Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Don't play the worker with me. Volovoi told me about you. You made a big mess back in Moscow. Captain Marchuk was crazy to let you off the line.'

  'Why did he?' Arkady was genuinely curious.

  'I don't know.' Slava seemed as confused as Arkady.

  Zina Patiashvili's cabin was the same as Arkady's in space and layout, four people living in what could pass for a fairly comfortable decompression chamber: four bunks, table and bench, closet and sink. The atmosphere itself was different. Instead of male sweat, the air contained a powerful mix of competing perfumes. Rather than Gury's pin ups and Obidin's icon, the closet door was decorated with Cuban postcards, sappy International Women's Day greeting cards, snapshots of children in Pioneer scarves, magazine pictures of movie stars and musicians. There was a smiling picture of the roly poly Soviet rock star Stas Namin. There was a scowling photo of Mick Jagger.

  'That was Zina's.' Natasha Chaikovskaya pointed to Jagger.

  The other cabinmates were 'Madame' Malzeva, the oldest worker from Arkady's factory line, and a little Uzbek girl named Dynama in honour of the electrification of Uzbekistan. Her family had done the innocent girl no favour, because in more sophisticated parts of the Soviet Union a 'dynama' is a flirt who wines and dines on a man's money, then goes to the rest room and disappears. Mercifully, her friends called her Dynka. Her black eyes balanced anxiously on enormous cheekbones. Her hair was done up in two ponytails that looked like black wings.

  For such a sombre occasion, Natasha had eschewed lipstick, compromising with a tall haircomb. Behind her back she was called 'Chaika', for the broad-shouldered limousine of that name. She could have smothered Stas Namin with one squeeze; Jagger wouldn't have had a chance. She was a shotputter with the soul of Carmen.

  'Zina was a good girl, a popular girl, the life of the ship,' Madame Malzeva said. As if holding court in her parlour, she wore a tasselled shawl and darned a sateen pillow with stitched waves and the invitation 'Visit Odessa'. 'Wherever there was laughter, there was our Zina.'

  'Zina was nice to me,' Dynka said. 'She'd come down to the laundry and bring me a sandwich.' Like most Uzbeks, she couldn't pronounce 'zch'; she just dropped it.

  'She was an honest Soviet worker who will be badly missed.' Natasha was a Party member with the Party member's ability to sound like a tape recording.

  'Those are valuable testimonials,' Slava said.

  A top bunk was stripped. In a cardboard box designed for holding thirty kilos of frozen fish were clothes, shoes, stereo and cassettes, hair rollers and brushes, grey notebook, a snapshot of Zina in her bathing suit, another of her and Dynka, and an East Indian jewellery box covered with coloured cloth and bits of mirror. Over the bunk a framed panel screwed into the bulkhead gave the occupant's assignment in case of emergency. Zina's post was the fire brigade in the galley.

  Arkady could tell immediately who the other bunks were occupied by. An older woman always had a lower, in this case one lined with pillows from other ports – Sochi, Tripoli, Tangiers – so that Madame Malzeva could repose on a soft atlas. Natasha's bunk held a selection of pamphlets like 'Understanding the Consequences of Social Democratic Deviationism' and 'Towards a Cleaner Complexion'. Perhaps one led to the other; that would be a propaganda breakthrough. On Dynka's upper bunk was a toy camel. More than men did, they had made a real home out of their cabin, enough for him to feel like an intruder.

  'What interests us,' Arkady said, 'is how Zina's disappearance went unnoticed. You shared this cabin with her. How could you not notice that she was gone for a day and a night?'

  'She was such an active girl,' Malzeva said. 'And we have different shifts. You know, Arkasha, we work at night. She worked during the day. Sometimes days would pass without our seeing Zina. It's hard to believe we will never see her again.'

  'You must be upset.' Arkady had seen Madame Malzeva cry in war movies when the Germans got shot. Everyone else would be screaming, 'Take that, you fucking Fritz!' but Malzeva would be sobbing into her babushka.

  'She borrowed my shower cap and never returned it.' The old woman raised dry eyes.

  'It would be good to gather testimonials from her other mates,' Slava suggested.

  'What about her enemies?' Arkady asked. 'Would anyone want to hurt her?'

  'No!' the three women said as a chorus.

  'There's no call for such a question,' Slava warned.

  'Forget I asked. And what else was Zina's?' Arkady scanned the photo montage on the closet door.

  'Her nephew.' Dynka's finger went tentatively to a snapshot of a dark-haired boy holding a bunch of grapes as big as figs.

  'Her actress.' Natasha pointed to a picture of Melina Mercouri looking pouty and wreathed in cigarette smoke. Had Zina seen herself as a sultry Greek?

  'Any boyfriend?' Arkady asked.

  The three women looked at each other as if they were consulting; then Natasha answered, 'Not any one man especially that we were aware of.'

  'No one man,' said Malzeva.

  Dynka giggled. 'No.'

  'Fraternization with all your mates is the best course,' Slava said.

  'Did you see her at the dance? Were you at the dance?' Arkady asked them.

  'No, Arkasha, not at my age,' Malzeva said, dusting off some coyness. 'And you forget that the factory line still processed fish during the dance. Natasha, weren't you sick?'

  'Yes.' When Slava, erstwhile musician, gave a start, Natasha added, 'I may have looked in at the dance.' In a dress, Arkady guessed.

  'Were you at the dance?' Arkady asked Dynka.

  'Yes. The Americans dance like monkeys,' she said. 'Zina's the only one who could dance like them.'

  'With them?' Arkady asked her.

  'It seems to me there is a certain unhealthy sexuality when Americans dance,' Madame Malzeva said.

  'The dance was meant to encourage friendship between workers of both nations,' Slava answered. 'What does it matter who she danced with if she had an accident later that night?'

  Arkady poured the box of effects onto Zina's bunk. The clothes were foreign and worn to the last thread. Nothing in the pockets. The tapes were of the Rolling Stones and Dire Straits variety; the player was a Sanyo. There was no ID, nor had he expected any; her paybook and visa would be in the ship's safe. Lipsticks and perfumes lay in the hollow of the bunk; how long would the scent of Zina Patiashvili linger in the cabin? Her jewellery box had a string of fake pearls and half a deck of playing cards, all the queen of hearts. Also a roll of 'pinkies', ten-ruble notes, held together by a rubber band. It would take more time to go through the effects than he had at this moment. He put everything back into the box.

  'Everything's here?' he asked. 'All her tapes?'

  Natasha sniffed, 'Her precious tapes. She always used her headphones. She never shared them.'

  'What are you trying to find?' Slava demanded. 'I'm tired of being ignored.'

  'I'm not ignoring you,' Arkady said, 'but you already know what happened. I'm more slow-witted; I have to go step by step. Thank you,' he told the three women.

  'That's all, comrades,' Slava said decisively. He picked up the box. 'I'll take care of this.'

  At the door, Arkady paused to ask, 'Did she have fun at the dance?'

  'It's possible,' Natasha said. 'Comrade Renko, maybe you should go to a dance sometime. The intelligentsia should mix with workers.'

  How Natasha had settled on this label for him Arkady didn't know; the slime line was not an avenue of philosophers. There was something ominous in Natasha's expression he wanted to avoid, so he asked Dynka, 'Did she seem dizzy? Sick?'

  Dynka shook her head, so that her ponytails rode back and forth. 'She was happy when she left the dance.'

  'At what time? Where was she going?'

  'To the stern. I can't say what time it was; people were still dancing.'

  'Who was she with?'

  'She was alone, but she was happy, like a princess in a fairytale.'

  It was a fantasy far better than men put tog
ether. These women believed they were sailing the seas with all the ordinary intrigues of a women's apartment, as if you couldn't step outside into the wide sea and simply disappear. During the ten months that Arkady had spent on board, he was feeling more and more that the ocean was a void, a vacuum into which people could be drawn at any moment. They should hang on to their bunks, and hold on for their lives if they stepped on deck.

  When Slava and Arkady reached the deck, they found Vainu jackknifed over the rail, his lab coat smeared with blood and slime. The axe lay at his feet. He held up two fingers.

  '... more,' he blurted and turned his face back into the wind.

  A void or a well of too much life. Take your pick.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  Arkady happily followed Slava towards the stern. He could almost breathe in the view: a lone figure at the rail, a catcherboat in the middle distance, black sea folding into grey fog. It was a change from claustrophobia.

  'Look around, Slava said. 'You're supposed to be an expert.'

  'Right.' Arkady stopped on command and turned, not that there was much to see: winches and cleats lit by three lamps that even at midday glowed like poisonous moons. In the middle of the deck was an open stairwell that led to a landing directly over the stern ramp. Stern ramps were a feature of modern trawling: the Polar Star's ramp began at the waterline and tunnelled up to the trawl deck on the other side of the aft house. All he could see of the ramp was the part below the well, and all he could see of the trawl deck were the tops of the booms and gantries beyond the smoke stack. Around the stack were oil barrels, spare cables and hawsers. On the boat deck, lifeboats hung on davits. On one side was emergency gear: fire axes, a pike, gaff and spade, as if fire could be fought like foreign troops.

  'Well?' Slava demanded. 'According to the girl this is where Zina was headed. Like someone in a fairytale.'

  He stopped in mid-stride and whispered to Arkady, 'Susan.'

  'Soo-san?' Arkady asked. There was a name that lent itself to Russian pronunciation.

  'Shh!' Slava blushed.

  The figure at the rail wore a hooded canvas jacket, shapeless pants and gumboots. Arkady had always avoided the Americans. They rarely came down to the factory, and above deck he felt he was watched, that he was expected to try to make contact with them, that he would compromise them, if not himself.

  'She's taking a net.' Slava stopped Arkady at a respectful distance.

  Susan Hightower's back was to them as she talked into a hand-held radio. It sounded as if she were alternately answering the Eagle in English and giving instructions to the bridge of the Polar Star in Russian. The catcherboat approached, putting its shoulder to the waves. A rattling came from below. Arkady looked down the well to see a cable of scarred red and white buoys spill down the grooved, rust-brown slope of the ramp. 'If she's working,' he said, 'we can talk to the other Americans.'

  'She's the head representative. As a courtesy, we must speak to her first,' Slava insisted.

  Courtesy? Here they were shivering and ignored, but Slava was in the throes of social embarrassment.

  On the water, the cable straightened as it played out twenty-five, fifty, a hundred metres, each buoy riding its own crest. As the line spread to its full length, the American boat approached on the port side and kept pace.

  'This is very interesting,' Slava announced heartily.

  'Yes.' Arkady turned his back to the wind. At this longitude there was no land between the North and South Poles and breezes built quickly.

  'You know how in our Soviet fleet we come so close to transfer fish,' Slava went on. 'There are battered hulls –'

  'Battered hulls are a signature of the Soviet fleet,' Arkady agreed.

  'This system that the Americans taught us, the "no-contact" system, is cleaner, but it is more intricate and demands more skill.'

  'Like sex between spiders,' Susan said without turning her head.

  Arkady admired the technique demanded. From the American trawler a fisherman with a strong arm threw a gaff over the trailing line. Another fisherman ran the line along the gunwale to the stern, where a full net of fish covered the trawler's narrow deck. 'They're connecting,' Susan told the radio in Russian.

  Like spiders having sex? An interesting comparison, Arkady thought. A buoy line was a relatively fine thread. Not only were the boats at a distance, but they were moving up and down in relation to each other. If the ships separated too much, the line would snap from the pressure; too little and the net wouldn't leave the trawler or would drop towards the bottom, where vertical drag could break the line and lose gear and fish worth $100,000 in American money.

  'Coming in,' Susan said as the net slipped off the trawler's deck. At once the weight of the bag made the Polar Star slow half a knot. The catcherboat veered off, while winches far back on the factory ship's trawl deck started hauling the line in.

  Susan gave Arkady no more than a glance as he stepped to the rail beside her. He thought she must be wearing layers of sweaters and pants to appear so shapeless, because her face was thin. She had brown eyes and the kind of concentration you see in a girl on a balance beam who doesn't give a damn about the rest of the world.

  'Fifty metres,' she was saying in Russian.

  Gulls started to gather. It was always a mystery how there could be not a bird in sight; then suddenly by the tens they would appear, as if the fog were a magician's cape.

  Behind its vanguard of buoys, the incoming net, its orange-and-black plastic hair glimmering wet, surged towards the Polar Star. Behind them a trawlmaster crossed the deck and ran down the stairs of the stairwell, taking his position on the landing over the ramp. The slim cable rose taut and dripping. Buoys bounced up the ramp. Dragged by its steel bridle, the bag surged out of the water and onto the ramp's lower lip.

  'Ease off!' Susan ordered in Russian.

  The Polar Star slowed almost to the point of wallowing. There was a necessary caution to hauling in thirty tons of fish which lost buoyancy and doubled in weight as it left the water. Any more tension on the winch of forward motion to the ship and the line could part. On the other hand, a dead stop could force the bag into the propeller screws. Patiently the cable eased the bag half on to the ramp as the ship coasted at dead slow. There the bag paused as if exhausted, water pouring out, crabs and starfish dripping out.

  Susan asked Arkady, 'You're from the factory?'

  'Yes.'

  'The mystery man from the Lower Depths.'

  Slava pulled Arkady to the stair-well rail. 'Don't bother her now.'

  At the well they looked down at the trawlmaster as the ramp's steel-mesh safety gate swung up and two men in hard hats, lifejackets and lifelines around their waists dragged heavy messenger cables down the ramp to the bag. The closer they came to the net the more steeply the chute curved down to the water. A floodlight in the well showed where, at the belly of the waiting bag, the ramp dropped dead away.

  The lead man shouted, slipped and clung to his lifeline. It was a deckhand named Pavel; his eyes had gone white with fright.

  From the landing the trawlmaster encouraged him. 'You look like a drunk on a dance floor. Maybe you'd like a pair of skates.'

  'Karp,' Slava said with admiration.

  Karp's shoulders stretched his sweater. He turned his broad head up to them and grinned, displaying golden dental work. He and his team were taking an extra shift, another reason they were the favourites of the first mate.

  'Wait until we reach the ice sheet,' he yelled up. 'Pavel will do some real skating on the ramp then.'

  Arkady remembered the half-mended net he had seen earlier on the trawl deck.

  'Did you cut Zina out?' he called down to Karp.

  'Yeah.' The gold left the smile. 'So?'

  'Nothing.' It was simply interesting to Arkady that Karp Korobetz, that exemplar among the trawlmasters, had taken the chance of ruining expensive American mesh rather than pour the fish out and wait for her body to emerge.

&nbs
p; Below, Pavel was struggling to untangle the bridle of this net so that his teammate could attach the G-hooks of the messenger cables and relieve the weight on the buoy line. It was one thing for a cable to snap and fly wildly on an open deck; in the close tunnel of the ramp, a broken cable would be a whip in a barrel.

  'Were you at the dance?' Arkady called to Karp.

  'No,' Karp yelled. 'Hey, Renko, you never answered my question. What did they nail you for?'

  Arkady detected the faint imprint of a Moscow accent.

  Susan turned around. 'Is there a problem?'

  Pavel fell again, this time to midway down the net before his lifeline saved him. A wave flowed up the ramp and lifted the net, so that it rolled indolently over the fisherman. Arkady had seen men die like this before. The weight of the bag wouldn't let the lungs breathe, and half the time the bag was in the water. Pavel's teammate shouted and pulled on the rope, but with Pavel beneath twenty tons of fish and net, the line didn't budge. Yells didn't help. As another wave broke over the bag, it rolled some more, like a walrus crushing a pup. Receding, the wave tried to suck the bag back to the sea, and the lifeline broke.

  Karp jumped down from the landing onto the net – what was another hundred kilos compared to tons? With the next wave, he was up to his waist in freezing water, holding onto the net by one hand and by the other dragging Pavel from a kelp-like mass of plastic chafing hair. Karp was laughing. As Pavel sputtered and climbed onto the back of the bag, the trawlmaster pulled himself up to the bridle and helped connect the G-hooks. It was all over in a second. What struck Arkady was that Karp had never hesitated; the trawlmaster had moved with such speed that saving another man's life seemed less an act of courage than a gymnast's spin around a bar.

  The catcherboat swung back into the Polar Star's wake, waiting for the call on the net's catch – so many tons, so much sole, crabs, mud. Gulls hovered at the mouth of the ramp, watching for any fish slipping through the net.

  'Someone from the slime line is the last thing we need here now,' Susan told Slava. 'Take him to my cabin.'