October 1, 1993
By the first of October I hadn’t set foot in the institute once. I was loaded down with work fourteen hours a day. The scheme Zhorik had built ran like clockwork. People brought cash into the fund. Vadim turned the cash into bank money and sent it to Fima. Fima converted the rubles into dollars and wired them to the Poles. On the return route – Gdansk to Moscow – came trucks full of liquor. Zhorik had signed a dozen and a half contracts that had to be paid for yesterday, come hell or high water. It looked as though he knew a calamity was about to fall on Moscow.
Maybe by accident, maybe he’d arranged it that way, but overnight, the moment the Supreme Soviet started making trouble, alcohol turned into a scarce commodity. Everything we brought in sold at a hundred percent markup and went like hot cakes; by evening the warehouse was empty. I’d crawl home dead with exhaustion. Collapse onto the bed, jerk awake.
Hell! It’s morning already! To work!
The company was working smoothly. Gena had taken on the duties at the Khryakino warehouse – light work, but with responsibility attached. First: take delivery of the trucks from customs against the waybill. Second: load the Gazon, which shuttled to Kalyazinskaya and back, according to the order sheet. Tedious, dreary work demanding hellish attention and diligence – exactly right for Genka. Nobody else could have managed it. Gena was also responsible for drawing up the stock reports, which he handed to Yurik in the evenings back at the dorm.
We didn’t envy Gennady, and he chuckled about it: a job like a night watchman’s – «Sit on the little couch and leaf through magazines.» He was putting on a brave face.
In the office the duties divided themselves automatically. Pashka – a notorious liar, chatterbox and giggler – dealt with the clients. He took down what they wanted, matched it against what we could do, drew up the orders and passed them to Yurik. Meticulous, scrupulous Yurets checked them against the liquor reports. If the booze wasn’t in the basement but was in Khryakino, he promised delivery tomorrow morning and printed out an invoice for Gena on the computer.
Clients went down to the basement, where the strongman Vovka reigned. Hauling ten cases upstairs was a light warm-up for him. Unloading a Gazon single-handed was a decent workout.
Phone calls were answered by Oksana, Yurka’s girlfriend, who possessed a magnificent voice. We hired her at a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, explained the essence of the job, shoved a price list at her and forgot about her. A week later we realized the firm had acquired a super-employee – a super-employee-ess, rather – who had closed off the hardest sector of all, talking to clients on the phone, with that velvet timbre of hers.
During the week Seryoga, the computer man from VychMekh, worked his magic. He wrote and debugged a program that issued invoices and recalculated liquor balances in the basement and at Khryakino, set up computers for Pashka and me, ran a local network, and was gone. He went back to his VychMekh den, calling us a fire in a madhouse during a flood. Seryoga was right. Taking in vouchers and paying out dividends was a hundred times nobler an occupation than selling booze.
With computerized accounting the chaos vanished. Computerization put the warehouse paperwork in order and brought relief. On a wave of joy we raised the number of computers from three to five – it wasn’t right for Oksana and Vovka to sit on the shoulder of progress with calculators in their hands. They were doing serious work; let them have access to information.
A second trouble spot surfaced – the basement warehouse. The fast-moving booze was bought out by mid-morning. After lunch, buyers were offered not what we’d promised but whatever was left. The cursing began, «Proma Impex» got called a fake village shop, a mobile grocery van without wheels, and other unkind names. The traders – Pasha and Yurik – took no offense. They fended people off with advice to get up earlier and printed out an order for Gennady.
I set myself the problem. And grasped what Zhorik had meant when he grumbled: «You can’t sort out an assortment matrix here without a bottle.»
I sorted it out without a bottle, blowing through three cups of double espresso to activate my thought processes. Studied the sales statistics, compiled a list of the fast-moving liquor, walked Yurik and Pashka through the list. Added a dozen more items and sent the sheet to Gena, so he’d load what was listed generously, with a triple margin. Let it sit idle at Kalyazinskaya rather than at Khryakino. Having settled the assortment, I turned my attention to the endless line in front of Yurik.
Half a day of thinking got me nowhere, no matter how I racked my brains. I decided to go down to the «Terem» for a bite, maybe something would come to me. The moment I sat down at a table, Genka – languishing in idleness – surfaced in my mind like a light jab to the cerebellum. Imagination? Didn’t matter. The solution was found.
While I bolted my lunch, thoughts flared in my head, each brighter than the last.
An hour later I was briefing Yurik. First I announced that, at the request of our purchasing citizenry, discounts of five and ten percent were being introduced. Explained that the discounts came with one condition – you take delivery at the Khryakino warehouse. Five percent for small clients, ten for the serious ones who bought in bulk from a thousand dollars up. Yurik agreed and told Pashka: anyone who’d sell his mother for a discount, send him out to the warehouse at Khryakino.
I called Gena with the news: the sinecure is over, the workdays have arrived.
The decision turned out to be right. The big clients worked out that ten percent off goods worth three or four thousand dollars was a decent reason to drive out to the far Moscow region. The line in the office thinned.
The positive effect showed up two weeks later. The problem showed up in an hour. There was no decent connection with the plant; there was noise and crackle on an ancient switchboard. The pager we’d issued to Genka didn’t save us. The paging-company operators got tangled in the dictated invoices like second-year students in participial clauses. Damn it all!
I was drowning in a heap of business, in a tumult of happenings…
