December 30, 1994
Friday
10:00 p.m.
Zhora listened with his jaw hanging open, shook his mane:
«My head’s not working right now, I’m not following. Let’s talk on the phone later. Here’s my card. Give me yours, before I get too drunk. Don’t be stingy. And you, Roma, why aren’t you drinking? First time seeing a real capitalist?»
I was dying of curiosity about what kind of foreign visitor this was, so I hadn’t touched a drop. Once Kalkin stepped away to the restroom, Zhorik explained:
«You’ll get the details later, just trust me for now. Kalkin’s a genius. He’s not some foreign tourist at all. Just a former head of the Russian literature department in Tartu, split for Israel in 1980, came back in 1986. Since then he’s barely left Russia — a couple months here and there, total. His business is incredible. Made seven hundred large over eight years. Says he’ll push it to a mil and retire. And he was a broke linguist before perestroika, if you can believe it.»
«What’s this got to do with us?»
«You can’t get anywhere on petty speculation anymore. You need a systematic approach, and Kalkin gets that — structural linguist, no joke! You know I’m no good with ideas. Plenty of enthusiasm, but a mess in my head. If Kalkin points us somewhere, we run with it,» Zhorik threw back a shot of vodka, froze, and concluded: «Gotta sic Chicha on him, squeeze the philologist a little.»
Something pricked at the back of my skull, a flash, a flicker of light I could almost see. I followed Zhora’s lead and knocked back forty grams of cognac.
The flicker kept haunting me for months afterward.
Zhora visited Kalkin’s office and lured Viktor Olegovich, the pensioner handling Kalkin’s export orders, into a private chat. Flipped the old man in an instant. He’d been working for Kalkin for a fixed two thousand dollars. Zhora offered him five times that plus ten percent of profit. He had the European buyers’ contacts within a week.
Starting at the end of January, Zhorik began flying around the country with Viktor Olegovich Kanyukov, now «Proma Chemical’s» vice president. The old man knew the business cold: in the chemical industry he was friendly with every director and could load up any plant with orders, this time under our name. We signed joint-venture agreements with a dozen chemical plants. In parallel, we drafted supply contracts. Following Kalkin’s scheme, Zhorik registered hundreds of companies under fake passports, which Pinochet never ran short of. The companies served different purposes and, to keep them straight, were sorted into three tiers:
— a zero-balance shell, used for signing letters of intent, guarantee obligations, and other worthless paperwork;
— a dump, whose only job was to shuffle money to another dump;
— a clean firm, paying its taxes, existing officially, free of blemishes or loose ends.
These were Proma’s three accounting poles. I reviewed the payments: who sent what to whom, and why. Ruble and hard-currency funds shuttled between outfits registered in Ingushetia, Kalmykia, the Altai, and the remote settlement of Tura, where Joseph Vissarionovich himself once served out a long stretch of exile. The local financiers there invited us out for hunting and fishing, swearing Turukhansk was practically next door — just an hour’s flight from Krasnoyarsk. Zhora and I begged off and offered instead to have them visit Moscow on our dime.
Surplus chemicals were sold off on the Moscow Commodity Exchange. Zhora had a quiet word with Vasilich, and through his old comrades — fellow gloomy retirees — got us plugged into the London exchange. I met a series of stern men with no business cards, who introduced themselves in clipped terms: Ivan Ivanych, Mikhal Mikhalych, Semyon Semyonych, Mr. John Doe...
They had no interest in Proma Chemical’s full catalog. We discussed specific lots for specific dates. Two-thirds of the lots sold at a stable profit, the rest was hit or miss. Once a month or two, a windfall would hit with a fifty-percent profit, but Zhora would immediately crush my excitement: that chunk’s not yours. The little generals earned it. All the money goes to them.
