Polar Star

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Comrade Jonah,' the captain said softly.

  There was no helmsman and no one was in the navigation room. The engine telegraph was set between 'Dead Slow' and 'Dead Stop'.

  'Why are we slowing?' Arkady asked.

  The captain had a pained smile. As he tapped out a cigarette he looked like a man contemplating life from the last step of a guillotine. Hess, caught in the moving shadow of a wiper, looked like he was only one step behind.

  'I should have left you where you were,' Marchuk told Arkady. 'You'd disappeared on the slime line, in the belly of the whale. We must have been insane to pluck you out.'

  'Are we stopping?' Arkady asked.

  'We have a slight problem,' Hess conceded. 'There are problems beside you.'

  The light from outside was pale and cold, but the fleet electrical engineer appeared to Arkady to be especially white, as if all the sun lamps on earth had been wasted on him.

  'Your cable?' Arkady suggested.

  'I told you,' Hess reminded Marchuk. 'He found my station today.'

  'Well, your station is a pearl in an oyster, so a man of Renko's abilities was bound to find it. One more reason why I should have left him where he was.' The captain let a reflective plume of smoke escape. To Arkady he said, 'I told him the bottom we were going over was too grabby and too shallow, but he put the cable out anyway.'

  'A hydrophone cable is designed not to snag,' Hess said. 'It's deployed from submarines all the time.'

  'And now something's tangled in the cable,' Marchuk said. 'Maybe part of a crab pot, maybe a walrus head. Tusks dragging on the ocean floor. We can't reel the cable in and the tension on it is too great for us to go any faster.'

  'Whatever it is will come loose eventually,' said Hess.

  'In the meantime,' Marchuk said, 'we must proceed ahead delicately even while we're making way through ice and a Force 7 wind. The captains in the Navy must be magicians.' When he inhaled, his eyes reflected the ember. 'Excuse me, I forgot: in the Navy they are deployed from submarines, not from factory ships in the ice.'

  The Polar Star trembled and heaved a little in the swell hidden below the sheet. Arkady was no engineer, but he knew that in order to break ice a ship, no matter how big, needed a certain amount of momentum. Too slow at too low a gear and the diesels would sooner or later burn out. 'How good a captain is Morgan?' he asked.

  Marchuk said, 'We'll find out. A boat like the Eagle should be in view of a coconut palm and looking for shrimp, nowhere near ice. Now the waves are picking up in the fairway, and his bow and deck aren't high enough. He shouldn't head into the wind, but he has to stay behind us or get iced in. He's already iced up and getting top-heavy.'

  Something occurred to Arkady. The quiet. A bridge always had one radio tuned to the distress frequency. Marchuk followed Arkady's eyes to the single-sideband. The captain left the wheel to turn up the sound, like pins dropping, of heavy static.

  'Morgan hasn't sent an emergency call yet,' said Hess.

  'He hasn't sent any call,' Marchuk said.

  Arkady asked, 'Why don't you raise him?' Off Sakhalin, boats always talked each other through heavy weather.

  'He doesn't respond,' Marchuk said. 'One of his antennas might be down.'

  Hess said, 'Morgan can tell by our speed that something is wrong, and he probably knows that the cable is played out. A piece of the cable is what he's after. We're the ones in trouble, not him. This weather is perfect for him.'

  On the radar screens the fairway carved by the Polar Star was a narrow line of green dots, sea returning the radar's signal. In the middle of the lane, about five hundred metres back, was the blip that was the Eagle; the rest of the screen was a blank. Arkady punched in a 50-k scale. Still there was nothing but the Eagle. Boats were supposed to be coming from Seattle, but the weather would be delaying them.

  'Morgan has a radar, too,' Hess said. 'And a directional echo-sounder. If something is caught on the cable he will detect it. This is probably the opportunity he's been waiting for.'

  Marchuk said, 'If he's lost a radio mast, then he's lost his radar, too.'

  'The autopilot turned the wheel a notch, minding its job.

  'Captain,' Hess said, 'I can understand your sympathy for another fisherman. Would that Morgan was, but he's not. George Morgan is their Anton Hess. When I see him I recognize myself. He will be silent and he will stay close to see if we make a mistake, such as picking up speed. Whatever is caught on the cable could lift it to the surface right beside the Eagle!

  'What if the cable breaks?' Arkady asked.

  'It won't break if we stay at this speed,' said Hess.

  'What if it does?' Marchuk asked.

  'It won't,' Hess said.

  What was Hess's musical instrument? The cello. Hess reminded Arkady of a cellist trying to play as his strings popped one by one.

  Hess repeated, 'It won't, but even if it did break, the cable has negative buoyancy; it would sink. The only problem would be returning to Vladivostok and the Pacific Fleet after losing a hydrophone cable. Our voyage has been disastrous enough, Captain. We don't need any more disgraces.'

  'Why doesn't Morgan answer our calls?' Marchuk demanded.

  'I've told you why. Except for the radio, the Eagle is proceeding normally. Everything else is in your imagination.' Hess lost patience. 'I'm going below; perhaps I can wind in the cable a little.' He paused in front of Arkady. 'Explain to the captain that Zina Patiashvili didn't go to the stern rail every time the Eagle was close to throw kisses. It turns out that she got plenty of them from my own radioman. If Zina were here now, I'd kill her myself.'

  The fleet electrical engineer left by the flying bridge. Before the door slammed shut, snow spun in the dark, then died.

  'It is humorous,' Marchuk said. 'After all that time in dry dock putting in the cable and it's the only thing that breaks down.'

  The captain leaned against the counter. He laid his hand affectionately on a compass repeater, opened its hood, closed it.

  'I keep thinking things will change, Renko, that life can be honest and direct, that there's good and dignity in anyone who's willing to work hard. Not that people are perfect, not that I'm perfect. But good. Am I an idiot? Tell me, when we get to Vladivostok will you tell them about me and Zina?'

  'No. But they'll take pictures of the officers and crew to the restaurant where she worked and the people there will recognize you.'

  'So I'm dead either way.'

  No, I'm dead either way, Arkady thought. Karp and his deck team will hunt until they find me. Marchuk was caught in the more significant drama of a trailing cable. How could he explain why Karp wanted to attack him if there was no evidence left of smuggling? At best he'd sound like a madman; more likely, he'd hang himself for Volovoi and the Aleut.

  'You know how this ship was delivered?' Marchuk asked. 'You know the condition in which any ship is delivered from the boatyard?'

  'Like new?'

  'Better than new. The Polar Star was built in a Polish yard. When it was handed over it was handed over complete, with everything: tableware, linens, curtains, lights, everything so you could go to sea right away. But they never got to sea right away. The KGB comes on board. People from the Ministry come on board. They take the new tableware and replace it with old, take the linens and curtains and replace bright lights with bulbs you could go blind by. Exactly as if they were robbing a house. Rip out the good plumbing and replace it with lead. Even mattresses and doorknobs. Replace good with shit. Then they give it to Soviet fishermen and say, "Comrades, go to sea!" This was a pretty ship, a good ship.'

  Marchuk bowed his head, dropped the butt of his cigarette on the deck and stepped on it. 'So, Renko, now you know why the ship is moving so slowly. Was there anything else?'

  'No.'

  The captain stared at the bright, blinded windshield. 'Too bad about us and the Eagle,' he said. 'The joint venture is good thing. The other way leads back to the cave, doesn't it?'

  Chapter Twenty-Eight
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  * * *

  Arkady went through the bridgehouse corridor without knowing where he was heading. He couldn't simply go to his cabin and wait. The dance wouldn't be safe. This was the sort of prison situation that an urku like Karp excelled at. The lights would go out and when they came on again he'd be gone, headed down the ramp in a weighted sack. Or he'd be found in an empty bunker, paint can by his side, an obvious victim of sniffing fumes. Moral lessons would be drawn.

  'We never finished our game,' Susan said.

  Arkady took a step back to her open door. He'd passed it without noticing because her cabin was dark.

  'Don't be afraid,' she said. She turned on the overhead lights long enough for him to see disconnected wires hanging from the radio and the base of the desk lamp. She sat on the lower bunk, her hair damp and dishevelled as if she had just stepped out of a shower. Her feet were bare and she was dressed in jeans and a loose denim shirt. Her brown eyes seemed to have gone black. In her hand was a glass filled to the brim. The cabin smelled of Scotch. She turned the light off with the bunk switch. 'Close the door,' she said.

  'I thought you never closed the door when Soviet men came to call.'

  'There's always a first time. Soviet ships never have unscheduled dances, but I hear you're having one right now. That's where all my boys have gone, so it's a night of firsts.'

  Arkady closed the door and groped to sit where he'd seen a chair by the bunk. She turned on her bunk lamp, a 20-watt bulb not much brighter than a waning candle.

  'For example, I said to myself that I would fuck the first man who walked by my door. Then, Renko, you walked by and I changed my mind. The Eagle's in trouble, isn't it?'

  'I have it on good authority that the snow will stop.'

  'They lost radio contact an hour ago.'

  'We still have them on radar. They're not far behind us.'

  'So?'

  'So their radio antenna is probably iced up. You know that happens up here.'

  Susan put a glass in his hand and poured from a bottle so that the Scotch swelled over the brim. 'Remember,' she said. 'First one to spill gets hit.'

  Arkady frowned. 'The Norwegian game again?'

  'Yes. They don't call them roundheads for nothing.'

  'Is there an American version?'

  'You get shot,' Susan said.

  'Ah, a short version. I have a different idea. Why not the first one to spill tells the truth?'

  'That's the Soviet version?'

  'I wish I could say so.'

  'No,' Susan said, 'you can have anything but the truth.'

  'In that case,' Arkady said and sipped, 'I'll cheat.'

  Susan matched him with a swallow. She was well ahead of him, though she didn't seem drunk. The bunk light provided more corona than illumination. Her eyes were shadowed but not softened.

  'You haven't been writing any suicide notes, have you?' she asked.

  Arkady set his drink on the floor so he could get out a cigarette.

  'Light one for me,' she said.

  'It's an art in itself, suicide notes.' Arkady lit two Belomors off a match and put one in her hand. Her fingers were smooth, not rough and scarred from cleaning cold fish.

  'You speak as an expert?'

  'A student. Suicide notes are a branch of literature too often ignored. There's the pensive suicide note, the bitter note, the guilt-ridden note, rarely the comic note because there's always some sense of formality. Usually the writer signs his or her name, or else signs off in some fashion: "I love you," "It's better this way," "Consider me a good Communist." '

  'Zina didn't.'

  'And the note is generally left where it will be found at the same time as the body. Or found when someone is discovered missing.'

  'Zina didn't do that, either.'

  'And always, because this is the writer's last testament, she doesn't mind using a whole piece of paper. Not a scrap, not half a page from a notebook – not for the last letter of her life. Which reminds me, how is your writing going?' Arkady looked at Susan's typewriter and books.

  'I'm blocked. I thought a ship would be the perfect place to write, but...' She stared at the bulkhead as if peering at some faraway, fading memory. 'Too many people, too little space. No, that's not fair. Soviet writers write in communal apartments all the time, don't they? I have this cabin to myself. But it's like finally having a chance to listen to your very own seashell and there's no sound at all.'

  'On the Polar Star I think it would be hard to hear a seashell.'

  'True. You know, you're strange, Renko, you're very strange. Remember that poem, the one –'

  ' "Tell me how men kiss you/Tell me how you kiss"?'

  'That's the one. Remember the last line?' she asked, and recited,

  'Oh I see, his game is that he knows

  Intimately, ardently.

  There's nothing from me he wants,

  So I have nothing to refuse.'

  That's you. Of all the men on this ship, you're the only one who wants nothing at all.'

  'That's not true,' Arkady said. He wanted to stay alive, he thought. He wanted to get through the night.

  'What do you want?' she asked.

  'I want to know what happened to Zina.'

  'What do you want from me?'

  'You were the last person to see Zina before she disappeared. I'd like to know what she said.'

  'See what I mean?' She laughed softly, more at herself. 'OK. What she said? Honestly?'

  'Try it.'

  Susan took a more judicious sip. 'I don't know. This game gets dangerous.'

  'I'll tell you what I think she told you,' Arkady said. 'I think she said she knew what the Polar Star was towing when we're not taking nets, and that she could give you information about the station where the cable was controlled.'

  She shrugged. 'What cable? What on earth are you talking about?'

  'That's why Morgan is where he is and that's why you're here.'

  'You sound like Volovoi.'

  'It's not an easy game,' Arkady said. The Scotch was good; it made even a papirosa taste as sweet as candy.

  'Maybe you're a spy,' Susan said.

  'No, I don't have the world view. I'm more comfortable in a smaller, more human scale. And I'd say you're a bit of an amateur, not a professional. But you got on the ship, and if Morgan says you stay on it, you stay.'

  'Well, I do have a world view. I don't think Zina would have been so desperate to leave an American boat.'

  'She –'

  He stopped and turned his ear. There wasn't so much the sound of boots in the corridor as of boots suddenly standing outside the door. Along the corridor were six cabins, with stairs at each end up to the bridge and down to the main deck. Other boots ran down the stairs and came to a halt.

  The door opened in the next cabin, then shut. A door opened across the hall. There was a knock at Susan's door. 'Soo-san?' Karp called.

  She watched Arkady kill his cigarette. Was there panic in his eyes? He wondered. There was fascination in hers.

  The second knock was harder. 'Are you alone?' Karp asked through the door.

  'Go away,' she said, her eyes still fixed on Arkady.

  The doorknob strained, resisting pressure. At least it was a metal door, Arkady thought. In Soviet housing projects the doors and frames were so easy to kick in that any locks were decorative. Susan stood, gathered a tape and cassette player from the upper bunk and turned on James Taylor very low.

  'Soo-san?' Karp called again.

  She answered, 'Go away now or I'll tell the captain.'

  'Open up,' Karp ordered. He hit the door with probably no more than his shoulder, and the latch, nearly persuaded, almost popped.

  'Wait,' she said and turned off the bunk light.

  While Arkady moved himself and his chair from the line of sight, Susan took her drink across the cabin and edged open the door. The mirror over her sink was ajar, and in it Arkady found he had positioned himself directly facing Karp's reflection. A head talle
r than Susan, the trawlmaster gazed over her into the cabin. In the hall's dim light the rest of the deck team huddled like a pack behind a lead wolf. The room was black – black enough, Arkady hoped, so that they wouldn't see him.

  'I thought I heard voices,' Karp hit a note of concern. 'We wanted to be sure there was nothing wrong.'

  Susan said, 'There'll be something wrong if I go to the captain and tell him his crewmen are breaking into my cabin.'

  'I apologize.' Karp seemed to be looking right at Arkady while he talked to her. 'It was for your own good. A mistake. Please excuse us.'

  'You're excused.'

  'Pleasant.' Karp kept his foot in the door and listened to the faint music, a man singing to a guitar. Finally he looked down at Susan and his smile of appreciation turned to an expression of concern. 'Soo-san, I am just a seaman, but I have to warn you.'

  'What about?'

  'It's bad to drink alone.'

  When Susan shut the door Arkady stayed still. The boots outside marched away, too much in unison. He listened to her cross the cabin and turn the volume of her player up higher, though the words were oddly soft and meaningless. He heard her set her glass down; it sounded empty. After six months in a small space, she knew her way around it even in the dark. She crossed the cabin again and he felt her fingers touch where sweat had broken out on his temple. 'Are they after you?' she asked.

  He put his hand lightly on her mouth. Someone, he was sure, still stood outside. She took his wrist and slipped his hand inside her shirt.

  Her breast was small. He took his hand out to unbutton the rest of her shirt. As she pulled his head close, he felt the rest of her body soften and let go. He kissed her face and lifted her towards him. If it was possible to step back to that moment in DutchHarbor when he suddenly left, they were there now.

  She seemed weightless. The rest of the world became soundless, as if the tape was playing in another room and the listener in the corridor were on another ship in another sea. Shirt and pants collected silently at her feet. Was this what women felt like? The damp hair at the nape of the neck? Teeth biting and lips yielding at the same time? How long had it been?