Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Are you coming?'

  'Our last day in Vladivostok, Zina and I went on a picnic outside town, on the cliffs overlooking the water. There's that lighthouse there at the cape, looks like a grey castle going to sea, with a red-and-white candle stuck on top. Renko, it's fantastic. Waves crash at the foot of the cliffs. Seals stick their heads out of the water. On top of the cliffs, pines are bent by the wind. I wish I'd had a camera then.'

  Holding the cigarette in his lips, Karp peeled off his other sweater. He still seemed clothed because of the urka tattoos that covered his torso and arms to his neck and wrists.

  'You're not coming?' Arkady asked.

  'Or you can go into the woods. It's not the taiga; it's not what people expect. It's a mixed forest – fir and maple on the hills, slow rivers with water lilies. You want to sleep in the woods, so you can hear a tiger. You'll never see one, and anyway, they're protected. But to hear a tiger at night, that's something you never forget.'

  Karp stepped naked from his pants and boots. He pinched the butt of his cigarette in his mouth. He was smoking an ember. As his skin pinkened from the cold, his tattooed decorations stood out.

  'Don't do this,' Arkady said.

  'The main thing is, nobody can say I ever hurt Zina. Not once. If you love someone, you don't hurt them and you don't run away. She wouldn't have stayed away.'

  The tattoos were freshened by the air. Oriental dragons climbed Karp's arm, green claws splayed from his feet, ink-blue women wrapped around the columns of his thighs, and with each steamy breath, the vulture picked at his heart. More vivid were the whitening scars, dead stripes on his chest, where the accusations had been burned away. Across his narrow brow spread a livid band. The rest of his skin was reddening, the muscles trembling and jumping in reaction to the cold, animating each tattoo. Arkady remembered what agony it had been for him, even when dressed, in the fish hold. Each second it visibly took more effort and concentration for Karp to get out a word, even to think.

  'Come back with me,' Arkady said.

  'To what? For what? You win.' By now Karp shook so hard that he could barely stay upright, but he took a final, burning drag before dropping a butt that was no more than a spark into the water. He spread his arms triumphantly. ' "I smile at the enemy with my wolfish grin, baring my teeth's rotten stumps. We're not wolves any more." ' He grinned at Arkady, took a deep breath and dived in.

  Arkady could see Karp swimming straight down in powerful strokes as glutinous air bubbles trailed behind. The tattoos looked appropriate, more like scales than skin in the twilight water beneath the ice. About four metres down, he seemed temporarily stalled, until he released a chestful of air and descended to the next, darker layer of water. There a current caught him and he began to drift.

  The soles of Karp's feet were not tattooed. After the rest of him disappeared, Arkady saw his feet still swimming, two pale fish in black water.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  * * *

  Arkady looked down at the patrol boat's broad radar rig, grey turtleshell guns, torpedo tubes. All night, it seemed, sailors of the Soviet Pacific Fleet had clambered on and off the Polar Star removing sealed boxes of equipment. Now, before dawn, the time had come for Anton Hess to make his exit, and like an actor between costume changes the fleet electrical engineer still wore a fishing jacket over pants with a military crease.

  'It's good of you to come to see me off. I always believed that you would prove yourself useful with the right goad, the right prize. And here we are.'

  'In the dark,' Arkady said.

  'In the clear.' Hess gathered Arkady from the rail. 'You don't know how toothsome a bone a failure of Naval Intelligence can be to the KGB. This will not go unappreciated.' He ended his sigh with a laugh. 'Did you see Morgan's face when we freed the Eagle from the ice? Of course his boat was a wreck. Worse, he knew what you had brought back to us.'

  As soon as it was independently free of the ice sheet the Eagle had limped towards the Alaska mainland, while the Polar Star cancelled the rest of its fishing. The ship dropped Susan Hightower and the other reps and Lantz off on a pilot boat outside Dutch Harbor.

  'The only thing I didn't understand was Susan, when she went,' Hess said. 'Why was she so amused?'

  'We shared a joke. I told her how valuable her help had been.' After all, she had told him what to steal, even if he had used her advice on a different boat.

  Nicolai was waiting inside the transport cage with a marine. The soldier, a moon-face between black fatigues and a beret, carried an assault rifle. The young radioman did not appear happy; on the other hand, he was not in irons. For a moment Hess seemed reluctant to leave, like any man reflecting at the end of a long and successful trip.

  'Renko, you understand that your name can't come up in connection with the disks. We don't want to taint them. I wish I could share the credit.'

  'Credit for sounds of submarines that were dismantled years ago? You were listening to submarines that don't exist,' Arkady said.

  'That doesn't matter. Morgan was compromised. And this time we have the trophy.'

  'Disks of nothing.'

  'Very well, ghosts and phantoms hissing in the dark. Careers have been made on less.' Hess boarded the cage and hooked the chain across the gate. 'Let me tell you something, Renko. It's round after round and it never stops. I'll be back.'

  'That's another reason Susan was smiling,' Arkady said. 'She won't be.'

  Hess's good humour could not be defeated, 'Nevertheless.' He put out his hand and shook Arkady's. 'We shouldn't argue. You served well. You rose early to say goodbye.'

  'Not really.'

  'Nevertheless,' Hess insisted.

  'Good luck.' Arkady shook Nicolai's hand.

  With the patrol boat gone, the Polar Star picked up speed again. Coastal trawlers increased by the hour on the night horizon. A kilometre away, they made a dazzling string of fishing lamps, each boat its own constellation, a different scene from the leave-taking at Dutch Harbor; there it had been a wet afternoon, with the kind of damp that was a second skin and the Americans huddled inside the bridge for the ride to the dock – all but Susan, who stood on deck, not waving, but never taking her eyes off the ship she was leaving.

  A curious life, he thought, when he always cared most for whatever he was losing. He'd felt her gaze across the widening water as strongly as when they'd been in bed. Some flaw in him led to futile connections.

  'Comrade Jonah.' Marchuk joined Arkady.

  'Captain.' Arkady stirred from his reverie. 'I always like night fishing.'

  'It'll be day in a minute.' Marchuk leaned on the rail. The captain tried a casual attitude, though for the first time on the voyage he wore dress blues, four gold stripes on the cuffs, gold braid on his cap, bright smudges in the dim light of the deck. 'Your cut is better?'

  'It proved to be within Vainu's level of competence,' Arkady said, though he wasn't taking any deep breaths. 'Too bad about your quota.'

  'We revised the quota.' Marchuk shrugged. 'That's the beauty of a quota. But it was good fishing. We should have just fished.'

  With the start of dawn, the trawler lamps began to fade into traceries of ordinary gantries and booms against a background of retreating shadow. Chains rang across the surface of the water as the fleet dipped its nets. In the twilight, claques of gulls shifted from boat to boat. On the Polar Star more crew came up on deck all the time. Arkady could see them by their cigarettes up on the boat deck and along the rail.

  'You weren't the Jonah,' Marchuk added. 'You know, on the radio they're starting to refer to you as Investigator Renko, whatever that suggests.'

  Below, a line of angular shadows flew by, their bills tucked, skimming the trough behind the bow wave, pelicans at work.

  'It could mean anything,' Arkady said.

  'True.'

  The trawlers shimmered in a grey haze, not fog but the normal exhalation of the sea. This was the in-between moment when the mind had to complete each ship, connect a bow here
or a stack there, paint them, people them, give them life. Arkady looked up at the boat deck, where Natasha had turned her face towards the breaking sun, her eyes shining, her black hair momentarily edged with gold. By her Kolya checked his watch, and Dynka rose on tiptoes as she looked east.

  Along the rail Arkady saw Izrail in a sweater so clean of fish scales he looked like a burly lamb; Lidia, her face wet with tears; Gury unfolding his dark glasses.

  Arkady hadn't risen to see Hess off; what he'd waited all night for was only now emerging.

  Gulls burst over the Polar Star as if blown by light that rolled like a wind over the factory ship. Clouds lit. The windows of the trawlers flashed and at last, out of the dark rose the low, green shore of home.

  END OF POLAR STAR