Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'He's a professional,' she said.

  'Did you make him jealous?' Arkady asked. 'Was that why you asked me to your room?'

  Susan's hand rose to slap him, then stopped. Why? Arkady wondered. Did she think a slap would be too banal, too bourgeois? Nonsense. On a Saturday night the Moscow metro resounded with slaps.

  The ship's speakers squawked. It was 1500, time for light musical selections from Fleet Radio, beginning with a rumba suggesting Cuban beaches and waving palms. Socialist maracas struck up a Latin rhythm.

  Arkady said, 'This music reminds me, before DutchHarbor you were leaving us for a vacation. Soo-san, why did you come back to this Soviet ship you hate so much? The fish? The excitement of filling the quota?'

  'No, but it might be worth it to see you rotting on the slime line again.'

  The radio room was the first portside cabin behind the bridge. Nicolai, the young man who had piloted the lifeboat that had taken Hess and Arkady into DutchHarbor, was idly working the crossword puzzle in Soviet Sport when Arkady entered. Nicolai's desk was occupied by stacked radios, amplifiers and a row of binders, one with the red stripe of classified codes, but there was room left for a hot plate and pot. Cosy. The rumba trotted in and out of the speaker. Not bad duty. Junior lieutenants with training in electronics were often assigned to fishing fleets to take an ostensibly civilian tour of foreign ports. Even in his warm-up suit and slippers he had the air of a freshly minted officer whose future was lined with gold braid. Nicolai raised his eyes lazily towards Arkady.

  'Whatever it is, old-timer, I'm busy.'

  Arkady checked to make sure no one was in the passage, then closed the door, kicked over the radioman's chair and planted a foot in his chest.

  'You screwed Zina Patiashvili. You took her into an intelligence station in this ship. If your chief finds out, you'll go to a military labour camp, and by the time you get out you'll be lucky if you still have teeth and hair.'

  On his back, Nicolai still held his pencil, his eyes two perfect pools of blue. 'That's a lie.'

  'Then let's tell Hess.'

  Arkady looked down at a young man who was experiencing all the terrors of free fall, for whom a comfortable and promising world had suddenly become an abyss.

  'How do you know?' Nicolai asked.

  'That's better.' Arkady removed his foot and helped him up. 'You can pick up the chair. Sit.'

  Nicolai promptly did as he was ordered, always a good sign. Arkady turned up the speaker a notch as the rumba faded and was replaced by a Bulgarian folk song.

  While the lieutenant sat at attention, Arkady considered the different ways to handle this interrogation: as a former lover of Zina himself, as a blackmailer, as someone still carrying out a ship's inquiry. But he wanted an approach that would throw an aggressive Naval Intelligence officer into a pit of despair, as if the young man were already in the hands of the military's most despised enemy. He deliberately chose the unlikely words with which the KGB always began its more informal chats.

  'Relax. If you're honest, you have nothing to worry about.'

  Nicolai shank in his chair. 'It was one time, that's all. She recognized me from Vladivostok. I thought she was a waitress; how did I know she was going to be on board? Maybe I should have told someone, but she begged me not to because she would have been sent back home on an off-loader. I had mercy on her, and then one thing led to another.'

  'It led her to your cot.'

  'I didn't plan it that way. There's no privacy on a ship. That was the only time.'

  'No.'

  'It was!'

  'Vladivostok,' Arkady prompted him. 'The Golden Horn.'

  'You were watching her then?'

  'Tell me about it.'

  Nicolai's story wasn't much different from Marchuk's. He'd gone to the Golden Horn with friends from the base and they'd all noticed Zina, but she seemed to be most attracted to him. When she got off work, the two went to her place, listened to music, danced, made love, and then he left and never saw her again until the Polar Star. 'I thought the investigation about Zina was over,' he said. 'I heard you were back in the factory.'

  'She was a good waitress?'

  'The worst.'

  'What did you talk about?'

  Arkady could feel the radioman's mind freeze like a rabbit wondering which way to run next. Not only was he implicated in the betrayal of his service on the ship, but the interrogation had dangerously expanded into the past, implicating him again, if only through coincidence. The worst construction was that Zina had infiltrated the Pacific Fleet not once but twice, both times through him. Not necessarily as a foreign agent, to be sure; the KGB was always and obsessively trying to worm into the military, and Naval Intelligence was always and paranoically testing the vigilance of its own officers to see if it could breach its own security.

  Like other men in similar dilemmas, Nicolai decided to plead guilty to a smaller crime as evidence of his honesty. 'I have the best receivers in the world in Vladivostok. I can get American Armed Forces Radio, Manila, Nome. Sometimes I have to monitor them anyway, so I tape – just music and just for myself, never for profit. I offered one to Zina as a friend and said we ought to go someplace where we could play it. OK, it was a come on, but we never talked about anything but music. She wanted me to duplicate the tapes and sell the copies through her. Zina was Georgian through and through. I told her no. We went to her place and listened to the tapes, but that was all.'

  'Not quite all. You got what you wanted; you slept with her.'

  Arkady asked what Zina's apartment was like, and again Nicolai's description resembled Marchuk's. A private flat in a relatively new building, maybe a co-op. Television, VCR, stereo. Japanese prints and samurai swords on the wall. Doors and bar upholstered in red plastic. A rifle collection in a locked case. Though there were no photographs, clearly a man lived there too, and Nicolai had assumed that Zina's friend was powerful and wealthy, either a black-market millionaire or someone high up in the Party.

  'You're a Party member?' Arkady asked.

  'Young Communist.'

  'Tell me about the radios here.'

  The radioman was happy to leave the subject of Zina Patiashvili and expound on more technical matters. The Polar Star's radio cabin had a VHP radio with a range of about fifty kilometres for communicating with the catcherboats, and two larger, single-sideband radios for longer range. One single-sideband was usually tuned to the fleet radio. The second single-sideband was for the radio conferences with other Soviet ships spread across the Bering Sea, or for contact with the fleet headquarters in Vladivostok and the company office in Seattle. In between, the radio monitored an emergency channel that all ships kept open.

  The cabin also had a shortwave for Radio Moscow or the BBC. 'I'll show you something else.' Nicolai brought from under the desk a receiver no larger than an historical novel. 'A CB radio. Very short range, but this is how the catcherboats talk to each other when they don't want us to listen in. All the more reason for us to have it.' He turned it on to the voice of Thorwald, the captain of the Merry Jane, droning in a Norwegian accent, '... fucking Russians pounded the fucking George Bank to death and pounding the fucking African coast until there's no fucking fish there. At least we'll get some fucking money –'

  Arkady turned the CB off. 'Tell me more about Zina.'

  'She wasn't a real blonde. She was pretty wild, though.'

  'Not sex. What you talked about'

  'Tapes. I told you.' Nicolai had the confused expression of a student who was trying to cooperate but didn't know what his new teacher wanted.

  'The weather?' Arkady prompted.

  'For her, anywhere but Georgia was too cold.'

  'Georgia?'

  'She said Georgian men would screw anything that bent over.'

  'Work?'

  'She expressed an un-Soviet philosophy about labour.'

  'Fun?'

  'Dancing.'

  'Men?'

  'Money.' Nicolai laughed. 'I don't know
why I say that, because she didn't ask me for money. But she had a way of looking at you one moment as if you were the most handsome, desirable man on earth, which is a very erotic sensation, and then a minute later dismissing you with her eyes as if you couldn't possibly meet her expectations. It's crazy, but somehow I had the feeling that, with Zina, emotions and money never met. I'd say, "Why are you looking at me so coldly?" and she'd say, "I'm imagining you're not a little sailor boy, that you're an Afghantsi, a soldier sent off to fight against Allah and his madmen, and you've just come home in a zinc-lined coffin and it makes me sad." Cruel things like that – and right in the middle of love, too.'

  'What about the guns in the apartment? Did she talk about them?'

  'No. I had the feeling I'd be some sort of softie in her eyes if I asked. She did say that the guy, whoever he was, slept with a gun under his pillow. I thought, Well, that's typically Siberian.'

  'Did she ask you questions?'

  'Just about my family, my home, did I write often like a good son and send proper packages of coffee and tea.'

  'Doesn't the Navy have its own system so that parcels don't arrive ripped apart months after they're sent?'

  'The Navy takes care of its own.'

  'And she asked you to send a parcel for her?'

  There was something increasingly calf-like about the radioman in the widening of his eyes. 'Yes.'

  'Tea?'

  'Yes.'

  'Already wrapped for you to take?'

  'Yes. But at the last minute she changed her mind and I left without it. That was another time when she gave me one of those looks as if I couldn't measure up,'

  'When you met on the Polar Star, did she tell you how she came to be on board?'

  'She just said she'd got bored back at the restaurant, bored with Vladivostok, bored with Siberia. When I asked how she got a seaman's union card she laughed in my face and said she'd bought it, what else? The rules about that are well known, but they didn't seem to apply to Zina.'

  'She was different?'

  Nicolai struggled with words, then admitted failure. 'You had to know her.'

  Arkady changed the subject. 'Our single-sideband radios, what's their range?'

  'It varies with the atmospherics. The captain can tell you; one day we can get Mexico and the next day nothing. But the ship's crew often calls home all the way to Moscow through a radio-telephone link. It's a morale builder.'

  Arkady asked, 'Can other ships listen to those conversations?'

  'If they happen to be monitoring the right channel they can hear the incoming part of the conversation, but not what we say.'

  'Good. Place a call for me to Odessa militia headquarters.'

  'No problem.' Nicolai was eager to please. 'Of course all calls have to be cleared with the captain.'

  'You don't want to clear this call; you don't even want to log it. Let's review,' Arkady said, because the radio technician was a young man who needed careful instruction. 'As a naval officer, simply for admitting Patiashvili into your station on the Polar Star you can be charged with betraying your sacred trust. Since this was an ongoing relationship the question of conspiracy to commit the state crime of treason comes up. Even if you were merely innocently attempting to seduce a citizen, you can still be charged with activities detrimental to the high standing of Soviet womanhood, failure to report illegal firearms, theft of state property – the tapes – and dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda – the music. In any case, your life as a naval officer is at an end.'

  Listening, Nicolai looked like a man swallowing a fish whole. 'No problem. It may take an hour or so to get through to Odessa, but I'll do it.'

  'Incidentally, since you are a music lover, where were you during the ship's dance?'

  'My other duties.' Nicolai lowered his eyes to indicate, belowdecks, the intelligence station Arkady had yet to find. 'It's funny you mention music. The tapes that Zina had in the apartment in Vladivostok? Some were rock, but most were magnatizdat. You know, thieves' songs.'

  ' "Cut my throat, but please don't cut the strings of my guitar"?'

  'Exactly! You did know her.'

  'I do now.'

  On the way out, Arkady had to admit to himself that he'd been harder on the radioman that he'd really needed to be. It was the dig, 'old-timer', that had been Nicolai's mistake. He found himself running his hand over his face. Did he look old? He didn't feel old.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  * * *

  Under Gury's bunk was a new nylon bag stuffed with plastic booty: Sony Walkmen, Swatch watches, Aiwa speakers, WaterPiks, Marlboros and a Mickey Mouse telephone. Taped on the wardrobe were Polaroid snapshots of Obidin, his beard cleaned and combed, standing before the wooden church in Unalaska like a man modestly posing on a cloud beside his Lord. Inside, the wardrobe was redolent with the exhalation of rows of jars of homemade brew flavoured by fresh and canned fruit from the DutchHarbor store. Anyone reaching for his jacket was assaulted by the sugary fumes of peaches, cherries and exotic mandarin oranges. The most botanical corner of the cabin, however, was Kolya's shelves of specimens gathered on the island and brought back in cardboard pots: furry moss clinging to a rock bedded on moist page from Pravda; a miniature bush with minute purple berries; the sickle-shaped, papery leaves of a dwarf iris; a paintbrush that still claimed one fire-red petal.

  Kolya was giving Natasha the tour; with the porthole laced by frost, his corner of the cabin resembled a greenhouse. It was the first time he'd ever impressed her. 'Any scientific voyage returned like this,' he explained. 'Cook and Darwin, their small ships were filled with botanical specimens in the holds, bulbs in the chain lockers, breadfruit trees on deck. Because life is everywhere. The underside of the ice sheet around us is covered with algae. That's what brings the tiny creatures which, in turn, attract the fish. Naturally, predators follow: seals, whales, polar bears. We're surrounded by life.'

  Arkady's mind was on botany of a different sort. He sat at the narrow table, enjoying one of Gury's cigarettes and thinking of wild hemp, thousands of square hectares of luxuriant, wild Manchurian hemp heavy with narcotic pollen, flowers and leaves growing like free rubles across the rugged Asian landscape. Every autumn what Siberians called 'grass fever' broke out as people flocked like Party volunteers – better than Party volunteers – to the countryside for the harvest. Often no travel was necessary because the weed grew everywhere – along the road, in the potato field, in the tomato patch. Called anasha, it was trucked in bags west towards Moscow, where it could be smoked loose like cigarettes or tamped into pipes.

  Then there was plan. Hashish. Plan came in kilo bricks from Afghanistan and Pakistan, then travelled by different routes, some on Army lorries, some on ferries over the Black and CaspianSeas across Georgia, then north to Moscow.

  'Polar bears wander for hundreds of kilometres out on the ice sheet,' Kolya was telling Natasha. 'No one knows how they find their way. They hunt two ways, by waiting at the holes where seals come up to breathe and by swimming under the ice and watching for a seal shadow above.'

  Or poppies, Arkady thought. How many Georgian collectives overfulfilled their quota for magic flower? How much was swept from the threshing floor, how much dried, how much baled, how much processed into morphine, then seemingly blown by the wind to Moscow?

  From an investigator's point of view, Moscow appeared to be an innocent Eve, surrounded by dangerous gardens, constantly seduced by oily Georgian, Afghani and Siberian snakes. The 'tea' that Zina had asked Nicolai to send was undoubtedly a block of hemp, anasha. She'd changed her mind, probably because it was such small change, but it meant that there was at least part of a network in place.

  'You found all these flowers just around the road and the store?' Natasha asked.

  'Well, you have to know where to look,' Kolya said.

  'The seed of beauty is everywhere.' Natasha wore her hair back to show off the crystal earrings she'd bought in DutchHarbor. 'Wouldn't you agree, Arkady?'

  'It
's undeniable.'

  'You see how much more constructively Comrade Mer spent his time on shore, instead of getting disgustingly drunk and falling in the water.'

  'Kolya, I bow to your scientific zeal.' Arkady noticed that his cabinmate's spiral notebook, with its grey, crocodile-textured binding, was the kind sold in the ship's store. The same as Zina's. 'May I?' He flipped through the pages. On each Kolya had noted a different plant by common name, Latin name, when and where picked.

  'Were you alone when you fell in?' Natasha asked.

  'It's less embarrassing that way.'

  'Susan wasn't with you?'

  'No one.'

  'You could have been hurt.' Kolya was upset. 'A little tipsy, in the water, at night.'

  'I was wondering,' Natasha said to Arkady, 'What you plan to do when we return to Vladivostok. When he was alive, Comrade Volovoi suggested that you might have difficulties with the Guard. Positive statements from your co-workers, from Party members, might be helpful. Then you might want to go elsewhere. There are some very nice hydro-electric projects starting on the Yenisei. Arctic bonuses, a month's vacation anywhere. With your abilities, you'd learn how to run a crane in no time.'

  'Thanks, I'll consider that.'

  'How many former investigators from Moscow can say they built a dam?' she asked.

  'Not many.'

  'We could keep a cow. I mean, you could keep a cow if you wanted. Anyone who wanted to keep a cow could keep a cow. In a private plot. Or a pig. Or even chickens, though you have to have some place warm for fowl in the wintertime.'

  'Cow? Chickens?' Arkady shook his head. What was this about?

  'The Yenisei is interesting,' Koyla said.

  'It's very interesting,' Natasha emphasized. 'Beautiful taiga of pines and larches. Deer and grouse.'

  'Edible snails,' Kolya said.

  'But you'd have a cow if you wanted. Room for a motorcycle too. Picnics on the river bank. A whole town full of young people, children. You –'