With time, Nina understood and appreciated the reasons for Samsonov’s secretiveness. It was not only that many of the things that he knew were really hot and explosive. Samsonov wanted Nina to look at the project through the eyes of an analyst – only. He wanted to be sure that his baby, investment project Zaryadje–XXI, was a robust financial organism. Of all the rest he was going to take care himself.
Even being almost totally ignorant as to the implications of Zaryadje and only guessing at the true importance of the project to various parties, Nina could not help feeling impressed by its grandeur and proud of her humble part in it. Hundreds of businesses, tens of thousands of people, enormous funds, strategic plans of the government… Gradbank which vied for leadership in that huge enterprise had to exhibit titanic drive and ability to crush down everyone and everything that stood in the way.
“As it has crushed father with his tiny company,” Nina reminded herself. The resentment at the wrong that had been done to her family had not dissolved with time – it was there, as a scar on her heart – but now that she looked at it from the height of Gradbank’s top floor, she had to admit to herself that she was beginning to understand another truth – the truth of big business in which the scale and challenging nature of the objectives left no room for sentiment. Nina had not noticed when she had lost her determination to take revenge on Gradbank. She had lived with that determination for a long time although she had always known at heart that it had been nothing but a silly, childish fantasy. Now it was time to grow up. Since she had not left the bank, she should be a good employee for it and do her job in a professional manner. Good work and professionalism were things that were always right and always important. Besides, Zaryadje was the project of her beloved man, so… Damn it, she was ready to kill herself with work to help him.
From time to time, Nina had visits from employees representing one or another of the bank’s departments. The visitors advised Nina on various special subjects. Sometimes it was Nina who asked for a consultation, but more often it was Samsonov’ decision. After another report by Nina he would say: “I think you should see someone from the leasing department.” Or: “It seems you’re not well enough versed in currency transactions. I’ll send someone along to enlighten you.”
The employees that were sent up to Nina were experts rather than managers. Typically, they started by being wary of Nina whom they took for a new boss of some kind, but then, finding a kindred spirit in her, they thawed out and helped Nina willingly to find her bearings in their respective fields.
Nina’s head was reeling with the knowledge hastily crammed into it. She feared at first that an overload might occur – that her head would refuse to work, stuffed beyond measure with all those facts and figures, rules and exceptions, and all the multitude of methods and procedures adopted in different areas of the boundless world of finance and investments. But her head was coping.
In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the great detective compared the human brain with an attic which, crammed with useless stuff, might be unable to take in anything else and thus be rejecting what was necessary. Nina adored that English gentleman and had read all the books about him but she found out from her own experience that Sherlock was wrong on that particular point. The human brain had an unlimited capacity; it could keep and process a huge amount of information – provided one had persistence and aptitude for organized thinking. Nina had both.
Nina was gratified to feel a growing control of the material. She had developed her own mnemonic technique: all the information on the project stored in her mind she divided into sections which she thought of as library catalogue boxes. Whenever she needed to recall something – for instance, the projected expense structure at a certain stage of the works, or forecasted return rate on such and such type of investments – she drew out mentally the right box, found the right card, and voilà! – the right figures were retrieved from memory. Afterwards, checking her mental findings against the computer data bases, she had never once caught herself being in error.
That memorizing of hers made a lot of sense. Computers were all right, but it was only in her memory that the figures became really alive and started to cross-fertilize one another paying mutual visits, as Nina called it. Then, suddenly, a question would pop up: what was going to happen to the profitability ratios if a particular stage of financing was prolonged by one month? by three months? What if this or that tax rate was raised or lowered?
The figures swarmed in her mind like a beehive. Quite often even at home, already lying in bed, she would go on pondering over some problem that she had posed herself. It even frightened her – such obsession could end in exhaustion – but as soon as she solved the problem she plunged immediately into sound sleep to get up the next morning feeling totally fresh and ready for further analytic labor.
One day the door of her room opened and Ariadna Petrovna appeared.
“Hi, Shuvalova. Samsonov told me to stop by and have a chat with you.”
Nina jumped to her feet. “Ariadna Petrovna, you didn’t have to! I would’ve come down to see you myself.”
The woman waved it away: “Don’t sweat it. Samsonov says have a talk here, so here we have it.”
As soon as she sat down, she asked: “Do you have any coffee?”
“Instant kind,” replied Nina.
“Not good,” Ariadna Petrovna said in a mentorial tone. “Instant coffee is no coffee.”
The woman looked around the room with interest.
“Hey, you’ve fixed yourself nicely here. The only downside is it’s too close to the bosses.” She grinned. “On the other hand, some like it that way.”
Nina did not know how to conduct herself with her former – or was it present? – chief. Above all, she did not want to appear a conceited upstart which was not at all easy to avoid in her new position.
The woman did not seem to notice her confusion.
“Well, come on, show me what you’ve got.”
Nina was not prepared for a discussion with Ariadna Petrovna, the bank’s most experienced analyst. It occurred to her afterwards that the director probably had meant it to be that way – he expected to gain some additional benefit from her being taken unawares. Samsonov was not always dumbly direct in his ways; those who believed that he was were in for a surprise – they discovered sooner or later that they had been unsuspectingly playing his game. It was not cunning on Samsonov’s part; he just did not consider it necessary to explain everything to everyone.
Nina was thinking hectically what to talk about with Ariadna Petrovna. Finally, she decided not to stall but to lay out directly her main finds.
There were three of them, and in Nina’s opinion, each could increase Gradbank’s chances of winning the tendering contest. Her first find concerned the leasing terms of heavy construction machinery. Nina had invented a leasing scheme that she believed to have a great cost-saving potential.
Ariadna Petrovna drew her massive body closer to the computer and started looking through the computations, clicking the mouse at a great pace. After a couple of minutes, she spotted an error.
“Here, look.” She highlighted a number with the cursor. “It should be zero zero five, not just zero five.”