The Smart Girl

Her new status made itself felt in small things, too. The guards no longer required that she produce her pass – they only nodded respectfully. When she requested that an additional power socket be mounted in her room, an electrician showed up in ten minutes accompanied by the superintendent who came in person to see to it that everything was done properly. Nina recalled that her former chief Ariadna Petrovna once spent a whole week trying to get that kind of service for her own office. Such episodes tickled Nina’s vanity. She was surprised to notice the effect this was having on her. “If I were a vain fool, I would get ideas of my own importance,” she said to herself. “But I am not a vain fool… I hope.”

As they met her in the lobby or in the elevator, her former co-workers fell into a kind of gleeful stupor. To them, she was a creature of a higher order, the heroine of a myth who had ascended to the sky right before their eyes. All office workers are alike. When one of them gets a promotion, the rest, while smiling to the lucky one’s face, are hissing spitefully, green with envy, behind his back. But that is only if it is an ordinary kind of promotion. If somebody, like Nina, draws a lucky ticket and jumps over many rungs of the career ladder, there is no more room for envy. The minion of Fortune is sincerely admired, seen as a dream come true.

“What is it like up there?” her former mates would ask Nina sheepishly whenever she ran into them. “It’s all right, it’s just work like any other,” Nina answered simply. They nodded with a grave look on their faces, showing that they understood everything and appreciated her modesty.

In order not to disappoint them, Nina threw in some food for their imagination. “Yesterday we had a visitor from the Cabinet of Ministers… Let’s not bandy about any names,” she said, smiling to herself at their simple-hearted love for the high-ups. “If only you knew what plans were discussed, what figures were cited! … There’s an awful pile of work to do – no breathing space left, really.” Hearing this, the analysts got stupefied with admiration.

Indeed, the bank had been visited by the minister of economics; his hearse-like limousine stood by the main entrance for everyone to see. Nobody had seen the great man himself, though – before he entered the building, the security had cleared the lobbies and elevators of any stray employees. Nina had not seen the minister either; all during his visit to Samsonov she had been toiling in her little room and had not learned of the event until later. But why share those details with her poor colleagues? She might as well let them imagine that at the negotiations, she was sitting at the director’s right hand, and everyone present, including the minister, devoured every word she had to say on financial issues.

Once or twice her colleagues plucked up the courage to invite her to some party that they were having. Their intent was clear – they hoped desperately that Nina would shed her heavenly light upon them – infect them with her good luck, or perhaps, even actually put in a word for them with Samsonov. “Thank you, but no chance, you understand,” Nina would reply. They did not get offended – they understood it their own way: Nina was out of their league now, and it did not become her to mix with small fry like them. In fact though, Nina would not at all mind getting distracted and spending an hour or two in meaningless chatter with people who, although not really her friends, were akin to her, being analysts like herself. But Nina was really overloaded; all the nights when she did not play tennis which she was sticking to obstinately, she stayed at work after hours. She had piles of work to do, that much was true.

It was also true that now she was involved with really big things – in fact, the largest construction project of the decade. The sheer size of it was dazzling in terms of both the money to be invested and works to be carried out. At first, figures with a lot of zeros had a paralyzing effect on Nina. Overwhelmed, she had difficulty getting at the meaning underlying the numbers. She was about to give up the assignment, when she thought of a simple trick – divide everything by one thousand. The project shrank miraculously, and everything became accessible and visible, similar to what she had dealt with before.

That allowed her to take some initial steps in her analysis. Yet, as an Asian saying goes, “a thousand susliks do not make a camel”. The project of constructing a huge business center was different in many ways from any number of small projects. Nina noticed that for some construction materials, the prices adopted in the project budget were significantly higher than those suggested by the market, even with due allowance for the future inflation. “Here, for example, for this type of cement, there is a local producer with a good business reputation,” she told Samsonov. “And here is their current price list. With a wholesale discount, we can get an economy of…” “That’s true,” the director replied. “But we are not just any other wholesale customer. We’re going to need ten times more of that cement than is produced locally. We’ll have to import it from abroad. Or, perhaps, we’ll buy that company and expand the production. Either way, it means expenses…”

It was the same way with unique construction machinery, specialists in areas that had been unheard of before, and lots of other things. The project was so big that it did not fit into the local construction industry as a whale did not fit into a pond.

The enormous scale of the project boosted the expenses, but it provided some additional opportunities, too. Nina pointed out to Samsonov that some of the project’s parameters disagreed with the construction industry regulations. He was surprised. “What do you know about the regulations?” Nina bit her tongue. She could not possibly start telling the director how those very regulations had been used by his henchmen to snatch away her father’s company. “Well, I don’t know anything, really… I just scraped the surface of this stuff in connection with a loan case,” she mumbled. “You’re really a precious worker,” Samsonov said. It was not clear whether he was joking or speaking seriously. “Don’t you bother about those regulations. They’re going to be revised by the time the project starts; that’s already been agreed on with the government.”

Even Nina who had very little knowledge of the business backstage realized that the project affected the interests of a lot of influential organizations and persons in the construction industry, city administration, federal agencies. However, Samsonov never discussed such matters with her, and whenever she touched upon them, he cut her short: “You don’t need to know that.” That was his domain which he was not sharing with anyone.

For that reason, some of Nina’s questions remained unanswered, hung in midair. “Why is this loan going to be placed with Bank X rather than Bank Y? You see, Bank Y offers more favorable conditions,” she would ask Samsonov. He would drum his fingers on the table, and then say reluctantly: “It works that way, that’s why.” But he did not ignore Nina’s remarks. “Does it stick out a lot?” he would ask in his turn. And if Nina confirmed that it did, he took some measures of his own, and after some time, corrections were made to Bank X’s offer which restored the logic of investments.

With time, Nina understood and appreciated the reasons for Samsonov’s secretiveness. It was not only that many of the things that he knew were really hot and explosive. Samsonov wanted Nina to look at the project through the eyes of an analyst – only. He wanted to be sure that his baby, investment project Zaryadje–XXI, was a robust financial organism. Of all the rest he was going to take care himself.

Even being almost totally ignorant as to the implications of Zaryadje and only guessing at the true importance of the project to various parties, Nina could not help feeling impressed by its grandeur and proud of her humble part in it. Hundreds of businesses, tens of thousands of people, enormous funds, strategic plans of the government… Gradbank which vied for leadership in that huge enterprise had to exhibit titanic drive and ability to crush down everyone and everything that stood in the way.

“As it has crushed father with his tiny company,” Nina reminded herself. The resentment at the wrong that had been done to her family had not dissolved with time – it was there, as a scar on her heart – but now that she looked at it from the height of Gradbank’s top floor, she had to admit to herself that she was beginning to understand another truth – the truth of big business in which the scale and challenging nature of the objectives left no room for sentiment. Nina had not noticed when she had lost her determination to take revenge on Gradbank. She had lived with that determination for a long time although she had always known at heart that it had been nothing but a silly, childish fantasy. Now it was time to grow up. Since she had not left the bank, she should be a good employee for it and do her job in a professional manner. Good work and professionalism were things that were always right and always important. Besides, Zaryadje was the project of her beloved man, so… Damn it, she was ready to kill herself with work to help him.

From time to time, Nina had visits from employees representing one or another of the bank’s departments. The visitors advised Nina on various special subjects. Sometimes it was Nina who asked for a consultation, but more often it was Samsonov’ decision. After another report by Nina he would say: “I think you should see someone from the leasing department.” Or: “It seems you’re not well enough versed in currency transactions. I’ll send someone along to enlighten you.”

The employees that were sent up to Nina were experts rather than managers. Typically, they started by being wary of Nina whom they took for a new boss of some kind, but then, finding a kindred spirit in her, they thawed out and helped Nina willingly to find her bearings in their respective fields.

Nina’s head was reeling with the knowledge hastily crammed into it. She feared at first that an overload might occur – that her head would refuse to work, stuffed beyond measure with all those facts and figures, rules and exceptions, and all the multitude of methods and procedures adopted in different areas of the boundless world of finance and investments. But her head was coping.

In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the great detective compared the human brain with an attic which, crammed with useless stuff, might be unable to take in anything else and thus be rejecting what was necessary. Nina adored that English gentleman and had read all the books about him but she found out from her own experience that Sherlock was wrong on that particular point. The human brain had an unlimited capacity; it could keep and process a huge amount of information – provided one had persistence and aptitude for organized thinking. Nina had both.

Nina was gratified to feel a growing control of the material. She had developed her own mnemonic technique: all the information on the project stored in her mind she divided into sections which she thought of as library catalogue boxes. Whenever she needed to recall something – for instance, the projected expense structure at a certain stage of the works, or forecasted return rate on such and such type of investments – she drew out mentally the right box, found the right card, and voilà! – the right figures were retrieved from memory. Afterwards, checking her mental findings against the computer data bases, she had never once caught herself being in error.

That memorizing of hers made a lot of sense. Computers were all right, but it was only in her memory that the figures became really alive and started to cross-fertilize one another paying mutual visits, as Nina called it. Then, suddenly, a question would pop up: what was going to happen to the profitability ratios if a particular stage of financing was prolonged by one month? by three months? What if this or that tax rate was raised or lowered?

The figures swarmed in her mind like a beehive. Quite often even at home, already lying in bed, she would go on pondering over some problem that she had posed herself. It even frightened her – such obsession could end in exhaustion – but as soon as she solved the problem she plunged immediately into sound sleep to get up the next morning feeling totally fresh and ready for further analytic labor.

One day the door of her room opened and Ariadna Petrovna appeared.

“Hi, Shuvalova. Samsonov told me to stop by and have a chat with you.”

Nina jumped to her feet. “Ariadna Petrovna, you didn’t have to! I would’ve come down to see you myself.”

The woman waved it away: “Don’t sweat it. Samsonov says have a talk here, so here we have it.”

As soon as she sat down, she asked: “Do you have any coffee?”

“Instant kind,” replied Nina.

“Not good,” Ariadna Petrovna said in a mentorial tone. “Instant coffee is no coffee.”

The woman looked around the room with interest.

“Hey, you’ve fixed yourself nicely here. The only downside is it’s too close to the bosses.” She grinned. “On the other hand, some like it that way.”

Nina did not know how to conduct herself with her former – or was it present? – chief. Above all, she did not want to appear a conceited upstart which was not at all easy to avoid in her new position.

The woman did not seem to notice her confusion.

“Well, come on, show me what you’ve got.”

Nina was not prepared for a discussion with Ariadna Petrovna, the bank’s most experienced analyst. It occurred to her afterwards that the director probably had meant it to be that way – he expected to gain some additional benefit from her being taken unawares. Samsonov was not always dumbly direct in his ways; those who believed that he was were in for a surprise – they discovered sooner or later that they had been unsuspectingly playing his game. It was not cunning on Samsonov’s part; he just did not consider it necessary to explain everything to everyone.

Nina was thinking hectically what to talk about with Ariadna Petrovna. Finally, she decided not to stall but to lay out directly her main finds.

There were three of them, and in Nina’s opinion, each could increase Gradbank’s chances of winning the tendering contest. Her first find concerned the leasing terms of heavy construction machinery. Nina had invented a leasing scheme that she believed to have a great cost-saving potential.

Ariadna Petrovna drew her massive body closer to the computer and started looking through the computations, clicking the mouse at a great pace. After a couple of minutes, she spotted an error.

“Here, look.” She highlighted a number with the cursor. “It should be zero zero five, not just zero five.”

Nina’s brilliant scheme which she had toiled at for two weeks burst like a soap-bubble.

She was burning with shame.

“Take it easy,” Ariadna Petrovna said indifferently. “Shit happens. Anything else?”

Another of Nina’s ideas was concerned with the city. It was true that project Zaryadje– XXI belonged to the domain of national and transnational interests, but at the same time, it was to be materalized in a particular metropolis with its problems and opportunities.

Nina had dug up the municipal budgets and investment plans for the entire city, and specifically, by the district, for the area bordering upon the future business center. She sifted through all those papers, asking herself just one question: “How does that relate to Zaryadje?” Mostly, there was no apparent relation, and occasionally the project of building a huge business center conflicted with the city’s interests, but on some essential points cooperation was possible with great potential mutual benefits. Nina was surprised to find out that those opportunities were totally ignored by both the municipal plans and Gradbank’s proposal. Nina prepared a whole package of suggestions on the issue. She had done a lot of meticulous work which she believed she could be proud of.

However, on hearing that, Ariadna Petrovna did not grab the mouse to open the file.

“I’m not even looking at it.”

“How…? Why?” Nina was taken aback.

Ariadna Petrovna was gazing at her with an expression that Nina could not read. After some hesitation, the woman said: “All those in the city hall who have anything to do with investments are on Atlas’s payroll. It’s a tight liaison of long standing, so we have no chance to butt in. Haven’t they told you that?”

“No. Nobody told me anything.” Nina blushed.

Her main achievement which she had hoped would become her contribution to the great project burst as quickly as her leasing scheme. But if with the leasing scheme it was an elementary error…

“Tell me, Ariadna Petrovna, why do they hold me for a dummy?” she asked, almost crying.

“It’s for your own good,” Ariadna Petrovna grinned without much sympathy. “All right, stop sniveling. And don’t you think of holding a grudge against Pavel Mikhailovich. He knows what he’s doing.”

“I’m not holding a grudge,” Nina sighed.

“How are you getting on with him, anyway?” asked Ariadna Petrovna.

“I’m good,” Nina uttered with a wooden tongue, feeling that she was blushing even deeper.

Nina had no intention of going into her relations with the director, but Ariadna Petrovna did not need much to figure things out. The shrewd woman looked Nina in the eye.

“Hey, girl, you what – have a crush on him?

Gradbank’s chief analyst burst into laughter. Ariadna Petrovna did not laugh often, but when that happened, she shook her whole massive body and hooted like and owl.

“Ariadna Petrovna, I would never…” Nina babbled.

“Welcome to the club! You’re like one hundredth,” the woman added through her laughter ignoring Nina’s babble.

When she was finally done laughing, Ariadna Petrovna said, “All right, relax. It’s your personal thing, what do I care? If you want to pine for him like an idiot, it’s your choice. Do you have anything else on business?”

The third idea Nina had in store she did not take seriously herself; she was aware that it was too bold – probably, totally unrealistic. She had not even intended to mention it to either Samsonov or the ruthless Ariadna Petrovna, but as things stood now, she had nothing else to report. Besides, she was only glad to change the subject, so she rushed into explanations eagerly.

It had to do with the financing of the project. The financing sources were the biggest secret of each tenderer; everyone was trying to disclose as little of them as possible and as late as possible. Most of the relevant information was kept secret from Nina, but from occasional remarks made by Pavel Mikhailovich Nina understood that an efficient solution of the financing issues could be a decisive factor in the fight for the contract. “No, a solution that’s merely efficient won’t do,” Nina corrected herself. Any tenderer bank had specialists capable of producing one. To win, the financing scheme had to be something really daring and unique – as was the project itself.

Lacking real information, Nina gave free rein to her imagination, and one night, as she was going to bed, she stumbled upon an idea. It was pure fantasy and at first, Nina was even unwilling to waste her time elaborating it.

What Nina invented was a large-scale multi-step financial operation. Apart from Gradbank, it required the participation of the largest state-owned bank which was known to be preparing for a major placement of its shares on the London stock exchange. The operation involved a huge package of government bonds which, under certain conditions, Gradbank could get hold of, thus becoming a creditor to the government, with all the legal and financial implications of such status. The plan was packed with details concerning the terms, conditions, rates and the like, but, as Nina realized with amusement and some horror, it was basically a reincarnation of the scheme that the late Ignatiy Savelievich had once initiated her into – only the scale was infinitely larger.

Ariadna Petrovna started reading the file.

Nina expected the smart woman to wave her idea away and scoff at her, but as minute after minute passed, Ariadna Petrovna kept reading, clicking the mouse and scanning the monitor pages with her eyes, pausing at calculations.

“Do you have any coffee?” she asked suddenly, without taking her eyes off the monitor, when some twenty minutes had passed. “Ah, yes, you have the instant kind. I’m telling you, it’s no coffee…”

Having done reading, she took out her calculator and re-checked some figures. Then she accessed some data bases which Nina was not aware of, searched them for something for quite a while and on finding it, grunted.

At last, Ariadna Petrovna moved away from the monitor. For some time, she gazed into space in silence, and then said:

“You know, it can work. It’s one hell of a crazy idea, of course, but who knows…”

She looked at Nina with a new expression.

“You’re good, Shuvalova. No, seriously, you’re good.”

Knowing how chary of praise the woman was, Nina blushed again – out of pleasure this time.

“Only you need to fix a few minor things here,” said Ariadna Petrovna.

She pointed out to Nina several items on the plan that had to be refined or reworded.

“Report this to Samsonov today, make no delay,” Ariadna Petrovna said, rising to her feet.

“I’ll tell him that you’ve helped me with that,” Nina assured hastily.

“Like hell you will! Don’t even think of that. It’s your idea, and it’s for you to take the rap.”

Nina did not understand whether that had been said as a joke or in earnest.

Already in the doorway, the woman turned around.

“I’m going to make you my assistant when all this mess is over. Are you in?”

“I am,” Nina replied mechanically.

“It’s a deal then. But you have to survive here first.”

“Wh-what do you mean?

“Nothing. Well, enough chitchat. I’ve got work to do… Yeah, and get yourself a coffee-maker!”

After Ariadna Petrovna left, Nina spent a while absorbed in thought. She had a lot to think about.

Chapter 3

Apart from Samsonov, Nina had only one person on the twelfth floor she could talk to; it was Klara Fedorovna. That was a woman of about forty, quite nice-looking, always very neatly, formally dressed. At first she was rather official, though polite with Nina, always ready to help with anything that belonged to her area of competence. And a broad, important area it was; apart from the duties of the general director’s secretary, she was performing the job of an assistant in charge of keeping the most important documents of Gradbank.

A breakthrough in Nina’s relations with Klara Fedorovna occurred when the secretary once took a seat next to Nina’s in the cafeteria. The director’s floor had its own cafeteria which was used by the top management. When Nina was told that now it was available to her, too, her first impulse was to refuse as she would rather stick to the common canteen on the third floor. But Sinitsin insisted: “Sorry, Nina Yevgenievna, you don’t have a voice in that matter. Security considerations, you understand.”

Forced to use the directorate cafeteria, Nina always tried to arrive there towards the closing time, when the bosses had already had their lunch and dispersed, leaving the cafeteria empty. Once, as she was sitting there alone, just starting on a mushroom julienne baked in smetana (the cafeteria served excellent dishes for symbolic prices), Klara Fedorovna suddenly came running in.

“Open yet? Thank God. With all this rush work, one will go hungry.”

In the recent weeks, Gradbank had been swept by some kind of rush every day.

Klara Fedorovna filled her tray and headed for Nina’s table.

“Do you mind, Nina?”

It was Nina’s impression that the director’s assistant was not exactly happy about the prospect of joining her for the meal but the woman had no choice – it would be impolite to take another table in the empty cafeteria, and Klara Fedorovna clearly tried to be polite to the analyst girl who was being singled out so by the director.

At first, their conversation was limited to idle comments about weather, but then, little by little, Klara Fedorovna warmed up to it. Apparently, she had long lacked someone to chat with like a woman, and now, finding a good listener in Nina, she thawed.