Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  It hadn't struck Arkady so forcibly before how lonely Slava was. This soft young man sitting in the shadow was meant for a carpeted office with a view of the Neva, not of the North Pacific.

  'Yes.'

  'The basketball courts near the Nevsky? No? Well, when I was five I was at the courts and there were some black Americans playing basketball. I'd never seen anything like them; they could have been from another planet. Everything they did was different – the way they shot, which was so easy, and the way they laughed, so loud that I put my hands over my ears. Actually they weren't even a team. They were musicians who had been scheduled to play at the House of Culture but the performance had been cancelled because they played jazz. So they were playing basketball instead, but I could imagine how they made music, like black angels.'

  'What kind of music did you make?'

  'Rock. We had a high-school band. We wrote our own songs, but we were censored by the House of Creativity.'

  'You must have been popular,' Arkady said.

  'It was pretty anti-Establishment. I've always been a liberal. The idiots on this ship don't understand that.'

  'Is that how you met Zina, at a dance? Or at the restaurant?'

  'No. Do you know Vladivostok?'

  'About as well as I know Leningrad.'

  'I hate Vladivostok. There's a beach by the stadium where everybody swims in the summertime. You know the scene, a pier covered with towels, air mattresses, chessboards, gobs of suntan lotion and all the anatomy you'd just as soon not see.'

  'That's not for you?'

  'Thank you, no. I borrowed a sailboat, a six-metre, and sailed the bay. Because of the naval channel you have to stay fairly near the beach. Of course, most of the people don't go in the water any deeper than their waist, or any further than the buoy lines, certainly not past the lifeguards in the rowboats. Just the sound drives you crazy, the yakking and splashing and lifeguards' whistles. Sailing was like escaping all of them. There was one swimmer, though, who swam so far out and so easily that I couldn't help noticing her. She must have swum underwater some distance just to get past the lifeguards. I was so distracted that I spilled the wind out of the sail and luffed. There was a rope trailing off the side and she grabbed it and pulled herself on board, just as if we'd planned it. Then she stretched out on deck for a rest and pulled her cap off. Her hair was dark then, almost black. You know how water beads in the sun, so she looked like she was covered in little diamonds. She laughed as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to leap out of the water on to the boat of someone she'd never met. We sailed all afternoon. She said she wanted me to take her to a disco, but that she'd have to meet me there; she didn't want me to pick her up. Then she dove in the water and was gone.

  'After the disco, we went hiking in the hills. She never let me pick her up or leave her off at her apartment. I assumed she was living in such poor conditions that she was embarrassed. I knew by her accent that she was Georgian, but I didn't hold that against her. I was able to tell her anything and she seemed to understand. With hindsight I realize she never talked about herself at all, except to say that she had a seaman's ticket and wanted to come on the Polar Star with me. She played me for a fool, which is exactly what I was. She played everyone for a fool.'

  'Who do you think killed her?'

  'Anyone, but I was afraid a murder investigation would sooner or later point to me, which makes me a coward as well as a fool. Am I wrong?'

  'No.' Arkady couldn't disagree. 'The water in the bay, was it cold?'

  'Out where she was? Freezing.' Sitting on the upper bunk, Slava seemed suspended in the dark.

  Arkady said, 'You told me before this is your second voyage.'

  'Yes.'

  'Both voyages with Captain Marchuk?'

  'Yes.'

  'Is there anyone else on the Polar Star that you sailed with before?'

  'No.' Slava thought. 'No officers, I mean. Otherwise, only Pavel and Karp. Am I in trouble?'

  'I'm afraid you are.'

  'I've never been in real trouble before, I never had the nerve. It's new, a whole different range of possibilities. What are you going to do now?'

  'Go to bed.'

  'It's early.'

  'Well, when you're in trouble even getting to bed can be exciting.'

  On deck, Arkady could feel the ship ride away from the wind, which meant that Marchuk had delivered the Merry Jane to the edge of the ice sheet and turned north, into the sheet again. Rain made the ice around the Polar Star shimmer like the blue of an electrical field. Arkady hid in shadow until his eyes adjusted.

  Slava hadn't known anything about the Golden Horn or about the apartment Zina had taken Nicolai and Marchuk to, so from the start she had treated Slava differently. No raucous seamen's restaurant, no apartment cum illegal arsenal to scare off the delicate third mate. She may have never seen Slava before that day she climbed on to his sailboat, but the trawlmaster had.

  At any moment Karp could swing from a guy wire or pop out of a hatch. 'Relax,' he had said. Why hadn't Karp killed him yet? Arkady wondered. Not because of his intelligence or luck. Officers occupied the Polar Star's wheelhouse, their realm of ignorance, and the rest of the factory ship's ill-lit passages and slippery decks were the trawlmaster's dominion. Arkady could vanish whenever Karp wanted. Each day since DutchHarbor had been a day of grace. He was alive, he realized, only because a third death was more than Vladivostok would be willing to accept. The Polar Star would immediately be ordered home. When a ship returned under a cloud it was surrounded by Border Guard troops and the crew kept on board while the vessel was stripped down and searched. Yet Karp had to get rid of him. For the moment the trawlmaster's dilemma was the difference between Arkady wearing his head or not. Karp was still thinking, taking his time since what could Arkady tell Marchuk that wouldn't point more at himself than at anyone else? Karp had witnesses for where he was when the first mate died. Still, despite that 'Relax,' Arkady crossed the deck from pool of light to pool of light like a man connecting dots.

  The crew was already packed away in their beds, and in Arkady's cabin only Obidin was awake.

  'Some persons say there's an off-loader coming to get you, Arkady. Some say you're Cheka.' Cheka was the old, honoured name of the KGB. 'Some say you don't know yourself.' The smell of homebrew rose from Obidin's beard like the scent of pollen from a thistle.

  Arkady pulled off his boots and climbed into his bunk. 'And what do you think?'

  'They're fools, of course. The mystery of human action cannot be denned in political terms.'

  'You don't like politics,' Arkady yawned.

  'The black soul of a politician cannot be plumbed. Soon the Kremlin will join the other devil.'

  'Which devil?' Americans, Chinese, Jews?

  'The Pope.'

  'Shut up,' Gury's voice said. 'We're trying to sleep.'

  Thank God, Arkady thought.

  'Arkady,' Kolya said a minute later. 'You awake?'

  'What?'

  'Have you noticed Natasha lately? She's looking nice.'

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  * * *

  In his sleep Arkady watched Zina Patiashvili swim from the Vladivostok beach, which was exactly as Slava had described except that the sunbathers were all seals, basking and craning their heads and long-lashed oriental eyes up to the sky. She was in the same bathing suit she'd paraded in on deck that sunny day. The same dark glasses, and her hair was blond, not even with telltale roots. It was a dazzling day. Long buoys were strung like candy sticks around a kiddy section. Timber had floated from the loading yards near by, and boys rode stray logs like war canoes.

  Further into the bay Zina swam, even past the sailboats on the surface of the water so that she could turn on her back and look at the city's overlapping green trees and office blocks and the Roman arches of the stadium. Dynamo Stadium. Every town had its Dynamos, Spartaks or Torpedos. Why not names like Torpor or Inertia?

  She dove to quieter, cooler wate
r where light penetrated the water at an angle, as if through the blinds of a room, down to a level both translucent and black, pulling herself with sweeping strokes to the soft, silent floor of the bay. A fish darted in front of her face. Schools of fish flowed by on either side, herring as bright as a shower of coins, blue streams of sablefish, the floating shadow of a ray moving from two beams of light that approached with the sound of an onrushing train. Steel trawl doors ploughed the sea floor on either side, sending up plumes of roiled mud. The lights attached to the headrope were blinding, but she could see the bottom exploding with the groundrope's advance, both geysers of silt and wave after wave of groundfish rising to try to escape the trawl, which roared as it engulfed them. A wall of water first pushed her away from and then sucked her into the maelstrom, into the deep bass chord of straining mesh and clouds of silt and glittering scales.

  Awake, Arkady sat up in the dark as wet with sweat as if he'd climbed from the sea. He'd told Natasha it was simply seeing what was before your eyes; no genius was needed. How do you smuggle on open water? What went back and forth twenty times a day? And where would the trawlmaster hide what he'd received? Another obvious answer came back: where on the Polar Star had he been attacked?

  This time Arkady took a flashlight. Rats scurried from beams, slipping between planks, red pinpoints staring down as he went down the ladder in the forward hold. Cooling pipes swarmed with the adept clambering of rats. At least his descent was shorter with a light.

  He stepped gently down on to the bottom of the hold, remembering how on his first trip he had picked up a loose plank and started beating on the walls in an attempt to drive out a lieutenant of Naval Intelligence, when all the while he had probably been standing on the lid of a treasure chest. The beam of the flashlight found the plank, the same paint cans and blanket, the same cat skeleton as before. But earlier the cat skeleton had been in the centre of the floor; this time it was curled up in a corner. There were heels and scuff marks on the floor planks. He touched them. Not scuff marks: wet.

  The hatch at floor level opened and Pavel, the deckhand on Karp's team, stepped halfway in. Wearing a helmet and jacket soaked with rain, he tried to squint over his hand through the glare of Arkady's flashlight. 'Still here?' he asked. Then he saw who it was, slammed the hatch and locked it shut

  Arkady climbed the ladder to the next level. Its hatch was locked. He continued up to the top level, the one he'd entered the hold through, his heart pounding like an extra prisoner willing his hands up the rungs. Kicking the hatch open, he ran to the stairs and down. When he reached the bottom level outside the hold Pavel was gone, but wet bootprints on the metal deck pointed like arrows in the direction he'd taken. There was the damp traffic of other boots on the same path.

  Arkady ran, trying to catch up. The path led aft, passed the No. 2 fish hold and then took the midship stairs to emerge by the forward crane of the trawl deck. There was no sign of Pavel or anyone else. Rain swept the boards of the deck, wiping them clean, and Arkady pocketed the flashlight and took out his knife. The main winch lamp was off, the gantry lamps were caked with ice. Across the deck the entrance to the stern ramp was black.

  At this point he didn't need arrows. What was surprising was that it was the first time he'd ever been on the ramp. The gantry lights touched the rough hide of its walls and the overlapping folds of ice at the top of the slip. With each step down, though, the light faded and the angle of the ramp became more precipitous. Far forward, the prow of the Polar Star hit heavier ice and shuddered. Deep within the stern, in the soundbox of the ramp, the shudder swelled into a moan. A following wave rushed up the ramp and subsided with a sigh, the way the audiomechanics of a seashell amplified the exaggerated sound, the way the inner ear gauged the pounding of the heart.

  If Arkady slid there was nothing between him and the water but the safety gate. He held on as best he could to the side of the ramp as he felt its deck start to fall away. Overhead, at the well, was a second dim intrusion of light. He could see that the chain of the safety gate was taut on its hook on the wall of the ramp; the gate had been swung up and out of the way. Too late to grasp the hook, he began to slide. Just a bit to begin with, the first millimetre that informs a falling man of his situation, then with momentum that grew as the curve of the ramp became steeper. Spread-eagled, face forward, his fingers digging into ice, he saw the white tracery of a wave rising towards him while his knife rattled ahead of him, free. At the lip the ramp opened to the black of the fairway and the sky, the sound of the screws and, to the sides, wings of ice. As the water rushed up, his hand found a rope along the side of the ramp and he twisted his wrist around it. When he came to a stop he saw below him another man standing in boots at a steep angle like a mountain climber in the waves washing the bottom of the ramp. The lifeline was tied to his waist.

  Karp wore a dark sweater and a wool cap pulled down to his heavy brow, and he held what looked like a cushion. 'Too late,' he told Arkady. He threw the cushion backhanded into the water. From the way it hit and plunged, the package was weighted. 'A fortune,' he said. 'Everything we'd bought. But you're right; they'll tear this ship apart when we get back to Vladivostok.'

  Karp leaned back with both hands free and lit a cigarette, a man relieved and at ease. The wake had a luminescence that dissipated in the dark. Arkady pulled himself to his feet.

  'You look scared, Renko.'

  'I am.'

  'Here.' Karp shifted, gave the cigarette to Arkady and lit another for himself. His eyes shone as they searched the ramp above. 'You came alone?'

  'Yes.'

  'We'll find out.'

  Arkady's attention was fixed on the rain and a light swaying in the distance like a lamp in a breeze. It was the Eagle, maybe two hundred metres back. 'What you tossed in, what if the net picks it up?'

  'The Eagle isn't towing now, they're busy enough hosing off ice. Pretty top-heavy in a boat like that. How did you know I'd be here?'

  Arkady decided not to mention Pavel. 'I wanted to see where Zina had gone into the water.'

  'Here?'

  'She left her jacket and a bag either here or on the landing while she went to the dance. What did she look like in the net?' Arkady asked.

  Karp gave his cigarette a long pull. 'Ever see anyone drown?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  'Then you know.' Karp turned to study the Eagle's light as it faded in a sweeping gust of rain. He seemed unhurried, as if waiting for a friend. 'The sea is dangerous, but I should be grateful to you for getting me out of Moscow. I was making with pimping and shakedowns, what? Twenty or thirty rubles a day? To the rest of the world, rubles aren't even money.'

  'You're not in the rest of the world. In the Soviet Union a fisherman makes a lot of rubles.'

  'For what? Meat's rationed, sugar's rationed. Restructuring is a joke. The only difference now is that vodka is rationed too. Who's a criminal? Who's a smuggler? Delegations go to Washington and come back with clothes, toilets, chandeliers. The Secretary General collected fast cars, his daughter collected diamonds. The same in the republics. This Party leader has marble palaces; that one had suitcases so full of gold you can't lift them from the floor. Another has a fleet of trucks that carry nothing but poppies, and the trucks are protected by the motor patrol. Renko, you're the only one I don't understand. You're like a doctor in a whorehouse.'

  'Well, I'm a romantic. So you wanted something else, but why drugs?'

  Karp's shoulders wore frozen beads of rain; their outline made Arkady think of the mist in a cloud chamber that betrayed the dewy track of ions.

  'It's the one way a worker can make real money as long as he has the nerve,' Karp said. 'That's why governments hate drugs, because they can't control them. They control vodka and tobacco, but they don't control drugs. Look at America. Even blacks are making money.'

  'You think it will happen in the Soviet Union, too?'

  'It's happening already. You can buy ammo off a Red Army base, run it right over the border an
d sell it to the Afghans fighting us. The dushmany have warehouses with cocaine piled to the roof. It's better than gold. It's the new currency. That's why everyone's afraid of the veterans – not just because they're drug-users, but because they know what's really going on.'

  'You're not part of any vast Afghani network, though,' Arkady said. 'You'd be dealing in Siberian goods, anasha. What's the rate of exchange as the nets go back and forth?'

  Karp's smile flashed gold in the dark. 'A couple of bricks from us for a spoonful from them. It seems unfair, but you know what a gram of cocaine brings at an oil rig in Siberia? Five hundred rubles. You figured out the nets; that's clever of you.'

  'What I don't understand is how you got anasha past the Border Guards and on to the Polar Star'

  The trawlmaster's voice became both flattered and confiding, as if it were a shame that the two of them couldn't pull up chairs and split a bottle. At the same time, Arkady was aware that the trawlmaster was only playing a role, enjoying the situation over which he had complete control.

  'You'll appreciate this,' Karp said. 'What can a trawl-master ask for in the way of supplies? Net, needles, shackles, ropes. The yard always gives you the worst, you can depend on that. What's the cheapest rope?'

  'Hemp.' Manchurian hemp was grown legally for rope and packing; anasha was merely the potent, pollinating version of the same bush. 'You packed anasha in the rope, hemp in hemp.' Arkady was forced to admire it.

  'And we end up trading shit for gold. Two kilos are a million rubles.'

  'But now you'll have to sign up for another six months to bring back a second load.'

  'It's a setback.' Karp looked thoughtfully up the ramp. 'Not like the one you're going to have, but still a setback. You say you came here in the rain in the middle of the night just to see where Zina went in? I don't believe it.'

  'Do you believe in dreams?'

  'No.'

  'Neither do I.'

  'You know why I killed that son of a bitch in Moscow?' Karp asked suddenly.