Polar Star (26 page)

A grandmotherly woman smiled from a counter. She wore a mohair sweater as white as an Arctic fox, and her hair was an astonishing silver-blue. Spread out on the counter before her were sliced oranges, apples and crackers smeared with pâté. A card on an electric urn said in Russian
COFFEE
. There was also a cash register, and she was taking money from some sophisticated seamen who simply carried their stereos to her. At her back a large sign announced, again in Russian,
DUTCH HARBOR WELCOMES THE POLAR STAR
!

Kolya seemed relieved until another thought struck him. “Arkady, what are you doing here? You don’t have the right visa.”

“I have special dispensation.”

Arkady was still trying to get his land legs. There was roll and pitch even on a factory ship, and after ten months his body didn’t trust level, motionless ground. The fluorescent lights and shiny colors of the store displays seemed to swim around him.

“I thought you were a factory worker, and you become an investigator,” Kolya said. “I thought you couldn’t go ashore, and suddenly you’re here.”

“I’m confused myself,” Arkady admitted.

Although Kolya had more questions, his eyes had lit on a rack of blank low-bias cassette tapes, which held a magnetic attraction for him. Arkady had caught a few other astonished glances in his direction, but everyone was too busy in this brief paradise to ask questions. One
figure did stop; from the end of an aisle, the informer Slezko gawked in alarm, a gold tooth brightening his gray face. In his hands was a box of electric rollers-evidence that somewhere there was a Mrs. Slezko va.

“Ugggh.” A machinist recoiled from his first bite of a cracker. “What kind of meat is in this pâté?”

“Peanuts,” Izrail told him. “It’s peanut butter.”

“Oh.” The machinist took another nibble. “Not bad.”

“Renko, you’re a regular Lazarus,” Izrail said. “You keep popping up. This business with Zina, it’s not over, is it? I see your look of determination and my heart sinks.”

“Arkady, you came!” Natasha seized his arm as if he had appeared at a ball. “This proves it. You are a trustworthy citizen or they wouldn’t have let you. What did Volovoi say?”

“I can’t wait to hear,” Arkady said. “What have you bought so far?”

She blushed. The only purchase in her net bag was two oranges. “Clothes are upstairs,” she said. “Jeans, jogging gear, running shoes.”

“Bathrobes and slippers,” Madame Malzeva butted in.

Gury had strapped on a heavy safari watch with a compass built into the strap. He turned in different directions as he moved to the counter, like a man dancing alone. “Apple?” The woman with blue hair offered him a slice.

“Yamaha.” Gury tried his English. “Software, programs, blank disks.”

Without money, Arkady felt like a voyeur. As the two women swept toward the stairs he retreated in the opposite direction. Passing by the food aisles, he saw Lidia Taratuta cramming her bag with instant coffee. Two mechanics shared a box of ice cream popsicles; they leaned against a freezer, popsicles in hand, like a pair of drunks. How could they resist? Soviet advertising consisted of the directive “Buy …!” The package might bear a star, a flag or a factory’s profile. In contrast, American packaging
was promiscuously splashed with color pictures of untouchably beautiful women and winsome children enjoying “New and Improved” products. Lidia had moved on to detergents and was starting to fill a shopping cart.

Even Arkady stopped at the produce section. Yes, the lettuce was browning and wrapped in cellophane, the bananas were liver-spotted with age, and many of the grapes were split and weeping, but they were the first uncanned, unsyruped fruit he had seen in four months, so he paused to pay his respects. Then the only member of the
Polar Star
’s crew able to resist the blandishments of capitalism went out into the road.

The northern afternoon had settled into a slowly dimming light that gently revealed the wide plaza of mud that was the center of Dutch Harbor. On one side was the store, on the other the hotel. Both were prefabricated shells of ribbed metal walls and sliding windows, and were so long they suggested that some lower floors had sunk into the mud and disappeared. A score of smaller prefabricated houses took shelter on the lower ridge of a hill. There were shipping containers and dumpsters for storage and trash, and stray unraveling heaps of suction hose used for off-loading fish. Mostly there was mud. The roads were frozen waves of mud; panel trucks and vans rocked like boats as they moved across the plaza, and each vehicle wore a skirt of mud. Every man-made structure was earth-toned, ocher or tan, a calculated surrender to mud. Even the snow was stained with it, yet Arkady could have lain down and wallowed in it, in the unyielding, toothy grip of cold mud.

A dozen Soviets stood outside the store, either because they were putting off the climactic act of shopping or because sheer excitement had impelled them to take a break and step out for a cigarette. They stood in a circle, as if it were safer to look at the town over another man’s shoulder.

“It’s not so different from home, you know,” said one. “This could be Siberia.”

“We use preformed concrete,” said another.

“The point is, it’s just like Volovoi said. I didn’t believe him.”

“This is a typical American town?” asked a third.

“That’s what the first mate said.”

“It’s not what I expected.”

“We use concrete.”

“That’s not the point.”

Looking around, Arkady saw three roads leading from the square: one along the bay to the tank farm, a second to the Aleut side of the bay and a third headed inland. Earlier, from the ship, he had noticed other anchorages and an airport on the island.

The conversation continued. “All those foods, all those radios. You think it’s normal? I saw a documentary. The reason their stores have so much food is that people don’t have any money to buy it.”

“Come on.”

“True. Posner said it on television. He likes Americans, but he said it.”

Arkady took out a Belomor, though a
papirosa
seemed out of place. He noticed that the store also housed a bank on the first floor and some offices on the second. In the early dusk their lights had a stove-grate warmth. Across the road, the hotel had smaller, blearier windows, except for the blazing plate-glass front of a liquor store, which the crew had been warned to avoid.

“There’s a place like that at home. A seamen’s hostel, ten kopeks a night. I wonder how much that is?”

“I wonder how many men to a room?”

The second floor of the hotel overhung the first, making a protected walkway that must have served during the rainy season or when snow piled high during the winter. On the other hand, the population of Dutch Harbor would halve in November when the fishing season ended.

“The point is, all your life you hear about a place and it becomes fantastic. Like a friend of mine went to Egypt. He read up on pharaohs and temples and pyramids. He came back with diseases you wouldn’t believe.”

“Sshh, here comes one now.”

A woman about thirty was headed for the store. Her hair had been teased into a yellow froth and her face was made up into a pout. In spite of the cold, she wore only a short rabbit-skin jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. The circle of Soviet cosmopolitans admired the view of the bay. An African warrior with a spear could have walked by them without their attention wavering from the water. Not until she was past did they glance after her.

“Not bad.”

“Not so different.”

“That’s my point. Not better.” This one kicked at the mud appreciatively, inhaled deeply and gave the dour hotel, hills and bay an authoritative sweep of his eyes.

“I like it.”

One by one they killed their cigarettes, tacitly arranged themselves into the prescribed groups of four and, working up their courage with an interchange of shrugs and nods, began moving back into the store. “I wonder,” one asked on the way, “can you buy those boots here?”

Arkady was thinking of the end of
Crime and Punishment
, of Raskolnikov redeemed on the bank overlooking the sea. Maybe he had been seduced in part by Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the intelligent interrogator into becoming an investigator himself; yet here, at this midpoint in life, by some twist he wasn’t the police but the criminal, a kind of unconvicted convict standing by the Pacific just like Raskolnikov, but on the other side of the ocean. How long before Volovoi had him dragged back to the ship? Would he cling to the ground like a crab when they came for him? He knew he didn’t want to go. It was so restful to stand still in the shadow of a hill and to know that the hill, fixed, unlike a wave, was not going
to slide underfoot. The grass trembling in the breeze would still be on that same slope tomorrow. Clouds would collect at the same peaks and light like flames at sunset. The mud itself would freeze and melt according to the season, but it would still be there.

“I saw you and couldn’t believe it.” Susan had come out of the hotel and crossed the road. Her jacket, the one she had worn from the boat, was askew, her hair was rumpled and her eyes were wild, as if she’d been crying. “Then I said to myself, Of course he’s here. I mean, I had almost believed that someone on the slime line might just possibly have been, long ago, a detective. And spoke English. After all, that’s the sort of man who would have gotten into so much trouble that he wouldn’t have a visa to come ashore. It was just possible. Then I look out the lobby door and who do I see? You. Standing here like you own the island.”

At first he thought she was drunk. Women drink, even Americans. He saw Hess and Marchuk emerge from the hotel, followed by George Morgan. All three were in shirt sleeves, though the captain of the
Eagle
still wore his cap.

“What is today’s story?” Susan asked. “What is the operative fairy tale?”

“Zina killed herself,” Arkady said.

“And as your reward you come ashore? Does that make sense to you?”

“No,” Arkady confessed.

“Let’s try it a different way.” She aimed her finger at him as if it were a sharp stick extended at a snake. “You killed her and as your reward you come ashore. Now
that
makes sense.”

Morgan grabbed the sleeve of Susan’s jacket and pulled her away from Arkady. “Will you think about what you’re saying?”

“You two bastards.” She swung her arm free. “You probably cooked it up together.”

“All I’m asking,” Morgan told her, “is that you think about what you’re saying.”

She attempted to return to Arkady by going around Morgan, but he held his arms out.

“What a pair you make,” she said.

“Calm down.” Morgan tried a soothing voice. “Don’t say anything that we’re all going to regret. Because it can get very messy, Susan, you know that.”

“What a perfect pair of bastards.” She turned away in disgust and stared at the sky—a trick, Arkady knew, to hold in tears.

When Morgan began, “Susan—” she silenced him by holding up her hand, and without another word started back to the hotel.

Morgan turned a bent smile toward Arkady. “Sorry, I don’t know what that was about.”

Susan pushed between Marchuk and Hess as she went into the hotel. They joined Morgan and Arkady in the road. The Soviet captain already had the glitter of a man who has had a drink or two. It was cold enough now for breath to show. There was an air of male embarrassment about Susan’s behavior.

“Of course,” Morgan said, “she has just learned that her replacement had to go back to Seattle. She’s going to have to stay on the
Polar Star
.”

“That could do it,” Arkady said.

19
Arkady and the two other Soviets had beers at a table that was redwood caramelized in plastic. As a body bounced against the shoulder-high partition that separated them from the bar, Marchuk observed, “When Americans get drunk they get loud. A Russian gets more serious. He drinks until he falls with dignity, like a tree.” He pondered his beer for a moment. “You’re not going to run on us?”

“No,” Arkady said.

“Understand, it’s one thing to take a man off the slime line and let him loose on the ship. It’s another to let him off the ship. What do you think happens to a master whose seaman defects? A master who allows a man with your visa to go ashore?” He leaned forward, as if pinning Arkady’s eyes. “You tell me.”

“They probably still need a watchman in Norilsk.”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll come after you and kill you myself. Of course you have my wholehearted support, but I thought you should know.”

“Cheers.” Arkady liked an honest man.

“Congratulations.” George Morgan pulled up a chair
and touched his bottle to Arkady’s. “I understand you solved your mystery. Suicide?”

“She left a note.”

“Lucky.” Morgan was the unruffled man in control again. Not a black-bearded tiger like Marchuk or a gnome like Hess, but a professional’s smooth face pierced by two blue eyes.

“We were just saying what an unusual place Dutch Harbor is,” Hess said.

“We’re closer to the North Pole than to the rest of the States,” Morgan said. “It’s strange.”