Free Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

for that,” Arkady answered.
    “Fuck that!” Coletti exploded. “We don’t know what happened to Zina. We don’t know if she took a swan dive or what, but we were off that fucking boat before anything happened.”
    “Coletti.” Morgan stepped in front of him. “Someday I’m going to open up your head just to see how small your brain is.”
    Ridley eased Coletti back with a touch. “Hey, we’re all friends. Take it easy like Arkady. See how he watches.”
    “Yes.” Morgan noticed; he told Arkady, “We apologize. Whatever happened to Zina was a tragedy, but we hope it doesn’t affect the joint venture. We all believe in it.”
    “We’d be shit out of work if we didn’t have it,” Ridley said. “And we like making new friends, having Slava play his sax or explain all about perestroika and how the Soviet Union from top to bottom is thinking in new ways.”
    “Thinking in new ways” was a catchphrase of the new men in the Kremlin, as if Soviet brains could be rewired like circuit boards.
    “Are you thinking in new ways?” Ridley asked Arkady.
    “I try.”
    “A senior man like you has to keep up,” Ridley said.
    Slava said, “He just works in the factory.”
    “No.” Coletti disagreed as if he had special information. “I used to be a cop and I can smell another cop. He’s a cop.”
    *
    Being lifted by cage up the
Polar Star
’s hull was like floating across a great curtain of suppurating steel.
    Slava was furious. “We made fools of ourselves. This is a Soviet affair; it has nothing to do with them.”
    “It doesn’t seem to,” Arkady agreed.
    “Then what is there to be cheerful about?”
    “Oh, I think of all the fish I didn’t see today.”
    “That’s all?”
    Arkady looked down through the open bars of the cage at the catcher boat below. “The
Eagle
has a low hull. I wouldn’t take it into the ice.”
    “What do you know about trawlers?” Slava demanded.
    There had been the Sakhalin trawler. Captured from the Japanese during the war, it was a little drift trawler, a porous wooden hull around an ancient diesel. Wherever paint peeled, ghostly Japanese markings emerged. There was no trouble getting a berth on a vessel overdue to sink, especially when the captain had a simple quota: cram the hold with salmon until the boat shipped water. As the new man, Arkady was stuffed into the warp hole; when the net was pulled in he had to run in a crouch around and around, coiling a hawser spiked with frayed metal threads. As the hawser filled the hole he circled on all fours like a rat in a coffin, then climbed out to help shake the net. By the second day he could barely raise his hands, though once he got the knack he developed the first shoulders he’d had since the army.
    The lesson of that foul little boat was that fishermen had to be able to get along in a confined space for long periods of time. All the rest—knowing how to wind or mend—meant nothing if a man set his shipmates on edge. Arkady had never seen as much antagonism on that trawler as he had witnessed on the glittering bridge of the
Eagle
.
    The cage swayed with Slava’s agitation. “You had a day off, that’s all you wanted.”
    “It was interesting,” Arkady granted. “Americans are a change.”
    “Well, I can promise you that you’re not getting off the
Polar Star
again. What are you going to do now?”
    Arkady shrugged. “There were people on special duty during the dance. I’ll ask whether any of them saw Zina on deck or below. Try to find out when the Americans actually left the ship. Talk to people who were at the dance. Talk to women she worked with in the galley. I want to talk to Karp again.”
    “After we talk to the women we’ll split up,” Slava said. “I’ll take Karp. You take the crew belowdecks—that’s more your style.”
    The cage cleared the side and began its descent toward the familiar scrofulous deck and the barrels heaped like a high-tide line of sea trash around the stack.
    “You put