Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  In business terms, it doesn’t get any riskier than that.

  Even so, the risk was well worth it, and has been since the earliest expeditions to Asia by Portuguese ships in the early 1500s, trading opium to the Chinese for silks. All kinds of fortunes were made when an ensuing opium-smoking plague swept through Asia. In modern times, it wasn’t opium that stoked the barter trader game, but rather things that are taken completely for granted in the West. You can get the idea by recalling the constant toilet-paper shortages in the Soviet Union, which on the black market was like solid gold on a roll.

  Make no mistake. There were plenty of capitalists behind the Iron Curtain, and they took no chances in beating out the competition. Most black-market businessmen were aided and abetted by the Russian Mafia—which is not quite like the Sicilian Mafia, at least not before the fall of Communism. In the old Soviet Union, ironically enough given the ham-fisted ways of the Communist regimes, the Mafia wasn’t absorbed with beating or murdering people. It was all about business, the expediting of deals.

  Having these kinds of ‘business partners’ would not, Danny and I knew, win us any awards from the Australian Chamber of Commerce. But it might win us the dolce vita we wanted. For a woman in particular, this was an unlikely career choice, to say the least. Very few women were involved in barter trade, which scared away numerous macho men as well. But for me and Danny, it was a no-brainer. We liked the scent of international wheeling and dealing. We liked the scent of danger, too, though we could hardly imagine a scenario whereby we would be in any great physical danger and had not heard of any barter trade merchant’s body washing up ashore lately. Most of all, we loved the scent of money.

  And so we moved fast, very fast. Anticipating a hydra-headed empire, we moved into a plush, 8000-square-foot office on Claremont Street in the South Yarra business district, which would now house both National Computer Services and the still-forming new business, which we named Video Technology Ltd.

  In getting Video Technology off the ground, we gave the big-talking Matthew Hurd free reign, as he had proven he had considerable and reliable business contacts in the Soviet Union.

  ‘You two just sit back; let me handle everything on the Russian side,’ he told us, cocky to no end.

  And he did. While Danny and I concentrated on National Computer Services matters, Matthew drew up contracts and put together joint ventures with parties all around Russia. With a Russian confidante named Grigory Miasnikov, he quickly created four of these joint ventures we could partner up with, all based in Moscow. The first, of which Miasnikov was general director, was called SovAustralTechnicka, so named because in exchange for scoring up the resource goods, we would deliver to it electronic and computer goods.

  For a while, we were kept at a distance from Grigory, hearing of him only from Matthew. We wanted no particular social relationship with the Russians, merely a business one. All we really cared about was that men like this could make us money, big money. Grigory, we were told, was valuable because in Moscow’s underground circles he was known to be a ‘fixer,’—that is, he could make good things happen and problems go away. How he did it, I told myself, was his affair, and his alone.

  That went for the bribes, too. Grigory, Matthew assured us, would take care of them from his own pocket, not ours. Only later did it become abundantly clear that we should have asked more questions about Grigory Miasnikov and Matthew Hurd.

  By mid-1988, the business had gotten up and running. Our first deal routed Russian fertiliser to China for around $30,000, hardly a huge amount but one that whetted our appetites for more. We had about twenty people, a mix of Russians and Chinese, working in the Claremont Street office, putting together lists of goods that Miasnikov would send. By 1989, Video Technology had netted upwards of $130,000. We still had National Computer Services, and that was still a successful concern, but we began giving it less of our time.

  It was as if a business had sprouted out of the ground without us having to do much of anything, and almost out of a sense of guilt about that, we repaid the efficacious Matthew by giving him a nominal salary of $40,000. More rewardingly, we named him co-director with us in Video Technology—which was extraordinarily generous of us, given that it’s customary for directors of any company to kick in equal shares of money. The amount of equity that Matthew had paid for in Video Technology was exactly zero, but whenever it struck Danny and I that perhaps we should have made him put his money where his braggadocio was, he would rig another deal and make us forget the thought.

  A typical deal would work like this: Grigory would put together his lists of desired items. He would make his own deal to scrounge up the natural-resource goods, and we would pre-sell them to China, to either of the Koreas, to the Eastern bloc, just about anywhere. The goods would be bundled in containers or stowed in the hull of a ship docked somewhere in Russia and then sent on its way—but only one very critical phase of the operation was effected: the paying of bribes. First, the harbormaster had to be greased to wave the shipment through. Then, at every stop along the journey, some other hand would have to do the waving, another harbourmaster, a trainmaster, a truck-stop manager, an airline pilot, even possibly a horse-and-buggy guy. Each of those hands had to be greased, or the goods wouldn’t reach their destination.

  Now you know why bribery is the lifeblood of this business. Paying them had to be factored into the operating budget. Call it ‘operating expenses’—not that it went into the books that way, of course. Matthew would say, ‘Let’s just keep this our little secret.’ And we did. It was the price we had to pay. However, Danny and I did not want to dirty our hands with the bribes. We left all that up to Matthew and Grigory. Evidently, they did their jobs well.

  As of 1989, the coffers of Video Technology Ltd. were filling quite nicely, although the receipt of monies from our deals required a little game of legal hopscotch, as well, to shelter most of the profits and keep them away from the reach of the Australian tax collectors. Our prime need was a tax-free port, and Hong Kong fit the bill perfectly, as we would be doing a lot of business in the Far East. And since SovAustralTechnicka was the hub of all of our operations, we needed a second account in Moscow. So, among our first orders of business was to open a US-dollar account in Hong Kong and Moscow, meaning that the only tax we would be paying on Video Technology profits was on the relatively small amount we would bring in to Australia, basically to cover our living expenses.

  As to how we would get the money from the sales, that was a two-step process that began even before the goods were moved. The buyer’s bank would be sent copies of what is called a ‘bill of lading’ along with either letters of credit or commercial bills—not cash but rather proof of collateral that the cash was in escrow pending delivery of the goods. As soon as the goods were on the water and the bill of lading documentation verified by the harbourmaster, the cash would be wired to our account in Moscow or Hong Kong.

  With that money, we would be able to fulfill Grigory’s wish list of commodities he could sell for a fortune on the black market. Danny and I began globe-hopping, personally scouting for wholesalers. We’d hop off to Tokyo for photocopiers, telex machines, and computers; to China for clothing and food; to America for cars and trucks. Whatever we needed, we bought and had it drop-shipped back to SovAustralTechnicka, then took off for the next destination. It was a mad, mad existence, and we were loving every minute of it. Our bags were never unpacked.

  In the complex, high-stakes game of barter trade, we were careening down the highway at breakneck speed. We’d proven we could master the game. Other partners were coming forward in Russia, with wish lists a mile long. If the thought occurred to us that it was all too good to be true, it faded when a new list would come in. We saw no speed bumps ahead, no off-ramps. Only the lure of money on the blue horizon.

  But was it too good to be true?

  There was more good news that winter of ’88, when I became pregnant—although in keeping with much else in my life, even that
blessed event would be fraught with danger.

  No birth is ever easy with me. My first daughter, Romy, had been overdue by two weeks and refused to come out until she’d put me through hell for thirty-two hours of labor. Avi had then deigned to stick around with us for all of three weeks before going off to India again on business, and I had to take Romy to my parents’ home in Perth lest I had no support at all. Billie and Wally had made sure to come and stay with me during the last days of my pregnancy, which also stretched two weeks beyond my late-February due date.

  In early March, I arranged with my doctor to check into St. Anne’s Hospital so that he could induce labor, and I was admitted to the hospital on the night of March 8. Early on the morning of the 9th, he broke my water, and at 5:17pm, I gave birth to an eight-pound cherub as blonde and quiet as Romy had been dark and boisterous.

  But as first Danny and then Billie cradled her, a drama was beginning to play out with me.

  There had been a complication. The placenta had become stuck inside me, causing me to hemorrhage. I started to bleed, and the doctors couldn’t stem it. Suddenly, the joyous birth of a child had turned into a race against time to save me from bleeding to death.

  As searing pain gripped me, twisting me into knots on the gurney, I saw a horde of grim-faced doctors and nurses pour into the delivery room. I felt myself being wheeled out of the room. With an ashen face, Danny tried to keep up with the gurney. I was raced into an operating room, where doctors would try to extricate the placenta, hopefully before it was too late.

  Semi-comatose and terrified, I began having thoughts of never waking up again, of my mother and father, of Romy, of Danny, poor Danny, who was about to lose his second wife—and at the very same hospital where Freda had died! Now he would be alone again and have to care for four children. My God, I thought, can’t I just see my new baby, just one time before I die?

  After being deposited on the operating table, an anesthesiologist pulled out another long needle.

  ‘Am I going to die?’ I managed to mumble, searching for reassurance that I wasn’t.

  Looking bored and completely unsympathetic while sticking a big needle in my spine, he sniffed, ‘If you don’t lie still, not only will you die, but you’ll be paralysed when you die.’

  Those awful words were the last ones I heard as I drifted into unconsciousness. Four hours later, I came to in the intensive-care ward, ringed by a maze of IV tubes. I would still need three transfusions because I had lost so much blood. I lay drained and groggy and still as a log for another twenty-four hours with a nurse at my bedside in case I began to bleed again. Whatever could go wrong, it seemed, did. During one of the transfusions, the bag holding the blood burst open, a very rare occurrence, and the doctors had to start over.

  Danny kept a stolid vigil, though he was furious that he was not allowed to bring Melanie in for me to hold. She was being fed by bottle in the children’s ward.

  Finally, after two touch-and-go days, my condition improved, and I was wheeled in to see my beautiful new baby, whose eyes locked with mine for a brief moment, as if to tell me she knew who I was.

  As my eyes welled up with tears of joy, I knew that that frozen moment in time would have been worth any amount of pain.

  Melanie would keep me company in the hospital for a week before I was strong enough to leave the hospital and resume my life. And when I did, I reasoned that making it through this crisis must have been a sign from above, a sign that I had earned a few life points. If so, then all of my risk-taking might not be all that risky, after all. Before, I would have been perfectly happy being the most successful businesswoman in Australia.

  Now, with our new business rolling, I wanted the world.

  6

  MELBOURNE AND RUSSIA, 1989

  Even as we brought Melanie home to a now-expanded family of two boys and two girls, Danny and I knew we would have precious little time to play at being Ozzie and Harriet. With all sorts of contracts on the table and the wheels of our goods-transport network constantly in motion, we fancied ourselves more like Mr and Mrs Captains of Industry. With that feeling of exhilaration, though, came a rising sense of fear as well, that we could lose it all in a heartbeat if something went wrong.

  Much of this quasi-paranoia had been ingrained in us by the always-hard-pushing Matthew Hurd. He seemed to be moving at warp speed himself, cracking the whip on the employees in the office in Melbourne to keep making bigger and better deals. Sylphlike, he would be here one day, gone the next to Moscow, having convinced us of the urgent need for him to go there and firm up business matters with the man we kept hearing more and more about, Grigory Miasnikov, general director of our SovAustralTechnicka joint venture. At first, Matthew took a photocopier and a telex machine to the SovAustralTechnicka office, stayed for a few weeks, and came back. By mid-1989, Russia seemed to be his second home. At our expense, he’d rented an apartment in downtown Moscow and would spend two or three months at a time there—to the consternation of his wife, Theresa, who suspected he had a woman on the side to keep him warm on those cold Russian nights. We too were concerned, since he was spending rubles like tonic water for vodka gimlets, and his expense reports left us needing a few stiff belts ourselves.

  Still, Matthew was our trailblazer on this unknown journey. We had little choice but to put our money where his mouth was—though we often wished that mouth wasn’t quite so big. In early June, again in Moscow, Matthew called us. His voice crackled over the speaker phone.

  ‘You both have to come here and meet with Grigory,’ he said, leaving no room for discussion. ‘You have to meet all the heads of the joint ventures. These are big deals, and Grigory wants you to look over the contracts.’

  As soon as we hung up, Danny and I looked at each other, sharing the same impish thought.

  ‘Did that sound a little like he was calling a meeting of the Five Families of the Mafia?’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘Does that mean we’re the Godfather and the Godmother?’ he said.

  ‘I just hope it doesn’t mean we’re getting whacked.’

  It was this kind of dark comedy that would become common as we progressed deeper into the business, and it belied the little nugget of fear we had about dealing with Russian ‘businessmen’ we didn’t know from Trotsky, yet we were undeniably fascinated with the idea of going behind the Iron Curtain.

  I, of course, had been smitten with the seductions and, by extension, the dangers of big-business globe-trotting when Avi had taken me to India. Now, I’d be one-upping that by going where few Westerners had stepped.

  What’s more, this was a particularly momentous time in history to be making such an excursion. The march of Western culture had seeped through the Curtain, stirring up demands for sweeping changes in the hoary Soviet Union. The word freedom, once forbidden to be spoken in public, was echoing in the corridors of every town and province, shaking the foundation of the eight-decades-old span of Communist repression.

  The feeling of anticipation in the air would soon break open like a champagne bottle. Within a few months, on November 9, 1989, Germans would be dancing atop the ruins of the Berlin Wall and on the grave of Communism, sparking a wave of Eastern European revolutions, the unification of Germany, and, within two months, an incredible upheaval in Russia. Even then, two other words—Glasnost and Perestroika—would be on everyone’s lips. These were Mikhail Gorbachev’s programs of openness and economic and political reforms, and they would be the wrecking ball of the USSR, and the building blocks of a new and shaky democracy, as well as a landscape of uncertainties and dangers.

  Poised on the precipice of that seismic moment, we knew our business would have only greater earning potential. Until recently, Russians not privileged enough to be able to cut deals with Western merchants could not even sell trinkets in public parks. Now, like children taking their first baby steps, new capitalists were already stepping out of the shadows, encouraged to join in a free-market economy and private ownership. At the same time,
because dying Communist holdouts clashed with the new system, threatening to crush it, the country’s economy couldn’t get off the ground; soon it would worsen, leading people to line up for goods, the most famous of which became toilet paper. Those long consumer lines symbolised the shortages of supplies to meet the demand. Needless to say, that too was good for our business.

  Not so promising were the dark repercussions of freedom—the scattering to the wind of the most onerous vestige of the dark age of Stalinism, the KGB. No longer needed to bludgeon dissent, the dreaded intelligence agency would itself be liquidated, sending unemployed agents out to roam the streets in search of work, honest or otherwise.

  More than a few would find jobs in the Mob, where their unique ‘skills’ could come in handy to the highest bidder.

  In the new Russian business class that teemed with people who lacked any sense of what business was, a few such ‘advisers’ might perhaps speed up a deal using ‘persuasion.’ For many new and struggling entrepreneurs, the alternative to hiring these free-agent thugs was going back to the toilet-paper line.

  The ex-KGB enforcers would not be alone in that role. In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union would at last break apart into separate republics, other, equally sinister forces would enter the picture in a marriage of necessity, not for business gain but to finance something few of us were aware of in 1989: fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. What we could not have known, as well, was that their targets would be Western businesspeople.