Polar Star (15 page)

“You.”

“Then we must consider the slim possibility of actually finding something out. Or of discovering a great many things, some of which we did not set out to find. This is where I need your counsel.”

“Really?” Hess sat forward, his whole attitude suggesting rapport.

“See, my vision—which is that of a man who cuts fish in the hold of a ship—is very limited. You, however, think in terms of the entire ship, even of the entire fleet. The work of a fleet electrical engineer must be difficult.” Especially so far from the fleet, Arkady thought. “You would be aware of factors and considerations I know nothing of. Perhaps of factors I
should
know nothing of.”

Hess frowned as if he couldn’t imagine what these could be. “You mean there might be some reason not to ask questions? And if there were such a reason, that it would be better to ask no questions at all rather than to stop questions once you’ve begun asking them?”

“You’ve expressed it better than I could,” Arkady said.

Hess rubbed his eyes, fumbled with a tobacco pouch, filled and tamped his pipe. It was a navigator’s pipe designed
to hang out of the way while its smoker studied charts. He lit it with short sucks of air, sounding like a radiator.

“Comrade, I can’t think of any such reason. The girl seems to have been ordinary, young, a little loose. But I have a solution for your concern. If you come across anything especially unusual, anything that bothers you, then please feel free to come to me first.”

“Sometimes you might be hard to find.” After all, I didn’t even know you existed until last night, Arkady thought.

“The
Polar Star
is a large ship, but it’s still only a ship. Captain Marchuk or his chief mate always knows where I am.”

“His chief mate, not his first mate?”

“Not Comrade Volovoi, no.” Hess smiled at the idea.

Arkady wished he knew more about the man. German communities had been invited to settle, cultivate and tone up the Volga for hundreds of years, until the Great Patriotic War, when Stalin ripped them out in advance of the fascist invasion and shipped them overnight to Asia.

Hess scrutinized Arkady in the same way. “Your father was General Renko, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you do your service?”

“Berlin.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“Sitting in a radio shed, listening to Americans.”

“Intelligence work!”

“Hardly so grand.”

“But you monitored enemy movements. You didn’t make any mistakes.”

“I didn’t set off a war accidentally.”

“That’s the best test of intelligence.” Hess pushed his hair back, but it rose again like a stiff beard. “Just tell me what you need.”

“I’ll need to be released from my usual duties.”

“Of course.”

Arkady kept his voice level, but the truth was that every word brought blood rushing through his veins in a sensation that was shameful and intoxicating. “I can work with Slava Bukovsky, but I’ll need an assistant of my own choice. I’ll have to question crew members, including officers.”

“All reasonable, if done quietly.”

“And question Americans, if necessary.”

“Why not? There’s no reason for them not to cooperate. After all, this is just a fact-finding preliminary to the official investigation in Vladivostok.”

“I don’t seem to get along with them.”

“I believe the head representative’s cabin is directly below mine. You could talk to her now.”

“Anything I say seems to annoy her.”

“We’re all out here together peacefully fishing. Talk about the sea.”

“The Bering Sea?”

“Why not?”

Hess sat with his hands on his belly like a little German Buddha. He looked too comfortable. Was he KGB? Sometimes it took a sharp stick to find out.

Arkady said, “The first time I heard of the Bering Sea I was eight years old. We had the encyclopedia. One day we received in the mail a new page. All the subscribers to the encyclopedia were mailed the same insert, along with instructions on how to cut out Beria so that we could tape in vital new information about the Bering Sea. Of course Beria had been shot by then and was no longer a Hero of the Soviet Union. It was one of the rare times I ever saw my father truly happy, because it gave him so much pleasure to cut off the head of the secret police.”

If Hess were KGB the inquiry would be over now. Even so, his smile wore the strain of a man whose new dog has proven to be a biter. “You killed the Moscow prosecutor, your boss. Volovoi was right about that.”

“In self-defense.”

“A number of others died too.”

“Not by my hand.”

“A German and an American.”

“Them, yes.”

“A messy business. You also helped a woman defect.”

“Not really.” Arkady shrugged. “I had the chance to wave good-bye.”

“But you didn’t go yourself. When all was said and done, you were still a Russian. That’s what we count on. You know seals?”

“Seals?”

“In the winter. How they hide under the ice sheet near a hole, just coming up to breathe? Is that a little bit like you right now?”

When Arkady didn’t answer, Hess said, “You shouldn’t confuse the KGB and us. I confess that sometimes we seem hard. When I was a cadet, far back in the days of Khrushchev, we set off a hydrogen device in the Arctic Sea. It was a hundred-megaton bomb, the largest ever detonated then or since. Actually, it was a fifty-megaton warhead wrapped in a uranium case to double the yield. A very dirty bomb. We didn’t warn the Swedes or the Finns, and we certainly didn’t tell our own people who were drinking milk under this rain of fallout a thousand times worse than Chernobyl. We didn’t tell our fishermen who sailed in the Arctic Sea. I signed on as a third mate, and my mission was to use a Geiger counter without telling anyone else on board. We caught one shark that measured four hundred roentgens. What could I say to the captain—to throw his quota overboard? His crew would ask questions, and then the cry would spread. But we let the Americans know, and the result was that Kennedy was frightened enough to come to the table and sign a test-ban treaty.”

Hess let his smile fade and held Arkady’s eyes, the way an executioner might briefly show his professional face
to a son. Then he brightened. “Anyway, for most of the crew, sailing on the
Polar Star
is no different from working in a factory anywhere, with the positive aspect of visiting a foreign port and the negative one of seasickness. For some, however, there is the attraction of freedom. It’s the aura of the wide sea. We are far from port. The Border Guard is on the other side of the earth and we are in the world of the Pacific Fleet.”

“Does this mean I have your support or not?”

“Oh, definitely,” said Hess. “Support and growing interest.”

As he left the cabin Arkady saw the informers Skiba and Slezko slip around the end of the passageway. Walk, don’t run, don’t trip, Arkady thought. Don’t bust your lips before you tell the Invalid what seaman visited the fleet electrical engineer’s accommodations. Carry the news as if it were a mug of tea from Hess himself. Don’t spill a drop.

Susan was at her cabin table, resting her head on one hand and letting cigarette smoke curl in the mop of her hair. It was actually a very Russian pose, poetic, tragic. Slava was with her and they were dining on soup and bread, which Arkady suspected the third mate had brought straight from the galley.

“I’m not interrupting?” Arkady asked. “I wouldn’t have stopped, but your door was open.”

“It’s my rule to keep my door open when Soviet men come to call,” Susan said. “Even when they come bearing strange breakfasts.”

Out of her jacket and boots she was practically a girl. Brown eyes and blond hair made an interesting contrast but were hardly unique. She had neither the complete ovalness nor the Slavic cheekbones of Russian women. The cigarette marked a fuller mouth, and etched around her eyes were those first lines that made a woman more real. But she was too thin, as if Soviet food wouldn’t
take. Admittedly the soup was a pasty liquid dappled with grease. She idly dredged bones, which she dropped back in the stew.

“It’s sweet butter,” Slava pointed out to her. “I told Olimpiada, ‘No garlic cloves.’ Anyway, you must visit Lake Baikal. Sixteen percent of the world’s fresh water is contained in that lake.”

“How much is contained in this bowl?” Susan asked.

Arkady began, “I was just wondering—”

Slava took a deep breath. If Arkady was going to ruin the intimacy of a civilized repast, the third mate would make him pay. “Renko, if you have questions you should have asked them yesterday. I think I hear them calling you on the slime line.”

“I’ve noticed,” Susan said. “You’re always ‘just wondering.’ Wondering what?”

“How do you like fishing?” Arkady asked.

“How do I like fishing? Christ, I must love it or I wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Then do it like this.” Arkady took the spoon from her hand. “Fish. If you want the bones, then do as you’re doing and trawl the bottom. But everything is at a different level. Cabbage and potatoes are a little higher off the bottom.”

“Baikal has indigenous seals … blind fish.…” Slava tried to hold the thread of his monologue. “Many species of …”

“To catch an onion is more difficult,” Arkady explained. “You must use a mid-water pelagic trawl to hunt them down. Ah!” He scooped one up in triumph. A burnt pearl.

“What about meat?” Susan asked. “This is a meat stew.”

“Theoretically.” Arkady gave her back her spoon.

Susan ate the onion.

Slava lost patience. “Renko, your shift is on duty.”

“This may seem a silly question,” Arkady said to Susan, “but I was wondering what you wore to the dance.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “Not my prom dress, that’s for sure.”

“Prom?”

“Crinoline and corsage. Never mind, let’s say I wore my basic shirt and jeans.”

“A white shirt and blue jeans?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Did you leave the dance for fresh air? Perhaps went out on deck?”

Susan was silent. She sat back against the bulkhead and studied him with a flare of confirmed distrust. “You’re still asking about Zina.”

Slava was outraged, too. “That’s over; you said so last night.”

“Well,” Arkady said, “I changed my mind this morning.”

Susan said, “Why are you so fixated on Americans? On this factory ship with hundreds of Soviets, you keep coming back to us. You’re like my radio; you work in reverse.” She pointed her cigarette to a speaker built into a corner of the cabin. “In the beginning I wondered why it didn’t work. Then I climbed up and found a microphone. See, it did work, just not the way I expected.” She tilted her head and blew smoke that drifted toward Arkady like an arrow. “When I get off at Dutch Harbor, no more imitation radio or imitation detectives. Never again. Any more questions?”

“I didn’t know anything about this,” Slava assured Susan.

“Are you taking your books with you?” Arkady asked.

On the upper bunk were the typewriter and cartons of books that Arkady had admired before. What Soviet poetry and toilet paper had in common was scarcity due to the inadequacies, despite the largest forests in the world, of the Soviet paper industry.

Susan asked, “You want one? Besides being a slime-line worker and an investigator, you’re also a book lover?”

“Some books.”

“Who do you like?” she asked.

“Susan is a writer,” Slava said. “I like Hemingway myself.”

“Russian writers,” Susan told Arkady. “You’re Russian and you have a Russian soul. Name one.”

“You have so many.” More good books than the library on board, he thought.

“Akhmatova?”

“Naturally.” Arkady shrugged.

Susan recited: “ ‘ “What do you want,” I asked. “To be with you in Hell,” he said.’ ”

Arkady picked up the next verse: “ ‘He lifted his thin hand/and lightly stroked the flowers:/“Tell me how men kiss you,/Tell me how you kiss.’ ”

Slava looked back and forth from Susan to Arkady.

“Everybody knows that one by heart,” Arkady said. “People do when books can’t be bought.”

Susan dropped her cigarette into her soup, rose, grabbed the first book she could reach on the upper bunk and threw it at Arkady. “That’s a good-bye gift,” she said. “No more questions, no more ‘wondering.’ I’m lucky you only surfaced at the end of the trip.”

“Well,” Arkady suggested, “actually you may have been luckier than that.”

“Tell me.”

“You were dressed like Zina. If someone did throw her overboard, it’s good they didn’t throw you by mistake.”

11
The cabin of the late Zina Patiashvili had the privacy of a dream; merely by turning on the lamp Arkady felt like a trespasser.

Dynka, for example, came from a race of Uzbeks and there was her own toy camel, a Bactrian from a miniature Samarkand, standing on the pillow of her upper bunk. There were Madame Malzeva’s embroidered cushions, each a sachet redolent of talcs and pomades. Her scrap-book of foreign postcards displayed minarets and crumbling temples. An embossed portrait of Lenin guarded Natasha Chaikovskaya’s berth, but there was also a snapshot of a mother smiling timidly amid giant sunflowers, as well as a glossy photo of Julio Iglesias.