June 25, 1993
Friday, 1:20 PM
Crossing the threshold of the apartment, I checked:
— Taking it easy now?
— Not a chance! We need to buy a computer with a printer, then we'll flip the car. I dug around and flagged a few dealers, — Zhorik tossed a thick tome onto the table.
Ah, the «Mobile» magazine.
— Pay attention, student. Your job's simple as a stool. Call around and find out where they've got a genuine Pentium in stock with a fifteen-inch monitor, plus a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer, both together for the lowest price. Lowest price — a fiver! Got it? Get to it!
Zhora yawned and headed off to his room. I sat down at the phone and started torturing the creaky dial.
Somewhere around the fiftieth call — the line busy, or nobody picking up, or someone cutting me off with «Nope! Sold out» — I was finally told that both items were in stock! Fully assembled, four-two-hundred cash, and if we didn't want to miss out, we'd need to buy right now.
I took down directions as they were dictated and woke up Zhorka. We tore off toward Savyolovsky station.
After circling some baffling fork in the road, taking the wrong turn every single time, we pulled into a parking lot in front of the station. There we studied the dictated directions and did indeed find «right behind the station on the left, a four-story brick building, with an iron door facing the tracks and a wooden one next to it. That's your door.»
Exactly right.
Behind the wooden door was a staircase, which we climbed up to the fourth floor and found the office, which greeted us grimly.
No one rushed to celebrate the arrival of distinguished customers. Men scurrying back and forth glanced at us and went on hauling boxes.
Who was the salesman here? Where was the smooth-talking clerk, or, as they say now, the «sales manager»?
— Who's in charge of computer equipment here? — Zhorik inquired, loudly.
A disheveled guy walked up, red-eyed from lack of sleep, dressed like a mover, built like a mover, with a face like a mover's, and asked, annoyed:
— What d'you need? I'm in charge.
— ...uh. Half an hour ago we agreed on a Pentium and a LaserJet. Here we are.
— Looks like it might be sold already.
— What?!
— Let's see, — the guy vanished, shouted from the hallway: — You're in luck. Still here.
— Phew. How much?
— What did we agree on?
— ...? Sounds like four-two-hundred cash.
— Hand it over.
Zhora pulled a stack of dollars from his pocket. Counted out forty-two bills and handed them to the salesman.
The guy — shff-shff-shff! A blur of fingers and bills!!! — counted it back. Scraped one bill with a fingernail, stuffed the wad in his back pocket, and waved a hand:
— Take it.
— What about the warranty, the paperwork, — I mumbled.
— Month's warranty. Breaks — bring it back, we'll swap it for a new one. Need paperwork, wait about ten minutes. They're drawing it up back there.
We peeked into the room he'd pointed to: a sweaty guy with a list in hand was droning at a girl behind a monitor, a light Chuvash accent in his voice:
— Per the May 25th contract, we took a hundred hard drives instead of a hundred fifty. You promised to make up the shortfall with floppies. Then there were two more contracts...
— Screw the paperwork, — Zhora concluded. — This'll drag on half an hour in here. Let's go.
On the way back Zhora shook his head:
— Yeah, funny bunch. Ex-students, businessmen now, but degenerates at heart same as ever. Don't pay a kopeck in taxes, hustle for millions. Take a lesson, student: cry to the tax office about the hard life of the entrepreneur, then go buy an apartment downtown and an Audi 100.
— They really don't pay any taxes?
— Why would they? They give you a receipt saying they squeezed four grand cash out of citizen Peskov? Turnover runs entirely on black cash, on paper they sell a couple floppy disks a year and post a loss.
— Lucky them, — I sighed.
— Well, not entirely. Nature abhors a vacuum. Every clever nut finds its bolt. There are Robin Hoods in this world, restoring justice. Bandits, they're called. They roll up, rob you, take a million. And where's the businessman supposed to complain, if on paper he never saw that million to begin with? A circulation of profits in nature. We live in a fun time, won't ever be like this again. Seize the moment.
— Let's seize it! Sell computers!
— Won't work, we're late to that party. Every other guy's already grinding away at it. Need to spin up some other angle. Ah, Romka, you dragged your feet a few years too long. Back in the day, deals like that were something! In 'ninety, guys were making a million a day on Atari machines. There were opportunities, there was romance! Now it's harder. Can't carve up a budget with a bare ass, can't stick to the feeding trough. Gotta take risks. The angles are still out there, but no telling which one'll hit and send you straight to the finish line! Would love to set up a little bank, but where to get the startup capital, I have no idea. Let's start with collecting vouchers, that's the gold mine for the year ahead. People got their vouchers for free. What kind of paper is it — nobody understands, not even the redhead. In a couple months we'll rake in the dough, then figure out a direction. There's one small «but,» though. Setting up a voucher fund also takes capital. Where to find it? Like Thomas Fuller said: «Money begets money.» And if there's no starting money, all that's left is labor at the standard pay scale. Nowhere near what happiness requires. A vicious circle, and we need to break it. We're gonna break it. You in?
— Always ready!
