August 6, 1993
On Friday Zhorik glanced at the calendar, frowned:
– In two weeks we’ve scraped together barely enough for payroll. Dividends are coming up soon, and Kirill’s drinking, and Bug-Eyes has a problem with the Pioneers. What a bunch we got saddled with…
– What Pioneers?
– Remember the trade-school kids?
– Yeah.
– Signed up to unload Chechen-bucks on the markets. Got it done in a day. Good lads, that part. Blew the profit at some dive. Morons, that part. How do we punish them? Write me up a report on who brought in how many vouchers. Can you have it by Monday?
Ha! Serega and I had set up stat-tracking from the trading-hall computers onto the server just the day before yesterday. The task he’d just laid out, we’d already solved first thing.
Five minutes later Zhorik was holding a three-page printout.
– Well done! – Zhorik praised. – Something to work with. Write up salaries per the pay scale and toss in an extra hundred bucks bonus each. They worked well, not their fault management’s a bit thick and can’t come up with a winning strategy.
He jabbed at both of us with that one.
Two weeks gone, and we still hadn’t figured out what profitable business to sink the cash pouring into the till.
I wrote up the payroll. Remembered his instruction and tacked on a hundred each in bonuses. Left my own name off — too thick, apparently. Went to Zhorik.
He turned the payment order for seven thousand four hundred dollars over in his hands, sighed, signed it, and sent it off to the cashier.
The premises had settled into a sort of blissful idyll. No clients, the trading hall empty, staff entertaining themselves however they could. The girls drank tea with cookies. The boys battled it out on the computers playing «Tetris» and «Lines.» Zhorik wandered the hallway.
After lunch he called me into his office:
– Now it’s all or nothing. We’re taking a risk. I need you badly for the next couple months, so you can kiss your trip home for vacation goodbye. Do you really need to see your folks that bad?
Like he knew I’d been planning to zip home the last week of August and show off in all my glory — a red blazer, wads of rubles in the pocket.
– Uh… not really, – I coughed.
– Great, then! We slave away till winter, and then it’s party time, ragamuffin! Me and Lyubka to the Emirates, and you go wherever you want, snot bubbles and finger fans, – Zhorik summed up. – Listen. Fedotych is coming with the booze any minute. Organize a party. A corporate booze-up is sacred business, right up there with the April cleanup day. Can’t cancel that. But I gotta run.
