Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The other officers hadn't brought their wives, so the general had them dance with his. They were pleased; none of their wives were as slim and tall and beautiful. 'Katerina, get in the spirit!' the general would order. From the porch, the young Arkady felt the floor shake under the shuffling of heavy boots. He didn't hear his mother's feet at all; it was as if they were spinning her through the air.

  When the guests had left was always the worst. Then his father and mother would go to their bed behind a screen at the far end of the porch. First the two sets of whispers, one soft and pleading, one through the teeth of a rage that made the heart shrink. The whole house swayed like a seesaw.

  The next morning Arkady had a breakfast of raisin cakes and tea outside under the birches. His mother came out still in her nightshirt, a gown of silk and lace his father had found in Berlin. She had a shawl over her shoulders against the morning cool. Her hair was black, loose, long.

  Did he hear anything during the night? she asked. No, he promised, nothing.

  As she turned back towards the house a branch reached out and plucked off the shawl. On her arms were the bruise marks of individual fingers. She lightly picked the shawl off the ground, replaced it on her shoulders and tied it tight by its end tassels. Anyway, she added, it was over. Her eyes were now so serene that he almost believed her.

  He could hear it now. 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.

  'Seriously, Zina, the chief would have my head and yours if he found out about this. You can't tell anyone.'

  'About what? This?'

  'Stop it, Zina, I'm trying to be serious.'

  'About your little room here?'

  'Yes.'

  'Who would care? It's like a little boys' club in the bottom of the ship.'

  'Be serious.'

  Each tape was thirty minutes long. As the last narrow band of black unreeled there was no way for Zina to turn the recorder off. Her companion would hear the 'click' as the tape stopped.

  'One moment it's all "Zinka, I love you"; the next it's "Zina, be serious." You're a confused man.'

  'This is secret.'

  'On the Polar Star? You want to spy on fish? On our Americans? They're dumber than the fish.'

  'That's what you think!'

  'Is that your hand?'

  'Keep your eye on Susan.'

  'Why?'

  'That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to impress you; I'm trying to help you. We should help each other. It's a long voyage. I'd go crazy without someone like you, Zinka.'

  'Ah, we've stopped being serious.'

  'Where are you going? We still have time.'

  'You do, I don't. My shift is on and that bitch Lidia is looking for any reason to get me in trouble.'

  'A little minute?'

  There was a rasp of canvas over the microphone, the sigh of a cot as a body stood up.

  'You go back to your mental work. I have some soup to stir.'

  'Damn! At least wait until I look through the hole before you go.'

  'Do you have any idea how silly you look right now?'

  'Okay, the way is clear. Go.'

  'Thank you.'

  'Zinka, tell no one.'

  'No one.'

  'Zinka, tomorrow?'

  A door shut reluctantly. Click.

  The other side of the tape started as a blank. Fast forward. It was all blank.

  Arkady studied the spiral notebook. On the first page was pasted a map of the Pacific. Zina had added eyes and lips so that Alaska leaned like a bearded man towards a shy and feminine Siberia. The Aleutians reached out to Russia like an arm.

  The last cassette started as Duran Duran. Fast forward.

  On the second page was a photo of the Eagle anchored in a bay surrounded by snowy mountains. On the third page, the Eagle wallowed in choppy water.

  'Making a baidarka the tape said in English. 'It's like a kayak. You know what a kayak is? Well, this is longer, leaner, with a square stern. The old ones were made with skin and ivory, even with ivory joints so it just flowed through the waves. When Bering came with the first Russian boats, he couldn't believe how fast the baidarkas were. The best baidarkas have always come from Unalaska. You understand a word of this?'

  'I know what a kayak is,' Zina answered in a slow and careful English.

  'Well, I'll show you a baidarka and you'll see for yourself. I'll paddle it around the Polar Star'

  'I should have a camera when you do.'

  'I wish we could do more than that. What I'd like to do is show you the world. Go all over – California, Mexico, Hawaii. There are so many great places. That would be a dream.'

  'When I listen to him,' Zina said on the second side, 'I hear a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold onto the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves. I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.'

  The next dozen pages were photos of the same man with straight dark hair. Dark eyes with heavy lids. Broad cheekbones around a fine nose and mouth. The American. The Aleut with a Russian name. Mike. Mikhail. The pictures, all taken from above and at a distance, showed him on the deck of the Eagle working the crane, posing on the bow, mending a net, waving to the photographer.

  Arkady smoked the last, intoxicating cigarette. He remembered Zina on the autopsy table in this same room. Her sodden flesh and bleached hair. The body was far removed from life as a shell on a beach. This voice, though – this was Zina, someone no one on the ship had known. It was as if she had walked in the door, sat across the desk in the shadow just outside the lamp's veil of light, lit her own phantom cigarette and, having finally found an understanding ear, confided all.

  Naturally Arkady would have preferred to have the technical lab back in Moscow throwing an exciting array of solvents and reagents, or mortar-sized German microscopes and gas chromatographs into the fight. He used what he could. In front of the spiral notebook he laid out spoons, pills and the card of fingerprints Vainu had taken from the body. He crushed the pills between the spoons, wrapped his sleeve around the handle of the spoon that held the pulverized iodine, struck a match and held it to the spoon's bowl. He moved both close to the notebook so that the fumes from the heated iodine would flow up the page opposite the map. The hot-iodine method was supposed to employ iodine crystals over an alcohol burner in a glass box. He reminded himself that in the spirit of the '

  New Way

  of Thinking' announced by the last Party Congress, all good Soviets were willing to bend theory to practical application.

  Iodine fumes reacted quickly to the oils of perspiration in a latent print. First a ghostly outline appeared of a whole left hand, sepia brown, like an antique photograph. Palm, heel, thumb and four fingers spread out, as they would have been while she held the book flat to paste in a picture. Then the details: whorls, deltas, ridges, radial loops. He concentrated on the first finger and compared it with the card. A double loop, like yin and yang. An island at the loop's right delta. A cut at the left delta. Card and page were the same; this was Zina's book and the imprint of her hand as if she were reaching out to him. There were two other prints, male by the size of them; rough, hurried marks.

  As the match burned down, the hand began to fade, and in a minute it had disappeared. He repacked all the effects neatly. He'd found Zina. Now to find the lieutenant who called her Zinushka.

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  Below decks everything was built around fish holds. Noah's Ark must have had a fish hold. When he called Peter a 'fisher of men', Christ must have appreciated the virtues of a tight fish hold. If cosmonauts ever sail on solar winds and collect specimens of galactic life, they will need a fish hold of sorts.

  Yet, for ten months the Polar Star had sailed with a forward fish hold that was inoperative. Various explanations were offered for why the hold was out of commi
ssion: pipes kept cracking; there was an electrical short in the heat pump; the plastic insulation seeped some kind of poison. Whatever, the result was that off-loading ships had to make more frequent rendezvous to take the fish crammed into the Polar Star's other two holds. Another result was that the area around the unused hold had been abandoned to stacks of barrel staves and steel plates. As the walkway became more crowded, the crew tended to take the longer but faster route on deck.

  A line of bulbs lit the way between the bulkhead and the hold. Access to it was a watertight door with a ramp to carry carts of frozen fish over the coaming. The wheel on the door was chained with an impressively large padlock. On one side of the door was a heat pump, its hood open to display a convincing tangle of unattached wires. On the other was an oil can full of tall capstan shafts. The bottom of the can stirred with rats. The ship hadn't been fumigated since Arkady had been on board. It was interesting that rats ate bread, cheese, paint, plastic pipes, wiring, mattresses and clothes – everything, in fact, but frozen fish.

  There seemed to be two Zinas. There was Zina as the public slut; then there was this private woman who dwelt within a world of hidden photographs and secret tapes. One tape could only be called dangerous. The amorous lieutenant had boasted of the fish hold's bedroom temperature and forty per cent humidity. Arkady had heard someone bother to mention a humidity ratio only once before: in the computer room back in militia headquarters on

  Petrovka Street

  in Moscow.

  All well and good. Arkady had no argument with naval intelligence. Every Soviet fisherman on the Pacific coast knew that American submarines constantly violated his country's waters. On dark nights periscopes would pop out of the Tatar Strait. The enemy even followed Soviet warships right into Vladivostok harbour. What he couldn't understand was how a listening station in a fish hold hoped to hear anything. An echosounder only told you what was directly below, and no submarine would venture under trawlers. As Arkady understood it, passive sonar like hydrophones could detect sound waves at a distance, but an old factory ship like the Polar Star had plating that was substandard, so thin that, pounding like a drum, it bowed in and out with each wave. It had been welded with the wrong beading, riveted with burned and undersized rivets, seamed with cement that wept, shored with timbers that creaked like bones. All of which made the ship more human, in a way, and even more trustworthy in the sense that a patched-up veteran, for all his complaints, was more to be trusted than a handsome recruit. Still, the Polar Star marched through the water like a brass band; its own noise would smother the whisper of any submarine.

  Arkady had no interest in espionage. In the Army, sitting for hours in a radio shack on the roof of the Adler Hotel in Berlin, he used to hum – Presley, Prokofiev, anything. The others asked why he didn't want to take a turn on the binoculars, to study the American shack on the roof of the Sheraton in West Berlin. Perhaps he lacked imagination. He needed to see another human to get interested. The fact was that in spite of Zina's tape, from the outside the fish hold looked like a fish hold.

  The lieutenant had told Zina about looking through a hole. There was no peephole that Arkady could see. The door had an ambient, clammy touch, nothing cosy about it. He pondered the shafts in the oil can, and after a moment's indecision selected one. It was like lifting a hundred pound crowbar; once he had it to his shoulders he wouldn't be able to casually brush off any rat that came with it. Sweat came just at the thought. But no rodent appeared, and when he inserted the shaft into the hasp of the padlock and gave it a twist the lock popped open like a spring: another black mark for State Quality Control. The wheel lock itself wouldn't give until he got a foot against the pump. Grudgingly, with short, metallic cries, it turned and he pushed the door open.

  The interior of the hold rose through three decks of the Polar Star, a shaft of dark air lit by a dim bulb at Arkady's level. Ordinarily each level of a hold had its own deck, open in the middle to raise fish from below. This single, precipitous drop was odd, as if there was no intention of using the hold at all. A watertight hatch covered the main deck overhead, sealing in a stale smell of fish and brine. The sides were covered with spaced wooden planks over the grid of pipes that usually circulated coolant. A ladder ran from the hatch down to the bottom deck two levels below. He swung onto the rungs and closed the door behind him.

  As Arkady descended his eyes adjusted. Once in a while he caught sight of rats climbing the pipes away from him. Rats never tried to enter an operating cold store, a sign of intelligence. It occurred to him that a flashlight would have been a sign of intelligence on his part. There were so many rats that the sound of their movement was like a wind in the trees.

  There should have been decks, block and tackle, crates covered in hoarfrost. The packing of a cold store was a maritime art. Cases of frozen fish not only had to be stacked but separated by planks to allow torpid air colder than merely freezing to circulate. Here there was nothing. At each level he descended was a door, a light socket and a thermostat. Each level was darker, and when he stepped off the last rung onto the wider bottom deck of the hold he was almost blind, though he felt the pupils of his eyes expand to their rims. This is a pit, he thought, the centre of the earth.

  He lit a match. The deck was more planking over a grid of pipes above a cement base. He saw orange peels, a piece of planking, empty paint cans and a blanket; someone had been using the hold to sniff fumes. There were comblike bones that explained what had happened to the ship's cat. What he did not see was a lieutenant of Naval Intelligence, a cot, a television or a computer terminal. Beneath the base was a double hull with tanks for fuel and water, enough space to smuggle contraband maybe, but hardly to hide an entire furnished room. He inserted the broken board between wall planks. No secret door swung open. When subtlety didn't succeed he swung the board against the planks. Through the booming echoes came high-pitched protests from the gallery of rats overhead, but no officers of Naval Intelligence emerged.

  Climbing back up the ladder, Arkady felt like a man returning to the surface of the water, as if he were holding his breath and swimming up to the bulb. Zina's tape made no sense any more. Perhaps he'd misunderstood the conversation. Perhaps he could find some vodka in Vainu's office. A little vodka in a bright room would be nice. Back at the bulb, he pulled the door open and swung himself through to the deck. By now the barrel staves and heat pump had a homey, welcoming appearance. He slipped the broken padlock onto the wheel; Gury, the biznessman, would help him find another.

  As Arkady started towards the factory the light over the cofferdam went out, then the one over the heat pump. A figure stepped out of the dark and hit him in the stomach. The pain was so sharp that at first he thought he must have been stabbed. While he bent and gagged, a ball of wet rags was stuffed in his mouth. Another rag was tied tightly over his mouth. A sack was pulled over his head and shoulders, all the way down to his feet. Something like a belt was pulled tight over the sack and around his arms and chest. He reacted the right way, breathing deeply and flexing his arms, and at once choked because the rags in his mouth had been soaked in gasoline. The cloths had pressed his tongue back into the soft palate, and he was close to swallowing his tongue. So he blew out, trying to clear his tongue, and as he did so, the belt was pulled tighter like a cinch.

  He was carried – by three men, he thought. There would also be one man up ahead to clear the way or stall anyone coming, and possibly another man following to do the same. They were strong; they toted him as easily as a broomstick. He tried not to choke on the gasoline fumes. On long voyages, seamen got together to share fumes and get a little dizzy. A coil of acrid vapour teased its way down his throat.

  They could have just thrown him down the fish hold; his body wouldn't have been found for days. So perhaps being hit, gagged and sacked was a good sign. He'd never been kidnapped before, not in all his years with the Prosecutor's Office, and he wasn't sure of the nuances of being beaten and seized, but it was clear they didn't want to
kill him right away. Probably they were crew members irate about the possibility of losing their port call. Even if they kept him in the sack, he might recognize a voice if they whispered.

  It was a short promenade. They stopped and a door wheel turned. Arkady was unaware of the men making any rights or lefts; had they returned to the fish hold? The only watertight entrances at this level were to the holds. The door opened with the clap of splitting ice. A furnace emits a fiery blast; a cold store, with a temperature of -40°C emits a more languid, frozen steam, but even within his sack Arkady could feel it, and he began kicking and twisting. Too late. They threw him in.

  The impact of landing snapped the belt. Arkady rose, but before he could pull off the sack he heard the door shut, and the wheel lock turn. He found himself standing on a wooden case. When he untied his gag and unwound the rags from his mouth the first breath was a draught that burned the lungs. It was a joke, it had to be a joke. White, almost liquid steam seeped from the planking and rolled down the walls of the fish hold; within the planking he could see the cooling grid, the pipes cased in skeletal ice. Each of his feet stood in a separate pool of milky vapour. As he watched, the hairs of the back of his hands stood and turned white with frost. As it left his lips, his breath crystallized, glittered and snowed.

  He stopped himself as he reached for the wheel of the door, because bare skin would adhere to the metal. He covered the wheel with the sack and then put his weight into it, but it wouldn't budge. The men outside must be holding it shut, and there was no chance he was going to overpower three or more of them. He shouted. Around the cold store were ten centimetres of fibreglass wool insulation; even the inside of the door was padded. No one was going to hear him unless they walked right by. For the last week, fish from the flash freezers had been stowed in the aft hold to balance the ship's trim. If this was the midships hold, there was no reason for anyone to hear. Overhead and out of reach was an insulated, watertight hatch. No one was going to hear him through that, either. Two cases below was the false deck and access to a lower level and another door. There was no way he could think of to lift two cases, each weighing a quarter of a ton. On one case was a rumpled tarp stiff with ice. The stamp on the cases said, 'Frozen Sole – Product of USSR'. Not a joke, but there was something comical about that.