Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'You're joking.'

  'In Moscow you're surrounded by enemies,' Pribluda said. 'You're in no condition to protect yourself, and I won't be able to rescue you twice – not here. The same would be true in Leningrad, Kiev, Vladimir – anywhere near. You need to go where no one wants to follow you.'

  'They'll follow me.'

  'But they'll be one or two instead of twenty, and you'll be able to keep moving. You don't understand; you're dead here already.'

  'Out there I'll be as good as dead.'

  'That's what will save you. Believe me, I know how their minds work.'

  Arkady couldn't deny the truth of that; the line between 'them' and Pribluda was fine enough.

  'Just two or three years,' the colonel said. 'With the new regime, everything is changing – though not all for the best as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, give them a chance to forget you and then come back.'

  'Well, it was a good act,' Arkady said, 'but you got me out too easily. You made a deal.'

  Pribluda killed the engine, and for a moment there was no sound except the settling of snow, all those tons of flakes gently blanketing the city.

  'To keep you alive.' The colonel was exasperated. 'What's wrong with that?'

  'What did you promise?'

  'No contact, not even the possibility of contact between you and her.'

  There's only one way you could promise "not even the possibility of contact".'

  'Stop playing the interrogator with me. You always make everything so difficult.' Under his cap Pribluda had little eyes driven deep as nails. It was a strange place to find embarrassment. 'Am I your friend or not? Come on.'

  Each red railroad car bore a golden hammer and sickle and a plaque that read 'Moscow-Vladivostok'. Pribluda had to carry Arkady up the high steps of the platform to a 'hard class' section. Exotic families in skullcaps and brilliant scarves camped on bedrolls, their berths occupied by new appliances still in packing cases – goods they could buy only in Moscow. Brown children peeked through curtains rolled up like bunting. Women opened bundles, releasing a buffet's smell of cold lamb, kefir, cheese. Students heading to the Ural Mountains stacked skis and guitars. Pribluda talked to the conductress, a top-heavy woman wearing what looked like an airline captain's cap and a short skirt. Returning, he stuffed into Arkady's overcoat a through ticket, an envelope of rubles and a blue workpass.

  'I've made arrangements,' Pribluda said. 'Friends will take you off in Krasnoyarsk and put you on a plane for Norilsk. You'll have a job as a watchman, but you'd better not stay too long. The main thing is, once you're above the Arctic Circle you'll be too much trouble to bring back. It's just for a few years, it's not a lifetime.'

  Arkady had never hated anyone as much as he once had Pribluda, and he knew Pribluda had loathed him in return. Yet here they were, as close to friends as each other had alive. It was as if everyone travelled the world in the dark, never knowing where he was going, blindly following a road that twisted, rose and fell. The hand that pushed you down one day helped you up the next. The only straight road was... what? The train!

  'I meant it about the promotion,' Arkady said. 'That's good.'

  On the platform a row of conductresses were raising batons, signalling that the express was ready to leave. Ahead, the locomotive released its air brakes and a tremor ran the length of the cars. Still the colonel lingered.

  'You know what they say?' He smiled.

  'What do they say?' Arkady wondered. Pribluda was not known for humour.

  'They say some waters are too cold even for sharks.'

  If the hospital had left him dazed, the motor yard in Norilsk made him numb. To keep from freezing, trucks were left running all night on Siberian diesel fuel, the cheapest on earth. Or else fires had to be carefully set under the engine block but away from the fuel line. The problem was that the surface was actually a thin cover of moss and dirt over permafrost, and as the frost around the fires melted and re-froze, the grounds became an icy swamp.

  One night in his second month on the job, Arkady was building a fire in the black space under a Belarus earth-mover, a ten-wheeler the size of an iron house, when he saw figures approaching from opposite sides of the yard. Truck drivers wore boots, quilted jackets, caps. These two were in overcoats and hats and stepped daintily across the rutted ice. The one skirting a coal pile picked up a pick axe and carried it with him. Theft of construction equipment, the sacred property of the state, was not unusual, that's why there were watchmen like Arkady. If you want it, take it, he thought. The two men stood in the shadows and waited. The temperature was ten degrees below zero and Arkady began to freeze. It felt like burning on a spit. He stuffed a glove in his mouth to keep his teeth from chattering. In the dark he saw the two men shivering, arms folded, hopping in place, their breath crystallizing and drifting to the ground. Finally, on wooden legs, they gave up and gathered at the fire in the oil can. The one with the pick axe held it up and carefully peeled his fingers back; when the axe dropped and bounced smartly off his knee he didn't seem to feel a thing. The other was so cold he cried tears that froze in waxy stripes down his face. He tried to smoke, but his hands were shaking too hard to get out one cigarette, and half the pack spilled into the can and onto the ice. Finally, slowly, as bent and unsteady as if they were walking into violent wind, they moved away. Arkady heard one fall: a muffled impact and an agonized curse. A minutes later he heard car doors shut and an engine start.

  Arkady dragged himself on his elbows to the burning can. He emptied kerosene into the fire and vodka into himself, and in the morning he didn't return to his hostel. He went to the airport and boarded a plane east, further into Siberia, like a fox heading for deeper woods.

  He was pretty safe. With the Siberian labour shortage, any strong back got double pay for laying railroad ties, sawing ice or slaughtering reindeer with no questions asked, because Siberian managers had their quotas too. A man carving ice with a chainsaw, his own face encased with frost, might be an alcoholic, a criminal, a bum or a saint. What were the odds? Once the quota was fulfilled, then a local apparatchik would check names against a list of persons in whom the militia or the KGB had an interest. But each of these work camps was a minuscule dot in a land mass twice the size of China. That was why workers were so prized, when Siberia's mere fifteen million inhabitants faced an envious one billion Chinese! By the time any agent of State Security arrived, Arkady was gone.

  The interesting thing was that although Irina was Siberian he never saw a woman like her, not in all the villages and work camps that he passed through. Certainly not among the Uzbeks or Buryats, nor among the women who tended cement mixers like so many milkmaids around a cow. Nor among the Young Komsomol princesses who came to pose on tractors for six months and then flew home having fulfilled their lifetime quota of volunteer labour.

  Yet when he cared to, he could stand on the duck-boards of a work camp and be sure that the next woman to jump from a truck to the mud, jacket open, scarf around her hair, lunch pail in hand, would be Irina. Somehow she had returned, and through a trail of incredible coincidences had arrived at the very same place he was. His heart would stop until she landed and looked up. Then he would be sure Irina was the next one. It was like a children's game.

  So he didn't think of her.

  At the end of his second year, escaping the Border Guard on Sakhalin, he crossed to the mainland and boarded a southbound train, re-connecting with the red Trans-Siberian Express after all this while. But this time he rode the platform because he smelled like a fish net. At dusk he arrived at Vladivostok, the 'Lord of the Ocean', the major Pacific port of the Soviet Union. Under tall, fluted streetlamps well-fed, well-dressed people filled the sidewalks. Motorcycles raced buses. Across from the terminal a statue of Lenin pointed to the Golden Horn, Vladivostok's bay, and on the rooftop above Lenin's steel brow glowed a welcome in neon script: 'Forward to the Victory of Communism!'

  Forward? After two years of exile, Arkady had ten rubles in his pocket; the
rest of his money was back on the island. A seaman's hostel was only ten kopeks a night, but he had to eat. He followed the buses to the Shipping Administration, where a board displayed the status of every civil vessel that claimed Vladivostok as its home port. According to the board, the factory ship Polar Star had put to sea that day, but when Arkady wandered to the docks he saw it still taking cargo and fuel. Floodlit gantries lifted barrels that had passed inspection by the Border Guard. Army veterans outfitted by the KGB in navy-blue uniforms. Their dogs sniffed each barrel, although how the animals could smell anything over the dockside odours of diesel fuel and the ammoniated steam of refrigeration plants was hard to understand.

  In the morning, Arkady was the first man into the Seaman's Hall, where a clerk admitted that the Polar Star was still in port and still needed a worker on the factory line. He took his workpass behind a steel door to be stamped by the Maritime Section of the KGB, where he also signed a statement that defection by a Soviet seaman was treason. On the desk were two black phones for local offices and a direct red phone to Moscow. Arkady was surprised because for coastal fishing there were no such precautions. The black phones were no danger, he felt, unless they called Sakhalin. If anyone bothered to check his name on the red phone, this would be as far as he got.

  'There are Americans,' warned the captain in charge.

  'What?' Arkady had been watching the phones.

  'There are Americans on the boat. Just be natural, friendly but not over-friendly. Better to say nothing at all, in fact.' He stamped the workpass without even reading the name on it. 'I'm not necessarily saying hide.'

  But isn't this what Arkady did, hide? First in the deep faraway of the psycho ward. Then, after Pribluda revived him, in Siberia and on the ship, carrying on inert and semi-dead?

  Now, asleep in his narrow bunk, he asked himself, Wouldn't it be good to be alive again?

  Zina Patiashvili had swum back. Maybe he could, too.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  In the morning, showered and shaved, Arkady took the long walk to the Polar Star's white wheelhouse and the cabin of the fleet electrical engineer for advice.

  'You're lucky,' Anton Hess said. 'You caught me between going off duty and coming on. I was just making tea.'

  His accommodations were no larger than a crew cabin, except that they were for one man rather than four, leaving room for a desk and a wall map that appeared to show every Soviet fishing fleet in the North Pacific. On a rubber pad on the desk was, instead of a samovar, a coffee maker, the sort that might grace a Moscow apartment.

  Hess had the sort of look Arkady had once seen on submariners returning from a polar voyage. Eyes red and sprung. Step shuffling and uncertain. The little man's hair was stiff and wild, as if attacked by a cat, and his sweater reeked of pipe tobacco. The coffee dripped in greasy black drops. He poured out two mugs, added a generous amount from a cognac bottle, and gave a mug to Arkady. 'Confusion to the French,' he said.

  'Why not?' Arkady agreed.

  The coffee delivered a kick to his heart, which started beating anxiously. Hess sighed and allowed himself to sink in slow motion into a chair, where his eyes fixed wearily across the room on a waist-high vertical glass tube with a stand and cord for the radiation of ultraviolet rays. Sunlight. Vitamin D. During winter in Siberia they would ring children around tubes like this.

  Hess's pale face smiled. 'My wife insisted I bring it. I think she wants to believe I'm in the South Pacific. Good tea?'

  Tea for coffee, French for Americans. Hess had an ease for misleading that struck Arkady as appropriate.

  There was no such thing as a fleet electrical engineer, it was a title of convenience that allowed an officer of the KGB or of Naval Intelligence to move from ship to ship. The question was which of these agencies the amiable Anton Hess belonged to. The best indicator was Volovoi, who was the political officer and who regarded Hess with both respect and animosity. Also, these days the KGB tended to be a strictly Russian club, where a name like Hess was a liability. The Navy tended to promote competence, with the exception of Jews.

  On the map Alaska yearned towards Siberia. Or was it the other way around? Either way, Soviet trawlers dotted the sea from Kamchatka, across the island arc of the Aleutians and down to Oregon. Arkady hadn't appreciated before how well the American coast was covered. Of course, in Soviet-American joint ventures Soviet trawlers functioned as processors; each fleet shared its company of American catcherboats. Only a great factory ship like the Polar Star could operate independently with its own family of American boats. The red dot for the Polar Star was about two days north of DutchHarbor and nowhere near other fleets.

  'Comrade Hess, I apologize for bothering you.'

  Hess shook his head, exhausted but indulgent. 'Not at all. Whatever I can do.'

  'Very well,' Arkady said. 'Let's say that Zina Patiashvili did not accidentally stab, beat and throw herself overboard.'

  'You've changed your mind.' Hess was delighted.

  'And let's say we investigate. Not a real investigation with detectives and laboratories, but with the meagre resources we have on hand.'

  'You.'

  'Then we must consider the slim possibility of actually finding something out. Or of discovering a great many things, some of which we did not set out to find. This is where I need your counsel.'

  'Really?' Hess sat forward, his whole attitude suggesting rapport.

  'See, my vision – which is that of a man who cuts fish in the hold of a ship – is very limited. You, however, think in terms of the entire ship, even of the entire fleet. The work of a fleet electrical engineer must be difficult.' Especially so far from the fleet, Arkady thought. 'You would be aware of factors and considerations I know nothing of. Perhaps of factors I should know nothing of.'

  Hess frowned as if he couldn't imagine what these could be. 'You mean there might be some reason not to ask questions? And if there were such a reason, that it would be better to ask no questions at all rather than to stop questions once you've begun asking them?'

  'You've expressed it better than I could,' Arkady said.

  Hess rubbed his eyes, fumbled with a tobacco pouch, filled and tamped his pipe. It was a navigator's pipe designed to hang out of the way while its smoker studied charts. He lit it with short sucks of air, sounding like a radiator.

  'I can't think of any such reason. The girl seems to have been ordinary, young, a little loose. But I have a solution for your concern. If you come across anything especially unusual, anything that bothers you, then please feel free to come to me first.'

  'Sometimes you might be hard to find.' After all, I didn't even know you existed until last night, Arkady thought.

  'The Polar Star is a large ship, but it's still only a ship. Captain Marchuk or his chief mate always know where I am.'

  'His chief mate, not his first mate?'

  'Not Comrade Volovoi, no.' Hess smiled at the idea.

  Arkady wished he knew more about the man. German communities had been invited to settle in, cultivate and tone up the Volga for hundreds of years, until the Great Patriotic War, when Stalin ripped them out in advance of the Fascist invasion and shipped them overnight to Asia.

  Hess scrutinized Arkady in the same way. 'Your father was General Renko, is that right?'

  'Yes.'

  'Where did you do your service?'

  'Berlin.'

  'Really? Doing what?'

  'Sitting in a radio shed, listening to Americans.'

  'Intelligence work!'

  'Hardly so grand.'

  'But you monitored enemy movements. You didn't make any mistakes.'

  'I didn't set off a war accidentally.'

  'That's the best test of intelligence.' Hess pushed his hair back, but it rose again, like a stiff beard. 'Just tell me what you need.'

  'I'll need to be released from my usual duties.'

  'Of course.'

  Arkady kept his voice level, but the truth was that every word brough
t blood rushing through his veins in a sensation that was shameful and intoxicating. 'I can work with Slava Bukovsky, but I'll need an assistant of my own choice. I'll have to question crew members, including officers.'

  'All reasonable, if done quietly.'

  'And question Americans, if necessary.'

  'Why not? There's no reason for them not to cooperate. After all, this is just a fact-finding preliminary to the official investigation in Vladivostok.'

  'I don't seem to get along with them.'

  'I believe the head representative's cabin is directly below mine. You could talk to her now.'

  'Anything I say seems to annoy her.'

  'We're all out here together peacefully fishing. Talk about the sea.'

  'The Bering Sea?'

  'Why not?'

  Hess sat with his hands on his belly like a little German Buddha. He looked too comfortable. Was he KGB? Sometimes it took a sharp stick to find out.

  Arkady said, 'The first time I heard of the Bering Sea I was eight years old. We had the encyclopedia. One day we received in the mail a new page. All the subscribers to the encyclopedia were mailed the same insert, along with instructions how to cut out Beria so that we could tape in vital new information about the Bering Sea. Of course Beria had been shot by then and was no longer a Hero of the Soviet Union. It was one of the rare times I ever saw my father truly happy, because it gave him so much pleasure to cut off the head of the secret police.'

  If Hess were with the KGB the inquiry would be over now. Even so, his smile wore the strain of a man whose new dog has proven to be a biter. 'You killed the Moscow Prosecutor, your boss. Volovoi was right about that.'

  'In self-defence.'

  'A number of others died too.'