Chapter 6
“Nina, are you all right? …”
Samsonov lifted her from the pavement. For the second time Nina floated up in the air in his strong arms. Once again, she saw very close his grey eyes and massive-featured face. This time, there was true concern and care in his look.
Carefully, Samsonov set her down on her feet.
“Are you OK, Nina? Does it hurt? Do you feel giddy?”
Nina was stupefied and only vaguely realized what had happened, but with all that she was feeling fine. Her exultation over her success as a woman and anticipation of something much bigger had not left her. She was not even frightened.
“Pavel Mikhailovich, everything’s all right with me. What was that?”
Samsonov drew himself up. “You want to know what that was?” he asked. His face was distorted with rage. “Damned outrage – that’s what it was! Scum, bastards!”
Sinitsin came up to them, limping.
“You are not hurt, Pavel Mikhailovich? Thank God. And you, Nina Yevgenievna?”
Samsonov turned to the man abruptly.
“Ah, here you are! Where have you been? How could you overlook that?”
The security chief made a helpless gesture: “I’m totally shocked, Pavel Mikhailovich. I believed we had taken all the precautions, but as it turned out, it wasn’t enough. Who knew that they would go as far as that…?”
Gradbank’s director grabbed his vice by the lapels of the man’s jacket, pulled him up, and roared him in the face: “You! You should have known! It’s your business to know everything!”
Samsonov was shaking the medium-sized Sinitsin like a tree – the security man was practically dangling up in the air, barely touching the ground with his toes.
“Listen, Sinitsin, listen carefully!” Samsonov roared on. “Do whatever it takes – don’t sleep, don’t eat, move heaven and earth – but give me security. If you blunder again – if the project wrecks because of you, or…” Samsonov glanced at Nina, “or if my people get hurt, I’ll kill you with my own hands. I mean it, you know me.”
He let Sinitsin go. The vice-director was all rumpled and had a remorseful look, but he did not strike Nina as being particularly scared.
Sinitsin smoothed his clothes. “I don’t deserve this kind of treatment, Pavel Mikhailovich,” he said quietly. “I am your man, too, and I am devoted to you. Believe me, I’ll do everything humanly possible…”
“Go away!” Samsonov barked at him.
Sinitsin flinched, dropped his eyes and retreated towards the burning car.
“Really, he shouldn’t treat people like that,” thought Nina.
Samsonov turned to the driver: “Kolya, how are you? Still in one piece?”
Contrary to his usual self, Kolya was not smiling. One could see now that it was a man, not a boy.
“I’m all right,” he responded. “What I don’t get is – where was the bomb? I checked everything out before starting up, as usual. Could they have planted it in the gas tank? … And it wasn’t a small bomb, either – three kilos at least.”
“Listen, Kolya,” said Samsonov. “You’re not working for me any longer. I promised your wife that your son would not be an orphan. So you hand in your notice and leave. I haven’t forgotten about your motordrome – you come round some time later, and we’ll have a talk about that.”
Kolya gave his boss a hurt look. “What kind of rat do you hold me for, Pavel Mikhailovich? You know I’ve been in Chechnya. Leave no man behind – that’s what we were taught there. I’m not leaving you until things quiet down here – don’t you even ask me to.”
“I am sorry,” said Samsonov. “And yet, don’t you be a fool! I don’t want you to get killed over nothing…”
“I’m in no hurry to get killed,” Kolya said seriously. “But if I leave, another guy will fill in – how about him getting killed? Me, I’ve been through stuff, at least.”
“That’s true,” muttered Samsonov. He was clearly touched. “And still, you are a fool, Kolyan.”
The familiar smile appeared on Kolya’s face.
“Yeah, Nastena says so, too. Well, it seems I was born that way.”
People began to pour out from the restaurant into the street; those were Gradbank’s guests of honor. In the street, they ran into the smoke-screen from the burning car. Startled cries and excited hubbub could be heard.
“To think that the bastard that contrived that must be here somewhere,” muttered Samsonov. “Scum…”
The guests realized at last what had happened. The cries grew into continuous tumult; the stockholders and partners rushed to the director – to satisfy their curiosity, to gloat, to sympathize.
“Kolya, take any car and drive Nina away,” said Samsonov. He turned to her: “Nina, you go home and stay put until I call you. You’ve got no business here…”
“Pavel Mikhailovich! …” Nina tried to protest.
“I don’t want to hear anything!” Samsonov cut her short. “One hero is enough… And anyway, you’ve already done your job – the rest is my business. You take a good rest now.”
“And one other thing,” he added, handing her a card. “Here, it’s my doctor’s. Tell him I sent you along. Let him make sure you don’t have a concussion or anything.”
“Yes, Pavel Mikhailovich. I get it – you need your employees to be able-bodied,” Nina tried to joke.
Samsonov ignored that. He was urging Nina to go away, and at the same time, he was keeping her, holding her by the hand.
“Nina, it’s awful that you had to go through this because of me. I’ll never forgive myself… But it’s a lesson for you, too: you see now that you’re better off away from me,” he smiled wryly.
More than ever before, Nina wanted to throw her arms around his neck and shout that she loved him and could not live without him. Embrace him and never let go. And let the bombs explode.
“Don’t worry about me, Pavel Mikhailovich,” she said simply.
“I do worry,” he objected.
He drew her up to his chest and kissed her on the cheek.
That was merely a friendly gesture, an expression of care, but still, that was their first kiss – and probably their last one, too.
“Well, you go now.” He released her.
Nina smiled, turned on her heels and walked away to where Kolya was waiting for her. Thus she missed her second chance to open her love to her man.
Nina was having rest. For once in a long while she had no work to do. Her brain and nerves which over the recent months had got accustomed to constant, great strain were idle now, which gave Nina a feeling of anticlimax and emptiness.
Nina was reliving the various episodes of her meetings with Samsonov. To her, it was like a favorite TV series, which she had already watched more than once but was eager to relish again, constantly finding something new in the familiar episodes. The last scene was, of course, the most important one – the culmination of the entire story. In it, the grey-eyed hero finally took notice of the heroine (modest, but full of inherent good qualities) and was about to open his armor slightly to let her into his heart, but… But at that very moment some scoundrels staged an explosion. Although Nina realized that Samsonov and his driver Kolya – and, incidentally, herself, too – had barely escaped getting killed, she did not give it much thought and was hardly worried at all – as if it really had been no more than a spectacular scene fixed by a skillful pyrotechnician.
What she was upset about was that the explosion had occurred at the wrong time. Had it taken place a little later, some very important words would have been passed between her man and herself so that everything would have been different ever since… As it was, the harsh reality claimed its rights; Pavel Mikhailovich was reminded in a brutal way that he was surrounded by enemies and had to be on the alert, not allowing himself even a moment’s weakness. He hid himself in his armor again and was not going to open up – at least not until all that contest business was over.
And then what? Nina had no doubt that Gradbank led by her beloved man was going to win. The success would make Samsonov a star of the banking world, a figure of international scale. From then on, he would be moving in the highest circles where not Marina alone but dozens of professional beauties would be seeking his attention. What chances would she, Nina, have then? “None whatsoever,” she admitted to herself with a sigh. She would be sent back to the analytical department where she properly belonged. Midnight struck, the ball was over – time for Cinderella to return to her kitchen.
And yet, Nina did not believe that it was the end. It could be that she, as all women in love, indulged in wishful thinking, but she had the feeling that the wonderful series was going to continue. The feeling was weak as the glow of a lightning bug in the night, but it would not die out.
She had absolutely nothing to do. As Samsonov had been sending her away, he had said that her work had been over, and that was true. The material that had been available to her had been squeezed dry, all possible conclusions extracted from it.
“All right, I’ll revert to my old life,” Nina said to herself. But the reverting did not work very well. She paid a visit to the tennis club which she had almost given up recently, but it was not half as good as before – the game seemed primitive and monotonous to her now. The partners were worse still – all of them were total nobodies compared with one big, awkward man who did not even know how to hold the tennis racket. Nina wondered at herself – it seemed impossible to her now that she had once planned to find a life companion among those jumping jacks in shorts.
Tennis set aside, Nina was sitting at home. She managed to kill some time doing chores about her small apartment which she had neglected badly in recent months. However, soon everything had been washed and polished, and she was again left without anything to do.
Nina spent her whole days lying on the sofa and leafing through her favorite detective stories. To get her head occupied, she tried inventing new episodes and dénouements to them, but soon she was bored with that, too.
The insipid literary images vanished as soon as her mind’s eye evoked the dear face with massive features and grey eyes. Nina repeated the words that she had said to her man on various occasions and added words that she had never dared to say; she voiced his answers for him and played out whole scenes in which they opened their feelings to each other, and everything went very well from then on. One evening Nina realized suddenly that she had been lying like that the whole day – staring blankly at the ceiling, immersed in her fantasies. “I’m losing my mind,” she said to herself. “I need to do something.”
The next morning Nina phoned Ariadna Petrovna.
“What do you want, Shuvalova?” the woman asked in a not very friendly tone of voice.
Nina started speaking hurriedly, trying to explain that she had been sitting at home for ten days already and did not know what she was expected to do.
“What does Samsonov say?”
“Pavel Mikhailovich told me to wait for his call.”
“Then wait.”
“But, Ariadna Petrovna, I’ve got absolutely nothing to do…”
“So what are you beefing about? I’d be happy to trade places with you. Me, I’m swamped here.”
“But… What if Pavel Mikhailovich just forgot about me?”
“He didn’t. Don’t you bother me with your nonsense, Shuvalova – I’ve got no time for it. Over and out.”
The woman hung up.
Nina felt uneasy. She imagined the frantic rush the bank must have been swept with during those last weeks before the date on which the bids for the contest were due to be submitted officially. The bank was united in an all-out effort to get things done properly, and she was the only one to be idling.
Once upon a time she had come to the bank with a silly intention to take revenge, but now she was a loyal employee, even a devotee, of the bank. She was especially partial to the project Zaryadje XXI, to say nothing of its grey-eyed leader…
Samsonov had said that her work had been finished. But was it really so? Had she taken everything into account? Could she be certain that there was no flaw in her recommendations? It was her responsibility to think about that since the director had a lot of other things on his plate and could miss something.
Nina began sorting out in her mind everything that she had done on Zaryadje. It turned out that the ten days of forced idleness had done her good – her brain had relaxed and distracted so that now she was able to take a fresh look at the things that had long been analyzed and decided on. But this fresh look seemed only to confirm that her conclusions were sound, and she had nothing to reproach herself for.
Then she remembered something. At the very beginning, as she had first been summoned up to the twelfth floor and Gradbank’s formidable director was introducing her to the project Zaryadje, he posed two questions – whether everything possible had been done to win the bidding contest, and whether it was a good idea for the bank to win it. Afterwards, the second question was somehow forgotten. Samsonov did not put it that way any longer; it seemed obvious that participating in the project promised huge benefits to the bank, and all the discussions were about the best way for the bank to win it. But Samsonov had not said those first words for no reason – he must have had his doubts.
Of course, at every stage of Nina’s work, the relevant risks were analyzed automatically, and all of them had been assessed properly… Or had they?
Nina remembered Samsonov saying once, “It looks like we’ve taken everything into account. Well, short of a big asteroid hitting the earth.”
It did not look like the earth was in for any such catastrophe in the near future, but what if something really extraordinary happened – something that could undermine all the basic estimates and parameter variation ranges adopted in the analysis?
Nina pondered. What was it that could happen? A political crisis, radical change of government? Nina had never taken interest in politics and was totally out of her depth in such matters. She thought of Ignatiy Savelievich who would have been able to give her invaluable advice. But the old finance trooper was no longer there, and Nina had never acquired any other good advisers in her life.
Nina’s mind was active again, and she was glad to have found a way to distract herself from her joyless love dreams. What if an influenza pandemic burst out similar to the one that had mowed down millions after the first world war? Nina shuddered at the thought, but her analytical mind noted that there was room for analysis here: such an event was impossible to predict but evaluating its broad consequences could be feasible.
A revolution in her mind occurred one evening, as she was drinking her green tea lazily preparing to go to bed. As usual, she had her TV set on, with sound off. The caption, Economic Review, appeared on the screen. Nina rarely listened to such shows – there was too much incompetence and lies to them – but this time she turned the sound on without much interest.
The host, a sleek character with shifty eyes, started putting questions to an equally sleek interlocutor who was introduced as an expert on global finances. Nina listened to their babble for a minute and was about to turn it off when she heard something that made her hand with the remote control in it freeze.
The expert on global finances spoke on the prospects for the next year. Most experts’ forecasts – including his own – were optimistic; the world was in for growth in every way. “True, sometimes different opinions are voiced,” added the speaking head on the screen. “For instance, the Nobel prize-winner in economics Bartholomew Mattiasson is predicting a global financial crisis. Well, what can I say…” The head smiled condescendingly. “We should take into account that professor Mattiasson won the prize forty years ago, and he is ninety-two now.”
Nina even got up from her chair. That was what Samsonov and she had not reckoned with – the possibility of a global economic crisis. All their estimates were based on a certain forecast of the economic growth of the country, with due margins allowed for unpredictable variations. Both the basic forecast and margins, computed and re-computed by various methods, were quite sound, but… But all of them relied on the fundamental global trends projected into the next few years. Those trends were universally accepted – all the leading expert institutes and rating agencies were unanimous about that. A major global economic crisis was as unlikely as the collision with an asteroid.
But what if the institutes and agencies were wrong?
Nina had never bothered herself with issues of global economy, and now she did not know even where to start. She tried the Internet. The query, “global crisis”, brought back an incredible amount of all sorts of rubbish: prophecies by ancient and modern visionaries, including those by Nostradamus; astrologers’ predictions; insane fantasies of an imminent apocalypse spread by the leaders of various cults; and almost as nonsensical twaddle by politicians.
Little by little, sifting tons of such stuff, Nina found what she was after. As it turned out, the elderly professor Mattiasson was not the only one to believe in a global crisis; some other economists predicted one, too. There were not many of them, and their voices evoked little response – the world was not eager to listen to bad news.
The alarmists approached the crisis issue in their separate ways, each focusing on their own piece of the general picture. The problem was that no satisfactory model of the global economy was available – nobody knew how to describe the enormous multitude of factors, disparate in nature and direction, as well as the ocean of individual human wills, chaotic on the surface of it while hiding in its depth the force fields of global control whose origins were a total mystery. As long as things were going on smoothly, any schoolboy could come up with an adequate forecast. But a major crisis – an economic collapse – nobody could predict to any degree of certainty; in fact, such predictions were no better than fortune-telling by tea leaves.
However, the heralds of crisis infected Nina with their concern. What if a global crisis was actually going to break out? What if it was going to occur not in some remote future but this year already?
Nina was surfing the Internet for whole days now. As a whale filters tons of ocean water to obtain plankton, Nina was running through her brain huge volumes of vacuous information to filter out facts that could be relevant to the possibility of a global crisis.
After a week of such whale work, she already had an idea of the main problem spots of the global economy. Despite apparent well-being, things actually were not going at all well – ignored for decades, the global economic problems were aggravating, and multi-billion financial bubbles were brewing which were bound to burst sooner or later.
There was nothing new about all that, and there were known counter-arguments that seemed to explain everything. Life on credit and systematic procrastination of dealing with problems had its proponents who wrote books, ran university courses and talked on TV shows. “Everything’s going to be all right,” they said. “Market will regulate everything on its own.”
The optimistic forecasts were groundless logically and clearly motivated politically, but one simple fact spoke for them: with all its crying problems, the global economy had been growing more or less steadily for many years, so why not go on growing?
Nina did not count on being smarter than all of the world’s best economists put together. Still, she hoped in her heart that her intuition which had helped her out many times before would do the trick again. But her intuition kept silent – apparently, the global problems were just beyond it.
That was a deadlock. The global economy showed all the prerequisites for a crisis but paradoxically, instead of a crisis, that might result in another couple of decades of accelerated growth. And if a crisis was to break out, there was no telling when that was going to happen. Nobody had anything more sensible to say on that, and neither had Nina Shuvalova who happened to take interest in global problems as she was dying of idleness and love-sickness in her one-room apartment.
What could she say to Samsonov? That they should make allowances for a crisis which might, or might not, happen? But that kind of strategy had its price as excessive caution reduced the profit margin of the project. What arguments could she offer to justify such sacrifices? None whatsoever. And anyway, there was only one week left before the tender due date, so it was probably too late to change anything.
After sitting up late into another night over a pile of dissimilar, controversial materials, Nina turned off the computer, saying aloud: “That’s enough, it doesn’t make any sense.”
She went to bed, but the global economy with its unfathomable problems kept her awake for another hour and then penetrated her sleep. In her dream, she met with professor Mattiasson who had the appearance of a gnome wearing a long white beard. Gnome Mattiasson was sitting on a heap of gold coins, looking very sad. The reason was that the coins were rapidly turning into cow’s droppings. Pointing at that disgrace with his crooked finger, Mattiasson said: “For shame, Nina! I counted on you so!”
On waking up, Nina slipped on her robe, groped for her slippers with her feet and, following her morning ritual, walked to the window to see what the weather was like. Like Nina, the sun was up late; its oblique rays were neither bright nor warm. Nina opened the window to let in the morning cold, and peeped out.
A near autumn could be felt in the air. On a brick ledge close by, a ruffled-up pigeon was sitting, waiting for the sun finally to warm it up.
“A global crisis is coming. It’s a matter of weeks at the latest,” Nina suddenly said aloud.
The pigeon squinted at her suspiciously.
Nina was startled much worse than the frozen pigeon. She stood there for a while, holding on to the window handle and trying to figure out whether it was she who had said those words, and whether something else was going to follow.
There followed a revelation.
It was like solving a puzzle of the type where an image – such as a huntsman with a dog – is hidden among a deliberate chaos of spots and lines. Peering at such a picture, one gets annoyed at first at not being able to make out anything, and then suddenly sees the huntsman and wonders how they could not see it just a second ago. It was the same way with Nina and the global economy. The night before she had not been able to make out anything in the tangle of economic problems, and now she saw the approaching crisis quite clearly. The crisis was huge, it was going to rock the whole world, and it was just about to burst out.
Of course, Nina would not be able to prove anything to any TV phrasemonger. But she was not going to prove or explain anything. She just knew that the crisis was near, almost arrived already.
Nina was standing motionless by the window, absorbed in the picture of imminent global economic trouble which had presented itself to her mind. The picture was terrifying and bewitching at the same time.
Nina was seized by a pioneer’s rapture. “To think that the world does not know anything yet. Nobody knows but me,” she said proudly to herself. “Well, that is – except for doctor Mattiasson and me…”
She wanted to cry out, “I am a genius!”
Instead, she yelled, “Idiot!”
The pigeon startled, slipped down from the ledge and flew away heavily.
Nina clutched her head and groaned. “Idiot! Genius, indeed! You’ve fouled up everything!”
All her recommendations on project Zaryadje were now up in the air. Gradbank had trusted her… To hell with Gradbank! Pavel Mikhailovich Samsonov, her love, had entrusted her with a matter of utmost importance to him, and she failed, let him down. Now it was too late to fix anything. Or was it?…
As she was, in her robe and slippers, Nina darted to her computer table.
“All right, calm down. Crisis, crisis… What does it mean?”
Nina was racking her brain trying to understand what consequences a global crisis might have for the project, Zaryadje XXI. The oil prices were probably going to fall. By how much? The state currency reserves were going to reduce, and a budget deficit was inevitable. How large a deficit, and what did it imply? All the stock indices would sink, that was for sure. A collapse of the entire system of international credit was possible. Enormous bad debts, bankruptcy of the major banks…
Nina lost track of time. When she finally noticed that night was falling, she realized that she was still sitting at her table in her robe, and that she had not had a bite to eat that whole day.
She gulped down a sandwich and two cups of coffee in the kitchen, and then rushed back to her work.