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.