Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'You were my compromise with Volovoi. He's the first mate. You heard what he said.'

  'You're the captain. If you want your crew to go ashore, do it.'

  Marchuk fell silent again. The cigarette burned down to a coal between his lips. 'Keep looking,' he said finally. 'Maybe you'll find something.'

  Arkady left by the outer bridge. Inside, Marchuk looked like a man chained to the wheel.

  Chapter Sixteen

  * * *

  By the time Arkady reached his cabin he was shaking so hard he decided to confront the spasms and kill them. From his room he took a towel and descended one deck to a small shower room with pegs and a sign that said, 'A good citizen respects the property of others.' A handwritten sign advised, 'Take your valuables with you.'

  With his knife tucked into the back of his towel, he entered the greatest luxury on the Polar Star, the sauna. It had been built by the crew and if not much larger than a stall, it was all of red cedar. A cedar box held smooth river stones heated by pipes that carried live steam from the laundry. A cedar bucket held water and a cedar ladle. A satisfactory mist already hung in the air. Two pairs of legs dangled from the upper bench, but they looked too spindly to be the legs of killers.

  Whether at a palatial spa in Moscow or a cabin in Siberia, it was a Russian credo that nothing cured more ills than a sauna. Chills, arthritis, nervous and respiratory diseases, and especially hangovers were helped by the balm of steam, and since the Polar Star's little sauna was in constant use it was always hot. The pores of Arkady's skin opened wide and he felt prickly sweat on his scalp and chest. Though his hands and feet stung, they hadn't turned white, the first warning sign of frostbite. Once he'd driven the shakes out, he'd be able to think straight. As he ladled more water on to them the stones turned a glossy black and then as quickly dried to grey. The super-heated mist became more dense. There was a birch lash in the corner for driving out the poisons of a bad drunk, but he had never believed in whipping himself, even under the guise of medical attention.

  'You're going to pick up any stuff?' a voice asked in English from the cloud. It was the American fisheries observer, Lantz. 'Dust or shit, Dutch is on the route. A lot of those fishing boats make funny runs all the way to Colombia, to Baja.'

  'I'll stick with beer.' The other voice was the rep called Day.

  'Ever try rocks? Smoke it in a pipe. Very intense. That'll unwind you fast.'

  'No, thanks.'

  'Worried? I'll get you a cocktail, it looks like a regular cigarette.'

  'I don't even smoke. After this, I'm going back to school. I'm not going to do crack in the Yukon. Lay off.'

  'What a wimp,' Lantz said as Day stepped down from the mist and out the door. There was a sound like Lantz blowing his nose on his towel. Slowly he slid off the bench. He was skin and bones, like a pale, long-limbed salamander. His eyes finally took in who was sitting on the lower bench. 'Well, look who's sneaking around and listening to other people. How about you, Renko? Are you going to get your American dollars and run into DutchHarbor?'

  'I don't think I'll be going in,' Arkady said.

  'No one will. They say you fucked it for everyone.'

  'That could be.'

  'And I hear that even if everyone else does, you won't. So what are you, Renko, a policeman or a prisoner?'

  'This is coveted employment, to work on an ocean-going ship.'

  'If you can make the port calls, not if you're trapped on board. Poor Comrade Renko.'

  'It sounds like I'm missing a lot.'

  'It looks like you need a lot. And you're just going to be walking up and down the deck hoping someone's going to bring you back a pack of smokes. Pathetic.'

  'It is.'

  'I'll bring you back a candy bar, a stick of gum. You wait, it'll be the fucking highlight of your trip.'

  The door sucked steam out as Lantz left. Arkady threw more water in on the box and collapsed on the bench again. He was scared when even an American saw how much trouble he was in.

  He was also scared by how little he understood. It didn't make sense that Zina would leave the dance just to ask Marchuk who her shopping companions in DutchHarbor would be. And then she stayed on the stern deck. According to the notes kept by Skiba and Slezko, Lidia crossed the mid-ships deck at 1115, at which point Zina was still alive at the stern rail. That was fourteen minutes before Ridley returned to the Eagle and fifty-five minutes before the Eagle cast off. Zina was too smart to try defecting when an American boat was tied up to the factory ship. Vladivostok would demand and the company, half Soviet-owned, would agree that the Eagle and the Merry Jane be searched. The two conditions for a successful disappearance, from what Marchuk had said, were that the Americans be beyond conceivable swimming distance and that not a single item of lifesaving gear be missing from the Polar Star. If defection was impossible, what did Zina want?

  The suggestion of a beer stuck in his throat. Sakhalin trawlers had made extra money by picking up cases of Japanese beer tied to crab pots and leaving in exchange sacks of salmon roe. He could use one of those beers, as cold as the sea, not the warm, liquid headache that Obidin brewed.

  The sauna door opened, and in the thick steam the new arrival seemed to be wearing shoes. He was a large man, naked except for a towel tied at the waist, and he was not wearing shoes; his feet were dark blue, almost purple. They were tattooed in a design of florid curls, each toe standing out as a green claw. This leonine design reached up his legs to his knees, like a griffin. He was what a scientist would call a mesomorph, muscular and nearly as deep through the chest as he was broad. Some of the older tattoos had smudged and blurred, but Arkady could make out chained, buxom women climbing each thigh to the red flames that spread around the edge of the towel. The stomach was scalloped with blue clouds. On the right side of the ribcage was a bleeding wound with the name of Christ, on the left side a vulture held a heart. The man's breast was smeared with scar tissue. Administrators did that in labour camps; if a prisoner tattooed something they didn't like, they burned it off with permanganate of potash. The man's arms were green sleeves, the right covered in fading dragons, the left with the names of prisons, labour camps, transit camps: Vladimir, Tashkent, Potma, Sosnovka, Kolyma, Magadan and more, a roster of wide personal experience. The tattoos stopped at the wrists and neck; the total effect was of a man wearing a tight dark suit, or of a pale head and hands levitating. Another effect was that a person knew just what this tribesman was: an urka, in Russia a professional criminal.

  It was the trawlmaster, Karp Korobetz. He smiled at Arkady broadly and said, 'You look like shit.'

  'I know you,' Arkady realized and said it at the same time.

  Karp said, 'It was a dozen years ago. In the hall when you started asking questions, I said to myself, "Renko, Renko, I know that name." '

  'Article 146, armed robbery.'

  'You tried to hang me for murder,' Karp reminded him.

  Now Arkady's memory worked fine. Twelve years before, Korobetz had been a big, soft kid who worked whores twice his age out of the tough Maria's Grove section of Moscow. Usually an arrangement was maintained between pimps and the militia, especially at that time, when prostitution was not supposed to exist, but the boy took to robbing victims when their pants were down. One old man, a veteran with a chest of medals, resisted, and Karp shut him up with a hammer. His hair had been lighter and longer then, with fanciful plaits around the ears. Arkady had appeared at the trial only to testify as the senior investigator for homicide. But there was another reason he hadn't recognized Korobetz. Karp's face had changed; his hairline actually was lower than before. If prisoners tattooed something on their brow like 'Slave of USSR', camps had the skin surgically removed. The whole scalp had shifted forward.

  'What did you write there?' Arkady pointed to the trawlmaster's forehead.

  '"Communists Drink the Blood of the People." '

  'All that on your forehead?' Arkady was impressed. He looked at Karp's chest. 'And there?'


  ' "The Party = Death." They took that off with acid in Sosnovka. Then I wrote, "The Party is a Whore." After they burned that off the skin was too rough to use any more.'

  'A short career. Well, Pushkin died young.'

  Karp brushed away a wisp of steam. His slate-blue eyes lay in a crease that ran across the bridge of his nose. He combed his damp hair with his fingers. Now his hair was full at the top and short on the sides, Soviet-style, while the body had become Neanderthal. An inked Neanderthal.

  'I ought to thank you,' Karp said. 'I learned a trade at Sosnovka.'

  'Don't thank me. Thank the people you robbed and beat; they're the ones who identified you.'

  'They taught us how to make television cabinets. Did you ever have a Melodya set? I might have made it. Of course, that was long ago, before my social rehabilitation took hold. See how strange life is? Now I'm a seaman first class and you're a seaman second class. And I'm on top of you.'

  'The sea is a strange place.'

  'You're the last person I ever expected to meet on the Polar Star. What happened to the high and mighty investigator?'

  'The land is a strange place.'

  'Everything's strange to you now. That's what happens when you lose your desk and your Party card. Tell me what you're doing for this so-called fleet electrical engineer.'

  'I'm doing something for the captain.'

  'Fuck the captain. Where do you think you are, the middle of Moscow? There are about ten officers on the Polar Star; the rest is crew. We have our own system; we sort things out between ourselves. I sort things out. Why are you asking about Zina Patiashvili?'

  'She had an accident.'

  'I know that, I found her. If it's just an accident, why bring you in?'

  'My experience. You know my experience. What do you know about Zina?'

  'She was an honest toiler. The ship is poorer for her loss.' Karp broke into a smile, showing gold molars. 'See, I learned how to say all that shit.'

  Arkady stood. Their eyes were on a level, though Karp outweighed him. He said, 'I was stupid not to recognize you. You're twice as stupid to tell me who you are.'

  Karp looked hurt. 'I thought you'd be pleased to see how I'd reformed and become a model worker. I hoped we could be friends, but I see you haven't changed at all.' Forgiving, he leaned closer to offer advice. 'We had a guy in camp who reminded me of you. He was political. He was an Army officer who wouldn't take his tanks into Czechoslovakia against the counter-revolutionaries – something like that. I was his section leader and he couldn't follow orders; he thought he was still in charge. You know, they'd take us out on a railroad spur and we'd drop trees and load them. A timber collective. Healthy reconstructive labour at thirty degrees below. The dangerous part is when you've got the trees on the flatbed; you don't want them rolling off. It's funny that the one guy with the education, this officer, is the one who had the accident, and he didn't even get his accident straight. What he said was he was held down on the track and somebody busted his bones with an axe handle. I mean upper arms, lower arms, hands, fingers – the works. Imagine. You've seen stiffs, the body has a lot of bones. But I was there and I didn't see anything like that. It's what happens when you make a mistake and a whole flatbed of logs rolls on you. He went crazy. He finally died of a ruptured spleen. I bet he wanted to at that point, or spend the rest of his life like a broken egg. The only reason I mention him is just because he reminded me of you, and you remind me of him, and because a ship way out at sea is such a dangerous place. That's what I wanted to tell you. You should be careful,' Karp said on the way out. 'Learn how to swim.'

  Arkady's shakes came back twice as bad. Did he ever get so scared when he was an investigator? Maybe it was fitting that he'd come all the way from Moscow to sail with Karp Korobetz. Why hadn't he recognized him? The name wasn't that common. On the other hand, would Karp's own mother recognize him now?

  The trawlmaster was the one who had thrown him into the fish hold; that was what his shakes were telling him. Three men had carried him and probably one had gone ahead and one had followed; that was Karp and his deck team, the well-organized winners of the socialist competition.

  Sweat poured off Arkady, giving him a sheen of fear. Karp was crazy; no mere case of 'sluggish schizophrenia' here. Not dumb, though; so why would he draw attention to himself while Arkady had some temporary authority?

  What had Karp said and what had he omitted? He hadn't mentioned the fish hold; why would he? But he hadn't mentioned DutchHarbor, either. Everyone else was worried about the port call, but not Karp; he wanted to know about Hess. Most of all he wanted to spread some terror, which he'd done.

  Again the sauna door opened. Arkady saw a dark foot and immediately reached behind for his knife. As cool air from the open door lifted the mist, however, he saw that the foot was a shoe, a blue Reebok. 'Slava?'

  The third mate was irritably sweeping steam aside. 'Renko, I've been looking everywhere for you. I found it! I found the note!'

  Arkady still couldn't get Karp out of his head. 'What? What are you talking about?'

  'While you've been sleeping and taking saunas, I found the note from Zina Patiashvili. She wrote one.' Slava's face poked through a wreath of mist. 'A suicide note. It's perfect. We're going into port.'

  Part Two

  EARTH

  Chapter Seventeen

  * * *

  DutchHarbor was surrounded by a green ring of cliffs covered by thick sub-arctic grasses. There were no trees, nothing bigger than a bush, but as the wind moved over the grass the effect was magical, as if the hills were a wave.

  The island was actually called Unalaska, and on one side of the bay there was an Aleut village by that name, a beachside line of cottages that led to a white, wooden Russian Orthodox church. The town of Dutch Harbor, however, was out of Arkady's sight, past a tank farm and beyond the breakwater that protected a loading dock with slag heaps of rusting trawl doors and rotting snow, and gas pumps and rows of the half-ton cages called crab pots. Beyond lay a pier of catcherboats and one large ship that had become a dockbound cannery with a fence of pilings around its hull. Behind all this, the hills of Unalaska rose rapidly to volcanic peaks edged in black stone and snow.

  It was odd, Arkady thought, how the eye became starved for colour. The clouds were broken, so that sun-spots moved around the bay. Off the lower cliffs, puffins dropped like rocks to the water. Eagles lifted from the higher cliffs and soared to inspect the Polar Star; they were enormous birds, bear-brown with imperious white heads and amber eyes. It was like being at the top of the world.

  The Americans had already gone ashore in the pilot boat. Soo-san was going home in a gift fishing jacket decorated with souvenir pins. On her way off the ship she'd distributed farewell kisses with the generosity of someone leaving jail. On the pilot boat as it came out had been a new head rep carrying a suitcase with $100,000, the Polar Star's port-call foreign currency. The entire crew had waited while the bills were counted and then counted again in the captain's cabin.

  Now, after four months' fishing, Arkady's co-workers were lined along the starboard rail and moving down the steps of the gangway to a lifeboat that would bear them and their allotted American dollars to the port they had dreamed of all this time. Not that they showed it. A Soviet seaman dressed for special occasions did not necessarily shave. He did shine his shoes, slick his hair back and wear his sports jacket even if the sleeves were too short. He also wore his most unimpressed face, not only for Volovoi's sake but for his own, so that his anticipation showed as a wary narrowing of the eyes.

  With exceptions. Under the brim of a squat peasant's cap, Obidin's gaze was fixed on the church across the water. Kolya Mer had stuffed his coat with cardboard pots; he eyed the hills like Darwin approaching the Galapagoan shore. Women wore their nicest cotton dresses under the usual layers of sweaters and rabbit-fur coats. They had their grim tourist faces too, until they looked at each other and broke into nervous giggles, then waved up at Natasha, who stood
on the boat deck with Arkady.

  Natasha's cheeks were almost as red as her lipstick and she wore not one but two haircombs, as if she would need extra ammunition in DutchHarbor. 'It's my first time in the United States,' she told Arkady. 'It doesn't seem so different from the Soviet Union. You've been before. Where?'

  'New York.'

  'That's different.'

  Arkady paused. 'Yes.'

  'Well, so you came to see me off?'

  Natasha looked ready to fly from sheer excitement over the water to the waiting shops. In fact Arkady had come to see whether Karp was going ashore. So far the trawlmaster hadn't. 'To thank you and see you off,' he said.

  'It will be just for a few hours.'

  'Even so.'

  Her voice and eyes dropped. 'It was a stimulating experience for me to work with you, Arkady Kirilovich. You don't mind that I call you Arkady Kirilovich?'

  'Whatever you like.'

  'You're not the fool I thought you were.'

  'Thank you.'

  'We came to a successful conclusion,' Natasha said.

  'Yes, the captain has declared the inquiry officially over. There may not even be an investigation at Vladivostok.'

  'It was good of Third Mate Bukovsky to find that note.'

  'Better than good, unbelievable,' Arkady said, considering he had looked under Zina's mattress well before Slava found her note there.

  'Natasha!' As her friends moved along the rail they waved frantically at her to claim her place in line.

  Natasha was ready to run, to sail, to fly, but there was a line on her brow because she had witnessed Arkady's earlier search of the bed.

  'At the dance, she didn't seem so down in the mouth.'

  'No,' Arkady had to agree. Dancing and flirting were not the usual symptoms of depression.

  Natasha's last question was the hardest for her. 'You really think she killed herself? She could have done something that rash?'