Polar Star (43 page)

“The one thing he couldn’t stop was the net going back and forth. How did you know when a package was coming?”

“Simple,” Karp said. “Ridley waved if they were delivering something besides fish and Coletti waved if they weren’t. I looked to see where Zina stood at the rail, starboard side or port. Then I told the men on the ramp the net looked heavy or it didn’t.”

“If it was, they found a waterproof package on the headrope of the bag?”

“You’d be good at this. Pavel would cut it off and slip it in his life vest. Then Zina signaled if we were sending a package back. Renko, what’s the point? You’re not getting away alive.”

“When you don’t worry about that, you can learn a lot.”

“Yeah.” Karp saw merit in the concept.

“And I’m interested in Zina,” Arkady added.

“Men were always interested in Zina. She was like a queen.” Karp’s gaze wandered up toward the percussive
chorus of hammers on deck, then dropped back; Arkady had never felt eyes so attentive.

“Could you have caught up with me on the ice?” Arkady asked.

“If I’d wanted to.”

“You could have killed me a minute ago, ten minutes ago?”

“Whenever.”

“Then you want to know what happened to Zina, too.”

“I just want to know what you meant on the ramp last night about Zina being thrown into the water.”

“Simple curiosity?”

Karp had the metallic stillness of a statue. After a long pause he said, “Go on, Comrade Investigator. Zina was at the dance.…”

“Zina went and flirted with Mike, but she didn’t say good-bye to him when he transferred back to the
Eagle
because she’d gone to the stern deck forty-five minutes before. She was seen there by Marchuk, Lidia, Susan. Thirty minutes before Mike transferred, Zina wasn’t seen on the
Polar Star
again. By the time he transferred, she was dead.” From his jacket Arkady slowly took out a piece of paper that he unfolded for Karp. It was a copy of the physical examination. “She was killed by a blow to the back of the head. She was stabbed so she wouldn’t float. She was stowed somewhere on this boat, bent and crammed in some small space that left these regular marks on her side. That’s what I came to find—that space. A wardrobe, a closet, a hold, a bin.”

“A piece of paper.” Karp shoved it back.

“That space is here or it isn’t. I have to look in the other cabin,” Arkady said, but he didn’t dare move.

Karp rolled the ax handle thoughtfully. The single-edged head turned reflectively, like a coin. He pushed the door open. “We’ll look together.”

Passing through the galley, Arkady heard hammers taking full swings, as if the Americans were trying to carve
their way home. He felt the ax cocked at his back and sweat rolling down his spine.

Karp prodded him into the starboard cabin. A real blanket covered this bunk. A railed shelf displayed books on philosophy, electronics and diesel mechanics. On the bulkhead hung a holster and a picture of a man sticking out his tongue. The man in the picture was Einstein.

“Ridley,” Arkady said in answer to himself.

“She disappeared from the
Polar Star
 … then what?” Karp demanded.

“Remember, you pointed out Slava to her when he was sailing.” Arkady spoke faster. Ridley’s bunk drawer held clean clothes neatly folded; leather wristbands and silver ear studs; photos of himself skiing with two women, touching wineglasses with a third; books of Hindu prayer; playing cards; an electronic game of chess; a lapel pin of Minnie Mouse. Arkady turned the cards face up, flipped through them and spread them on the bed.

“I wanted her on the ship, and Bukovsky had the connection. So?”

“She liked to visit men on their boats, and it must have seemed easy for a swimmer as strong as she was to take a few strokes to the
Eagle
when it was tied up to the
Polar Star
. She simply stepped off the stern ramp of the ship, Madame Malzeva’s shower cap on her head, her shoes and a change of clothes in a black plastic bag tied to one wrist. From the rail she was probably invisible.”

“Why would she do that?”

“That was her method. She moved from man to man and boat to boat.”

“No, that doesn’t answer my question,” Karp said. “She wouldn’t have taken the chance just to visit. So, Comrade Investigator, why would she do it?”

“I asked myself the same question.”

“And?”

“I don’t know.”

Karp used the ax like a long hand to push Arkady to
the wall. “See, where you went wrong, Renko, is saying that Zina would ever leave me.”

“She slept with other men.”

“To use them; that didn’t mean anything. But the Americans were partners; that’s different.”

“She was here.”

“Now that I look around, I don’t see any space like you said she was put in. Not a sign of her.” Karp glanced at the open drawer. “If you were hoping to find a gun, forget it. On this boat everyone carries his gun all the time.”

“We have to look around more,” Arkady said. He remembered fighting the trawlmaster in the bunker; the last place he wanted to dodge an ax was in the confines of a trawler cabin.

Karp’s attention fell on the playing cards spread across the bunk. Still holding the ax high, he scanned the cards back and forth. “Don’t move,” he warned. He set the ax down to pick up the cards and painstakingly thumb through them. When he was done, he squeezed them back into a pack, which he replaced in the drawer. His small eyes receded into a stricken white face of love. For a moment Arkady thought Karp would actually drop to the floor. Instead, he picked up his ax and said, “We’ll start in the engine room.”

As they opened the door to the galley another furious assault on ice began overhead. The trawlmaster only glanced upward as if at the sound of heavy rain.

The
Eagle’s
two diesel engines throbbed on their steel beds, a six-cylinder main and a four-cylinder auxiliary. This was Ridley’s domain, the warm inner boat beneath the deck where it took maneuvering to walk safely around layshafts and pulleys, generators and hydraulic pumps, wheel valves and convoluted piping. Low pipes, belt guards and every other dangerous possibility were painted
red. The path between the engines was crosshatched plating.

While Karp prowled Arkady went into the forward space, a repair room with tools, hanging belts, a table with a threader and vise, a rack with saws and drills. There was also what appeared to be the door of a refrigeration unit, though since the
Eagle
delivered its catch to the
Polar Star
, why would it need refrigeration? When he opened the door he had to laugh. Stacked to waist level were mahogany-brown, resinous one-kilo bricks of Manchurian hemp,
anasha
. Well, it was the way the major companies worked. Because the ruble wasn’t hard currency, international business was always done by barter. Soviet gas, Soviet oil, why not Soviet
anasha
?

In the narrow bow end of the refrigerator were crammed a table and chair, headphones and oscilloscope, amplifier and equalizer, mainframe, dual console and a file of floppy disks. It was much the same as Hess’s station except that the hardware was shinier and more compact, with names like EDO and Raytheon. Sure enough, below the table was a fiberglass dome. He picked a disk from the file; the label read, “Bering Menu. File: SSBN-Los Angeles. USS
Sawtooth
, USS
Patrick Henry
, USS
Manwaring
, USS
Ojai
, USS
Roger Owen.”
He flipped through the other disks; their labels read “SSBN-Ohio,” “SSGN,” “SSN.” On the table was a clipboard with a paper divided into columns that listed “Date,” “Boat,” “Position,” “Transmission Time,” “Duration.” The last transmission had been of the
Roger Owen
two days before. Arkady opened the desk drawer. Inside was an assortment of manuals and schematics. He flipped through the pages. “Acoustic simulator …” “Polyethylene-covered tow cable with acoustic section and vibration isolation module …” “Winch drum traverses axially …” There was a book titled in red letters: “You Cannot Take This Book from This Office.” The subtitle was “Reserve, Decommissioned, Dismantled
Status—1/1/83.” Under “submarines” he found that the USS
Roger Owen
had been dismantled a year ago, and that the USS
Manwaring
and the USS
Ojai
had been removed from service.

The outline of a wonderful joke was taking shape. The electronics were similar to Hess’s, with one difference: at the end of Morgan’s cable wasn’t a hydrophone for listening; instead, there was a waterproof acoustic transmitter trailing sounds like a lure. The disks were recordings, and all the submarines on them had been decommissioned or dismantled. Morgan and Hess were circling the Bering Sea, one spy sending false signals for another spy to collect in triumph. Hess must think that American subs were swarming like schools of fish. Arkady replaced the book, but pocketed the disks. From the engine room Karp paid no attention, as if nothing Arkady did at this point could matter.

Together they returned to the wet room’s intermediate damp and pegs of slickers and boots, then went back outside. Under the cover of the shelter deck lay rolls of mesh laced with ice, net bags of buoys, a welder’s table with a vise, storage lockers and oil drums of shovels and grappling hooks. The hammering overhead was intermittent, but there was no stopping Karp now. The
Eagle
had fish-holds it had never used since it began transferring nets to factory ships. With his ax, the trawlmaster chipped away the ice covering the holds. As it split it flew up in prism-like flashes. He had to use a grappling hook to lift the hatch. After all his effort, the hold was empty.

Arkady hastily concentrated on the storage lockers under the shelter deck. From the first one he emptied loose rope and blocks; from the second, rubbery legs of coveralls, gloves, torn slickers, tarp. At some previous point the box must have held wire rope, because the bottom had a mixed residue of lubricant and rust. A coffin. He could see clearly the marks where Zina’s knees and forearms
had rested. On one wall was a row of six nuts, about five centimeters apart, that had bruised her side.

“Come and look,” Arkady whispered.

Karp leaned in and came up with a tuft of hair, blond with dark roots. As Arkady reached for it, he felt something brush his neck.

“What are you doing here?” Ridley pressed the gun’s cold muzzle more firmly against Arkady’s head as Coletti came through the wet-room door with a double-barreled shotgun.

“This is an unofficial visit?” Morgan stood halfway down the wheelhouse ladder.

Ridley and Coletti looked inflated by the parkas under their slickers. Their left hands were huge with heavy gloves, their right hands bare to fit in trigger guards. Their mouths were raw and frosted by their breath, proper faces for a boat draped in white. In contrast, with his down vest and cap, Morgan looked as if he’d stepped out of a different climate. Except for his eyes; they had facets as crystalline as ice. Slung over one shoulder was a stubby automatic weapon, a military piece, its ammunition clip longer than its barrel.

“Looking for vodka?” Morgan asked. “You won’t find it there.”

“The
Polar Star
sent us,” Arkady said. “Captain Marchuk would probably appreciate a call that we made it.”

Morgan pointed to the mast. For all Ridley’s labor, the radar bar was still locked in place, the antennas still bent and sheathed in ice. “Our radios are down. Besides, you two don’t look like an official rescue party.”

“Here we are, freezing our asses off to de-ice this tub and we hear this banging on the deck and come around to find you two going through gear like a pair of bag ladies. You understand ‘bag ladies’?” Ridley twisted the barrel into the back of Arkady’s head.

“I think so.”

“I have the feeling,” Morgan said, “that no one on the
Polar Star
knows you’re gone. And if they do, there’s no way they can know you and the trawlmaster made it here. What were you looking for?”

“Zina,” Arkady said.

“Again?” the captain asked.

“This time we found her, or the only evidence that’s left of her here.”

“Like what?”

“Some hair. I took a sample from the muck at the bottom of this box, and I think I can match that with the marks on her pants. I’d prefer to have the whole storage box, of course.”

“Of course,” Morgan said. “Well, we’ll have the box clean before you get back to the
Polar Star
, and as for the hair, you could have gotten that anywhere.”

All Arkady could see of Ridley’s weapon was the cylinder of a large revolver, a cowboy gun. The approach to the back of the skull was the same style used on Mike and Zina, but whoever killed them had been a knife artist. There was no help from Karp; the trawlmaster stood immobilized, his eyes desperately chasing a foreign conversation, the grappling hook hanging limply from his hand.

“Consider the situation,” Ridley said to Morgan. “We have a lot to lose and you have a lot to lose.”

“You mean the
anasha
,” Arkady asked.

Ridley paused, then told Coletti, “They’ve been below.”

“This is where I draw the line,” Morgan told Ridley. “I’m not going to let you kill someone in front of me.”

“Captain, my captain,” Ridley said, commanding the stage as usual. “We’re trapped in the fucking ice. If Renko goes back and reports what he’s seen, the next thing you know we’ve got fifty more Soviets traipsing over for an interested look. This is a case of national security, right?”

“You just want to protect your drugs,” Morgan said.

“I could get personal, too,” Ridley answered. “At Dutch Harbor, Renko was balling your woman. He took her right away from you. He’s probably been balling her on the big ship ever since.”

Morgan looked at Arkady. The moment of denial came and went.

“How about that?” Ridley said. “Bingo! Cap, you going to let him go back now?”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” Morgan said. “I’m a professional and you’re a greedy little bastard.”

“We have a right to our stake, too.”

Arkady asked, “Why didn’t you unload the
anasha
at Dutch Harbor?”