I found out as much as I could about it, which was very little. There’s been very little written about this joint venture. Many people believe it didn’t exist.

DS:
Is this true?

MCS:
Absolutely.

DS:
And there is a
Polar Star?

MCS:
Well, there is in fact a Soviet factory ship called the
Polar Star
. It’s not the one I use. Um, there is in fact the ship that I was on, which was the
Sulac
. That was not the ship I used. It’s
pretty much
the ship I used, but
I want to make clear here
the events that I, that
take place in this book
are
fiction
. There were no bodies on the
Sulac
 … that I was aware of. But the ship, the physical description is a
very, I think, accurate description of a factory ship in the Bering Sea.

DS:
And there were both Americans and Soviets on this ship?

MCS:
That’s right.

DS:
Uh-huh. And where did you stay?

MCS:
When I was on the ship, it was in port. I didn’t get to go fishing with the Soviets. Uh, I had a deal with the Soviet captain that I would, but, unfortunately, after the fishing grounds, the Soviet Embassy caught up with me. They had always been against my going up there.

DS:
And where was it in port?

MCS:
In Dutch Harbor. In the Aleutian Islands—

DS:
Oh, it was in the Aleutians.

MCS:
Yeah.

DS:
Yeah. Well, they can’t stop you from getting on, can they? You’re in an American port—

MCS:
Oh,
yes they can
. Oh, they can’t stop me from going to Dutch Harbor, although they tried to dissuade me. But they sure
can
stop me from getting on a Soviet ship. When I—they had been very against having any American reporter come on the ship, but the Soviet captain was, ah, an interesting man. He was a Party man, of course, ambitious, smart, a leading captain. And he figured out who I was. He, ah, found an old American magazine in his cabin—This is his one interpretation, this is his one story of how he figured out or found out who I was. And, ah, it
was an old, ah, it was an old review with a picture of me, with the name of this anti-Soviet writer underneath it. And so we had a long talk, the two of us, in which we talked about what it was to be anti-Soviet—whether it was accurate or not, what kind of a writer I was, what kind of a boat he was captain of—at the end of which he decided that he would trust me. And he wanted me to go sailing with him. I told him, I had to be honest with him and tell him that the Soviet Embassy had tried to dissuade me from doing this, because there’s no point in cutting the man off at the knees. But he wanted me to go fishing with him anyway. However, the Soviet Embassy did get word of what was going on—probably from the political officer on board—and while we were steaming out to the fishing grounds from the port a day or so later, the word came down that I was not ever to get back on that ship.

DS:
Mmm. And yet it feels like you were on it for a long time. Your physical descriptions are so good.

MCS:
Well, uh, you know this kind of situation. You go someplace, you’re gonna be there for maybe five seconds, five minutes, or five hours. But you have to see, you have to
know
this place intimately. And your eyes are open. You know situations as a reporter. You go in and you are going to remember this room for the rest of your life.

DS:
Yeah. Well, Arkady Renko really fell out of grace, didn’t he? Where was he? As the book opens, tell me where he is.

MCS:
He’s on the slime line. Now, that’s a phrase, a phrase used today by anybody in a factory ship like this, and it’s called it for good reason. Because it’s, ah, as they process the fish,
thousands
of fish in an hour, 40 tons,
metric tons, 300 metric tons in a day, say. Um, they’re processing the fish, chopping it up, beheading it, gutting it, hosing it down, and, of course, what you’ve got a lot of the time, a lot of it is bottom fish, which has exploded on the way up to the top, to the surface, so you have fish slime everywhere. And the last place any fisherman wants to work is the slime line. And that is where Arkady Renko reappears. That’s where—you know, you wonder, the reemergence of someone you’re very fond of, a heroic character you always want him to be seen on a hillside, riding a horse. Not this time.

DS:
Now, but first there is the murder of the young woman, and … actually, it turns into an old-fashioned mystery, doesn’t it?

MCS:
Well, it has—I like old-fashioned mysteries. On the other hand … on the other hand, I’m very
bored
by old-fashioned mysteries.
(Laughs)
Um, to do an old-fashioned mystery
just to do
an old-fashioned mystery is a waste of time. It’s a waste of time to
me
. To do an old-fashioned mystery and present that and then explode it with characters who come alive and give it the depth and dimension of real life, and of political tension—the Soviet Union just itself, let alone tension between the Soviet Union and the United States
—that
is to make something of it,
that
makes it worthwhile. But, ah, it’s taking the rules of this little old game of the mystery novel and making it, giving it this enormous juice.

DS:
Yeah, it’s so exciting, your hero has so many close calls, so many narrow escapes. That refrigerator room for example. Um, you had to do a lot of research, though. The autopsy room, when he is in there, freezing to death—

MCS:
Yes—

DS:
I mean, that—

MCS:
Yes, yes—

DS:
I mean, it takes a lot of research, doesn’t it?

MCS:
It does.

DS:
For him to know what happens to people.

MCS:
Well, that’s always interesting. What
would
happen? What would you do if you found yourself in a fish locker, in the freezing fish locker? Ah, how would you get out? If there was no one to—if, in fact, the door was being held against you, held shut? And, um, you have to start thinking it through. What would you do? You know, it’s a little bit like the Chuck Yeager routine. The plane is spinning towards earth, it’s cruising at about a thousand feet a second, ah, you go through Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, in hopes that, at last, if you get down to Plan F, something is gonna work. It’s an interesting way to do it when in fact your mind is starting to slow down because you’re starting to freeze.

DS:
Well, we’re not gonna divulge how your hero gets out of
that
one. But the autopsy, I mean this is, this is something, like, out of
Alien
.

MCS:
Yeah. Well, look, look, it’s a book that’s very serious in some ways, but I do like to have fun. And there are some—there should be some points where the reader suddenly sits up, sits all the way up, and stares at the book in some degree of disbelief or surprise.

DS:
But not at dinnertime.

MCS:
Not at dinnertime.

DS:
Well, what’s gonna happen? Are you gonna bring Arkady back?

MCS:
Well—

DS:
Yes, I know you are. What’s gonna happen to him after
Polar Star
? I mean, he emerges a hero. He’s off the, uh, the slime line. Isn’t he?

MCS:
I—well, I—Look, obviously I didn’t go to Moscow just to, ah, visit my rubles. Ah, I’m thinking about what would happen next. But if I don’t—This is a curious situation in which you’ve got this character that I feel very fondly towards, who helps me write, in fact, who helps me write well, or as best as I can. And I want to see him again, but I’m not just gonna drag him out until there’s the right story, the right answer to the end of this one.

DS:
There’s probably a long gestation period, isn’t there? Where you think and think and think about what you’re gonna do and what is gonna happen?

MCS:
Yeah, so this is, you
think
, you try to direct your, you’re directing your thought—but how am I, what can I do next? what can happen next?—when in fact the answer tends to come by itself. Like, as this, the ship
Polar Star
, came in by itself and, just, into my consciousness while I was thinking of something else. I think if Arkady Renko comes back again, and as I hope he does, I suspect he’ll be standing in front of me for some time before I realize it.

(To enjoy the rest of the interview, visit the Wired for Books website at
www.wiredforbooks.org
).