'Well, I'll show you a baidarka and you'll see for yourself. I'll paddle it around the Polar Star'

'I should have a camera when you do.'

'I wish we could do more than that. What I'd like to do is show you the world. Go all over - California, Mexico, Hawaii. There are so many great places. That would be a dream.'

'When I listen to him,' Zina said on the second side, 'I hear a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold onto the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves. I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.'

The next dozen pages were photos of the same man with straight dark hair. Dark eyes with heavy lids. Broad cheekbones around a fine nose and mouth. The American. The Aleut with a Russian name. Mike. Mikhail. The pictures, all taken from above and at a distance, showed him on the deck of the Eagle working the crane, posing on the bow, mending a net, waving to the photographer.

Arkady smoked the last, intoxicating cigarette. He remembered Zina on the autopsy table in this same room. Her sodden flesh and bleached hair. The body was far removed from life as a shell on a beach. This voice, though - this was Zina, someone no one on the ship had known. It was as if she had walked in the door, sat across the desk in the shadow just outside the lamp's veil of light, lit her own phantom cigarette and, having finally found an understanding ear, confided all.

Naturally Arkady would have preferred to have the technical lab back in Moscow throwing an exciting array of solvents and reagents, or mortar-sized German microscopes and gas chromatographs into the fight. He used what he could. In front of the spiral notebook he laid out spoons, pills and the card of fingerprints Vainu had taken from the body. He crushed the pills between the spoons, wrapped his sleeve around the handle of the spoon that held the pulverized iodine, struck a match and held it to the spoon's bowl. He moved both close to the notebook so that the fumes from the heated iodine would flow up the page opposite the map. The hot-iodine method was supposed to employ iodine crystals over an alcohol burner in a glass box. He reminded himself that in the spirit of the 'New Way of Thinking' announced by the last Party Congress, all good Soviets were willing to bend theory to practical application.

Iodine fumes reacted quickly to the oils of perspiration in a latent print. First a ghostly outline appeared of a whole left hand, sepia brown, like an antique photograph. Palm, heel, thumb and four fingers spread out, as they would have been while she held the book flat to paste in a picture. Then the details: whorls, deltas, ridges, radial loops. He concentrated on the first finger and compared it with the card. A double loop, like yin and yang. An island at the loop's right delta. A cut at the left delta. Card and page were the same; this was Zina's book and the imprint of her hand as if she were reaching out to him. There were two other prints, male by the size of them; rough, hurried marks.

As the match burned down, the hand began to fade, and in a minute it had disappeared. He repacked all the effects neatly. He'd found Zina. Now to find the lieutenant who called her Zinushka.

Chapter Thirteen.

Below decks everything was built around fish holds. Noah's Ark must have had a fish hold. When he called Peter a 'fisher of men', Christ must have appreciated the virtues of a tight fish hold. If cosmonauts ever sail on solar winds and collect specimens of galactic life, they will need a fish hold of sorts.

Yet, for ten months the Polar Star had sailed with a forward fish hold that was inoperative. Various explanations were offered for why the hold was out of commission: pipes kept cracking; there was an electrical short in the heat pump; the plastic insulation seeped some kind of poison. Whatever, the result was that off-loading ships had to make more frequent rendezvous to take the fish crammed into the Polar Star's other two holds. Another result was that the area around the unused hold had been abandoned to stacks of barrel staves and steel plates. As the walkway became more crowded, the crew tended to take the longer but faster route on deck.

A line of bulbs lit the way between the bulkhead and the hold. Access to it was a watertight door with a ramp to cany carts of frozen fish over the coaming. The wheel on the door was chained with an impressively large padlock. On one side of the door was a heat pump, its hood open to display a convincing tangle of unattached wires. On the other was an oil can of tall capstan shafts. The bottom of the can stirred with rats. The ship hadn't been fumigated since Arkady had been on board. It was interesting that rats ate bread, cheese, paint, plastic pipes, wiring, mattresses and clothes - everything, in fact, but frozen fish.

There seemed to be two Zinas. There was Zina as the public slut; then there was this private woman who dwelt within a world of hidden photographs and secret tapes. One tape could only be called dangerous. The amorous lieutenant had boasted of the fish hold's bedroom temperature and forty per cent humidity. Arkady had heard someone bother to mention a humidity ratio only once before: in the computer room back in militia headquarters on Petrovka Street in Moscow.

All well and good. Arkady had no argument with naval intelligence. Every Soviet fisherman on the Pacific coast knew that American submarines constantly violated his country's waters. On dark nights periscopes would pop out of the Tatar Strait. The enemy even followed Soviet warships right into Vladivostok harbour. What he couldn't understand was how a listening station in a fish hold hoped to hear anything. An echosounder only told you what was directly below, and no submarine would venture under trawlers. As Arkady understood it, passive sonar like hydrophones could detect sound waves at a distance, but an old factory ship like the Polar Star had plating that was substandard, so thin that, pounding like a drum, it bowed in and out with each wave. It had been welded with the wrong beading, riveted with burned and undersized rivets, seamed with cement that wept, shored with timbers that creaked like bones. All of which made the ship more human, in a way, and even more trustworthy in the sense that a patched-up veteran, for all his complaints, was more to be trusted than a handsome recruit. Still, the Polar Star marched through the water like a brass band; its own noise would smother the whisper of any submarine.

Arkady had no interest in espionage. In the Army, sitting for hours in a radio shack on the roof of the Adler Hotel in Berlin, he used to hum - Presley, Prokofiev, anything. The others asked why he didn't want to take a turn on the binoculars, to study the American shack on the roof of the Sheraton in West Berlin. Perhaps he lacked imagination. He needed to see another human to get interested. The fact was that in spite of Zina's tape, from the outside the fish hold looked like a fish hold.

The lieutenant had told Zina about looking through a hole. There was no peephole that Arkady could see. The door had an ambient, clammy touch, nothing cosy about it. He pondered the shafts in the oil can, and after a moment's indecision selected one. It was like lifting a hundred pound crowbar; once he had it to his shoulders he wouldn't be able to casually brush off any rat that came with it. Sweat came just at the thought. But no rodent appeared, and when he inserted the shaft into the hasp of the padlock and gave it a twist the lock popped open like a spring: another black mark for State Quality Control. The wheel lock itself wouldn't give until he got a foot against the pump. Grudgingly, with short, metallic cries, it turned and he pushed the door open.

The interior of the hold rose through three decks of the Polar Star, a shaft of dark air lit by a dim bulb at Arkady's level. Ordinarily each level of a hold had its own deck, open in the middle to raise fish from below. This single, precipitous drop was odd, as if there was no intention of using the hold at all. A watertight hatch covered the main deck overhead, sealing in a stale smell of fish and brine. The sides were covered with spaced wooden planks over the grid of pipes that usually circulated coolant. A ladder ran from the hatch down to the bottom deck two levels below. He swung onto the rungs and closed the door behind him.

As Arkady descended his eyes adjusted. Once in a while he caught sight of rats climbing the pipes away from him. Rats never tried to enter an operating cold store, a sign of intelligence. It occurred to him that a flashlight would have been a sign of intelligence on his part. There were so many rats that the sound of their movement was like a wind in the trees.

There should have been decks, block and tackle, crates covered in hoarfrost. The packing of a cold store was a maritime art. Cases of frozen fish not only had to be stacked but separated by planks to allow torpid air colder than merely freezing to circulate. Here there was nothing. At each level he descended was a door, a light socket and a thermostat. Each level was darker, and when he stepped off the last rung onto the wider bottom deck of the hold he was almost blind, though he felt the pupils of his eyes expand to their rims. This is a pit, he thought, the centre of the earth.

He lit a match. The deck was more planking over a grid of pipes above a cement base. He saw orange peels, a piece of planking, empty paint cans and a blanket; someone had been using the hold to sniff fumes. There were comblike bones that explained what had happened to the ship's cat. What he did not see was a lieutenant of Naval Intelligence, a cot, a television or a computer terminal. Beneath the base was a double hull with tanks for fuel and water, enough space to smuggle contraband maybe, but hardly to hide an entire furnished room. He inserted the broken board between wall planks. No secret door swung open. When subtlety didn't succeed he swung the board against the planks. Through the booming echoes came high-pitched protests from the gallery of rats overhead, but no officers of Naval Intelligence emerged.

Climbing back up the ladder, Arkady felt like a man returning to the surface of the water, as if he were holding his breath and swimming up to the bulb. Zina's tape made no sense any more. Perhaps he'd misunderstood the conversation. Perhaps he could find some vodka in Vainu's office. A little vodka in a bright room would be nice. Back at the bulb, he pulled the door open and swung himself through to the deck. By now the barrel staves and heat pump had a homey, welcoming appearance. He slipped the broken padlock onto the wheel; Gury, the biznessman, would help him find another.

As Arkady started towards the factory the light over the cofferdam went out, then the one over the heat pump. A figure stepped out of the dark and hit him in the stomach. The pain was so sharp that at first he thought he must have been stabbed. While he bent and gagged, a ball of wet rags was stuffed in his mouth. Another rag was tied tightly over his mouth. A sack was pulled over his head and shoulders, all the way down to his feet. Something like a belt was pulled tight over the sack and around his arms and chest. He reacted the right way, breathing deeply and flexing his arms, and at once choked because the rags in his mouth had been soaked in gasoline. The cloths had pressed his tongue back into the soft palate, and he was close to swallowing his tongue. So he blew out, trying to clear his tongue, and as he did so, the belt was pulled tighter like a cinch.

He was carried - by three men, he thought. There would also be one man up ahead to clear the way or stall anyone coming, and possibly another man following to do the same. They were strong; they toted him as easily as a broomstick. He tried not to choke on the gasoline fumes. On long voyages, seamen got together to share fumes and get a little dizzy. A coil of acrid vapour teased its way down his throat.

They could have just thrown him down the fish hold; his body wouldn't have been found for days. So perhaps being hit, gagged and sacked was a good sign. He'd never been kidnapped before, not in all his years with the Prosecutor's Office, and he wasn't sure of the nuances of being beaten and seized, but it was clear they didn't want to kill him right away. Probably they were crew members irate about the possibility of losing their port call. Even if they kept him in the sack, he might recognize a voice if they whispered.

It was a short promenade. They stopped and a door wheel turned. Arkady was unaware of the men making any rights or lefts; had they returned to the fish hold? The only watertight entrances at this level were to the holds. The door opened with the clap of splitting ice. A furnace emits a fiery blast; a cold store, with a temperature of -40C emits a more languid, frozen steam, but even within his sack Arkady could feel it, and he began kicking and twisting. Too late. They threw him in.

The impact of landing snapped the belt. Arkady rose, but before he could pull off the sack he heard the door shut, and the wheel lock turn. He found himself standing on a wooden case. When he untied his gag and unwound the rags from his mouth the first breath was a draught that burned the lungs. It was a joke, it had to be a joke. White, almost liquid steam seeped from the planking and rolled down the walls of the fish hold; within the planking he could see the cooling grid, the pipes cased in skeletal ice. Each of his feet stood in a separate pool of milky vapour. As he watched, the hairs of the back of his hands stood and turned white with frost. As it left his lips, his breath crystallized, glittered and snowed.

He stopped himself as he reached for the wheel of the door, because bare skin would adhere to the metal. He covered the wheel with the sack and then put his weight into it, but it wouldn't budge. The men outside must be holding it shut, and there was no chance he was going to overpower three or more of them. He shouted. Around the cold store were ten centimetres of fibreglass wool insulation; even the inside of the door was padded. No one was going to hear him unless they walked right by. For the last week, fish from the flash freezers had been stowed in the aft hold to balance the ship's trim. If this was the midships hold, there was no reason for anyone to hear. Overhead and out of reach was an insulated, watertight hatch. No one was going to hear him through that, either. Two cases below was the false deck and access to a lower level and another door. There was no way he could think of to lift two cases, each weighing a quarter of a ton. On one case was a rumpled tarp stiff with ice. The stamp on the cases said, 'Frozen Sole - Product of USSR'. Not a joke, but there was something comical about that.

Veterans of the north knew the stages of exposure. He was shivering; shivering was good. The body could actually maintain its temperature for a while by shaking to death. Still, he lost a degree every three minutes. When he lost two degrees he would stop shivering and his heart would start slowing and shutting off the flow to skin and limbs to maintain core heat; that was the cause of frostbite. When he lost eleven degrees his heart would stop. Coma came midway. He had fifteen minutes.

There was another problem. He had the classic first signs of poisoning he'd seen in sailors who had imbibed vapours: blinking, dizziness, intoxication. Sometimes they howled like hyenas; sometimes they danced off the walls. He couldn't help laughing. He'd gone to sea to die in this ice? That was funny.

His arms jerked spasmodically as if a maniac were bending his bones. He'd worked in this kind of cold before - granted in quilted coveralls, felt boots and fur-lined hood. Frost made its own white fur over his shoes and cuffs. He swayed, trying to keep his balance and not step into the narrow space between the cases; he was sure if he slipped he wouldn't get his leg out again.

At his chest level was a plate that covered the thermo-coupler, a coil of copper-constantan wire. He couldn't get the plate loose with his fingernails; it was another good example of the sort of emergency for which a fisherman should carry his knife at all times.

He jiggled the matches out of his pocket and dropped them. Since he was trying not to tip over, he picked up the book painfully with the sort of graceful bow a French dandy might execute as he swept a lady's handkerchief from the ground. Again he dropped the matches and this time went down on all fours to retrieve them. The flame was a tiny yellow ball overwhelmed by the cold, but a precious dew formed on the thermocoupler plate as it warmed. The problem was that his hands were jerking so badly he couldn't keep the flame to the plate for more than a second at a time.

There was a certain cunning to killing him this way. Freezing him and, he assumed in thinking it through, moving his body one place to thaw, then taking him to another site to be found. It was now well established that Vainu was not the most expert of pathologists, and the most obvious evidence he would find would be signs of sniffing fumes, the tragic vice of petroleum-age man. With official approval, they'd slap his body back in the same cold store until they reached Vladivostok. He saw himself riding a block of ice back home.

These were excellent matches, wood tipped with phosphorus and wax especially for the foul weather that seamen encountered. On the box cover was the design of a ship's prow splitting a curling wave. On the ship's stack was a hammer and sickle. His whole body was shaking so badly that it was hard to even aim the flame at the plate. For no reason he suddenly remembered an even better case of suicide than the ones he'd cited to Marchuk and Volovoi. A sailor had hung himself in Sakhalin. There was no investigation because the boy had secured the rope to the hammer and sickle on the smoke stack. He was put in paper slippers and buried in a day since no one even wanted to ask questions.

At least he'd stopped shivering and could hold the match steady. Looking down, he saw that both his pants legs were covered in fleecy frost. A big fish like a halibut could be frozen rock solid to the core in an hour and a half. The box squirted from his fingers. They were turning from white to blue and moved so slowly. When he knelt to pick the box up, his hands fumbled like a pair of hooks. As he struck another match, the box dropped, bounced off the crate and fell between it and the wall. He heard it ticking off crates on its way down to the deck.

With all his concentration he brought the cool, little glow again to the thermocoupler, marvelling at how the dim heat spread visibly like breath upon the metal plate. It was his last match now. He held on while flames burned on his fingernails. There was still some gasoline left on his hands from taking the rags from his mouth. Secondary flames lit like candles on his palms. They didn't hurt. He stared because they were so remarkable, like a religious experience. Slowly his eyes moved to the rags. Was this how slowly fish thought? he wondered. As the match flame sank to a nub, he thrust it and his hands into the rags, which burst into a beautiful flowerlike fire. He kicked the burning rags closer to the planks beneath the plate.

The rags unfolded in hues of violet and blue that turned to rich black smoke. Around the fire, on the planks and on the crate, grew a ring of wet glaze, of ice melting, re-freezing and melting again. Arkady sat at the edge of the flames, arms out to cup the heat. He remembered a picnic he'd once had in Siberia of frozen fish whittled into shavings, frozen reindeer sliced into strips, frozen berries formed into patties and Siberian vodka that had to be constantly turned, first this side and then that, towards the fire. The year before, an Intourist guide had taken a group of Americans into the taiga and laid out an even more splendid lunch but had forgotten to turn the bottle. After many toasts with warm tea to international friendship, mutual respect and closer understanding, the guide poured glasses of nearly frozen, almost congealed vodka and showed his guests how to drink it in one go. 'Like this,' he said. He tipped the glass, drank it and fell over dead. What the guide had forgotten was that Siberian vodka was nearly two hundred proof, almost pure alcohol, and would still flow at a temperature that would freeze the gullet and stop the heart like a sword. Just the shock was enough to kill him. It was sad, of course, but it was also hilarious. Imagine the poor Americans sitting around their camp-fire, looking at their Russian guide and asking, 'This is a Siberian picnic?'

It was an unequal battle between a mere rag fire and the glacial cave of a fish hold. The flames subsided to eyes of light, to a nest of wrestling glow-worms, then to a last black gasp of smoke above a shell of ashes. The crate and planks were smudged, not even charred.

Gasoline was a bit like Siberian vodka. Moment by moment he felt more Siberian. Finally, sailing off the coast of America, he had achieved that blissful distinction. Frost advanced up his pants and sleeves again. He blinked to keep his eyes from icing shut and watched his breath explode into crystals that rose up, then eddied down in fine drifts. How else would a Siberian breathe? Wouldn't he have made a good guide? But who for?

Time to lie down. He tugged the tarp off the crate to use as a blanket. It slid off stiff with ice, revealing Zina Patiashvili in a clear plastic bag. Clear but covered within by wonderful patterns of crystalline frost like a coat of diamonds. She was white as snow and her hair was dusted with ice. One eye was open, as if she wondered who was joining her.

Arkady curled up in the corner farthest from Zina. He didn't believe the wheel really was turning until the door cracked open. Natasha Chaikovskaya filled the doorway, eyes and mouth agape at the remains of the fire and at Zina and then at him. She rushed into the hold and lifted Arkady, gently at first so his skin on the ice wouldn't tear, then like a weightlifter starting a press. He'd never been lifted by a woman before. Probably Natasha wouldn't take that as a compliment.

'I made a fire,' he told her. Apparently it had actually worked. He had dropped the temperature at the thermo-coupler and finely tuned monitors had sounded. 'You heard an alarm?'

'No, no. There aren't any alarms. I was just walking by when I heard you inside.'

'Shouting?' Arkady didn't remember.

'Laughing.' Natasha shifted, getting a better grip to angle him out the door. She was frightened, but also disgusted, as anyone is with a drunk. 'You were laughing your head off.'

Chapter Fourteen.

While Izrail Izrailevich gently massaged Arkady's fingers and Natasha ministered to his bare toes their patient responded with hypothermia spasms. The factory manager looked with scorn and disappointment at Arkady's eyes, which were a brilliant pulpy red from gasoline fumes.

'Other men I expect to be drunkards or sniffers, not you,' Izrail said. 'It serves you right to wander into a fish hold and almost freeze to death.'

The trouble was, feeling returned as a sensation of skin burning, of capillaries bursting and waves of shakes. Fortunately none of his cabinmates were home when Izrail and Natasha laid him out on the lower bunk. Buried in blankets when touch itself was torture, he felt as if he were wrapped in broken glass.

Fish scales glittered on the factory manager's sweater and beard; he had run from the slime line to help carry Arkady to the cabin. 'Do we lock up all the gasoline, the paint and thinner as if they were expensive foreign liquors?'

'Men are weak,' Natasha reminded him.

Izrail gave his opinion. 'A Russian is like a sponge; you don't know his true shape until he's soaked. I thought Renko was different.'

Natasha blew her warm breath on each naked, individual toe and then tenderly kneaded it, which felt like having red-hot needles stuck under the nails. 'Maybe we should take him to Dr Vainu,' she suggested.

'No,' Arkady managed to say. His lips were rubbery, another effect of the fumes.

Izrail said, 'I let you off the line because you were going to perform some sort of investigation for the captain, not so you could go crazy.'

'Zina was in the hold,' Natasha told Izrail.

'Where else are we supposed to keep her? Did you say he started a fire?' Izrail was concerned. 'Did he thaw any fish?'

'He didn't even thaw himself.' Natasha attended to a toe that remained blue.

'If he damaged any fish - '

She said, 'Fuck your fish, excuse me.'

'All I'm saying is, if you want to kill yourself, don't do it in my fish hold,' Izrail told Arkady. Vigorously he rubbed Arkady's other hand.

A thought occurred to Natasha and spread on her brow like a furrow on virgin snow. 'Does this have to do with Zina?'

'No,' Arkady lied. Go away, he wanted to say, but he couldn't slip more than one word at a time through a chattering jaw.

'You were looking for something? Someone?' she asked.

'No.' How could he explain about a lieutenant who might or might not exist? He had to stop shaking and rest his traumatized nerve endings a little; then he could start asking questions again.

'Maybe I should get the captain,' Izrail said.

'No.' Arkady started to rise.

'Okay, okay, that seems to be the only word you remember,' Izrail said. 'But if this was an attack, I'm not surprised. I don't share their attitude, but I can tell you that the crew is unhappy about this rumour that you've put Dutch Harbor off limits. What do you think they come on this stinking barrel of shit for? Fish? You want to jeopardize all their months of work to find out what happened to Zina? This ship is full of silly women. Why do you care so much?'

As his shakes receded, Arkady burrowed into a comatose state. He saw that he had been changed from his frozen clothes into dry ones, a task that must have been performed by Izrail and Natasha, an act about as erotic as dressing a fish. He had a vision of himself on a conveyor belt moving towards the saw.

Obidin and Kolya came into the cabin, fumbled quietly for one thing or another and left without paying any attention to Arkady or the fact that he was in the wrong bunk. It was etiquette on a ship to let other men sleep.

When he surfaced again, Natasha was sitting on the opposite bunk. As soon as she saw he was awake, she said, 'Izrail Izrailevich wondered why you cared about Zina. Did you know her?'

He felt comically weak, as if his body had been beaten and badly sunburned while he dozed. At least he could talk now, in a rush of words between the shakes. 'You know I didn't.'

'I thought I knew you didn't, but then I wondered why you cared.' She looked at him, then away. 'I suppose it helps to care, in a professional manner.'

'Yes, it's a professional trick. Natasha, what are you doing here?'

'I thought they might come back.'

'Who?'

She crossed her arms as if to say she wouldn't play games. 'Your eyes are red slits.'

'Thank you.'

'Are all investigations like this?'

He burped in his sleep and the entire cabin reeked like a garageful of gasoline fumes. When Natasha opened the porthole to clear the air, a song mournfully crept in from outside.

'Where are you, wolves, ancient wild beasts?

Where are you, yellow-eyed tribe of mine?'

Another thieves' song, again about wolves, rendered in the most sentimental fashion by a hard-handed fisherman. Or, just as likely, by a mechanic in greasy coveralls, or even an officer as prim as Slava Bukovsky, because in private everyone sang thieves' songs. But especially workers sang. They strummed their guitars, always primitively tuned D-G-B-D-G-B-D.

'I'm surrounded by hounds, feeble relatives, We used to think of as our prey.'

Westerners thought of Russians as bears. Russian men saw themselves as wolves, lean and wild, barely restrained. To see them standing in line hours for a beer was hard to understand unless you saw the inner Soviet man. The song was another one by Vysotsky. To his countrymen much of Vysotsky's appeal lay in his vices, his drinking and wild driving. The story was that he'd had a 'torpedo' implanted in his ass. A 'torpedo' was a capsule of Antabuse that would make Vysotsky sick whenever he had alcohol. Yet still he drank!

'I smile at the enemy with my wolfish grin, Baring my teeth's rotten stumps, And blood-specked snow melts On the sign: "We're not wolves any more!" '

As Natasha closed the porthole, Arkady came fully awake. 'Open it,' he said.

'It's cold.'

'Open it.'

Too late. The song had ended; all he could hear through the open porthole was the heavy sigh of water as it slid by below. The singer had been the same as on Zina's tape. Maybe. If he sang again, he could tell. Arkady started shaking, though, and Natasha closed the porthole tight.

As the cabin door opened, Arkady sat bolt upright, knife in hand. Natasha turned on the light and regarded him with worry. 'Who were you expecting?'

'No one.'

'Good, because in your condition you couldn't scare a doormouse.' She uncurled his fingers from the knife handle. 'Besides, you don't need to fight. You have a brain and you can out-think anyone else.'