Polar Star (22 page)

Since Natasha was standing in front of the door in case Arkady tried to escape, he accepted the glass. He was the first to admit he didn’t understand women. He certainly didn’t know why he had been brought here.

“He can’t leave the ship,” Natasha said. “He’s an investigator, but he’s in some kind of trouble.”

“A man with a past?” Lidia asked.

“A spell of political unreliability,” Arkady said.

“That sounds like a head cold, not a past. Men have no past. Men move on from place to place like leaves. Women have pasts. I have a past.” Lidia’s eyes flicked to a framed wardrobe picture of two little girls sitting like a pair of cockatoos on a single chair, wearing white dresses, with white bows in their hair. “That’s a past.”

“Where’s the father?” Arkady asked, to be polite.

“What a good question. I haven’t seen him since he kicked me, six months pregnant, down the stairs. So now I have two children in a day-care center in Magadan. There’s a nurse and an aide for thirty kids. The nurse is an old woman with consumption; the aide is a thief. That’s who’s raising my angels. All winter the girls have coughs. Well, those women are paid ninety rubles a month, they’re forced to steal, so I send extra every time I’m in port just to make sure my girls don’t starve or die of pneumonia before I see them again. Thank God I can go to sea and make money for them, but if I ever saw their father again I’d cut off his prick and use it for bait. Let him dive for it, right, Natasha?”

A giggle rose like a bubble from the Chaika, who caught herself and stared soberly again at Arkady. “Be careful, he’s a mind reader.”

“Believe me,” Arkady said, “I can’t remember when I’ve understood a situation less.”

Lidia smoothed her lap. “Well, what do you know about your crew mates? For example, what do you know about Dynka?”

He was taken by surprise again. “A nice—” he began.

“Married at fourteen to an alcoholic,” Lidia said. “A cab driver. But if her Ahmed goes to an alcohol clinic, as soon as he registers he loses his driver’s license for five years, so she has to get him Antabuse on the black market. She’s not going to make that kind of money in Kazakhstan, so she has to work out here. The old lady in Natasha’s cabin, Elizavyeta Fedorovna Malzeva, sits and sews all day. Her husband used to be a purser on the Black Sea Fleet until his pecker wandered up a passenger, who charged him with rape. He’s been in a camp for fifteen years. She gets by with her daily dose of Valeryanka. Watch her in Dutch Harbor; she’ll try to get some Valium. Same thing. So, Comrade Renko, you’re surrounded by frailty, by women with pasts, by sluts.”

“I never said that.” Actually, it had been Natasha who had first called Zina a slut, but Arkady thought it probably wouldn’t help to protest on grounds of consistency. Anyway, he wasn’t fighting the situation anymore. He’d always suspected that while men might make the best police, women would make the best investigators. Or at least a different kind of investigator, picking up different sorts of clues in a different manner, searching sideways or backwards, as compared with the straightforward, pig-in-a-rut method of men.

“He’s more interested in Americans,” Natasha said. “We left Susan smirking up on deck.”

“He’s sick?” Lidia asked.

Arkady was so used to trembling that he no longer noticed it.

Natasha said, “He doesn’t take proper care of himself. He goes places he shouldn’t go and asks questions he shouldn’t ask. He wants to know about Zina and officers.”

“Which officers?” Lidia asked.

Defensively Arkady said, “I only mentioned to Natasha the question of officers sleeping with crew.”

“That’s a broad brush.” Lidia refilled his glass. “On
a ship we live together for six months at a time. We spend more time here than we do with our families. Of course relationships develop because we’re human. We’re normal. But if you start putting things like that in your report, you can ruin people. A name gets written down in a report and never gets erased. From the outside it can look bad. An investigation about Zina suddenly becomes an investigation of the whole ship, of philanderers and sluts. See what I mean?”

“I’m starting to,” Arkady said.

“He is.” Natasha nodded.

“You mean
your
name,” Arkady said.

“Everyone knows what the
bufetchitsa
does,” Lidia said. “I direct the officers’ mess, I clean the captain’s cabin, I keep the captain happy. It’s customary and I knew it the day I applied. The Ministry of Fisheries knows it. His wife knows it. If I didn’t take care of him on board ship, he’d rape her at the door, so she knows. Other senior officers have other arrangements. You see, it makes us human, but it doesn’t make us criminal. If you put even a hint of that in your report, it forces the Ministry and all those wives back on shore, who would much rather kiss their husbands’ pictures than come sail on the
Polar Star
, to demand our heads.”

Lidia took a ladylike sip of wine. “Zina was different. It wasn’t that she was a tramp, necessarily; it was just that sleeping with a man meant nothing to her. There was no affection in her. I don’t think that she ever slept with anyone more than once; that was the way she was. Of course, once I was aware of what was going on, I took steps to remove the temptation.”

“Such as?” Arkady asked.

“She was working in the officers’ mess. I moved her to the crews’.”

“That sounds more like spreading temptation.”

“Anyway,” Lidia said, “she became obsessed with
Americans, so you see that there’s no need to even mention our good Soviet men at all.”

Arkady asked, “Obsessed with Americans or with one American in particular?”

“See how sharp he is!” Natasha said proudly.

Lidia answered evasively, “With Zina, who could say?”

Arkady tapped his head as if it might stir an idea. He had received the message Lidia was sending—don’t name the ship’s officers in any report—but he didn’t understand her reason for sending it.

“He’s thinking,” Natasha said.

He seemed to have dislodged a new headache. “Did you go to the dance?”

“No,” Lidia said. “That night I had to prepare a buffet in the officers’ wardroom for the Americans. Sausages, pickles, delicacies they don’t have on their own boat. We were too busy to dance.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Captain Marchuk, Captain Morgan, Captain Thorwald and myself. The American crews went on to the dance, but the captains were going over charts and I was serving and cleaning.”

“All evening?”

“Yes. No, I did take one break, a cigarette on deck.”

Arkady remembered that at 11:15 Skiba saw her walking forward at midships. “Someone saw you.”

Lidia put a lot of work into hesitating, batting her eyelashes, even delivering a sigh from the bosom. “It doesn’t mean anything, I’m sure. I saw Susan at the stern rail.”

“What was she wearing?”

The question took Lidia by surprise. “Well, a white shirt and jeans, I suppose.”

“And Zina, what was she wearing?”

“A white shirt, I think, and blue pants.”

“So you saw Zina too.”

Lidia blinked, like a person walking off an unexpected step. “Yes.”

“Where?”

“The stern deck.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You were close enough at night to know what two different women were wearing and neither of them saw you?”

“I have excellent eyes. The captain often says he wishes he had an officer with eyes as good as mine.”

“How many times have you sailed with Captain Marchuk?”

Lidia’s excellent eyes brightened like a pair of candles. “This is my third voyage with Viktor Sergeievich. He became a leading captain of the fleet on our first trip. On the second, he overfulfilled the quota by forty percent and was named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He was also named a delegate of the Party Congress. They know him in Moscow; they have big plans for him.”

Arkady finished the wine and got to his feet, which felt not excellent or even good but serviceable. His brain was finally working. “Thank you.”

“I can get us some smoked fish,” Lidia offered. “We can have more wine, a little something to eat.”

He tried a tentative step or two. It looked as if he’d make the door.

“Arkady,” Natasha said, “be careful where you throw the first stone.”

The bridge was dark except for the green glow of radar and loran screens, of VHF and side-band radio displays, of the glass ball of the gyrocompass, of the lunar face of the engine telegraph. The twin figures of left- and right-rudder controls stood at either side of the deck. Marchuk was at the starboard window; a helmsman was at the wheel. Arkady realized how much the
Polar Star
ran itself.
With meditative clicks the automatic pilot hewed to a course already set. The luminous numbers that seemed to hang in the air were largely information after the fact, dispensed by the factory ship as it plowed into the night.

“Renko.” Marchuk noticed Arkady. “Bukovsky is looking for you. He says you haven’t reported.”

“I’ll get to him. Comrade Captain, can we talk?”

Arkady could feel the helmsman stiffen. Factory workers did not come onto the bridge uninvited.

“Leave us,” Marchuk told the man.

“But—” Regulations were that two officers or an officer and a helmsman had to be on the bridge at all times.

“It’s all right,” Marchuk assured him. “I’ll take over. Seaman Renko will scan the heavens and seas and keep us safe from harm.”

After closing the door behind the helmsman, Marchuk checked the navigation room to be sure no one was there, then took his position behind the wheel. The bulkhead behind him held a fire-control panel and a closed box of radiation meters; these were in case of war. Whenever the autopilot clicked, adjusting to a swell, the wheel made a barely perceptible turn.

“Did you sleep with Zina Patiashvili?” Arkady asked.

For a while Marchuk said nothing. Oversized wipers spread snow on the windshield, and through the streaks Arkady could see anchor winches riding the bow deck and little arabesques that were counterclockwise coils of rope on either side of the winches. Beyond, in the wide beam of the searchlight, was a seemingly solid wall of snow. It was cold on the bridge, and his shakes started again. The radar monitor in the windshield counter was a Foruna—Japanese. Its ever-moving beam, a little fragmented by the snow, showed two blips keeping pace—the
Eagle
and the
Merry Jane
, he assumed. At least the echo sounder was Soviet, a Kalmar; it said the
Polar Star
was making fifteen knots over the bottom, which meant that the old ship had the aid of a following sea. According
to the terms of the joint fishery, Soviet ships weren’t allowed to use their echo sounders in American waters, but no captain would sail blindly while Americans were off the bridge.

“This is the way you run an investigation?” Marchuk asked. “With wild accusations?”

“With the time limit I have, yes.”

“I hear you took Chaikovskaya as your assistant. A strange choice.”

“No stranger than your picking me.”

“There are cigarettes on the counter. Light one for me.”

Marlboros. As Arkady lit one for him the captain stared across the flame at his face. It was an intimidation that strong men practiced to catch a flinch. “You have a fever?”

“A chill.”

“Slava calls you and Natasha his ‘pair of deuces.’ What do you think about that?”

“Slava could use a pair of deuces.”

“Natasha said something about me?”

“She introduced me to Lidia.”

“Lidia told you?” Marchuk was startled.

“Not meaning to.” Arkady blew out the match, then wandered back to the windshield and the lethargic rhythm of the wipers. The fog had been brooding up to this snow. If fog was thought, snow was action. “She heard I was asking about Zina and officers. She was concerned about your reputation and confided to me that you already had a lover—herself. Why? As she says, everyone, including your wife, knows that you sleep with your
bufetchitsa
. Even I knew it. She was trying to stop a line of questioning, to throw herself in front of a train for you.”

“Then you’re guessing.”

“I
was
guessing. When?”

The wheel clicked right, left, left, held course. On the
counter, the echo sounder displayed the depth: ten fathoms. Such a shallow sea.

Marchuk either cleared his throat or laughed. “In port. I was there for so long while the ship was hauled out. Generally, you know, I’m busy during repairs because the yards outfit you with such shit—inferior plates, bad welding, cracked boiler mounts. The navy gets the quality goods, so it’s a full-time job to wheedle any decent brass, copper, alternators. This time it was all taken care of.

“In short, I was bored, and the wife had been in Kiev for a month. Look, this is a typical maudlin story. I took out some navy men who wanted to eat at a real sailors’ restaurant. The Golden Horn. Zina was a waitress there. We all made a pass at her. After my guests were drunk enough to be put to bed, I went back. That was the one and only time. I didn’t even know her last name. You can imagine my surprise when I saw her on board.”

“Did she ask to sail on the
Polar Star
?”

“She asked, but a captain doesn’t have that authority.”

It sounded like the truth, Arkady thought. Even if Marchuk had arranged her berth, he certainly wouldn’t have placed her under the eye of Lidia Taratuta. “Did you see Zina the night of the dance?”

“I was in the wardroom. I had a buffet set out for the American fishermen.”

“From?”

“From the
Eagle
and the
Merry Jane
. The crews went to the dance and the captains stayed to argue over sea charts.”

“Captains have different opinions?”

“Or they wouldn’t be captains. Of course there are different qualifications. A Soviet captain must study six years in a maritime academy, then have two years as a coast mate, then two years as a deepwater mate to finally qualify as a deepwater captain. There are always a few-let them be nameless—who think a father in the Ministry
can make them an officer, but they’re rare. A Soviet captain has degrees in navigation, electronics, construction and law. If an American
buys
a boat, he becomes a captain. The point is, when we leave Dutch Harbor we’re going to the ice sheet. That’s good fishing, but you have to know what you’re doing.”