'A number of others died too.'

'Not by my hand.'

'A German and an American.'

'Them, yes.'

'A messy business. You also helped a woman defect.'

'Not really.' Arkady shrugged. 'I had the chance to wave goodbye.'

'But you didn't go yourself. When all was said and done, you were still a Russian, That's what we count on. You know seals?'

'Seals?'

'In the winter. How they hide under the ice sheet near a hole, just coming up to breathe? Is that a little bit like you right now?'

When Arkady didn't answer, Hess said, 'You shouldn't confuse the KGB and us. I confess that sometimes we seem hard. When I was a cadet, far back in the days of Khrushchev, we set off a hydrogen device in the Arctic Sea. It was a hundred-megaton bomb, the largest ever detonated then or since. Actually, it was a fifty-megaton warhead wrapped in a uranium case to double the yield. A very dirty bomb. We didn't warn the Swedes or the Finns and we certainly didn't tell our own people who were drinking milk under this rain of fall-out a thousand times worse than Chernobyl. We didn't tell our fishermen who sailed in the Arctic Sea. I signed on as a third mate, and my mission was to take a Geiger counter without telling anyone else on board. We caught one shark that measured four hundred roentgens. What could I say to the captain - to throw his quota overboard? His crew would ask questions, and then the cry would spread. But we let the Americans know, and the result was that Kennedy was frightened enough to come to the table and sign a test-ban treaty.'

Hess let his smile fade and held Arkady's eyes, the way an executioner might briefly show his professional face to a son. Then he brightened. 'Anyway, for most of the crew, sailing on the Polar Star is no different from working in a factory anywhere, with the positive aspect of visiting a foreign port and the negative one of seasickness. For some, however, there is the attraction of freedom. It's the aura of the wide sea. We are far from port. The Border Guard is on the other side of the earth and we are in the world of the Pacific Fleet.'

'Does this mean I have your support or not?'

'Oh, definitely,' said Hess. 'Support and growing interest.'

As he left the cabin, Arkady saw the informers Skiba and Slezko slip around the end of the passageway. Walk, don't run, don't trip, Arkady thought. Don't bust your lips before you tell The Invalid what seaman visited the fleet electrical engineer's accommodations. Carry the news as if it were a mug of tea from Hess himself. Don't spill a drop.

Susan was at her cabin table, resting her head on one hand and letting cigarette smoke curl in the mop of her hair. It was actually a very Russian pose, poetic, tragic. Slava was with her and they were dining on soup and bread which Arkady suspected the third mate had brought straight from the galley.

'I'm not interrupting?' Arkady asked. 'I wouldn't have stopped, but your door was open.'

'It's my rule to keep my door open when Soviet men come to call,' Susan said. 'Even when they come bearing strange breakfasts.'

Out of her jacket and boots she was practically a girl. Brown eyes and blond hair made an interesting contrast but were hardly unique. She had neither the complete ovalness nor the Slavic cheekbones of Russian women. The cigarette marked a fuller mouth, and etched around her eyes were those first lines that made a woman more real. But she was too thin, as if Soviet food wouldn't take. Admittedly, the soup was a pasty liquid dappled with grease. She idly dredged bones which she dropped back in the stew.

'It's sweet butter,' Slava pointed out to her. 'I told Olimpiada, "No garlic cloves." Anyway, you must visit Lake Baikal. Sixteen per cent of the world's fresh water is contained in that lake.'

'How much is contained in this bowl?' Susan asked.

Arkady began, 'I was just wondering - '

Slava took a deep breath. If Arkady was going to ruin the intimacy of a civilized repast, the third mate would make him pay. 'Renko, if you have questions you should have asked them yesterday. I think I hear them calling you on the slime line.'

'I've noticed,' Susan said. 'You're always "just wondering". Wondering what?'

'How do you like fishing?' Arkady asked.

'How do I like fishing? Christ, I must love it or I wouldn't be here, right?'

'Then do it like this.' Arkady took the spoon from her hand. 'Fish. If you want the bones, then do as you're doing and trawl the bottom. But everything is at a different level. Cabbage and potatoes are a little higher off the bottom.'

'Baikal has indigenous seals . . . blind fish . . . ' Slava tried to hold the thread of his monologue. 'Many species of . . . '

'To catch an onion is more difficult,' Arkady explained. 'You must use a mid-water pelagic trawl to hunt them down. Ah!' He scooped one up in triumph. A burnt pearl.

'What about meat?' Susan asked. 'This is a meat stew.'

'Theoretically.' Arkady gave her back her spoon.

Susan ate the onion.

Slava lost patience. 'Renko, your shift is on duty.'

'This may seem a silly question,' Arkady said to Susan, 'but I was wondering what you wore to the dance.'

She laughed in spite of herself. 'Not my prom dress, that's for sure.'

'Prom?'

'Crinoline and corsage. Never mind, let's say I wore my basic shirt and jeans.'

'A white shirt and blue jeans?'

'Yes. Why do you ask?'

'Did you leave the dance for fresh air? Perhaps went out on deck?'

Susan was silent. She sat back against the bulkhead and studied him with a flare of confirmed distrust. 'You're still asking about Zina.'

Slava was outraged, too. 'That's over; you said so last night.'

'Well,' Arkady said, 'I changed my mind this morning.'

Susan said, 'Why are you so fixated on Americans? On this factory ship with hundreds of Soviets, you keep coming back to us. You're like my radio; you work in reverse.' She pointed her cigarette to a speaker built into a corner of the cabin. 'In the beginning I wondered why it didn't work. Then I climbed up and found a microphone. See, it did work, just not the way I expected.' She tilted her head and blew smoke that drifted toward Arkady like an arrow. 'When I get off at Dutch Harbor, no more imitation radio or imitation detectives. Never again. Any more questions?'

'I didn't know anything about this,' Slava promised Susan.

'Are you taking your books with you?' Arkady asked.

On the upper bunk were the typewriter and cartons of books that Arkady had admired before. What Soviet poetry and toilet paper had in common was scarcity, due to the inadequacies, despite the largest forests in the world, of the Soviet paper industry.

Susan asked, 'You want one? Besides being a slime-line worker and an investigator, you're also a book lover?'

'Some books.'

'Who do you like?' she asked.

'Susan is a writer.' Slava said. 'I like Hemingway myself.'

'Russian writers,' Susan told Arkady. 'You're Russian and you have a Russian soul. Name one.'

'You have so many.' More good books than the library on board, he thought.

'Akhmatova?'

'Naturally.' Arkady shrugged.

Susan recited, ' "What do you want," I asked.

"To be with you in Hell," he said.'

Arkady picked up the next verse, 'He lifted his thin hand and lightly stroked the flowers: "Tell me how men kiss you, Tell me how you kiss." '

Slava looked back and forth from Susan to Arkady.

'Everybody knows that one by heart,' Arkady said. 'People do when books can't be bought.'

Susan dropped her cigarette into her soup, rose, grabbed the first book she could reach on the upper bunk and threw it to Arkady. 'That's a goodbye gift,' she said. 'No more questions, no more "wondering". I was lucky you only surfaced at the end of the trip.'

'Well,' Arkady suggested, 'actually you may have been luckier than that.'

'Tell me.'

'You were dressed like Zina. If someone did throw her overboard, it's good they didn't throw you by mistake.'

Chapter Eleven.

The cabin of the late Zina Patiashvili had the privacy of a dream; merely by turning on the lamp Arkady felt like a trespasser.

Dynka, for example, came from a race of Uzbeks and there was her own toy camel, a Bactrian from a miniature Samarkand standing on the pillow of her upper bunk. There were Madame Malzeva's embroidered cushions, each a sachet redolent of talcs and pomades. Her scrap-book of foreign postcards displayed minarets and crumbling temples. An embossed portrait of Lenin guarded Natasha Chaikovskaya's berth, but there was also a snapshot of a mother smiling timidly at giant sunflowers, as well as a glossy photo of Julio Iglesias.

The bulkheads of the cabin were dyed a romantic maroon by a glass wind chime that hung before the porthole. The room was a little dizzying, a nautilus shell of colours, of inner folds and cushions, of warring perfumes as powerful as incense, of life crammed into a steel compartment. There were more pictures in evidence than before, as if the removal of Zina had released the last constraint on the three cabinmates remaining. The wardrobe door was decorated with more Uzbeks and Siberian construction workers shimmering in the watery reflection of the chimes.

He was looking under Zina's stripped mattress when Natasha arrived. She was in a damp blue running suit, the universal outfit of Soviet sports. Sweat lay like the dew on her cheeks, but her lipstick was fresh.

'You remind me of a crow,' she told Arkady. 'A scavenger.'

'You're observant.' He didn't tell her what she reminded him of, which was her nickname 'Chaika' for the big limousine. An out-of-breath Chaika in a blue tarp.

'I was doing callisthenics on deck. They said you wanted to see me here.'

Because Arkady was wearing rubber gloves from the infirmary his sense of touch took all his concentration. When he pulled open a slit in the mattress, a tape cassette slid out. 'Van Halen', said the case. Rooting around inside the mattress he came out with three more tapes and a small English-Russian dictionary. Flipping through it, he noticed some words underlined in pencil. The lines had the heavy assertiveness of a schoolgirl's, as did the words, which all had to do with sex.

'A major breakthrough?' Natasha asked.

'Not quite.'

'Aren't there supposed to be two witnesses in a police search?'

'This is not a search by any official body; this is just me. Your cabinmate may have had an accident, maybe not. The captain has ordered me to find out.'

'Hah!'

'That's what I'm thinking too. I was once an investigator.'

'In Moscow. I heard all about it. You became involved in anti-Soviet intrigue.'

'Well, that's one story. The point is, for the last year I've been in the hold of this ship. It's been an honour, of course, to take part in the process of preparing fish for the great Soviet market.'

'We feed the Soviet Union.'

'And a wonderful slogan it is. However, not expecting this particular crisis, I have not maintained my skills as an investigator.'

Natasha frowned as if examining an object she didn't know quite how to handle. 'If the captain has ordered you to carry out a task, you should do so happily.'

'Yes. But there is another limitation. Natasha, we work together on the factory line. You've expressed the opinion that some men on the line are soft-bellied intellectuals.'

'They couldn't find their pricks if they weren't tied on.'

'Thank you. You come from different lineage yourself?'

'Two generations of hydroelectric construction workers. My mother was at the upper Bratsk Dam. I was brigade leader at Bochugany Hydroelectric Station.'

'And a decorated worker.'

'The Order of Labour, yes.' Natasha accepted compliments stiffly.

'And a Party member.'

'I hold that lofty honour.'

'And a person of underestimated intelligence and initiative.'

Arkady remembered that when Kolya lost a finger in the saw and blood was spraying from his hand over his face, the fish and everyone around him, it was Natasha who immediately tied her scarf tightly around his wrist, then made Kolya lie down with his feet up and guarded him fiercely until a stretcher was brought. When he was taken to the infirmary, she searched on her hands and knees for the missing finger so it could be sewn back on.

'The estimation of the Party is sufficient. Why did you ask me down here?'

'Why did you leave construction work for the cleaning of fish? You got double pay at the dams, plus an Arctic bonus for some of them. You worked outside in the healthy air instead of in the hold of a ship.'

Natasha crossed her arms. Her cheeks coloured.

A husband. Naturally. There were more men than women at a construction site, but not like a ship, where more than two hundred healthy men were trapped for months with perhaps fifty women, half of them grandmothers, leaving a ratio of ten-to-one. Natasha was always touring the deck in her running suit or fox-trimmed coat or, on a day with the merest hint of balminess, in a flower-print sundress that made her resemble a large, threatening camellia. Arkady was embarrassed for being so obtuse.