And here is fantastic news from Sergey: a television program is being prepared about our financial association, famous personalities are involved, who oh, a miracle! they are literally located behind our wall, the creative troops landed in the next office! Among the creators are an experienced film director Sergeyeva, a popular St. Petersburg composer and singer Igor Azarov and, attention, an actress, singer and TV presenter the incomparable Anna Samokhina! Thats cool!
Where is the wind blowing from? Here it is necessary to make a really lyrical digression. Our vice-president Oleg Borisovich has two brothers Mikhail and Evgeny. Bright personalities Evgeny, a top manager of Holding-Invest, a master of sports of international class, tall and powerful, practically did not appear in our department. There were legends about him from the mouth of his older brother:
Evgeny at the wedding in a police cap and a traffic policemans baton blocked traffic in St. Petersburg for the wedding motorcade of Oleg and his bride. Or:
Evgeny hit a bailiff in a hotel in Moscow so hard that he drove several meters across the floor.
The eldest, Mikhail Borisovich, immediately inspired the sympathy of others with his friendliness and creative abilities. A gambler by nature, he wrote poetry and, thanks to his irrepressible positive aura, was on close terms with people of creative professions. Lyudmila Gurchenko sang in our office, I listened with interest to his stories about Irina Ponarovskaya, the guys from the Adams Apple TV show often came. In general, it has always been a pleasure for me to deal with him creative or business. By the way, he traded me a magnificent Hungarian sheepskin coat for four hundred dollars. I am not a slave to things, but I have never seen such things again, and in the subway passengers at that difficult time looked at me like an alien. Mikhail Borisovich was very dynamic, easily rebuilt from one type of business to another, but the scale of his activities for objective reasons was not comparable to ours.
One day, at the moment of another delay in the urgent study of a letter of credit from a western bank, dear Mikhail came to me «to talk.» After a couple of minutes of polite communication, I pointed to a thick folder of documents lying on the table and asked quietly:
How much do you think this folder costs? Mikhail Borisovich visually appreciated the black cardboard with metal corners and assumed, inflating the price out of respect for me:
One hundred thousand dollars!
Five million, I also rounded up the amount a little. Turning a little pale, Mikhail said:
I never thought that Oleg was doing such things.
This was the best characteristic of the significance of our work. On the other hand, a high degree of secrecy was maintained between the brothers how wonderful, gentlemen counterintelligence officers! After this incident, he did not come to us again, but we happily greeted each other in the corridor.
Employees of other departments stopped coming to us at all apparently, such a command came from above. I was disconnected from other matters, and my habitat is my own room and the head of the department, a reception room with two secretaries, and the offices of the president and his deputy. It was in the reception room that I met Anna Samokhina she came with some question to the assistant, and I was just finishing a conversation with her. As polite people, we greeted each other, our eyes met for a second, and I went out into the corridor. But Sergey was often behind the wall apparently, he was attracted by the magic power of art and its representatives, he even invited the director to come to us, cordially offering the services of himself and our car this is more interesting than boring numbers and pieces of paper. It is curious that Anna Samokhina quickly figured out the situation in our business community and rather flatteringly nicknamed the brothers Oleg, Evgeny and Mikhail «the Kennedy brothers» obviously, not only because of the quantitative coincidence.
As a result, somewhere around the New Year of 1993, a restaurant was rented, where, according to the script, a gala evening and a presentation of the Holding were held. The presenters at this musical festival were Anna Samokhina and Igor Azarov, whose song «Full Moon power» became the name of this action. The whole color of our company was present at the shooting, including the head of our department Viktor Vasilyevich and his wife. The President and his two vice-presidents pronounced health resorts in pauses between musical numbers, but we can say the opposite, that is, the songs sounded in pauses between health resorts. Sergei and I were not invited, and for him it was a serious blow to his reputation, especially after advertising his own image to the creators of this film. But on the evening of the thirtieth of December, sitting at a party among friends over a glass of cognac, we were able to see our bosses on the TV screen «Russia» and hear about our company, like many citizens of our vast country. Guitar songs were also played this evening «How great that we are all gathered here today» and the all-season «Sunny Afternoon» by The Kinks after all, we are the lucky ones from Department Foreign Trade! We were overwhelmed with pride we are a part of this holiday and our holding, and each of us received not only moral satisfaction, but also champagne with a small bag of money as a New Years gift from Santa Claus.
Chapter nine. John Hunters Lessons
I remember, somewhere in the mid-seventies, I read with great interest the book «The Hunter» by the Scottish writer John Hunter. The writer was able to vividly describe his adventures in Africa in the late XIX early XX century in the exotic role of a hunter of large animals lions, buffaloes, rhinos, elephants and leopards. Later, our well-aimed and courageous shooter became a safari guide for rich people looking for thrills in the wild and hunting big animals. If his client could not shoot or missed, then Hunter could not be mistaken, because this mistake could well cost the lives of himself and his companions. He was and will forever remain the record holder for the number of predators killed, and in whose courage, firmness of character, physical condition and common sense there is no doubt. Although not every reader likes such a craft, but Mr. Hunter expressed a universal truth for any activity, which he established on the basis of his experience.
In any activity, he writes, there are three stages. At the first stage, a person does not know how to do anything, but learns some kind of craft and achieves the first successes. At the second stage, having gained some experience, he often already considers himself an expert who has learned all the secrets of his profession. But this is a delusion, and it is at this stage that he makes serious, and sometimes fatal mistakes. At the third stage, when a person has experienced the second stage, there is a sense of reality, an objective assessment of their skills and possible obstacles, and at this stage the specialist is most effective. Hunter himself almost died at the second stage, overestimating his abilities and getting lost in the center of Africa, and only a miracle saved him after two days of wandering in the endless impenetrable forests, he stumbled upon a power line support, and a day later he went to a small town.
I hugged a metal pole and fell to my knees I cried because I realized that I was saved now, he wrote.