Polar Star (4 page)

In fact, on display in the hall was a board that kept count of the competition between the three watches, the winner each week being awarded a gold pennant. So many points were awarded for the quantity of fish caught, for the quality of fish processed, for the percentage of the all-important quota. Karp’s team won the pennant month after month. Because Arkady’s factory team had the same shift, they won too.
YOU ARE BUILDING COMMUNISM BY FEEDING THE SOVIET PEOPLE
! said the banner over the board. That was him and Karp!

The trawlmaster idly shook out a cigarette. Deckhands didn’t take much notice of crew that worked below. He
hardly glanced at Slava. On the screen, white packets were being passed from one secret agent to another.

“Heroin,” Karp said.

“Or sugar,” said Arkady. That was hard to get, too.

“Trawlmaster Korobetz was the one who found Zina.” Slava changed the subject.

“What time was that?” Arkady asked.

“About 0300,” Karp said.

“Was there anything else in the net?”

“No. Why are
you
asking questions?” Karp demanded in turn. The quality of his gaze had changed, as if a statue had opened its eyes.

“Supposedly Seaman Renko has experience in matters like this,” Slava said.

“In falling overboard?” Karp asked.

“Did you know her?”

“I only saw her around here. She served food.” Karp’s interest was growing all the time. He tried Arkady’s name like a bell. “Renko, Renko. Where are you from?”

“Moscow,” Slava answered for Arkady.

“Moscow?” Karp whistled appreciatively. “You must have really fucked up to end up here.”

“But here we are, all of us proud workers of the Far East fleet,” Volovoi said as he joined them, and with an eye to another newcomer, an American boy with freckles and a bush of springy hair who was coming warily down the hall. “Bernie, go in, please,” Volovoi urged him. “It’s a spy story. Very exciting.”

“You mean we’re the villains, right?” Bernie had a sheepish grin and only a slight accent.

“How could it be a spy story otherwise?” Volovoi laughed.

“Think of it as a comedy,” Arkady suggested.

“Yeah.” Bernie liked that.

“Please, enjoy yourself,” Volovoi said, although he had stopped laughing. “Comrade Bukovsky will find you a good seat.”

The first mate took Arkady down the hall to the ship’s library, a room where a reader had to slip sideways between the stacks. In such a limited collection it was interesting to see who was represented. Jack London was popular, as were war stories, science fiction and a field of literature called tractor romances. Volovoi dismissed the librarian and sat himself at her desk, pushing to one side her tea cozy, pots of glue and books with broken spines to make room for a dossier he pulled out of his briefcase. Arkady had tried to stay out of the political officer’s way, hanging back at meetings and avoiding entertainments. It was the first time the two of them had ever been alone.

Although Volovoi was the ship’s first mate and habitually wore a canvas fishing jacket and boots, he never touched the helm, a net or a navigational chart. The reason was that a first mate was the political officer. There was a chief mate for more mundane matters having to do with fishing and seamanship. Very confusing. First Mate Volovoi was responsible for discipline and morale; for hand-painted signs in the corridor that proclaimed
THIRD SHIFT WINS GOLD PENNANT FOR SOCIALIST COMPETITION
!; for announcing the news every noon on the ship’s radio, mixing telegrams to proud crew members about babies born in Vladivostok with items from revolutionary Mozambique; for running movies and volleyball tournaments; and most important, for writing a work and political evaluation of every member of the crew from the captain on down, and delivering that judgment to the Maritime Section of the KGB.

Not that Volovoi was a weakling. He was the ship’s champion weight lifter, the kind of redhead whose eyes were always pink, whose eyelids and lips had a crust of eczema, whose meaty, well-kept hands had golden hair. Crewmen called political officers “invalids” for their lack of real work, but Fedor Volovoi was the healthiest invalid Arkady had ever seen.

“Renko,” Volovoi read, as if familiarizing himself with a problem. “Chief investigator. Dismissed. Expelled from the Party. Psychiatric rehabilitation. You see, I have the same file the captain has. Assigned to labor in the eastern section of the Russian Republic.”

“Siberia.”

“I know where the eastern section is. I notice also that you have a sense of humor.”

“That’s basically what I’ve been working on for the last few years.”

“Good, because I also have a more complete report.” Volovoi placed a thicker dossier on the desk. “There was a murder case in Moscow. Somehow it ended with you killing the city prosecutor, an unexpected twist. Who is Colonel Pribluda?”

“An officer of the KGB. He spoke for me at the inquiry, which decided not to charge me.”

“You were also expelled from the Party and kept for psychiatric observation. Is that the fate of an innocent man?”

“Innocence had nothing to do with it.”

“And who is Irina Asanova?” Volovoi read the name.

“A former Soviet citizen.”

“You mean a woman whom you helped to defect and who has since been a source of slanderous rumors about your fate.”

“What are the rumors?” Arkady asked. “How far off?”

“Have you been in contact with her?”

“From here?”

“You’ve been questioned before.”

“Many times.”

Volovoi flipped the pages of the dossier. “ ‘Political unreliability.’ … ‘Political unreliability.’ Let me tell you what is humorous to me as first mate. In a few days we will be in Dutch Harbor. Everyone on this ship will go into port for shopping, with one exception: you. Because
everyone on this ship has a Number One seaman’s visa, with one exception: you. I must assume you have only a Number Two visa because those people who should know believe you cannot be trusted with foreigners or in a foreign port. Yet you are the man the captain wants to assist Bukovsky, even to help him speak to the Americans on board or to those on the trawlers. That’s either humorous or very odd.”

Arkady shrugged. “Humor is such a personal thing.”

“But to be expelled from the Party …” The Invalid liked hitting that nail, Arkady thought. Never mind dismissal and exile; the real punishment, the fear of every apparatchik, was losing his Party card. Molotov, for example, was denounced for writing up the murder lists of thousands of Stalin’s victims. He wasn’t in real trouble, though, until they took away his card.

“Membership in the Party was too great an honor. I could not bear it.”

“So it seems.” Volovoi pondered the file again. Perhaps the words were too painful. He lifted his eyes to the bookshelves, as if no story there could be so tawdry. “The captain, of course, is a Party member. Like many sea captains, however, he has a decisive nature, a personality that enjoys risk. He’s astute about fishing, about avoiding icebergs, simply going to starboard or port. But politics and human personality are more complicated, more dangerous. Of course he wants to know what happened to the dead girl. We all do. Nothing is more important. That’s why the proper control of any inquiry is vital.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Arkady admitted.

“And didn’t listen. Then you were a Party member, a high official, a man with a title. I see by your file that you haven’t been on shore for almost a year. Renko, you’re a prisoner on this ship. When we return to Vladivostok, while your cabin mates return to their girlfriends or families, you will be met by the Border Guard, an arm
of State Security. You know that or you would have left the ship the last time we were home. You have no home, no place to go. Your only hope is a strongly positive evaluation from the
Polar Star
. I am the officer who writes that evaluation.”

“What do you want?”

“I expect,” Volovoi said, “to be closely and quietly informed before any report is made to the captain.”

“Ah.” Arkady bowed his head. “Well, it’s not an investigation; it’s only asking questions for a day. I’m not in charge.”

“Since Slava Bukovsky speaks little English, it’s obvious you will do some of the questioning. Questions have to be asked, the truth ascertained, before any proper conclusion can be reached. It’s important that no information be given to the Americans.”

“I can only do my best. Would you like accidental death? We’ve considered food poisoning. Homicide?”

“It’s also important to protect the name of the ship.”

“Suicide comes in many forms.”

“And the reputation of the unfortunate worker.”

“We could declare her still alive and name her the Queen of Fisherman’s Day. Whatever you want. Write it out and I’ll sign it right now.”

Volovoi slowly closed the dossier, dropped it into his briefcase, pushed back his chair, and stood. His pinkish eyes became a little redder and more fixed, the instinctive reaction of a man sighting a natural enemy.

Arkady gazed back.
I know you, too
. “Do I have permission to leave, Comrade?”

“Yes.” Volovoi’s voice had gone dry. “Renko,” he added as Arkady turned to go.

“Yes?”

“Suicide, I think, is what you’re best at.”

4
Zina Patiashvili lay on the table, her head resting on a wooden block. She had been pretty, with the nearly Grecian profile that Georgian girls sometimes possessed. Full lips, a graceful neck and limbs, a black pubic stripe and a head of blond hair. What had she wanted to be, a Scandinavian? She had gone into the sea, touched bottom and returned with no apparent signs of corruption aside from the stillness of death. After the tension of rigor mortis all flesh became slack on the bone: breasts sagged on the ribs, mouth and jaw were loose, eyes flattened under half-open lids, the skin bore a luminous pallor mottled with bruises. And the smell. The operating room was no morgue, with a morgue’s investment of formaldehyde, and the body was enough to fill the room with an odor like the stench of soured milk.

Arkady lit a second Belomor straight from the first and filled his lungs again. Russian tobacco, the stronger the better. On a medical chart he drew four silhouettes: front, back, right side, left.

Zina seemed to levitate in the flash of Slava’s camera, then settle back on the table as her shadow faded. At first
the third mate had resisted attending the autopsy, but Arkady had insisted so that Slava, already hostile, couldn’t later claim any findings were prejudiced or incomplete. If this was a last twinge of professional pride on Arkady’s part, he didn’t know whether to be amused at himself or disgusted. The adventures of a fish gutter! At this point, Slava was snapping pictures like a combat-hardened photojournalist from
Tass
, while Arkady felt ill.

“Altogether,” Dr. Vainu was saying, “this trip has been a great disappointment. Back on land I had a good trade in sedatives. Valeryanka, Pentalginum, even foreign pills. But the women on this boat are a group of Amazons. Not even many abortions.”

Vainu was a young consumptive who generally received patients in his leisure suit and slippers, but for the autopsy he wore a lab coat with an ink-stained pocket. As always, he chain-smoked cigarettes laced with antistormine for seasickness. He held the cigarette between his fourth and little fingers, so that every time he took a puff his hand covered his face like a mask. On a side table were his surgical tools: scalpels, protractors, clamps, a small rotary saw for amputations. On the table’s lower shelf was a steel pan holding Zina’s clothes.

“Sorry about the time of death,” Vainu added airily, “but who in his right mind would believe a trawl would pick her up more than a day after she went over?”

Arkady tried to smoke and draw at the same time. In Moscow a pathologist did the actual work and the investigator only walked in and out. There were laboratories, teams of forensic specialists, a professional apparatus and the steadying hand of routine. One comfort of the past few years had been the idea that he would never have to deal with victims again. Certainly not a girl out of the sea. A salty rankness underlay the smell of death. It was the smell of all the fish that had come down the factory line, and now of this girl from the same net, her hair
matted, her arms, legs and breasts purpled with pooled blood.

“Besides, estimating a time of death from rigor mortis is very chancy, especially in cold conditions,” Vainu went on. “It’s only a contraction caused by chemical reactions after death. Did you know that if you cut a fish fillet before rigor mortis the flesh will still shrink and get tough?”

The pen slipped from Arkady’s hand and his boot kicked it when he stooped for it.

“You’d think this was your first autopsy.” Slava picked up the pen and surveyed the table clinically. He turned to the doctor. “She seems pretty bruised. Think she hit the propeller?”

“But her clothes weren’t torn. Fists, not a propeller, from my experience,” Vainu said.

Vainu’s experience? He was trained in broken bones and appendectomies. Everything else was handled with green liniment or aspirin because, as he said, the infirmary dealt primarily in alcohol and drugs. That was why the table had restraining straps. The
Polar Star
had run out of morphine a month ago.