'You really worked there.' Karp was amused. 'Korin had two sons.'

'Daughters.'

'One with tattoos, though. Funny, isn't it? All the time I was in the camps, all the time in Siberia, I said if there was any justice in the world you and I would meet again. And all the time, fete was on my side.'

Overhead, the crane operator carried a mug into his cabin. Across the deck, the American called Bernie made his way aft. Enveloped in a parka, holding on to the line, he looked like a mountaineer. From Karp's radio came Thorwald's throaty voice to say that the Merry Jane was approaching with a bag. The trawlmaster sheathed his knife and at once work tempo changed. Hoses were shut off, cables were dragged to the ramp.

'You're not dumb, but you never think more than one step ahead,' Arkady said. 'You should have stayed in Siberia or smuggled videotapes or jeans - small stuff, nothing big.'

'Now let me tell you about you,' Karp said. He brushed ice from Arkady's jacket. 'You're like a dog that's kicked out of the house. You live off scraps in the woods for a while and you think you can run with wolves. But really, in the back of your mind, what you want to do is bring down one wolf so they'll let you back in the house.' He picked a crystal from Arkady's hair and whispered, 'You'll never make it back to Vladivostok.'

People became winter animals, wearing their jackets while they ate. In the middle of the long table was a pot of cabbage soup that smelled like laundry and was consumed with raw garlic offered on separate plates, along with dark bread, goulash and tea that steamed enough to make the cafeteria as foggy as a sauna. Izrail slipped on to the bench next to Arkady. As usual, the factory manager bore fish scales on his beard, as if he'd waded to the crew's mess. 'You cannot ignore your socialist duty,' he whispered to Arkady. 'You must take your place on the work line with your comrades or you will be reported.'

Natasha sat across from Arkady. She still wore her factory-line toque, the high, white cap designed to keep her hair out of the fish.

'Listen to Izrail Izrailevich,' she told Arkady. 'I thought you must be sick. I went to your cabin and you weren't there.'

'Olimpiada has a way with cabbage.' Arkady offered to ladle soup for Natasha; she shook her head. 'Where is Olimpiada? I haven't seen her.'

Izrail said, 'You will be reported to the captain, to your union, to the Party.'

'Reporting me to Volovoi would be interesting. Natasha, you're not having any goulash?'

'No.'

'At least bread?'

'Thank you, tea is sufficient.' She poured herself a dainty cup.

'This is serious, Renko.' Izrail helped himself to soup and bread. 'You can't go around the ship as if you had special orders from Moscow.' He bit into a dove and reflected. 'Unless you do.'

'You're dieting?' Arkady asked Natasha.

'Resisting.'

'Why?'

'I have my reasons.' With her hair pulled back inside her cap she was showing more cheekbone, and her dark eyes seemed larger and softer.

Obidin sat beside her and heaped his plate with goulash, which he examined for meat. 'I understand there is a feeling we should never take fish again where we found Zina,' he said. 'Out of respect for the dead.'

'Ridiculous.' Natasha's eyes grew hard at the thought of Zina. 'We're not all religious fanatics. This is the modern age. Have you ever heard of such a thing?' she demanded of Izrail.

'Have you ever heard of Kureyka?' Izrail asked in turn. A smile hid in his beard. 'It's where Stalin was exiled by the Tsar. Then when Stalin ruled, he sent an army of prisoners to Kureyka to nail his old cabin back together and build around it a hangar filled with lights that shone twenty-four hours a day on the cabin and on a marble statue of himself, A giant statue. One night years after he died, they secretly dragged the statue out and dropped it into the river. All the boats detoured so they wouldn't sail overhead.'

'How do you know about this?' Arkady asked.

'How do you think a Jew becomes Siberian?' The manager asked in turn. 'My father helped erect the hangar.' He bit into the bread. 'I won't report you right away,' he told Arkady. 'I'll give you a day or two.'

On his way to the radio shack, Arkady heard a voice that sounded like the one on Zina's tape. The voice and guitar, resonantly romantic, emanated from the infirmary door. It didn't sound like Doctor Vainu.

'In a distant blustering sea A pirate brigantine is making sail.'

It was an old camper's song, though a camper had to be fairly drunk and probably incapable of walking around a tree to enjoy such weepy lyrics.

'The Jolly Roger flaps in the breeze, Captain Flint is singing along.

And, our glasses ringing, we too Begin our little song.'

When Arkady entered the infirmary the song stopped.

'Shit, shit, I thought it was locked,' Doctor Vainu said, rushing to block Arkady's way. At the far end of the hall Arkady saw the broad, borscht-red backside of Olimpi-ada Bovina running into an examining room. The doctor was in a leisure suit and slippers and looked only slightly rumpled, slippers on the wrong feet. Arkady would have thought that Bovina and Vainu made a pair like a steamroller and a squirrel.

'You can't just come in,' Vainu protested.

'I'm in.' Looking for the singer, Arkady led the doctor down the hall to the operating room, where a sheet covered the operating table. Arkady noticed that the box with Zina's effects was still on the counter.

'This is a medical office.' Vainu checked his zipper.

Beside the table was a steel tray with a beaker and, from the taste of varnish in the air, glasses of grain alcohol. Also, a half-eaten chocolate with a cream centre. Arkady laid his hand on the sheet. Still warm, like the hood of a car.

'You can't just break in,' Vainu said with evaporating conviction. He slumped against a counter and lit a cigarette to calm himself. On the counter beside the box was a new Japanese cassette player with its own miniature stereo speakers. Arkady pressed the player's 'Rewind' button, then 'Play.' ' . . . Roger flaps in the breeze.' Then 'Stop'. 'Sorry,' he said.

The voice wasn't like the other singer anyway.

Col. Pavlov-Zalygin's sonorous voice travelled the telephone path and airwaves all the way from Odessa. His rich, unhurried baritone reminded Arkady that while the ice sheet might be moving south in the Bering Sea, in Georgia they were still pressing grapes, and on the Black Sea ferry boats were still filled with the last tourists of the year.

The colonel was happy to aid a colleague far at sea, though it meant digging through old files. 'Patiashvili? I knew the case, but lately the bosses are sticklers about the law. Lawyers are getting into everything, accusing us of violence, appealing perfectly good sentences. Believe me, you're better off at sea. I should study the case and call you back.'

Arkady remembered that if they happened to be monitoring the Soviet channel, other ships could hear the incoming half of the conversation. The less calls the better, even assuming he had a chance for another one. Nicolai studied the dials on the single sideband; the needles swayed with the colonel's voice. 'It's the weather,' he told Arkady. 'Reception is deteriorating.'

'There's no time,' Arkady spoke into the receiver.

'Criminals are having their letters printed in the newspapers,' Pavlov-Zalygin said. 'In the Literary Gazette!'

'She's dead,' Arkady said.

'Well,' the colonel said, 'let rne think.'

There was a four-second gap in each transmission that only added confusion. Instead of a microphone, the radio had a telephone receiver with a daisy pattern on the mouthpiece as an old-fashioned nicety. It struck Arkady that all the modern technology on the Polar Star was at the bottom of the ship with Hess.

'The trouble was we had no real case against her,' Pavlov-Zalygin said reluctantly, 'nothing we could take to court. We searched her apartment, we held her in custody, but we never had enough to charge her. Aside from that, the investigation was a great success.'

'Investigation of what?'

'This was in the newspapers, in Pravda,' the colonel said with pride. 'An international operation. Five tonnes of Georgian hashish shipped from Odessa on a Soviet freighter to Montreal. Very high-quality goods, all in bricks, inside containers marked "raw wool". Customs discovered the narcotics here. Usually we make the arrests and destroy the illegal shipment, but this time we decided to collaborate with the Canadians and to make arrests at both ends.'

'A joint venture.'

'Just so. The operation was a great success, you must . . . it.'

'Yes. How was Zina Patiashvili involved?'

'The ringleader was a boyfriend of hers. She had worked six months in the galley of the freighter; in fact, it was the only freighter she ever really worked on. She was seen on the dock when the ship was first loaded, but . . . '

As the static increased it pushed the needle in the radio's wattage meter.

' . . . to the prosecutor. Nevertheless, we ran her out of town.'

'The others involved are still in camps?'

'Camps of strict regimen, absolutely. I know there's been an amnesty, but it's not like the Krushchev amnesty when we let everybody go. No, when . . . .'

'We're losing him,' Nicolai said.

'You said that she worked on that freighter for six months, but her paybook shows that she worked in the Black Sea Fleet for three years,' Arkady said.

'Not as a galley worker exactly. She . . . with . . . recommendations and the usual titles . . . .'

'What did she do?' Arkady asked again.

'Swam.' Suddenly the colonel's voice was booming and clear. 'She swam for the Black Sea Fleet at meets everywhere. Before that she swam for her vocational school. Some said she could have tried for the Olympics if she'd had any discipline.'

'A small girl, dark hair bleached blond?' Arkady couldn't believe they were talking about the same woman.

'That's her, except her hair was just dark. Attractive in a cheap . . . foreign . . . Hello? . . . Re . . . .'

The colonel's voice faded like a boat sighted in a storm, moving from one fog bank of static to a thicker one.

'He's gone.' Nicolai watched the needle bounce out of control.

Arkady signed off and sat back while the lieutenant watched him anxiously. With good reason. It was one thing for a virile young radioman to slip an honest citizen into a secret intelligence post to seduce her; it was quite another to reveal the post to a major criminal.

'I'm sorry.' Nicolai couldn't stand the suspense any longer. 'I wanted to get you up here to the radio shack earlier when the transmission was better, but there was a lot of fuss about the trawl we lost, with calls to Seattle and the fleet. It was the last net from the Merry Jane'

'Thorwald?'

'The Norwegians, yes. He blames us, but we blame him because he tried to transfer more than the maximum load. He lost, his trawl and gear. There's no way of grappling for it in this ice apparently - and he has to return to Dutch Harbor.'

'We're down to the Eagle?'

'The company has already dispatched three catcher-boats to join us. They're not going to leave a factory ship like us depending on only one trawler.'

'Did Zina tell you that she swam?'

Nicolai cleared' his throat. 'She just said she could.'

'Back in the Golden Horn, the restaurant, was there anyone else you recognized, someone on the ship?'

'No. Look, I have to ask about your report. What are you going to say about me? You seem to know everything.'

'If I knew everything I wouldn't be asking questions.'

'Yes, yes, but are you naming me in your report?' Nicolai hunched closer; he was the kind of boy, Arkady thought, who would try to read his marks upside down on his teacher's desk. 'I have no right to ask, but I beg you to consider what will happen to me if there are adverse comments in your report. It's not for myself. My mother works in a cannery. I always send one bolt of Navy cloth home, and she sews skirts and pants that she can sell to friends, that's how she gets by. She lives for me, and something bad like this would kill her.'

'Are you suggesting that I'd be responsible if your betrayal of your duty caused your mother's death?'

'Of course not, nothing like that.'

Vladivostok would listen to Zina's tapes no matter what happened to Arkady. On the basis of her trip to the chain locker alone the lieutenant faced the brig. 'Before we reach home port you'd better talk to Hess,' he said. He wanted to get out of the radio shack quickly. 'We'll see what happens.'

'I remember one other thing, on the subject of money,' Nicolai said. 'Zina never asked for any. What she wanted me to bring was a playing card, a queen of hearts. Not a payment, a . . . '

'A souvenir?'

'I went to the recreation officer and asked for a pack. Can you believe we have only one pack for the entire ship? And it didn't have a queen of hearts. The way he was smiling, he knew.'

'Who was the recreation officer?' Arkady asked, though since the position was the lowest function an officer could have only one name was likely.

'Slava Bukovsky.'

Who else?

Chapter Twenty-five.

Arkady found Slava sitting in shadow on an upper bunk, wearing the headphones of a Walkman and playing the mouthpiece of a saxophone, his bare feet swinging with the beat. Arkady sat quietly at the cabin's table as if he'd arrived midway at a concert. Only the hooded light over the desk was on, but he could see the appointments that graced an officer's cabin: the desk itself, bookshelves, a waist-high refrigerator and a clock inside a waterproof case, as if Slava's were the cabin most likely to be flooded. He reminded himself not to be too disparaging; Slava had concealed successfully until now any involvement with Zina. The bookshelf held an entertainment officer's usual books on popular games and recommended songs, as well as forbidding tomes on Lenin's thought and on diesel propulsion; the second mate, Slava's cabinmate, was studying for his first mate's ticket.

As Slava's cheeks swelled, his eyes closed, his body swayed and soulful bleats emerged from the mouthpiece. There was a calendar on a pennant, a photo of a group of boys around a motorcycle, with Slava in the sidecar, and a typed list of the year's May Day slogans; No. 14, 'Toilers in the agro-industrial complex! Your patriotic duty is to fully provide the country with food in a short time!' was underlined.

The third mate pulled off his headphones. He squeezed a last mournful note from the mouthpiece, let it drop and finally looked at Arkady.

' "Back in the USSR.,",' he said. 'Beatles.'

'I recognized it.'

'I can play any instrument. Name an instrument.'

'Zither.'

'A regular instrument.'

'Lute, lyre, steel drum, sitar, Pan's pipes, Formosan chong chai?'