Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Have you ever heard of Kureyka?' Izrail asked in turn. A smile hid in his beard. 'It's where Stalin was exiled by the Tsar. Then when Stalin ruled, he sent an army of prisoners to Kureyka to nail his old cabin back together and build around it a hangar filled with lights that shone twenty-four hours a day on the cabin and on a marble statue of himself, A giant statue. One night years after he died, they secretly dragged the statue out and dropped it into the river. All the boats detoured so they wouldn't sail overhead.'

  'How do you know about this?' Arkady asked.

  'How do you think a Jew becomes Siberian?' The manager asked in turn. 'My father helped erect the hangar.' He bit into the bread. 'I won't report you right away,' he told Arkady. 'I'll give you a day or two.'

  On his way to the radio shack, Arkady heard a voice that sounded like the one on Zina's tape. The voice and guitar, resonantly romantic, emanated from the infirmary door. It didn't sound like Doctor Vainu.

  'In a distant blustering sea

  A pirate brigantine is making sail.'

  It was an old camper's song, though a camper had to be fairly drunk and probably incapable of walking around a tree to enjoy such weepy lyrics.

  'The Jolly Roger flaps in the breeze,

  Captain Flint is singing along.

  And, our glasses ringing, we too

  Begin our little song.'

  When Arkady entered the infirmary the song stopped.

  'Shit, shit, I thought it was locked,' Doctor Vainu said, rushing to block Arkady's way. At the far end of the hall Arkady saw the broad, borscht-red backside of Olimpiada Bovina running into an examining room. The doctor was in a leisure suit and slippers and looked only slightly rumpled, slippers on the wrong feet. Arkady would have thought that Bovina and Vainu made a pair like a steamroller and a squirrel.

  'You can't just come in,' Vainu protested.

  'I'm in.' Looking for the singer, Arkady led the doctor down the hall to the operating room, where a sheet covered the operating table. Arkady noticed that the box with Zina's effects was still on the counter.

  'This is a medical office.' Vainu checked his zipper.

  Beside the table was a steel tray with a beaker and, from the taste of varnish in the air, glasses of grain alcohol. Also, a half-eaten chocolate with a cream centre. Arkady laid his hand on the sheet. Still warm, like the hood of a car.

  'You can't just break in,' Vainu said with evaporating conviction. He slumped against a counter and lit a cigarette to calm himself. On the counter beside the box was a new Japanese cassette player with its own miniature stereo speakers. Arkady pressed the player's 'Rewind' button, then 'Play.' '... Roger flaps in the breeze.' Then 'Stop'. 'Sorry,' he said.

  The voice wasn't like the other singer anyway.

  Col. Pavlov-Zalygin's sonorous voice travelled the telephone path and airwaves all the way from Odessa. His rich, unhurried baritone reminded Arkady that while the ice sheet might be moving south in the Bering Sea, in Georgia they were still pressing grapes, and on the Black Sea ferry boats were still filled with the last tourists of the year.

  The colonel was happy to aid a colleague far at sea, though it meant digging through old files. 'Patiashvili? I knew the case, but lately the bosses are sticklers about the law. Lawyers are getting into everything, accusing us of violence, appealing perfectly good sentences. Believe me, you're better off at sea. I should study the case and call you back.'

  Arkady remembered that if they happened to be monitoring the Soviet channel, other ships could hear the incoming half of the conversation. The less calls the better, even assuming he had a chance for another one. Nicolai studied the dials on the single sideband; the needles swayed with the colonel's voice. 'It's the weather,' he told Arkady. 'Reception is deteriorating.'

  'There's no time,' Arkady spoke into the receiver.

  'Criminals are having their letters printed in the newspapers,' Pavlov-Zalygin said. 'In the Literary Gazette!'

  'She's dead,' Arkady said.

  'Well,' the colonel said, 'let me think.'

  There was a four-second gap in each transmission that only added confusion. Instead of a microphone, the radio had a telephone receiver with a daisy pattern on the mouthpiece as an old-fashioned nicety. It struck Arkady that all the modern technology on the Polar Star was at the bottom of the ship with Hess.

  'The trouble was we had no real case against her,' Pavlov-Zalygin said reluctantly, 'nothing we could take to court. We searched her apartment, we held her in custody, but we never had enough to charge her. Aside from that, the investigation was a great success.'

  'Investigation of what?'

  'This was in the newspapers, in Pravda,' the colonel said with pride. 'An international operation. Five tonnes of Georgian hashish shipped from Odessa on a Soviet freighter to Montreal. Very high-quality goods, all in bricks, inside containers marked "raw wool". Customs discovered the narcotics here. Usually we make the arrests and destroy the illegal shipment, but this time we decided to collaborate with the Canadians and to make arrests at both ends.'

  'A joint venture.'

  'Just so. The operation was a great success, you must... it.'

  'Yes. How was Zina Patiashvili involved?'

  'The ringleader was a boyfriend of hers. She had worked six months in the galley of the freighter; in fact, it was the only freighter she ever really worked on. She was seen on the dock when the ship was first loaded, but...'

  As the static increased it pushed the needle in the radio's wattage meter.

  '... to the prosecutor. Nevertheless, we ran her out of town.'

  'The others involved are still in camps?'

  'Camps of strict regimen, absolutely. I know there's been an amnesty, but it's not like the Krushchev amnesty when we let everybody go. No, when... .'

  'We're losing him,' Nicolai said.

  'You said that she worked on that freighter for six months, but her paybook shows that she worked in the Black Sea Fleet for three years,' Arkady said.

  'Not as a galley worker exactly. She... with... recommendations and the usual titles... .'

  'What did she do?' Arkady asked again.

  'Swam.' Suddenly the colonel's voice was booming and clear. 'She swam for the Black Sea Fleet at meets everywhere. Before that she swam for her vocational school. Some said she could have tried for the Olympics if she'd had any discipline.'

  'A small girl, dark hair bleached blond?' Arkady couldn't believe they were talking about the same woman.

  'That's her, except her hair was just dark. Attractive in a cheap... foreign... Hello?... Re... .'

  The colonel's voice faded like a boat sighted in a storm, moving from one fog bank of static to a thicker one.

  'He's gone.' Nicolai watched the needle bounce out of control.

  Arkady signed off and sat back while the lieutenant watched him anxiously. With good reason. It was one thing for a virile young radioman to slip an honest citizen into a secret intelligence post to seduce her; it was quite another to reveal the post to a major criminal.

  'I'm sorry.' Nicolai couldn't stand the suspense any longer. 'I wanted to get you up here to the radio shack earlier when the transmission was better, but there was a lot of fuss about the trawl we lost, with calls to Seattle and the fleet. It was the last net from the Merry Jane'

  'Thorwald?'

  'The Norwegians, yes. He blames us, but we blame him because he tried to transfer more than the maximum load. He lost his trawl and gear. There's no way of grappling for it in this ice apparently – and he has to return to DutchHarbor.'

  'We're down to the Eagle?'

  'The company has already dispatched three catcher-boats to join us. They're not going to leave a factory ship like us depending on only one trawler.'

  'Did Zina tell you that she swam?'

  Nicolai cleared his throat. 'She just said she could.'

  'Back in the Golden Horn, the restaurant, was there anyone else you recognized, someone on the ship?'

  'No. Look, I have t
o ask about your report. What are you going to say about me? You seem to know everything.'

  'If I knew everything I wouldn't be asking questions.'

  'Yes, yes, but are you naming me in your report?' Nicolai hunched closer; he was the kind of boy, Arkady thought, who would try to read his marks upside down on his teacher's desk. 'I have no right to ask, but I beg you to consider what will happen to me if there are adverse comments in your report. It's not for myself. My mother works in a cannery. I always send one bolt of Navy cloth home, and she sews skirts and pants that she can sell to friends, that's how she gets by. She lives for me, and something bad like this would kill her.'

  'Are you suggesting that I'd be responsible if your betrayal of your duty caused your mother's death?'

  'Of course not, nothing like that.'

  Vladivostok would listen to Zina's tapes no matter what happened to Arkady. On the basis of her trip to the chain locker alone the lieutenant faced the brig. 'Before we reach home port you'd better talk to Hess,' he said. He wanted to get out of the radio shack quickly. 'We'll see what happens.'

  'I remember one other thing, on the subject of money,' Nicolai said. 'Zina never asked for any. What she wanted me to bring was a playing card, a queen of hearts. Not a payment, a...'

  'A souvenir?'

  'I went to the recreation officer and asked for a pack. Can you believe we have only one pack for the entire ship? And it didn't have a queen of hearts. The way he was smiling, he knew.'

  'Who was the recreation officer?' Arkady asked, though since the position was the lowest function an officer could have only one name was likely.

  'Slava Bukovsky.'

  Who else?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  * * *

  Arkady found Slava sitting in shadow on an upper bunk, wearing the headphones of a Walkman and playing the mouthpiece of a saxophone, his bare feet swinging with the beat. Arkady sat quietly at the cabin's table as if he'd arrived midway at a concert. Only the hooded light over the desk was on, but he could see the appointments that graced an officer's cabin: the desk itself, bookshelves, a waist-high refrigerator and a clock inside a waterproof case, as if Slava's were the cabin most likely to be flooded. He reminded himself not to be too disparaging; Slava had concealed successfully until now any involvement with Zina. The bookshelf held an entertainment officer's usual books on popular games and recommended songs, as well as forbidding tomes on Lenin's thought and on diesel propulsion; the second mate, Slava's cabinmate, was studying for his first mate's ticket.

  As Slava's cheeks swelled, his eyes closed, his body swayed and soulful bleats emerged from the mouthpiece. There was a calendar on a pennant, a photo of a group of boys around a motorcycle, with Slava in the sidecar, and a typed list of the year's May Day slogans; No. 14, 'Toilers in the agro-industrial complex! Your patriotic duty is to fully provide the country with food in a short time!' was underlined.

  The third mate pulled off his headphones. He squeezed a last mournful note from the mouthpiece, let it drop and finally looked at Arkady.

  ' "Back in the USSR",' he said. 'Beatles.'

  'I recognized it.'

  'I can play any instrument. Name an instrument.'

  'Zither.'

  'A regular instrument.'

  'Lute, lyre, steel drum, sitar, Pan's pipes, Formosan chong chai?'

  'You know what I mean.'

  'Accordion?'

  'I can play that. Synthesizer, drums, guitar.' Slava looked at Arkady suspiciously. 'What do you want?'

  'Remember that box of personal effects you took from Zina's cabin? Did you have a chance to go through her spiral notebook?'

  'No, I didn't have time because I had to interview a hundred people that same day.'

  'The box is still in the infirmary. I just came from going over the notebook for fingerprints more completely than I did the first time. There are Zina's and yours. I compared them with the prints on the suicide note you found.'

  'So I did look in her dumb book. Too bad, you should have asked me in front of someone. Anyway, what are you doing running around the ship, not even bothering to show up in the factory?'

  'We don't have that many fish to clean. The team isn't going to miss me.'

  'Why isn't the captain stopping you?'

  Arkady had thought about it. 'It's a little like the Inspector General. Remember that story about how a fool comes to town and is thought to be an official of the tsar? Also, murder changes everything. Nobody knows quite what to do, especially with Volovoi out of the way. As long as I don't argue with orders, I can ignore them for a while. As long as people don't know how much I know; that's what scares them.'

  'So it's just a matter of calling your bluff?'

  'Pretty much.'

  Slava sat up. 'I could march right up to the bridge and tell the captain that a certain seaman second-class has been shirking work in order to pester the crew with questions he was ordered not to ask?'

  'You can march better with your shoes on.'

  'Done.'

  Slava tucked the mouthpiece into his shirt pocket and hopped lightly from the bunk down to the deck. Arkady reached across the desk for an ashtray while the third mate pulled on his boots. 'You're going to wait here?' he asked Arkady.

  'Right here.'

  Slava threw on his running jacket. 'Anything else I should tell him?'

  'Tell him about you and Zina.'

  The door slammed and Slava was gone.

  Arkady took a cigarette from his pants and found a book of matches in the desk's mug of pencils. He studied the design on the face of the book: the world 'Prodintorg' emblazoned on a ribbon. As he remembered, Prodintorg was in charge of foreign trade in animal goods: fish, crab, caviar, racehorses, cattle and animals for zoos, a wholesale approach to the wonders of nature. He had barely lit up when Slava returned shutting the door with his back. 'What about Zina?'

  'Zina and you.'

  'You're guessing again.'

  'No.'

  A lifetime of bowing to authority shaped people. Slava sat on the lower bunk and put his face in his hands. 'Oh, God. When my father hears about this.'

  'He may not, but you do have to tell me.'

  Slava raised his head, blinked and took the sharp breaths of a man hyperventilating. 'He'll kill me.'

  Arkady prompted him. 'I think you tried to tell me once or twice and I wasn't smart enough to hear you. What I couldn't solve, for example, was how Zina was assigned to this ship. To have that much influence in Fleet headquarters is highly unusual.'

  'Oh, he tried to please, in his way.'

  'Your father?' Arkady held up the matchbook.

  'Deputy minister.' Slava was silent for a moment. 'Zina insisted she had to be on this ship to be near me. What a joke! As soon as we left port, everything was over, as if we'd never known each other.'

  'He made the call that put you on the Polar Star, and then at your request ordered to have Zina assigned too?'

  'He never orders; he just calls the head of the port and asks if there's any good reason someone can't be placed somewhere or something can't be done. All he says is that the Ministry is interested, and everybody understands. Anything: the right school, the right teacher, a Ministry car to bring me home. You know the first sign of restructuring was when he couldn't get me into the Baltic Fleet, only the Pacific. That's why Marchuk detests me.' Slava stared into the dark as if there were a ghost there at a desk with a battery of phones. 'You never had a father like that.'

  'I did, but I disappointed him early and completely,' Arkady reassured him. 'We all make mistakes. You couldn't know that I'd already looked under the bed where you found the suicide note. Or, I should say, where you put the note, which came from her notebook that you took away from her cabin. I was slow not to figure that out right away. Was there anything else in the notebook that I didn't see?'

  A nervous giggle overcame Slava. 'More suicide notes, two or three on a page. I threw the rest away. How many times could she kill herself
?'

  'So there you were, leading the ship's band and watching a woman you'd helped get on board dancing with American fishermen and ignoring you.'

  'No one knew.'

  'You knew.'

  'I hated it. During the break I had a smoke in the galley just so I wouldn't see her. Zina came in and out and didn't give me a second glance. Because she couldn't use me any more I didn't exist.'

  'That wasn't in your report.'

  'Nobody saw us. Once I tried to talk to her, one day in the wardroom, and she said she'd tell the captain if I ever bothered her again. That's when I saw what was going on between the two of them, the leading captain and Zina. What if he knew about me? I wasn't dumb enough to say I might have been the last one to see her alive.'

  'Were you?'

  'Slava unscrewed the mouthpiece band and examined the reed. 'Cracked. It's hard enough to find a sax to buy, and when you do own one it's impossible to find reeds. They control you either way.' Gingerly he slipped the reed back on, like a man putting a ruby into a ring. 'I don't know. She took a plastic bag from a soup pot. The bag was all taped up. She put it under her jacket and went out. I've tried to figure it out over and over. I thought those people on deck saw her after I did, but they didn't say anything about a jacket or a bag. I'm not a good detective.'

  'How big was the bag? What colour?'

  'One of the big ones. Black.'

  'See, you remembered that. How is your report on Volovoi going?'

  'I was just working on it when you came in.'

  'In the dark?'

  'Does it matter? What can I say that anyone will believe? They have a way of checking the lungs, don't they, to tell whether he really died in a fire?' Slava laughed bitterly. 'Marchuk says if I do a good job he'll second my move to a Party school, which is another way of his saying I'll never make a captain.'

  'Maybe you shouldn't. What about the Ministry?'

  'Working under my father?' The question answered Arkady's.

  'Music?'

  After a silence Slava said, 'Before we moved to Moscow we lived in Leningrad. You know Leningrad?'