Polar Star (20 page)

“Other men I expect to be drunkards or sniffers, not you,” Izrail said. “It serves you right to wander into a fishhold and almost freeze to death.”

The trouble was, feeling returned as a sensation of skin burning, of capillaries bursting and waves of shakes. Fortunately none of his cabin mates was home when Izrail and Natasha laid him out on the lower bunk. Buried in blankets when touch itself was torture, he felt as if he were wrapped in broken glass.

Fish scales glittered on the factory manager’s sweater and beard; he had run from the slime line to help carry Arkady to the cabin. “Do we lock up all the gasoline, paint and thinner as if they were expensive foreign liquors?”

“Men are weak,” Natasha reminded him.

Izrail gave his opinion. “A Russian is like a sponge; you don’t know his true shape until he’s soaked. I thought Renko was different.”

Natasha blew her warm breath on each naked toe and then tenderly kneaded it, which felt like having red-hot needles stuck under the nails. “Maybe we should take him to Dr. Vainu,” she suggested.

“No,” Arkady managed to say. His lips were rubbery, another effect of the fumes.

Izrail said, “I let you off the line because you were going to perform some sort of investigation for the captain, not so you could go crazy.”

“Zina was in the hold,” Natasha told Izrail.

“Where else are we supposed to keep her? Did you say he started a fire?” Izrail was concerned. “Did he thaw any fish?”

“He didn’t even thaw himself.” Natasha attended to a toe that remained blue.

“If he damaged any fish—”

She said, “Fuck your fish, excuse me.”

“All I’m saying is, if you want to kill yourself, don’t do it in my fishhold,” Izrail told Arkady. Vigorously he rubbed Arkady’s other hand.

A thought occurred to Natasha and spread on her brow like a furrow on virgin snow. “Does this have to do with Zina?”

“No,” Arkady lied. Go away, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t slip more than one word at a time through a chattering jaw.

“You were looking for something? Someone?” she asked.

“No.” How could he explain about a lieutenant who might or might not exist? He had to stop shaking and rest his traumatized nerve endings a little; then he could start asking questions again.

“Maybe I should get the captain,” Izrail said.

“No.” Arkady started to rise.

“Okay, okay, that seems to be the only word you remember,” Izrail said. “But if this was an attack, I’m not surprised. I don’t share their attitude, but I can tell you that the crew is unhappy about this rumor that because of you Dutch Harbor is off limits. Why do you think they come on this stinking barrel of shit? Fish? You want to jeopardize all their months of work to find out what happened to Zina? This ship is full of silly women. Why do you care so much?”

As his shakes receded Arkady burrowed into a comatose state. He saw that he had been changed from his frozen clothes into dry ones, a task that must have been performed by Izrail and Natasha, an act about as erotic as dressing a fish. He had a vision of himself on a conveyor belt moving toward the saw.

Obidin and Kolya came into the cabin, fumbled quietly for one thing or another and left without paying any attention to Arkady or the fact that he was in the wrong bunk. It was etiquette on a ship to let other men sleep.

When he surfaced again, Natasha was sitting on the opposite bunk. As soon as she saw he was awake, she said, “Izrail Izrailevich wondered why you care about Zina. Did you know her?”

He felt comically weak, as if his body had been beaten and badly sunburned while he dozed. At least he could talk now, in a rush of words between the shakes. “You know I didn’t.”

“I thought I knew you didn’t, but I wondered why you care.” She looked at him, then away. “I suppose it helps to care, in a professional manner.”

“Yes, it’s a professional trick. Natasha, what are you doing here?”

“I thought they might come back.”

“Who?”

She crossed her arms as if to say she wouldn’t play games. “Your eyes are red slits.”

“Thank you.”

“Are all investigations like this?”

He burped in his sleep and the entire cabin reeked like a garageful of gasoline fumes. When Natasha opened the porthole to clear the air, a song mournfully crept in from outside:

Another thieves’ song, again about wolves, rendered in the most sentimental fashion by a hardheaded fisherman. Or, just as likely, by a mechanic in greasy coveralls, or even an officer as prim as Slava Bukovsky, because in private everyone sang thieves’ songs. But especially workers sang. They strummed their guitars, always primitively tuned, D-G-B-d-g-b-d.

Westerners thought of Russians as slow-moving bears. Russian men saw themselves as wolves, lean and wild, barely restrained. The song was another one by Vysotsky. To his countrymen much of Vysotsky’s appeal lay in his vices, his drinking and wild driving. The story was that he’d had a “torpedo” implanted in his ass. A “torpedo” was a capsule of Antabuse that would make Vysotsky sick whenever he had alcohol. Yet still he drank!

As Natasha closed the porthole, Arkady came fully awake. “Open it,” he said.

“It’s cold.”

“Open it.”

Too late. The song had ended; all he could hear through the open porthole was the heavy sigh of water as it slid by below. The singer had been the same as on Zina’s tape. Maybe. If he sang again, he could tell. Arkady started shaking, though, and Natasha closed the porthole tight.

As the cabin door opened Arkady awoke and sat bolt upright, knife in hand. Natasha turned on the light and regarded him with worry. “Who were you expecting?”

“No one.”

“Good, because in your condition you couldn’t scare a dormouse.” She uncurled his fingers from the knife handle. “Besides, you don’t need to fight. You have a brain and you can outthink anyone else.”

“Can I think myself off this ship?”

“The brain is a wonderful thing.” She put the knife aside.

“I wish the brain were a ticket. How long have I been asleep?”

“One hour, maybe two. Tell me about Zina.” She wiped the sweat from his brow and eased him back onto his pillow. His hand was still cramped from holding the knife, and she began massaging the fingers. “Even when you’re wrong, I like to hear how you think.”

“Really?”

“It’s like listening to someone play the piano. Why did she come on the
Polar Star—
to smuggle those stones?”

“No, they were too cheap. Natasha, I want the knife.”

“But just for herself the stones might have been enough.”

“A Soviet criminal rarely operates alone. You don’t
find a Soviet criminal alone in the dock. There are ten, twenty of them there at a time.”

“If it wasn’t an accident—and not for one second am I saying that it was anything but—maybe it was a crime of passion.”

“It was too clean a murder. And planned. For her blood to pool the way it did she must have been stowed for at least half a day before she went into the water. That means moving her to hide her, then moving her again to throw her overboard. We were fishing harder then; people were on deck.”

Arkady stopped for breath. A therapeutic massage was not easy to distinguish from torture.

“Go on,” Natasha said.

“Zina fraternized with Americans, which she could have done only with the permission of Volovoi. She informed for Volovoi. There wouldn’t be any reprimand from the galley staff because they were told to let her roam, and she probably kept Olimpiada happy by feeding her chocolates and brandy. But why did Zina always go to the stern deck when the
Eagle
delivered fish? And
only
when the
Eagle
delivered fish—not any other boat? To wave to a man she might dance with one night out of every two or three months? Is Slava’s band that good? Maybe the question should be asked the other way. What were the Americans looking for when they delivered fish?”

Arkady didn’t mention the possibility that there was an intelligence station on the
Polar Star
. On the tape the lieutenant had invited Zina into the station when fish were coming on board. Did the station operate only between incoming nets? Was it a matter of nets or the Americans?

“Anyway,” he said, “Americans, various lovers, Volovoi—a lot of people used Zina or were used by her. We don’t have to be brilliant; we just have to see the pattern.”

He remembered her voice on the tape: “He thinks he
tells me what to do. A second thinks he tells me what to do.” Arkady counted the he’s. Four significant men, one of whom she knew was a killer.

“What people?” Natasha asked.

“An officer, for one. He could be compromised.”

“Which?” She was alarmed.

He shook his head. His hands were pink, as if they’d come out of boiling water. They felt that way.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“About First Mate Volovoi, I don’t agree. About the Americans, they must answer for themselves. About Olimpiada and the chocolates, you may be right.”

When he awoke again Natasha had returned with a giant samovar, a silver urn with a spigot for a nose and cheeks shining with good-natured heat. While they took tea, each drinking from a steaming glass, she sawed a round loaf of bread.

“My mother drove trucks. Remember how we built trucks then, when the factories fulfilled their plan according to gross weight? Each truck weighed twice as much as trucks anywhere else in the world. Try to steer one of those in the snow.

“The route was across a frozen lake. My mother was a shockworker of Communist Labor; she was always in the first truck. She was popular. She had a photo album, and she showed me a picture of my father. He drove too. Maybe you wouldn’t think it, but he looked surprisingly intellectual. He read anything, could argue with anybody. Wore glasses. His hair was light, but actually he looked a little like you. She said he was too romantic was his problem; he was always in trouble with the bosses. They were going to be married, but in the spring, in the thaw, his truck went through the ice.

“I grew up around dams. I always loved them. There’s nothing on earth as beautiful and beneficial to mankind. Other students were interested in special institutes, but I
got out of school as fast as I could and up on a scaffold with a mixer. A woman can mix cement as well as any man. The most exciting time is working at night under lights powered by the last dam you helped to build. Then you know you’re someone. A lot of the men, though, are drifters because they make so much money. That’s their dilemma. They make so much money that they have to drink it up or spend it going to the Black Sea or on the first girl like Zina. They don’t make homes. It’s not their fault. It’s the site directors who are shameless, who offer anything to get their project finished first. Naturally the men say, ‘Why stay in one place when you can sell yourself for more money somewhere else?’ That’s Siberia today.”

The net slid up the stern ramp into a circle of sodium lamps, rose on boom cables and swayed as if alive, seawater weeping from chafing hair and flowing over the deck in shallow waves. Forty tons or fifty tons of fish, maybe more! Half a night’s quota in one tow. Crabs danced over wooden planks. Taut cables moaned from the weight as the trawlmaster flashed his scalpel and on the run sliced the belly of the bag from one end to the other. The whole net seemed to split open at once, flooding the deck up to the gunwale rail and boat-deck stairs in a rich, live, twisting mass of slime eels, milky blue in the light.…

Arkady awoke with a start, heaved off his blankets, pulled on his boots, found his knife and fought the door to get out of his cabin. It wasn’t just claustrophobia but a sense of being buried alive; leaving the bed didn’t help if he was still below steel decks.

Outside, the lights were smothered in an underlit night fog no worse than the smoke of a fire. He’d slept through the entire afternoon. It was only a day and a half since he was introduced to Zina Patiashvili’s corpse, and he was feeling rather that way himself. And in less than
twelve hours he was supposed to uncover some startling revelation that would resolve to everyone’s satisfaction the mysterious death of Zina Patiashvili and allow the ship’s crew to go into port. He stumbled against the rail, inching away from the trawl deck toward the bow. The catcher boats had disappeared, so there were neither stars nor other lights to lead the eye away from the dull glow of the
Polar Star
’s lamps.

The deck was empty, suggesting that it was dinnertime. Everyone was falling into a single schedule now that the factory ship had stopped taking fish and was steaming to port. He hooked an elbow over the rail for support. This was not going to be the usual brisk perambulation around the deck. It would be a stroll with ample time to think about drowning, about fear that wrapped like a wet shroud around his heart. He marked his progress by the machine shop. The bridge house was a goal far in the distance, dissolving in the mist.

“The poetry lover.”

Arkady turned toward Susan’s voice. He hadn’t heard her approach.

“Taking a break?” she asked.

“I like the sea air.”

“You look it.” She leaned on the rail next to him, pushed her hood back and lit a cigarette, then held the match up to his eyes. “Christ!”

“Still pink?”

“What happened to you?”

His muscles were still cramping, going from numb to hot to numb again. As casually as possible he gripped the handrail. He would have walked away if he could have trusted his legs to make a dignified exit. “I was just trying to See in New Ways. It was a strain.”

“Oh, I get it,” Susan said as she glanced around the deck. “This is the scene of the accident; that’s why you’re here. It’s still an accident, isn’t it?”