Chapter 6
They had to live on somehow, but they were in a complete mess, not knowing what to make of their situation or what to do about it. Was the company going to be left alone now or was it in for visits by some new hoods who would claim the debts of Misha Permyak?
Nina’s father was summoned to the police department where he was questioned about both Permyak and Simonyan. Yevgeniy Borisovich honestly could not tell the investigator anything about their affairs, and there seemed to be nothing he could be incriminated with himself. Nevertheless, he was made to sign an undertaking not to leave town.
Nina saw that her father was in a terrible state. Oddly, even the past half year, when he had been under the gangsters’ heel and in real danger, had not been as hard on him as this interminable uncertainty and suspense. The old fears and new fears, humiliation and the awareness of his total helplessness – all that was eating him up.
One day, Nina had a phone call from Lydia Grigorievna, the first one since they had been introduced to each other. The woman asked for them to have a talk in private, and they met in a café in town. Lydia Grigorievna looked tired and faded. “Ninochka, what shall we do? Please, help. This has to be stopped,” she said. “This company – it’s simply killing your father. We have to get rid of it. Nina, you’re a smart girl – talk to him. He won’t listen to me.”
She confirmed Nina’s fears – her father was on the bottle again, getting drunk almost every evening.
Lydia Grigorievna’s words clicked with Nina’s own thoughts – she was convinced that it was the right time to sell the business. Things were not all that bad now, and they could net some money on the sale. That would not make Nina’s father a rich man, but at least he would be able to pay off his personal debts and not risk ending up in the street. The company should be sold before it was too late – before some new misfortunes arrived.
For Nina, the most convincing argument in favor of selling the company was one that she could not even begin to discuss with Yevgeniy Borisovich. After having worked with him shoulder to shoulder for some time, she knew now that her father was not cut out to run his own business. He was an excellent engineer, a solid manager, but not a boss. He lacked something of what the late Simonyan had had in plenty and what was vital for success in the ruthless, unfair and unlawful world of domestic business.
She felt uncomfortable at the thought that she was evaluating her father as a grown-up person would evaluate a peer, and even looking down on him a bit. Her dear papa, who had always been the biggest and best man in the world for her, turned out to have his flaws and weaknesses. However, seeing him in this new way – and understanding that there was no one but her to give him support – made her love him even more.
Nina had hesitated to start this talk fearing that it might be difficult but she had not expected it to be such a disaster. At her very first words, her father flared up. He yelled hysterically and flung impossible accusations at Nina – called her a traitress who was stabbing him in the back. He shouted that the company was the reason of his life and he would not let anyone undermine it; that he was responsible for the people who trusted him, and that if Nina did not believe in him – fine, he could live with that, and he did not want to see her in the company ever again.
Nina was dumbfounded. She had never imagined that she would live to hear such things from her father. The next day he called her and they had a meeting. Yevgeniy Borisovich apologized for the breakdown he had had the day before, but he was still keeping aloof and said firmly that he really did not want to see Nina in the company. “Maybe I’ll never make it – maybe I’m no good as a businessman – but this is my life and this is what I do,” he said. “I’ll carry on but I’m not going to drag you into it any more. You must live your own life. It’s time for you to get married and start a family, anyway.”
To that last argument, Nina did not even know what to say.
Nina hoped that it was just nerves – that all that was going to melt away – but her father stood by what he had said and still would not allow her into the company weeks and even months later. Lydia Grigorievna called again and sobbed on the phone. Nina’s father went on drinking, literally killing himself. Nina was in despair. Her only hope which she shared with Lydia Grigorievna was that Yevgeniy Borisovich was having a psychological crisis, a belated reaction to that whole gangster story, which was bound to pass sooner or later. He was going to recover his balance – they only needed to have patience.
In part, she was right – but only in part.
At the same time, Nina faced the necessity to change jobs. In her investment company, she had long outgrown her entry position, but any promotion was blocked for her by her group manager. A woman of middle age and medium talent, the manager was extremely concerned with her own status in the organization. During her first years in the company, Nina was the manager’s favorite and was even held up as an example of a good young performer who never complained and worked on improving her skills. The woman’s attitude changed when she started to see a competitor in Nina. Not a great analyst herself, she did not tolerate gifted people around her. She started hounding Nina – loading the girl with the hardest and most boring work, finding faults with her, and mentioning her among problem employees at the staff meetings. In the past year, Nina had given food for criticism herself – submerged with her father’s problems, she had taken too many days off, refused to work extra hours, and failed to meet the report deadlines. The manager was now constantly bandying about her name, preparing the ground for her dismissal. It was clear to Nina that she had to leave the company herself.
Changing jobs is always an important event in the life of a professional – Nina had to search around for opportunities and weigh them up carefully in order to make a forced resignation into a step ahead in her career. However, she could not concentrate on her own affairs as her mind was full of her father and his severe crisis. Nina wanted with all her heart to help him, but he kept detached and would not allow her anywhere near him. Nina spent many evenings in gloomy reflection, sitting in her armchair in front of the mutely shimmering TV set. For a long time, she could not think of any way out.
However, her unfailing, bright mind finally came up with an answer. The idea that occurred to her seemed absurd but already the next day, Nina set to putting it into practice. She decided to quit the investment company and take up a job in the bank that credited her father – in order to at least be informed of his financial affairs and, given a chance, be of help to him. She could do that without disclosing their relationship – especially as she bore a different surname now.
Getting a job in the bank was easy. The bank’s management was in the process of change, new bosses recruiting new employees, and Nina who already had some experience was taken on readily. Her wish to work in the area of industrial credit was respected, too. Thus, without telling anything to her father, Nina landed in the very bank and the very department that credited him.
The bank had a weird atmosphere to it – everything reminded of its semi-criminal past. Back in the nineties, the bank had been started by some Komsomol functionaries and cooperative profiteers in crimson jackets. Where the starting capital had come from was a mystery – not only to the tax authorities, but it seemed, to the present owners of the bank as well, since the founders who had kept that secret had long been dead.
The first shady dealers had been replaced by others, then yet others. However, the times were changing, and the bank was touched by new drifts. The management was joined by new people who aimed at legal business and professionalism. Nina came to the bank at the time of transition when the bank resembled a frog which had almost turned into a prince but was still bearing spots of its frog past. In the managers’ offices, respectable Western businessmen could be met as well as local criminal bosses, and lofty financial talk was mixing with prison jargon.
In the industrial credit department, the table next to Nina’s was occupied by a character that looked like a professional boxer and did not even know how to turn on the computer. He came to work every day, never spoke to anyone, and killed time studying automobile magazines. Nina did not know why someone who had nothing to do with finance should be kept in that position, neither did she want to find out. Another table was always vacant although the staff list said that it was occupied by a specialist on long-term loans. Apart from her own work, Nina did everything for those two, and she did not mind the arrangement.
Also, the department had on its staff a number of mature women who had received accounting education some thirty years before. All of them had children and grandchildren. They were as interested in their work as in life on Mars, but they needed their jobs for the sake of the same children and grandchildren. For that reason, they were ready to perform great volumes of routine operations, but any attempts by the department manager to charge them with anything that went beyond their thirty-year-old skills were doomed.
The department manager, named Kirill, was a very corpulent young man with rosy cheeks who looked like a big baby. He had graduated from the same financial university as Nina, but he was five years her senior. He was very glad to have Nina in his department – he recognized at once a kindred mind in her, and soon the two of them formed a kind of alliance. Hardly a day went by without Kirill summoning Nina to discuss some business matters or, not infrequently, just have a chat and complain about his life.
Kirill’s life in the bank was not an easy one. He lived in cycles. From time to time, he was possessed by the zest for action. Then he called in Nina and Ignatiy Savelievich, the department’s leading specialist. Kirill unfolded grandiose plans before them – in his imagination, they were going to expand the operations many times over, and transform the modest credit department into a branch leading an independent investment policy. Ignatiy Savelievich, who had heard such speeches many times before, agreed with everything. Nina, for whom those plans were new, tried to grasp them and was surprised to find that, with all their Napoleonic audacity, Kirill’s ideas were not idle fantasies – they could very well be feasible. Inflamed with his projects, Kirill would cry out, “Let’s get to it, people! Time waits for no one.” With these words, he hustled his subordinates out of his office, and then tackled specific issues himself stirring up everyone around.
A period of Kirill’s great activity would end by his being called up to the bank’s bosses. From the top floor, Kirill came back crushed. The castles in the air that he built collapsed as they came in contact with the crude reality. The bosses who could not tell debit from credit or do without obscene slang in their speech imparted Kirill to their view of the business. The instructions that Kirill received were not too various – typically, he was ordered to write off, for unknown reasons, the debt of some client company, launder large sums of cash, or take on another criminal mug as a financial consultant for his department.
After his visits to the top, Kirill lapsed into apathy, let things take their course and signed without looking the papers that were brought to him. Nina became a shoulder to cry on for him. She was worried about that at first, fearing that Kirill might have his eye on her as a woman. That kind of interest on his part could thwart all her plans. Luckily, it soon became clear that there was no reason for her concern – Kirill was married and adored his wife. He kept a framed picture of her on the table in his office. His wife was thin and angular, with a face like a horse – in Nina’s view, not an attractive woman, but, thank heaven, Kirill was of a different opinion.
Apart from Kirill and Nina, the department’s only real specialist in finance was Ignatiy Savelievich, a man of retirement age. In former times, he had been himself a department head in one of the major state-owned banks. He knew everything and everyone – both in the profession and beyond it. Once, as they were having tea, he told Nina that one of the current vice-premiers in the federal government had served under him at one time. “Nina, do you know what dyslexia is? It’s pathological inability to make up words out of letters. A dyslexic person simply cannot read. Now, that guy has a severe case of dyslexia. You want to ask me how someone who was unable to read could work in a bank? You tell me – how can he work as vice-premier today?” Ignatiy Savelievich chuckled, “Who cares about dyslexia? It’s nothing! I know some more exciting things – what industries were privatized by whom in the government, and what foreign accounts billions were transferred to. I don’t know all of it, but I know a lot. If I wanted to die in style, I could let out one per cent of it to the media. But I mean to live on a bit longer, so I’m not letting out anything.”
Nina asked him, “Ignatiy Savelievich, why haven’t you privatized anything? Why do those people have billions while you, already on pension, have to work?” “That’s because I am a fool,” answered Ignatiy Savelievich. “No,” protested Nina. “You are not a fool, but a good, honest man.” “It’s one and the same thing,” laughed the old finance hand.
Before Nina’s time, Ignatiy Savelievich had been the department’s main force in everything that required application of knowledge or intellect. When Nina arrived, he sized up her potential at once and started shifting work on her without ceremony. The benefit was mutual, though – in compensation for the exploitation, he taught her many niceties and tricks of their profession.
It was from Ignatiy Savelievich that Nina received the file of her father’s company. Now she was the one who supervised that debtor on behalf of the bank and received quarterly reports on his operations. According to the reports, the company’s business was going on in a satisfactory way.
After she had worked in the department for half a year, Nina was already its unofficial leader. Whenever complex questions arose, everyone turned to her now. Ignatiy Savelievich was not jealous of her growth, and Kirill was happy to have such an employee on his staff. Strangely enough, Nina’s life in that ‘joint’ as it had been referred to by the late Misha Permyak was quite tolerable – the work suited her and so did the weird, disorderly state of things in the department which gave her a great deal of latitude.
About once in a month Nina visited her father at his place. Lydia Grigorievna was willing to receive her and made a special dinner for such occasions. Those evenings à trois ran peacefully, everyone trying to be polite and avoid sore subjects. Nina’s father would not talk about his work, and when asked, would only say, “Everything’s all right, there’s nothing to tell.” Nina, who had never told him about her getting a job in the bank, could not dwell on her work either and got away with the same dummy formula, “Everything’s all right.” As a result, they mostly discussed Lydia Grigorievna’s culinary novelties and theater shows which Nina’s father and his wife were frequenting again.
It was from Lydia Grigorievna that Nina learned how things actually were with her father. The woman would snatch a moment to give Nina a brief account – everything seemed to be quiet in the company, no new gangsters had turned up. Yevgeniy Borisovich was off drink, working a lot.
Nina was thinking of joining them for their theater outings, which had been more than once suggested by Lydia Grigorievna. However, Nina really had no time for that – she was busier than ever before, loaded down with work for almost all her evenings.
What depressed her was that she was deceiving her father. What had started by holding back some minor things from him at the time when he had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had to be spared had grown into a big lie which she did not know how to stop. Confessing to her deception now would mean hurting him badly and probably, estranging from herself for good the only person on earth with whom she had a real bond, while not confessing meant leading the situation further and further into an impasse.
Nina was stalling, unable to make up her mind and put an end to the lie. That was not at all like her. Rather, it was like her mother who had not had a single conflict with anyone in her life, preferring to smooth over the differences and let time sort everything out. “Mama, mama, where are you?” sighed Nina. “If you are there somewhere, forgive me for not remembering you more often. I love you.” It seemed to Nina that an eternity had passed since her mother’s death and sometimes she caught herself at not being able to recall the dear face.
Nina had not come to the bank in vain – a time arrived when she actually played the guardian angel to her father’s company. The due date was approaching on the last short-term loan, the largest of them all. The company clearly did not have enough money to pay it off. Nina believed that, if she had been by her father’s side, she would have found a way to obtain the necessary means from another bank, but she doubted that her father could manage it on his own. Or rather, she was sure that he could not.
She was pondering what arguments she could offer Kirill to convince him to grant the company an extension on the loan. But then the worst possible thing happened – the bank was swept by a wave of cash mobilization. The owners, who were suddenly in urgent need of huge sums of money, gave an order to collect debt ruthlessly from all the borrowers, and squeeze out cash by all means. The first thought that occurred to Nina when she heard of that was, “Good heavens, the same story all over again. First Simonyan, then Misha Permyak, now these fellows…”
Kirill convened his brain trust consisting of Nina and Ignatiy Savelievich, and announced the immediate goals. Then, separately, he complained to Nina, “I can’t take it any more. What are they doing, for heaven’s sake? I’ll quit. I mean it, I’ll quit.”
Nina panicked, not knowing what to do. Asking Kirill for an extension on the loan would be futile now. However much he might favor her, he was not going to cover such a violation of the rules with his plump white body. Should she rush to her father, confess to her lie and offer help? At the thought of that Nina recalled the terrible incident when she tried to reason with him and was called a traitress in return. What her father would call her now was hard to imagine.
Nina and Ignatiy Savelievich had formed a habit of having tea twice a day, and each time, the old finance wizard would tell her something of interest. Seized by her new anxiety though, Nina was not disposed to listen to his life recollections and observations. At one of their tea sessions, on a sudden impulse, she interrupted the man with the question, “Ignatiy Savelievich, please tell me – how can an extension on a loan be arranged for a company?”
The old fox figured out everything at once. Looking at her ironically, he munched on a dry biscuit, took a sip of tea and said, “Oh-ho-ho, young lady. You, of all people! I’ve been holding you to be a model of integrity, and now this…”
Nina blushed. “Ignatiy Savelievich, I’m begging you. It’s really important. And it’s urgent.”
However, the old man was in no hurry – he was clearly enjoying the situation.
“Who is it you have in that company – a sweetheart?”
“Well… Yes, kind of,” said Nina, with her eyes dropped.
“All right,” said Ignatiy Savelievich, taking pity on her at last. “Your problem can be helped. Here’s one solution for you.”
He described a scheme of four successive operations. The first of them consisted in taking out, contrary to all common sense, another large short-term loan in the name of the company. At the second stage, the borrowed money was used to buy shares of that very bank, which made the company its stockholder, and accordingly, gave it some essential privileges. As a result of all the four operations, the company was freed from all short-term loans and left with long-term debt given out to her on very favorable terms.
Nina gasped at the simplicity and ingenuity of the scheme.
“And, mind you, each separate operation is quite legal and justified from the standpoint of the bank,” added Ignatiy Savelievich. “But there’s a catch.”
He gave her an earnest look, not joking any more.
“According to the rules, there are certain minimum time intervals that must pass between those operations, so fixing the whole affair should take at least…” he pondered a second. “…about three weeks.”
“But that’s impossible!” Nina cried out in despair.
Ignatiy Savelievich took another sip of tea and then asked quietly, “When is it due?”
After some hesitation, Nina named the loan due date which was only ten days off.
“Not good,” said Ignatiy Savelievich. “Then, my dear colleague, you’ll have to take the road of forgery. But don’t you say afterwards that I spurred you on to that.”
“What are you talking about?” Nina asked, genuinely confused.
“Do you remember how exactly the loan documentation is kept in this bank?” Ignatiy Savelievich spoke in a very low voice now.
“Of course. The hard copies are kept here, in the department. The digital files are also kept here, on our computers, with duplicates of them stored on the bank’s server.”
“And what’s the schedule for transferring the duplicates to the server?” asked Ignatiy Savelievich.
“They are transferred once a month.” Nina was still at a loss.
“Yes, and the last time it was done was just about a month ago.”
“You mean to say that I can…” Nina got it finally.
“Precisely. Remember Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’? What happens between one census and the next is not quite final yet – it can be turned one way or another. Before the next transfer of the data to the server you can record those operations as having taken place within the past month. And as for the hard copies… I presume, the dossier of that company is in your file cabinet?”
“Yes,” admitted Nina. “But… Is it really possible?” She was dumbfounded.
“Yes, dear. And all seasoned accountants know that. Now you do, too.”
“But… What if I get exposed?”
“Who is there to expose you?” Ignatiy Savelievich grinned. “Our Kiryusha has a lot of other things on his plate, and I…” He tapped his temple with his forefinger. “This skull keeps so many secrets that another tiny secret won’t burden it any.”
Nina, who had never in her life so much as crossed the street on a red light, faced the prospect of committing a real crime. In complete mental turmoil, she came home, made a large pot of strong coffee, perched on her chair and got to thinking. There was not much to think about, though. The alternative was clear – either she dared to do that or she did not. If she did, then, with luck, she could help her father in a big way – really be there for him for once in her life. And if she got caught… Well, they would hardly kill her. Probably, not even put to jail. They would simply throw her out of the bank with a bang, so that she would never find a job in her profession again. “All right, I can always make a living cleaning public toilets or something,” decided Nina.
Everything was clear but still she stayed awake till dawn. She knew already that she was going to do it, but she was still groping for the right words to wrap her decision in. Finally, the words occurred to her. “You have to carry it through,” she said to herself. “This is what you came to this bank for, so why back out now? You have always to finish what you’ve started.”
After a couple of hours of sleep, she got up, poured into herself another cup of coffee, and went to the bank. Full of the decision that she had made, she felt jittery and elated at the same time.
Once in the department, she carried out the scheme that Ignatiy Savelievich had taught her – she did everything in an unruffled, efficient, all-in-a-day’s-work way as if she had been some kind of hardened criminal or spy rather than a young financial analyst named Nina Shuvalova.
When he saw Nina, Ignatiy Savelievich certainly noticed the pallor of her face and understood what had caused it, but he said nothing. That survivor of the past knew how to hold his tongue.
At the end of that week, Nina’s father invited her to his place. He was solemn, full of great, wonderful news. Lydia Grigorievna, also radiant, was looking at him lovingly.
Pouring out champagne, Evgeniy Borisovich said, “You may congratulate me, Nina. The bank has notified me of a debt restructuring. There are no more financial risks, and the company is back on its feet. We did it! I knew all along that it would work out this way.”
“And you didn’t believe in me,” Nina seemed to hear. As best she could, she made a show of happy surprise, kissed her father and clinked glasses with Lydia Grigorievna. It was clear to her now that she would never be able to open her secret to her father.
Evgeniy Borisovich was blithe and full of fun. He put on the fez that Nina had given him and showed a Turk, owner of a harem. Then he dug out his guitar from the far corner of the closet and sang a few songs which Nina had not heard for ages.
As Nina was leaving, Lydia Grigorievna dragged her into her room and asked in a whisper, “Ninochka, do you have something to do with it?”
“What are you talking about, Lydia Grigorievna?” Nina replied, shrugging, in the same kind of whisper.
Lydia Grigorievna squeezed her hand silently and kissed her on the cheek.