Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

deck?”
    “Oh.” Skiba thumbed through his notebook, flustered but also angry, as if he’d known there would be a surprise question. “The captain I said already. At 2240, the Americans Lantz and Day headed aft.” He pivoted to be sure. “At 2315, Comrade Taratuta.” She was in charge of the captain’s quarters and galley.
    “Which direction?”
    As Slezko held up his left hand and then his right, Skiba faced the door and then away.
    “From aft—” Slezko began.
    “To forward,” Skiba finished.
    “Thinking in new ways. What does this mean?” Gury asked. “The old ways meant Brezhnev—”
    “No,” Arkady corrected him. “They may mean Brezhnev, but you don’t say his name. Brezhnev no longer exists, only the problems of old ways, obstructionism and foot-dragging.”
    “It’s confusing.”
    “All the better. A good leader mystifies people at least half the time.”
    Gury had spent a month reading two American books,
In Pursuit of Excellence
and
The One-Minute Manager
, a feat of concentration that was religious considering how little English he understood. Arkady had translated much of these chronicles of business greed, and the collaboration had, at least in Gury’s mind, made them fast friends.
    Now Arkady watched Gury test condoms in a tub. Users called them “galoshes,” and they came rolled in talc, two to a paper envelope. Powder exploded as he inflated each condom, tied it and plunged it under water. A film of talc covered his leather jacket.
    The site Gury had chosen for this consumer review was an empty fuel bunker. Although the bunker had supposedly been flushed, there was an acrid edge to the air and the promise of a petroleum-based headache. In the absence of vodka, a lot of sailors sniffed fumes; they would be found laughing or crying uncontrollably or dancing off the walls. Or Thinking in New Ways, Arkady guessed.
    As champagne-sized bubbles worked their way to the surface of the tub and broke through a scum of talc, Gury fumed. “Lack of quality control. Basic lack of management commitment and product integrity.”
    He tossed the condom onto a growing pile of tested and rejected ones, unwrapped another one, blew it upand held it underwater. His plan was not only to buy radios and cassette players in Dutch Harbor, but also to smuggle aboard as many batteries as possible in elastic, watertight containers that could be secreted in an oil drum.
    Getting condoms was no problem; Gury ran the ship’s store. The problem was that the KGB had informers that not even Volovoi knew about. Someone always seemed to know about the book in the sand bucket or the nylon stockings in the anchor well. Unless, of course, Gury was himself one of those extra ears of the Committee for State Security. Everywhere Arkady had gone a different informer had appeared—in Irkutsk, at the slaughterhouse, even in Sakhalin. Setting out from Vladivostok on the
Polar Star
, he had simply assumed that one of his cabin mates was an informer, but whether it was Gury, Kolya or Obidin, paranoia could fight friendship just so long. Now they all seemed comrades.
    “How will you get the batteries on board?” Arkady asked. “They’re going to search everyone coming back to the ship. Some they’ll strip-search.”
    “I’ll come up with an idea.”
    Gury was always coming up with ideas. The latest was a book that would teach anyone to Think in New Ways in a minute. “The crazy thing,” he went on, “is that I was convicted of Restructuring. I was doing away with state planning, offering initiatives—”
    “You were convicted of illegally buying a state-owned coffee roaster, selling coffee privately, and doctoring the beans with fifty percent grain.”
    “I was just a premature entrepreneur.”
    Bubbles trailed to the surface and popped. “You sold condoms to Zina,” Arkady said.
    “Zina was not a girl to take chances.” Gury threw the latest failure on the pile, picked up another and sneezed. “At least not that