Overnight, Alex and his senior executives were setting the national exchange rates for all foreign currencies. Heady power for a young man, not yet twenty-five years old. Also, quite happily, a gold mine.
Alex took a slice of every ruble shuttled one way or the other, only two percent, but as the mountain of cash approached billions, he scraped off millions. Then tens of millions.
He saw another rich possibility and promised twenty percent interest to any Russian willing to park their savings at his bank for one year. Reams of advertisements flooded every TV station in Russia. A striking female model was used for certain pitches. She wiggled her pliant shoulders and gyrated her sinewy hips, and in a seductive whisper purred that her boyfriend was a sexy genius: his money was earning interest. Who knew it only took a little interest to get laid? To appeal to a different segment, a handsomely aged couple stood against the backdrop of a decrepit wooden cottage and in tearful voices thanked Alex's bank for ensuring their retirement funds were not only safe but actually growing by the day. Then, flash a year forward in time, and the same old couple were shown climbing sprightly into their gleaming Mercedes sedan parked in front of a charming seaside dacha.
It was unheard of. No Soviet bank ever advertised. None offered interest, not a single kopeck. Wasn't it enough that they protected their customers' money? Why should any bank dish out the bucks for its own generosity?
The commercials were vulgar and the promise of interest bordered on criminal negligence, the Soviet-era bankers growled among themselves and to whatever reporter would listen to their gripes. But twenty percent? Okay, one or two percent, maybe; but twenty? Konevitch would pay dearly for his bluster-he'd be bankrupt before a month was out.
Millions more investors lined up at the door. Billions more rubles flooded in. Alex took the deluge and hedged and bet it all against the unstable ruble, then watched as inflation soared above a thousand percent. At the end of a year, the investors took their twenty percent cut and considered themselves lucky indeed; at least their life savings hadn't melted into half a kopeck as happened to millions of miserable others. The remainder of the spread went to Alex. Nearly ninety percent of every ruble in his savings bank was his to keep. He cleaned up.
And as the economy limped from one catastrophe to another, as the disasters piled up, Boris reached out desperately for help. At the president's insistence, a telephonic hotline was installed between Boris and his trusted whiz kid, who seemed to have this whole capitalism thing figured out. Late-night calls became routine. A single push of the red button and the president would rail about this problem or that, long, whiny diatribes fueled by staggering amounts of liquor. Alex was a cool, sober listener; also a quick study with a mathematician's lust for numbers.
Yeltsin had little background and even less appetite for financial matters; all the economic prattle bored him to tears. Alex would talk him through the latest disaster-boil it all down to simple language-propose a reasonable solution, and Boris would pounce on his cabinet the next morning, issue a few brusque instructions, and a total meltdown would be avoided, or at least postponed for another day. One night after a long rambling conversation about the evaporating foreign currency reserves, Yeltsin paused to catch his breath, then, seemingly out of the blue, asked Alex, "By the way, how's your house?"
"Nice. Very nice."
"Is it big?"
"Fairly large, yes. Why do you ask?"
"I heard it's huge."
"Okay, it is. Very, very big."
"How many bedrooms?"
"Six, I think. Maybe seven. Why?"
"Which is it, six or seven?"
"I honestly don't know. Could be ten for all I know. I've wandered through most of it, but there are rooms I've never seen. It was a wreck when I bought it, an old brick mansion constructed before 1917. According to local lore, it was built for a baron or maybe a wealthy factory owner to house his ten children. Poor guy. He was dragged out and executed by a Bolshevik firing squad three days after the last stud went in."
"Are you pulling my leg?"
"The bullet scars are still visible on the west side of the house. That adds a certain charm."
"And after that?"
"Well, I don't know about the early years. But the Ministry of Education owned it for decades. Occasionally it was used as a school for children of the elite, sometimes as a training center for school principals. Of course they neglected it disgracefully. The electrical wiring, even the plumbing had not been updated since it was built. The pipes were made of cast iron. Turn the spigot and chunky brown slush poured out."
"But you like it?"
Alex chuckled. "What's not to like?"
"You tell me," Boris replied.
"Not a thing. I used my own construction company to gut and rebuild with the best of everything. Voice-activated lighting, saunas in every bathroom, two mahogany-paneled elevators, the works. I even had an indoor pool installed, and a well-equipped gym. The attic is now a movie theater, twenty seats, with real popcorn machines and a ten-foot screen. A French chef and three servants live in the basement and take care of everything."
After a long moment, Yeltsin asked, in a suspiciously knowing tone, "And your wife, does she like it?"
"There are a few things she might like to change," Alex admitted, a loud understatement. Elena detested the house. He had bought and refurbished it before they met, a gift to himself after he made his first hundred million and regarded it as a neat way to pat himself on the back. A gay Paris decorator had been flown in and instructed to spare no expense. He did his best. He chartered a plane, flew around the world, slept in five-star hotels, loaded up on antiques from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He had drapes hand-sewn in Egypt, and furniture hand-manufactured by the best craftsmen in Korea.
As the bills piled up, Alex convinced himself that he wasn't being wasteful; it was a business expense, an unavoidable cost he couldn't do without. The big moneymen from Wall Street and Fleet Street and Frankfurt did not talk business with anybody not like themselves, prosperous enough to show it off.
The house was cavernous and every nook and cranny was saturated with grandeur. But Elena liked things simple and small enough that you didn't have to shout across the room at each other. She didn't care for servants, either; she was reared to do things herself, and that's how she preferred it. If she even thought about a cup of coffee, a silver urn appeared out of nowhere. The flock of hired help violated their privacy. They made her feel guilty and spoiled.
The mansion sat on the corner of two furiously busy Moscow streets, for another thing. Traffic and pedestrians were always pausing to gawk at the impressive old home, and occasionally littered the property with letters strewn with vile curses and filthy threats. In a city populated largely with impoverished former communists-their families and few belongings suffocating in six-hundred-square-foot apartments-the newly rich and their expansive indulgences were not viewed fondly.
Any day, Elena expected a flotilla of Molotov cocktails to sail through her window.
After enough hateful letters, Alex built a small guard shack out front and posted guards around the clock to chase away disgruntled tourists. But it was, quite spectacularly, a mansion and thus a magnet for the growing breed of Moscow criminals. After two attempted break-ins, another guard shack was erected, more guards were added to the rear of the house, one was posted on the roof, and enough state-of-the-art surveillance systems were sprinkled around to give a porn studio fits of envy.
Elena began calling their home "The Fortress," without affection. Still, there was no doubt the house continued to pose serious security issues and little could be done about it.