Nina was one of them now. Although she was a mere analyst who never took part in any management meetings and had no voice in making any decisions, everyone knew that almost daily the director conferred with her in person and listened to her report, which placed her very high in the bank’s hierarchy. The vice-directors and department heads – all the bosses who formerly had been unaware of her existence – were now saying hello to her politely and smiling at her as one of their own. There was no doubt that it was going to be that way until the need for her was over and Samsonov sent her away to where she really belonged.
Her new status made itself felt in small things, too. The guards no longer required that she produce her pass – they only nodded respectfully. When she requested that an additional power socket be mounted in her room, an electrician showed up in ten minutes accompanied by the superintendent who came in person to see to it that everything was done properly. Nina recalled that her former chief Ariadna Petrovna once spent a whole week trying to get that kind of service for her own office. Such episodes tickled Nina’s vanity. She was surprised to notice the effect this was having on her. “If I were a vain fool, I would get ideas of my own importance,” she said to herself. “But I am not a vain fool… I hope.”
As they met her in the lobby or in the elevator, her former co-workers fell into a kind of gleeful stupor. To them, she was a creature of a higher order, the heroine of a myth who had ascended to the sky right before their eyes. All office workers are alike. When one of them gets a promotion, the rest, while smiling to the lucky one’s face, are hissing spitefully, green with envy, behind his back. But that is only if it is an ordinary kind of promotion. If somebody, like Nina, draws a lucky ticket and jumps over many rungs of the career ladder, there is no more room for envy. The minion of Fortune is sincerely admired, seen as a dream come true.
“What is it like up there?” her former mates would ask Nina sheepishly whenever she ran into them. “It’s all right, it’s just work like any other,” Nina answered simply. They nodded with a grave look on their faces, showing that they understood everything and appreciated her modesty.
In order not to disappoint them, Nina threw in some food for their imagination. “Yesterday we had a visitor from the Cabinet of Ministers… Let’s not bandy about any names,” she said, smiling to herself at their simple-hearted love for the high-ups. “If only you knew what plans were discussed, what figures were cited! … There’s an awful pile of work to do – no breathing space left, really.” Hearing this, the analysts got stupefied with admiration.
Indeed, the bank had been visited by the minister of economics; his hearse-like limousine stood by the main entrance for everyone to see. Nobody had seen the great man himself, though – before he entered the building, the security had cleared the lobbies and elevators of any stray employees. Nina had not seen the minister either; all during his visit to Samsonov she had been toiling in her little room and had not learned of the event until later. But why share those details with her poor colleagues? She might as well let them imagine that at the negotiations, she was sitting at the director’s right hand, and everyone present, including the minister, devoured every word she had to say on financial issues.
Once or twice her colleagues plucked up the courage to invite her to some party that they were having. Their intent was clear – they hoped desperately that Nina would shed her heavenly light upon them – infect them with her good luck, or perhaps, even actually put in a word for them with Samsonov. “Thank you, but no chance, you understand,” Nina would reply. They did not get offended – they understood it their own way: Nina was out of their league now, and it did not become her to mix with small fry like them. In fact though, Nina would not at all mind getting distracted and spending an hour or two in meaningless chatter with people who, although not really her friends, were akin to her, being analysts like herself. But Nina was really overloaded; all the nights when she did not play tennis which she was sticking to obstinately, she stayed at work after hours. She had piles of work to do, that much was true.
It was also true that now she was involved with really big things – in fact, the largest construction project of the decade. The sheer size of it was dazzling in terms of both the money to be invested and works to be carried out. At first, figures with a lot of zeros had a paralyzing effect on Nina. Overwhelmed, she had difficulty getting at the meaning underlying the numbers. She was about to give up the assignment, when she thought of a simple trick – divide everything by one thousand. The project shrank miraculously, and everything became accessible and visible, similar to what she had dealt with before.
That allowed her to take some initial steps in her analysis. Yet, as an Asian saying goes, “a thousand susliks do not make a camel”. The project of constructing a huge business center was different in many ways from any number of small projects. Nina noticed that for some construction materials, the prices adopted in the project budget were significantly higher than those suggested by the market, even with due allowance for the future inflation. “Here, for example, for this type of cement, there is a local producer with a good business reputation,” she told Samsonov. “And here is their current price list. With a wholesale discount, we can get an economy of…” “That’s true,” the director replied. “But we are not just any other wholesale customer. We’re going to need ten times more of that cement than is produced locally. We’ll have to import it from abroad. Or, perhaps, we’ll buy that company and expand the production. Either way, it means expenses…”
It was the same way with unique construction machinery, specialists in areas that had been unheard of before, and lots of other things. The project was so big that it did not fit into the local construction industry as a whale did not fit into a pond.
The enormous scale of the project boosted the expenses, but it provided some additional opportunities, too. Nina pointed out to Samsonov that some of the project’s parameters disagreed with the construction industry regulations. He was surprised. “What do you know about the regulations?” Nina bit her tongue. She could not possibly start telling the director how those very regulations had been used by his henchmen to snatch away her father’s company. “Well, I don’t know anything, really… I just scraped the surface of this stuff in connection with a loan case,” she mumbled. “You’re really a precious worker,” Samsonov said. It was not clear whether he was joking or speaking seriously. “Don’t you bother about those regulations. They’re going to be revised by the time the project starts; that’s already been agreed on with the government.”
Even Nina who had very little knowledge of the business backstage realized that the project affected the interests of a lot of influential organizations and persons in the construction industry, city administration, federal agencies. However, Samsonov never discussed such matters with her, and whenever she touched upon them, he cut her short: “You don’t need to know that.” That was his domain which he was not sharing with anyone.
For that reason, some of Nina’s questions remained unanswered, hung in midair. “Why is this loan going to be placed with Bank X rather than Bank Y? You see, Bank Y offers more favorable conditions,” she would ask Samsonov. He would drum his fingers on the table, and then say reluctantly: “It works that way, that’s why.” But he did not ignore Nina’s remarks. “Does it stick out a lot?” he would ask in his turn. And if Nina confirmed that it did, he took some measures of his own, and after some time, corrections were made to Bank X’s offer which restored the logic of investments.