July 21, 1993
Wednesday
Vadim had botched the job. Swore up and down he’d performed every possible miracle. Vowed everything would be shipshape by end of week.
I’d settled into a daily routine: from ten to two, drafting paperwork, from two to three, reviewing the drafts with Marina, from three to six, making revisions, checking against a list of comments. At six in the evening I’d move to a table with tea and cookies, and Zhorik would drift in.
We’d drink our tea, work through the state of preparations for the fund’s opening. Never any time to think things through during work hours, problems kept cropping up: the local network glitching, a computer frozen in the operations hall, the PBX cursing in some language not our own, or Marina not understanding why we needed «Appendix Three to the Certificate Purchase-Sale Agreement» when, according to every other document, the voucher wasn’t being sold at all, just handed over for management. I didn’t understand a single one of the problems that kept coming up, but I made the decisions anyway. Right or wrong, nobody could tell me. I relied on myself, or rather, on vague gut feelings: «it’ll be fine! Don’t sweat it…»
Zhorik didn’t take part in the fund’s day-to-day. Flashed a fancy word, «Auftragstaktik,» explained that you had to act on the situation immediately and without hesitation, guided by your own judgment, without bothering the higher-ups. He’d vanish from morning till night on his own business, unrelated to ours. What occupied him were lines in his notebook, multiplying every evening at our tea sessions.
Same thing this Wednesday.
Zhora dropped into the armchair, furious, wound tight, ready to explode. Cursing Vadim, he scribbled over a couple of pages in his notebook, tore out the sheet, crumpled it, hurled it toward the trash can: «Bug-eyed creature!»
I smiled.
Zhorik got indignant: what are you grinning about? Problems up to my ears! No money, no documents, nothing, and here I am drinking tea!
To my point that he should stop boiling over and just solve the problems, Zhorik grunted that he had an idea. Next week there’d be a currency exchange. There was a chance to strike gold, but the legal paperwork was a total mess. We wouldn’t make it in time. Had to swing by some trusted guys first thing in the morning, would cost a pile of cash, which we barely had to spare.
— How little to spare? — I asked.
— Ten grand, but if the exchange pans out, that’ll be a hundred grand in a week.
— What exchange?
— Roma, don’t you read the papers? Soviet banknotes are getting exchanged for Russian ones. Limit’s thirty bucks per citizen’s mug. The rest gets deposited into a savings account. We’re going to peddle shares for Soviet rubles with a promise to pay back in genuine Russian banknotes, no limits.
— What shares? We’re selling certificates.
— There you go, nagging like a crab-lice bite. Same eggs, different angle. Shares, whatever, what’s the difference? Draw up the contract right and quit grumbling. Any questions?
— Where do we get the new money from? And where do we hand off the old?
— We’ll figure something out for Russian banknotes before fall, for the Soviet ones I’m heading off right now to negotiate with a banker about taking in a couple billion in Soviet notes. You think about how to peddle our shares for Soviet-model rubles. Some kind of staged dividend payment system. And don’t forget the «certificate» in fine print. There’s no such thing as a small detail in business. Got it?
— Got it.
Zhorik tore off into the night. I finished my tea and went to see Seryoga. He was tinkering with some elaborate program that let you track cash-register money movements in real time, so as not to breed excess paperwork and to stay on top of things.
