by Talia Carner
Brooke stepped closer and squeezed Olga’s shoulder.
“Who could have imagined it?” Olga turned to Brooke. “I didn’t realize until I saw this how dangerous it was for you to go downtown. I’m so sorry. You hear about it on the radio, you see on TV, but you just don’t know how bad it is. Are you all right?”
“More or less, but I’ve lost Svetlana.”
“You’re speaking funny.”
“I bit my tongue badly. May I have some boiled water? I need to take a Tylenol.”
Olga poured water from a jug, and Brooke downed two pills while watching the White House blacken on the far horizon as if in a silent movie. After the events of the last hour, she finally felt safe.
“Sit down. We’ll have tea,” Olga said.
Brooke sank into the faded green chair, surprisingly comfortable in spite of its uneven springs. While Olga busied herself in front of a white wooden chest, Brooke closed her eyes. She opened them a few minutes later to see the Russian filling china cups from the hissing samovar. Olga laid out the tea cups on a small table covered with lace.
“Our group has brought a carton of disposable cups and plates for tomorrow’s symposium—if it takes place,” Brooke said, speaking slowly so her speech wouldn’t come out garbled. No need to mention again that if the symposium held, she might not be there if the airport opened. “I helped Amanda box up all the tea and coffee you’ll need, plus a lot of cakes and cookies.”
Olga handed her a cup. “A gift well appreciated, but we will not insult our guests by serving in plastic dishes. China is the only way.”
“Aren’t you expecting a hundred people? Do you have enough porcelain cups? And who’ll wash everything?”
“The employees will donate theirs. Then we’ll clean up. No problem.” Olga lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tapped the gray wisps from its tip into an ashtray. She sucked again, and her lungs responded with a long, violent cough. When she had recovered, she dabbed her bloodshot eyes with an embroidered muslin handkerchief.
“I can’t help but comment that you should quit smoking,” Brooke said.
Olga shrugged. With careful movements, she unwrapped a sugar cube, quartered it with her teeth, picked up a piece and motioned to Brooke to pick one too. Olga placed hers between her front teeth and, with pursed lips, sucked in a dainty sip from her cup. “That’s the best way to drink tea.” Her eyelids drooped as steam from her cup rose to her nostrils.
“That’s how my mother still drinks her tea,” Brooke said, dropping her sugar into the cup. She stirred it. “She also quarters the sugar cube and rations it.” Savoring the moment was one tiny pleasure her mother permitted herself.
For a while, neither spoke. Exhausted, Brooke brought the tea to her lips, careful not to aggravate the pain in her tongue. She closed her eyes. Scenes of her life in New York flashed in her head: the ballet performances, Broadway shows, and gala concerts to which she treated clients; the invitations to opulent black-tie charity events that made the gossip columns. With all the comforts, had she or her clients ever enjoyed their tea the way Olga did?
Olga cleared her throat. Brooke peeked again at the horizon of downtown buildings. The burning White House’s center now appeared like a gap between twin teeth. Brooke’s near-death experience and its rush of adrenaline knitted itself into her body, and images of the boy writhing in the crater, his leg torn off, flashed in her head. But the worst was behind her now. Her tongue would heal, and a shower and an afternoon nap would revive her. But the boy, if he lived, would be crippled.
“You’re so certain people will show up for the symposium tomorrow,” Brooke said. “How will they get here? What if the fighting escalates?”
“They’re coming from all over Russia. Many are already here. Others have been traveling for days.”
“Are the trains running in all this chaos?”
“The fighting, as you see, is only in Moscow.” Olga glanced at the White House and back. “Our women are so eager to meet American businesswomen; they can hardly believe it’s happening. It’s better than meeting our Olympian stars.”
If history hadn’t intervened, this American would be gone. Olga didn’t say it, but the knowledge hovered between them like miasma.
“Let’s get to work,” Brooke said.
Olga locked the door and cleared her desk. A large black fly hurled itself against the window, bounced back, and circled the room only to hurl itself again against the glass.
Brooke yawned and scanned the ceiling. The paint was yellow and chipped, and the bare fluorescent lights glared.
“My office is not bugged,” Olga said, but she nevertheless unplugged the phone and her computer. Her hand swept toward the ceiling. “If bugs had been put in, it would have left marks in the plaster.”
Brooke removed the stack of files from the vinyl bag and placed them on the desk. “I hope you can make heads or tails of this.” She rifled through a file. It was neatly partitioned with colored dividers labeled in Cyrillic and jammed with documents. “A lot of papers for such a new institution,” she remarked.
Olga picked up another file. “The documents are organized chronologically within each category: Permits, Production, Purchasing, Orders, Shipments, Expenses.” She leafed through the pages. “Lots of figures.” She pushed it across the desk. “Your turn. Our numerals are the same as your Arabic ones.”
Brooke peered at the file. Untangling a financial scheme required a forensic accountant; she had no experience investigating fraud, but she knew a lot more about accounting than Olga did. She sighed and pointed to the title of the thinnest file. “What does this say?”
“Factory number three hundred seventy-six. Manufactures soap and toothpaste.”
“How many brands?”
Olga crinkled her forehead. “Brands?”
“How many different products in each line?”
“Just those two. Toothpaste and soap.”
“No different types of each, such as toothpaste for children, toothpaste in large tubes and small tubes, in different flavors? Different names of toothpaste?”
“Just toothpaste, and the soap is a large, big cube.” Olga’s hands shaped themselves around an imaginary solid block. “Russian soap. Doesn’t smell good, but we use it to wash everything: clothes, hair, dishes.” She laughed. “Our national soap.”
“The soap may be rough, but it sounds like it’s a leading brand. That’s huge,” Brooke said. “Okay. Let’s look first for the privatization certificate. When were the ownership shares issued, and to whom?”
Olga looked at the papers. “In January 1992, with privatization, ownership vouchers were distributed to each of the four hundred employees.”
Olga went over the file page by page, briefly translating each. The fly left the window, circling and buzzing around their heads. Brooke threw her scarf over it, caught it, and then opened the door to the corridor to let it free.
Olga raised her head. “Why didn’t you kill it?”
“It’s harmless. Another one of God’s creatures, don’t you think?”
Olga chuckled. “No wonder Americans fight for human rights. You spare even the life of a fly.”
“Probably my Jewish upbringing.” Brooke resettled in her chair and yawned again. “Go on.” The length of each form and the number of copies filed with various government agencies created a staggering amount of paperwork, much of it redundant.
“The Economic Authority arranged to open a bank account and also guaranteed the bank loans for the initial operating costs,” Olga explained haltingly as she gathered the facts under Brooke’s probing. “Then a request was filed to switch banks. Let me see. It was signed by the head of the Finance Division at the Economic Authority.”
“Like in the Gorbachevskaya Street Factory and Vera’s. We’re moving along.” Brooke craned her neck above the file. “Let’s look for the ledger. It should have two to four columns of figures.” But there was no page with columns. No accounting practices, Western or other.
“Hmmm,” Brooke said. “Since the factory has been doing business with one bank or another, there should be some sort of a bank statement. A monthly or a quarterly list of transactions. Something.”
Olga shook her head as she flipped through a stack of yellow slips barely larger than theater tickets.
“What about those?” Brooke asked.
“Copies of transactions. Bank deposits and withdrawals.”
“I’ll have to reconstruct the financial history,” Brooke said. Olga’s cigarette smoke didn’t help her headache, but Olga seemed to need it like air. On a lined sheet of paper, Brooke drew up columns for a hypothetical ledger and began to fill it in. “Dictate for me each bank deposit—from sales, from loans—and each withdrawal. Start with the dates.”
Soon, her reconstructed ledger began to tell a story. Each deposit from a sale was followed by a cash withdrawal of the same amount, leaving no operational cash flow. The salaries that had been paid at the early stage of privatization had stopped months ago, and no other bills had been paid either.
Brooke tapped her pencil. “How does the factory buy raw materials? And what about gas and electricity? They can’t keep running for so long without paying their electric bills.”
“This may answer your question.” Olga held up a three-page form. “This is a request the factory has filed, asking for the Economic Authority’s permission to sell parcels of ownership certificates. The employees—now the owners—want to sell their shares. It says here that since the venture has failed to manage itself—”
“Failed? What’s the factory’s output? Let’s go back to the previous documents. Can you find the output in ’91, when the factory was still government owned?”
After a short review of the file, Olga dictated the 1991 number of tons shipped for each of the two products: twenty million tons of soap and seven million tons of toothpaste.
“It’s safe to assume that production would show a marked upturn after privatization,” Brooke explained. “That’s the case when workers have a new incentive to succeed as owners.” She examined her ledger, then waved it. “We already totaled the purchase orders in 1992. We can assume this was the minimal output because additional inventory may have been stored rather than shipped.” She pointed to the next page. “You see? In 1992 they almost doubled the factory’s output from 1991.”
“Meaning what?”
“The factory did well—is doing well and producing more. No failure here, only financial shenanigans. More important, now with the government out of the picture, owners of a private venture shouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to sell their shares. And regardless, there is no need to; their factory should be making a profit.”
Olga’s lips squeezed into a hard line. Remnants of her pink lipstick bled into fine crinkles around them. “Now what? Have we reached a dead end?” She tapped her cigarette pack.
Brooke laid a hand over Olga’s to stop her from pulling out yet another cigarette, and for a moment both stared at their hands, Brooke’s manicured fingernails with their clear nail polish resting on Olga’s ruddy, short fingers stained by nicotine. A wave of affection for the dauntless woman washed over Brooke. For an instant, in spite of her pounding headache and everything she had been through, she was glad she had been detained in Moscow.
“Let’s search for another angle.” Brooke sucked on her throbbing tongue and contemplated the options. She glanced at her watch. There was no choice but to plow on. “The shipping orders. Let’s compare them to the purchasing reports.”
With Olga again sifting through the file, Brooke taped a page next to the one she was writing on and added a column of shipping orders. They matched the production. “No merchandise has left the factory unaccounted for.”
“Meaning what?”
“The workers are not stealing. Someone else is,” Brooke replied. She added another column. “Please find me an invoice for each of these shipments. They should correlate to the sales.”
But the information had ceased to be available by the spring of 1992. Goods had been produced, ordered, and shipped, but no invoices had been recorded.
“Maybe the factory was paid by veksels,” Olga said. “What do you call them?”
“IOUs. Svetlana has mentioned those.”
Olga smiled her little sad smile. “One more double-system. Everybody now trades in them instead of currency. If the factory cashes them for half their value, it gets what you call cash flow.”
Brooke shook her head. “In which case there should be invoices, marked as paid.” She sipped her tea. The sugar, which she never took in New York, revived her. “Who at the factory signed these shipping orders?”
“It’s stamped by the Finance Division of the Economic Authority.”
Brooke paused. “You can’t mean someone from the Economic Authority hangs around the loading dock and signs paperwork? There’s no reason for it. The Economic Authority’s supposed to be long out of the picture.” She could almost hear the gears clicking into place. “It should not be involved in a factory’s internal affairs—shipping or purchasing orders.”
Olga drummed her fingers. “Meaning what?”
Brooke hesitated. “To whom were the ownership shares sold?”
“The Economic Authority.”
“The Economic Authority’s a government agency with only a service function. It doesn’t own anything. Its job is to free the venture from its former dependence on the government; it certainly doesn’t buy a cooperative that it helped to privatize.” Brooke took in a deep breath. “Someone at the Economic Authority’s behind it all.”
“You’re sure?”
Brooke looked at Olga until the Russian woman met her gaze. Olga held her own, the blue of her eyes challenging Brooke’s stare.
Then Olga’s face crumbled. “Of course I must believe it. This is what this country has been for much too long. Corrupt.”
Brooke waited a moment, then picked up the file and leafed through the documents. Her headache lingered; she needed hours of sleep, but she was close to solving this puzzle. “Let’s check the day the Economic Authority purchased the shares of the factory,” she finally said. “Read me the signatures on each of the forms.”
Olga scoured through a dozen forms. “This is an application to the External Market Resources—”
“What’s that?”
“Some new agency with which all ownerships must register.”
“Good. Who’s signed it?”
“Sidorov— No—” Olga squinted. “It’s strange. . . . It’s not Nikolai Sidorov; it’s a different name. See?” Olga flicked through the stapled papers. “It’s someone named . . . Nadia Sidorova.”
Nikolai Sidorov’s wife? Mother? It didn’t matter. Brooke grabbed Olga by the shoulders. “You’ve got it! Sidorov, the head of privatization of small businesses, robs them at gunpoint and then takes over.”
“Sidorov is the new owner? How could he sabotage these ventures? How could he take these peoples’ livelihood?” Shock was embedded in Olga’s voice. “Maybe there’s a mistake?”
“I don’t think so,” Brooke said softly. “You already know that the employees were persuaded to sell by violent means.” She thought of the drunken, pompous man she had met. “I try not to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but this is too deliberate. No incompetence here. Just pure, cynical evil.”
Olga pushed herself up, brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt, and paced around the room, still limping slightly. “Sidorov operates like a feudal lord.”
“This is not a one-man operation—and I’m not referring to the thugs he hires to do his dirty work. He must have powerful connections. What do you call them?”
“Po blatu?”
“Yes, po blatu. Someone high up—must be in the Kremlin—assigned the Economic Authority to privatize small businesses in the Moscow region. That person must be enjoying the fruits of this looting, too.”
Olga fell back into her chair. “The Communist legacy of
corruption is so pervasive, it has made a mockery of democracy before it has started.” She looked out the window. “They are shelling our parliament. Even if we get through today, we may never make it because of this.” Her hand slammed the file shut, then she looked at Brooke. “Sidorov is the person in charge of your group’s well-being.”
Brooke nodded slowly. She was thinking the same. What had been his intentions in inviting them?
Chapter Thirty-seven
OLGA HAD STOPPED a private car for Brooke and given the owner instructions, but he wouldn’t start driving unless Brooke first paid him his five-dollar fee. She had dozed off during the ride through eerily empty streets and now felt better and further relieved when, upon exiting the elevator at the ninth floor of Hotel Moscow, she saw Svetlana jump to her feet.
“You’re here!” The Russian searched Brooke’s face. “Are you all right? I didn’t know what happened to you.”
Brooke hugged her. “And I was worried about you, so we’re even. Someone in uniform began to ask me questions, so I got out.” She smiled and touched the blue vinyl bag, again filled with the files. Olga had photocopied some incriminating documents. “Mission completed. Olga and I have figured it all out—thanks to you.”
A twitch dimpled Svetlana’s chin. Her fingers wrung her sodden handkerchief. “It’s not over.”
Brooke grabbed her arm. “Let’s go to my room.”
Svetlana shook her head. “It’s not safe,” she whispered. “Sidorov—he wiretapped us— you, Dr. Rozanova, maybe me.”
“Are you sure?”
Svetlana’s head bobbed. Her words were barely audible; Brooke had to lower her head to catch them. “That’s what I went to check. As of this morning, his people have been listening in on Dr. Rozanova’s phone conversations. They may have listened to yours all along.”
“Just me? What about the rest of my group?”
“I don’t know.” Svetlana sniffled. “I’m scared. You don’t know him. He’s cruel.”