“Is that it?” thought Nina. She had expected Pavel Mikhailovich to recognize her work in some way. But the man fell silent and remained so for a while.
“Come on, my dear Tin Man, praise me – admit that I’ve been a brave girl!” Nina urged him in her mind.
Suddenly he covered her narrow hand with his huge, tough palm.
“You know, I’m not good at saying nice words, but… thank you, Nina. I’m going to consult someone else about it, but it seems your idea might work. If it does, then… Quite possibly, you’ve just saved me. I’ll not forget that.”
He squeezed her hand, looking at her point-blank with his grey eyes.
After a pause, he nodded, said, “All right then,” and left.
Nina’s cheeks were burning. For this man to hold her hand in his, she was ready to invent a dozen financial schemes.
For some time, Nina had to move to the director’s reception. The date of the board meeting was near, and it meant preparing piles of papers. Many employees were involved in that, and Nina was mobilized, too.
Nina shared the desk with Klara Fedorovna who needed help with financial documents which were multiplying as an avalanche. Watching closely Klara Fedorovna at work, Nina was amazed – that was really a great secretary. The woman’s fingers flitted about the keyboard at an incredible speed; she kept everything in her memory and never mixed up things. Having received a handful of disparate pieces of text speckled with hand-written editing marks, she would take only a couple of minutes to produce a final document, completely corrected and formatted.
Nina joined in with Klara and got infected with her breakneck pace, but even absorbed in work, she could not help noticing what was going on in the reception. An endless succession of visitors were passing through it. Some of them Samsonov came out to greet personally and showed out afterwards; others were let in and out by Marina. Nina saw for the first time how diverse Samsonov could be with people. Sometimes he was unceremonious and rude, sometimes businesslike and formal, sometimes markedly respectful, and sometimes easy and matey. Occasionally, laughter could be heard coming from his office, but more often heated arguments, or even fierce rows.
Samsonov was no natural diplomat or sly dog; he was a fighter, but the fight that he was waging required diplomatic skill and slyness, so he was maneuvering as best he could. As the French say, à la guerre comme à la guerre. The date of the board meeting was nearing, and Samsonov was busy from morning till night talking to the right people and cementing the ranks of his supporters.
One day Nina heard a familiar voice in the reception. She was sitting side by side with Klara Fedorovna, with her back to the waiting visitors and could not see the one who spoke, but there could be no mistake about it – the voice belonged to Konstantin from Gradstroiinvest. Nina froze up.
“What the hell’s going on?” Konstantin said, not loudly but with passion. “This is the limit, really. How can he not understand it? In another month we’ll complete the reorganization, and then this business will soar up in value…”
“Quiet, Kostya,” said another visitor. Undoubtedly, that was accountant Revich.
“I don’t give a damn!” Konstantin raised his voice. “I’m not going to keep mum, I’ll tell him everything.”
“You will, for sure. You just quiet down for now,” muttered Revich.
They were silent for a minute. Then Konstantin said, “Listen, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be let in for another half hour. Let’s go have a smoke.”
“You’ve given up smoking, remember?”
“With all this bedlam going on? Not a chance… Come on, let’s go.”
The men left the reception. When the door closed after them, Nina waited out a few minutes, and then ran away to her room under some pretext never to show her face in the reception until the end of the day.
She never saw Konstantin again. Much later she found his name on the list of the top executive staff of the project, “Zaryadje XXI”. For the young manager, that was a huge promotion.
A few days before the date of the board meeting, Samsonov disappeared. Nobody – not even the bank’s top management – knew where he was or what he was up to. For the time of his absence, he assigned Sinitsin to act for him, thus bypassing the first and second vice directors. Apparently, Sinitsin was the only one Samsonov kept in contact with. At any other time, such an assignment would cause a lot of gossip, but in the turmoil of those days it was taken for granted.
Sinitsin refused to occupy Samsonov’s office and exercised his directorship from his own, very modest one. He behaved in a studiedly plain way, not posing as a big boss, and to almost every question, he gave the same answer, “Pavel Mikhailovich will decide on that when he’s back.” It was only the arrangements for the board meeting that Sinitsin left to himself. He checked up thoroughly on the work made by Klara Fedorovna and Nina. Nina had an occasion to find out that, although not being a specialist in finance, Sinitsin knew his way around all the papers. He gave some very reasonable instructions; then, just before the meeting, when everything was ready, he suddenly sent off on a two-day vacation Klara Fedorovna, Marina, Nina, and all the rest of the twelfth floor staff except for the board members. Samsonov’s battle against the opposition was to take place without witnesses.
As soon as she got home, Nina dumped onto her bed. “Gosh, am I tired,” she murmured as she was sinking into the dark abyss of dreamless sleep.
When she woke up, it took her a while to figure out what time of day it was – morning or evening. She took a shower, had something to eat and went to sleep again. Thus she slept through all the main events and it was only afterwards that she learned how things had turned out in the bank.
Samsonov arrived at the board meeting dead on time. Without explaining anything to anyone, he opened the session.
The opposition were well-prepared and bursting to fight. Samsonov was markedly polite to everyone. If his opponents had feared that he was going to abuse his authority to shut them up, they had been wrong.
The board included twenty one members. By prior estimates, eight of them were solidly on the director’s side, seven flatly against him, while the rest were undecided. Samsonov gave the floor to everyone who wished to speak. One by one, his opponents rose and voiced their grievances against the director. The charges mainly focused on the project Zaryadje; the speakers maintained that it was an insane adventure which was bound to wreck the bank.
The opponents’ arguments clearly impressed the undecided members who exchanged glances and remarks in whisper, watching the director worriedly, or else looking aside in confusion.
Finally Samsonov took the floor. He thanked all the speakers for their genuine concern about the future of Gradbank as well as their principled stand and valuable criticism which he promised to take account of in his work.
Then he set off a bomb. The bomb was the stunning news that Gradbank’s general director, acting through the bank’s subsidiaries, had sold off at one go a huge package of the bank’s assets including over one hundred businesses in the public utilities sector. Taken separately, none of those businesses were large, but as Samsonov listed them, it became clear that Gradbank had let go – and somebody had got hold of – a solid lump of the local utilities industry which gave the owner real influence in the city.
Baffled, the board members attacked the director with questions. To the first question, “Why did you do that?” – the answer obvious: Samsonov had been accumulating resources for Gradbank to bid for Zaryadje. With the additional injection of funds, the prospects of financing the project no longer seemed hopeless. But it was almost in chorus that the board members asked the next question, “Who’s the buyer? Who did you sell all that to?”