Polar Star (39 page)

“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 go 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 a good thing. The other way leads back to the cave, doesn’t it?”

28
Arkady went through the bridge-house 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 urka like Karp excelled at. The lights would go out, and when they came on again he’d be gone, 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 disheveled 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 twenty-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 one, the guilt-ridden one, 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?” He 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 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. “Okay. 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 taller than Susan, the trawlmaster gazed over her into her 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 explained. “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. “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 up the volume of her player, 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 toward him. If it was possible to step back to that moment in Dutch Harbor when he’d suddenly left, they were there now.

She seemed weightless. The rest of the world became soundless, as if the tape were 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?

His jacket and clothes fell, sloughed off like an old skin. Perhaps this was what being alive was like: the heart hammering within the chest, a second heart answering outside, being doubly alive. His body was like another man who had been entombed and, now let free, was in control. He himself was swept along. She clung to him, climbed him, wrapped herself around him. They tottered dizzily against the bulkhead and then he was in her.

At what point does antagonism twist, turn and become desire? Is heat so interchangeable, or only masked? Why do suspicions already bear their answers? How did he know she would taste like this?

“I knew I was in trouble,” she whispered, “when I heard about Volovoi and Mike and my first thought was, How is Arkady?”

She curled against him as if dying even while, inside, she held him tighter. He held her and helped her move. Standing, they were like two people walking a tightrope in the dark, so high up that they preferred the dark.

“Susan—”

“Another first,” she said into his ear. “My name.”

They slowly sank to their knees and then to her back on the deck. He felt her wide brown eyes watching. Cat’s eyes, night eyes. Her legs spread like wings.

As he had borne her standing, she carried him now, both on top and deeper within, to the unseen torch in the dark, as if the cold metal of the deck were warm water.