'What do you want?' she asked.

'I want to know what happened to Zina.'

'What do you want from me?'

'You were the last person to see Zina before she disappeared. I'd like to know what she said.'

'See what I mean?' She laughed softly, more at herself. 'OK. What she said? Honestly?'

'Try it.'

Susan took a more judicious sip. 'I don't know. This game gets dangerous.'

'I'll tell you what I think she told you,' Arkady said. 'I think she said she knew what the Polar Star was towing when we're not taking nets, and that she could give you information about the station where the cable was controlled.'

She shrugged. 'What cable? What on earth are you talking about?'

'That's why Morgan is where he is and that's why you're here.'

'You sound like Volovoi.'

'It's not an easy game,' Arkady said. The Scotch was good; it made even a papirosa taste as sweet as candy.

'Maybe you're a spy,' Susan said.

'No, I don't have the world view. I'm more comfortable in a smaller, more human scale. And I'd say you're a bit of an amateur, not a professional. But you got on the ship, and if Morgan says you stay on it, you stay.'

'Well, I do have a world view. I don't think Zina would have been so desperate to leave an American boat.'

'She - '

He stopped and turned his ear. There wasn't so much the sound of boots in the corridor as of boots suddenly standing outside the door. Along the corridor were six cabins, with stairs at each end up to the bridge and down to the main deck. Other boots ran down the stairs and came to a halt.

The door opened in the next cabin, then shut. A door opened across the hall. There was a knock at Susan's door. 'Soo-san?' Karp called.

She watched Arkady kill his cigarette. Was there panic in his eyes? He wondered. There was fascination in hers.

The second knock was harder. 'Are you alone?' Karp asked through the door.

'Go away,' she said, her eyes still fixed on Arkady.

The doorknob strained, resisting pressure. At least it was a metal door, Arkady thought. In Soviet housing projects the doors and frames were so easy to kick in that any locks were decorative. Susan stood, gathered a tape and cassette player from the upper bunk and turned on James Taylor very low.

'Soo-san?' Karp called again.

She answered, 'Go away now or I'll tell the captain.'

'Open up,' Karp ordered. He hit the door with probably no more than his shoulder, and the latch, nearly persuaded, almost popped.

'Wait,' she said and turned off the bunk light.

While Arkady moved himself and his chair from the line of sight, Susan took her drink across the cabin and edged open the door. The mirror over her sink was ajar, and in it Arkady found he had positioned himself directly facing Karp's reflection. A head taller than Susan, the trawlmaster gazed over her into the cabin. In the hall's dim light the rest of the deck team huddled like a pack behind a lead wolf. The room was black - black enough, Arkady hoped, so that they wouldn't see him.

'I thought I heard voices,' Karp hit a note of concern. 'We wanted to be sure there was nothing wrong.'

Susan said, 'There'll be something wrong if I go to the captain and tell him his crewmen are breaking into my cabin.'

'I apologize.' Karp seemed to be looking right at Arkady while he talked to her. 'It was for your own good. A mistake. Please excuse us.'

'You're excused.'

'Pleasant.' Karp kept his foot in the door and listened to the faint music, a man singing to a guitar. Finally he looked down at Susan and his smile of appreciation turned to an expression of concern. 'Soo-san, I am just a seaman, but I have to warn you.'

'What about?'

'It's bad to drink alone.'

When Susan shut the door Arkady stayed still. The boots outside marched away, too much in unison. He listened to her cross the cabin and turn the volume of her player up higher, though the words were oddly soft and meaningless. He heard her set her glass down; it sounded empty. After six months in a small space, she knew her way around it even in the dark. She crossed the cabin again and he felt her fingers touch where sweat had broken out on his temple. 'Are they after you?' she asked.

He put his hand lightly on her mouth. Someone, he was sure, still stood outside. She took his wrist and slipped his hand inside her shirt.

Her breast was small. He took his hand out to unbutton the rest of her shirt. As she pulled his head close, he felt the rest of her body soften and let go. He kissed her face and lifted her towards him. If it was possible to step back to that moment in Dutch Harbor when he suddenly left, they were there now.

She seemed weightless. The rest of the world became soundless, as if the tape was playing in another room and the listener in the corridor were on another ship in another sea. Shirt and pants collected silently at her feet. Was this what women felt like? The damp hair at the nape of the neck? Teeth biting and lips yielding at the same time? How long had it been?

His jacket and clothes fell, sloughed off like an old skin. Perhaps this was what being alive was like. The heart hammering within the chest, a second heart answering outside, being doubly alive. His body was like another man who had been entombed and, now let free, was in control. He himself was swept along. She clung to him, climbed him, wrapped herself around him. They tottered dizzily against the bulkhead and then he was in her.

At what point does antagonism twist, turn and become desire? Is heat so interchangeable, or only masked? Why do suspicions already bear their answers? How did he know she would taste like this?

'I knew I was in trouble,' she whispered, 'when I heard about Volovoi and Mike and my first thought was, How is Arkady?'

She curled against him as if dying even while, inside, she held him tighter. He held her and helped her move. Standing, they were like two people walking a tightrope in the dark, so high up that they preferred the dark.

'Susan - '

'Another first,' she said into his ear. 'My name.'

They slowly sank to their knees and then to her back on the deck. He felt her wide brown eyes watching. Cat's eyes, night eyes. Her legs spread like wings.

As he had borne her standing, she carried him now, both on top and deeper within, to the unseen torch in the dark, as if the cold metal of the deck were warm water.

'I like the name,' he whispered. 'Susan. Soo-san. Was it Susannah and the elders?'

'A virgin, I think. You know the Bible?'

'I know good story with elements of voyeurism, conspiracy' - he stopped to light his cigarette from hers - 'seduction and revenge.'

They lay on her bunk against her pillow and another one made of her blankets. Despite the cool, he wasn't cold. Her cassette player now stood on the floor, aimed at the door. Every time the tape ended, she turned it over and started it again.

'You're a strange detective,' she said. 'You like names?'

'There's Ridley. A riddler, someone full of riddles. Morgan? Wasn't there a pirate named Morgan?'

'Karp?'

'A fish, a big fish.'

'And Renko? What does that mean?'

'Son of. Fedorenko would be son of Fedor. I'm just son of . . . something.'

'Too vague.' She ran a finger around the line of his lips. 'A stranger detective by the minute. But then I make a strange virgin. The two of us are a perfect pair.'

At least for one night, Arkady thought. The door existed as a thin line of light in the dark. If Karp was still waiting outside, his team was probably up on deck. They could try to look in through the porthole, but all they'd see was a drawn curtain.

Arkady picked up the glass. 'We didn't finish the game.'

'Being honest? Look at me, isn't this honest enough? I'll be more honest. My door was open just on the chance you'd go by. I didn't know what I'd say. You make me mad.' In a sorter voice she said, 'You made me mad. Then I admitted to myself that this ritual of animosity between us was because you were the last person I wanted to be attracted to.'

'Maybe we make a perfect pair of moths.'

But it was more than that, he knew. He'd been coming back to life and when he held her he found himself at last fully alive, as if her heat had melted some final frozen lock inside him. Though they were trapped in a small steel cabin in the middle of the ice, he was alive, even if just for a night. Or was that a moth's rationale?

'He recruited me in Athens,' Susan said.

'Morgan?'

'George, yes, I was doing a graduate course in Greek, which was the passion of my life - or at least at the time I thought it was. He was the captain of a yacht that belonged to some rich Saudi. He'd send telegrams to George to meet him here or there. The Saudi never showed up, but George had to move the boat from Cyprus to Tripoli and then back to Greece. He recruited me when I finally realized there was no Saudi.

'Slavic Studies were my next great passion. George said I had a talent for languages. He doesn't himself, though his Arabic is passable. He paid my way through school in Germany. I'd see him at Christmas and for a week in the summer. When I got out of school, though, he said he'd gone private. No more government hassle, he said.

'He had a small shipping company in Rhodes that specialized in beating embargoes. We re-labelled canned goods from South Africa, oranges from Israel, software from Taiwan. We always had buyers from Angola, Cuba, the USSR. George said that Communists trust you as long as you're making a profit, and that they'll trust you even more if you give them a kickback.

'It made sense. He didn't have to clear anything any more. No oversight committee, no paperwork, just lunch in Geneva every two weeks with someone from Langley. George had to visit the bank anyway, so it was convenient.

'George is smart. He was the first one to notice the fishing venture and the possibilities for the Soviets here, because he was sure you were doing the same thing he was. He folded the company in a week and moved to Seattle. There were plenty of boats available. I think he deliberately got a bad one so he wouldn't make too much of a splash. He certainly could've gotten a better crew.

'So I've known George for years and been recruited for three. I was in Germany for one, worked on Rhodes for one, have been on Soviet ships for one. In all those years, he and I have actually been together for a total of six months. Two days together in the last ten months. It's too hard to stay in love with someone that way. I end up waiting for someone like you. Is that honest enough?'

Were ships like women or were women like ships? Something to cling to in a dream?

Outside in the hall, Arkady heard American voices, weary from the hour and the dance, staggering back to their separate quarters. He didn't have a watch.

He ran his hand softly down from the middle of her forehead as if he were tracing her profile. At one time he had thought of her looks as thin and triangular, but now it seemed the right frame for such a mobile mouth and wide-apart eyes, the only face for such childishly cut hair. As his ringers grazed down across her stomach she turned towards him, a warm, enfolding barque with a golden sail.

'Zina mentioned seeing something in the water, Arkady said.

'She also mentioned a Navy officer she saw on board, the radioman.' Susan lay with her head resting on Arkady's chest. They shared a Winston, one of hers.

'You thought she was a provocateur?'

'At first. She did tell Volovoi about smoking grass with Lantz, just enough to keep him titillated.'

'Just enough to give her the run of the ship,' Arkady said. He passed the cigarette back to her and rested his hand where the corner of her jaw met her neck.

'Zina was too wild to be fake. Too bright,' Susan said. 'Men never realized that.'

'She manipulated them?'

'Volovoi, Marchuk, Slava. I don't know how many others. Maybe everyone but you.'

'Did she talk about Vladivostok, about her life there?'

'Just about waiting tables and fending off sailors.'

'So why did she come on the Polar Star? Arkady asked. 'It was only more of the same.'

'I wondered, too. That was her secret.'

'Did she talk about a man in Vladivostok?'

'Marchuk and the radioman.'

'Guns?' he asked.

'No.'

'Drugs?'

'No.'

'So what do you think Zina was doing every time she joined you at the stern rail?'

Susan laughed. 'You never get tired of that question, do you?'

'No.' He felt the pulse in her neck begin to race. 'I never get tired of good questions. Was it fish? Why was she interested in fish just from the Eagle?

'Men, not fish,' Susan said. 'Mike was on the Eagle'

Arkady pictured Zina standing at the stern rail, waving to the American catcherboat. Did it matter who waved back? 'Morgan was on the Eagle,' he said.

All Morgan needed from Zina was confirmation that there was something like the cable. She couldn't give him any real details. He had no other use for her.'

'What did she want from him?' Arkady asked.

'Too much.'

'Is that what you told her the night of the dance? Was that what you said to her just before she disappeared?'