Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Split the Germans while we can.'

  'How would you describe Hell?' she asked Arkady.

  He thought about it. 'A Party Congress. A four-hour speech by the Secretary General. No, an eternal speech. The delegates spread out like flatfish listening to a speech that goes on and on and on.'

  'An imaginary evening with Volovoi. Watching him lift weights. Either he's naked or I'm naked. Whichever, it's horrible.'

  'He calls you "Soo-san".'

  'So do you. What's a name you say better?'

  'Irina.'

  'Describe her.'

  'Light brown hair, very dark brown eyes. Tall. Full of life and spirit.'

  'She's not on the Polar Star'.

  'No.'

  'She's home?'

  Arkady changed the subject. 'They like you on the Polar Star?

  'I like Russians, but I don't like having my cabin bugged. If I mention there's no butter, suddenly I'm served a plate of butter. Bernie has a political discussion with a deckhand and the man is taken off the ship. At first you try not to say anything offensive, but after a while to keep your sanity you start talking about Volovoi and his slugs. The Polar Star is hell to me. You?'

  'Only limbo.'

  'It can all be joint venture,' said Hess. 'The shortest sea route between Europe and the Pacific is through the Arctic and we could provide the icebreakers the same way the Polar Star leads the Eagle through the ice sheet.'

  'And depend on you?' Morgan asked. 'I don't think things have changed that much.'

  'You liked Zina,' Arkady said. 'You gave her your swimsuit, you let her borrow your sunglasses. In return, she gave you... what?'

  Susan took a long time to answer; it was like holding a conversation in the dark with a black cat. 'Amusement,' she said finally.

  'You told her about California, she told you about Vladivostok, an even trade?'

  'She was a combination of innocence and guile. A Russian Norma Jean.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'Norma Jean bleached her hair and became Marilyn Monroe. Zina Patiashvili bleached her hair and remained Zina Patiashvili. Same ambition, different result.'

  'You were friends.'

  She refilled his glass so full that the Scotch swelled like oil above the rim, then did the same for herself. 'This is a Norwegian drinking game,' she said. 'The first one to spill has to drink. Lose twice and you sit in a chair while the other person hits you on the head and tries to knock you over.'

  'We'll do it without the hitting. So, you and Zina were friends,' Arkady repeated.

  'The Polar Star is like a deprivation tank. You know how rare it is to meet someone who actually seems to be alive and unpredictable? The problem is that you Soviets have a peculiar idea of friends. We're all peace-loving peoples of goodwill, but God forbid an American and a Soviet should get too close. Then the Soviet is next heard of on a ship off New Zealand.'

  'Zina wasn't shipped off.'

  'No, so we knew she was informing on us, at least to some degree. And I was willing to accept it because she was so alive, so naive, so much fun, so much smarter than any of the men knew.'

  'Which of your men did she sleep with?'

  'How do you know she slept with someone?'

  'She always did; it was the way she operated. If there were four American men on board she slept with at least one of them.'

  'Lantz.'

  Arkady remembered Lantz, the thin, languid observer from the sauna. 'After that, you warned her off? It wouldn't have been Volovoi.' Arkady took a sip. 'Good Scotch.'

  Overfilled, the surface of the drink trembled but didn't break. Neon light lay on it like a moon.

  'Who do you sleep with on the Polar Star?' she asked.

  'No one.'

  'Then the Polar Star is a deprivation tank for you too. I drink to you.'

  For the first time, Morgan raised his head in her direction, then returned to a description by Hess of the latest invasion of Moscow. 'The Japanese are everywhere, at least in the best hotels. The best restaurant in Moscow is Japanese, but you can't get in because it's full of them.'

  Arkady said, 'Zina told you about herself and Captain Marchuk, didn't she? Is that why you didn't tell me you saw them at the stern rail during the dance, so that you wouldn't embarrass him?'

  'It was dark.'

  'He didn't think she was suicidal. You talked to her, did you think she was depressed?'

  'Are you depressed?' Susan asked. 'Are you suicidal?'

  Arkady was thrown off the track again. He was out of practice at interrogation, too slow, too swayed by the counterflow of her questions.

  'No, I would describe myself as a carefree reveller in life. I was more carefree when I was a Party member, of course.'

  'I bet.'

  'It's harder to get in trouble if you have a card.'

  'Really. Like how?'

  'Take smuggling. Without a Party card, tragedy. With a Party card, comedy.'

  'How is that?'

  'A drama. Say the second mate gets caught. He goes before the other officers and sobs, "I don't know what came over me, comrades. I have never done anything like it before. Please give me a chance to redeem myself." '

  'So?' Susan had been lured into the light.

  Hess and Morgan had fallen silent, listening.

  'A vote is taken,' Arkady said, 'and a decision is reached to place a severe reprimand on his Party record. Two months pass and another meeting is held.'

  'Yes?' Susan said.

  'The captain says, "We were all disappointed in the conduct of our second mate and there were times I felt I would never sail with him again, but now I see a sincere effort to redeem himself." '

  'The political officer says...' Susan prompted him.

  'The political officer says, "He has drunk again from the clear wellsprings of Communist thought. I suggest that, taking into consideration his spiritual rebirth, the severe reprimand be removed from his Party record." What could be more comic?'

  Susan said, 'You're a funny man, Renko.'

  'He's an angry man,' said Hess.

  'That's how it ends if you're a Party member,' Arkady said, 'but if you're not a Party member, if you're just a worker and are caught smuggling videotapes or gems, the outcome is not comical or humane. Then it's five years in a labour camp.'

  'Tell me more about Irina,' Susan said. 'She sounds interesting; where is she?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Somewhere...' She spread her arms to indicate the vaguest of directions. 'Out there?'

  'Some people are like that,' Arkady said. 'You know, there's a North Pole and a South Pole. There's another place called the Pole of Inaccessibility. Once it was thought that all the ice in the ArcticSea turned around one point, a mythical pole surrounded by wheeling floes impossible to cross. I think that's where she is.' Without a pause he asked, 'Was Zina depressed the night of the dance?'

  'I didn't say I talked to her.'

  'If you'd warned her off the Americans on the Polar Star, then wouldn't you warn her off the Americans on the Eagle?

  'She said she'd found true love. You can't stop that.'

  'What exactly were her words?'

  'That no one could stop her.'

  'If you're talking about Mike,' Morgan spoke up, 'they only met at a couple of dances. Otherwise all they did was wave at each other. Anyway, all my men were back on my boat, so what does it matter?'

  'Unless she was murdered,' Susan said.

  Morgan reacted with the thin smile of a man whose patience for the simple-minded was wearing thin, and he seemed to find everyone but Hess in that category, Arkady thought.

  'I'm out of cigarettes,' Susan said. 'There's a machine in the lobby. Are you allowed to come?' she asked Arkady.

  He looked towards Hess, who slowly nodded. Morgan shook his head at Susan, but she ignored him.

  'We'll just be a second,' she said.

  The machine offered a dozen brands, like flavours. Susan, though, didn't have the correct change. />
  'I know you don't have any.'

  'No,' Arkady said.

  'I have cigarettes in my room. Come on.'

  Susan's room was on the second floor at the far end of the hall. A gamut of sounds, each room had a different argument or played a different tape. She touched the walls twice for balance's sake and Arkady wondered how drunk she was.

  She unlocked the door to a room not much larger than her cabin on the Polar Star, but offered twin beds, shower, telephone and, instead of a built-in Soviet radio with two stations, a television on a desk. The bureau held a disarray of Scotch, plastic ice bucket, gooseneck lamp. The beds were by the window and though it was thin and dirty, not even double-paned, Arkady felt bathed in utter luxury.

  Outside, the sun was gone and DutchHarbor drifted in the dark. From a hotel guestroom Arkady watched his shipmates emerge from the store and gather on the road, reluctant to walk to the dock even though their arms were weighed down with plastic and string bags stuffed with their purchases. They were used to standing in line for hours to buy one pineapple or one pair of stockings. This was nothing, this was heaven. Polaroid cameras flashed, capturing a closed rank of friends, blue-white in an American port. Natasha and Dynka. Lidia and Olimpiada. On a hill above the tank farm a fire burned like a beacon. Ridley said there were fires all the time, kids torching the wooden structures left from the war. Fog had thickened around the hill, turning the flames to a soft furze of light.

  Arkady found the light switch and turned it on. 'What did you mean when you said that Morgan and I had "cooked up" something together?'

  'Captain Morgan is not too careful about the company he keeps.' Susan turned the switch off. 'I guess I'm not either.'

  'Someone tried to kill me two days ago.'

  'On the Polar Star?'

  'Where else?'

  'No more questions.' Her hand was on his mouth. 'You seem to be for real,' she said, 'but I know you have to be a fake because everything is fake. Remember the poem?'

  Her eyes seemed so dark that he wondered how much he'd had to drink. He could smell the dampness in her hair.

  'Yes.' He knew which one she meant.

  'Say it.'

  ' "Tell me how men kiss you." '

  Susan leaned into him and rose at the same time, bringing her face up to his. Strange. A man considers himself nearly dead, cold, inert; then the right flame appears and he flies into it like a moth.

  Her lips opened to his. 'If you were real,' she said.

  'As real as you.'

  He lifted her and carried her to the bed. Through the window he saw that the plaza outside was as bright with camera flashes as a celebration of silent fire-crackers, a last wave of picture-taking before the happy visitors, his shipmates, decamped for the dock. Out on the road, a camera's bright flash illuminated Natasha as she posed coquettishly, jacket open to a glass necklace, her head tossed in profile to display crystal earrings. Arkady felt oddly like a traitor seeing her from a hotel window.

  He stood poised above the bed, at one of those points that make the difference in the rest of a lifetime. On the road a blue flash illuminated Gury and Natasha, and incidentally froze Mike, the Aleut, as he was leaving the hotel.

  'What's the matter?' Susan asked.

  Another flash bathed a happy Madame Malzeva with a bolt of satin, and also caught Volovoi rushing in the hotel door.

  'I have to go,' Arkady said.

  'Why?' Susan asked.

  'Volovoi's here. He's looking for me.'

  'You're going with him?'

  'No.'

  'You're going to run?' She sat up.

  'No. I couldn't on this island even if I wanted to. You depend on us too much. Who else would the fishermen here sell their fish to? Who else comes all this way to buy stereos and shoes? If any Soviet tried to run here, you'd throw him back as fast as you could catch him.'

  'Then where are you going?'

  'I don't know. Not back. Not yet.'

  Chapter Twenty

  * * *

  As he climbed the hill, Arkady felt the thick grasses softly yielding, then springing up behind his step. Behind him, the hotel lay bathed in electric light, its bright windows banked in mid-air above the walkway, which was a shaft of still, white light. A figure on the walkway seemed to move in slow motion. Volovoi looking right, then left.

  The last few Soviets were joining the crowd on the road, and some of them were already moving towards the docks, like the vanguard of a herd. Some of the men lingered while Lantz visited the liquor store. Returning, he distributed pints of vodka, which they stuffed in their pants. Natasha and Lidia lingered too, as if to give the evening a last embrace. America? With so many Soviets in the street it could have been a Russian village, with Russian dogs barking in the yards, Russian grass blanketing the hills. Arkady imagined Kolya off in the dark digging up tender orchids, and Obidin entering the doorway of the church.

  He had crossed the road away from the hotel and worked his way through the dumpsters beside the store. The building had windows only in front, so he slipped into the shadows in back, then manoeuvred between the pre-fab housing on the ridge, long metal homes with aluminium windows bathed in shifting colours of television sets. A couple of dogs, black-and-white animals with pale eyes, challenged him, but no owner appeared. The yards had pitfalls, auto parts and suction hoses covered by snow; but he slipped only once before reaching the hill. Mike was well ahead, keeping the beam of the flashlight on a path. So far he hadn't looked back.

  Land was so seductive, dark but firm underfoot. Sometimes Arkady stepped on cushions of waterleaf or moss. Dried lupin brushed his hands. He couldn't so much see as sense the volcanic mountains rising like walls in the mist. Ahead, a fire lit one peak. Out in the harbour the lights of the ships at anchor were more distinct; the lamps of the Polar Star floated on a tilted sheet of black.

  What if he did run? There were no trees to hide behind, few houses to beg at. There was an airport on the other side of the island. What could he do, jump on to a wheel as a plane took off?

  Hummocks made climbing easy. Snow was cupped into the northern slope; there was just enough light to turn the drifts blue. After ten months at sea, it was like mounting heaven. A cold wind, a harbinger of the winter to come, stirred earthy vapours of berry bushes, parsley and moss. Mike seemed to be enjoying himself, too, following his flashlight at a leisurely pace.

  Where the path joined a dirt road, the fog grew more intense. At points, the ground dropped away on either side, and Arkady could make out the difference between firm footing and air mainly by the sound of the sea breeze as it rushed up the face of the cliff. He knew which way to walk because the fire, though obscured, was closer and brighter, like a beacon.

  Then, in a matter of steps, the fog dissipated and fell away. It was as if he had climbed to the surface of a second ocean and second set of mountains. The fog lay heavy, still and foamy white under a night sky as brilliantly clear as deep space. The mountain peaks floated like smaller islands, hideaways of sheer black rock and starlit ice.

  The road ended at the fire. Around its glow Arkady saw signs of an abandoned military battery: earthworks turned to a grassy knoll, gunplates now rings of rust, a mare's nest of barbed wire. In the muffled tussling of the flames were boards, bed springs, oil cans and tyres. On the far side, Mike pulled open a heavy door built into the hill. For the first time, Arkady noticed that he carried a rifle.

  The stars were so near. The Little Bear was still chained to Polaris. Orion's arm reached over the horizon as if tossing stars. In his ten months on the Bering Sea, Arkady had never seen a night so clear, yet they'd always been there, just above the fog.

  He walked around the fire to the door. It was iron set in a concrete frame, an entrance to a wartime bunker. The concrete was chipped and stained with rust, but it had resisted both years and vandals. A new padlock hanging open on the hasp showed that someone had taken ownership and the door swung easily on the oiled hinges.

  'Mike!' h
e yelled.

  A kerosene lamp burned on the floor, and in its light Arkady saw that someone had done his best to turn the bunker into a fisherman's loft. A trawl net billowed artistically down from the ceiling. On the walls were shelves of starfish, abalone shells and jawbones of baby sharks. There was a cot and fruit-box bookcases stuffed with paperbacks and magazines, and barrels of salvaged webbing, twisted tow shackles and split corks.

  When he saw the rifle on the cot, Arkady relaxed. 'Mike?'

  On a stand and filling the entire middle of the bunker was the largest kayak Arkady had ever seen. It was at least six metres long, low and narrow, with two round hatches, and although it was only half finished an intrinsic sleekness and grace were evident. Arkady remembered the voice on Zina's tape describing a native boat, a baidarka, that the speaker would paddle around the Polar Star. The more he examined the boat the more impressed he was. The keel was wood, jointed with bone. The ribs were bent wood, lashed with sinew. He didn't see a nail in the whole construction. Only the sheath of the craft was a compromise with the modern age: a covering of fibreglass fabric sewn up to the rear hatch coaming by nylon thread held in place with a hemostat. On a workbench was an assortment of whittling knives and files, sail needles and twine, paint brushes, gas mask, electric hair dryer and half-gallon cans of epoxy resin. Epoxy was volatile material; pails of sand bracketed the bench and there was a toxic bite to the air from a sample that had been painted on the skin.

  'Come on out,' Arkady called. 'I just want to talk.'

  The way the bow of the craft split and curled backwards, Arkady could easily imagine the baidarka bending, riding lightly on the waves. He could also see why Zina was attracted to Mike. A 'merman' she had called him, a romantic who dreamed of sailing with her to all the points of the Pacific. How different from himself, who just wanted to stay on land.

  The hairdryer meant there had to be power. Arkady found an extension cord on the floor and followed it to a blanket hanging on the end wall, pulled it aside and discovered a second, smaller room to the bunker. There was a gasoline generator, not running, with an exhaust pipe to a duct. A gasoline can lay on its side and a flashlight spilled its own light.