'You know what I mean.'

'Accordion?'

'I can play that. Synthesizer, drums, guitar.' Slava looked at Arkady suspiciously. 'What do you want?'

'Remember that box of personal effects you took from Zina's cabin? Did you have a chance to go through her spiral notebook?'

'No, I didn't have time because I had to interview a hundred people that same day.'

'The box is still in the infirmary. I just came from going over the notebook for fingerprints more completely than I did the first time. There are Zina's and yours. I compared them with the prints on the suicide note you found.'

'So I did look in her dumb book. Too bad, you should have asked me in front of someone. Anyway, what are you doing running around the ship, not even bothering to show up in the factory?'

'We don't have that many fish to clean. The team isn't going to miss me.'

'Why isn't the captain stopping you?'

Arkady had thought about it. 'It's a little like the Inspector General. Remember that story about how a fool comes to town and is thought to be an official of the tsar? Also, murder changes everything. Nobody knows quite what to do, especially with Volovoi out of the way. As long as I don't argue with orders, I can ignore them for a while. As long as people don't know how much I know; that's what scares them.'

'So it's just a matter of calling your bluff?'

'Pretty much.'

Slava sat up. 'I could march right up to the bridge and tell the captain that a certain seaman second-class has been shirking work in order to pester the crew with questions he was ordered not to ask?'

'You can march better with your shoes on.'

'Done.'

Slava tucked the mouthpiece into his shirt pocket and hopped lightly from the bunk down to the deck. Arkady reached across the desk for an ashtray while the third mate pulled on his boots. 'You're going to wait here?' he asked Arkady.

'Right here.'

Slava threw on his running jacket. 'Anything else I should tell him?'

'Tell him about you and Zina.'

The door slammed and Slava was gone.

Arkady took a cigarette from his pants and found a book of matches in the desk's mug of pencils. He studied the design on the face of the book: the world 'Prodintorg' emblazoned on a ribbon. As he remembered, Prodin-torg was in charge of foreign trade in animal goods: fish, crab, caviar, racehorses, cattle and animals for zoos, a wholesale approach to the wonders of nature. He had barely lit up when Slava returned shutting the door with his back. 'What about Zina?'

'Zina and you.'

'You're guessing again.'

'No.'

A lifetime of bowing to authority shaped people. Slava sat on the lower bunk and put his face in his hands. 'Oh, God. When my father hears about this.'

'He may not, but you do have to tell me.'

Slava raised his head, blinked and took the sharp breaths of a man hyperventilating. 'He'll kill me.'

Arkady prompted him. 'I think you tried to tell me once or twice and I wasn't smart enough to hear you. What I couldn't solve, for example, was how Zina was assigned to this ship. To have that much influence in Fleet headquarters is highly unusual.'

'Oh, he tried to please, in his way.'

'Your father?' Arkady held up the matchbook.

'Deputy minister.' Slava was silent for a moment. 'Zina insisted she had to be on this ship to be near me. What a joke! As soon as we left port, everything was over, as if we'd never known each other.'

'He made the call that put you on the Polar Star, and then at your request ordered to have Zina assigned too?'

'He never orders; he just calls the head of the port and asks if there's any good reason someone can't be placed somewhere or something can't be done. All he says is that the Ministry is interested, and everybody understands. Anything: the right school, the right teacher, a Ministry car to bring me home. You know the first sign of restructuring was when he couldn't get me into the Baltic Fleet, only the Pacific. That's why Mar-chuk detests me.' Slava stared into the dark as if there were a ghost there at a desk with a battery of phones. 'You never had a father like that.'

'I did, but I disappointed him early and completely,' Arkady reassured him. 'We all make mistakes. You couldn't know that I'd already looked under the bed where you found the suicide note. Or, I should say, where you put the note, which came from her notebook that you took away from her cabin. I was slow not to figure that out right away. Was there anything else in the notebook that I didn't see?'

A nervous giggle overcame Slava. 'More suicide notes, two or three on a page. I threw the rest away. How many times could she kill herself?'

'So there you were, leading the ship's band and watching a woman you'd helped get on board dancing with American fishermen and ignoring you.'

'No one knew.'

'You knew.'

'I hated it. During the break I had a smoke in the galley just so I wouldn't see her. Zina came in and out and didn't give me a second glance. Because she couldn't use me any more I didn't exist.'

'That wasn't in your report.'

'Nobody saw us. Once I tried to talk to her, one day in the wardroom, and she said she'd tell the captain if I ever bothered her again. That's when I saw what was going on between the two of them, the leading captain and Zina. What if he knew about me? I wasn't dumb enough to say I might have been the last one to see her alive.'

'Were you?'

'Slava unscrewed the mouthpiece band and examined the reed. 'Cracked. It's hard enough to find a sax to buy, and when you do own one it's impossible to find reeds. They control you either way.' Gingerly he slipped the reed back on, like a man putting a ruby into a ring. 'I don't know. She took a plastic bag from a soup pot. The bag was all taped up. She put it under her jacket and went out. I've tried to figure it out over and over. I thought those people on deck saw her after I did, but they didn't say anything about a jacket or a bag. I'm not a good detective.'

'How big was the bag? What colour?'

'One of the big ones. Black.'

'See, you remembered that. How is your report on Volovoi going?'

'I was just working on it when you came in.'

'In the dark?'

'Does it matter? What can I say that anyone will believe? They have a way of checking the lungs, don't they, to tell whether he really died in a fire?' Slava laughed bitterly. 'Marchuk says if I do a good job he'll second my move to a Party school, which is another way of his saying I'll never make a captain.'

'Maybe you shouldn't. What about the Ministry?'

'Working under my father?' The question answered Arkady's.

'Music?'

After a silence Slava said, 'Before we moved to Moscow we lived in Leningrad. You know Leningrad?'

It hadn't struck Arkady so forcibly before how lonely Slava was. This soft young man sitting in the shadow was meant for a carpeted office with a view of the Neva, not of the North Pacific.

'Yes.'

'The basketball courts near the Nevsky? No? Well, when I was five I was at the courts and there were some black Americans playing basketball. I'd never seen anything like them; they could have been from another planet. Everything they did was different - the way they shot, which was so easy, and the way they laughed, so loud that I put my hands over my ears. Actually they weren't even a team. They were musicians who had been scheduled to play at the House of Culture but the performance had been cancelled because they played jazz. So they were playing basketball instead, but I could imagine how they made music, like black angels.'

'What kind of music did you make?'

'Rock. We had a high-school band. We wrote our own songs, but we were censored by the House of Creativity.'

'You must have been popular,' Arkady said.

'It was pretty anti-Establishment. I've always been a liberal. The idiots on this ship don't understand that.'

'Is that how you met Zina, at a dance? Or at the restaurant?'

'No. Do you know Vladivostok?'

'About as well as I know Leningrad.'

'I hate Vladivostok. There's a beach by the stadium where everybody swims in the summertime. You know the scene, a pier covered with towels, air mattresses, chessboards, gobs of suntan lotion and all the anatomy you'd just as soon not see.'

'That's not for you?'

'Thank you, no. I borrowed a sailboat, a six-metre, and sailed the bay. Because of the naval channel you have to stay fairly near the beach. Of course, most of the people don't go in the water any deeper than their waist, or any further than the buoy lines, certainly not past the lifeguards in the rowboats. Just the sound drives you crazy, the yakking and splashing and lifeguards' whistles. Sailing was like escaping all of them. There was one swimmer, though, who swam so far out and so easily that I couldn't help noticing her. She must have swum underwater some distance just to get past the lifeguards. I was so distracted that I spilled the wind out of the sail and luffed. There was a rope trailing off the side and she grabbed it and pulled herself on board, just as if we'd planned it. Then she stretched out on deck for a rest and pulled her cap off. Her hair was dark then, almost black. You know how water beads in the sun, so she looked like she was covered in little diamonds. She laughed as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to leap out of the water on to the boat of someone she'd never met. We sailed all afternoon. She said she wanted me to take her to a disco, but that she'd have to meet me there; she didn't want me to pick her up. Then she dove in the water and was gone.

'After the disco, we went hiking in the hills. She never let me pick her up or leave her off at her apartment. I assumed she was living in such poor conditions that she was embarrassed. I knew by her accent that she was Georgian, but I didn't hold that against her. I was able to tell her anything and she seemed to understand. With hindsight I realize she never talked about herself at all, except to say that she had a seaman's ticket and wanted to come on the Polar Star with me. She played me for a fool, which is exactly what I was. She played everyone for a fool.'

'Who do you think killed her?'

'Anyone, but I was afraid a murder investigation would sooner or later point to me, which makes me a coward as well as a fool. Am I wrong?'

'No.' Arkady couldn't disagree. 'The water in the bay, was it cold?'

'Out where she was? Freezing.' Sitting on the upper bunk, Slava seemed suspended in the dark.

Arkady said, 'You told me before this is your second voyage.'

'Yes.'

'Both voyages with Captain Marchuk?'

'Yes.'

'Is there anyone else on the Polar Star that you sailed with before?'

'No.' Slava thought. 'No officers, I mean. Otherwise, only Pavel and Karp. Am I in trouble?'

'I'm afraid you are.'

'I've never been in real trouble before, I never had the nerve. It's new, a whole different range of possibilities. What are you going to do now?'

'Go to bed.'

'It's early.'

'Well, when you're in trouble even getting to bed can be exciting.'

On deck, Arkady could feel the ship ride away from the wind, which meant that Marchuk had delivered the Merry Jane to the edge of the ice sheet and turned north, into the sheet again. Rain made the ice around the Polar Star shimmer like the blue of an electrical field. Arkady hid in shadow until his eyes adjusted.

Slava hadn't known anything about the Golden Horn or about the apartment Zina had taken Nicolai and Marchuk to, so from the start she had treated Slava differently. No raucous seamen's restaurant, no apartment cum illegal arsenal to scare off the delicate third mate. She may have never seen Slava before that day she climbed on to his sailboat, but the trawlmaster had.

At any moment Karp could swing from a guy wire or pop out of a hatch. 'Relax,' he had said. Why hadn't Karp killed him yet? Arkady wondered. Not because of his intelligence or luck. Officers occupied the Polar Star's wheelhouse, their realm of ignorance, and the rest of the factory ship's ill-lit passages and slippery decks were the trawlmaster's dominion. Arkady could vanish whenever Karp wanted. Each day since Dutch Harbor had been a day of grace. He was alive, he realized, only because a third death was more than Vladivostok would be willing to accept. The Polar Star would immediately be ordered home. When a ship returned under a cloud it was surrounded by Border Guard troops and the crew kept on board while the vessel was stripped down and searched. Yet Karp had to get rid of him. For the moment the trawlmaster's dilemma was the difference between Arkady wearing his head or not. Karp was still thinking, taking his time since what could Arkady tell Marchuk that wouldn't point more at himself than at anyone else? Karp had witnesses for where he was when the first mate died. Still, despite that 'Relax,' Arkady crossed the deck from pool of light to pool of light like a man connecting dots.

The crew was already packed away in their beds, and in Arkady's cabin only Obidin was awake.

'Some persons say there's an off-loader coming to get you, Arkady. Some say you're Cheka.' Cheka was the old, honoured name of the KGB. 'Some say you don't know yourself.' The smell of homebrew rose from Obidin's beard like the scent of pollen from a thistle.

Arkady pulled off his boots and climbed into his bunk. 'And what do you think?'

'They're fools, of course. The mystery of human action cannot be denned in political terms.'

'You don't like politics,' Arkady yawned.

'The black soul of a politician cannot be plumbed. Soon the Kremlin will join the other devil.'

'Which devil?' Americans, Chinese, Jews?

'The Pope.'

'Shut up,' Gury's voice said. 'We're trying to sleep.'

Thank God, Arkady thought.

'Arkady,' Kolya said a minute later. 'You awake?'

'What?'

'Have you noticed Natasha lately? She's looking nice.'