Chapter Twenty-six.

In his sleep Arkady watched Zina Patiashvili swim from the Vladivostok beach, which was exactly as Slava had described except that the sunbathers were all seals, basking and craning their heads and long-lashed oriental eyes up to the sky. She was in the same bathing suit she'd paraded in on deck that sunny day. The same dark glasses, and her hair was blond, not even with telltale roots. It was a dazzling day. Long buoys were strung like candy sticks around a kiddy section. Timber had floated from the loading yards near by, and boys rode stray logs like war canoes.

Further into the bay Zina swam, even past the sailboats on the surface of the water so that she could turn on her back and look at the city's overlapping green trees and office blocks and the Roman arches of the stadium. Dynamo Stadium. Every town had its Dynamos, Spartaks or Torpedos. Why not names like Torpor or Inertia?

She dove to quieter, cooler water where light penetrated the water at an angle, as if through the blinds of a room, down to a level both translucent and black, pulling herself with sweeping strokes to the soft, silent floor of the bay. A fish darted in front of her face. Schools of fish flowed by on either side, herring as bright as a shower of coins, blue streams of sablefish, the floating shadow of a ray moving from two beams of light that approached with the sound of an onrushing train. Steel trawl doors ploughed the sea floor on either side, sending up plumes of roiled mud. The lights attached to the headrope were blinding, but she could see the bottom exploding with the groundrope's advance, both geysers of silt and wave after wave of groundfish rising to try to escape the trawl, which roared as it engulfed them. A wall of water first pushed her away from and then sucked her into the maelstrom, into the deep bass chord of straining mesh and clouds of silt and glittering scales.

Awake, Arkady sat up in the dark as wet with sweat as if he'd climbed from the sea. He'd told Natasha it was simply seeing what was before your eyes; no genius was needed. How do you smuggle on open water? What went back and forth twenty times a day? And where would the trawlmaster hide what he'd received? Another obvious answer came back: where on the Polar Star had he been attacked?

This time Arkady took a flashlight. Rats scurried from beams, slipping between planks, red pinpoints staring down as he went down the ladder in the forward hold. Cooling pipes swarmed with the adept clambering of rats. At least his descent was shorter with a light.

He stepped gently down on to the bottom of the hold, remembering how on his first trip he had picked up a loose plank and started beating on the walls in an attempt to drive out a lieutenant of Naval Intelligence, when all the while he had probably been standing on the lid of a treasure chest. The beam of the flashlight found the plank, the same paint cans and blanket, the same cat skeleton as before. But earlier the cat skeleton had been in the centre of the floor; this time it was curled up in a corner. There were heels and scuff marks on the floor planks. He touched them. Not scuff marks: wet.

The hatch at floor level opened and Pavel, the deckhand on Karp's team, stepped halfway in. Wearing a helmet and jacket soaked with rain, he tried to squint over his hand through the glare of Arkady's flashlight. 'Still here?' he asked. Then he saw who it was, slammed the hatch and locked it shut Arkady climbed the ladder to the next level. Its hatch was locked. He continued up to the top level, the one he'd entered the hold through, his heart pounding like an extra prisoner willing his hands up the rungs. Kicking the hatch open, he ran to the stairs and down. When he reached the bottom level outside the hold Pavel was gone, but wet bootprints on the metal deck pointed like arrows in the direction he'd taken. There was the damp traffic of other boots on the same path.

Arkady ran, trying to catch up. The path led aft, passed the No. 2 fish hold and then took the midship stairs to emerge by the forward crane of the trawl deck. There was no sign of Pavel or anyone else. Rain swept the boards of the deck, wiping them clean, and Arkady pocketed the flashlight and took out his knife. The main winch lamp was off, the gantry lamps were caked with ice. Across the deck the entrance to the stern ramp was black.

At this point he didn't need arrows. What was surprising was that it was the first time he'd ever been on the ramp. The gantry lights touched the rough hide of its walls and the overlapping folds of ice at the top of the slip. With each step down, though, the light faded and the angle of the ramp became more precipitous. Far forward, the prow of the Polar Star hit heavier ice and shuddered. Deep within the stern, in the soundbox of the ramp, the shudder swelled into a moan. A following wave rushed up the ramp and subsided with a sigh, the way the audiomechanics of a seashell amplified the exaggerated sound, the way the inner ear gauged the pounding of the heart.

If Arkady slid there was nothing between him and the water but the safety gate. He held on as best he could to the side of the ramp as he felt its deck start to fall away. Overhead, at the well, was a second dim intrusion of light. He could see that the chain of the safety gate was taut on its hook on the wall of the ramp; the gate had been swung up and out of the way. Too late to grasp the hook, he began to slide. Just a bit to begin with, the first millimetre that informs a falling man of his situation, then with momentum that grew as the curve of the ramp became steeper. Spread-eagled, face forward, his fingers digging into ice, he saw the white tracery of a wave rising towards him while his knife rattled ahead of him, free. At the lip the ramp opened to the black of the fairway and the sky, the sound of the screws and, to the sides, wings of ice. As the water rushed up, his hand found a rope along the side of the ramp and he twisted his wrist around it. When he came to a stop he saw below him another man standing in boots at a steep angle like a mountain climber in the waves washing the bottom of the ramp. The lifeline was tied to his waist.

Karp wore a dark sweater and a wool cap pulled down to his heavy brow, and he held what looked like a cushion. 'Too late,' he told Arkady. He threw the cushion backhanded into the water. From the way it hit and plunged, the package was weighted. 'A fortune,' he said. 'Everything we'd bought. But you're right; they'll tear this ship apart when we get back to Vladivostok.'

Karp leaned back with both hands free and lit a cigarette, a man relieved and at ease. The wake had a luminescence that dissipated in the dark. Arkady pulled himself to his feet.

'You look scared, Renko.'

'I am.'

'Here.' Karp shifted, gave the cigarette to Arkady and lit another for himself. His eyes shone as they searched the ramp above. 'You came alone?'

'Yes.'

'We'll find out.'

Arkady's attention was fixed on the rain and a light swaying in the distance like a lamp in a breeze. It wass the Eagle, maybe two hundred metres back. 'What you tossed in, what if the net picks it up?'

'The Eagle isn't towing now, they're busy enough hosing off ice. Pretty top-heavy in a boat like that. How did you know I'd be here?'

Arkady decided not to mention Pavel. 'I wanted to see where Zina had gone into the water.'

'Here?'

'She left her jacket and a bag either here or on the landing while she went to the dance. What did she look like in the net?' Arkady asked.

Karp gave his cigarette a long pull. 'Ever see anyone drown?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'Then you know.' Karp turned to study the Eagle's light as it faded in a sweeping gust of rain. He seemed unhurried, as if waiting for a friend. 'The sea is dangerous, but I should be grateful to you for getting me out of Moscow. I was making with pimping and shakedowns, what? Twenty or thirty rubles a day? To the rest of the world, rubles aren't even money.'

'You're not in the rest of the world. In the Soviet Union a fisherman makes a lot of rubles.'

'For what? Meat's rationed, sugar's rationed. Restructuring is a joke. The only difference now is that vodka is rationed too. Who's a criminal? Who's a smuggler? Delegations go to Washington and come back with clothes, toilets, chandeliers. The Secretary General collected fast cars, his daughter collected diamonds. The same in the republics. This Party leader has marble palaces; that one had suitcases so full of gold you can't lift them from the floor. Another has a fleet of trucks that carry nothing but poppies, and the trucks are protected by the motor patrol. Renko, you're the only one I don't understand. You're like a doctor in a whorehouse.'

'Well, I'm a romantic. So you wanted something else, but why drugs?'

Karp's shoulders wore frozen beads of rain; their outline made Arkady think of the mist in a cloud chamber that betrayed the dewy track of ions.

'It's the one way a worker can make real money as long as he has the nerve,' Karp said. 'That's why governments hate drugs, because they can't control them. They control vodka and tobacco, but they don't control drugs. Look at America. Even blacks are making money.'

'You think it will happen in the Soviet Union, too?'

'It's happening already. You can buy ammo off a Red Army base, run it right over the border and sell it to the Afghans fighting us. The dushmany have warehouses with cocaine piled to the roof. It's better than gold. It's the new currency. That's why everyone's afraid of the veterans - not just because they're drug-users, but because they know what's really going on.'

'You're not part of any vast Afghani network, though,' Arkady said. 'You'd be dealing in Siberian goods, anasha. What's the rate of exchange as the nets go back and forth?'

Karp's smile flashed gold in the dark. 'A couple of bricks from us for a spoonful from them. It seems unfair, but you know what a gram of cocaine brings at an oil rig in Siberia? Five hundred rubles. You figured out the nets; that's clever of you.'

'What I don't understand is how you got anasha past the Border Guards and on to the Polar Star'

The trawlmaster's voice became both flattered and confiding, as if it were a shame that the two of them couldn't pull up chairs and split a bottle. At the same time, Arkady was aware that the trawlmaster was only playing a role, enjoying the situation over which he had complete control.

'You'll appreciate this,' Karp said. 'What can a trawl-master ask for in the way of supplies? Net, needles, shackles, ropes. The yard always gives you the worst, you can depend on that. What's the cheapest rope?'

'Hemp.' Manchurian hemp was grown legally for rope and packing; anasha was merely the potent, pollinating version of the same bush. 'You packed anasha in the rope, hemp in hemp.' Arkady was forced to admire it.

'And we end up trading shit for gold. Two kilos are a million rubles.'

'But now you'll have to sign up for another six months to bring back a second load.'

'It's a setback.' Karp looked thoughtfully up the ramp. 'Not like the one you're going to have, but still a setback. You say you came here in the rain in the middle of the night just to see where Zina went in? I don't believe it.'

'Do you believe in dreams?'

'No.'

'Neither do I.'

'You know why I killed that son of a bitch in Moscow?' Karp asked suddenly.

'In the train yard with the prostitute?' 'The one you nailed me on, right.' 'So it wasn't an accident, you meant to do it?' 'Long gone, fifteen years ago, you can't charge me a second time.'

'So why did you kill him?'

'You know who the whore was? It was my mother.'

'She didn't say. She had a different name.'

'Yeah, well, that son of a bitch knew it, and he said he was going to tell everyone. It wasn't like I was crazy.'

'You should have said so then.'

'It would have made her sentence worse.'

Arkady remembered a coarsely painted woman with hair dyed Chinese red. At that time prostitution did not officially exist, but she was sentenced for conspiracy to rob.

'What happened to her?'

'She died in corrective labour. In her camp they made padded jackets for Siberia, so maybe you or I wore one. They had a quota like anyone else. She died happy, though. There were a lot of women there with babies, a kindergarten with its own barbed wire, and they let her clean up there. She wrote and said she'd gotten better being around kids. Except she died of pneumonia, which she probably picked up from some runny-nosed brat. It's funny what can kill you.' He shook a knife from his sleeve.

Arkady turned at the sound of steps. Against the faint glow from the trawl deck he could make out someone in a hard hat descending the ramp, holding on to the rope that led to Karp.

'It's Pavel.' Karp said. 'He took his time getting here. So you really did come alone.'

Arkady started back up the rope, pulling himself hand over hand. Karp was faster. Though the lifeline was tied around his own waist the trawlmaster didn't seem to need it and he strode easily up the icy slope.

Ahead, the figure from the trawl deck stopped. Arkady would have to go wide to get by, and he knew that as soon as he left the rope he would slide down the ramp to the water. His boots slipped. How did Karp move up the ramp so quickly, like a devil flying up steps?

'This was worth waiting for,' Karp said. He shook the rope so that Arkady slipped again, and then he had him by his jacket.

'Arkady?' Natasha called. 'Is that you?'

'Yes.'

The shape looming on the ramp above wasn't Pavel. Now that they were closer he saw that what had looked like a man's helmet was a scarf over her hair.

'Who are you with?' she demanded.

'Korobetz,' Arkady said. 'You know Korobetz.'

Arkady could almost hear the calculations in the trawlmaster's mind. Would it be possible to kill him and Natasha before she reached the trawl deck and called out?

'We're old friends,' Karp still held on to Arkady. 'We go back a long way. Give us a hand.'

'Get on deck,' Arkady told her. 'I'll follow.'

'You two?' Natasha asked suspiciously. 'Friends?'

'Go,' Arkady ordered. He stayed where he was so that Karp couldn't get past.

'What's the matter, Arkady?' She stood her ground.

'Wait,' Karp told her.

'Wait there,' Pavel added as he came down the ramp above Natasha. An axe dangled from his free hand.

Arkady kicked Karp's leg. The trawlmaster landed on his stomach and slid down the ramp the length of his lifeline. Arkady hoped he would go into the water, but Karp stopped just above the churning spine of the wake. At once he was back on his feet and scaling the ramp, but by then Arkady had reached the hook where the chain holding up the safety gate was fastened. He released the chain. With a rush of air, the gate swung down and with a metallic clap slammed shut in Karp's face, trapping him on the lower end of the ramp.

Arkady got ahead of Natasha. Behind him, he heard Karp shaking the gate as if its steel mesh could come apart in his hands. Then the gate was still. 'Renko,' the trawlmaster's voice came up the ramp.

Pavel hesitated as Arkady approached. His eyes were round hollows, more afraid of Karp than of Arkady. 'You're fucking up everything. He said you would.'

Karp's laugh filled the ramp. 'Where are you going to run?'

'Piss off.' Natasha said the magic words and Pavel backed away.

Chapter Twenty-seven.

'We make a good team,' Natasha said.

She was still exhilarated by their escape from the ramp, her eyes bright, a long strand of hair hanging loose. Arkady led her into the cafeteria, which they found turned into a dance floor.

There had been no announcement over the loudspeakers. Third Mate Slava Bukovsky, the officer in charge of entertainment, had for purposes of morale spontaneously gathered his band and sent word below decks that music would be offered to the crew. As no nets were being taken and the night was foul, the entire ship's company had been holing up, bored and stifling, in their cabins. Now they holed up happily and communally in the cafeteria. This time there were no Americans, not even reps, and for some reason no rock. The ball of mirrors spun, its reflections scattering like snow over dancers who moved in dreamy slowness. On stage, Slava squeezed from his saxophone a sweet, dirgelike blues.

Arkady and Natasha crowded on to a back bench with Dynka and Madame Malzeva. 'I wish my Mahmet were here now.' The Uzbek girl clasped her hands together.

'I've heard musicians in the Black Sea Fleet.' Malzeva wrapped a babushka around her shoulders for dignity's sake, but unbent enough to add, 'Actually, he's not so bad.'

Natasha whispered in Arkady's ear. 'We should go to the captain and tell him what happened.'

'What would we say? All you saw was me and Karp. A trawlmaster has any number of reasons to be on the ramp. I don't.'

'There was Pavel with an axe.'

'They've been chopping ice all day. Maybe he's a Hero Worker.'

'You were attacked.'

'I dropped the gate on Karp, not the other way round, and all you heard him say was that we were friends. The man's a saint.'

The next song was 'Dark Eyes', a syrupy tale of gypsy love. The girl on the synthesizer plunked out a sound something like a guitar's while Slava produced lush, brassy melody. It was shameless and irresistible. The floor was a slowly surging tide of dancers.

'You and Karp are like a mouse and a snake,' Natasha said. 'You can't share the same hole.'

'Not for much longer.'

'Why were you on the ramp?'

'Would you like to dance?' Arkady asked.