Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  He felt the quilting at the back and sleeves, then squeezed the edge at the neck and bottom hem. When he slit the hem at the centre, a stone the size of a candy lozenge dropped into the palm of his hand. As he pinched the hem, more stones dropped until the hollow of his palm was filled with the red, light purple and dark blue of polished but uncut amethysts, rubies and sapphires. Although they were pretty, they didn't look like high-quality gems.

  He poured the stones into a pocket of the Chinese jacket and snapped it shut, then pulled the rubber gloves off his hands.

  'They could have come from Korea, the Philippines or India. No place we've been, so Zina got them from another ship. Let's just be happy that Dynka didn't try to wear this jacket past the Border Guard.'

  'Poor Dynka,' Natasha muttered as she considered the prospect of her friend being caught for smuggling. 'How would Zina get the stones through?'

  'She'd swallow them, sew the jacket and wear it down the gangplank just like she said. Then she'd collect the stones later.'

  Natasha was disgusted. 'I knew Zina was brazen. I knew she was a Georgian. But this...'

  Arkady struck while the Chaika was still awed by his elementary reasoning and good luck. 'See, I didn't know she was "brazen". I don't know anything about the crew. That's why I need you, Natasha.'

  'You and me?'

  'We've worked the same factory line for six months. You're methodical and you have nerve. I trust you, just as you can trust me.'

  She glanced at the jacket and the swimsuit. 'Or else?'

  'No. I'll report I found them under her mattress. The third mate and I should have found them before.'

  Natasha pushed a damp curl away from her eyes. 'I'm not the sort who squeals.'

  She had nice eyes, about as black as Stalin's but nice. Striking, in fact, with the blue running suit.

  'You wouldn't be informing; you'd be asking questions. You'd be telling me what other people say.'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'The captain wants to know what happened to Zina before we reach DutchHarbor. The first mate says we shouldn't have a port call at all.'

  'That bastard! All Volovoi does is run the movie projector. We've cleaned fish for four months.'

  'You only have one more shift in the factory. Skip it. You'll be working with me.'

  Natasha studied Arkady as if really seeing him for the first time. 'No anti-Soviet agitation?'

  'Everything according to Leninist norms,' he assured her.

  She was good for one final hesitation. 'You really want me?'

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  Arkady enjoyed the view from the crane operator's cabin, the top decks covered with nets and planks, the yellow gantries framing the fog, the gulls seesawing in the wind. Looking forward, around the gantries of the forward house was a spider's nest of wire antennas strung to catch low radio frequencies. An array of whip dipoles cast in the breeze for shorter frequencies. Two interlocked circles were a radio directional finder, and star-shaped antennas picked up passing satellites. Despite all appearances, the Polar Star was not alone.

  'Bukovsky is happy about my selection?' Natasha asked.

  'He will be.' Arkady was pleased because the book from Susan was by Mandelstam, a wonderful poet, very urban, dark and probably not Natasha's cup of socialist tea. Even if it was only a collection of letters, Arkady had already stashed it as tenderly as gold leaf under his mattress.

  'Here he comes,' Natasha said.

  Indeed, the third mate was fairly flying across the forward deck and around a group of mechanics who were lazily batting a volleyball back and forth over the net.

  She added, 'He doesn't look happy.'

  Slava disappeared below and Arkady thought he could hear the reverberations of his Reeboks as they ran up three flights. In Olympic time the third mate emerged on the top deck and pushed into the crane cabin. 'What is this about another assistant?' Slava gasped. 'And why are you calling me to meet you? Who's in charge?'

  'You are,' Arkady said. 'I thought we might have some fresh air and privacy here. A rare combination.'

  The crane cabin was the ultimate in privacy because the windows, broken and repaired with washers and pins like crockery, sloped in and forced intimacy whenever more than one person was inside. Still, the view could not be beaten.

  Natasha said, 'Comrade Renko thinks I can be helpful.'

  'I've cleared Comrade Chaikovskaya with the fleet electrical engineer and the captain,' Arkady said. 'But since you are in charge, I thought that you should know. Also, I have to make a list of Zina's effects.'

  'We did that,' Slava said. 'We saw her old clothes, we examined the body. Why aren't you looking for a suicide note?'

  'Victims rarely leave them. It will be very suspicious if that's the first thing we find.'

  Natasha laughed, then cleared her throat. Since she took up half the cabin it was hard for her to be subtle.

  'And what are you going to be doing?' Slava glared at her.

  'Gathering information.'

  Slava laughed bitterly. 'Great. Stirring up more trouble. I can't believe this. My first voyage as an officer and they make me trade union representative. What do I know about workers? What do I know about murder?'

  'Everyone has to learn sometime,' Arkady said.

  'I think Marchuk hates me.'

  'He's entrusted a vital mission to you.'

  The third mate slumped against the cabin side, his face sunk in misery, his curly hair limp with self-pity. 'And you two, a pair of deuces from the slime line. Renko, what is this pathological need of yours to lift every rock? I know Volovoi will write the final report on this; it's always a Volovoi who writes the final – Look out!'

  The wall below the crane cabin resounded as the volleyball bounced off. The ball fell back down onto the deck and rolled by the mechanics, who glared up at the threesome in the cabin.

  'See?' Slava said. 'The crew has already heard all about their port call depending on this so-called investigation of ours. We'll be lucky if we don't end up with knives in our backs.'

  Gantries had another name, Arkady recalled: gallows. A succession of bright yellow gallows sailing through the mist.

  'But you know what really gets me?' Slava asked. 'The worse our situation becomes, the happier you are. What difference does it make whether there are two of us or three of us? Do you really think we're going to find out anything about Zina?'

  'No,' Arkady conceded. He couldn't help noticing that Natasha was starting to be affected by Slava's pessimism, so he added, 'But we should take heart from Lenin.'

  'Lenin?' She perked up. 'What did Lenin say about murder?'

  'Nothing. But about hesitation he said, "First action, then see what happens." '

  Wearing rubber gloves, Arkady laid out on the operating table jeans and blouses with foreign labels. Paybook. Dictionary. Snapshot of a boy amid grapes. Postcard of a Greek actress with racoon eyes. The intimate hardware of rollers and brushes still coiled with bleached hair. Sanyo cassette player with headphones and six assorted Western tapes. Bikini for a single sunny day. Spiral notebook. Jewellery box containing fake pearls, playing cards and pink ten-ruble notes. An embroidered Chinese jacket with a pocketful of gems.

  The paybook: Patiashvili, Z.P. Born Tbilisi, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Vocational-school training in food industries. Three years working galleys of the Black Sea Fleet out of Odessa. One month in Irkutsk. Two months working in a dining car on the Baikal-Amur main line. Eighteen months at the Golden Horn Restaurant in Vladivostok. The Polar Star was her first Pacific voyage.

  Arkady lit a Belomor and drew in the raw fumes. This was his first time alone with Zina – not the cold corpse but the inanimate odds and ends that held whatever soul was left. Somehow smoking made it more social.

  Odessa had always been too rich and worldly. They didn't settle for smuggling semi-precious stones there; they brought in bars of Indian gold for the locals and bags of Afghan hash for trucking north to
Moscow. Odessa should have been a natural habitat for a girl like Zina.

  Irkutsk? Rabid Young Communists volunteered to lay railroad ties and fry sausages in Siberia, not a girl like Zina. So something had happened in Odessa.

  He broke the wad of pink ten-ruble notes: a thousand rubles, a lot to take to sea.

  Vladivostok. Waiting tables at the Golden Horn was a clever move. Fishermen drank by the bottle to make up for their relatively dry months at sea, and they regarded their hard-won Arctic bonuses as onerous burdens to be shared with the first warm women they met. She should have done well.

  Slut. Smuggler. Depending on politics or prejudice, it was easy to write off Zina as either a corrupted materialist or a typical Georgian. Except that usually it was Georgian men, not Georgian women, who were adept privateers. Somehow from the start Zina was different.

  He fanned the playing cards. They were a collection, not a deck. A variety of cut-down Soviet cards, corners cracked, with bright-cheeked peasant girls on one side, the design of a star and sheaves of wheat on the other. Swedish cards with nudes. A British Queen Elizabeth on her Silver Jubilee. All of them the queen of hearts.

  Arkady hadn't heard the Rolling Stones for a long time. He slipped the cassette into the tape deck and pushed "Play". From the speaker came a commotion like the sound of Jagger being dropped from a height onto a set of drums and then being pummelled by guitars; some things never changed. Fast forward. Stones in the middle of the tape. Fast forward. Stones at the end. He turned the tape over and listened to the other side.

  Arkady tore a strip of electrocardiograph paper from a roll and sketched an outline of the ship, marking the cafeteria where the dance was held, Zina's cabin and every possible route between the two. He added the position of each crew member on watch and the transport cage on the trawl deck.

  Out with the Stones, in with The Police. 'Her precious tapes,' Natasha had said. 'She always used her headphones. She never shared them.'

  Fast forward. With a following sea the ship seemed to be gathering speed, as if plunging downhill and blind through the snow. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it.

  Why did Zina ship on the Polar Star? The money? She could have made as much off sailors in the Golden Horn. Foreign goods? Fishermen could bring her whatever she wanted. Travel? To the Aleutians?

  Out with The Police, in with Dire Straits.

  He sketched the stern deck and the well to the ramp. There was room to kill her, but no place to hide her.

  What had been in her pockets? Gauloises, a playing card, a condom. The three great pleasures in life? The card was a queen of hearts of a style unfamiliar to him. Fast forward. Below the Polar Star he drew the Eagle.

  'Politically mature' was the label the Party applied to any young person who was not a convict, dissident or outspoken defender of Western music, which by itself was a whole arena of subversion. There were over-age 'hippies' who still listened to the Beatles and migrated to the Altai Mountains to meditate and drop acid. Kids tended to be 'Breakers', who danced to rap, or 'Metallisty', who saturated themselves in heavy-metal music and leather gear. In spite of her taste in music, in spite of her absences from the galley, in spite of her casual sleeping around, Zina was still, according to as conservative an arbiter as Volovoi, an 'honest toiler and politically mature'.

  Which only made sense given the first mate's task of watching foreign provocateurs.

  Slut, smuggler, informer. A neat and simple total. A sliding of beads on an abacus; answer as addition. A girl from Georgia. Education limited to ladling soup. Expanded to smuggling in Odessa. Sleeping around in Vladivostok. Informing at sea. An abysmal life begun and ended in ignorance, without morals, soul or a single reflective thought. At least it seemed that way.

  Arkady noticed that on the Van Halen cassette, the recording-proof tab had been punched. He put the tape into the player and heard a woman with a Georgian accent say, 'Sing to me, just sing.' It was Zina's voice; Arkady recognized it from the cafeteria. There was a microphone built into the corner of her player.

  A man accompanied by a guitar answered,

  'You can cut my throat,

  You can cut my wrists,

  But don't cut my guitar strings.

  Let them tramp me in the mud,

  Let them push me under water,

  Only leave my silver strings alone.'

  As Arkady listened he found spoons in a desk drawer and looked for iodine crystals. Not finding crystals, he searched for iodine pills. There was a padlocked metal cabinet for radiation medicine – in other words, for war. He broke the lock by twisting a screwdriver through the shank, but there was nothing inside except two bottles of Scotch, a booklet on the effective distribution of iodine and Vitamin E in case of nuclear explosions. He found the iodine itself in an open cabinet.

  'Sing another,' Zina said. 'A thieves' song.'

  The man on the tape laughed and whispered, 'That's the only kind I know.'

  Arkady couldn't put a name to the man's voice but he did know the song. It wasn't Western at all, not rock or rap; it was by a Moscow actor named Vysotsky who had become famous underground throughout the Soviet Union by writing, in the most traditional Russian style, the plaintive and bitter songs of criminals and convicts, and by singing them accompanied by a seven-stringed Russian guitar, the most easily strummed instrument on earth. Magnatizdat, a tape version of samizdat, spread every song, and then Vysotsky had sealed his fame by drinking himself, while still young, into a fatal heart attack. The Soviet radio offered such mindless pap – 'I love life, I love it over and over again' – that you'd think people would caulk their ears; yet the truth was that no other country was so dependent on or vulnerable to music. After seventy years of socialism, thieves' songs had become the counter-anthem of the Soviet Union.

  The singer on the tape wasn't Vysotsky, but he wasn't bad:

  'The wolf hunt is on, the hunt is on!

  For grey prowlers, old ones and cubs;

  The beaters shout, the dogs run themselves until they

  drop,

  There's blood on the snow and the red limits of flags.

  But our jaws are strong and our legs are swift,

  So why, pack leader, answer us,

  Do we always run towards the shooters,

  And never try to run beyond the flags?'

  At the end of the tape all Zina said was, 'I know that's the only kind you know. That's the kind I like.' Arkady liked the fact that it was the kind she liked. But the next tape was completely different. Zina was suddenly speaking in a low, weary voice. 'Modigliani painted Akhmatova sixteen times. That's the way to know a man, to have him paint you. By the tenth time you must start to know how he really sees you.'

  'But I attract the wrong men. Not painters. They hold me like I'm a tube of paint they have to empty in one squeeze. But they're not painters.'

  Zina's voice could sound honeyed or as tired as death, sometimes all in one sentence as if she were casually playing an instrument. 'There is a man on the factory line who looks interesting. Paler than a fish. Deep eyes, as if he were sleepwalking. He hasn't noticed me at all. It would be interesting to wake him up.

  'But I don't need another man. One thinks he tells me what to do. A second thinks he tells me what to do. A third thinks he tells me what to do. A fourth thinks he tells me what to do. Only I know what I'm going to do.' There was a pause; then, 'They only see me, they can't hear me think. They have never heard me think.'

  What would they do if they could hear you? Arkady wondered.

  'He'd kill me if he could hear me think,' Zina said. 'He says wolves mate for life. I think he'd kill me and then he'd kill himself.'

  On the fifth tape the tab had been removed and then taped over. The cassette began with a sibilant rustling of cloth and an occasional muffled thud. Then a man said, 'Zina.' It was a younger voice, not the singer.

  'What kind of place is this?'

  'Zinushka.'

  'What if they catch us?'


  'The chief's asleep. I say who comes and goes here. Stay still.'

  'Take your time. You're like a boy. How did you get all this down here?'

  'That's not for you to know.'

  'That's a television?'

  'Pull them down.'

  'Gently.'

  'Please.'

  'I'm not going to get completely undressed.'

  'It's warm. Twenty-one degrees Celsius, forty per cent humidity. It's the most comfortable place on the ship.'

  'How do you have a place like this? My bed is so cold.'

  'I'd climb into it any time, Zinushka, but this is more private.'

  'Why is there a cot here? You sleep here?'

  'We put in long hours.'

  'Looking at television. That's work?'

  'Mental work. Forget about that. Come on, Zinushka, help me.'

  'You're sure you shouldn't be doing important mental work right now?'

  'Not while we're taking a net.'

  'A net! When I met you at the Golden Horn you were a handsome lieutenant. Now look at you, at the bottom of a fish hold. How do you know we're taking a net?'

  'You talk too much and kiss too little.'

  'How do you like that?'

  'That's better.'

  'And that?'

  'That's much better.'

  'And this?'

  'Zinushka.'

  The microphone was voice-activated and apparently she'd had no chance to turn it off. The recorder was probably in the pocket of her fisherman's jacket and either under her or hanging beside the cot. Arkady had two cigarettes left. On his match a flame bobbed toward his fingers.

  He was five years old. It was summer south of Moscow, and in the warm nights everyone slept on the porch with doors and windows open. There was no electricity in the cottage. Luna moths flew in and danced above the lamps, and he always expected the insects to flare up like burning paper. Some of his father's friends, other officers, had come by for a buffet. The social pattern set by Stalin was of dinners starting at midnight and ending in a drunken stupor, and Arkady's father, one of the Leader of Humanity's favourite generals, followed this style, though while others got drunk he only got more angry. Then he would wind up the gramophone and always play the same record. The band was the Moldavian State Jazz Orchestra, an ensemble that had followed General Renko's troops on the Second Ukrainian Front, performing in their greatcoats in each town square the day after it had been liberated from the Germans. The tune was 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.