Arkady hadn't heard the Rolling Stones for a long time. He slipped the cassette into the tape deck and pushed "Play". From the speaker came a commotion like the sound of Jagger being dropped from a height onto a set of drums and then being pummelled by guitars; some things never changed. Fast forward. Stones in the middle of the tape. Fast forward. Stones at the end. He turned the tape over and listened to the other side.

Arkady tore a strip of electrocardiograph paper from a roll and sketched an outline of the ship, marking the cafeteria where the dance was held, Zina's cabin and every possible route between the two. He added the position of each crew member on watch and the transport cage on the trawl deck.

Out with the Stones, in with The Police. 'Her precious tapes,' Natasha had said. 'She always used her headphones. She never shared them.'

Fast forward. With a following sea the ship seemed to be gathering speed, as if plunging downhill and blind through the snow. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it.

Why did Zina ship on the Polar Star? The money? She could have made as much off sailors in the Golden Horn. Foreign goods? Fishermen could bring her whatever she wanted. Travel? To the Aleutians?

Out with The Police, in with Dire Straits.

He sketched the stern deck and the well to the ramp. There was room to kill her, but no place to hide her.

What had been in her pockets? Gauloises, a playing card, a condom. The three great pleasures in life? The card was a queen of hearts of a style unfamiliar to him. Fast forward. Below the Polar Star he drew the Eagle.

'Politically mature' was the label the Party applied to any young person who was not a convict, dissident or outspoken defender of Western music, which by itself was a whole arena of subversion. There were over-age 'hippies' who still listened to the Beatles and migrated to the Altai Mountains to meditate and drop acid. Kids tended to be 'Breakers', who danced to rap, or 'Metallisty', who saturated themselves in heavy-metal music and leather gear. In spite of her taste in music, in spite of her absences from the galley, in spite of her casual sleeping around, Zina was still, according to as conservative an arbiter as Volovoi, an 'honest toiler and politically mature'.

Which only made sense given the first mate's task of watching foreign provocateurs.

Slut, smuggler, informer. A neat and simple total. A sliding of beads on an abacus; answer as addition. A girl from Georgia. Education limited to ladling soup. Expanded to smuggling in Odessa. Sleeping around in Vladivostok. Informing at sea. An abysmal life begun and ended in ignorance, without morals, soul or a single reflective thought. At least it seemed that way.

Arkady noticed that on the Van Halen cassette, the recording-proof tab had been punched. He put the tape into the player and heard a woman with a Georgian accent say, 'Sing to me, just sing.' It was Zina's voice; Arkady recognized it from the cafeteria. There was a microphone built into the corner of her player.

A man accompanied by a guitar answered, 'You can cut my throat, You can cut my wrists, But don't cut my guitar strings.

Let them tramp me in the mud, Let them push me under water, Only leave my silver strings alone.'

As Arkady listened he found spoons in a desk drawer and looked for iodine crystals. Not finding crystals, he searched for iodine pills. There was a padlocked metal cabinet for radiation medicine - in other words, for war. He broke the lock by twisting a screwdriver through the shank, but there was nothing inside except two bottles of Scotch, a booklet on the effective distribution of iodine and Vitamin E in case of nuclear explosions. He found the iodine itself in an open cabinet.

'Sing another,' Zina said. 'A thieves' song.'

The man on the tape laughed and whispered, 'That's the only kind I know.'

Arkady couldn't put a name to the man's voice but he did know the song. It wasn't Western at all, not rock or rap; it was by a Moscow actor named Vysotsky who had become famous underground throughout the Soviet Union by writing, in the most traditional Russian style, the plaintive and bitter songs of criminals and convicts, and by singing them accompanied by a seven-stringed Russian guitar, the most easily strummed instrument on earth. Magnatizdat, a tape version of samizdat, spread every song, and then Vysotsky had sealed his fame by drinking himself, while still young, into a fatal heart attack. The Soviet radio offered such mindless pap - 'I love life, I love it over and over again' - that you'd think people would caulk their ears; yet the truth was that no other country was so dependent on or vulnerable to music. After seventy years of socialism, thieves' songs had become the counter-anthem of the Soviet Union.

The singer on the tape wasn't Vysotsky, but he wasn't bad: 'The wolf hunt is on, the hunt is on!

For grey prowlers, old ones and cubs; The beaters shout, the dogs run themselves until they drop, There's blood on the snow and the red limits of flags.

But our jaws are strong and our legs are swift, So why, pack leader, answer us, Do we always run towards the shooters, And never try to run beyond the flags?'

At the end of the tape all Zina said was, 'I know that's the only kind you know. That's the kind I like.' Arkady liked the fact that it was the kind she liked. But the next tape was completely different. Zina was suddenly speaking in a low, weary voice. Modigliani painted Akhmatova sixteen times. That's the way to know a man, to have him paint you. By the tenth time you must start to know how he really sees you.

'But I attract the wrong men. Not painters. They hold me like I'm a tube of paint they have to empty in one squeeze. But they're not painters.'

Zina's voice could sound honeyed or as tired as death, sometimes all in one sentence as if she were casually playing an instrument. 'There is a man on the factory line who looks interesting. Paler than a fish. Deep eyes, as if he were sleepwalking. He hasn't noticed me at all. It would be interesting to wake him up.

'But I don't need another man. One thinks he tells me what to do. A second thinks he tells me what to do. A third thinks he tells me what to do. A fourth thinks he tells me what to do. Only I know what I'm going to do.' There was a pause; then, 'They only see me, they can't hear me think. They have never heard me think.'

What would they do if they could hear you? Arkady wondered.

'He'd kill me if he could hear me think,' Zina said. 'He says wolves mate for life. I think he'd kill me and then he'd kill himself.'

On the fifth tape the tab had been removed and then taped over. The cassette began with a sibilant rustling of cloth and an occasional muffled thud. Then a man said, 'Zina.' It was a younger voice, not the singer.

'What kind of place is this?'

'Zinushka.'

'What if they catch us?'

'The chief's asleep. I say who comes and goes here. Stay still.'

'Take your time. You're like a boy. How did you get all this down here?'

'That's not for you to know.'

'That's a television?'

'Pull them down.'

'Gently.'

'Please.'

'I'm not going to get completely undressed.'

'It's warm. Twenty-one degrees Celsius, forty per cent humidity. It's the most comfortable place on the ship.'

'How do you have a place like this? My bed is so cold.'

'I'd climb into it any time, Zinushka, but this is more private.'

'Why is there a cot here? You sleep here?'

'We put in long hours.'

'Looking at television. That's work?'

'Mental work. Forget about that. Come on, Zinushka, help me.'

'You're sure you shouldn't be doing important mental work right now?'

'Not while we're taking a net.'

'A net! When I met you at the Golden Horn you were a handsome lieutenant. Now look at you, at the bottom of a fish hold. How do you know we're taking a net?'

'You talk too much and kiss too little.'

'How do you like that?'

'That's better.'

'And that?'

'That's much better.'

'And this?'

'Zinushka.'

The microphone was voice-activated and apparently she'd had no chance to turn it off. The recorder was probably in the pocket of her fisherman's jacket and either under her or hanging beside the cot. Arkady had two cigarettes left. On his match a flame bobbed toward his fingers.

He was five years old. It was summer south of Moscow, and in the warm nights everyone slept on the porch with doors and windows open. There was no electricity in the cottage. Luna moths flew in and danced above the lamps, and he always expected the insects to flare up like burning paper. Some of his father's friends, other officers, had come by for a buffet. The social pattern set by Stalin was of dinners starting at midnight and ending in a drunken stupor, and Arkady's father, one of the Leader of Humanity's favourite generals, followed this style, though while others got drunk he only got more angry. Then he would wind up the gramophone and always play the same record. The band was the Moldavian State Jazz Orchestra, an ensemble that had followed General Renko's troops on the Second Ukrainian Front, performing in their greatcoats in each town square the day after it had been liberated from the Germans. The tune was 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.

The other officers hadn't brought their wives, so the general had them dance with his. They were pleased; none of their wives were as slim and tall and beautiful. 'Katerina, get in the spirit!' the general would order. From the porch, the young Arkady felt the floor shake under the shuffling of heavy boots. He didn't hear his mother's feet at all; it was as if they were spinning her through the air.

When the guests had left was always the worst. Then his father and mother would go to their bed behind a screen at the far end of the porch. First the two sets of whispers, one soft and pleading, one through the teeth of a rage that made the heart shrink. The whole house swayed like a seesaw.

The next morning Arkady had a breakfast of raisin cakes and tea outside under the birches. His mother came out still in her nightshirt, a gown of silk and lace his father had found in Berlin. She had a shawl over her shoulders against the morning cool. Her hair was black, loose, long.

Did he hear anything during the night? she asked. No, he promised, nothing.

As she turned back towards the house a branch reached out and plucked off the shawl. On her arms were the bruise marks of individual fingers. She lightly picked the shawl off the ground, replaced it on her shoulders and tied it tight by its end tassels. Anyway, she added, it was over. Her eyes were now so serene that he almost believed her.

He could hear it now. 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.

'Seriously, Zina, the chief would have my head and yours if he found out about this. You can't tell anyone.'

'About what? This?'

'Stop it, Zina, I'm trying to be serious.'

'About your little room here?'

'Yes.'

'Who would care? It's like a little boys' club in the bottom of the ship.'

'Be serious.'

Each tape was thirty minutes long. As the last narrow band of black unreeled there was no way for Zina to turn the recorder off. Her companion would hear the 'click' as the tape stopped.

'One moment it's all "Zinka, I love you"; the next it's "Zina, be serious." You're a confused man.'

'This is secret.'

'On the Polar Star? You want to spy on fish? On our Americans? They're dumber than the fish.'

'That's what you think!'

'Is that your hand?'

'Keep your eye on Susan.'

'Why?'

'That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to impress you; I'm trying to help you. We should help each other. It's a long voyage. I'd go crazy without someone like you, Zinka.'

'Ah, we've stopped being serious.'

'Where are you going? We still have time.'

'You do, I don't. My shift is on and that bitch Lidia is looking for any reason to get me in trouble.'

'A little minute?'

There was a rasp of canvas over the microphone, the sigh of a cot as a body stood up.

'You go back to your mental work. I have some soup to stir.'

'Damn! At least wait until I look through the hole before you go.'

'Do you have any idea how silly you look right now?'

'Okay, the way is clear. Go.'

'Thank you.'

'Zinka, tell no one.'

'No one.'

'Zinka, tomorrow?'

A door shut reluctantly. Click.

The other side of the tape started as a blank. Fast forward. It was all blank.

Arkady studied the spiral notebook. On the first page was pasted a map of the Pacific. Zina had added eyes and lips so that Alaska leaned like a bearded man towards a shy and feminine Siberia. The Aleutians reached out to Russia like an arm.

The last cassette started as Duran Duran. Fast forward.

On the second page was a photo of the Eagle anchored in a bay surrounded by snowy mountains. On the third page, the Eagle wallowed in choppy water.

'Making a baidarka the tape said in English. 'It's like a kayak. You know what a kayak is? Well, this is longer, leaner, with a square stern. The old ones were made with skin and ivory, even with ivory joints so it just flowed through the waves. When Bering came with the first Russian boats, he couldn't believe how fast the baidarkas were. The best baidarkas have always come from Unalaska. You understand a word of this?'

'I know what a kayak is,' Zina answered in a slow and careful English.